Have easy emblems ruined heroics?

World of Warcraft Philosophized recently posted an article entitled How the emblem system ruined heroics (and what can be done to save them). This article was then followed up by WoW.com in a post entitled Have emblems ruined heroics? (Hint: no).

I want to take a look at the first article and give you my reasons why I disagree with his opinion and proposal:

1. When Cataclysm is released, the heroics that are available upon the launch date with drop the same emblem as the starter 10-man raids, while the 25-man versions will drop the next tier of emblems. As patches are released, the new raids will give better emblems, but the base emblems in old heroics will not change.

2. Emblems will become bind-on-account so that raiders can use their extra emblems to gear up their alts.

3. With each raid that is released, one, two, or three new 5-mans will be released, the heroic versions of which will drop the same emblem as the 10-man version of their corresponding raid. This will allow people to gear themselves up for the current raid content without running old content.

On the surface this may sound like a good idea. However, I see a few problems:

1. Higher geared players would be running the same 2-3 instances over and over again for emblems for themselves and their alts. That would be very boring and monotonous.
2. Lesser geared players or players without a raiding toon would only be able to get the lesser emblems and therefore lesser gear. Gearing up would take a lot longer. There would also be less and less 80’s to run heroics with as they moved onto higher levels. Especially if alts never ran the lesser heroics.

Emblems are currently the only way for players who are new to 80 or casual players can get geared enough to do current level raiding.

I have a number of friends that are casual players, who enjoy running random heroics and the occasional PuG raid.

In the past it was difficult for them to get enough people together to run a heroic and they had no chance to get into a raid because of their gear.

Without running a raid, one of my friends is now geared enough to tank 10-man ToC and with a decent healer could tank ICC-10. He finds the emblem system to be really good for him.

For casual players the system works.

The whole point of the LFD (and current emblem) system was to make emblems easier to obtain by casual players or smaller guilds. It mixes up well geared raiders with lesser geared players so that everyone can have a fun time in the instances.

Note

For the sake of this article I am ignoring the elitest jerks out there who call you a noob if you have less than a 5k gearscore, say gogogogogo in party chat or are just jerks in general.  Unfortunately these supposed ‘hardcore raiders’ who behave like 10 year olds (actually they is an insult to 10-year olds) are always going to be around. Luckily there are not too many of them and you can put them on ignore and forget about them.

The last thing I want to see is tiered content similar to BC. Where if you missed a level of raiding you were basically stuck there. All the raiding guilds had moved onto the newer content and you had no way of gearing up to get there.

I like the current emblem system.

What about you?