Well, last I checked, “working together” isn’t whining that you can’t do it by yourself in the manner which most suits your schedule and abilities.
ITs a little more than the mechanics of it. I had been to D&D events where there were several games running at once. No one ever had a timed event to see who could “finish” the campaign first. No one ever said “Ha you only ran the regular dungeon with no mechanics so you should only get the +1 longsword but I deserve the +2 longsword because I had to roll a dex check in my fight”
skins loose prestige in games if they’re handed out for free.
This is the exact reason why I quit the game and refuse to buy Shadowlands. Gear is literally gate kept with mythic/heroic content so new/returning players stand little to no chance of obtaining said gear… Unless they want to pay for it, or know people who played who want to carry them. There’s a reason why people think BFA was the single worst expansion in the history of WoW. Not only is gear gate kept, but now it’s abilities with essences. A fresh new dinged 50 stands about 0% chance to compete in PVP without them, never mind there Ilvl is almost doubled by someone who raided. Congrats blizzard from completely segregating new and returning players and not offering even slightest hint of a catch up mechanic. I’m glad I quit in MOP and never looked back.
This will drive away people. This is not good for the game.
It is literally impossible to gatekeep anything when every player of appropriate level can enter the content whenever they want.
This isn’t logical.
If all you do is LFR, your max ilvl gear is LFR gear.
The max ilvl gear that you get is the gear that the content you do yields.
I don’t have an issue with not having the same ilvl as people who do higher difficulty content than me.
The entire purpose of gear scoring is so that a relative difficulty is maintained regarding the content that you do.
In my opinion, getting bizarrely high gear for the content that you did (trivial world boss, warfronts) is more devaluing than anything else.
At some point the gear you get
Bs Design theories aside. People liked getting 445 from doing emissary quest or other ways beside raiding and dungeons, take this away is just gonna make people leave.
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How many posts in trade chat did you see prior pre patch SL and probably soon in the next day or so with “selling heroic/mythic nzoth runs, funneling gear, blah blah blah” have anything to with difficulty for that player. It has literally become a Pay 2 Win scheme for players who can’t afford the time for that content. You are absolutely blind if you think this type of game design mentality isn’t driving people away from the game.
I don’t think you know what pay2win means.
How do you have a Void Elf priest if you quit in MOP?
ANYway, what do you need mythic/heroic gear for if you’re not doing mythic/heroic? You know to get that gear you have to have the gear from the tier before it, right? That’s how the game works.
Also gatekeeping doesn’t mean what you want it to mean. Gatekeeping is colloquially used as “socially imposing an authority on something, usually with elitist bias.”
However, the more general term means “to control access.”
Saying that during progression your raid needs to hit certain requirements is gatekeeping is technically correct, but common usage of it is incorrect and sounds silly. That’s like saying playing a board game is gatekeeping moving 13 spaces because dice only go up to 12.
Gatekeeping in raid context would be if some sort of false authority or impression of a class causes people to limit access to content because of their authority. A guild master sitting all shadow priests because they think shadow priests are bad. That person is gatekeeping. “You’re not a real raider if you play a shadow priest.”
To say “you’re not a mythic raider if you don’t have heroic gear” isn’t gatekeeping:
it’s describing the game.
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Guild Wars (1) did this and was wildly popular and successful. Just saying.
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Some casual players like to try out war mode, but it’s pretty impossible without the gear.
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I know i make really long winded rambly posts, so i’ll try and keep it simple and clear.
There are three (well, technically 4) holistic issues with modern wow.
The game offers a pseudo endgame (the casual world/solo endgame) and the real endgame (mythic dungeons/raiding/rated pvp).
The casual end game is monotonous, time/labor intensive, repetitive, tedious gameplay. It’s slow, boring, and trivial. It offers no challenge and offers very little in the way of reward.
We all recognise this, right? Its not a surprise. Its just what it is. Its dull, boring, chores that almost everyone in game (casuals and hardcore alike) have to do to enjoy the part of the game they actually want to do. The only difference is that this is the casual source of progression. I’m not trying to make a judgement yet. Im setting up the premises. This is the casual endgame.
The real end game is more dynamic, more rewarding, faster paced, more skill focused, more engaging. Once you’re on that ladder, the only limitation is you. Yeah? We’re all good with the distinction?
Well, here’s some current issues.
- That playerbase is and has been shrinking for several expansions. And they arent moving from casual to non-casual. They are going from casual to cyclical sub (patch to patch, then expansion to expansion) to no longer interested in wow.
- Its in the interest of the game to replace those players (or else, obviously see a reduction in its budget). The game is atrophying. Sure, i can absolutely accept that its also ‘finding its core’. But then it is also possible, given this, that it no longer has mainstream appeal because it no longer caters to a broad audience.
- The game currently does a TERRIBLE job of getting players to the actual end game. For whatever reason, (and we all have varying opinions on why). But for whatever reason, the game does a poor job of facilitating the move from the pseudo-endgame to the actual endgame.
Now i hope we can agree on most, if not all of these points. Because they’re sort of important to how we look at the problem Ralph is trying to solve in the OP and why gear wont necessarily work in itself. However, gear is a part of the solution to the puzzle of how you can make the casual player a hardcore player within the modern game.
Issue 1: There is a gear gap. Pretty fair. You get vastly lower gear running the mainstays of the casual loot game. This leads to an access issue in the pug game (which is one of the main ways modern wow differentiates itself from early wow (where guilds played a much larger role in tackling instanced/group content)).
