Beat me to it.
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Never said it wasnât a long slog but it is able to be done and a system in the game. Proving the point that it can.
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M+ is undoubtedly the worst game mode ever invented in the history of the MMORPG genre and should be removed from WoW entirely. PvP can take its place on the vault. M+ is a mini-game with nothing to do with the Lore and is responsible for turning group content into the worst experience World of Warcraft has to offer. Take it out of retail and make it a mobile game. M+ is not fun, Dungeons are not fun. Raids are not fun when tanks overpull trash like they are on a clock causing unnecessary wipes, frustration, and wasted time. The poison spread throughout all group content due to the timer, IO scoring, and the competitiveness M+ brings is immeasurable. Cut the cord and move away from this incurable sweaty, smelly, and divisive disease.
If any player doesnât like the risk/reward ratio of something they can choose to invest time practicing and learning to reduce the risk by playing better. They can choose to play at a lower difficulty to reduce the risk. They can choose not to engage at all and eliminate the risk. These are all viable solutions that address the actual problem and are entirely within the agency of the player.
Complaining about it will not solve the problem they are experiencing, and neither will coddling them and telling them whatever you think people should be saying instead of the truth. The people who arenât âunderstanding of the human condition,â whatever that is supposed to mean, are the ones providing actual, fact based solutions to the problem. People donât like facts sometimes, but they are what they are.
If people want to feel accomplished and rewarded there are a million different ways to do that in the game, of varying levels of difficulty. People shouldnât expect to receive every reward, and they certainly shouldnât expect it if theyâre not willing to invest whatever is required to reach the accomplishment, especially with so many different options available.
Sure, but what youâre missing is that every one of these posts is telling me how Iâm supposed to engage, and thatâs what causes the pushback. Every thread that says M+ is too hard, or not fun, or whatever phrase people decide makes their argument look better is also saying that people who enjoy it the way it is currently is wrong.
This is another poor paraphrase again. Telling someone to drive in whichever lane they find most enjoyable is not the same as saying get back in your lane. All the lanes are open and the OP is free to decide which one is the best fit for them. If +10 isnât fun then donât do it. Just because itâs the highest reward doesnât mean itâs required.
No. I found tanking at the beginning of this season much more challenging than I did in any previous season. I had two choices, give up on my usual season goals, or learn to play better to meet them. I chose to study and practice and learn to get better, and ended up easily hitting my benchmarks and becoming a better player than I had been. Another player might choose not to invest the time. But either way, the choice is in the hands of every player. The only one who can sacrifice your satisfaction is you.
I donât care about loot at all, other than as a tool to become strong enough for the next challenge. I just want to kill the next boss in line. If all the stats were just normalized at level cap and there were no gear drops, I wouldnât miss it at all, as long as I could keep progging bosses.
Part of the problem is too many people play for the loot and not for the thrill of winning. When you stop caring about loot youâre free to play whatever level of challenge excites you without fear of missing out on some reward.
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Iâve seen your take and I donât think throwing the baby out with the bathwater is the correct approach.
I realize you donât like it, but many of us do, and would simply prefer that it remain active. If changes are required, Iâm ok with that.
I found there to be many things wrong with what you said, but I donât resent you for saying them, or believing them to be true.
What I reject is the notion that the system works well, or that what you do is replicable by the average player.
The biggest myth pervading these forums is that players who exceed the average think that they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, instead of affording themselves access to skills that they werenât using.
I donât know how much guild leading, or raid leading youâve done. I donât know how many players circle your sphere of influence, or how many of them you have tried to help over the years.
I have done practically all of it, from MC until now and I can assure you that what you think is the average level of player, is probably 50-75% less skilled than you believe.
This game has upwards of 100 million unique accounts, and *maybe* 10 million active users. The amount of players who are willing to step up and extend themselves is probably similar to that ratio, something like 5-10%, and the rest will fall short and dabble until they run of steam, or will just quit.
This game is not in a position to demand much more of itâs players. Perhaps thatâs how they want it, but Iâm not convinced itâs a wise path forward.
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What people donât seem to understand is that you donât need to do the crest upgrade slog if you have skill and gameplay knowledge. They only need to resort to slogging through upgrades if they are hard stuck and unwilling to get better.
Players can progress from key level to key level with only using what they get as drops and vault or people who are hard stuck need to farm for create, upgrade gear, then proceed.
All of which is optional if they feel the need to progress higher.
