I think Blizzard has accidently stumbled into creating toxic game play by introducing the concept of “failing” a key. I really think there’s a couple things they could do to correct this without a drastic effect on the overall game and I think it would improve the overall game experience for many across the spectrum.
When you do not time a key, instead of demoting the key and penalizing your reward tokens. Really the only “penalty” to not timing the key really should be that your key is simply not promoted to +1, +2, or +3. It should still reward the +12 tokens for completion, otherwise inadvertently many may not want to stay for completion in those cases. The only one who has any type of issue here would be the key holder, who may not be at fault for the incompletion anyway.
Anyway, I’m not sure if others think this sort of adjustment to not timing a key would be a good for the health of the game, but I think I would personally welcome it with open arms as a positive reinforcement for progress, rather than constantly tug of waring keys.
For example, if you can’t quite time an 8 yet, but you are geared for it, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to push you back down to a 7 to make you push it back up to an 8 just because you can’t time that key range yet.
No, if you aren’t able to succeed at the level of the key you get one of more appropriate level. It’d be like saying the penalty for wiping to Heroic Court should be that we don’t move on to Ansurek, but we still get full loot and rewards.
Are we pretending that people don’t get toxic and ragequit in content without keys? Go wipe a timewalking group a couple times and let me know how that goes for you.
If keys don’t deplete then failing to meet the win conditions shouldn’t reward the player with Crests, End of Dungeon Drops, Score, or Vault.
No other content rewards you for failure. It would seem that M+ is actually way more rewarding than it should.
There are reasons, whether you like it or not, for key to deplete. More so than if key didn’t.
Instead on constantly begging for the removal of key depletion, maybe focus on something more realistic with less room for exploitation. Like adding 2-3 charges per key. You all need to stop with this all or nothing demands.
But I would say, maybe a very short window of not losing a key level would make sense, like 30 seconds or something. The point where you really need a bit of practice at the right level to get over the hump. Maybe it could be a once per key effect, so if you missed the 2nd run by 30 or less you’d still get the dropped key
Ah, but you see, if the streamers could only do each dungeon once per week, they couldn’t stream the same dungeons over and over again all day seven days a week.
failing a key is punishment enough on its own. you waste time. most that fail m+ wont be able to complete it regardless of timer or not, they arent good enough.
the added punishments on top literally dont need to exist, at all.
of course none of this actually matters because the m+ system is not about making a good system to let people have fun playing a video game.
what the m+ system was designed for is not fun, but player engagement metrics, to keep you and us on a forever spinning hamster wheel to keep blizzards quarterly player number reports high.
so stop suffering in m+ hoping for a change. just stop doing them. the only thing blizzard understands is looking at data, and if data shows player engagement down then maybe they will care.
Once the timer runs out the dungeon mobs should turn friendly, you get no loot, and teleported out with a grey piece of trash in your inventory “Depleted Keystone”.