Honestly the average skill level isn’t any better in Normal guild raids at this point than in LFR. The raid as a whole gets to retain learning from week to week, but LFR makes up for it with Heroic people who go in for the bonus bags.
I don’t know what the situation was when LFR and Normal were differentiated, but at this point the only real difference is that Normal is designed for gregarious extraverts who like to zerg things, and LFR is designed for introverted loners who prefer to queue into a group of strangers they never have to meet again.
Sorry, I didn’t realize you meant with war mode off. Faction assaults with war mode off are basically the same as emissaries. I guess there was a time when both they and emissaries awarded Heroic gear, which I agree was overkill. I think at the time Blizzard was desperate to prevent people from unsubscribing.
Sorry, was being incredibly silly with my language. I didnt mean that the game is catering to hardcore players more. Rather i meant that players are becoming more ‘hardcore’ (a more accurate term might be ‘intransigent’) in the specific content of the game they want to play.
I think back to vanilla through wrath and the whole game was a mix of world stuffs, pvp, dungeons and to a lesser extent in my case, raids. You’d just do this. It was the game. More importantly, you kinda did it because it was fun. A side issue perhaps, but It also wasnt really high stakes unless you opted into that aspect of the game. I think the formalising of certain systems (mythic plus for dungeons, rated bgs for pvp for example) have raised the spectre of ‘real’ content and huge gigantic waste of time content (normal bgs/heroic dungeons/lfr) which people are less interested in playing.
The low stakes game and the high stakes game have become much less nebulous than they once were. In the point above on dipping into all parts of the game, you’d have the hardcore and the casual playerbase crossing paths a little more in dungeons, lowbie raids,and pvp.
This might be revisionism or rosy spectacles of course.
One of the things you often find on forums are people discussing things like anxiety in grouping (watching hazel on allcraft). And i think this is in part a consequence of the formalising of this group content raising the stakes and pressure to perform. So instead of dealing with it, they just make their own goals, do their own stuff, dip in and out of the most boring content in the game and just enjoy it on a relatively solo level.
And i think this in turn fostered the ‘group’ player and the ‘solo’ player experience (which have themselves taken on a kind of identity). Hence the intransigence. I’m THIS TYPE OF PLAYER. I think its crystalizing with each passing expansion, and this is why i believe this is the last roll of the dice for the theme park design philosophy. Next expansion will probably get rid of meta-systems completely and just let players go where they like.
ETA: Oooh! and all of this goes back to my third point on revamping normal mode into wings and ten man content. I guess the desire to find ways for the hardcore player and casual player to cross paths again kind of underpin the reasons why i’d love to see that change. UBRS and Kara were not serious business. LFR has its niche. Heroic and mythic have theirs. Normal should be the bridge between the two worlds like how kara, ubrs and flex was in panda (well, that was my personal experience with flex in panda).
oh for sure. Gatekeeping will never go away. But i’d love to see blizzard look at ways to bring the whole playerbase into contact with one another and find inventive ways to bring people out of the solo game and back into the mmo experience without the pressures of the more formalised game systems. Revitalising normal might be a nice way to do it.
It’s literally the base of the raid. The way they develop the other difficulties is by dumbing down mythic and making them flexraid. So getting rid of mythic would save a negligible amount of development time. Honestly getting rid of LFR and normal would likely save more time. Which in essence would be what getting rid of mythic would really look like. They would just call it heroic.
I’m not sure that goal is doable in modern wow without creating more frictions. The only thing I can see would be to make 40 man content, because no guilds have a 40 man roster. But at the same time, it would just end up being warfront level of difficulty and boringness. And I don’t want developpers to make more boring content that takes too much time to developp.
I guess the only thing then would be to make it so wqs have to be done in groups. I guess worldbosses are kinda the only content everyone do.
I’m gonna genuinely say, thats sad. But optimistically… thats DEFEATIST!!! Lets helping with ideas and perspectives.
You see this crossover now and again in features like for example, the headless horseman. Other areas might be the massive 40 v 40 BGs (ashran is super underrated - okay, ive destroyed my credibility, but i enjoyed it) or wintergrasp. Mythic plus KIND OF SORT OF MAYBE POSSIBLY COULD PERHAPS solve this… Someone for example posted about the keys being intrinsic to you (SPOILER!!!) thus a person with a level 2 key for x dungeon needed to find other people with the level 2 key for that dungeon. And my little ears pricked up for the first time since wod. I have a thing. You need that thing. I guess we’re buddy-cops. There are ways. We just need to find them. And dont get me wrong. Expediency will have to take a hit. But i’d like to think the benefits (particularly for the hardcore community and the longevity of the game) are huge.
developers should be spending EQUAL energy and content for:
pve raiders
solo game play with lower item lv rewards BUT close to
raiding
pvp players
rp events
equal…period.
also key teams should be developed for modern game gear design, ie, lifelike textures, and realistic animations, high heels, massive character customizations for all races etc
a team for PLAYER housing, design, decorationg, functions…not garrison, real housing.
remove pathfinder, flying granted with max lv.
removal of gear type restrictions/weapon restrictions/holiday restrictions for all classes, anything pve/rp pvp in bg and areas is the exception.
We will never know how much time or energy they put on stuff. But clearly there’s more people doing pve than most other content, it doesn’t make sense to put as much energy in other content.
Wow always was more cartoonish, that’s their approach. Also we’re getting a lot of character customizations in Shadowlands.
Housing would be pretty much shop content if they do, it’s not worth else to developp. People don’t just spend tons of time in player housing or stay subbed for it. It’s nice I agree, but that’s not wow strenght.
Housing: ESO. Its so obviously worth stealing. It literally rejuvenates professions outside of power progression. You have a constant source of revenue that lasts the entirety of the expansion (and all expansions thereafter). This is such a boon to a constantly neglected playstyle since… well, vanilla. Annoyingly, it also incentivizes players into content they might not bother with to gain that recipe (because its worth it).
Blizzard rp/lore is awful player made is much better
It’s an mmo. This means there are a massive number of players in place at once wow’s graphics style has endured precisely because it’s not realistic. It has always had a more cartoony style.
Should have just jacked the wildstar team for that.
I don’t think it is, not in the way they do it. It was a huge mistake IMHO to go for a full difficulty levels instead of what they had in Ulduar. It’s not interesting or exciting. There should be one difficulty that’s based around the majority of player’s skill where early bosses are easier than later bosses and some, not all, bosses have a way to add something extra to the fight that gives you some bonus if you beat it while active (bonus loot, extra stat or socket or whatever, etc). This 4 difficulties where it’s basically the same fight with more health/damage and let’s throw in an extra mechanic is lazy bullcrap.
LFR is its own beast and requires a separate discussion but I think mythic/heroic in general how WoW did it is terrible.
Problem is they want to try and appeal to everyone’s tastes but they can’t. They need to suck it up, pick a specific style and then do that and that might entail them telling a tiny group sorry we can’t cater to what you want anymore.
This may have been addressed already (haven’t read the entire thread yet), but they do not start with mythic. They have stated this before in a blue post that I no longer have bookmarked. They start with heroic and then add the small changes for mythic, and remove/water down the fight for normal/LFR. They do not start with mythic.
The biggest raid development timesinks are asset development and heroic raids encounters. The other raiding difficulties take up a drastically lower % of developer time because they build from a heroic baseline.
Making interesting hard-mode toggles for every single boss for decades sounds like a design nightmare. There’s a reason they tried it once and then abandoned it.
Lets helping with ideas and perspectives.