This is my only real beef, itâs the goal post moving every couple of seasons.
Itâs too much to ask that Blizzard does something (like next season) in the way of introducing new rewards for more advanced players, so they make people âget betterâ and invest more time for the same rewards they were already getting by increasing how hard the content is, or how far you need to climb.
And sure, most of us here are doing the content high enough to get near max rewards, so itâs easy to get short sighted on the mass of players who canât/wonât being isolated. But is being in the minority with meaningless virtual rewards really worth the content we all like going down in popularity?
Or even if the content was fine population wise (and right now I do think itâs surviving well) and we have no threat of it being dead, why would anyone actively want less for others when it costs them nothing?
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Iâm legitimately baffled by what in that excerpt you would find to be wrong. Can you elaborate?
I donât understand the difference here. I am a much better player than I was a year ago, and a year ago I was a much better player than when I started. I didnât pay someone to pilot my account, I didnât pay boosters to get achievements. I invested my time and energy to improving and learning. Am I not responsible for my own return on that investment?
No guild leading, though I was a guild officer for a decade. Iâve done a lot of raid leading and assistant raid leading. Probably the most significant help was leading a once a week pug on an alt in ICC, where I took literally anyone who would join, no gear, no experience, no problem. I helped that group of mostly scrubs kill 11 bosses. Yes, it was self serving because I was on an alt I couldnât get into groups even though I knew I could do the fights, so I did it so I could gear up and eventually bring that alt to better raids. But I did learn that even bad players can succeed if they are willing to try to improve. I donât think I could get a group of randoms to persevere through the wipes like that anymore.
Okay, so why do these super unskilled players need to be handed the highest rewards. From my perspective itâs never about gatekeeping loot. I donât care about loot. Itâs about a general ambience of entitlement. Why does everyone expect the bar be lowered to meet their current capabilities instead of working to try to reach it where it is? Thatâs the attitude I push back against, because I find it utterly repugnant.
99% of the game is for players with little to no skill, with little to no challenge and little to no risk. Why are those players, who have the overwhelming majority of the game to play in, always coming for the tiny niche that is made for players who want to feel the thrill of a victory that wasnât guaranteed? From my perspective it looks like itâs the loot, and that is a terrible reason to nerf or remove my fun.
It doesnât demand anything. People can collect transmogs, battle pets, RP, follow story quests, explore, collect mounts, see any of the instanced content at a difficulty where failure is nearly impossible. Most of the game couldnât get much easier. Players may demand higher achievement from themselves, but if that achievement is expressed in item level, then theyâre missing the point and need to prepare to rise to the challenge.
I want more for others, not less. I want them to experience the satisfaction of a hard fought victory, success that comes with a real risk of failure, and especially if it was preceded by a lot of failure.
Reducing the challenge reduces the fun, so lowering the bar does come at a price. A win with no risk of losing doesnât feel like a win at all.
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You had that in you all along, you just hadnât accessed it.
You possess a rare(?) combination of skills that mesh well with this game. Physical and mental dexterity that allows you to both maneuver your character in virtual space AND manage all of the mental inputs.
By internet metrics, you represent the portion of society that misidentifies their position on the dunning-kruger graph with regard to WoW skill.
You are so much better than you realize, and relative to the actual average player you are a demi-god.
You have 42935 achievement points. Under no sun do you reflect the average player, or anything that they are willing to do in order to play this game.
The players weâre talking about, the overwhelming majority of wow subscribers, possess some limited combination of both, but typical donât master either. But the way this game promotes itself, the way it incentivizes interaction through the carrots it dangles sets those players up for disappointment.
What you want and what is realistic are too far apart, and thatâs the reality you have to face.
I want that too, and I donât want cheap rewards, or faceroll content, and I think there are ways to preserve that, but with compromise. Right now, the players who are compromising are the ones getting priced out of content by ever-increasing difficulty. Players being fed gear that goes to 626 and feeling forced to sit at 619 because they canât get into runs.
It may well be their fault, technically, but all of the barriers they face are arbitrary and negotiable in reality. I am not clever enough to express it better so I will use an analogy and I trust you understand that I donât mean it literally.
The loot system is the reason that telling players to stay in their comfort zones and accept their fate doesnât work.
