High Key Rating to be Adjusted January 31

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
81

For clarity here, it’s not my suggestion, I’m just in support of someone else’s. I actually took their suggestion to mean that you had to progress on a per-dungeon basis. My take away wasn’t that if you beat a +20 shadowmoon you’d unlock +20 on all other dungeons, it would be that you’d unlock +20 on shadowmoon and still have to go beat keys on other dungeons.

I can’t be sure of the original person’s intent, but it would be pretty unreasonable (to me) for it to work as you’re describing here, Sôsari.

82

From the blue post it sounds like things are only changing for +21 and higher keys.

So 2-20 keys are unchanged in terms of rating provided.

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83

Yea I really enjoyed gearing alts and doing runs just to upgrade their gear. I still wish valor was uncapped but that would make the game too much fun to play so…

84

Okay, but you still diminish the entire purpose of the M+ reward restructuring by allowing people to have unlimited attempts at a key level. The entire purpose was to stop players from getting top tier loot in a way that’s disproportionate to the difficulty and effort of raiders.

85

I actually really like that idea. I’ve literally got TJS 18 and 19 myself about 6 times last week and a guildmate i run with got the same. We would run one of our keys to change it, then I would get like AA, so we’d do that and change his, but then at the end of mine I got TJS and it was just us ping ponging back and forth trading keys to not keep having to do TJS.

I don’t really see a problem with people being able to work on a specific dungeon other than yea if you’re trying to fill your vault you’re just going to run SBG or CoS 8 times at the highest level you can. But if you’re saying people can’t just do that already it’s not true cause I’ve never had a problem finding any key that I want. There are so many on LFG it’s not that big of a deal. I could see it breaking the LFG system a bit though since that’s how people do find the keys they want.

86

If there’s a major wipe that is unrecoverable most groups generally agree the key is toast anyways (as in this already happens). There isn’t a reason to spend time slogging through a 21+ when the goal is to climb the competitive ladder. So no change.

This change only has a positive impact imo. Helps curb inflated rating. I wish they’d do this with all keys.

87

Based on the Blue response, I think they are considering bringing it back to how it was in SL with untimed keys.

They clearly didn’t think things through of how badly inflated scores were going to be this season.

88

The purpose of M+ rewards is to allow for further progression in M+. That’s all. You beat higher keys, you gain access to better loot, which in turn lets you progress further. From +2 to <insert reward cap here>, it’s really just a treadmill. Individual and team skill will dictate how quickly you pass each hurdle since, presumably, a more skilled player can do a higher key with less gear, but it all ends at the same place.

After which, the rewards stop mattering and it’s all about personal progression. In Shadowlands, that reward cap was +15 and any key you did beyond that was entirely on you and your team’s ability to deal with the mechanics. In Dragonflight, that cap is +20… but it doesn’t matter what the cap is, the end result is the same.

So being able to select your key means you might have a better time of getting through that cap since you’ll actually be able to learn the dungeons more effectively in this scenario. You might think that this is bad, but does it matter? It shouldn’t, but even if it does, the M+ system shouldn’t be made frustrating just to slow players down. There are other ways to pace the content.

You’ve introduced an entirely new component to the discussion with this but I believe you’re right to point this out. Balancing difficulty and rewards between various game content has been a challenge since the very beginning of the game, though more-so starting in TBC. This needs to be addressed but again, there are ways to solve it without making things more frustrating for the player.

The best example we can look to here is PvP gear. In TBC the term “welfare epics” was coined because PvP players could go get very strong epic gear fairly easily, then take that gear into raids and be ahead of people who were waiting for drops. It took a weirdly long time for Blizzard to properly solve that issue, but they finally did so in Shadowlands when they made PvP gear a lower item level, but then get a boost when used in PvP combat.

Honestly, I’d expect it’s only a matter of time before we see a similar thing for M+. It’s just become it’s own pillar of the game and having the best gear for M+ come from raids, and vice versa, is not really a fun experience. Especially when you consider that the reason a lot of people engage in M+ is because they can’t commit to the scheduling demands dictated by a fixed 20-man Mythic Raid roster. M+ is there to provide them with engaging content that fits with the group size they want to play, they shouldn’t be at a disadvantage because they can’t raid. Likewise, people who just want to raid and don’t enjoy the format of M+ shouldn’t feel like they have to go do M+ to get the best gear for raiding.

