Absolutely the FUNNIEST thing I will read all day! Thank you for that! Guessing you never saw this from the BNet Launcher:
It was more than a bone, it was an acknowledgement of how many solo players they have, and how the game needed to shift away from forced social interaction.
Delves are relatively small when compared to rest of the game.
It’s like one of the first major things that was directly given to solo players. It is a bone.
Just like when they implement new pvp stuff they throw a bone to the pvpers
Like at this point you are really arguing what can be considered a bone.
True. There are a small part of the experience, but an important one. They are one of 3 pillars for end game when it comes to gearing up. Your need to diminish their weight tells me that people are afraid this is where the game is headed. And they should be. It’s a widely popular option, and allows the majority of players who are not Mythic Dungeoners and Raiders a chance to enjoy the endgame level gear without the endgame level hassle. Also, if it were just “a bone”, the gear would have no impact on the “end game” content. Also, what is considered a bone to some, is a feat to others. I’m just not so narrowminded to assume my opinion is the only/right opinion. But you have a great day. I have delves to run on all my alts.
If you can’t see a mechanic it does not matter if you know how to deal with it. This is just misappropriating a skill check with a design issue. If you want a player to see something, show them.
It is a bone….
They are not a pillar of end game…. They are a stepping stone… one that doesn’t matter, except to a small group of the player base.
Fear… no one is scared of casual play because that is what it is… it’s a funny thing you act like these delves are going to clash with the mythic keys and it really doesn’t. You act like because delves are popular they are going to remove the end game, but you can’t see that they coexist. No matter what you will always have the high play time extremely good players, the mid to high play time average players, and the low play time average to terrible players.
If wow made this player fully single player they would lose so much revenue that like all single player games there would be an end. But the lose of revenue from the high play time players is much more than a weekly sub. Wow tokens, race to world first, streaming platforms, the list goes on.
And just so you know I like delves, I like that I can get a few more pieces of hero gear in my vault that might help me in raid. But again I think it was an oversight that they essentially removed any need to do mythics 1-6 because it doesn’t drop hero gear.
So now you have a large portion of the player base who claim they can’t get invited to sub 7 keys because they have the item level but not the io.
What I think they should do is let mythic keys 1-8 drop hero gear. This opens the window to people playing in what ever content they want, but makes it super easy for people to get hero gear from mythic which removed the need for anything below champion gear.
Because it is a garbage system that promotes toxicity and is horrible for a game like WoW in which a lot of players pug.
MMOs set out to be virtual fantasy worlds, but WoW devs for some reason want their game to be an e-sport.
Whoever thought turning dungeon crawling into a ranked competive mode was a good idea, needs to get their head checked.
You keep posting at me, trying to convince me to change my position. ITS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!!
I don’t know why you have taken the mantle of cheif M+ defender on these forums. Reading some of your comments are just hilarious, its like you almost think that the developers are taking feedback from you, or the you get worried that anti-M+ comments are going to somehow get M+ deleleted.
It’s painfully obvious the devs don’t know what to do with M+. They have tinkered with it each expansion since Legion, and it still sucks, because it is like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole.
All the other big MMOs on the market don’t have anything like this in their games except GW2, and barely anyone runs fractels anyway.
M+ is a dumb system, and it goes against the spirit in which this game was built upon, which was DnD.
Seems to me if I need a score, I will do the content to get me the score which means starting at 0 and working my way up rather than getting into Delves. Or, even smarter, get the gear from delves and then just Blow through the 0-7 to get the score up. I’m not surprised people don’t use common sense. Sure, it may take an extra DAY of gaming, but then you are playing in the content you like.
Also, just so we are on the same page: " An end game pillar is a type of activity in a video game that becomes available to players after they reach a certain level or upgrade their gear. Endgame content allows players to improve their characters and earn rare rewards." Delves have a scaling system, and through Bountifuls offer gear up to 603 and allow for 616 gear in your Vault… a locker system designed around doing end game content, like Mythics and raiding.
This gear can then be upgraded to use in other content, or you can use it to simply see the endgame content in LFR. Mythic may be a challenge mode, but regardless of the level in which it is completed, I still get to see the end game content. If T7 - T11 drops champion gear and M2-6 off the same champion gear, then why not run low keys to get gear and stay out of delves? I’ll tell you why, cause delves are faster and you don’t have to put up with randos and their BS.
But this game IS a single player game with a couple of Multiplayer options. Everything you do in this game is single player minus some instanced content, and with the addition, and success, of follower Dungeons, I am predicting Follower Heroics and Follower Raids (with reduced rewards) are just around the corner, isolating the M+ community and maybe even pushing them out. We casuals stay subbed during the expansion, and don’t just gear and unsub til next season. We are the profit margin. We are the cash cow. We pay for the content. We support the cash shop and microtransactions. We buy the tokens. We pay their salary and finance their game…
and they know it.
