It really has been a steady downgrade for the casuals the past few expansions, hasn’t it?
Legion: Titanforging gave casuals upward mobility thru just doing casual content alone (LFR, World Quests, etc). On the PvP side of things there was templates/no worries about joining a random BG as a casual.
BFA: Titanforging still in the game up until 8.3, Warfronts provided a welfare Heroic piece here and there, solo-queue Visions of Nzoth provided some accessible welfare gear as well (up to Heroic, I believe). On the PvP side of things, casuals could gear themselves up to Heroic iLvL just playing random BGs alone, and scaling somewhat helped reduce power gaps.
Shadowlands: No titanforging, casual gear “maxes out” slightly above Normal, large 30 iLvL power gaps in PvP
He gets carried?
But yeah I’m more looking at Ion since even before Ybarra came in. It’s been clear TO ME from various interviews they gave and Q&A’s, they are pretty friggin’ clueless. I remember watching one Q&A where Ion looked at the camera and said ‘‘tell me what you want’’.
Shadowlands = Classic Modernized in the dev’s eyes
They heard all this talk of classic so they introduced classic elements and thought it’d be greatly received.
World of Warcraft became a genre-dominating juggernaut on the basis of the fact that you could progress and level to max level through solo play and has provided plenty of solo and randomly queued content in the time since, recognizing that the massive multiplayers didn’t have to be forced to play together or into artificial coordinated group structures but could instead just hang out, group, socialize and see each other doing their thing in parallel tandem.
You are required to get a high enough ilvl so that you can get invited to another players group, but you can only get the high enough ilvl by being invited into the groups in the first place to obtain the high enough ilvl. Solo content needs to be onpar with entry ilvl so players can become raid ready to join groups to play with others.
LOL! You have to be a dev? Seriously, are you?
That was just to good of a troll not to have read!
“Danger” doesn’t universally equal “fun”. Fun is a very subjective concept. Content where I continue to struggle against enemies that I’ve killed a dozen times is content that I don’t play. Too much content that I don’t play, and I start wondering if it’s worth $15 a month to keep subscribing.
So it will always be a balancing act for Blizzard. How many players like me are there, compared to players with preferences like yours? I linked an article above with data scraped from the armory that suggests that about 80% of players are more like me. That’s a lot of $15 a month.
But is is an arbitrary pain in the hind end, for no reason other than to extend my playing time and try and push me into group content that I don’t want to do?
Increasingly, yes.
The scuttlebutt is that the dev team rested on the laurels of being confident that nothing would make players like me quit, we were too addicted, so we could keep getting prodded into taking longer to do things to maximize their #engagement metrics. Their steadily falling MAUs say otherwise.
Blizzard’s been watching “players like you” quit the game for years.
And they’ve been handing out greater and greater rewards for less and less difficulty throughout all of that.
Maybe they’ve finally realized that the demands will never cease, so they’ve just given up because that beast simply cannot be kept fed.
Especially when you (and others in this thread) only seem obsessed with item level and are completely ignoring the massive buffs that the Cypher system gives players doing solo content in 9.2.
So, I assume that you’ve been playing the Alternate Universe version of WoW where the general directive wasn’t that for every new quality of life perk or system, two needed to be arbitrarily taken away.
It’s a pattern that started with the rise of Ion and the release of WOD, and has steadily gone on into the present day, chip-chipping away at players’ patience and tolerance for increasingly aggravating nonsense.
Oh yeah, that’s me for sure. Obsessed with item level
You always say this, but the numbers in Shadowlands show a different story. The iLvl gap between solo content rewards and group content rewards is higher than ever, almost equal to the power gains from 2 patches. In MoP, we were just 15 iLvls behind, for example.
The Cypher system buffs don’t work in Torghast, legacy content, or even the other outdoor zones of Shadowlands. I would rather have a higher iLvl for actual power.
We were told that our Legendaries would really push us over the top once we ground them out. I haven’t seen it.
We were told that Domination Shards would really super make a difference in our day to day content and definitely weren’t just for min-maxers. I haven’t seen it.
We were told that our Covenant abilities would be well-balanced and super make a big difference to our average play. The only classes that I play that saw this got nerfed.
I have zero trust that the new Cypher system will turn out to be the only thing that I need rather than better gear and boosts to base stats.
Do you not “get” that the quote on this original Warcraft box reveals the intent of the original World of Warcraft developers? The time was, indeed, Classic WOW, but the words tell you that Blizzard intended for this to be a home to solo players just as much as players of the highest levels. There was no differentiation in the value of players, or of gameplay, or insinuation that solo play was any less welcome than dungeon and raid play.
To ignore that and try to claim that it does not mean anything is as pointless as watching the current developers thinking that they can ignore large portions of the player base without negative consequences. The current state of things does not seem to be considering large portions of the player base and they are leaving. The end game of this will be bad for ALL Warcraft players.
So, keep trying to claim that Warcraft was not created with solo players in mind. Their own words say otherwise. It is the later developers that have made the decision to ignore solo players as they march into the e-game era of Warcraft.
Funny that I just noticed that I am posting on my classic toon, which, ironically, is the same level as my Retail toon.
That is another recent decision made that has critics and supporters, but has obviously not enhanced anything in the game enough for players to stop leaving in droves. Another issue for another day.
