Current M+ difficulty is not good for player retention

It was really rough for me to get KSM but I did it. I’m a pretty average player and I wouldn’t say I got carried through, but I certainly contributed to enough bricked keys to that end.

I feel like it isn’t the difficulty that makes the keystones unpalatable but it’s just too frustrating. All the affixes are frustrating. The timer is frustrating. The lack of reward for missing a timer is frustrating. It just leads to a whole lot of wasted time with people giving up early and giving up often.

You can’t even really learn how to properly deal with mechanics in combination with affixes because people just give up at the first sight of trouble.

I don’t even blame them for doing it because you are given nothing for your time even if you stay to help show people how to clear it.

Finishing the dungeon, even over the timer, needs to have meaningful rewards to encourage players to stick it out.

As it stands people try a lot of keys and fail a lot of keys and many people don’t even have the opportunity to learn why they failed, they are just spending time with shields up because the nature of the activity breeds incredible hostility among the players.

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By the time we get mythic VAULT… we have alrady been getting hero vault for SEVEN key levels lol… And hero End of Dungeon for 3… We dont need hero vault between 7 and 9 when we can get unlimited hero end of dungeon from 7 to 9… thats just silly.

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Most of the people arguing that the system is fine as is happen to also sell carries on the side and don’t want the price of those to decline with the easing of difficulty.

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You’re looking at it from the high level, but when you drill down you are talking about a bite sized gaming session where you are faced with earning absolutely nothing meaningful for your time, of which is mostly spent getting frustrated.

That’s the problem.

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AHHH THIS MAKES SO MUCH SENSE… As only 8% are clearing 10’s… so yah I guess it makes perfect sense that a lot of those are the only ones capable of selling carries right now.

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I totally disagree. I think they have two goals:

  1. Players will have to git gud. Everybody, including casuals and solo players. If you’re gud already, you’ll need to git better.
  2. They are attempting to teach players a lesson in humility, to accept that Blizzard knows best. That every unpopular change that ever had to be reverted because of player blowback should have been kept as is.

This is the expansion they are planning on teaching players once and for all that they will be sorry they complained.

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There is more to this game than grinding M+.

Vault loot is the problem maybe? (in the low to mid)

M+ is easier than Heroic raids, yet drops and rewards are higher chance.

The difficulty is fine. Its just there arent enough people to do them anymore because of the vile and toxic playerbase. So many people stopped doing them in PUGs or they only do them as a guild. I dont blame them either. Its become a Sludge Flinging experience now.

You do realize that means they will stop playing, right?

I think that M+ was more “fun” and “accessible” in prior xpacs should be very concerning. But, as others have said, this is a problem that will sort itself out. There is 100% chance Bliz will nerf M+ pretty hard in the next few months, but not until they have shed a lot of players.

The problem here is lack of a curve. It is brain-dead easy until boom, it’s too hard. They failed on the scaling mechanic that made M+ good before - you could be fine for a while, but then it scaled until it was too hard. Doesn’t work that way now.

The amount of people that will quit over not being to get Myth track gear out of M+ is probably is pretty small.

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Time will answer this for us.

Time has answered this. The bulk of the player base doesn’t care about those high keys. The only people complaining are washed up raiders that gravitated to M+ the last few expansions.

If people quit, it’s gonna be over the lackluster story and the lack of content. Most players don’t care about grinding 10 more points of ilevel.

Delves are the future, and Blizzard knows this. M+ participation is so grossly overexaggerated by the community that engages with it. They think that everyone loves M+, that M+ is the best thing to ever grace a MMO, when the reality is, most people don’t care for it, and soon as there was an alternative for gearing, people took it.

Blizzard needs to jetison M+ out of the game, imo. It doesn’t fit in WoW one bit. Every expansion this forum is filled with complaints around M+, I’m sick of it.

I think M+ did more damage to the game, and the retention metrics than any system they have ever introduced.

They have been trying to fix it since BFA now with the constant tinkering, they really don’t know what to do with it. The changes we got for TWW was the first big attempt to reign in M+, to bring into parity with Mythic raiding.

Letting players get some of the best gear in the game through 5 mans was a dumb move from the get go.

It’s funny, when I first learned about this one, I said that as a healer I thought this was going to be horrible. The next post in that thread I was called a bad healer then lol. “You let people die??”

I see so many complaints about it now.

