I was heading into the Valley of Spirits. I'd done two pulls and was at a little over half my sanity, with all three orbs left. I needed two more pages from the book you need to beat the "Corrupted" areas for the quest I was on. Things were going well.
I pulled two groups - my Frost DK build is excellent at tearing down groups quickly - and then my client froze.
I waited a moment, hoping it was a little lag spike, but it wouldn't go away. So I quickly rebooted the client and got back in, only to see that - despite having what I would imagine was a couple minutes left of sanity (not to mention the emergency talent that gives you half your sanity back if you drop to 0 health or sanity the first time,) I had apparently failed, with absolutely nothing to show for that run.
It was my last vessel, so I won't be able to take my Death Knight in again until probably tomorrow, if then (I don't recall if the 5.5k one gets for the mini-assaults are enough for him to get a new one.)
This is not a world-ending tragedy or anything, but it does indicate an issue with this kind of time-restricted content.
Yes, you can keep farming Coalescing Visions to get more attempts, but to really get ahead of the curve (actually, just to stay on the curve) is a pretty big time commitment.
Lag spikes and disconnections are always going to be a thing in WoW - they always have been.
Again, this is not the end of the world, but while I think that games can challenge you, there are some ways that a game can just make you feel bad.
In dungeons and raids, if something catastrophic happens and everyone dies because of a nasty lag spike or a sudden disconnection, it's annoying, but once things are up and running, you can easily just go back in and try again.
Also, if you get disconnected in a dungeon, sure, your current pull is probably going to be a mess (if you're a tank or healer, or if it's a very DPS dependent pull,) but if something happens - whether it's an issue with the client or you, say, need to move your car to let your roommate out - it's not horribly punishing to step away from the game for a moment.
People invented pause buttons for games for a reason. And while online games naturally can't be paused because there are other players in the middle of their game experience, the design has historically allowed for people to chill and take a break if necessary. A dungeon's corridors remain cleared until the thing is reset (which, to be fair, was not originally the case - it used to be that after an hour or so trash would respawn.) In the quasi-online Soulsborne games, the enemies are similarly tethered to particular locations, and you can even quit out and show up exactly where you were, with all the enemies you killed still dead.
Just thinking about Torghast as something that could be similar to Horrific Visions in some ways, I would hope for the following:
First, change the limiting factor from a time limit to something else. My sense is that you'll just go up more floors as you push into higher difficulties, and I hope that means there won't be any time limits in there.
Second, I know that rewards need to be time gated so that players don't spam these like crazy. But how about making it so that it's just the rewards you get within it that are gated, but your attempts to get those rewards aren't?
The former is already true in Horrific Visions - the items you need to upgrade the cloak can only be found when Wrathion gives you the quest for them, and those quests, after the first several, only show up once per week. I get that, because of... man there are a lot of currencies here. Because of Echoing Memories or whatever they're called, a lot of people would just spam visions to level up their talent tree thingie.
But if you put a weekly cap on those as well - like the Valor caps back in Cataclysm - and then allowed people to do Visions whenever they wanted, you could make failures less frustrating.
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