While the design of Mythic raiding or any other ‘‘high skill-based content’’ is for sure tailored for the minority of the playerbase, I don’t think it compares exactly well to an activity like pursuing drop chance mount that only a minority of players will see.
Let’s say we take off all the incentives of those activities. No gear drop from raiding, no achievements, titles, mounts and all the good stuff. I’m sure a lot would still enjoy raiding. I even personally know people who raid and don’t care about any of the rewards (shoutout to the friends who traded me mounts and transmogs). But I doubt people would spam kill Apothecary Hummel hundreds of time if it didn’t drop a mount.
You can even use your own example of poker and slot machines. The rewards for both activities is a fun part. However, a simple game of poker alone, without playing for money, is fun (for some), while the penny-slot machine (assuming it would be free to spin it) would be seen as a boring, waste of time if it didn’t have a prize. While I’m sure you could have some fun ‘‘trying your luck’’ a few times to see if you theoretically win, you wouldn’t spend hours doing it if it wasn’t for the for the actual prize. But poker can be played both for fun or for the money.
With that in mind, can you honestly answer this:
Would you be willing to sit (somewhat AFK) for about 15 minutes to kill Sha of Anger a thousand times if its Heavenly Cloud Serpent didn’t exist?
I’m not trying to be rude either, just hoping my perspective on the whole thing is understood.
This is the general kind of things I’ve heard in the past after telling my attempts to other people. I’m not trying to be mean here, but I can sort of understand why people see it this way.
While I understand any type of behavior can be pushed to an extreme where people will go ‘‘that’s insane’’, including Mythic raiding, I believe there are two types of scenarios, one being arguably good, and the other one just being bad. Let me try to put in words what I mean here:
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Someone practicing the piano 10 hours a day
While this can be considered degenerate behavior by some (if not the majority), at the very least you progressively get something out of it - skills. Unless you’re somehow one of those child prodigies, you don’t start playing Beethoven the first five minutes you stand in front of the instrument. Obviously this can comes with risks. If you skip meals and stop taking care of yourself to play the piano, then it’s not a good obsession to have - which is why it’s arguably good. But it’s a good thing if you can strike the right balance between spending time playing and stay physically and mentally healthy.
You can apply this scenario to competitive raiding in WoW, which I’m sure some of us went through. It’s okay to quit mid-progress if you don’t feel okay anymore. Even if you don’t reach your original end-game goals (let’s say, Hall of Fame for instance), at the very least you probably learned a lot and became a better player, made some friends and hopefully had fun. I don’t wanna go too deep into this, but hopefully you understand what I mean. -
For the case of the Heartbreaker:
It’s the bad ‘‘insane way’’ because you don’t really get anything out of it. You either have or don’t have the mount. You don’t get better at the game, you’re not really interacting with people (considering the length and difficulty of the actual instance). The only thing you’re getting is an increased to your Rarity attempt count. To me, it feels like I could open a Word document and spam the word banana 10 000 times to ‘‘beat the game’’ - except for Heartbreaker, you don’t even know how many times you need.
With that in mind, this is why I’m saying that skill-based difficulty > time-based difficulty. Something that is hard and challenging will effectively takes time to master as well, less for certain people and more for others. And even if you don’t end up becoming the next Beethoven or a world first raider, the time you invested doing those things reflect the rewards you got, and as long as you did it in a healthy way, nothing is lost.
There’s simply very little to gain from the Valentine dungeon or camping MoP bosses. And just because something takes no skill to complete, it doesn’t means that it should be compensated by taking considerably more time than it has to. Arguably, you could say that you ‘‘gained’’ things because of these bosses: ended up leveling more alts, met people leveling, played new specs and roles, etc. But feeling forced to have alts to have more chance to get something my main character cannot get just because of RNG shouldn’t be the main thing that drives me to play alts.
There’s no argument to be made here. I don’t think you could change something in the game without at least making one player unhappy. But in my opinion, if that change did make 99 more players happy, then I think it’s for the best.
All things considered: I personally don’t care too much if some value is lost overtime by making certain things easier for other players. If a piece of content is widely seen as boring, unrewarding, unfun, unfair, too repetitive or too grindy, then they can either turn it into something that’s fun and exciting, possibly even challenging if it was easy, or reduce the time it takes to do those boring activities. so that players can sooner go back to do things they actually enjoy while still having made progress on things they’re working for.
Hopefully we can see some changes in past content, but I have greater hopes for the future. While I can’t say whether or not they’ll change the drop rate on the Heartbreaker, I pray that we simply don’t get a new similar case in DF.