I could definitely use a new ranting system. BECAUSE MY CURRENT ONE SUCKS,
see what I mean?
2 Likes
“Punishing” people that leave is a double-edged sword. You’d be forcing players into staying in any number of bad situations ranging from hopeless keys to toxic, non-tank players pulling extra mobs or griefing the group.
This system forces players to “buy in”, and therefore create an intellectual “contract” with the other participants that this is the maximum you will lose, but also there IS SOMETHING to lose if you choose to abandon the key.
As far as m+ being about timing: so many people (many of which are right here making the same argument) are convinced that’s the whole point of the content. At the same time, as many–if not more–players are now complaining about the impact that has had on people’s inability to slow down in game and not rush through things.
Blizzard CHOSE to make mythic+ about time. It didn’t have to be, and honestly in my opinion it SHOULDN’T be. Affixes provide so much more engaging content possibility than “how fast can you do this?!”.
The left of bell curves need to get over being left of bell curves and instead figure out where their deficit lies and work on improving.
Mythic+ is a speed run timed mode. Plain and simple. You got raids for dumbed down easymode encounters with a hefty budget to be a carry.
Even back in Vanilla we went fast. Just because we were mechanically required to go slower than we do today doesn’t change the fact that it was always expected to go as fast as we could. In fact, in Vanilla, you could get trash respawns if you took too long meaning if you wiped on the last boss, there is a really good chance the run was over because nobody was willing to kill all the trash again.
Players weren’t any nicer back then either. Don’t mistake our shared/collective lack of knowledge/experience and the need to struggle and learn together as niceness. It very quickly became “required” to know stuff or, at the bare minimum, take order and direction.
The timer is ignorable in mythic+ if you want it to be. The affixes are MEANT to be negative and a pain/hassle to deal with. Players already can control the level of difficulty by keeping to an expected key level/range with fellow like-minded players.
Pugs aren’t meant to be your friends or babysitters. You’re literally little more than a glorified NPC who exists to serve a purpose. You’re punching too far above your skill class if all you ever have are negative experiences.
Mythic+ isn’t perfect. Affixes aren’t balanced to be the same relative difficulty as each other. There are definitely significantly harder weeks than others. Certain classes/specs definitely bring more to the table and/or do so far more easily and just plain better than others. Your fault though if you got the option to be a superior spec/role and just choose not to out of stubbornness.
I’m nearly 40 years old and not 6ft tall. I don’t whine and moan that I can’t play basketball with the NBA pros. I’ll never be anywhere near their level. Doesn’t mean I can’t go toss the ball around with friends if any of us actually had such a desire.
The “cap” for mythic+ is already pretty low/generous. +12/13 keys already award really good gear, the most needed crests, and have 1 affix (other than the mandatory fort/tyr). 16’s for aspect crests and 18 for mythic track vault items. Find like-minded people and you can go as slow and tedious as you want.
Stop trying to make mythic+ as free as heroic and lower raids are though.
A lot of people’s problems would be solved if they just stuck to their own kind.
3 Likes
You’re not wrong, but I think you overlooked the bigger argument you’re making that’s actually a net positive for both players and blizzard. Just like they currently do with class tuning, blizz pays attention to what classes/specs are being played, how often, and how those are performing from player to player.
They would be able to do the same thing with affix choice in dungeons. If no one wants to play spiteful because it’s cancer, it would force them to look at spiteful and either rework the affix, get rid of it completely, or increase the reward for including it in your keystone.
Again, the system is meant to create positive feedback loops for everyone involved.
Except these devs have proven time and again over 18 years that it’s easier to break something, than to make something better. They would nerf popular affixes long before they took a hard look at why sanguine or spiteful are deemed “cancer” by players.
1 Like
Hmm… Except I very much remember getting through strat, bfd, ubrs, etc, as fast as possible.
Going quickly is not a new thing at all in any sense. Gamers have always understood that beating a challenge fast usually means you and your group really know your stuff. Back then the incentive was simply the faster you finish this run the faster you can do it again for a drop you didn’t get.
Overall I see what you’re getting at, but it’s unnecessarily complex. Almost all of the issues you’re raising can be solved by participating in communities. If there really are so many people in this camp, why have they not united and formed a community where mplus doesn’t feel like such a chore?
I dunno, I only do sub 20 keys so maybe the pug life is different at that range.
Edit: I do think picking affixes is pretty cool idea. I don’t think we should be able to pick all of them though without it affecting difficulty. Some affixes are pretty clearly harder than others, so there’d need to be some system to determine rewards based on affixes chosen.
