Yea I’m also on that part that hard content is fine to exist.
Yes there might be too many difficulties.
Maybe some bosses shouldn’t get a mythic version (I’m really not a big fan of the first mythic bosses being gifts).
But that’s like a whole other topic.
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Was it easy because you farmed a bunch of M+ gear?
So many CE raiders on my realm are wearing mostly stuff from M+ in the first few weeks of Mythic.
This raid until Tindral was probably the easiest one we’ve had this expansion. Fyrakk again is super hard to judge as an end boss because he requires killing Tindral but even as a spectator he seems to be pretty tame compared to jailer.
There are problems with the state of mythic raiding and honestly Tindral is the epitome of all of them with it’s heavy comp restrictions, tight “There is one way to do this” encounter design, and complete lack of mechanic downtime. That doesn’t however mean that, outside of what Tindral demonstrates, things need to be any easier relative to player capabilities.
I think they just poorly did Tindral in general Smolderon seemed fine but yea the earlier mythic bosses are just too easy. I would say being 4/9 mythic doesn’t mean much atm.
I did say “Relative to ilvl acquisition” but maybe that needs a bit of explaining.
If m+ was a worse source of gear then mythic would have to be easier in an absolute sense, and that’s fine because at the end of the day the difficulty I experience as a player would remain roughly the same.
And though we’re not the intended audience for heroic as a guild, I feel it’s worth mentioning we cleared it day 1 with basically the 447 gear we came into the patch with so turning mythic into something of that nature would be sorely disappointing.
While that’s probably true, it’s also a better gameplay experience for an MMO to have as many people on the server before the servers can no longer handle it. Even though the cost might be less of a concern, player retention would almost certainly be better with fewer shards that are more densely populated than what we have today. The only reason that I can come up with for why they don’t is because some number of the servers are functionally full and players would experience degradation if they added more.
We can keep going back and forth on this, but honestly I will remain skeptical until someone can produce actual numbers or Blizzard starts pushing more server shards together to boost up their populations.
You have no idea how much I understand about server tech, and at no point did I mention anything about the underlying hardware. You’re jumping to conclusions here about both my knowledge base and the motivations I have for bringing them up.
Even if spinning up extra servers doesn’t have a direct hardware cost, there is overhead both in the hypervisor and in the humans maintaining the servers for every one you spin up. You will need more space for logging and there will be more network and memory consumption as the hypervisor spends more cycles checking on and reporting server health. So no, even with modern server technology, it is more expensive at the scale of Blizzard to run multiple servers in a situation where one would suffice.
But that isn’t even my main point about referencing server counts. The player experience would be better with more players distributed across fewer servers up to the point where players experience degraded services due to overpopulation. The fact that Blizzard is still maintaining 200+ servers for retail makes me real skeptical that classic has more bodies than retail, especially when classic only has 6 servers that are listed as high or full.
Nah everything is just sharding and etc. For players it’s all an illusion. Everything is on the same server and functioning as one even for players ingame unless you want to mythic raid.
Just login on any server and watch from what realms people are, it’s just all mixed in.
The bigger the realm, the less people from other realms you should see.
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Sigh, you say you understand the tech, but this comment shows you don’t.
These servers are just leftovers from the old server structure. Most of these low servers are connected with each other, they only kept the servers in place so people didn’t have to name change. These servers are an illusion, nothing more.
The phasing tech keeps areas playable. You gotta to stop thinking that the game is operating as unique servers now, WoW is like ESO now, everyone is basically playing on a megaserver.
This is why you can hop to any realm you want through the LFG.
Edit: Back to the topic at hand No one wants to run the same dungeon on 10 different difficulty levels.
People want 10 dungeons based on varying difficulty levels.
There’s a reason why people flocked to this game when systems like this were in place, and why the player base has fallen so low with the inception of these repeat systems.
It is painfully obvious that WoW isn’t getting the resources it needs to be fun again, it is basically just trying to put out enough content to milk the remaining diehards.
Asmon sums it up pretty well here.
It’s not one big free-for-all, there are groups of certain servers. At any given time your character will exist on one of these groups, and you will only see players from servers on those groups. I don’t know the hardware architecture for sure, but I’d bet that all servers within a group live on the same server. If you are partied with someone from another group, that group will be placed onto a specific group and all players not normally on that group will be moved; thus the other players you see will be from the group you moved onto.
At the time of writing, there are 52 connected realm groups in the Americas and 50 servers that stand on their own (there are no other servers in their group). Which again leads me back to my skepticism on the popularity claim of classic versus retail. There will be less overhead and fewer player restrictions (mythic raiding, crafting orders, open world interaction) if Blizzard combined more of these server groups together. What would their motivation for maintaining 102 server groups be compared to consolidating them further?
So like I said before, nothing I’ve seen would lead me to a conclusion that classic truly has more players than retail. I have highly circumstantial evidence to suggest the opposite, and I fully acknowledge that evidence doesn’t have solid ground to stand on. But it’s still more evidence than anyone has been able to provide for the actual popularity of classic. I will happily admit that classic is more popular if such evidence can be provided.
You are using my use of the term “server” to mean that I think they are on dedicated pieces of hardware. In reality there is no definition of server that requires a 1:1 mapping of server to the machine it runs on. You’re making a pedantic argument here to try to discredit my knowledge.