A PvP gear like change is coming to M+. The sooner the better imho.

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89

The M+ system shouldn’t be dragged down so everyone reaches the top. That defeats the purpose.

Yes, but the rewards were disproportionate to the effort and skill required. Raiding was pointless unless it was Mythic difficulty. Allowing players to spam “+20 no leavers” would make the restructuring pointless. I don’t know how many times I have to repeat that.

A system where players only move up will end up with a flood of PuG groups that clearly shouldn’t be in that key level.

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90

They definitely didnt. Foresight is not blizzards strong point for sure. I can’t wait for 4-5 weeks of beta testing season 2s rotation.

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91

I still don’t get why you guys care so much about people getting gear that is the same level as raid gear. I don’t really enjoy raiding that much and I don’t have the time for it either. But I still probably invest more time than people who raid log when I’m doing keys cause it’s just easier to get 5 people together. It’s like when 25s gave better loot than 10s, and then they did away with that system and made raids scale from 10 to 30 and only 20 on mythic.

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92

That’s not really the purpose of it at all. It’s just a progression system. Let people play it. You’re pretty hung up on where people are or how they are compared to you but you’re forgetting that the only rating that matters is above the reward cap. If you need to compare yourself to others, great, do so starting at +21 and up.

People do that in the current system. Stop dictating how people need to play the game when it has zero impact on you. I don’t know how many times I have to repeat that.

I have no doubt that the concept of depleting keys was created to solve a problem… but it’s not really working out and just servers as a frustration for players. It’s time to explore other options and the root from which that exploration starts should be player enjoyment and fun, with challenge and progression following closely behind it.

93

Yes, it’s a progression system. People sometimes fail. It’s okay. Let people play the way it is. We don’t need to coddle and hand hold people because they can’t cope with failure.

That’s exactly the point. It already happens in a system where keys deplete. Now imagine how much worse it will be where players only move up. It will be a complete disaster trying to find an actual competent group.

It will impact me, severely. As a player who only pugs this will make it considerably more difficult to find decent groups who didn’t get carried there.

Keys deplete for a reason. Let people play it.

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94

They’ll still fail even when they can select their key. Failure is ok and learning from failure is important. This change just means that the time between your failure and when you try again is smaller, which is actually a good thing. It’s not coddling to better support people’s growth and learning. There’s no value in putting artificial barriers in place to make the game more frustrating for players.

95

They can and I’m sure some will, but they will be able to try again and again and again. Each time bringing in other puggers and wasting their time.

Yes. Failure is ok. Consequences for failure is okay to and just as important.

It’s 100% coddling players who have never had to deal with failure before. They can learn to cope.

You’ve used this argument multiple times already “but it already happens” yet can’t see how exasturbated it will become if keys don’t deplete.

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96

I think some of your views with respect to learning and reinforcement might be a tad outdated, but I don’t think there’s much left to be said here. I’ve made all the points I have to make and I suspect we’re about to hit that point where we go around in circles. I think this is a good stopping point for this line of discussion.

Have a good rest of your day :slight_smile:

97

The problem is that you’re not really demonstrating skill if you just push +20 SBGs and CoS into +22s and just yolo them, fail, and still get +7-10 extra points over a timed +20. To put things into perspective if I fail time a +21 I get usually +3-5 more IO than timing a +20 and the failed +21 will show as my highest key even though I have a timed +20.

Timing +22s and higher is difficult because of how much higher keys scale from +21 and beyond. You really reach a point around +22/23 where pugging isn’t really much of an option anymore.

Timing +22s on both weeks is worth about 368 points. Fail timing two +22s is only about -8 less points. Fail timing +23/24s are worth about 385-390 points.

So once this change goes through I’m expecting a lot of people are going to drop like 50-150 points.

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98

I didn’t realize they did this until this very post. I was actually wondering why I was getting so many points from failed runs, but we tend to just do runs at our level.