Issue 2: There is a skill gap. The game is terrible at teaching players how to play its game. It throws endless waves of trivial mobs at the players, whether through quests, world quests, rares, dungeons, heroic dungeons or LFR. Anything you can solo or LFD/r), teaches you nada about the actual end game (except perhaps how to tunnel your rotation). Even in mythic dungeons… big ball of death, aoe down… Maybe the games just not that complicated? I dunno. Maybe theres not even a skill gap, maybe the game is just super-lacking in ANY challenging content. Which brings me to three:
3. There is a psychological gap. For whatever reason, there is a vast swathe of players who would have no trouble at all clearing a mythic plus 10 or an heroic raid, but wont even put themselves forward for even a +0 or a normal raid clear. I say ‘for whatever reason’ but the big one is very likely ‘being judged by other people for making a mistake’. And wow has this problem (IN SPADES) compared to its competitors.
I remember preach doing his ‘im going to be a noob to see what its really like’ series. His advice at the end was ‘dudes, you’ve got to get out of those early keys (and the pug world) as fast as you can… its not good for your mental health’.
Okay, these are the problems, so maybe we need to look at solutions addressing them. You have from the blizzard side the issue of declining interest and players not sticking around. You have their magic solution (build around systems) losing their sheen. You have the problem that new players are going to get stuck in the same place because the game deliberately designed the casual game to feel like a game in itself.
From the player side, you have an interest to keep the reward structures in tact. You probably have either one of a single path of progression (pyramid) where players are fairly rewarded for their investment, or multiple paths of progression where players are rewarded fairly for their investment into the sphere of the game they want to play.
For casuals you have the problem of access and how to cross into the core game. Or, how to make their sphere of the game that they want to play more rewarding and fleshed out without being forced into playing parts of the game they dont want to play just because its the most rewarding.
If you solve these disparate and competing interests, you solve the problems of wow.
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While your strawman argument is cute the actual argument behind NOT doing that is simply that gear is the primary reward for doing content in this game and as such the hardest tasks reward the best gear. Fundamentals of game design that have existed since well before WoW and still exist today.
So what’s driving you away from the game is that you’re gatekeeping how people should play it, spend their time and money? That’s the opposite of what you’re trying to say.
I ran a guild from vanilla through WOTLK and 100% of the players who got boosts or wanted carries quit as soon as progression happened because they thought the game was BORING to attend raids every week just for some miniscule attempt at loot.
It’s not difficult to join a progression guild as long as you put in the time and effort, and you too can get all the heroic/mythic gear you want.
Anyone who ran a guild knows how huge of a waste of time it can be, how risky it is, to gear someone up just so that they can help with progression.
WoW has not been a FORCED social/community driven game for a long, long time. People anonymously join groups with people they’ll never talk to or meet just to “get the loot” or “fill the bar.”
LFR was the nail in the coffin: I can subscribe to WoW for 2 months out of an expansion and experience everything it has to offer besides the tedious grind.
I can quit after I clear LFR of each dungeon 1 time, do 0 progression and not worry about “the loot.”
Conversely, I can absorb everything about an expansion and do the progression in the game.
You want the best of both worlds with the negatives from neither? That doesn’t make any logical sense: you can’t play casually and get the same reward as someone who doesn’t play casually. It’s just that simple. MMOs have always rewarded people for 1) grouping and 2) playing more. It’s kinda their entire business model.
Your argument is that if it was just easier to get everything, people would play more? That’s laughable.
I don’t think there will ever be a sustained MMO again where people are required to rely on each other. Technology, spoilers, botting, automation have gotten too advanced to make that really massively successful. And any system that requires reliance on others will make it that much more lucrative to cheat it to “get ahead.” Good luck with that.
That’s not even remotely true. Carries exist, have so for awhile now.
This is the one of the most illogical fallacies I’ve heard in a while.
I genuinely believe you don’t have a firm grasp of what Gate keeping is.
the activity of controlling, and usually limiting, general access to something.
If I cannot compete in current content as a fresh or returning player because of limited Ilvl this fits the very definition verbatim.
Are these the same casual players who are so uninformed about the silly systems in WoW that they don’t realize that being lower geared is an advantage in warmode? because they need something to blame when they have the advantage, think they don’t, and lose?
But in your scenario the person getting carried isn’t getting the gear, the people who are performing the carry are getting the gear. And in order to get that, they had to get the gear before it. Wow, logic.
Nah, you don’t know what gatekeeping is: it’s just some buzzword that you use when you lie about quitting wow yet you have a character only available after you claim to have quit, and look for some excuse.
You claim to want a “path to progression” except you ignore that there are paths but you handwave them as being unfair to your preferences.
An infant can’t compete in the olympics either, but they can still race the other infants around. You don’t want to do that. Shrug.
You cannot compete in “current content” because you’re not current, in your definition. You’re a RETURNING or FRESH player, not a COMPETITIVE player.
Those are mutually exclusive players.
Guess what, the COMPETITIVE players are the ones selling carries to those who don’t bother joining/creating guilds of likeminded players.
The rest of us join guilds and do progression, or don’t.
I came back to WoW 2 months ago after taking a break from the beginning of BFA, and was able to get AOTC heroic in 2 months with a boosted 120 character from prepurchasing shadowlands.
I’m failing to see what was “gatekeeping” except for putting in the effort to help a guild that had attrition due to incoming expansion, and do progression content with them, ignoring that it was “old” or “beaten a long time ago” by others.
Shrug, it was fine.
Not remotely true. I actually came back in the last final few weeks of BFA and had a Mythic CE guild come into my Heroic run with them deciding to bring in Hunters to funnel gear into me. If you go into the content, you’d get the gear. Sitting on your hands and doing nothing means you get nothing and should receive nothing.