Analogy Alert. If this was a skate park, beginners or âcasualsâ would avoid the dangerous parts through instinct or experience. Most would gradually work their way up, or give up. The only rewards would be innate; self-satisfaction, the approval of others, etc. If you offered people money for riding certain ramps or rails, youâd have unqualified idiots breaking their necks every day trying to make a buck.
The loot system in WoW incentivizes poorly, delivers poorly and generally causes headaches for a lot of players. The instinct and experience clearly arenât enough to prevent players from âbreaking their necksâ when they should be on the baby jumps and that, I believe, is where most of our problems come from.
The game doesnât command enough respect from the average player for them to believe in a system that doesnât reward them to their satisfaction. It doesnât matter what elitists mindset you invoke to justify your position.
My opinion is that nothing about the loot in this game is so precious that it should be made so rare or inaccessible. I donât believe looting should be easier, or quicker, or that prestige should be removed entirely, but I do believe that more players should have access to higher rewards through better mechanisms. I think prestige should be awarded through titles, transmogs, mounts and the like.
Having a myth track helm isnât prestigious and no amount of self gaslighting should be enough to fool yourself into believing youâre special for it.
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precisely how much better they are at the game than the average player.
Like mind-blowingly better. Like, in the biblical sense of the word, awesome.
What you have accomplished may feel entirely mid by your own standards, but the potential that you have tapped into, the depths of skill you have plumbed leaves them incapable of understanding.
I mean this with every ounce of sincerity and respect possible, you are so good at this game by relative standards that I donât believe itâs possible for you to appreciate their position, and just the staggering improbability that they could achieve the task you casually suggest as a remedy.
The amount of things you have done to improve probably totals in the tens of thousands.
What kind of keyboard do you use?
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Isnât that what all learning is?
Outside of people that have physical limitations that would prevent these things, nearly everyone has the capacity to do this. How much effort they need to expend to do it at whatever level is variable according to peopleâs aptitudes, but nothing Iâm doing is outside the boundaries of most peopleâs capacity, if they have the time and energy to invest in learning it.
I think this may be one of the most cynical things Iâve seen on the forums. I am not inherently better at the game than many people. Iâve worked at it more than many, and still fall well short of better players.
It seems like the biggest gulf between our perspectives is I think people arenât working hard enough to reach their potential, and you donât think they have any potential. Thatâs pretty rough.
Yes, a lot of people donât obsess over collecting things, but achievement points arenât a mark of skill. Anyone who wants them could go out and hug all the squirrels, battle all the pets, and collect dungeon and raid achievements once theyâre soloable.
Nope. Iâm a professional educator, and Iâve spent 25 years watching students achieve more than they, or others around them, believed they could handle, just from accepting that hard doesnât mean impossible.
Iâm not willing to accept that people are incapable of improving themselves if they work hard at it. Iâm definitely not willing to accept it from the people who show no sign of effort and are in a constant state of demanding the bar be lowered. FFS at least try to hit it before deciding itâs too high.
I agree with you. Trying to access a reward before youâve invested the effort required to qualify for it is bad. People should stop doing that all the time everywhere.
This doesnât remove the core problem, which is that people want what other people have, but they donât want to expend the effort to earn it if they find the process too difficult, time consuming, or tedious.
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Not even remotely close. Youâre roughly in the upper 3% of something like 10% of the population.
You are so far removed from the average player of this game itâs almost literally unfair.
This is a game. What you are willing to do for it, whatever justifications you make for expending that effort has nothing to do with what others are willing to do for it.
Iâm telling you right here and now, your real life character sheet has a list of attributes that falls into the Goldie-locks zone of this game.
The number of factors that contribute to your circumstances, from your education, your employment, your home life, your income tax bracket, your favorite author, and a million million other random interactions have culminated in something especially unique with regard to WoW.
A lot of people who play this game are missing one or many of those âassets.â Unless the game can effectively accommodate those shortcomings, chances are those players will not stick. And thatâs ok, you canât make the game for everyone. But when you have players in your game, begging to enjoy it, then I believe itâs important to identify their needs and find a way to support them.
I think Blizzard is doing that with the delve reward changes and I think more will come. I think thatâs worlds better than trying to demand that they âgit gudâ or stay in their lane.
Again, I donât want accomplishments tainted, or achievements made meaningless. I want difficulty where itâs appropriate so that the best players have room to express themselves.