Wow needs housing, and more interesting world content, with less focus on repetitive scaling instanced content.
This is why so many players love Vanilla, because Vanilla still feels like you’re playing an MMO.
Retail’s leveling content and max level world content is abysmal now, and has been for a long time.
I like Delves, but they just feel like M+ lite. I would love for the game to add more content like the MoP farm, player housing, keeps that could be captured, guild halls, more pvp objectives in the world, trade runs like we had in Archeage, a music system like in Lotro.
WoW just needs more content that isn’t just chasing ilevel.
I was reading a blog by the ESO developers a few months ago, they were commenting on how taken back they were that a lot of their player base was engaging with ESO’s evergreen systems that didn’t award character power.
ESO’s combat is horrible, but that game has so many amazing systems that make ESO a fun MMO to play. If the combat was better, WoW would be dead.
Facts, and this is where capping iLvL at Heroics and removing M+ would be amazing. Then we could add Follower… EVERYTHING… so small groups of friends could fill in the gaps with AI instead of toxic randos.
That’s a lot of words to say nothing of value.
I think you would find there are more people that consider themselves in the middle group I mentioned than the lower group that you claim.
But you clearly have all the data in front of you so let me just take your word for it.
It’s funny the very people you are claiming need to be pushed out, is the very type of person you are. You want them pushed out because you either lack the time to be amazing, lack the social skills of any adult, lack the skill to be amazing, or any combination of the above. They are doing it from the top down, you are doing it from the ground looking up. But neither side is looking at the largest player base…. The middle average player.
At least the top don’t really care what the bottom is doing because it really doesn’t bother them…
As far as keys go… if you get heroic gear solely from delves and try to join a 7 key or a 10 key pretty much no one will invite you. And because of delves there are not many groups for sub 7 keys. Therefore if you only gear through delves and are a solo player it will be super difficult to get the io to move up. Effectively stopping your gear climb at 4/6 heroic gear.
The primary difference between us is I believe all content has its place. And I think the reward should be fair based on time and skill. You just want to have access to the best loot with no skill, and no time investment.
I’m okay with some content being out of reach of casual players, but all of WoW’s endgame is geared towards competitive players, or at least it has been.
Playing Classic has made me realize that most WoW players like some challenge, but not at the levels retail has been for some time now.
Blizzard had a winning formula, I don’t know why they have been chasing this ultra competitive crowd. My only theory is that WoW suffered from the same issues Overwatch did, which as meddling from Bobby Kotick.
Bobby pushed hard for OW to become this big e-sport, and I can sort of see this influence when it comes to M+. M+ came onto the scene around the time of Legion, which is when OW 1 launched.
The devs for OW1 that left all complained that leadership’s obsession with chasing e-sports was killing the game for casuals, who were basically the main people funding the game.
WoW has the same problems, and I think Blizzard is finally starting to realize they made a mistake.
A lot of gamers think these big companies are infailable, espeically people that only play WoW, but we are seeing more and more blunders by all the big AAA publishers now, and I would put Blizzard right in there with them.
Modern WoW has made some cool changes over the years, but they also have made a ton of blunders, and I put M+ as one of the biggest blunders, with LFR being a close 2nd.
This comment is kind of funny, kind of shows how people forgot that video games were once just a form entertainment.
Incorrect. ilvl =/=potential or performance. People with high ilvls can still be bad and vice versa - lower ilvls with better performance.
Neither of us have data, so quit pretending your answer is right and mine is wrong. I am expressing an opinion, you are attempting to pass your opinion off as fact. We are not the same.
Let’s face it, and this is a TRUTH, not necessarily a fact:
If End Game were the MAJORITY, WoW never would have catered to casuals with Warbands, Renown account wide rep, Follower Dungeons, or Storymode Raids. It would still feel like the grind of Classic with a handful of QoL changes and almost no solo player content. Instead, Blizz made a conscious business decision to add a bunch of QoL updates to go hand in hand with the new solo content.
Why else do you think all OLD content is soloable? Because casuals can go back, completely overgeared, and see the content they never got the achievements for when it was current. If Solo mode were NOT the dominant mode, everything would scale to level cap and you would be forced to find 40 people to run Molten Core 20 years later.
I get that you think you are right, and anyone who disagrees with you is wrong. Well, Blizz apparently disagrees with you, so they must be wrong. After all, they are the ones changing the game to be more suited to players like me… and I love it.
Which the vast majority of players have no reason to participate in if that’s how they feel. You have not once found me saying you should lose what you like about the game, whatever that happens to be, regardless how much I may dislike it.
