Let’s cut to the chase.
Badges of Heroism and Valor are going to be phased out. Every raid instance and 5 man dungeon is going to be dropping Conquest emblems.
I like this change from a raid leader perspective! Here’s why:
Raising the floor – The minimum standard is being raised. During Burning Crusade, many guilds were either starting on Karazhan, Gruul’s Lair or Magtheridon. Other guilds were wrapping up in Mount Hyjal, Black Temple and Sunwell. There weren’t a lot of guilds working on SSC and TK. But this change will help shrink the gear gap between upper end guilds and lower end guilds. The minimum gear standard is going to go up.
Less time spent gearing – Are you a skilled player? Your gear just doesn’t show it right? Good, then this is another change. I’ve met many “skilled†players who wanted to apply to Conquest. Unfortunately, their gear level did not meet the minimum requirements to enter Ulduar. I’ve had to turn them away. Now those same players can come back and reapply. Since gear won’t be as big of an issue, they can demonstrate their skills in a raid environment. The fact that gear sucks won’t be much of an excuse.
Reduces the links in the progression chain – Currently, the order of operations in which players go through to get loot is:
- Heroics/Badge gear
- Naxx/OS/VoA
- Eye of Eternity
- Ulduar
Similarly, let’s look at the projected badge drops.
- Emblem of Heroism
- Emblem of Valor
- Emblem of Conquest
- Emblem of Triumph
What’s essentially going to happen is that the game will be reset so that Conquest badges are going to be at the bottom of the ladder. Who knows what the Triumph gear will be. Right now it takes players a lot of time investment to work their way up from zero to hero.
People have a reason to do stuff again – Hard time finding healers for Naxx or DPS for an instance? Fear not. Trade chat will rev up again and you won’t have to spend hours trying to find a player to fill that spot. From my perspective, once my Priest hit a threshold in gear, I never went back to Naxx. The badges meant nothing to me. I didn’t need the items anymore. I had no reason to go back into Naxx. I know other players feel the same way. Why participate in an activity when there’s no reward for the time invested? Now there is. Conquest badges give players an incentive to head back in. That’s a bonus to everyone. Epic gems, right? With Triumph badges dropping from heroic daily quests, I think they’re going to raise the cost of new Triumph level items. I remember some of the stuff we got from Sunwell vendors. That was over 100 badges for several of the items.
Alts – This makes it really easy to gear up alts now. I’ve got a Ret Paladin and an Elemental Shaman that I like to mess around on from time to time. This will help hasten the rate at which I can join Ulduar pickup groups or other raiding alliances.
Yes, I am very much in favor of this change.
I like the changes to the emblems and I really have fun running the 5 man content with my guildies, but my concern is this: the difficulty of the 5 man heroic content versus the gear level you will be getting with badges. I understand that it will take a lot of runs to get badges to get gear. But currently with my current tank and healers being mostly Naxx geared as well as myself in heroic purples, we dont have any need for strategy in 99% of the boss fights. We just burn them down as quickly as possible. I really enjoyed Skadi before we were all geared because it was always, “Oh man, I hope everyone is at the top of their game so we can get thru this.” Now not so much. I would like to see Blizz implement a system where boss health and abilities would scale based on the level of the gear you wear when the boss is engaged. There would need to be safeguards to prevent abuse of the system but this could be a great tool for prolonging the entertainment value of the 5 man runs.
@Thromanan: That’s actually a pretty damned good idea. Blizzard has shown they can implement gear scaling difficulty levels with the vehicles in Wintergrasp and in Flame Leviathan. The technology is there.
I like the idea too, but I’m a bit worried that with gear so “easily” accessible, it’s going to be hell trying to find a group that will take you if you’re not totally decked out in epic gear for even a heroic that I’m overgeared for because they want to just blast through it as fast as they can and get badges. I mean we used to see this when wrath first came out : “LFM heroic badge speed runs. 3k dps minimum. We will be gear checking.” And this was back when most people were having trouble even getting 2k dps – which I think is a dumb measurement anyway. Meters lie.
I’ve been having trouble getting into Naxx PuGs on my alts, even though they are all in 200 Item Level gear, which should be more than acceptable. I’m happy the minimum standard is being raised…unless the restrictions on PuGs are going to get worse. 🙁
Gear has always been accessible in WotLK. You could conceivably take a person in quest blues and greens and make them Ulduar ready (maybe not for hard modes and the rest of the instance) within a week.
