Honestly it depends, I’m not defending the requirement for raiders to have to run content they don’t enjoy to reasonably keep up with the demands of progression. However I do enjoy Mythic+ at a high level because the repetitive nature is, for me personally, overshadowed by the difficulty. I find any Mythic+ dungeon below 27 a chore, but I do enjoy that there is hard content in this game that doesn’t have the time constraints of raiding CE.
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Yep there’s no solution that will make everyone happy outside of segregating them completely from one another.
Raiding and m+ are both PVE content, but play completely different and have different goals from one another. To put them in the same gameplay loop of being mandatory is a recipe for failure.
Most of us are old enough now to where we can’t commit to a raid schedule which makes m+ a much better option. Being forced to raid to be good in m+ defeats that whole purpose
That’s definitely a fair point, and I should have been more explicit that the numbers don’t prove anything in terms of how well the formula was working.
I was merely trying to add at least a little objectivity rather than responding to the purely subjective statement that was being claimed. The reality is none of us know how well WoW’s formula of raiding being the only meaningful PVE endgame works at any given point of time. There are any number of reasons why WoW’s player count might rise or fall. I cannot claim that the formula becoming stale is the reason for WoW’s player counts any more than anyone else can claim the formula was still working despite them.
I responded to the claim “Blizzard had a winning formula that worked for over a decade” with numbers suggesting that perhaps the might be a flaw in that formula. There was no evidence presented to support how well the WoW formula worked, and the burden of proof falls on the claimer, not anyone requesting said proof.
Citation needed.
Everyone who was around at the time.
There’s your citation.
I see this parroted a lot on these forums. Your personal circumstances are yours alone, trying to push this narrative that raiding isn’t possible for people because “they’re older” is just silly. The irony is, people are spending triple the amount of time grinding M+ every week. If anything, this system is worse for people that have limited time.
M+ is popular because logistically it is just easier, and it allows players to get raid level loot without raiding.
If this system existed in Vanilla, all those 15-25 year olds would be spending more time in M+ than raiding.
Like I said, if M+ is going to exist, just bring into line with the rest of the end game when it comes to rewards.
The bigger issue here is if raiding is obsolete, then why is Blizzard dedicating so much time to making new raids, if the bulk of the player base will just grind a bunch of recycled dungeons?
WoW was always a raid focused game and people of all ages and circumstances would make time to raid. This is what made the game so sticky for many people. Guild raiding was lifeblood of this game, and this is the case for a lot of MMOs still.
The changes to the game over the years, the addition of LFR and M+ has just eroded away at the family raiding guild. Players will always take the path of least resistance.
Retail has become a seasonal lobby game now, that looks more like a Destiny 2 than the MMO I fell in love with.
A lot of MMO players that liked how the game played for over a decade have been forced to find new MMOs or to play Classic.
People will say that retail is the same game as it was in 2008, but I strongly disagree. What we are playing now is a some weird online game that is the midst of a huge identity crisis.
I put the blame solely on the developers that inherited the game from the talented developers that made WoW.
These new developers have the technical knowledge to work on the game, but they lack the talent and the vision that the original team had.
This is why we got systems like M+, which ironically only start at the level cap.
Kevin Jordan one of the original WoW developers talked a great length about M+ on his stream. He asked why this system was just limited to end game, and that new players get zero exposure to it while leveling. At least with raids, the fundamentals of dungeon running are largely similar to what players have experienced while in leveling dungeons. M+ doesn’t get experienced until the level cap, which just sucks for new players.
The only thing WoD lacked content wise until the massive drought a year into the expansion was daily quests the players just spent most of MoP complaining about.
Apparently daily quests are the glue.
New zones, dungeons, raids, Ring quests, professions, new PvP event, proving grounds, etc that were core to WoW for years were present in WoD at launch.
Yet the cries of “nothing” to do kept getting louder.
The status quo works, until it doesn’t.
I do think part of it is leveling used to be a 100+ hour adventurer for a lot of casual players. But over time they’ve completed more and more of it so less remains and also they kept shrinking the time to level.
So spending a few hundred hours as a casual with an “engaging” longer leveling experience on their alt eventually became having multiple level capped characters fairly quickly.
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The way modern leveling dungeons are ran has WAY more in common with mythic+ than raids lol.
In leveling dungeons it’s a speed run, constant aoe, tank is invincible, and impossible to lose. Sounds exactly like mythic+
I’d also quickly point out this has been the case since at least MoP, if not cata.