What I donât believe in is a loot system that pits itself against the players or against each other just for the sake of calling itself a reward. âItâs just a gameâ has never rang truer than with regard to gear. Most players, literally represented by the tiny ratio of players who engage in the most difficult content, couldnât care less about gear and the ones most obsessed with it, and who gets it, are in some weird space where just the prospect of players having the same gear as them, causes them to feel offended.
I do generally think that the format is too punishing for lack of rewards. What the rewards should be I might have a different idea for another day of the week. Rather I think that the cost of engaging in m+ is very big. Itâs very time consuming and gold draining. Then you have no control over what drops in the vault and it does matter cause having your bis trinket vs not having it is significant like court tank trinket, spymasters, changeling, etc.
I heard we are getting a currency to purchase the items after a while of declining vault so I like that. I think also an item to add tertiary stats to items would be nice. Currently we can only had like 3% avoidance or leech or speed to wrist+cloak with enchantments. Just today i had to to replace a heroic piece with avoidance with a myth piece for ilvl. In doing so i lost like 2% avoidance and Iâve wondered if the 300 int was worth 2% damage reduction considering this season is extremely unfair with aoe damage and most of its magic damage so i donât think the the armor gain made up for it? Sim said 0.71% hps increase, even less dps increaseâŚuh ok. But 1-2% damage reduction loss, nice.
If weâre talking strictly about gear, then tedious and time consuming are most accurate. I already talked about rng above so Iâll skip that.
For many seasons weâve asked for blizz to make the titles spec specific rewards and only for your main spec of your main toon. Seasons like this or df s2 are examples of why, if youâre not a meta pick even trying to get into higher keys this late in the season is a sisyphusian task, time consuming, expensive, etc. Prot pals are tanking something around 93% of keys and disc and lesser extent rsham are the majority of healers. I even have seen +12 and 13 keys asking for disc priest exclusively even tho itâs not required for most dungeons until +16. Applied to keys at like 2 am to 5 am where people would rather sit in lfg for an hour or longer to wait for a meta healer than take an off meta one.
A lot of class forums here have people saying theyâre just gonna give up and go prot paladin and I know lots of people who did. People who went from guardian druid to boomkin, rets to prot or vice versa, warriors to protpal, etc. If you post a key like 40 ret paladins will apply in 2 seconds.
People might be willing to expend the effort but the way titles are awarded currently youâd either need to be among the absolute very best of your spec or reroll to a meta spec and hope thereâs enough time left in the season to get into range for the title. But like go look at the holy priest rankings. I think itâs like 2 are in range for title? Disc priest 150 with hundreds behind them close to rioâs rating cutoff. MW, 12 in the US running. Holy paladin 2 in the US. Pres, 2. Resto druid 1.
The season is hostile to pugs in general and tuned so unreasonably that it created this situation aaaaand blizzard did nothing about it for like 80% of the season. And what they did wasnât enough imo. Every day I am thinking more and more about just not playing until next season. I wanted to finish at 3.2k but this is so time consuming just to get a key started to even play the game. 2 hours in lfg on average.
This is all to say I think there are people that absolutely want to do that but the situation blizzard created and allowed to fester, and the communityâs maladaption to it, has created a situation not just where the game isnât fun but you canât even play the game. Unless you consider nonstop homework keys your idea of fun for some reason. Because they also donât give any rewards, theyâre also time consuming, and just playing the homework and reroll minigame can consume your entire day or days. Hours of this gameplay loop just for a chance to run a key you need or want to doâitâs not fun, nobody thinks itâs fun. Or hours in lfg to get into a high key you need and you get better at it everytime but for some people itâs prog and when it depletes the key holder has to do the homework mini game and you sat in lfg for like no reason.
Think about a key like NW where you could be doing very, very good at it but someone misses or overlaps a kick and itâs a wipe and all that effort and time was wasted. Add on top of that the toxic way people are at times. Idk what the rewards need to be exactly just that this needs to be less punishing. My key wonât deplete below 12 next season? The problem with having a 12 key most of the time is that only lower xp players want to do them and therefore more likely to deplete them. And who wants to do gb 12 to get a 14/15 with only people that havenât even timed any 12? Yea idk. Nobody wants to run their own keys because of this.
I didnât pop out of the womb being able to play where Iâm at. I started from square one just like everyone else. So this argument that other players canât do it and that Iâm somehow special is honestly low quality.
Some 10-keyless corsair one. Also a G502 mouse with no extra buttons. I donât use any keybinds and I click almost all of my abilities.
