That’s what I would expect you to want as well. It sounds like, at least prior to +20, the rating system isn’t really doing a good job of supporting you in that
Yea, and there’s been a lot of conversations around that lately. I’m left to ask the question though… is this a reasonable expectation? It feels like I shouldn’t have to be an internet detective to play the game. If there’s information I need, the game should provide it in a mostly streamlined and intuitive way.
Carries have always been a problem that skews it (in all game content), but I did feel like I could rely on the SL rating more than I can rely on the DF rating now. What’s more is that I didn’t realize this change happened so I was treating rating in DF like it was rating in SL.
From Kaivax’s follow up post, it sounds like maybe they’re aware of this to an extent. I hope we do see some adjustments in future seasons.
I think you are severely overthinking this change as it will not affect anyone who is running +2-20. This change is effectively only impacting untimed +21s and above. It won’t change anything for players running +20s for Portals or for max Vault rewards.
Which would be no different from key pushers in Shadowlands. They didn’t care about loot or vault, they only cared about timing the key.
Rating and rewards (arguably) are entirely separate from mythic+ being fun.
I’m not quite sure you can change anything about m+ to make it more or less fun without detracting from its core values. The second you start removing mechanics and affixes, everything literally just becomes a health sponge that players want big numbers on. I wouldn’t call that much fun.
In a competitive, scaling difficulty system, it’s very hard to qualify fun as at some point it will always stop being fun for someone.
People who run M+ purely for gear are not running M+ for fun. They are slogging themselves through it for rewards. I agree with what you are saying.
To somewhat separate pure reward vs pleasure. ~40% of characters pushed at least 20% beyond what was required for KSM in Shadowlands. I could argue that those 40% did it for fun since there were no additional rewards.
Indeed, and so I think it’s important to boil down M+ to a core set of gameplay features revolving around a specific intent, or set of intents. What role within World of Warcraft should M+ serve?
That’s not a question aimed directly at you, it’s more of an open question designed to encourage us to think more about M+ from a broader view.
I agree here, which I think is perhaps a problem in tying rewards to infinite M+ scaling progression. You know my thoughts about this season and why I’m considering stopping early, but typically I just like to try to progress to wherever the skill cap of my team takes us.
I would actually be quite happy if M+ had no rewards at all and instead handed you a set of gear choices at a fixed ilvl and you could only tweak them by selecting secondary stats and applying gems/enchants from a fixed M+ set. Then, just go and see how high a key level you can achieve, offering cosmetic rewards (ie, transmog, mounts, pets) as incentive.
It absolutely spikes the likelihood of leavers in 21-22 keys, which as I laid out in the post should be the “middle ground” between people running things for vault and people running things for score. Having the “middle ground” be exactly +20, no more, no less, is a toxic threshold with the way that key depletion works where 20% of a group can elect to brick a key with no recourse and no penalty. Even +20 keys already have a competing incentive with the portal and max vault, they’d be a lot less toxic if portal was at +22 or higher since you wouldn’t be dice rolling on people trying to do the “easiest” key level they can time for portal but who are unwilling to complete for vault.
If you’re spam applying to +20 keys as a tank and getting relatively regular invites, sure, this change won’t really impact you because you’re leveraging the keys that other people ran up. It’s the people who have to list their own keys that now effectively lose the padding that a 21-22 provides of being able to complete it overtime and still get back another key that’s 20+, since 21-22 keys will be cutthroat, either time for sure or leave at the slightest sign of trouble. You have to select 4 people to add, and only 1 of them needs to have that mindset for the run to be a wash.
Which is fine, the people aiming for 0.1% having a “time or bust” mindset is okay because at the key levels that will land you in that segment (likely 24+ or 25+ by end of season) there’s no other competing incentive anymore, so everyone is on the same page, working towards the same goal, and should generally be in agreeance on when to call it quits.
But the cutoff for when we say people are going for score over going for gear simply shouldn’t be 1 key level past the max gear threshold when depletion is a system, boxing the people going for gear into exactly +20 keys if they don’t want to risk dipping into the players going only for score and have a key that would have ended 10% overtime but yield rewards instead be unfinished. And even +20 keys aren’t free of these people due to the fact people who “think” they’re key pushers and yet still aren’t past +20s at this point in the season, as well as people only doing them for portals, are presenting competing objectives even at that key level.
I really don’t think it’s a wild idea that the Mythic+ system should be designed in such a way that players may have different goals in mind, but shouldn’t have strictly contradictory goals at any given key level.
This isn’t an issue with the system or reward structure. It’s entirely on the player’s perception of feeling entitled to loot. They got fed with a silver spoon with +15 vaults in Shadowlands. I’m not surprised one bit about the crying that they can’t reach the top anymore. People need to adjust their expectations and just continue playing at their level and progress.
