Optional. As a way to teach. Those whom complete it would have it shown next to the in-game Rio that Blizz recently added when applying to groups.
Players wouldn’t have to do it but it would just look good on your resume.
I know it is a feature that was disliked by players that couldn’t do it but that’s kinda the entire point.
What it did do right was teach players the fundamentals of their role.
After all, why not have a way to educate players on what to expect in groups at endgame?
It taught DPS the need to interrupt and the importance of what to interrupt and what to save your kick for. When to focus down or funnel a mob, when to AoE. The importance of CCs.
It taught healers the distinction between triage or AoE heal. Dispelling debuffs. Purging buffs.
It taught tanks the basics of using their mitigation.
It was a decent system that could be expanded on.
Blizz needs to toughen up and keep features like this around. I remember the only people complaining about Proving Grounds or asking for it to be nerfed were ones you wouldn’t want to group with anyways.
Now that Mythic plus has been growing in popularity would be a great time to bring this back.
You know what I think? I think that all Proving Ground showed was that some people were good at doing Proving Grounds.
It didnt prove anything beyond that. Just because someone could breeze through a staged fight with npcs in a very limited area for a very limited time would not show that they could manage the many and varied situations of a decently long dungeon. It wouldnt show they could behave well in a social situation with other people in the instance. It would not guarantee they paid attention to things like affixes or even know how to adapt to them. Some things cant be trained in an artificial test environment, and it certainly wouldn’t do a thing to people who want to leave. That’s not something you can test for.
If they had been a good idea they would have been reused, but all they did was impose an artificial barrier against participation that actually did nothing to improve participation.
Wouldn’t it be great to have PG back and make it a prerequisite for M+ queue? In general as a DPS I can’t queue, I don’t do. Not into wasting time spamming groups like it’s 2004. A PG prerequisite and ilvl minimum would mitigate most of the things people complain about with pugs.
Your own key is your proving ground. Once you have proven yourself at that level, you will be able to join others’ groups around that level. I just proved that I can do 18s with my mists key, so I will apply for 17 and 18 keys, and people will see that I have experience and have proved that I can do it. When I time one of my 19 keys, I will do that level.
proving grounds was a pretty low bar at the time, and it was introduced before m+ existed.
Add in a section to demonstrate how each affix works beyond how target focusing and interrupting works.
This is a laughable statement. you think every good idea that has ever been in the game has been reused?
The way they implemented proving grounds was a joke and taught you nothing worthwhile. Maybe if they improved it or you know, actually let you practice real bosses with real mechanics.
Laughable, not really. I seem to recall Ion actually discussing it, and why they didnt carry the idea forward. I cant remember the actual interview but it was more to do with the concept of that sort of testing environment, whether it be along the same lines or some other iteration of it. And he didn’t consider it laughable, it appeared to be something they’d given thought to.
There was no teaching component to proving grounds. It was a vanity achievement in MoP, that was converted with essentially no changes into a pass fail test in wod intended to keep bad players from accessing content.
It failed because there were still constant complaints about “bad players in muh dungeons”. But the big failure was the fact that people who didn’t feel like paying to be forced to take humiliating tests and had nothing else to do just quit the game. Why should they keep playing? There was no tutorial aspect involved.
Quoting something Ion said as a defense is an interesting stance to take.
And since you’re having trouble with this…
Is a laughable statement.
I can understand how you misinterpreted what I meant when I only quoted that line. It’s clear how I could have meant something else.
If good players passed it and bad players did’nt, isn’t that the very definition of teachable?
Some people paid attention and learned and some didn’t.
If it wasn’t a learning experience why did some people pass and some come to the forums wanting it nerfed to be easier?
It was disliked because players don’t want to have to get better YET we see a new thread about M+ nearly everyday about how it should be easier, no timer, etc.
Absolutely not. The best players were already able to ace it. Learners ended up getting tired of being asked while stunned if they wanted to try again. Or having to repeat them on all their alts before being able to access the only content in the game for them.
