This has been said before, and should be stated another time…
Party members randomly quitting midway through an M+ key with ZERO consequences is unacceptable. People will say oh Blizz can’t do anything, it’ll be toxic, etc.
These excuses aren’t sufficient anymore. I’m sure someone in the entire company or a group of people “quick strike group, reaction group, focus group” whatever you want to call it, could brainstorm how to fix this problem.
Until we as players collectively push for change we will still get people randomly quitting on a zero death perfect key for no apparent reason.
Not entirely relevant, but there was a bug last week where people would get randomly kicked from groups. Not experienced it myself but seen/heard of it.
The game is too hardcore. To many small fails lead to a complete disaster on some bosses, in PUGs.
The game is not toxic because people leave keys. People leaving is just a symptom of the game being to focused on giving the 0.1% a good experience and giving a damn about casuals. It’s the difficulty which makes it toxic
M+ isn’t supposed to be easy, it’s a form of end game. You can spam low keys all day and have an easy, fun, casual experience sure, but high keys are supposed to be on par with mythic raiding.
I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet this season to track a bunch of stuff. (Data nerd)
24 keys in the last 2 days, 0 leavers. This is only keys up to 9 so far, since it’s literally my first 2 days. Small sample size, sure. People leaving good groups/runs is super rare.
I even had an azure vault where someone failed the first set of whelp and we had 5 deaths before we even really got going. Still no leavers.
There are people who want to complete the key no matter what, and feel like those who leave are toxic. There are people who want to leave after giving an honest effort and feel those who accost them are toxic. Sometimes maybe it has nothing to do with any of the fights; I’ve left keys where people say racist or sexually aggressive things. If you’re having leaving issues with pugs, I’d try adding the people you like and slowly creating a small friend group to run dungeons with.
Another expansion, another lack of understanding basic human emotions and motives.
Remember when you were a kid and you had that one friend whose mom forced you to let his little brother tag along? Well, now he is grown up and wants in your key. He feels entitled, he was raised to be that way.
No, what makes it toxic is punishing the key holder by lowering their key if someone leaves. If this didn’t happen, people wouldn’t be nearly so upset about it.
And there’s no reason it needs to happen.
The rest of your post is drivel. In an infinitely scaling system, there’s going to come a point where bad players can’t succeed any more. There’s nothing anyone can do about that.
I have never seen anyone purposely abandon a key that is being timed unless it was an emergency/unintentional DC. Even then, those situations are extremely rare. While I am disappointed when it happens, I won’t get overly mad because its just a game and we can’t control what might interfere with out gameplay from the outside world sometimes.
While I fundamentally disagree with OP, I do think that there could be a safety net for abandoned keys. I think, if mathematically, a key CAN be timed (comfortably) and someone leaves the key should not be downgraded (grace period). There would need to be a lot of rules set for this though to avoid this system being abused. The grace period would need to be weighted heavily on the side of the potential to brick a key and not be weighted towards key forgiveness in my opinion. This means that it would only really apply on an extremely early leave.
This would require a fundamental redesign of how the system works. The key isn’t currently downgraded when the key is finished after the timer. It is downgraded when the key is started. If the key is finished in time, the downgraded key is replaced with a new key.
Another level of complexity is who judges if a key can still be completed, and what is the review process? If it’s not something that can be automated it’s not going to work. If it can be automated, are you comfortable with the fact that people may restart a key several times to mulligan early mistakes? I haven’t considered this thoroughly enough to have a conclusion, but I think there will be a lot of people uncomfortable with the idea that you can just have someone drop every time there is an early mistake and get a fresh start with no penalty until you get smooth beginning. This would be especially abused where there are early walls like the tree boss in academy.
How early, and how often does this happen? Is it worth all of the trouble of redesigning and building an enormously complex system that will work only a small fraction of the time people leave a key?
Highly questionable… Healers must compensate low dps. Group could be friendly like ghandi, but if the healer needs to even out the low overall performance, I’d leave as well.
Again… it’s the games fault not the players. It’s unrewarding and stressfull to PUG. Why should anyone put their mental health at risk for a game? I’d rather quit as well.
as someone who plays a healer as an alt in mid to high keys - it’s exhausting having to heal pug groups who
refuse to interrupt
repeatedly stand in avoidable mechanics
apologise without actively trying to be or do better.
if your healer is leaving these are just some of the reasons, I dont give two fs about how “nice” you are, you could be a god damn saint and it wouldnt change the fact that I’m tilted because my entire group bar (maybe the tank) are all standing in a bunch of crap and I’m having to cover your a$$es
In my experience people don’t “refuse” to interrupt. It’s just that in pugs, there is no communication about who is supposed to be interrupting what, so everyone blows their interrupt on the same cast and then you die to the next cast when everyone’s interrupt is on CD.
