While I never thought of M+ like this I do see your point.
M+ should indeed remain a part of the end game meta as it is more accessible content to more people than say raiding. It’s a very viable pve option for endgame.
However I do agree that the lack of new 5 player dungeons like we used to get is a problem and would go quite a long way to giving new content. Balancing old dungeons and current ones for M+ I’m sure is taxing but at the same time with the size of the wow dev team I don’t see how new dungeons wouldn’t be possible.
I’m personally not a fan of M+ either but I can’t say it kills wow.
Just because I don’t get the incessant drive to speed run dungeons.
It’s just another mode of play.
I have a lot of guildees they just love pushing keys. All they talk about. More power to em. I’m not mad at em.
I prefer the story and raids myself. If I feel there’s nothing in game I like doing while waiting for more content I’ll let my sub lapse. M+ imo isn’t content. My opinion
Having so many different variants of it certainly isnt helping. KSM is standard, then there is the KSC for entry level, then there is the KSH for the other achievement.
i agree shaddox. i lost close to 30 friends since legion SPECIFICALLY because of m+. that is just little ol’ me’s friend list. m+ burned them out. they felt the game was going nowhere because of it and because m+ hands out end game max ilvl gears, it made raiding feel pointless because they were already “geared” and felt done.
i feel the same way. imo as well m+ ruined this game. most of the people that are still on will say different because they are the only players left. everyone else quit as per 90% of the empty realms will prove unless you are on illidan, stormrage, area 52 etc… lol. or they are like me and you. i am only hanging on because my wife plays and does everything open world, so we have a hobby we both enjoy. i found this guild that casually mythic raids and clears 60-70% of every tier but again, i, myself am forced into the trash that is m+ to stay relevant and not lose my raid spot.
m+ should of died in legion just like torghast died in shadowlands. then the game would of not have declined as much as it did since legion due to burn out and pointlessness of raiding (gear wise)
Yeah, you’re exactly right, no one in my list even plays retail anymore let alone M+ special operations, they all moved on to other games. I came back for HC classic and had way more fun on that than I ever did on dragonflight.
I won’t argue the MMO-ness of classic versus retail, to each their own to be sure. However, this idea that classic caused a mass exodus from retail because so many players want the classic experience just doesn’t pan out if we look at total server counts. There are 99 retail servers that have high or full populations compared with 66 total classic servers (41 classic, 2 hardcore classic, 23 wrath classic) in the US/OCE region. To be clear, this is certainly a lot of servers when many other MMOs don’t have enough players to support half of what classic has; but there’s no doubt that more players are on retail today than classic.
But on the flip side, how many players left because of not really caring for raiding even before M+ came out? How many players begrudgingly raided in expansions prior to the release of M+ because there was nothing else to do but their friends were still playing WoW who made the swap to M+ because it’s more enjoyable for them?
I do empathize with raiders who feel they lost something they truly enjoyed in raiding because M+ provides something that raid does not. But those stories are not the only stories in WoW and to act like there wasn’t good to come out of M+ from other players is disingenuous. You certainly don’t have to be happy about it and I welcome suggestions to make raiding more enjoyable for you.
But when your suggestions are only “kill M+,” you’re drawing battle lines against a large group of players, possibly even larger than those in raid. And this is especially problematic given your problem with M+ is a raider-created problem. There is not a single raid tier that requires any player to step foot into M+ once to achieve CE. If as many of your friends are burning themselves out on M+ in the name of raiding as you claim, it shouldn’t be difficult to form a guild where the expectations are that nobody needs to M+ if they don’t want to, and you’ll progress as you get gear from heroic raid and what you can craft. If anything, M+ has a bigger beef with the best gear coming from mythic raid due to the existence of key levels that require mythic raid gear to time…
There has only been one expansion that Blizzard admitted failed. There has only been one expansion that Blizzard cut to last significantly less than 2 years. There has only been one expansion where raid preparation could be completed without leaving your main hub of the expansion inside of 20 minutes. And that expansion was WoD, the expansion viewed by many as the most raid or die expansion and the last expansion before M+. I cannot claim the poor reception of WoD was due to garrisons or the raid or die mentality, but there is a whole lot more evidence to suggest M+ was a response to poor raid reception than a cool feature that now has negative ramifications on raid.
Have you ever considered that perhaps a big part of Legion’s success was M+? What do you think would happen to player counts if Blizzard killed M+ after Legion, specifically those that came back and/or stayed because M+ was a thing? How would that have been good for the game?
Also, comparing M+ in Legion to Torghast in Shadowlands is ridiculous. M+ was wildly popular even in Legion while Torghast was mostly despised. It’s no surprise at all that Blizzard killed the latter and built upon the former.
And let’s not forget the mass exodus that began when people found out they were lied to about flying. There’s way to many things about WOD to pinpoint one thing that ‘killed’ it.
Sure, which I freely admit. But many of the people I’ve responded to about M+'s impact on the game over the past few weeks are convinced all of WoW’s problems are the result of the introduction of M+. I mean this entire post was created to try to make that claim. I’ll happily back off the rhetoric about WoD and its potential role on M+ if others stop using M+ as the universal boogie-man to explain every shortcoming the game has ever seen.