It was entirely trivial for some classes and very hard for others. It was very gear dependent. If your gear was too high or low ilvl, it was much harder.
And all the mechanics were irrelevant. They didn’t teach you to follow the tank and stop butt pulling. They didn’t teach you to keep out of the orange swirlies but stand in the green ones.
Self-styled elites complained constantly that there were still bad players in their dungeons, so it didn’t even work to keep them out. But it was very successful in getting people with nothing to do to quit the game.
It was like your local school system shutting down to save money and instead giving a pass fail test annually to students to see if they learned that stuff on their own.
I think an optional tutorial mode would be great, where players could learn real abilities or dungeon mechanics from real fights with the help of AI and on-screen prompts, and pass a little test without those prompts to go on to the next one. On completing all tests they could get some little thing.
It worked to stroke your ego, because elitists like the idea of noobs getting trashed and failing. It didn’t teach any mechanics, let alone relevant ones. It didn’t keep bad players out of your precious heroic dungeons. It gave the opportunity to elitists to post obvious trolling threads posing as noobs on the forum. It caused players who had little to do because there was next to no content in wod and didn’t feel like passing tests should be part of “entertainment” to quit.
So what was it successful at?
It looks like you were one of the players who quit mid-warlords. You took a 5 year break.
This might be a fair point, i dont know, but since it was doable in pre heroic dungeon gear for all classes, I’m going to say maybe not.
Yeah, just interrupting the healer, swapping targets, and some positioning. still kind of relevant.
All this really means, is that proving grounds was still easy enough for lots of “bad” players complete, meaning they met a bar of minimum skill.
not even a good comparison.
Like maybe an optional proving grounds, with some updates??? Like what the op asked for in the very beginning?
That’s some strong projecting you’re doing there.
proving grounds was just a very simple test. if they couldn’t pass the proving ground, how can you argue they would pull their own weight in a dungeon?
and for you comparison, proving grounds is like a highschool diploma, does it mean you will be successful? no. does it mean without it, you won’t be successful? no. Was it just a standard line set for people to pass? yes.
You need to understand that WoW is designed to protect the ego of every player-base. As much as I bash raiders from time to time, it isn’t just raiders. M+ers, Casuals, PvPers, everyone who plays this game is coddled by Blizzard, to protect fragile egos. Blizzard never, ever wants to tell a player that they’re bad at the game. The only voice that matters for the most part is the voice of the wallet, and people simply leave WoW when WoW says straight to their face “You suck”. We’ve seen in happen many times before.
Blizzard will never bring back something intentionally meant to gate players like this. Giving players score for failed keys for instance softens the blow of the raider IO implementation and Blizzard has intentionally “flattened the curve” so worse much worse players are only 400-600 IO below big pumpers.
It was a failure. It didn’t teach anyone to play, especially not dungeons, where most of the mechanics were not present. There was no learning component. And it convinced a lot of people who had little to do to leave the game.
“But those people were casuals. They should do boring chores all the time. Casuals shouldn’t be permitted to play group content of any sort. You morons should be grateful we force you to do boring chores.”
We (better players) do not want to play with a %%%% player. Your exact defense is why we got Mythic dungeons and Mythic+ dungeons in the first place. We do want to to play with those players. Do you understand? We do not.
If we don’t want to kick them out of the content, which evidently we consider bad, we need to create a new space that exists to accomplish what the previous space had done. Which is what happened - we got Mythic and eventually Mythic+.
And the end result is that we have a Heroic Dungeon Queue that is almost completely and utterly pointless because it isn’t used by leveling players and almost no end-game players participate. Heroic Dungeons can never be allowed to reward worthwhile loot because they’re not meant to be progression content, so you end up where we are now, with LFG/LFR existing as they do, with Heroic being almost completely pointless and LFR being only useful to see the content and not much else.
It is what it is I suppose. The entitlement of casual players to do heroic content because “They had a dungeon queue in WOTLK” is where this inevitably led us.