Harder Difficulty vs Alt Friendly

Community General Discussion
1

What do you think works better for long term retention?

The new proposed mythic plus mount at 2850 got me thinking… what works better at keeping players around longer term?

This group is already likely in the minority or at least a minor majority but what keeps people coming back to the game after a character is fully geared?

In my mind higher difficulties while enjoyable are not as effective as making the game more approachable for alts, and allowing players a new gameplay experience. I would increase the number rewards to minimize grinding rather then upping the difficulty alone.

I am genuinely curious for people’s opinion on this. Should the game incentivize players to move past the reward cap or make it easier to catch up with alts to help retention?

2

Alt friendly would keep me around much longer.

8 Likes
3

I don’t understand where the “VS” comes from, these aren’t mutually exclusive

14 Likes
4

I am failing to understand why we have to pick one or the other?

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5

I think long term rewards and alt friendliness are both important factors.

More people would push for 3K m+ rating than today if there was an elite transmog set. Just like people who are typically 2700 are going to push for 2850 next season.

Alts are in a pretty good place right now, I think gear tracks in general have too many steps though.

6

Why not both?

I think it will be interesting to see what this new higher IO mount will do to player retention for M+ or if everyone who cares about it will rush to the end point and then get bored and go do something else.

7

Just going off of the usual blizzard trend.

My guess going off of portals. People will push to 2850 then immediately revert to doing 10s for weekly.

I personally think it will make pugging even worse as people will want members with 2850 as a minimum a month in.

1 Like
8

Yea, why not both?

As an avid key player its nice to have a new reward for play at my level after 4 expansions of doing it just for personal satisfaction once gear is got.

I also play 1-5 alts, still love running on them too and theyre likely never running that high.

9

I see the two as exclusive for the reason you stated. If you want alts to get into hogher difficulties later a system like this moves up the pug floor to 2850.

The resting score of people who fill vault after mounts.

10

Im not sure i understand what you mean.

A reward existing doesnt mean my alt army needs access to it

11

blizz has long tried to balance the myriad ways people play this game

method of engagement:
-hardcore
-casual
-the average player

content type
-instanced PVE/PVP
-open world PVE/PVP
-pet battles
-crafting
-roleplaying
-economic activities (AH flipping, crafting, etc)

group vs solo

I am sure that I am missing something

i don’t really see any one piece of content restricting another.

I guess the one that I can see the most potentially at cross-purposes or the most complex to even come close to balancing is that of PVE vs PVP.

In PVE, the game requires all sorts of CC, interrupts, etc that can be completely broken in PVP. I guess that is why we had resilience gear back in the day, and now have diminishing returns and PVP adjustments to various talents.

The way the game is now from season to season and certainly from expac to expac, lots of people reroll toons to adjust for all sorts of reasons.

sometimes, it is just for fun and of course sometimes it is to keep up with some newly formed “meta”.

Some players clearly have very long-term mains that they will always play and have very few if any other toons.

Some people just like playing lots of toons and have an alt army going all the time.

some people like to specialize in a role and switch from class to class depending on which of them can best fill the role this season.

however, you break it down, I still don’t see anything that impeded blizz from having rewards (e.g. titles, mounts, cosemetics) for those at the highest ranks of the game versus having mechanisms for people to either re-roll a main and gear up alts.

on top of all of this, players always have their own person in-game goals.

I tend to like to tank m+ to reach the 2k score and then do it again with a different tank class. 2k gets me a mount. gets me reasonably geared. gets me to balance the fun/frustration element of this game.

a 2850 mount gets my attention, but I have only gotten two toons to 2.5k score twice. I think you need to pretty much get all +10s now for that score. that feels beyond my reach as a “serious casual” pug tank.

in the end, each of rats whack away at the reward levers for our own reasons.

I don’t think that there is a game design conflict between incentivizing high end play and an alt-friendly environment, In fact, as I noted above, for some people an alt-friendly design can help many players continue to push true end-game content from season to season.

2 Likes
12

This already happens. Folks run +10 with 2.6k, 2.7k, or better yet, 3k and only allow either meta or a similar/higher io into their group. If you don’t meet the criteria your options are the left-over [possibly] meh groups. I was in enough myself to just outright quit once I got all the portals.

Though for me, gear wasn’t my goal, the portals were. 6/6 Hero is more than enough to enjoy the game in all levels. 6/6 Myth is pretty much overkill.

1 Like
13

Alt friendly has to mean you can have unlimited mains nowadays.

14

Alt friendly should never mean “everything is trivial”.

15

Depends by what you mean by that. I don’t ever really see people mention difficulty being lowered when it comes to alts.

Just the tedium of time locks removed or circumvented by additional difficulty.

You are not suggesting time gating is positive are you, rather than skill gating?

16

What time locks are involved with the new m+ mount?

Isn’t the point of this thread that difficulty must be lowered for alts?

You asked about challenging content vs alts, as if you had to pick one.

17

Well i mean theres not gonna be a whole lot of players looking from a total number or players that will get 2850 mount lol, same as mythic raid mounts

18

More mid-core content that is invested on interesting, engaging mechanics.

Adopting the arcade model of “hard = more playtime” as the have is just further fractioning the game and showing they don’t really respect our time.

1 Like
19

It’s not always about catching up with alts. Some folks like me are altaholics but i have NO INTEREST in having 60+ toons that are all fully geared, it’s more about creating characters and taking them through the world. Honestly i enjoyed doing Class halls in Legion on a TON of my alts because it was a hard mostly well written story for each character to go through. I only have 2-3 toons i bother with “gearing” to pvp with.

The leveling process is fun and quick and it’s always nice to build a story around toons. I think housing will be good (if done right which is not a slam dunk) for keeping me in game.

1 Like
20

No you completely misunderstood what I was getting at in relation to your question. To the point we are talking about two entirely different points.

The mount and your comment on alts bypassing all time locks are unrelated.