A group that can manage fort, bolstering, and necrotic will have a much harder time than one doing tyr, volcanic, and sanguine.
For me, being forced to farm low-level content for crests is by far the worst thing about the current gear system.
It has made me not want to make alts because I don’t want to farm the low crests again.
If they are going to keep this system, I hope at least crest unlocking for each slot becomes account-wide.
4 Likes
I only read the first half of the post
no.
I vastly prefer just getting a keystone not having to freaking farm for one. tha’ts insane.
3 Likes
So you want to get everything up to 483-489 (using current values for simplicity) on your main, then all your alts would be able to upgrade their gear to that level using only flightstones?
Yea, that’s not going to be a thing. They want us to actually use their content, not skip it on 90% of our characters.
Same filling, different crust.
-
Picking your keys. Some way to target a key is good. Being able to freely and infinitely target the easiest dungeon because you can’t be bothered is bad. I think an m+ currency you can use to reroll/target a key would be a good middle ground.
-
The timer is an aggregate measure of success — dps, route, survival, etc. In a world without timers, we’d need enrage mechanics, penalties for overclear, and hard survival checks. I prefer the timer.
-
Most of the friction in m+ is people. Everybody can have a bad day, make a mistake, press the wrong button, etc., but jerks are gonna be jerks no matter the medium. When you join a group, there’s a conversation you need to be having. “Whats our minimum goal”, i.e. completion vs time and what’s our tolerance for fault, how slow is too slow. If we don’t want to have this conversation, the next best thing is to have all the rewards from timing. That way, everyone has the same goal and the same tolerance.
-
Affixes still need a bit of work. There are definitely weeks where it’s not worth it to push, and that feels bad.
You make a lot of great points, if given in a colorful and…salty way lol.
That being said, you realize you contradict yourself when you say
And then follow it up with
That’s like saying there’s ONE way to play this particular part of the game, that’s it. Oh, but you can ignore that one way, if you want. M+ is only a speed run because blizzard put a timer in them at the beginning and locked rewards behind whether you hit the timer or not. Players doing it since it was added just solidified the permanence of the timer; not because we wanted to, but because we had to. The only groups I know of completing keys over time either list it before the group starts, or are friends/guildies who acknowledge their short-comings.
As far as
and
I couldn’t agree more. The irony is that EVERY.PLAYER.EVER chooses people to fill their groups that are either over-geared or over-rated, while giving themselves leniency for a lower ilvl or rating. Every player wants to be carried and gets indignant when they don’t get invited to a group they can clearly do. If you say you don’t, you’re a liar. Full stop.
Right, but imagine if every court you went to had nothing but collegiate all-stars or NBA players, any of which were only looking for others like themselves to play with. What’s that? You like basketball? Well, too bad. You want to pay to get into a group? Good luck playing to that level after that particular game if you’re “punching above your skill class” to begin with.
Yes, I want my alts to be able to upgrade their gear using only flight stones.
However, the alts still won’t be able to simply upgrade gear to 483-489 as you mentioned. Remember the gear upgrades would still be locked within certain tracks (veteran, champion, etc).
So, if I wanted the alt to upgrade to 483-489, they would have to earn that gear first by completing the necessary high level content, which I have no issue with. I just want don’t want to be forced to farm low level content again when I already “proved” my alt can earn the high track gear.
The only changes I could possibly see truly benefitting M+ is letting people choose the dungeon their key is, and having the weekly chest be based off of whatever dungeons you did. Let’s face it, most people farm a specific dungeon over and over because they want a specific item (Rise for the trinkets this season, for example), but doing this can be difficult or time-consuming for anyone other than tanks/healers since you’re not guaranteed to get into any groups you apply for. That can be perceived as an issue that needs fixing and the solution is rather simple without changing the system for the most part. People never getting their BIS trinkets or other slots because of the weekly chest’s loot pool being comically large is another thing many people despise, so having it go off of the dungeons you actually did would be a solution that isn’t intrusive to the current system in the slightest.
Outside of that I can’t really see any issues that need fixing. Leavers and rating aren’t really a problem as those things are just inherent to a competitive system, which M+ inherently is, so those don’t need to be fixed.
1 Like
Absolutely! I agree some affixes are harder than others. They could definitely bracket them by complexity/difficulty and award higher gear/more rating/better rewards for the harder affixes.
