This is the craziest take I’ve ever read. No. You can just go play pvp. Those of us that like m+ want it to be better. Things don’t have to be outright destroyed because they are imperfect.
I started healing in s2. The reason I’m a dwarf is just because of the bleeds. But staggered out damage feels a lot better than non-stop humongous burst damage that we currently have. Like it always feels much better healing mist and nw bosses (well the 2nd NW one not as much cause you’re panicking about all the stuff that needs kicked but everything else is good) because you just get to pump healing indefinitely while the dps get to do the dps check to end the fight. I love having 2m hps that’s epic. What i don’t like is the 2nd boss of dawn and 3rd boss of cot. Designed to be every healer, except hpal and pres evoker’s, worst nightmare. Heck even for the specs that have an advantage there if the dps goof you might have to spend cool downs early just so the next slam doesn’t obliterate them, rather than to prep for the pulse, so then that advantage just goes away. Even though I still hate neltharus I would take it over City of Threads every day of the season.
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it’s not even a take. it’s just a thing he pastes in every thread about m+. i’ve been reporting them as spam because he’s clearly just trying to bait people.
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I’m not necessarily replying to this exact post but just to hear your thoughts in general
Is the TLDR that you believe the max rewards should be easier to obtain for all in order to keep the game subs healthy, and there will always be difficult content for vanity/competitive purposes anyway because of its infinitely scaling systems?
Bare with me, you may have covered this somewhere but your responses are very long and I’m more of a cliff notes guy myself (ya know the dumb 50%) so I apologize if you did say something about this already.
I’m happy to restate it, I appreciate your interest. I do think myth track gear should be more easily acquired by all players by lowering the loot thresholds, not the difficulty.
I think it’s an absurd premise to be concerned with what other players are wearing, so long as you yourself are feeling rewarded, and anyone who takes the time to compare themselves to others for anything other than perhaps PvP strategy, has completely lost the plot or missed the point in the first place.
This game has never been a competition to see who get the highest ilvl and nothing about it is designed to support that behavior. Certainly players put a lot of time and effort into that goal, but everyone has access to the same max ilvl so nobody can really win, and there’s nothing to win anyway (except perhaps invites to M+, but ilvl alone will not get you there.)
Treating randomly acquired gear as some sort of precious commodity reserved for special boys and girls is understandable, but I don’t think it’s nearly the incentive nor reward that people treat is as.
Furthermore, nothing about having access to myth track gear guarantees you will receive the pieces you need, nor even that you will have a higher ilvl than someone who does a single +10 key each week. Chances are higher, but for all the covetous, greedy, self-centered interest, most players are espousing a system that’s not even good for them, and want it worse for other players.
If we list out the arguments for and against, they aren’t nearly as compelling as players would believe. There is a pervasive argument that if you give players all the gear, they will quit. If you give it to them quickly they will quit quickly. But equal, or greater in number are players who want to keep playing, to access gear, but quit because the options they see before them are untenable. Whether that’s their fault, or the games, is hardly relevant. There are no magic words to make them get good, so they just get disillusioned and leave.
I base my experiences on a time when loot was much easier to acquire, or at least could be earned by lesser skilled players by participating in raids with guilds capable of clearing the content. I think gear tracks are ugly, designed to be nothing but time sinks to ensure that players are compelled to do all difficulties of content. Generally speaking the whole system is designed to be stingy and unrewarding and a players are blind enough to believe it’s as good as it gets.
It’s my belief that as Blizzard has cranked up the difficulty, and segregated the groups more and more that the real losers in this equation are all the friends and family that use to be successful enough at this game to log off satisfied, without being a burden on the system.
I think Blizzard has priced them out of the game and the fallout has been them leaving, or distancing themselves from end-game altogether.
I don’t think increasing the difficulty to the levels they have has been healthy for the overall pillars of M+ and raiding and I’m not the only one. The complaints are coming from top players too. Blizzard double-down on making this season pug-unfriendly and I don’t think the fallout has been worth the price we’ve paid.
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Yes, we’re all special unique individuals, but in many ways we’re all functionally the same. All of these variables that go into our special uniqueness don’t necessarily have any significant effect on our capacities to choose to do something or not. While most people can’t choose to play basketball well enough to make it in the NBA, nearly everyone can choose to play basketball. The limit to how well they play, within reasonable bounds, is dependent on how much it matters to them to play well.