This is similar to my premise earlier though… I think we should start from a position of making M+ fun and for players rather than trying to make everything that exists now fit together. For example, the scenario you’re describing is based on the Dragonflight rating model, which is brand spanking new. Selecting your key and scoring would fit better with the Shadowlands model where you only increase in score with timed runs.

I’m honestly not even sure how I feel about this new model. Even though it no longer applies to keys above +20, it feels unintuitive to me that a failed +16 can reward more points than a timed +15.

At it’s core, is the intent of rating not to indicate preparedness and general skill level? Getting more points for a failed run skews what I understand the rating to mean…

99

I don’t think this is the surgical change you’re billing it as, this is going to hit hard for players that aren’t just pushing the highest keys as well. A more smooth reduction would have been ideal, but even with just this change to completely negate score you would have a much more targeted system if it was implemented at +23 keys and higher, rather than +21.

Let’s consider the targets of the change first. The only thing to chase at the “very high end” is the achievement/title for being in the top 0.1% of players in score at the end of a season (and inclusion in MDI, but those players are necessarily also 0.1%). With ~2.3M players currently with an IO score, the cutoff would currently be the top 2300 players. If we look at the 2300th ranked player currently, they’re quite capable of logging timed runs for all dungeons at +22, which as the season progresses will be required to meet that threshold regardless of this change. So they aren’t making that cut with depletes of 21-22 keys, and therefore depletes of 21-22 keys won’t change who ultimately ends up in the top 0.1%. Depletes of 23+ keys might, but 21-22 keys would be regularly timed by the 0.1%. So why do these levels (21-22) matter relative to anything higher?

For everyone else who isn’t chasing the top 0.1%, M+20 is the highest key level for the weekly vault, so it’s the obvious goalpost for people who only care about the weekly gearing side of Mythic+, which is a substantially larger number of people. Anyone who has listed these keys knows that they’re much more scarce than the number of players who want them, you’ll easily get 50+ applicants to the worst dungeons over the span of a few minutes and considerably more if it’s SBG/COS. So the prevailing refrain in response to the “I can’t get accepted into keys” is “just run your own key”. Which is fine, more people should be running their keys, but the issue is that there’s a large number of game instituted thresholds that segment the playerbase, which coupled with player toxicity result in a pinch on the ability to construct successful runs of higher keys reproducibly. This change would add another threshold and effectively “box in” +20 keys to where they’re teetering on a knife’s edge.

These are the current thresholds that segment the playerbase:

  • People who can run +11 keys generally don’t want to run +10 or lower keys because they don’t drop Primal Infusions.
  • People who can run +16 keys generally don’t want to run +15 or lower keys because they don’t drop Concentrated Primal Infusions.
  • People who can run +18 keys generally don’t want to run +17 or lower keys because they don’t count towards a 418 weekly which exceeds the maximum valor cap.
  • People who can run +19 keys generally don’t want to run +18 or lower keys because they don’t drop the maximum base item level gear that reduces the amount of valor needed to be invested to cap the item out, with valor being a scarce resource.
  • People who can run +20 keys generally don’t want to run +19 or lower keys because they don’t count towards a 421 weekly which maximizes their vault rewards.

With this change, you’ll also be adding this:

  • People who run +21-22 keys will be in a constant conflict over whether it’s being run to be timed, but if not then for the weekly and still some score, or whether it’s purely for score and any wipe is cause to leave the dungeon since overtime is 100% worthless to those people (no leaver penalty btw, 2 people die → “sorry about the key”).

This is problematic because 21-22 are still “close enough” to the gear cap that it’s completely reasonable for people who aren’t pushing for top 0.1% to want to run them just for weekly gear and maybe a chance at score. If you time/2-chest a +20 or 2-chest a +19, you end up with a 21-22 key. Logic would dictate that to hit your 8 keys for the week, it makes sense to run the 21-22 key. Best case, you time it and get a nice boost in score as well as the completion. Worst case, you complete it, and it depletes down to a key level that also offers 421 rewards in the weekly. 21-22 keys are lower risk for the people being admonished to “run their own key” because even if not timed, the subsequent key still counts for a 421 in the vault.

