A Couple Thoughts on M+

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
1

Hi All,

Thought I would share a couple thoughts on the state of M+ and what could potentially be done to make it both more engaging for a competitive player as well as less toxic for pugs.

Let’s start with toxicity as I would assume the vast majority of people who hop into a M+ dungeon do not have some sort of formal group.

Would it make sense to have a system to penalize those who leave keys the second they look like they may not be timed? No hear me out on structure.

  1. If any member leaves the key while it is in progress their key will be dropped 1 level. This would also be the case if someone gets kicked from the group for just staying and acting like a tool flaming the group.

  2. Give the key holder the ability to right click and end their active key whereby no party member gets punished for leaving and the current mechanic of a key downgrade still takes place.

This helps as it incentivizes players to stay in the groups the join while also trying to align everyone’s objectives of finishing the key. Is it perfect? Absolutely not - what if a person truly has to leave early or someone d/c’s well the key holder can end the key and they wouldn’t be penalized or alternatively if someone “d/c’s” (aka just logs since the key isn’t going well) this is a gray area where the party could kick the player who would experience a key downgrade if they truly thought the person was trying to just leave via that method. Again not perfect but could significantly help where people just leave while the key downgrade of 1 really isn’t that bad.

Now onto an idea to make M+ feel more competitive in nature to try and increase engagement (this is probably a terrible idea).

Now I am lukewarm on just chasing IO as some arbitrary number and pushing yourself to receive 12 io is alright, but doesn’t really feel all that rewarding.

Raiders watch RWF which they effectively replicate by completing the raid, PvP tournaments are effectively the same as what people experience in the arena. Why is there no game mode for M+ that aligns with The Great Push where you compete head to head with another team that queues to race to complete the dungeon the fastest?

How this could be done:

  1. Based on IO players would be placed into a specific key level let’s arbitrarily say 7, 10, 14, 18, 22. There could be large ilvl disparities so ideally the queue would preferentially try and match teams with the closest ilvl in that bracket.

  2. Teams would complete the dungeon as normal, however they would be able to see the other teams icons on their minimal and each milestone (I.e. boss kill and percentage) would have an indicator if each team has completed it.

  3. In terms of reward I think you could honestly just keep the rewards the same as the current dungeon ilvl but the winning team gets an extra piece of loot.

While this isn’t perfect it would be a pretty fun system to iterate on and you could even have weekend ladder tournaments teams could sign up for.

The last thing I would like to raise and I know mythic raid purists will disagree to some extent. But you have people in mythic raid gear top the io charts usually every season, however even they top out at a certain key level. Why in an infinitely scaling system does loot arbitrarily stop scaling up at a 15? Why not set some threshold that aligns with mythic raid difficulty, for instance a 20 or 22 that drops 252 loot? Most players do not complete this key level so does it really expedite gearing all that much? Later in a patch sure people may be completing enough to gear fast but otherwise not overly.

Oh the dungeons are “spammable” is the argument, however we get random keys that we don’t get to choose. Further, key availability at a high level is very selective and has a hundred of the class that needs it for that BIS piece queuing. Realistically keys that you need are not spammable due to these inherent limitations and the average player probably has real life commitments that prevent them from spamming dungeons that take 30-40 minutes for multiple hours every single day of the week.

2

I mostly just join other people’s keys so if my key got tanked it wouldn’t impact me at all. So, as a punishment, this would be completely ineffective.

Also, if my premade group scuffed a key but we wanted to retry the key at the same level we would just pick someone from the group whose key we do not care about to leave thus protecting the key we want to retry.

I think I would just prefer a system where there are no keys and we can just do the dungeon we want at the level we choose.

3

Fair enough!

My point is for the general public where someone pushes a key up to a level they havent done before and someone cherry picks that key saying I need that for a small IO bump as I dont have HOA on Tyrannical at 16 yet then leaves the second the key isnt looking good.

You are right that if people never ran their own keys it wouldnt matter to them, however thats a loophole to the system that I dont think can be easily solved.

To iterate on your system where you just choose the dungeon and key - why not make bring in a “scoreless” practice system along with the tournament/competition mode? People can practice whatever key they want but it will not count for score to do that you need to run actual key stones or the random keys generated in the competition mode.

Again I stated these are probably bad ideas - however the main thing I want is some form of better competition than an IO score so M+ can engage more people who would like to try their hand at something like the Great Push.

Edit: An alternative to the select and practice any key you want in a scoreless environment would be after you complete your random key you get a token and can complete any dungeon at that key level. So only the first key of the week is random.

4

Many players have struggled some way to punish leaver or incentivize staying after a key isn’t timed and I haven’t seen one that isn’t exploitable in some other way.

5

Yes - but for example an improvement with a loophole is still better than no improvements. I would hazard quite a few of the higher IO people will run their own keys so it would still cover the majority of scenarios.

6

Why not just rename it “prison plus”?

1 Like
7

The way things work now is people prioritize timing keys they haven’t done before. There’s no incentive to redo the same key at the same level unless you’re doing it for the great vault.

If I only care about IO score than I’m going to skip out on every key that doesn’t give me a point upgrade. So this ends up fracturing the playerbase a bit. I’m not going to run my own key as well if it’s not a dungeon I need. I’ll do somebody else’s and reroll.

8

I agree - hence why I had an edit which says maybe you get a token after completing your random key awarded by the vault and get to preferentially select which dungeon you want.

And the whole if I only care about IO is the main thing I am trying to target. Timed races through the dungeons as a game mode you as a group could queue into would not only be fun it replicates the current competition held and introduces a competitive element to M+ that isnt I need to boost my score in x dungeon by this amount to hit 2.3k io etc.

Going head to head against teams in a similar IO bracket seems like a decent idea but completely open to anything that enhances the appeal where it isnt just some number I am chasing.