Oh am I clearly a younger person? A younger person with 25 years of experience in my profession, as I mentioned earlier. It doesn’t take naivete or a belief in magic to recognize that people almost always have more potential than they have realized.
People who don’t care enough about meeting challenges should obviously also not care enough about the rewards from meeting those challenges. The entire attitude I have a problem with is the idea that the rewards are important enough to someone to raise an issue over, but the requirement to receive them is somehow not important enough to expend any effort towards.
I’m not projecting anything. I’m stating as simple matter of fact that every individual, in every facet of life, has to constantly make judgements about what is important to them, what is possible for them, and what they’re willing to do. The fact that it is a video game doesn’t change this calculus at all, in either direction. Nobody is able to simply bypass requirements they don’t like to get rewards they haven’t earned anywhere in life, and there’s no reason to expect that kind of bypass in a video game.
And those people will benefit far more from learning to fix those issues than being handed mythic loot for logging in. And again, if they don’t care enough about the game to expend any effort, they shouldn’t care at all about what they receive for rewards.
This is misleading. Assuming a normal bell curve, 68% of the population is within one standard deviation of the mean. Yes, those at the bottom of that group are approaching a wide gap from those at the top, but essentially, two thirds of the population is all within a similar range of intellect and ability. Obviously the 16% above are quite capable, so that only leaves the 16% below who might realistically be fitting into the group that you’re identifying as incapable. Anyone in the upper 84% who doesn’t perform well in WoW is making a choice. Whether that choice is based on disinterest in the game, real life issues, family or friend obligations, is their business, but they all have the capacity if they were to direct their energy in that direction.
Not really. WoW requires internet access, a subscription fee, and time. Anyone who doesn’t have all 3 is excluded automatically from the population. While certainly not uniform, people on the bottom end of our bell curve are more likely than people on the higher end to have difficulty meeting all 3 of those requirements. Because of this, WoW probably doesn’t have a fully representational population, meaning it’s more likely that the percentage of people in the game truly incapable is even lower than that 16%.
Let me clarify my statement. I’m not sure why your concern for the sustainability of WoW as a business doesn’t include an understanding that the decision makers have a much more vested interest in that sustainability than you do, alongside much more data than you have to help them ensure it.
Only the hardest content has gotten harder. World content has never been easier. Normal and Heroic dungeons have nothing in common with the older iterations of those difficulties. Normal and Heroic raids were both nerfed downward going into WoD. In many ways, this perpetual nerfing is partially responsible for the huge chasm that’s developed between the most challenging content and everything else.
Do you recognize that this exact statement applies equally to the people demanding mythic track gear without doing the content that drops it?
Oh look a Gen Z who wants to have all the best stuff without doing the work!
It’s clearly a skill issue, keep practicing… you might get there.
We’ve got McDonald Trump and Elon Goebells in the White House. We’ve got corporations, run by human beings, ripping their own selves off at the behest of their masters because they are too ignorant to see the error of their own complicity.
We are like two steps removed from actual Idiocracy and you think the average WoW player is going to start downloading weakauras and making focus kick macros because Blizzard gave them 6 steps on hero track gear and only made it possible to get 4/6 doing the content from which it drops.
They’re going to download Shadow: Raid Legends instead and accidentally spend a bunch of cash on loot boxes and end up with nothing to show for it.
I salute your optimism. I don’t think we’re doomed, but I do think we’re entering a serious period of collective stupidity that will make us ask what the hell we were all thinking.
I genuinely appreciate your perspective, but I think your reasoning is totally misguided.
This game used to be the 1950s and 1960s where your grandparents could buy a house with three months wages and get tier, or not get tier and still clear content. You didn’t need a credit score, a wow gold-making job and references to find a good guild to complete the raids.
Now it’s like a mirror of society. Ridiculously expenses, odiously difficult in places, requires way more commitment and is full of idiots who think that someone getting the same stuff as them is some sort of threat to their superiority.
Ya, except one argument is simply, “this is just a game, don’t be a stingy bastard with virtual rewards for an extra-curricular diversion,” and the other is “people should really be committed to video games because that’s what I think.”
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Top end gear has never been accessible to the average player, why start now?
Far more reasonable would be to tell people to find another game to play instead of changing something that has been working for two decades.