Your arguments that this system is better than TBC’s is off base because in TBC you had to go from Kara/Gruuls to SSC/TK to get to Hyjal/BT/Sunwell because you needed the gear from the previous tier’s raid content to continue (sort of like Vanilla).
For WotLK the progression line is much more blurred, basically any fresh 80 will only need to do the 10 man encounters for Naxx/EoE/OS for the gear, but this wouldn’t prevent them from doing the 25 man counterparts because the majority of people they would do these instances with would outgear it.
All this change boils down to is to get the most people (read fresh 80s) ready for the normal 10 and 25 man versions of the Coliseum raid instance rather than forcing them to go through the normal gear progression path.
With the start of summer our Ulduar 25-man progression has stalled; only one of our ten-man teams has made any real progress in Ulduar. We’re currently working with some new-to-raiding folks in our guild, going through the arduous process of lengthy Naxx-25 runs to get them up to speed, in the hopes that we’ll ultimately get back on track in Uld-25. I hope this will help.
Yeah, I’m not so sure how I feel about these changes to emblems. On one hand, yes I agree that it will be nice for those people that are skilled players, but for one reason or another are not in a good enough guild to recieve higher end gear, and are thus being held back. I had this issue myself, and it can be a difficult threshold to cross.
However, I feel that even at the present people are crying out that the game is “too easy”, and the fact that any person can be running around in Tier 8 gear simply by running H nexus is a little bit crazy to think about, and will only worsen these issues for current players.
At first I thought that they should make all heroics give out Emblems of Valor first but then I realized that even though it’s T9, it’s actually 3 extra item levels. That’s why they took the drastic route and are giving out Conquest badges. So though I feel 3.2 is coming out too soon and making this “reset” seem too sudden/overboard, it makes sense considering the item levels that are coming out. Good to gear up alts, for sure.
“. You could conceivably take a person in quest blues and greens and make them Ulduar ready within a week.”
not
You are not thinking this one through.
I think the difference between this badge change and typical nerfs is that it is not merely a case of bleeding edge saying “I had to suffer to do this instance, so you should too.” It is literally a gear reset in the MIDDLE of an expansion.
Wow used to be broken into tiers of gear G based on your skill S and time commitment T. The higher your S and T, the higher your G. Some people’s G would be ulduar level, some naxx level, some heroics level, etc. Each tier of players had some pride and sense of accomplishment about their position. They could say, “I’m not Ensidia, but I worked hard to get to this point and am proud of myself. My gear represents that.â€
Every time they release a new patch and nerf dungeons, there is essentially a shift in the tiers. People who have finished ulduar move up to Coliseum, players at naxx level can now complete nerfed Ulduar, heroics move up to naxx, etc. However, there still existed the tiers of gear, everything just shifted.
With the new badge change, you lump the entire player base into Coliseum Tier or Everybody-Else tier. Players in Coliseum Tier are unaffected, as they will clear Coliseum and still have the high G they want. Players that are on the lowest level of G are happy too, because they now have a G that is higher than they typically could acquire given their S and T. It is players with a G greater than the lowest tier but below Coliseum that are the ones to suffer. They have higher S and T than most players, but it doesn’t matter because everyone is capable of getting the same gear as them.
This badge system truly is a gear reset the makes Naxx and Ulduar redundant. People, like most things in nature, take the path of least resistance. Nobody is going to go into a harder Naxx and Ulduar when they can faceroll AOE every heroic in under 20 minutes.
The best analogy I can give is the release of Wrath, in which there was also a gear reset. Leveling to 80 is equivalent to farming heroics. BT/Sunwell are naxx and Ulduar. Who goes back to BT/Sunwell now? What happened to people who were unable to finish BT or Sunwell? Of course, that was a NEW expansion, so it was tolerated. This, on the otherhand, is a content patch.
G
thats just watering down the content to push every one to there end game content and making the ones that worked for there badges feel like its a slap in the face if you put in more time you get better rewards is how it should bew LEAVE the badges alone ……………think about it every ones not progrssing with whats there already and there gammins skills arnt aswell….=more people being rushd to end game content more people standing around bored….bad bad bad
“Nobody is going to go into a harder Naxx and Ulduar when they can faceroll AOE every heroic in under 20 minutes.”