If people don’t have the expectation to be clearing Mythic raids then they shouldn’t have the expectation to be clearing +20s.
I think you are being disingenuous if you seriously think the change in score for untimed keys +21 and up will make an impact. People were already dipping out if there is a bad wipe in high keys. There will be no impact. That’s just how it works. People say “gg” or “key’s dead”. No one has hard feelings in high keys because it happens as long as it wasn’t a deliberate troll.
If you decouple rewards from m+ you’d lose the majority of the players taking place in the game mode. Those who seriously push keys are generally the ones that have 0 interest, or more so no need for gear as a reward to do so.
I think adding the extra notch to m+ rewards in terms of ilvl from higher keys was a good change. What I think is having a negative effect is that primals are tied to 16s, which are significantly harder than a SL 15, and the spread of ilvl increase widens above level 10 keys.
I don’t think there was a good reason with respect to the large majority of m+ players to slide entry level mythic raid rewards up past 15. The parity to heroic raiding is kind of nice I guess.
Too many players are concerned about having everything now, and maxing out ilvl as quickly as possible. I’m not sure why they play if it’s exclusively just a gear treadmill and not enjoying game modes or encounter design.
How could it not make an impact? They’re literally removing an incentive for people pushing score to stay in them. If you’re on the last boss and are 1 minute over time, before this change that may yield score for the people only there for score, so they have a reason to stay. If they don’t need end of dungeon loot or weekly credit, it’s technically more efficient for them to leave the group on the last boss of the dungeon rather than finish it out, and only common courtesy would dictate not doing so, which appears to be in short supply these days. That’s a wild system to enable, player degeneracy aside it’s on Blizzard for setting these two incentives up in parallel and in direct opposition to one another.
But it’s all going to be anecdotal, some players would leave the same as before, some players would leave more often after the change. What I’m curious about is who would it harm if they changed the threshold to +23. It won’t change anything about the scores of the top 0.1% at the end of the season. It doesn’t change the ability of anyone to read the RIO tooltip and look at “Timed 20+ Keys”. If there are people concerned about “imposters” with an over time 22 in CoS/SBG and 14s in everything else, that’s their fault for not installing the most basic addon for key pushers and glancing at a simple tooltip.
Again, which was already a thing in the past. They rescaled how points work in Dragonflight to reward more for untimed keys than they used to. They are realizing it was a mistake. In Shadowlands people left with even 1 bad wipe in keys +20 and up. Their only incentive back then was score too.
Based on your Feats, it seems this is the first time you are pushing keys into the +20s. I’m telling you that this is the norm. People leave when they are not going to be timed.
Do you have any personal experience in high level keys?
The group abandoning a key on critical wipes is very common place. This wont change at all. It literally already happens.
Example, we attempted a 22 AV, had a rocky trash pull up to 1st boss but no issues even though we had a two deaths. Got halfway through first boss, tank got clipped by one of the ads pools and died. There was no way to time the key. Everyone said GG, our pug healer left, and we went to try the 21.
I don’t expect to even kill 1 mythic raid boss. I do expect to get 20 keys done every week though, and I have been for a few weeks now. That’s an odd thing to link together.
20s are harder than the first few mythic raid bosses, quite a lot harder if you exclude SBG and CoS. While I do think SL 15s (DF 13s) was too low for mythic ilvl there’s no reason the top vault reward needs to be set to DF 20s (SL 22s) IMO.
They massively increased the difficulty in obtaining rewards for M+ runners while reducing the difficulty of raiding and probably went a tad bit too far for M+.
The reward rate is much closer for raiding and m+ now.
The first 4 bosses only drop 415 gear with the exception of the rare ring/trinket. 16s are not difficult if you’re already doing 20s. In either scenario you’re spending a similar amount of time raiding or doing m+.
The addition of 418/421 gear I think is an equivalent addition vs raiding. With how easy SB and COS are if you’re only purpose is filling vault, it’s not that hard to at bare minimum get 418s in all 3 slots, which is higher ilvl than the first half of mythic bosses.
It’s more that he missed the point I was making about how raiders don’t have expectations that they will be clearing Mythic levels. Yet, somehow M+ players have the expectation of getting top tier loot and get upset if they hit a wall and can’t touch the ceiling. Raiders and M+ players have different expectations of where their paths end.
I might be misunderstanding your words here because this seems like the statement is at odds with itself.
The people who seriously push keys typically aren’t the ones interested in rewards, as those rewards stop coming at some point. If folks were only in it for the rewards, keys would have stopped at +15 in Shadowlands and +20 in Dragonflight. Yet in every season we see people pushing keys well past the point where it stops generating rewards.