Gear can be special, Blizzard just has to make it so. There’s also nothing wrong if Blizzard chooses to do so.
For games I casually play, I’m certainly not complaining about things being too hard or how developers have to lower things to my level.
Whatever, it’s not my paycheck they’re gambling. Go wild.
To change WOW to something that it never has been, for people that “may” come. Lol.
Sounds foolish.
It’s not even about catering to new players either, but needlessly pissing off existing players.
They are here, asking for it and you’re trying to pretend they don’t exist. Seems rational.
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And they are paying for a game, they allegedly hate. Why pay for said game?
Like it seems silly.
Any ilvl reward complaints will simply result in people complaining about the game at a higher ilvl. If you can prove how this is not the case, then it’s worth entertaining.
The fanciful idea of just spit out more content, is just a fantasy. Development takes time.
Now who’s the optimist? Two steps away is pretty generous where we are right now…
No. I think the average WoW player is capable of it if they choose. If they choose not to, that’s fine. They just need to accept that they’re also choosing not to get the highest rewards.
That’s honestly fine with me. The game is better without a bunch of people who don’t want to actually play it anyway.
What nonsense is this? How many people meaningfully raided Black Temple, let alone Sunwell? How many people meaningfully raided Heroic 25 ICC? The reason we have item level displayed in the base ui is because of the Gear Score addon that basically everyone used to determine who to invite to raids during Wrath.
Not even a little bit. It’s easier to get into normal raids than it ever was before there were different difficulties. Running dungeons used to involve spamming trade to put groups together, then you had to travel to the instance, and there was a chance that your pug would crash and burn. Now you can click a button and be ported to a dungeon that is almost impossible to fail.
The game overall is easier than it’s ever been, as long as you don’t waste your time looking up at someone’s ilvl who is doing the challenging versions of the content and going insane with jealousy.
No, you’re changing the argument here. Stick with your original statement of stop looking at other players’ ilvl.
Nobody said they hated the game, they said they’re not satisfied. Funny how you jump to the most damning conclusion.
I have proposed that reward thresholds be lowered and that reward structures are augmented with non-power rewards like unique tmogs and mounts, achievements and titles.
Difficulty and prestige should still exist but should not be a barrier to players simply feeling like the game rewarded them to their satisfaction.
The entire foundation of your argument is that you know exactly what it takes to please people and that Blizzard has nailed that. Blizzard nailing anything is a stretch, and they have very clearly not aced this one yet.
In case you haven’t noticed, there are many significant changes to the loots systems that were outlined in the latest PTR notes.
I have to assume that whether they like the idea or not, they recognize the need to appease an unhappy audience. Maybe through gritted teeth, but they are biting the bullet and making some serious updates.
Perhaps you should lobby against it because Blizzard is bending some unwritten universal law about how video game loot should never be awarded to PlAyErS wHo DoN’t DeSeRvE iT, hurr durr.
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We have threads complaining about Plunderstorm even existing because people hate PVP.
People will complain about anything if it bars them from something they want, and they don’t want to go through the effort to obtain it.
The entire foundation of your argument is that you know exactly what it takes to please people and that Blizzard has nailed that. Blizzard nailing anything is a stretch, and they have very clearly not aced this one yet.
No, I just think if Blizzard makes ilvl easier to get, people will be bored at a higher ilvl because they run out of content that matters to them.
I have to assume that whether they like the idea or not, they recognize the need to appease an unhappy audience.
Top end still exists.
Mythic raid loot is still different, and usually has one or two needlessly op items so people want to go there.
The size of your misunderstanding makes me sad.
Players don’t need to look at each other to know what the ilvl cap is on their gear. They aren’t saying, “I want what Jonny has,” they’re saying, “I want what WoW has.”
It’s like you don’t even know people at all.
This isn’t just a case of them coveting others, it’s a case of them wanting the cool shizz. Just like they would in any single player game.
So you’re saying the mistake was the 5th and 6th upgrade on Heroic gear? If it capped at 4/4 619 all of this would be avoided?
Brewa argues that. I can see the angle.
I suppose, but at the same time it should be pretty easy to just understand that your gear caps at 619 unless you decide to do gilded crest content.
I hate it when people see bonus opportunities as punishments when they’re choosing themselves not to pursue the bonus.