How many complaints do you hear about the title cut-off, that donât relate to the class balance issues?
How many players actively complain about Gladiator mounts being beyond their reach?
Balance that against how many players complain about gear acquisition on a daily basis. The reasons seem pretty obvious to me, gear is a driving force in their capacity to defeat content.
The players who need the gear the least donât care who gets it. The players who need it most have the hardest time getting it and somewhere in between are a bunch of players thinking that gear makes them special, when it really doesnât.
Historically, loot was treated as a mark of achievement. If you saw someone in T2 shoulders in town you knew what they had done and you made your judgements and personal evaluations on that fact.
What got lost in that whole equation was the actual kind of effort involved, or the skill required to achieve that status. A whole load of human-shaped mythical baggage was attached to it. âOoh, they must be good at the game,â when in reality few people were properly good at it and most of the skill was following someone elseâs instructions for a few hours.
What disappoints me most is that they latched onto that teet so hard and havenât let off since. Every time the average player figures out the system they introduce new, harder methods for gating gear. Azerite gear was an especially egregious example, but things like gear tracks, crests and rare items are equally toxic in the overall.
As I said earlier, the system is totally upside down. The players who need the gear canât get it and the ones who can arenât even that satisfied. The calls for bad-luck protection arenât just from players who donât try. Youâve got âmythic raidersâ who want better systems, but if theyâre 4/8 they donât qualify as mythic raiders, will be shunned for not being better and told to find a new game.
Imagine telling players in the 90th-95% percentile of raiders that they are just bads who want free gear. Thatâs the level of elitism from which this game suffers.
I genuinely donât know how to argue against a perspective so limited and incapable of self-awareness.
Do you actually believe that any human is capable of anything?
A miniscule percentage of the miniscule percentage of humans that play this game will have both the skills and the mindset to excel at it.
If this game was designed to find the Last Starfighter, then Iâd say crank up the difficulty, letâs get our guy or gal in a suit and blast them off asap. But itâs not. Itâs a product, from a company in the business or providing entertainment to its customers. If its customers arenât happy with the way itâs working out it doesnât matter what someone in the top 5% of the gameâs population feels about the level of commitment that should be demanded of the players.
They arenât here to rise to your levels of âgreatness.â There are probably thousands of highly-accomplished, exemplary human beings who have mastered medicine, law, engineering and other proper achievements who could give two toots about your belief that they should step it up for some ephemeral virtual rewards. They just want to muck about and walk away feeling good about what they got from it.
I think you grossly misunderstand the relationship between the average player and this game. âIf you love me youâll do this for meâ isnât a hard decision for many players to walk away from. I donât think itâs a bluff this game should be calling.
Then donât? Yet you find yourself engaging and initiating with me every single chance you get.
Itâs called a bell curve and similarly not everyone is meant to reach the top of the progression ladder. Itâs not a bad argument tell people to play at key levels that are relative to their skill. Do all raiders go into Mythic raids? No. Double standards.
Itâs a terrible argument if you goal is to run a sustainable business. One that you make if you think the world behaves as youâd expect, rather than as it does.
You will understand that in time.
If everyone just did what they were supposed to everything would be perfect.
Does every raider go into Mythic raids? Do they reach the top of the progression ladder or expect to?
Nope. And nobody suggested that they should.
The actual question that Iâm debating, is whether they should be able to receive top ilvl gear, and my belief is that they should, because gear is not that special and shouldnât be treated as such.
If players are only entering content for the gear then the content doesnât really matter. They could just make a free-gear vendor and call it a day.
I think content should be content, and gear should be content agnostic. Content should aim to reward achievements and non-combat accessories befitting the contentâs difficulty an gear should be earned though participation via tokens or badges or whatever it takes to prevent players from feeling compelled to do content they donât like for gear they want.
I think coddling players who measure their worth around gear is central to the whole mess we have now and why we have so many players attempting to get into content they shouldnât. Because they donât find the rewards that satisfy them in content they can do, so they stray across the fence and upset the cows in the other field.
We coddle raiders who donât want to have to do this or that extra work to get gear, but when some casual says they donât want to do X or Y for gear they are talked-down to.
I love the concept of loot dropping from bosses as a facet of rp and lore, but honestly the pretense is so flimsy and contrived that I donât think it would make much difference at all if all gear was tokenized. Nobody cared if you got your BIS trinket from the boss, the vault of the dinar vendor. It just mattered that you got it.
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