It depends on what your objectives are. If you’re after gear for the sake of gear, then maybe not. If you actually want to SEE Ulduar, you will. The change to emblems merely helps players get there a little faster. Not always a good thing, but not necessarily bad, either.
The analogy of BT/Sunwell doesn’t apply in this case, for the simple reason that you stated: People stopped going there because there were ten new levels to move through, a ton of quests, and a bunch of instances. They didn’t not go simply because they could get equivalent gear by grabbing 22 badges of Justice in Kara each week.
“making the ones that worked for there badges feel like its a slap in the face if you put in more time you get better rewards is how it should be”
But YOU know what YOU did to get that gear. Nobody can take that away from you. YOU have your achievements to prove it, if you need to. Take pride in what you accomplished, by all means; but why should it really matter to you how the next guy got his gear?
“If you’re after gear for the sake of gear, then maybe not. If you actually want to SEE Ulduar, you will.”
..unless half of your guildmates are after gear for the sake of gear. In which case, you and the other half that actually want to SEE Ulduar are left twiddling your thumbs and wondering where you can find enough enthusiastic recruits to refill your raid.
Sounds unlikely? It’s precisely what happened to my guild in TBC. Half wanted to progress, half wanted to farm Kara five times a week on five different alts.
Given the PvP leveling in 3.2 and the mount changes, I can really see Blizzard wanting to limit support for non-max level characters. This is a serious boost to gearing alts, as will be the new VoA boss.
This is a fantastic change in all regards, especially given that I am going to finally be able to not feel stupid for wanting to actually get a daily heroic run going now. As it stands, the rewards aren’t worth the trouble when I can just be dragged through a friend’s VoA or Naxx or Uld10 to get quick upgrades no one else wants.
“People have a reason to do stuff again”
Unfortunately, this has exactly the opposite effect.
It becomes harder to raid Ulduar, since the drops are subpar in 3.2, and the badges are equal to those more easily farmed in 5mans and Naxx.
But the worst part is that this change is presumably intended to AID the entry level raider in gearing up, when it really doesnt. Anyone remember what the gearchecks for Kara were like before the expansion hit ? They didnt just require heroic gear, but generally far above that attainable from fully gearing FROM Kara. The same will be expected for Naxx.
@Bagheera: We’ll just have to see. From a technical standpoint, players will have the gear necessary to reach the minimum floor that Ulduar demands. The Conquest badge gear will help for that. I don’t think players will be able to get a full set of gear out of it. They’re still going to need weapons at least. There aren’t that many good ones from badge vendors.
What happens, happens.
Matticus, congratulations, you win the retard of the week award.
If you were any kind of a good raid leader you would take good, but undergeared players and gear them in alt/farm runs.
Enjoy sifting through the endless waves of moronic players with better gear than they deserve.
I have to disagree. I put a slew of work into learning, and gearing, and enhancing my toon.
while I may not be much affected by this, i’m sure the quality of “pugs” that I grab for tens, or misc will be affected. certainly I’ll be looking at armory statistics more.
we’ve seen this before, but the bads should not be given even footing. at any stage in progression.
if they put forth the work they’ll find the people in need of their help, and whom need some fill ins.
some rtard walking around in badge stuff… well I guess that the raid leader now just needs to look harder before an invite.
@smeedsc, Nick Lang, and Upyursh: Here’s the problem with the assumption that you’re making. You’re assuming that Conquest loot is the end all/be all for items. It’s not the best items you can get in the game. When 3.2 comes out, there’s already better items available from CC. Who knows what the Triumph vendors will have. Icecrown’s right behind it.
Bad players will ALWAYS be bad no matter what gear they sport. That can be spotted quite easily.
If I was any kind of good raid leader, I would take good but undergeared players and do whatever was necessary to gear them up to a reasonable level. Having Conquest items available opens up that route and makes it even easier.
You could argue that bad players are going to get geared up easily. But I’m also going to argue that good players are going to get geared up easily as well. Take it however you like.
Hey Matt great blog btw. Read it often.
I think there is a fundamental lack of gearing stages to raid in wrath and this change is going to pretty much remove tier 7 (10 man at least) from the game. The path will now be level to 80 then farm heroics to get tier 8.25 gear and head straight into ulduar to finish the set and skip naxx for the most part. Where someone having tier 7.25 gear meant they’d actually been into naxx/OS/VoA at some stage, and had been part of a raid group at least once in their lives, this change means that you’d be unable to tell the difference straight away.
