You’re right, we’ve discussed the ramifications of punishing leavers at length. That’s why I’m against it.
What hasn’t been discussed at length is why keystones not degrading would be bad.
Explain.
I’ve asked you three times now, and all you keep saying is “it’s bad” “it would denigrate the content” and most recently, that “Blizzard doesn’t agree with me.”
Like, use your words. What bad things would happen if keystones didn’t degrade? Is this abusable? If so, how? How would the content be denigrated?
Because I see a lot of things that would be improved:
Keyholders now share the same loss of time as the rest of the group. More keys of higher levels would be on the group finder, which is good for everyone. People may be less willing to insist upon meta comps, and may be willing to take chances inviting less desirable classes/specs to try out new things knowing there’s no longer a penalty for failure. That’s also good. And yeah, teams and groups could just keep resetting a key until they got it done on time, but a) that’s already how raid works; and b) that’s kinda already how M+ works. You can keep trying a key at a level again and again and again until you time it. You’re simply time-gated by the availability of that specific key. If you’re a team, you can just keep rerolling your keys. If you’re a pug, you can just keep refreshing the group finder until you find that one again.
As to that last part, as I’ve said before, if everyone playing started doing M+, the group finder would be so stuffed with keys, you would, in theory, be able to keep immediately finding a group for the same key over and over again and repeating it until you time it. But no one’s saying less folks should do M+.
Your turn.