Once you get to +20, if that key is depleted (which has many of the same problems due to dungeon ports being tied to timing +20s rather than higher) and people leave before finishing, not only do you not get credit for the weekly vault, you’re also now stuck with a +19 key. Anyone who has listed a +20 key and then a +19 key knows the obvious disparity in the quality of applicants, so weirdly despite the +19 being theoretically easier, it’s often harder because the skill level of the group goes down, and 1 person can’t typically carry 4 other people in high Mythic+.

With this change, the degenerate loop of running your own key to fill out the weekly vault will only get more degenerate, because now you’re juggling whether to run a +21-22 key and potentially waste 20m of your playtime that week only for people to leave in the middle, or lower it to a +20 every time you get a 21-22 and effectively have 1 chance each time to not have it fall below the threshold.

There’s really three types of groups/players for these keys levels:

  • We’re only here for the timer and score, if it depletes “ggs”
  • We’re capable of timing it and are going for that, but if we miss by a few minutes we’ll take the vault reward
  • We’re only here for the weekly vault (AKA we have 1-2 people to carry in the group and it may take 3 hours)

It’s very hard in PUGs to aim for the second category and not get any players who fall in the first category and will happily brick your key at the first sign of trouble. You can’t list it as “for completion” because that calls to mind the third category which scares off good players who don’t want to spend hours. Half the keys I’ve joined which said in the note “going for timer, but if not at least completion” had people leave if it looked like it was going to end 10-20% over the timer.

So pretty much the entire system seems geared for only the super high end players and seeks to punish everyone else, because:

  • There’s no leaver penalty, so there’s no incentive to try and complete the key for a certain segment of the playerbase pushing score to avoid that. On the flip side, there’s no reward for that same segment of the playerbase as a positive incentive since things like Concentrated Primal Infusions aren’t account bound, and there’s no equivalent repeatable resource that cuts in at 20+ if they’re already going to cap vault.
  • If your key is bricked by leavers rather than simply being overtime, you’re left “holding the bag” with a lower key that won’t provide you any rewards other than a time sink and another risk at lowering it yet again with a lesser skilled group. But you also got nothing from the original key, whereas completing it overtime would at least yield vault credit.
  • There’s a huge amount of overlapping thresholds that segment the playerbase based on what content will provide them rewards below the highest end.
  • In a world where you can lower your key on demand, depletion seems geared at preventing system abuse by players at the top end, rather than as a system that feels good and respects time for 99% of the player base. Often a depletion isn’t even indicative of the player whose key it was being unable to do that content, since there are 4 other players who can make the mistake that causes someone to leave.

A lot of this is obviously assuaged by having a coordinated group or a guild, but Mythic+ as a system is designed to be more freeform and PUG friendly than things like Mythic raid. And even among groups of friends, the current levels result in major stratification.

I think there need to be more widespread changes to the Mythic+ system, neither of the other forms of endgame (Raid: everyone is there to kill the boss (even parsers need it to die for the parse to count), PvP: everyone is there to win the match) have such contradictory incentives that result in people in the same group not working towards the same goal, while also making it impossible to replace players and impossible to “run it back”. For this change specifically though, it would be a lot better for a majority of the playerbase and not change the composition of the 0.1% at the end of the season with one simple change:

“Now, completing a Mythic+23 or higher dungeon, but exceeding the target time, awards Mythic+ Rating as if the dungeon were a Mythic+22.”

3 Likes
100

People invite usually based on IO score > class usually. So if somebody pushes their IO score to 2800-2900+ they’ll get almost instant invited to any +20-21 key because the average person is around 2600 IO that tries applying.

Well that’s all fine and dandy, but I see a lot of people at that IO score level who are literally all failed +22/23 keys. You have to open raider io and click around to see what their real timed keys are and a lot of them have only timed a +20.

If I want to push a +21/22 key I’m looking for people who have demonstrated they’ve timed similar keys equal or higher to that level. M+ pugging is just gambling and your success rates can vary. If somebody is literally all failed +21s, I don’t want them in my +21…

I also don’t want a failed key showing as my highest timed one as well.

I’m just picky with people I invite into my group and I look at all the details.

1 Like