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In MoP we also had scenarios, the halfhill farm, different rares with valuable stuff, farming herbs and ores and a different profession system, pet battles as brandnew content… and the open world was much more accessible because of flying mounts.
In WoD there were only garrisons and shortly after I was max level and timegating in my garrison kicked in, I was standing there… “k, what do I do now?”. Archaeology? A pain without flying. Rares? Suddenly had a daily lockout and most of them didn’t drop anything of significance. Farming stuff? Nah, no value anymore because of the garrison. There was just nothing and when the next patch hit with the Twitter integration instead of loads of new content, it was a recipe for desaster.
Everyone is quite a hefty claim. Do you have depositions from everyone who was in your vicinity of WoW at that time?
I get that the “citation needed” quote is overused, but people exaggerate their knowledge of a situation FAR too frequently, especially in cases where they cannot possibly have the data necessary to reach their definitive conclusion. The ONLY people that could possibly have the data required to make a claim about why WoD resulted in a large player decline work (or did work) at Blizzard. Any other data source is conjecture at best. I won’t dispute your personal experience, but no amount of anecdotal evidence will consist of a large enough cross section of the players to serve as proof of such a conclusion.
For me personally, I stopped seriously raiding at the beginning of MoP. Raiding being the only thing for me to do at endgame after the first couple weeks of max level had become stale. For me, the formula wasn’t working even before we reached WoD. I don’t dispute that lack of content and developer decisions might be the primary driver for the player base as a whole to start unsubbing. But that was not my experience, and I don’t subscribe to the “just trust me bro” philosophy for making a compelling argument.
Some combination of factors led to a precipitous drop in player counts, that much is proven. There are many different factors we could suggest for that fall, and I’m sure we each can pinpoint factors for ourselves or people we know. Something happened, and exactly none of us has enough data to pinpoint exactly what.
If you truly can’t see that your average WoW player by this point is well into their careers or having a family and can’t commit to 3 nights a week of raiding, you’re delusional. Yes, you may not have a career, or a family and can raid, that’s great for you, but the older you get the more responsibilities you have, that is a fact not opinion.
I’m not saying everyone has a schedule that raiding can’t work around. But to sit here and act as if an older average consumer base with WoW isn’t going to have people dropping off from scheduled weekly content as time goes on, with having a game with an extremely high barrier to entry for new players is delusional. Even IF peoples work schedules allow them to raid, you’re still choosing nights away from your wife and kids, or time to relax, to instead play WoW, eventually your priorities will shift.
No, it’s popular because you can hop on, play when you want, and pug the hardest content not feeling like your time is wasted because Timmy in your guilds raid can’t do a single mechanic and wipes you non stop for the whole night.
There is an IO score which leads to competitive play amongst the m+ community, and it’s non stop go go action compared to raiding where you wipe and spend 10 mins between pulls waiting for people to figure their crap out.
Ya when those core philosophies were set people were also teenagers with a fraction of the responsibilities, and raiding was more about your ilvl than it was about your mechanical skill and addons. Raiding is nowhere near what it used to be in terms of a friendly guild environment
I would challenge the “tank is invincible” as being a permanent feature of M+. I still have vivid nightmares trying to deal damage as a melee to the conga line of trash mobs on each platform of De Other Side chasing a VDH running for his life while avoiding swirlies and frontals that will knock you off the platform to a swift demise…
Reduced populations on way too many realms contributes to this issue, too. As with most group content, it’s easier and faster to get going with a set group than it is with pugging, and this is significantly more true for raiding and trying to pug vs being in a guild. There are way too many realms, with most of them dwindling in population over the last few years. It’s hard to find a regular group or guild that fits your (general “you”) schedule and that has a spot for your role, particularly if you’re a tank or healer. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
I mean… it’s not really anecdotal or just some personal experience. What happened to WoD was quite the phenomenon and when big parts of the vocal playerbase voice a certain opinion about content or a whole expansion it’s quite clear there’s an actual problem. Such a gigantic crash with half of the playerbase leaving in such a short amount of time isn’t something that happens because players decide from one day to another that WoW is not for them anymore and it was crystal clear that it was because of an objective lack of content in comparison to the expansion before and even the removal of content (like flying), because these things were the general discussion points back then.
