I really really wish people would stop assuming casuals don’t do hard content. That’s a disservice to the game and outright wrong. Casual just means they aren’t taking time off or dedicating serious portions to playing. Quite a few ‘casual’ guilds clear heroic and even do mythic every tier. Are they doing world firsts… no, but that doesn’t mean that they should be ignored or considered hardcore.
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One of the rewards used to be access to more forms of content (difficulties).
While I agree that there needs to be a different rewarding system, it’s funny to think that everything should be designed to have a physical reward rather than just because you want to do it.
Do people not go out and buy games any more because they want to have fun? Does there need to be rewards involved with it?
It’s hard to believe people would have played Mega-man and said “well, I’ve unlocked all the upgrades and progressed my character no point in beating Dr Wily as he doesn’t give me anything” and then never completing the game.
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Semantics games, ms 600io 2/9h
This is an amazing write up, thank you for sharing this.
To touch on something you said, that I think feeds into other complaints that we often see cropping up, forging in particular:
Needing your rewards to “Titanforge an insanely high bonus just to break even with your other gear” feels bad.
I feel like BfA has made me despise WF/TF more than usual, and it’s precisely down to what you described. Casual content itself is so quickly irrelevant, that for a casual player you’re reliant on WF/TF to get upgrades.
WF/TF aren’t, in a vacuum, a problem. They’re a nice bonus to rewards that you would have wanted anyway. If I’m wearing 355 shoulders, and I get 370 shoulders that TF up to 385, that’s nice. It’s not mandatory upgrades, it’s just a nice upgrade.
The problem comes in when the content you’re doing no longer provides upgrades natively. At this point you’re fishing for WF/TF, and WF/TF become a much larger part of your personal progression.
Not an issue for raiders and people who push mythic+, but a very large issue for anyone who isn’t interested in that content.
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On the forums if you’re a raider then you’re a Method level player and usually are considered a scumbag elitist.
If you’re a LFR/Warfront player, you’re a poor soul that works 70h a week with 10 kids and have no time to commit to those stinking elitists that dictate how you will play the game!!!
So basically black and white. Nothing in between.
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Apparently I don’t exist then… don’t tell anybody they might catch on that there is a middle ground ![:wink:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=6" ":wink:")
What does this even mean? There are four secondary stats in the game, all of which can be found equally on raid gear or on casual gear, and which stats are right/wrong depends on what spec you play.
I think people keep saying this as a holdover from when raid gear had tier set bonuses and extra sockets, but it has neither anymore. A 385 from N BoD isn’t in any way better than a 385 from a WQ emissary.
We don’t want higher gear than what we have. We have too much gear too easily. Read the thread before making assumptions.
See the funny part is that, people like you and me(before when I raided) were most likely the majority of the playerbase(the middle class). And we got shunned and ignored for 3 xpacs now. This is why a lot of people left.
Edit: just an assumption btw
What part about “I want gear progression to slow down so I don’t outgear low M+'s and random BGs in a week” is not clear?
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I guess I’m confused why you call that casual unfriendly??? Theres a misunderstanding of terms here I think
Because it pushes casuals very quickly into content that is a higher difficulty level than they want to do or even have time to do so they’re left with nothing else but to level alts or do their desired content while outgeared and without getting any relevant rewards. In short it quickly makes the game unrewarding.
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So, to break it down:
There’s a stretch of iLvls between ~290 and ~370. This is where “casuals” would live, in prior expacs. Eventually catchup mechanics come out to push people up a bit, but it would usually take a few weeks or a month to go from 290 to 350.
Casuals lived on that cycle, and enjoyed it. It wasn’t mythic raiding quality gear or anything, and they knew they weren’t getting that. It was a progression that was relevant mostly only to them.
In BfA, 290-370 can be done in a weekend if you put some time in. You hit a fairly hard wall of casual progression where the average casual player has nowhere to go. That pre-raid content used to last a fair bit of time for players (at least, until the catchup mechanics would come out), and meant that people who preferred world content, heroics, random bgs, or LFR, could spend a reasonable amount of time doing that.