You’re wrong. I actually do like having multiple different difficulty levels, which literally disproves the claim of “no one.”
Citation needed.
I’d love to see verified player numbers that show the player base has fallen with these repeat systems in place compared to before.
You do realize fun is subjective, right? If I wasn’t having fun with WoW, I wouldn’t stay subbed. I’m sorry if you don’t find it fun (which begs the question of why you have an active sub, but I digress).
I agree WoW needs more resources put into it. I would be all for alternatives to M+. But what this argument keeps coming back to is the fact that WoW has never had these mythical alternatives you claim would have been inevitable had M+ not been added. Blizzard put out basically the same game, gameplay wise, for 12 years before the failure of WoD. The ONLY new ways to engage with the game in expansions prior to Legion were arenas in BC, challenge modes and farms in MoP, and Garrisons in WoD. Legion, BFA, and Shadowlands each brought more new ways to engage with WoW than the cumulative total of every expansion prior. This narrative that M+ is the reason why Blizzard is coasting at this point is simply not supported by the history of the game. Had Blizzard not added M+, there is no reason to believe they would have added a suitable alternative for PVE endgame for players seeking an alternative to raiding.
If you want to argue the content is lacking or low quality, that’s your prerogative. Perhaps it has been worse since M+ was introduced. But just like fun, that’s subjective, and it’s simply an impossible ask to expect any game studio to be able to deliver content that always resonates with all players.
And Asmon shares exactly zero numbers, merely offers his opinion. He has no more of an idea on the true popularity of retail or classic than I do.
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Selling services like server transfers. 
And not having to rename tons of characters because their technology don’t let them have people with the same name.
Never really cared about that part. I’m mostly only interested in the raiding population of Classic.
Perhaps. Though Blizzard has consolidated servers into connected realms since adding paid server transfers. It could be a combination of things with server transfer money being a factor, without a doubt.
Fair enough. I won’t dispute that Classic has a healthier raiding scene than Retail, it very well might. I fully expect it would as a percentage of population.
But the claims in this thread at least started as a more general claim that Classic is more popular than Retail, which is a pretty common theme on the forums. It just seems nobody has even so much as a blue post suggesting this to be true and so I’m skeptical it’s accurate.
It’s true because Youtubers (which we fourm folks don’t like) and Twitch numbers (which we forum users don’t watch) show that retail is dead and everyone wants classic. Duh.
/s
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Is it though? Under which circumstances? Let’s say, if you really want to have a bit of meaningful progress and actually get gear from raiding, you have to invest two evenings á 2,5/3 hours with a guild. Getting loot with pugs and the group loot system can be a really frustrating experience. How is M+ way more time consuming? In 5-6 hours per week you can squeeze in a lot of dungeons and probably get way better gear then trying to progress your way through Heroic or even Mythic.
This is how it’s been in the game up until Dragonflight, where they started rotating in different dungeons per season, several that have never been at the M+ level (and so could be considered somewhat new), but it seems like the complaint now is they are not new-enough. 
Would you honestly be happy if every season had 8 brand-spanking new never-before-seen M+ dungeons with as-unique-as-you-can-get mechanics and visual design (so as not to trigger “Oh, it’s just a reskin / remaster of previous dungeon X” complaints)?
If not, why even bring it up? 
You could make the exact same argument about raids. It’s the same boss fights week after week until you finish them, then you just do it all over again at a slightly higher difficulty, again and again, week in and week out.
It’s only a waste of time if you don’t want to do it. I like playing my classes, I like pressing the buttons and tanking, healing and DPSing on them in content where my performance matters. M+ gives me that opportunity outside of raids.
Is this a serious question? You know that the playerbase is NOT split at those levels, so why even ask this? 
I’d be ready to settle for more, but yes that would only be solving a part of the problem I have with current M+. I think there definitely should be a minimum of 12 new dungeons per expansions.
Raids have way higher progression content. It’s not just about scaling but new mechanics.
And it existing is not an issue. But if it’s gonna share rewards with raiding then it needs to be balanced around that. Else it would be better to split it from it like pvp was.
The playerbase is trying to use a system to find other players in 20+ levels of content. You think it’s better to reduce the chance of finding people to do content just because they want the system to feel more grindy? It’s not because the current breakpoints for crest farming are different than my example that it doesn’t make sense.
Has M+ gear rewards ruined raiding?
What sort of raiding. LFR raiding, Normal raiding, Heroic raiding, Mythic raiding … these could all have different answers.
The pillar of raiding, is topped with mythic raiding. How much should we even be propping up the lesser raids? In my mind this is like saying that normal raiding invalidated heroic dungeons. It’s absurd.
It’s basically ended the ‘beer night with buds’ normal raiding experience. We haven’t been able to keep a friendly normal raid night team going since BfA.
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Yep, you either faceroll LFR and have to find some sweaty guild to run heroic raids. There is no in between anymore. Thank goodness Classic exist.
i hate you tell you, but this is only going to get worse. Delves will likewise invalidate your experience, if you are looking for meaningful gear progression in normal raids.
Delves are going to go up to heroic raid rewards. Sure weekly capped tho.
But I’m personally not planning to play first patch of TWW, I’ll let people beta test the expansion and do not care for hype anymore.
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