Whether or not someone feels entitled to loot doesn’t change the fact that M+ is essentially two things right now. Early M+ is a reward treadmill, late M+ is a challenge treadmill.
In the current season, if you want to go beyond +20, you will not be rewarded for doing so… and that’s ok. I sincerely hope Blizzard doesn’t get caught up in the reward loop and start offering gear rewards at higher key levels.
A lot of this conversation about reward and fairness stems primarily from the fact that M+ and Raiding are still using each other’s loot. It wasn’t “fair” that people could do a +15 and get equivalent loot from Mythic Raid so it was adjusted upwards… but did it need to be? Why are we so caught up in what other people have and how they get it?
Still, that’s a thing, everybody wants to feel like what they do matters and that someone else can’t have an easier, or even different, path to the same place they are. It’s maybe not the best outlook but it certainly is human. So then, why do M+ and Raid rewards even need to be in the same conversation? As I said, split them out like they did with PvP and move on.
This opens up avenues to address the issue I pointed out earlier, which is that M+ is currently two games. The one where you’re chasing rewards and the one where you’re challenging yourself to just push further even though your character will never get more powerful.
Expectations but also just how M+ works, so it is kind of baked into it. You can almost think of it as prestige mode that a lot of games have. You don’t get anything extra (except maybe cosmetics), but you still get to progress beyond if you want to.
In M+ context…
Normal Mode: +2 to +20
Prestige Mode: +21 and up
Not everybody is going to want to keep going, but a lot do. With that said though, I wonder how it would play out if the rewards weren’t power based, or competitive with Mythic Raid gear and usable in it. You might say nobody would be interested, but they made that change in PvP and did that immediately diminish participation in PvP and result in a long-term downward trend, or did participation remain generally consistent with how it was before the change?
(I don’t know the answers to these questions, I’m just asking them :D)
What you’re suggesting or asking fundamentally exists as is.
The main reason you can’t decouple gear from mythic+ is that for those who don’t raid it’s the main source of gear progression. DF has improved upon this issue by adding craft-able gear that’s actually relevant.
I mentioned this in another thread but this is circling back to everyone expecting the best gear to be thrown at them as a participation trophy. It’s not healthy for an mmo with competitive and skill based game modes to exist like that. There needs to be some carrot on the stick. As much as we want to we can’t have everything we want just because we want it.
In Shadowlands gear stopped at +15 though, as it did in every other expansion since mid-Legion when it was raised from +10, so there was a 5 key level buffer between players playing for gear and players playing for score. So sure, expecting people to leave in a +20 key if not in time would be the same as expecting that in +25 now, which is perfectly reasonable. In previous expansions people would still run 16s/17s for the credit of a 15+ because a) it’s more convenient than spam lowering the key, and b) even if you failed you still get a key that gives max reward credit to do next.
My contention is simply that there needs to be more of a buffer that enables cross-play between these two opposed types of players than +20 only where the falloff in score value isn’t instantaneous. It doesn’t need to be +25, it could be +24 or +23. Then it’s the same as previous seasons where +23 and above is for score only, +20 is “optimal” for gear only, and +21-22 are the buffer zone where people playing for score and gear overlap and aren’t completely at odds in their metric of success (time or bust).
There’s nothing “norm” about this season because the key pushers and the vault gearers have never been this close in key level at this point in the season. In previous expansions you’d be running 15-17s within a couple weeks of the patch, and the people pushing score would blow past those soon after and not even be in the pool applying to the 15-17 keys. Now with the increased difficulty and gear scaling to +20 (which I like incidentally, not complaining about max loot not being “free”), a lot of the people who fancied themselves “key pushers” are actually barely at the max gear reward. Maybe it will sort itself out in a month’s time when they move on to 23+ keys, but as of right now 20-22 is a cesspool.
Sure, I’m not sure how I could have speculated at all of those factors without having run any keys. I’ve completed 80 16+ keys this season and 7 20+ keys (and another 5+ incomplete runs). I don’t claim that’s a high score or a high exposure, but it’s plenty to see how the season has been trending and roughly the same as you’ve done. I’m well aware that people will leave these keys if it’s not going to be timed. What I’m saying is we shouldn’t be making that even more likely than it is now, that doesn’t help the majority of people.
You’re giving one anecdotal example of people leaving, but you also have clocked several over time 20s and 21s that were missed by a handful of minutes and likely still gave score and vault credit. If the system encourages people to leave at the end of a 30m+ dungeon and make it so the 4 other people wasted their time, the system is broken, unless the system also segments the people who are only doing it for time from those who are doing it for rewards. Right now that segmentation is broken because 20-22 is a heavy overlap of these two mindsets that never existed before.
