Community toxicity is a huge part of why so many are leaving the game. Every single day we have threads complaining about toxicity, especially in the m+ experience, which is a core part of the current design. I myself have had to deal with a fair share of toxicity.
Some people say, oh just join a guild! get friends! whatever, the reality is that most players enjoy pugging, without the commitment of having to join a guild and good friends are few and far in between - and most everybody’s friends left the game anyway. The game needs to adapt to human nature, and not try to change the players to adapt to it.
Blizzard needs to fix the root of the toxicity. The current mythic+ design in itself does not work for the majority of players. Adding IO score to the game was not the solution, since it does not address the root of the problem.
One needs to ask why is the m+ experience so toxic for the majority? I can point a few core reasons:
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Players are allowed to leave keys without any punishment at all. The only one who gets truly punished is the key holder who nows has to deal with a depleted key, and has to waste about 1 hour (between pugging and doing the key) to get back to where they were, assuming the lower key doesn’t get depleted again. While there are good reasons to leave a key, no consequences at all for leaving leaves the door wide open to a lot of frustration.
==> A short term solution could be that a key does not get depleted and instead, allow for multiple tries.
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New players have absolutely no way of learning how to play the game in a proper way. There is no friendly environment for new players to engage into the game and actively learn the ropes. The current shortage of tanks is a glaring symptom of this issue. The community is extremely toxic to new players who are trying to learn and there is no punishment for players when they undermine or harrass a new player.
When I was still playing, I used to run 15+ keys on my main and lower keys on alts (5~8). The reason I ran lower keys on alts was that I would invite unexperienced tanks and healers and help them along. I would give tips on which mobs to pull, what to dispel, boss mechanics and general small things that nobody remembers that new players have no idea about. A single +6 key could take up to an hour sometimes, and I was fine with that. It turned the dungeon into a player experience and we used to actually have some laughs when someone would die to some obvious mechanics, rather than yelling at the new player and quitting the key.
==> There should be an environment in the game where more experienced players could assist new players learn and get some incentives for it. What the incentives would be, I cannot say - but perhaps mounts and pets after they get good commendations from the new players would be a good start.
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DPS rankings - most classes and specs are not meta due to the extreme inbalance they have in the current patch/expansion. It is quite impossible to balance all this mess of 200 different systems that they decided to added to the game and several classes and specs are suffering a lot.
We get punished for playing a spec that we love. It is my opinion that the logs published by icy-veins in a weekly basis, which rank the specs by dps is misleading and extremely toxic to the community. In my personal experience, my main BM hunter (which has been my main since they ditched ranged survival in legion), can do perfectly fine in 15~16 keys and I can do more dps than average players who play a meta, but don’t know the spec well - however, I never get invited to groups just because of not being meta.
I understand that in order to push higher keys meta is something to consider, but for low 15s any class can do fine. But what we see happening is that most classes and specs are not even getting invited to 3s or 4s because of this.
==> A idea for mitigating this would be: Parties that bring non-meta specs and classes would get better RNG, one more piece of loot and a higher IO score from a dungeon - thus so incentivising people to either play those specs, or invite someone using the non-meta spec. And it would be fair, because it is a harder difficulty when you don’t play the FOTM spec.
They could even make special challenges and achieves for completing keys in different non-meta party compositions like (prot war, disc priest, sv hunter, feral druid and demo warlock). Similiar to when familiar pet battles where we have to use a pet of a certain family to beat an npc and get different achievements for that. There could be an all druids 15+ achievement (a party made up of only druids). A beast cleave 15+ achieve (guardian druid, healer, 3 bm hunters), stealth 15+ (tank, healer, 3 rogues), the pink 15+ (prot paly, holy paly, 3 rets) - something like that would add so much variety to the game.
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Diminished loot - all relevant m+ loot comes from the Vault. The loot that drops at the end of a key is trash. And the amount of loot and valor is also bad. Which means that people are playing 10 dungeons in order to loot the vault once per week and that is it. Which means that it is just a chore for the majority of players. With each dungeon taking about 30~40 minutes, sometimes an hour for less experienced players, assuming nobody quits the key, that is a huge time investment for a chance of goot loot on a Tuesday - plus I have seen several instances of people going weeks without a good upgrade because the vault keeps giving repeated items.
I would rather have the m+ loot we had in Legion (I didn’t play BFA so I can’t say anything about that). But in Legion, in spite of having just a chest on Tuesday, the dungeon loot was relevant - so it felt less like a chore and more like a rewarding experience. It also allowed us to target a certain item we were after, reducing RNG.
In summary.
Until the community toxicity is addressed, things are not going to improve long term. And this toxicity is rooted in the game design.
We have currently too much focus on eSports, and too little focus on anything else. “World” of warcraft is pretty much dead, there is little to no engaging content for casual players and new players are not welcomed by the community.
I don’t blame the community, since whoever still plays this game is on a constant treadmill, trying to keep up with 200 systems so they don’t fall behind and then never get invited to groups again. Which in turn makes progression a painful experience.
Not everyone who plays can play 24/7 and the little time they do have available to play, they have to spend 90% of that time catching up wht system a, b, c, d, e, f so they can enjoy 10% of the time doing the things they really enjoy. So that also leads to extreme frustration when a key would take a whole hour of the precious limited leisure time.
The core design of the entire m+ experience needs to be revisited. But in the meantime, I believe that the solutions I presented above could help mitigate a lot of the frustration that people are facing right now.
