Agreed. Now those who don’t have the time or schedule for good groups must pay and bliz makes their money through tokens as opposed to subs.
ARE WE REALLY TALKING ABOUT A LIVING WAGE UP IN HERE
OK, go go Economics!
Living wages and minimum wages aren’t too different. They both set a floor for what a person can earn, but it also kills jobs and raises prices on goods.
Let’s say that the US institutes a ‘living wage’ for everyone. You can’t get a job below 15 an hour now. However…since everyone is now earning at least 15 an hour, the cost of business goes up. There are less jobs because small businesses now can’t afford to hire more help without significantly more business or increasing prices to cover the cost. Same with large businesses, but they can cut costs in different ways, usually revolving around cutting employee benefits but also involving increasing cost of product. Now that 15 an hour has the same spending power as the previous 7.25 minimum wage did because everything costs more.
Competition always increases advantages for the consumer, but it also separates workers who want to get ahead from those who don’t. Disincentivizing earning more just makes people lazy and apathetic. Working up to 15 an hour is far better for everyone than being handed 15 an hour.
And if a living wage is supposed to solve all the problems, why make it 15 an hour? Why not 30? Or 100? Or 1000? Make everyone a millionaire!
But you can’t. The more you inflate pay, the more you inflate the cost of doing business cause businesses have to find ways to pay that minimum. Which will almost always involve increasing the cost of products and services. Just remember that when your Big Mac at McD’s suddenly costs 35$.
Have you played Vanilla WoW???
It did not start out for casuals. MMO’s in general, back when WoW came out, was not for casuals.
But WoW did grow because Blizzard wanted more subs/money and made it more casual friendly. Now everyone can have purple gear for little effort.
And remember that great line from the Incredibles. “When everyone is super…nobody is.”
idk itd feel kinda weird getting raid tier gear in world quests
im probably missing something but it doesnt sound like a good idea at all
Oh wow this thread is still here… how unfortunate
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You could solo and no exp loss on death, it was the most casual MMO ever made at the time.
Have you played actual MMO’s?
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you could solo in everquest too 
just not with every classes
Exactly. People forget how casual friendly WoW was at the beginning. It only seems “hardcore” now compared to how ridiculously “casual” it has become.
Sounds good in theory. Doesn’t work in practice. Visions of Nzoth broke the integrity of loot (470s on the solo progression track), and we’ve seen that loot doesn’t take the bad out of casuals, it just makes it hard to find successful groups as a geared and skilled player, without using third party tools.
Difficulty is a core part of feeling accomplished. If anything, BfA went WAY WAY too far in making high level gear accessable to those who don’t need it. All players having access to gear is what caused the rise of Raiderio. If everyone has gear, gear doesn’t matter, and the metric players use to evaluate each other shifts to a factor idependant of gear.
Rewarding difficult content appropriately is vital in keeping the rewards structure fair and balanced.
No mythic player wants raids to be ‘overwatch but PvE’. The reason why there’s such a conversation about balance is because shadowlands beta, as I type right now, has worse balance than Classic WoW. Picking a bad spec, with a bad cov, with bad legos, with bad soulbinds, will put you more than 50% behind a player who makes the right decisions. Some specs and builds feel genuinely just as viable as a Classic WoW retribution paladin. We’re liiking at 40-60% throughput differentials on single target. AoE cap is creating like 500% disparity in dungeons between classes that can effectively AoE and those that can’t. Balance is bad. Nobody wants a chromecast hyperbalanced game, but SL’s beta looks worse balanced than Classic.
It’s actually kind of upsetting this thread has stayed active as long as it has, because the core argument completely misses all nuance, and fails to understand why casual or hardcore players engage with the game. Leave power gains for power gamers, and make a slew of genuinely fun and engaging activities for those who don’t want to grind power.
‘Casual’ gear (world quests, heroic dungeons, torghast, etc) should reward normal raid level gear. A weekly piece of heroic gear seems fine. Coming anywhere close to M+15 or Mythic raid gear, and you’re crossing a line and start rapidly devaluing that content for those who enjoy it.
Power is frankly a terrible motivation for casual players, and I’d rather see Blizzard leave power to those who actually want to grind tooth and nail to get it.
This isn’t even an ‘elite vs casual’ thing. This is actually just ‘good game design vs bad game design’. If you even consider rewarding casual players similarly to mythic raiders, mythic raiding as a concept breaks. The entire point of it is that its supposed to be the hardest content in the game, while offering the best rewards. You can’t design content like mythic raiding, or m+15s, and not have them offer the best rewards. That’s ludacris.
High end group content requires character optimization, rotation optimization, strat optimization, and teamwork. I think that if a player is unwilling to put in these elements, and preform them at a high level, they should be locked out of higher tier rewards until they obtain the skill and playgroup to overcome those obstacles.
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What’s even more unfortunate is how many people actually agree with OP (the minority, but still … )
When some people are so angry at casuals demanding fair gear that angry mobs flag the OP as “Real life threat”
You know the moments mods see they are gonna remove the flag right?
For the 10th time. I’ll spell it out slowly: I - am - not - advocating - M-Raid -gear. - I - simply - want - a - way - to - use - crappy - RNG - gear - to - increase - Ilevel - of - gear - I - already - have - like - Benthic - gear - worked. - It - can - cap - out - 5 - or - even - 10 - ilevels - below - your - righteous - MRaiders - gear - so - you’ll - always - be - shinier - than - us - filthy - casuals. Why is this so hard to understand and in what way does it impact your game? You want to play that content and get that gear, have at it. I don’t want to play that content and understand top tier content rewards top tier gear, I just hate the RNG crap so bad and this idea would at least help a little.
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There absolutely is, regardless of what you think. Higher difficulty content rewarding higher quality gear is something that’s a staple of most quality MMORPGs these days, for a very good reason. It’s a reward structure that encourages playing through higher-difficulty content, and without it, playing said higher-difficulty becomes more discouraged.
People that don’t go through higher-difficulty content don’t need the highest quality gear to enjoy the game and do the content they enjoy doing. Because that’s generally the case, there’s not much harm in retaining a reward structure that encourages higher difficulty content. What OP is asking for would be fixing something that, for what I’d wager is the majority of players, isn’t actually broken.
Mythic raid level gear for everyone isn’t necessary to enjoy the game. Don’t get caught in a mindset where you feel like it is.
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Having power gaps between gear awarded from solo and easy activities versus group and difficult activities is fine.
Having power gaps between content grow as large they became in BfA is excessive.
Also having alternative methods for players to reduce some of the gap between content over time, such as with Benthic stuff, is fine (sans putting BiS raid level bonuses on the solo gear).
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I asked this in swtor before they changed to their current trash gear system, and I’m gonna ask it here. For what purpose do you need that top in gear? You’re not raiding or doing content that requires that gear progression, so what do you need it for?
SWTOR did that crap where you can get max ilvl gear from any form of content and it literally killed the raiding scene. Why raid when you can spam the shortest dungeon in the game and get top tier gear in just a few days?
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It never had one.
Gotta have those big stats for pet battles and afking in SW/Org
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Yes it did.
Then maybe people don’t s tislly care about raiding as much as you say and you just want to force raid content on everyone else
You have an awful lot of likes on your post even though I am not sure you are serious.
I am not sure Shadowlands is going to be an expansion to your liking in this regard though. It seems they have taken 2 steps back in this regard.
It gives people something to work towards. Does it need to have more of a function than that? People’s egos get fed all sorts of ways in this game already might as well share the wealth.