(Disclaimer: I’m slow to rise in keys on season 1for any expansion so I’m not there yet)

Citation needed. Like seriously, you make this claim every chance you get without ever providing a single shred of evidence.

How many of those complaints are started or heavily bolstered by you?

Just last week you tried to claim Blizzard continually worsened rewards from M+ from the get-go until we finally reached TWW, which of course is verifiably false. Now they’re trying to fix it since BFA, despite them continuing to make better rewards for comparatively lower effort until TWW.

Look it’s fine for you to offer your opinion of M+. But when you just make up things that we can verify are factually inaccurate, do you genuinely think you are going to convince anyone to those opinions?

When those 5-mans scale to being the most difficulty content in PvE, why not? Isn’t the entire argument behind why people argue mythic raid should reward the best gear is the highest challenge?

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Pretty sure the lack of participation and all this crying about how bad pugs are this season IS the proof that m+ has been artificially boosted because it was the loot piñata of wow… and now that it’s not so much anymore you’re seeing a healthy uptick in raid participation and a lot of interest in delves.

Nobody REALLY likes m+… they like free loot and unlimited farmable crests. If you really loved m+ you wouldn’t be commenting on the conditions of loot you’d just be out there rocking 11’s and getting wrecked progging 12’s. Instead you’re sitting here trying to adjust rewards by crying in forums.

I’m the perfect example for m+ haters running m+. I think m+ is the devil. But I run 9’s and 10’s. Why? Because I need gilded crests and even with the slightly harder content this season, m+ is STILL the loot piñata of crests it has always been. And might as well get some mythic vault options while I’m at it. Do I run 11’s? Hell no why would I put myself through that for no reward. I’m only going to run 11’s when the slobbering mouth breathers stuck on 7-8 start doing 9’s and 10’s… just so I don’t have to deal with them.

You want to have gilded drop at 7? Fine. I propose we give you what you want… BUT that we also lower m+ crest drops to 3 per dungeon (it can go back up to 5 for fails and 12 for upgrades at +10) and put a weekly lockout on each dungeon. One run per week per instance… pick your key level. Fail after you kill the first boss and you get nothing for the week. We’ll see who wants to waste their one run on a 7 then.

If we ignore the fact that the entry point for M+ was moved and another endgame pillar that gives the same gear as low level keys, then sure. But those things did happen. “Low” keys are filled with people who have now idea how the dungeons work or how threatening the mechanics because they simply aren’t used to a “low” key being something where mechanics need to be respected. And then applying the non-linear scaling to higher keys starting from a lower level, the players moving up into those higher ranks are facing difficulty jumps that are also foreign to them.

Yes, the ease with which people could acquire loot in M+ is probably playing a factor. I am not trying to suggest there aren’t players who are upset they have to exhibit more effort to get loot out of M+. But we saw the largest structural changes to both M+ itself and small group content in general ever coming into TWW S1. To pretend those changes are irrelevant and it’s just gear leading to the discontent is just disingenuous.

I like M+. If there were a way to progress my character that wasn’t from gear through M+, I truly wouldn’t care if gear dropped from M+. It’s just in WoW, progress = gear, so it simply comes with the territory.

This is just a bad faith argument. A player who after 3 weeks would be content running a former +8 won’t be in an appropriate M+ difficulty for their skill level. They will either still be gearing up in heroic, M0, or delves, or in M+ that’s over their head. Again, you’re trying to ignore a massive change in the environment for keys to focus solely on the narrative you want to believe.

If this is a negotiation, then I propose we do the same for raid. Wipe on Broodtwister or Ky’veza, well I hope you do better next week so you can try your hand at Silken Court.

If the only reason you choose one form of content over another is how easy and quick it is to get gear, then you’ll never be happy.

Well i mean not only that you used to be able to do like 4 or 5 and get the same gear as normal raid which is raceroll

For every raid experience I have done it consists of clearing trash to a boss, explaining the mechanics to unprepared players who are there for gear, and then dying to re-explain to 1 or 2 players that can brick the whole run for the remaining 20+ folks that are researched. You spend more time out of combat than in.

This is like being a Manager of an Einstein Bros and arguing that people like omelets more than bagels.

There is an astronomically higher number of keys ran per week logged in Warcraft Logs, which follows wow profiles and does not require anyone to run logs, than there are Raid Logs. And reading the forums at all you might gather from others that do raid that after raid nights their guild is a ghost land.

Don’t go into business for yourself. They axe Mythic+ their game would be dead.

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