Just when the SL exodus happened because of certain reasons the community had voiced over and over and Blizz chose to ignore them - just to do a huge 180 turnaround out of panic when people were leaving in droves for FF or other games. There were known reasons for that and not just because someone decided over night that raiding i boring.
Dude, people in 04 had the same responsibilities. I get so tired of millennials acting like they’re the only people that exist on this planet.
People aren’t raiding, because the raids are too hard, and the alternatives are easier and more lucrative.
Been playing WoW with a career and family since 04. Sure, there were times I didn’t raid, but I didn’t expect the game to shower me in raid gear because I didn’t have the time.
People make time for their hobbies. Stop acting like this is some new thing, where working adults can’t schedule time for their hobbies. I get so sick of this millennial mindset, you all are some of the most entitled gamers of all time.
You nailed what is wrong, it is that the content is too difficult. People spend way more time in M+ now than they did raiding in the past.
Right, because this is how it has always been, welcome to adulthood. This is just another typical millennial take here.
All gaming is like this, duh.
A lot of gamers enjoy the social side more than just padding some esport simulator score.
Again, you’re shoehorning in your circumstances into the equation here, typical millennial take here.
And that is why raiding sucks now, under Ion’s leadership, they started tuning raiding around RWF guilds, and the game has been horrible since, hence another reason have settled on grinding the same dungeons over and over again for content.
Themepark MMOs survive on new content and a little bit of recycled content, the current team is relying on recycled content way too much now to keep players engaged.
I understand why this is the case, the people that were actual game developers are long gone from the company, what we have here today are a bunch of talentless drones pumping out cookie cutter content.
Tindral Mythic is too hard and maybe fyrakk is by extension but it’s hard to tell because people spent so long gearing on tindral that they’ve got an extra 2-3 more ilvl than we might’ve expected were progression to have gone the same as aberrus, rest of the bosses feel fine.
Wouldn’t want a Mythic raid any easier than Aberrus honestly.
These assessments are also of course relative to ilvl, were we not to have Mythic+ progression then raids would have to be easier relative to that loss of ilvl.
It started in cata for sure as that’s when we got the first revamp of the talent trees where we got our primary big abilities upfront upon choosing a specialization. This is also when specializations became a thing as previously … you were a class and a role.
But honestly the whole point of trying to really finish dungeons quickly started in Wrath. Because once folks knew about dungeons and what they could do at higher levels, folks just started to run dungeons more and more aggressively. Learning what works and what doesn’t. Even if it is also important to note that during vanilla you had the Dire Maul runs which gave you better rewards for doing it faster. So… yah’.
Running dungeons as fast as possible has always been a WoW thing. The only real difference is that back in the day an hour and a half was considered normal for a “small” dungeon. Whereas for stuff like BRD, three hours - now that’s a FAST run!
Folks who complain about “speedrunning” in WoW has never thought critically about what they are talking about even once in their life. Folks like to do dungeons quickly, and that’s been how people have played the game since the launch of it 19 years ago. The criteria of what “quickly” means is the only thing that has changed.
But I’d guess a lot more players didn’t have these responsibilities. Most young people who got into gaming at least played WoW once and I had sooo much more time when I started with the game. A lot of my friends also played at the time and there were so many young people that I met in the first years - almost all of them quit after a while because they didn’t have the time, energy or lifestyle anymore to commit to such a game. Some of them kept gaming, but other games they could just play casually here and there for an hour and still accomplish something.
All these people quit over the years, one after another, but there’s no big generation of new players. All these young people who get into gaming look for other games and genres, while WoW is becoming some kind of forgotten boomer game.
I’m sure they can. But a lot of them just don’t want to when it’s such a “meaningless” hobby and I’m sure more people realized this when they grew a bit older.
Not really, nah. In most other games I can decide when I want to play and for how long - in WoW, when I’m committed to a raid group, I have to stick to a schedule and invest many hours and strictly set evenings to this. This problem doesn’t really exist that much in pugs, but in those it’s often a huge waste of time because anything can go wrong, and then people leave and you have to wait again for 15 minutes for new healers to get in… it starts to add up.
I am not even sure why M20+ does not drop 480 ilvl,
I would spam more dungeons.
I am not raiding period, you cannot make me.
Unless Mythic raiding is made LFRable 1/2 bosses a wing.
If u read further down u would see im not talking about everyone. And that im actually talking about my own personal struggle and ppl like me.