Naxxramas’ fairly simple/easy design was quite lenient towards PuG’s however Ulduar so far as i’ve seen (up to thorim atm) is not. I don’t think this will necessarily mean more interest in naxx either, as i agree with ggyourlife that people will usually take the path of least resistance. It’s easier to organise a heroic than round up 10 or 25 people for a naxx raid and raid lockouts make them a slow source of badges especially at 1 per boss. A 3 hour clear of naxx atm could net you 16 badges which is an achievable rate through heroics with less startup hassle and drama. I assume that they will drastically increase the cost of badge gear to compensate for the easy aquisition now.
I’d also hope that Blizzard get some more instance servers too, as it will be chaos with the already overworked (on my EU realm anyway) heroic servers trying to support everyone farming badges.
Have to disagree with you on some of these points, or more so that these points are positives.
effectively what this change will mean is nubs who can do 5 mans (be carried through them maybe haha) will end up with gear on par with those of us who have worked our butts through Naxx25/OS25/Maly25/Ulduar25 etc etc
I think this change will annoy MANY raiders, and rightfully so.
Again another move to give people access to high-end raids without gaining the experience of doing 5mans, 10mans, 25mans first. I’d rather someone in my raid with lower levels of gear but who has spent hours in a raid environment.
Gear will not fix the area where most people fail at with raiding, awareness and class knowledge.
Actually the only people it seems to annoy are those to whom status is an issue. Really now if the person is bad he is bad and no amount of gear is going to change that.
Honestly if you are a serious raider and heading into the what could be 2nd last raid zone of this expansion do you really want to limit your recruiting pool?
When we were pushing Sunwell in TBC the only recruits we could find were tier 4 geared people. They were so far behind without any realistic way of catching up. Mind this was on one of the top PvE servers in the world with alot of raiding guilds. I can only imagine how difficult it is to recruit people on small servers.
You guys are all acting like your raids are going to be suddenly filled with ‘rtards walking around in badge gear’ and ‘nubs who can do 5 mans’ — what do you think is going to happen to all of those stalwarts who fought alongside you, and earned their gear the proper way (like you)? Where are they going? Getting ‘bads’ in the guild or in a PuG slot is the fault of the person doing the recruiting, not Blizzard.
I don’t mind the Emblems of Conquest in Naxx and the heroics, but I do mind the Emblems of Triumph as daily rewards. I know it will take a lot of time to gather enough for gear, but I still think that the current top tiers should be only accessible though the current top raid instance.
I’m no elitist or something like that (we havent downed the general in 10man yet and don’t ask about 25man Ulduar), but I invest time and effort (learning my class, wiping through bosses figuring them out) into my gear and have to admit, that I want it to mean something. If that’s petty, well, than it’s just that. 🙂
I thought the concept WOLK was making content available to all players. Nax was entry level raiding. Uld was suppose to be lesson 2. How is giving people the same gear from Heroics going to increase the number of people seeing content. Do you really think that people that have not seen Nax or Uld are going to bother now that the gear is worthless. Why waste time and money on repairs with progression when you can wait a month and get the same gear. Yes with only badge gear you may have a few item slots to fill that but it looks like the tournment dailes will take care ot that.
Yes the change may help fill some raid spots or gear alts but it just seems wrong somehow or maybe just to early in the expansion for such a move.
@katrasofy: For the people that don’t care about gear and want to actually see the instances, they can do it now. I firmly believe that every raid instance has a minimum threshold to meet in order to be effective. You have to b able to heal this much, or deal this much damage. If you can’t do those, and then you have no business being in there.
Not everything in this game is about gear. Just because player A is lootwhore and just wants to get 3 sets of Conquerer’s doesn’t mean player B is the same way. 11 million people play this game. Don’t think that they’re all the same.
There is one big caveat to this whole emblem change that I do not like, and I know will happen, at least on my server. Back in BC, trade chat looked something like this:
/2 LF9M karazhan. Must have full tier 6.
/2 LFM KZ badge farm. T6+ ONLY.
/2 LFM Kara. MAINS ONLY, NO ALTS. (Insert rediculous DPS benchmark here).