Now, that’s not true. You outgear that content so quickly that the content that you want to do is now irrelevant to you. It boils down to wanting the content that we enjoy doing to be relevant longer. Which would mean reducing the reward structure and stretching it out, or altering it somehow so that World Quests aren’t irrelevant within a week and that heroics/LFR are somehow a bit longer lived for us.
It’s not about wanting to get mythic gear, it’s about wanting the gear that our playstyle does provide to be relevant. Which is why much of this thread is about asking for the treadmill to slow back down. We want to take longer to get gear so that our content is relevant for longer, not for our content to provide even better gear than it currently does.
It’s casual unfriendly because, providing that a casual is the kind of player who does mostly the content we’re discussing, the content runs out of relevant rewards within a week, and then is a boring slog with zero path of progression.
Which, as Leiloni said, requires us to either engage in content we don’t want to do, move on to an alt, or rehash the same content with no goal, purpose, or reward.
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Ok I got you now, I can agree with this now. Basically we both agree welfare loot is bad, yes? Basically we get the “casual” perspective on why it’s bad, right?
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Well, one option would be to offer affixes that were WF or World only. This would still maintain the raw power out and about doing casual oriented stuff, but would actually be detrimental for raiding (aside from cheesing ilvl…). Personally I think that raw character power only takes you so far. I’d be more interested in things that maybe change your in-game experience.
Maybe boots that let you double jump once every 10 seconds. A 30 second glider on a 5 minute CD. A WQ teleporter that lets you teleport to the nearest WQ. Or maybe make it so you need to collect sets that give you zone bonuses to access solo content experiences like a molten front with additional zone lore. I personally would be all for delving further into Drust’var lore.
I really liked the MoP Dread Wastes buffs. I thought those were really neat and fun to use while doing the dailies then.
I don’t know. These are all just thoughts and Ideas, completely agree though… It’s a very complicated problem and to their credit Blizz has tried many solutions to “fix” the problem.
Edit: A lot of people were complaining about scaling at the start of expac, what if these sorts of progression systems were the direct counters to such scaling? World progression outside of ilvl. Keep the same scaling so that traditional PvE players eventually also level out of it, but use these progression systems for the casual player to conquer the world around them?
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Or better yet, I’d love to see something like the shoulder enchants from ZG to entice a broad range of players to do content. Instead of a ilvl 400 piece of gear from warfronts, how about a nice beefy shoulder enchant? Or a very sought-after crafting reagent? Rewards don’t need to be cosmetic to not be a piece of gear.
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You could phrase it that way.
We just want our content to last longer. We understand that the ideal method of doing that is to extend our content, and make the rewards take longer and not have it rain from the sky.
We do not desire for World Quests, Heroics, and LFR to continue providing an infinite treadmill of gear until we’re on par with the highest difficulty content.
The problem itself is created by the perpetuation of near-infinite high-quality gear that outstrips casual content so quickly that there’s little point to casual content. They want to funnel people into M+ and Raids, and in doing so they’ve completely devalued all prior content.
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I’m totally on board brother, glad to hear the “casual” playerbase is also upset with the gearing systems in place. I take back all things I said so far to op.
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Edit: Sorry, couldn’t see the original commenter had replied and you were both on the same page. I’ll leave the post just in case others still want another spin of it.
They aren’t asking to progress without improving. They are asking to be able to progress up to the content they feel comfortable in, with the potential of progressing further in a linear fashion.
How long have you been playing this game? More than 8 years maybe?
Not everyone is an old experienced player like us, and for those that aren’t the game fails them.
They don’t necessarily want to jump straight into M+9 because “that’s what gear they have from WQs”, a lot of people aren’t comfortable with that. On the other hand though, they don’t want to be slogging through 50 +2s to get experience when their ilvl is already 390+.
They want their ilvl to be around 370 so that they can do the +2s and not have it feel wasted, then their gear will progress along with their difficulty progression. They can plateau where they want, and they can push where they want. But they will still feel rewarded for doing the content that is appropriate to them.
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But where, lfg is loaded with groups going down to boda and m+