It being boring doesn’t make it equally difficult.
Difficulty is relative to the measure(s) used. In this case, it’s patience.
Edit: to be even more precise, patient tenacity.
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What is value for the dollar?
How is X hours of gameplay for Y ilvl any less value than the same X hours for Y + 10 ilvl?
The number is just an arbitrary denotation of a gear’s power.
If you are getting the same hours of gameplay with the same engagement, why should the arbitrary number matter?
Personally I preferred the casual gameplay loop of the older expansions than the modern ones which to me are unplayable (if I’m not raiding I’m not playing), despite the ilvl disparity being much more severe. (You never got close to even normal ilvl outside of raiding)
You can say that about M+ also. We nearly cap out after about 4 weeks. Not max but fairly close. But we still keep playing, and DF makes this better as we can get rewards from M+20 keys.
“Casual” simply means that a player is lacking in commitment or intent. This can mean that they don’t play regularly or for long periods of time, don’t do activities that involve an intense level of gameplay or challenge, or don’t approach WoW seriously in any other aspect.
But whatever your definition, the Shadowlands / Dragonflight design model refuses to reward casual players across the board. The goal is to make hardcore players feel more validated while also motivating casual players to become more hardcore. The goal is to create friction and prune away all the progress that this game made in Legion towards offering progression for non-raiders.
But this approach has failed miserably, because most players don’t want to do more difficult activities and do them for longer for the same levels of power that they earned in previous expansions. Many players don’t want to go back to raiding as the end-all.
Dragonflight is basically a copy and paste of the three pillars of Shadowlands, but with M+ scaled up in difficulty and with open world gearing blown out of the water—all in a ham-fisted attempt to save raiding.
Solo visions gave you gear but you had to work for it. 5 mask solo runs and all. Some people literally cried real tears on the forums because they simply couldn’t even finish no mask in time.
FF14 has tons of stuff that isn’t raids/dungeons/PvP. WoW really needs to adopt a lot of those things. But Ion doesn’t even want to pay anyone to update in game holidays so that’ll never happen.
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Maybe raiding would not need saving if raiders actually treated their fellow players like humans or at least dumped stupid “you need better gear then what the difficulty drops to run”.
Raiding is fun, M+ is fun, world content can be fun, but it is also all fun that is semi-dependent on you and the group you are with, I have fun raiding with my guild but I don’t touch pugs, outside of filling the vault, with a 10-foot pole.
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Shadowlands has tons of content that isn’t raids/dungeons/PvP.
I did a ton of it.
I have lots of friends who did a ton of it.
Most of the people saying “WoW needs more content” barely did any of it.
Even according to your definition, Shadowlands rewarded “casuals” all expansion. The only exception was season 4 where they didn’t release a new zone.
ZM provided 252 ilvl gear purely for solo content. That 252 gear was more powerful than Mythic Raid gear in open world content because of bonus effects.
You can’t sit there and say “casuals” are not being rewarded when they are able to get Normal raid equivalent gear for solo/world content.
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Maybe they need to argue “WoW needs more content that I enjoy or desire” and then answer truthfully when asked what that content is. If they answer something like “gear mailed to me” or “content I can do without needing to do any work”, they get mocked, derided and even I will till them things like “then go play the game that has such, if you can find it”.
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I think most would have been satisfied with the zones getting the world boss treatment for callings and the weeklies. No new zone needed, just extend the fated/empowered to more content already in game.
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The number of players who do some kind of organized group content on a regular basis is less than 50%, but WoW devs are still catering to the overall 1%.
You can do raiding, M+, or rated PvP casually but still feel friction in WoW’s newfound design principles.
It’s the top 1% or so who have praised Shadowlands, because it gave them the validation and feeling of superiority or accomplishment that they put hours in every day to feel.
Contrast this with the Wrath / Cata / MoP era where you could earn raiding gear from queued content like Heroic dungeons, or the Legion / BfA era where open world and solo players actually had an endgame.
By that measure I should be able to get a PhD from repeating the 3rd grade enough times.
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Link your sources. If less than 50% participate in organized group content then we have like 10million+ subs based on the numbers running keys and raids.
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You mean the usual “rares”, box looting and dailies?
FF14’s Gold Saucer all by itself outdoes anything WoW offers for casuals. Best part? No player power needed. Its all cosmetics.
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Not to mention the 2 pieces of 291 ilvl legendary gear everyone got.
And tier sets from world content, even.
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Yes, good points. Full set pieces without stepping foot in organized content. Same with double legendary, full conduit upgrades, ect.
My sources are practically any achievement tracker. I have posted the stats dozens of times, only for the elitists to say, “But, but…” and reject the numbers.
Could you please link your sources? I have a feeling that they track only players with keys completed or bosses downed rather than the entire population.
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