The emblem change brings a return to badge farming groups. Which actually HURTS the natural gearing up process unless you have a reliable instance group. Why? No pug would take someone who was at appropriate Karazhan level. They wanted their badges, and they wanted them quickly. Have some blues? Sorry, not taking you. Have heroic gear? Sorry, not geared enough. Just turned 70? Not a chance in hell. Heck, even just getting a heroic group could be hard… all people wanted were quick badges.
I couldn’t pug anything on my alts. I remember a couple occasions where guild alts and friends were only allowed in a Karazhan group because I was tagging along in my sunwell geared priest who could solo-heal the place. These were people with sunwell mains, and appropriately geared alts who were told no. These were people who, had they been able to run with other guild alts, could clear the place faster in blues and greens than the pugs could in tier 6 epics.
So good luck to anyone who was new to the game or server or had just gotten their first 70.
So the natural progression was supposed to be Level to 70 -> 70 dungeons -> Heroics -> Karazhan -> SSC/TK -> BT/Hyjal -> Sunwell
Instead it became Level to 70 -> ??? -> BT (or even sunwell) -> Karazhan
What?
I’ve seen it already in naxx pugs, though much less vicious (because honestly the gear gap isn’t that extreme yet). But I can’t wait.
/2 LFM Heroic Daily. Must have ulduar hard-mode gear. Will armory.
Love your site Matt, but I disagree on some of your points being made here.
First off I’d like to say (as others have said) that I’m not elitist. My guild runs strictly 10-mans, and we’ve only reached Auriaya (been in Ulduar *two* times ever since it came out, due to people wanting to bring alts to Naxx…). I didn’t even reach 60 in Vanilla, and only cleared Karazhan and Zul’Aman before WotLK.
Having said that, I think Blizzard has now crossed the line with “welfare epics.” There are tons of people who have better gear than me, and I generally have no problem with that. But I take pride in my gear. It shows a level of dedication and commitment. I’ve spent countless hours getting it. I agree with people who say that gear isn’t the most important thing (who cares about cool-looking pixels right?) but it’s still a part of the reason why I raid. It’s part of the reason why I want to see new content. Without the gear I’d probably not be playing WoW, even though the social aspects are great and the encounters wonderful.
When you can get better gear than my Ulduar-10 gear with just doing heroics, I don’t really see why I should spend my time clearing the instance. Seeing the dungeon is nice but I can think of other things to “marvel” at; good movies and books, for example. And don’t give me that bull about liking challenges. There are many things more difficult than WoW, and if all I wanted was to derive satisfaction for a job well done, I’d learn Chinese or advanced statistics or somesuch.
TL;DR: With Ulduar-10 gear (and its current badges!) having become obsolete, why clear it at all?
@Wall: Buddy that’s just you. Don’t assume you’re speaking for everyone. You may not derive such satisfaction but you can’t say others don’t feel the same way. I obviously can’t speak for everyone either since there are players (like yourself) who don’t think its a good idea.
And here’s the other thing. Can you honestly get full gear purely from Conquest badges? Do you have any idea how long that would take? I’m actually looking at the vendors right now (all 3 of them).
Conquest vendors
* Legs
* Gloves
* Belt
* Neck
Valor
* Ring
* Cape
* Bracers
* Boots
* Tier shoulders
Heroism
* Trinket
* Belt
* Offhand
* Tier chest
* Tier gloves
…While you can probably build a decent set with that, you’re far and away not going to have the best geared character by exclusively farming Conquest badges based on items that you purchase. Look at it realistically especially from the Conquest vendor. 4 items that are 226 that can be purchased. The Valor and Heroism badges are lower tier so yes, if gear is what you want, then you have ample reason to pursue it. Because the Heroism and Valor ones don’t offer Chest, weapon, helms, shoulders, and other slots that are high grade.
If you’re satisfied with just gloves, belt, neck, and legs, I understand. But if you’re not, then this should help you accelerate the process to get into Ulduar to get other pieces.
@Matticus: Of course, I know I can’t speak for anyone else. I’m just writing from my own POV; if that didn’t come across clearly then that’s on me.
You make a good point, gathering Emblems for all pieces (even if you could get them all) would probably take ages. I still think it sucks though. The gear gained from Ulduar will only be placeholders until you’ve run enough heroics/raids to upgrade it. This is in my opinion only, but I think that gear gained from badges should complement normal drops at the right tier level, not replace them.
