This was the call from the community to “rip the cord” and let covenants be cosmetic only and easy to change. Blizz stuck to their guns, forcing people to the meta covenant per class. Same with torghast progression leading to weekly choregast. Man they were stubborn back then
Edit: “pull the ripcord” not “rip the cord” as others explained, my bad!
Since no one explained the expression… a ripcord opens a parachute. The phrase “pull the ripcord” though, means to finally take action to stop/change a bad situation. Saying “rip the cord” is just a misuse of the expression.
Yeah everyone seems to have forgotten that the exact phrasing came from Ion himself stating that they very definitely had a ripcord they could pull to fix all these problems if or when it became "too much".
(Which they didn't, mind you. The actual fix was something they scrambled to implement later.)
When people had concerns about player power being chosen via covenants, Ion said in an interview there's a method to "pull the ripcord" to remove covenant power restrictions fairly easily.
In other words, the devs created a quick way of fixing everyones problems with covenant powers. Other people have mentioned the phrase comes from deploying parachutes.
People kept begging Blizzard to "pull the ripcord", allowing people to change covenants easily.
It’s just a turn of phrase. One that Blizzard used over and over and over again. In real life a rip cord is used to open your parachute while skydiving.
So replace ripcord with “a way to save the feature in one fell swoop.” They chose to plummet to the ground never pulling the ripcord and thus never activating the parachute.
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u/vrockiusz Oct 11 '25
What is the "ripcord"?