I think M+ has been slowly eroding the community and it over shadows the game as a whole quite a bit. You won’t any reasonable discussion on M+ on these forums, the M+ fanbois are a rabid pack of wolves.
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I guess I disagree that classes are specifically designed for mythic+ considering the disparity in utility and damage profiles.
To me that is scapegoating without diving into class differences that existed before and after Legion.
You have stopped here. The community in general is more toxic. Arena, raiding, M+, etc. Even classic devolved into tryhard toxic.
And it’s really not just WoW. LoL, OW, CSGO, etc have all devolved. It’s just the internet in general.
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The internet has always had pockets on toxicity, but the way retail is designed these days amplifies this toxicity quite a bit. I’ve been playing Classic since it launched and there is stark difference between the community there verse the toxic cesspool that is retail.
Your examples of other games being toxic just proves my point even more. Competitive games breed toxic behavior.
Competitive play necessitates grey blob class design, which waters down the RPG part of MMORPG to the point of irrelevance.
All the best competitive games have no persistent character progression, and all the best RPGs have little to no competitive element. This isn’t a coincidence. It’s a requirement for unencumbered balance work required competitive play and unencumbered character building for RPGs.
What we really need is an MMORPG that has dungeons/raids as just another thing to do instead of being the primary focus of the game.
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The pro M+ crowd doesn’t get this at all. Trying to balance 36 specs around 5 man content pretty much guarantees boring class design.
I personally think this game was at it’s best when the end game content wasn’t so segregated. Look at the popularity of Wrath raiding, people to this day still have fond memories of tackling Wrath raids with their guilds.
WoW’s current developers are trying way too hard to appease the wrong type of player, namely the players that keep demanding more and more hardcore content. Is the game really better off trying to appease a segment of hardcore players that is probably so small that it doesn’t even amount to 1% of the player base?
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Competitive elements have ruined the game
I tend to think more of it in terms of Blizzard has ruined the competitive elements of the game.
I’m looking forward to Wrath classic in the era of warcraftlogs and hyper meta focused.
Bet we see a lot of class stacking and spec shunning once the math and numbers become extremely widespread.
Players are different now.
It happened with classic.
It’s going to happen with TBC classic soon.
And tackling content with a guild or friends is absolutely still the best way to do it.
Which is why in the modern context, it’s best to just preclude that behavior entirely (or at least, render it moot — nobody cares if you’re speedrunning dungeons for transmogs) by making instanced content a fun sidegame instead of the main attraction.
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In my opinion, WoW is and has always been instanced content (dungeons, raids, PvP).
Turning that into a side game will kill WoW.
For the first chunk of its lifespan, when the game was at its largest, the overwhelming majority were doing below-M0 difficulty 5-mans and more accessible raids (ZG, AQ20, Karazhan, etc). That lines up more with “fun sidegame” instanced content than it does modern competitive instanced content.
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M+ is what has kept WoW relevant for so long after its prime. People wanted repeatable content and it filled that niche. Also, you didn’t list raiding but raids have meta as well. Stuff can and will always be a competition as it breeds better and more fun gameplay.
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Raids under mythic at least have flex though, which helps alleviate meta issues.
Aren’t those still instances?
Agreed, but I don’t think the playerbase is new enough for that to be enough anymore.
Classic is shining a spotlight on that right now.
If Blizzard went and gutted the game so it was only heroic dungeons and normal raid, do you really think it would grow and become more popular and better at this point in its life?
Do you think that would help people who say they don’t have anything meaningful to do if you remove a massive part of the game that has upgrades?
Do you think if TBC classic launched and they gutted the rewards to transmog from T5 and T6 content its players would be happy?
Raids under mythic are cleared week 1 and are a total joke. The game can’t survive with trivial instances like that.
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No, but it’s probably unrealistic to expect an MMO as MMOs currently exist to grow. Even with competitive instanced stuff, the game is becoming continually harder to sell. It’s time to either do some radical innovation or start focusing on keeping a moderately sized loyal playerbase around.
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Fully agreed about growing a 16 year old game. I would argue that WoW has already been shifting to a loyal fan base for years.
At this point, I’m not so sure the casual non-raiding or non-dungeon player is in the majority anymore.
Just running around SW or Oribos it’s almost impossible to find a 60 without some mythic+ gear.
Same in classic, finding a 60 not in some raid epics is actually hard. I’ve tried when waiting on a WB to drop in Org.
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I think the reason subs are so low as it is, is likely due to the nerf in dungeon loot. They should have given it a tier set not nerfed it.
You realize casual doesn’t mean doesn’t like challenges right?
Did this time ever truly exist in WoW? In vanilla you couldn’t even get into a raid as a ret paladin unless you were the guild leader’s girlfriend.