OwnedCore Report #116 - The Black Lotus Problem

[Kenneth]

This weeks Report will be more of a rant about the Black Lotus design in Classic WoW and how outdated it is rather than news. Hope everybody enjoys!

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Black Lotus

Raiding in Classic WoW is definitely different. On one hand you have guilds who have min maxed their characters from the gear down to the racial choice. On the other hand you have the more casual guilds who play what they want, don't necessarily gear properly, and just enjoy the game in their own fashion. No matter which guild you are in I think a common opinion would be that Classic raiding is not hard. Unlike retail where progression usually exists on a mechanical level Classic WoW's barrier of entry is how min maxed is your group as far as gear, world buffs, consumables, and dare I say rotations....I'm looking at you rogues who have low Slice and Dice up time. See the difference between a sweaty min maxed character and the dad gamer's boomkin in damage is quite literally 5x or more damage and even though these bosses have very little mechanics there are enrage timers and mana pools on healers that basically put a time cap on how long the fight can last. For example some guilds never required a potion called Greater Fire Protection in BWL where as others force you to pop them multiple times a run allowing the flow and speed of the raid to continue due to not draining healer mana.

There is one consumable/herb that seems to have its own barrier of entry though and that's the infamous Black Lotus. See up until this point the raids have had such minimal damage checks that most guilds never really needed to pop things like Flasks unless they wanted to just speed up their run. AQ is most likely going to be announced very soon and even though the Classic raids up until this point have been easier than anticipated a lot of people think AQ will still be a guild breaker. It's long, its got a ton of trash that can easily wipe you, and some bosses like C'Thun will actually require good damage and coordination on some mechanics. This means the game is about to get more expensive to play because more consumables will be required to clear the instance in a reasonable fashion as far as time goes. Flasks are the ultimate consumable in Classic WoW. There are three of them in the game. Flask of the Titans for HP, Flask of Supreme Power for spell damage, and Flask of Distilled Wisdom for mana increase. They persist through death and last 2 hours. To make these bad boys though requires one infamous herb, the Black Lotus.



Old Spawn Points


New Spawn Points


Now unlike any other herb the Black Lotus has an interesting spawn cycle. Up until recently and even back in real vanilla Black Lotus only spawned in Winterspring, Burning Steppes, Silithus, and Eastern Plaguelands. Not only was it very zone limited but the true kicker was only one Black Lotus could be up at a time and the respawn was 45 minutes. Finding one of these as your riding on by would be like finding a $20 bill on the ground, just super unlikely. With this system came the issue of mafias. Yes, mafias exist in Classic WoW. What this means is groups of people organize to the point of sitting at each spawn of Black Lotus in a zone and once it pops at one of the locations they grab it. This is crucial because once the Black Lotus has been picked by a player in a mafia now the whole group knows the timer and can log out and back in when the new lotus is about to spawn. So even if they somehow got "out-picked" by somebody not in the mafia they still know the timer based on seeing when it was picked. Black Lotus herbing can fail multiple times when you're trying to grab it so if you're unlucky you can just see somebody else snatch it from right under your nose. Either way these mafias controlled the market completely because every single Black Lotus that was picked went into their inventory. Some zones like EPL and Winterspring didn't have these mafias due to the amount of people constantly in the zones it makes it hard to control but Silithus and Burning Steppes were notorious for this. Due to a small group of people hoarding such a large amount of the Black Lotus the price has sky rocketed especially on more popular servers. It got even worse when the bots came into player from gold selling companies. These companies would sit a dead low level ghost at each spawn point of Black Lotus this way they couldn't get ganked while waiting for it to pop and when they saw it they would log in to the higher level character with 300 Herb and pick it. So we got bot/gold selling companies now competing with the mafia and at the bottom of the totem pole is the average player just looking to flask for his next raid.


Incomes a huge change. Blizzard just recently saw this as an issue and used their power to change the system for the better. They made it so there are more spawn points in each zone and the spawn rate has been increased so they can spawn every 10-30 minutes. This means more lotus all the time. On top of this they made it so you cannot see lotus on the ground while dead and also if you didn't have 300 herb meaning no dead bodies or low level alts camping spawn points. This definitely but a damper on the gold selling/bot companies strategy and the price has decreased for Lotus a good amount but it is, on many popular servers, seeing a quick rise back to its old price. And here is the issue. The mafias are back. Yes making the 300 herb requirement and no dead body sight killed off the companies but it just opened up the door for the mafias to take total control again. The system might be pumping out more lotus which does increase the off chance a solo herbalist gets one but it does not decrease the amount of organization some of these groups have at taking over whole zones Black Lotus inventory. This is the Black Lotus problem in Classic WoW right now. The barrier of entry to consumes has gatekeepers with long neckbeards and 10's of thousands of gold. " You cannot kill that which has no life." Classic servers today are much more populated than their 2004-2005 counterparts and these spawn rates have definitely helped fuel more people but it just isn't enough. The Black Lotus system as a whole is too abusable in 2020 gaming standards. So yes AQ might be a guild killer because Tom went Boomkin and his girlfriend is a Shadow Priest so the damage is lacking.....but it will also be a guild killer because even if Tom and his girlfriend wanted to buy flasks to help improve the damage they most likely won't be able to afford it regularly if ever. The real guild killer won't be AQ it will be the Black Lotus system and the mafia that comes with it.

My proposal to the Blizzard employee who most likely will never read this would be to add Black Lotus to more high level zones such as WPL, Felwood, Ungoro Crater, and dare I saw even Deadwind Pass. Just flood the game with Black Lotus. #NoChanges died long ago. People who will be playing until Naxx is cleared would probably like their servers to not die out I think one thing that would help a lot of these mid to low tier guilds out is simply just more Black Lotus.