You are just simply not reading my posts if you think this. I have said M+ is too lucrative at the high end in a solid half of my posts. The rewards for M+ should go higher up the difficulty scale than they do today.
But let’s get two things straight about big picture. You and several others continue to push this idea that you have to farm M+ in order to raid. This pressure is coming solely from other raiders. There has never been a tier where you needed any M+ gear to obtain CE. That may not be acceptable for the goal you and your raid team set because other raiders will farm that gear to get ahead, but that is absolutely the fault of raiders and their expectations.
Second, M+ is a very popular game mode on its own. And it was popular going back to before it was as lucrative as is it today gear wise. There is a lot more to the story than just how much gear it provides to its popularity. So when nearly every suggestion that you make is centered on worsening M+ rather than improving raid (or any other mode) you really lose the ability to try to claim a big picture view.
But also not a problem for a ton of other players. Your entire argument relies on valuing the experience of one group of players over another. Having an iron curtain on gear might be the best solution, but pretty much everything else would hurt M+ just to keep other modes the same.
That’s your opinion and I disagree. When those 5 man dungeons can scale to harder levels of difficulty than raid, players should be rewarded accordingly.
Indeed, and sometimes games have to evolve to stay relevant with current players. Whether WoW should still be raid or die is something we can agree to disagree with, but we can’t ignore that the largest known subscriber loss in an expansion came before M+ even existed. We also know that a lot of players would not raid even if M+ wasn’t a thing.
Nothing forces players from playing M+ like an esport. Pick a key level that matches your group’s level and run. You can keep depleting keys until you eventually reach a level where you’re able to time even without pushing yourselves harder than you want.
Nothing stops Blizzard from improving raid further either before or after M+. This is the crux of my point. If a large percentage of players found raid as fun as you do, there wouldn’t be so many players in M+ that aren’t raiding. Rather than continuing to tear down M+, perhaps you could suggest improvements that would make raid feel better to play for those who might prefer raid but are instead in M+ for reasons unrelated to the fights themselves.
That’s your opinion. Insulting the devs is 100% not the way to get any of the changes you want to see.
You really need to start providing proof of these claims.
But even if you’re right that this was the reason it was created, that doesn’t mean the consequences are all bad. There are a lot of players who play M+ that would not be raiding regardless; all of those players would have no endgame PvE progression. You’ll never convince me that would be better for the game.