Honestly, I participate in communities. I’m in guilds. And I have friends that I regular run keys with. The same issues crop up. You might not have issues with people sabotaging keys with a community. And you can definitely find the right group for your key-level. One of my guild does mythic-mondays where multiple groups run multiple keys simultaneously. There might a 10-15 group running at the same time as an 18 group, all while a 2-7 group is helping new players and alts.
I only do 18s, no higher. I stop where the player-power rewards stop; and at the level of least resistance. I’ll do 16s to pay out the 3 ilvls on the myth track piece I get from an 18 that easier than a 20 or what not.
except that in this case there are hundreds of people standing around complaining that nobody will invite them to a game, instead of just… talking to each other and starting up their own games.
1 Like
Honestly, yes. I agree 100%. My guildies and I have talked on a number of occasions about wishing blizz would, at the VERY LEAST, let you pick what armor slot you want to have all of your GV choices drop as. If you’re looking for a belt, you choose that. If you have 6 choices in the GV, you’re gonna get 6 belts. As to whether they allow it to be non-repeat choices is another story.
Too many people are going to come behind me saying all that and jab about how EASY GEARING IS!!! You want to make it easier?! WTF?!? OMG do you even want to play this game! Just have everything given to you you entitled sob…and I’m just like, uhh…no, but I would like to have my time respected.
When I play for 20 hours this week to unlock 6 choices in the vault doing M+ and raids, I’d like to at least see SOMETHING in the gear slot I actually need an upgrade in. It’s insulting enough to get 6 rings in a row, or pick something out of your GV only to have a replacement drop the very next dungeon you do. I shouldn’t be PENALIZED for making choices.
what? you want a mythic plus rating system that gives you rating for doing open world content?
if that’s what you want then we should have open world content giving people arena rating… want the gladiator mount? just do ten world quests a week and it’s yours!
Yep, you got us. We’re just a big salty group of ungrateful whiners sitting around wondering why daddy blizz doesn’t give me my silver spoon back.
Dude, I have every class at 70. I have half of those above 460. I have 4 at 2500 rating. Every week I do at least 4 dungeons on as many toons as I can for 2 choices in the GV. Nobody is sitting around wanting someone to play the game for them.
Plenty of people are just like me, experiencing weird, clunky aspects of a great part of the game. Does it work? Sure. Could it be improved? ABSOLUTELY! Would giving players the choice of what dungeon, keystone level, and affixes they want to do add to their perception of individual agency? It sure would. You know what it wouldn’t do? Make the game easier. In fact, it would change next to nothing for a player like you who would continue doing things the same way they’ve always done them and found no problem.
For players that experience ANYTHING close to what I’ve described previously, it would resolve several MAJOR issues.
It’s not salty. At most, it’s just tiring to come here and over and over and over and over and over and over people gripe and whine about a mode they probably shouldn’t be in in the first place. I’m not the best and have next to no aspiration to even try and go beyond my coasting zone.
I also didn’t contradict myself. Completion groups are a thing even in my own group. We missed a +22 throne timer by literally 2 seconds last week but had we wiped, we still would’ve just finished it for a +1 if nothing else. Plenty of our runs, especially last week, were untimed completions for vault for our alts.
Get like minded people who just want the vault or the +1 to vault and the timer is indeed irrelevant. In fact it’s been my experience when solo pugging that unless the run is super duper bad, people are usually willing to finish even if clearly untimed.
And you can check, I don’t pug super duper high IO people if/when my group does need a pugger. I don’t like running with people who think they are MDI-capable people. In fact, I specifically look for people who are just under 2k or more likely 2500 now and/or whose best key on that toon is a 18/19 because I know they want the score/portal and are probably going to try even that teensy bit harder.
1 Like
Uh…if you have PvP on…you get honor for killing people in the open world. I’m just suggesting the same thing for dungeon content. That aspect of the system is to prevent people from getting pushed down to 0 rating after successive failed dungeons and then not being able to contribute a minimum to the next dungeon.
You can’t let players contribute nothing, otherwise you’re back to the issue of players being able to leave without consequence. Yes, there’s the consequence of their time wasted–for those players ACTUALLY trying. But, for bad actors who will leave because god forbid the group wipe once, they need to lose something for that choice.
If you read it closely, you’ll notice I not only said that rating would be capped, it would also be meant to provide you a floor so you don’t fall forever. It’s not meant to be an exploit for people to just get KSM/KSH by doing dailies. The system wouldn’t allow that. If the minimum rating to contribute to a key is 500 points, then you could only farm a maximum of 500 points from world content. Once you have anything over that, it deactivates and you can’t earn more unless/until you dip below 500.