Further, you are happy to talk about the conclusions you’ve reached about the system but I have yet to see you explain your reasoning for it. You like to use phrases such as “promotes toxicity” without ever explaining why M+ does so, even when examples of toxicity exist in other modes as well.
In what way does M+ prevent dungeon crawling?
And I don’t know why you seem surprised that people like myself will defend M+ when a significant portion of the points you bring up are projections, misreading of data, or flat out lies. And then you clearly cherry pick the comments you think you can make an argument again, ignoring other arguments you seemingly do not have a response for. You insist there are all sorts of problems with M+, and perhaps there are. But when nearly every post you make have blatant fabrications and ad hominem at their core, it really hampers the validity of your arguments.
I don’t think this point lands the way you expect it does. Having a unique game mode does not immediately mean the game mode is bad or doesn’t work for the game. Further, it also means for anyone who does enjoy the mode, it means WoW is the only place players can get it. It’s not surprising there would be players in WoW specifically for that mode if it really can’t be found anywhere else in the genre.
And it’s also optional, so why does this matter? You still have not even attempted to bridge the gap between why M+ has such this detrimental effect on the rest of the game.
But why do you have to chase item level? Why do we need to remove M+? If you want to stop at heroic raid and not run M+, nothing is stopping you from doing so. Why do other people who like aspects of the game you do not have to sacrifice when you can already get what you’re advocating for?
Sure, why not? I see no issue with there being a lot more follower content, save for how bad the AI currently is just for normal dungeon. But if they can improve it to the point where they are capable in higher levels of content, by all means it should be added.
The difficulties that exist in Classic also exist in Retail. The difficulties for competitive players were solely additions to the game, not replacement. Why can someone who enjoys normal raiding difficulty not progress their way through a season in normal and call it a day?
Because players improve over time. The players who were pushing what was difficult raid content in retail 10, 15, 20 years ago likely wouldn’t find that same content engaging today. There’s a reason every raid tier in Classic is cleared hours after it is launched. If the pinnacle of content difficulty matched what is currently in Classic, a lot of long term players wouldn’t have engaging content at all. It’s likely those players would have left the game a long time ago.
That’s why we have so many difficulties today. Newer and lesser skilled players still have content that can be engaging, while having a path to those higher levels of difficulty as they improve as players. But the veterans who find those levels of content to be a waste of time also have an engaging difficulty to play.
You keep saying that, but the end-game is designed currently to push you into M+.
You will never reach these M+ defenders, they just don’t get it. They think that the majority of the player base loves M+, because Raiderio has millions of keys displayed, when the reality is, a ton of those runs are alts of people that play M+.
When you look at the overall achievement stats on DataforAzeroth it basically shows that only around 30ish % of the player base bothers with pushing keys enough to get any of the M+ achievements.
I look at FF14, and that game has a huge player base, and it doesn’t have M+, or raid bosses that require 400 plus pulls. The hardest bosses are just there for bragging rights and some cool mog items.
ESO has hardish raids, but the vast majority of it’s conent is over land questing, and their dungeons are super fun, but not overly difficult. The hardmode dungeons add a little extra challenge, but are nothing like M+ higher keys.
Edit: I think WoW is being held back by old design phliosophies that upper management of the game hold. Ion has said many times that he was instilled with desing principles from the old devs that made the game.
For some reason, Ion thinks having this tryhard content in the game is some how in the spirit of how the old versions were designed.
I think he loved that only a percentage of players got to see certain raid bosses, and I think the upper management likes players having to use 30 addons to just be able to see what is going on.
Blizzard needs to let go of these old design principles and take the game in a new direction.
Having your MMO just be raid or die, or speed run the same 8 dungeons or die is bad design.
Oh, I’m not trying to “reach” anyone. I just want to make sure my opinion is heard, and not simply dismissed.
At the highest levels of PvE, sure. But how many people does that actually affect? I’m in an AOTC guild where 2/3 of the players will never set foot into M+, so heroic raiding doesn’t require this. For solo/world players, delves can get them geared up to heroic raiding level, much better gear than they have ever been able to get without grouping.
But more importantly, the context of what I was replying to was with how M+ has changed the game. No group of player that wants to consume the game the way they could before M+ was added has any reason to run M+ if they don’t want that. Normal, heroic, and M0 dungeons are available to them. LFR, normal, and heroic raids all don’t require M+. PvP gear gets such a high item level bump that M+ isn’t required for gear to PvP.
But where do they get runed crests?
Again, Runed crests. If they ever fall behind (IE: miss 1 boss in a week), the raiding crest catchup system is “Go grind M+”.