I guess the important question will be the difficulty level of the Coliseum. I haven’t read up on it but if it’s supposed to be the next tier in raiding then I have no problem with the “gear reset.” The game evolves. If, however, it’s just another VoA like raid then I can’t possibly sympathize with the opinion that what they’re doing is right.
Thanks for answering btw. 🙂
Actually Matt curretly there are 6 ilvl 226 pieces you can buy for EoConquest. Not sure if they are changing the conquest vendors wares in PTR but at the vendor in game currently you can buy:
Conquest:
neck
gloves
legs
belt
chest(8.25)
head(8.25)
Then you add in the current EoValor
Valor:
Legs (7.25)
shoulders(7.25)
Bracer
Rings
Cloak
Idol/Totem/Libram
And all you need from heroism is:
Heroism:
Trinkets
Offhand
The only thing you can’t get from badges currently are weapons which as someone pointed out can be done through the Argent tournament and even crafted to get you by.
Thats every slot filled with only 2 or 3 ilvl 200 epics without ever having to set foot in a raid instance. I think this is the problem for most people, including myself, who think this is a bad change. What happened to raiding for raid gear? Heroics are easy enough with the current level of crafted and badge gear, what would you need 226 epics for if raiding isn’t your thing? And if raiding is your thing why would you not want to raid for your gear? Blizzard is channeling everyone into some form of raid or another by limiting the content ouside of raid instances. Now you won’t even have to raid to get tier set gear. At this rate I’m just waiting for the day when you ding 80 and get the top level raid gear sent to you in the mail with love from Blizzard so you never have to see the content they are pushing you to see, because people complained that not everyone got to see the content (what?!?). 🙂
Wall does also make a good point on the 10 man gear in that the badge kit will now be better than the gear that drops from within the instance. In all of the gear i have listed above not 1 piece is a 10 man tier item.
I do get your point that it will be easier to gear alts/new recruits and fill raid spots etc and it is a valid point. This is another mix of Blizzards “bring the player not the class” (or in this case gear) however i do like that currently and in the past having the gear = “i was there” even if you were horrendously unlucky and only got the badges and bought the gear. For recruiting / vetting PuG capabilities you now you have to look deeper into achievements and total work on a character than you ever had to before. Has the person got optional faction rep like oracles / frenzyheart and taken pride / put effort into their character to get pets / mounts or gone back and done old content just for interests sake. Have they tried harder achievements in the normal content or have they just been doing i187/200 level content daily and getting the 213 / 226 epics. Alumynym may also have a point by saying pugging becomes more difficult as the standards are raised to promote easy badge farming again. As in TBC it will become harder to find groups outside of the guild as someone who actually needs the gear. This may be remedied slightly by having guild members farming instances.
I understand all the concerns on these comments, but I just love this change.
5-mans have just been dead on my server – even Naxx!
Can’t wait for ppl actually interested in running something on the weekend or raid off-nights.
My main is doing fine in Ulduar, and I don’t need anything from Naxx or heroics, even the badge gear is not so great if you’re actually in Ulduar – so I´ll just get a little something out of helping a guildie gear some alt – maybe get some heirloom items for alts and gems of course.
But for my alts, this is just really welcome – I’ve been trying to gear my warrior up, but it’s just impossible right now. I dont need anything lvl200 or from heroism emblems anymore, so no reason to run heroics or Naxx 10.
All I really need is from Naxx 25, and the current pugs in my server are just a waste of time, since they suck at slow speed. And there arent many around.
I’m just stuck, unable to get to Ulduar with him, and with nothing to do but the stupid tournament right now.
This will bring new life to all content, and I do not care if the bad players can actually get gear – good for them!
Not much is gonna change for the raiders who are clearing Ulduar, we will just have a reason to help out someone in lower lvl content. And those stuck in that content will actually be able to move forward and Ulduar pugs might actually start showing up on my server.
.-= Wangari´s last blog ..Is that cheating? =-.
This is the stupidest thing ever. All this is going to do is make the players who suck at the game think they’re better than they are. Now every facerolling huntard or DK is going to think they can play with the big boys, and that isn’t the case. All it’s doing is lowering the standards for the people who’ve already put in the time and effort.