It is a runaway problem since the more people leave, the harder it is to form groups.
I’ve made a few posts pointing at issues that cause the wait times but the more I think about it the more it seems like the actual waiting itself is the problem that manifests itself in many places.
I recently took a break from wow (still kinda on break, I used to play like it was my job) and I realized how desensitized I was to the long waits.
I think it is a core philosophy of the game creators – their priority for us is to SPEND TIME instead of HAVE FUN. It seems like they are very paranoid for us to run out of stuff to do so the “running out of stuff to do part” is frontloaded into waiting for groups to form.
waiting for weekly stuff is meant to put pressure on us to log in regularly but without an immediate reward to make it all feel worthwhile in the moment
and unfortunately there isn’t solo content that makes one relevant – you can’t get 252+ gear solo (except your legendary) and it really just doesn’t exist
I don’t think there’s one solution, I think a design philosophy is needed. Blizzard would make more money with 12 million subscribers vs the current 2.5 if they simply focused on making the game fun and didn’t try to manipulate us to spend more time playing
Yes I know this ignores the story component. I do think some of that plays in here but it’s for another post. I’m guessing the people leaving because of the story are more casual for the most part anyways
At this point in time, I already got my healer and tank to all 20/21’s timed on BOTH weeks and this rogue is just a few away.
I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s like asking for a Lambo while you live on an island — useless.
252 is for people who play hard content, such as higher keys & mythic raids. Or for people who earned it by doing the harder content (depends which way you look at it)
. You also can’t expect WQ’s to reward same item level gear as M15+…Then why ever do M+ or Mythic raiding?
If you’re a casual who runs world quests, rep/mount farms & has absolutely zero interest in M+/Raiding, you have absolutely no need for 252. You can get full 233 already, which is more than sufficient to even run 15’s, which would then give you 252s from the vault.
You can’t expect yourself to be on par with me, while all you do is log in twice a week, do a few quests and I push 20’s & up keys.
If you got 252’s, solo content would be even MORE irrelevant. 233 ilvl already obliterates any form of difficulty. But if you play casually, and you’re like 210-215 ilvl, WQ’s are still relevant. Those are like entry level clerk jobs. Low effort=low results.
speaking of waiting… how bloody annoying is it just to get to where you wanna go? when a flight takes so long, you end up AFK, it seriously kills all desire to actually DO anything. we need more fast travel options, like portal gates…
anyways as far as the group thing, I’ve given up on groups. i am not patient. blizz would do well to add some mercenaries to the game. allow players to hire npcs and even players! there could be a whole new rep/faction system called the Mercenary Guild where you can sign up to get hired to run anything and with anyone regardless of faction. the npcs could quickly fill up missing group roles so that you can at least get in the dungeon without a thirty minute wait. maybe there could be some bounty quests along with it—like, go kill so-and-so from Deadmines or help clear three dungeons, maybe even some Named Mob bounty quests just to get some rep.
I’ll tell you. We all know that one individual that peaked in high school, who is constantly living in the past and says “back in the good old days” at least once a day. Well, that is wow.
Its not the waiting … its the players. while there is no game without players … it’s the player bases’ behavior that is ruining the game.
It is the quandary of all retail, you can’t be in business without customers … BuuUUt its the customers that will cost you most … in demands and shrinkage (that’s a fancy retail word for, Theft). or to quote an old song lyric. “Call a place paradise , you can kiss it goodbye”.
If the player base behaved with honesty consistently while playing, no hacks, no cheats instead of giving in to the 'It’s an avatar, no one will know it was ME that did rotten action X ,idea.
if they made their demands logical and sensible it would be a far better and much more enjoyable game to play…
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LOL like any one is going to do that!! LOL
tell that to the people here where i live ( on Oahu ). not saying you are not right but yea bunch of rich people got outdated cars like lambo’s and what not compared to what you see in other states at least my case california. but as you said yes it is useless especially with the amount of traffic we deal with, the conditions of our roads ( terrible ), the weather, speed limit, the turns, etc… i don’t think i’ve seen many people flooring a lambo or even a corvette here compared to all the young kids with there little civics or brz’s and what not. of course they get into crashes here and there but that is at their own risks.
just the other day on Maui i think it was there was a crash involving a corvette. 17 year old kid died. was right after christmas day. likely was speeding, didn’t make the turn and car rolled over caught fire. i’ve been in similar situations thus i don’t push my limits simply just isn’t worth it.
That was the original plan I think, but people complained until it was nerfed to the point where it couldn’t award gear. Giving out 252 gear in there would have to be challenging enough to where most people couldn’t do it.
Disagree with this take. Just depends on the implementation. 8.3 was a failure in many aspects but was a good example of what meaningful solo content could look like via Visions. It had a scaling difficulty and rewarded appropriate gear for the challenge.
Whether solo content should be a 4th pillar of the game is a whole separate debate. But just adding here it can be done.
But Ion believes what they are doing is creating ‘fun’. /s
I really heard him say that [in not those exact words].
It’s hard for a team to understand how to not design backwards, old, redundant analytic based content. This team is running a great world into the ground.
This is a game design issue that there is no meaningful solo content challenging enough to warrant the use of 252 gear. BFA had horrific visions which gave 470 gear which was pretty meaningful back then – AND they were challenging enough that gear mattered
Strong disagree. It is the landscape of the game that causes people to want to wait around for the FOTM classes etc. People are doing their best to achieve their goals in the environment that is available to them. So if your party needs a bres, they wait (where I think any res class should have a bres which would fix that particular issue)
Same here. people are going to be people. It is up to Blizzard to do a GOOD job herding us into places of fun instead of waiting 6 hours to join in on content. By this logic no MMO would ever ‘work’
Yes! I agree! they even have the transmogs for the gear. But this is a part of their design philosophy – they want the gear acquisition to be slow because they’re afraid we’ll stop playing if we don’t have anything to gain but RIO score
That sounds fun to me … a real challenge with no wait time
While I do not think 252 gear should be obtainable with purely solo content (in its current form) I do wish there was more role-agnostic activities, similar to Islands. As much of a flop as Islands were, it’d be neat if they figure dout a way to allow, say, 5 dps to run dungeons, maybe it could mean the bosses will switch aggro to each player every 20 seconds or something and each player gets two new buttons, a heal and a shield, which they have to incoporate into their rotations and such (I dunno just spitballing).
However, if they made it that some solo content like WQs were much harder, as in, you have to know your class and spec inside and out to overcome the challenge, I wouldn’t mind if they awarded much stronger gear. I’ll always hold to the principle that the reward should be commensurate to the challenge.
Yeah, but those kinds of things never end up going live. Designing balanced content for a single player is difficult to do and people will complain about pretty much everything. The MT complaints were ridiculous. Imagine what those would have looked like if good gear was tied to it.
Nope, key difference here is you think it is the player’s fault while I think it is a game design fault for giving people such strong reasons to take a particular set of classes.
Well sure, you also don’t even need dps to complete a key. You don’t even need 5 people, didn’t some guy just complete a 21 court of stars solo? You sound like the type of person that blames people for not accepting low-scored-for-that-key-level players
You can’t fault people for wanting to use the best tools (and people) available to them to time their key. It’s human nature.
Designing a game like this is a challenge entirely, I get it. I think Blizzard at least had the budget when BFA was out. Even with only 2.5 million subs that’s still more than 25 million a month in revenue, enough to pay lots of QA people to help with balancing. If they only half-do their creation of game mechanics they’ll only have half the playerbase