On devs abdicating responsibility for the PUG game

Community General Discussion
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I’ve done… a lot of threads all kind of in the same orbit of ideas, largely because it seems that not everyone that shows up to this admittedly minority-of-a-minority space seems to realize what’s happening on a certain axis, and I legit want to get discussions rolling that kind of, I don’t know… warn people.

I kind of tripped over a way to sum it all up and encapsulate the idea, so bear with me as I take another stab at this PSA:

It seems that it can be interpreted, IMO that the devs don’t feel responsible any more for the state of PUG WoW and, to be honest, I can’t blame them.

Exhibit A: The DF S4 level cap dungeoning paradigm. Normal dungeons and their loot are essentially handed to every player via followers if one desires going after it that way (yes, people are doing that, and more will do it if we get “alts as followers”). Heroics, randoms being season locked in TWW, are “relevant and notable” in their leap in difficulty, but again, are (eventually) solo queueable. Mythic 0 is the “eternal megadungeon,” 5-person raid mode, and M+ skips the entire “low key” reality of DF S3 and earlier, which is now delegated to heroic dungeons with built-in random PUGability. Essentially, you got your “queueable keys,” and M+ starts at or at least escalates quickly to the “no really, have a team” level. But players only see “KEEEEYS” and “it should be PUGable.” Well, WoW disagrees, so you have heroics. You didn’t lose anything, you just might need to see heroic as your ceiling, which is honestly fine. There was a whole thread on this and I’ll end this point here.

Exhibit B: The 1-5 person pipeline. From follower dungeons at level 10, to delves populating the great vault, to “Story mode” of the final raid boss, there isn’t a reason to accept PUG abuse any more at any point before “the gear you need to take a crack at the BEST gear,” which most players don’t need, that being the BEST gear. It is ok to incentivize “maybe you should form a solid team” with literally the highest tier of numbers in the game. Again, there are threads on this, I just wanted to point this part out.

Exhibit C: Heightened interdependence at the endgame, or the return of an actual trinity. Tanks need healers, and to pull more reasonably. Healers need to heal, DPS need to shorten pressure moments. “This is MADNESS” you might say! “The PUG game will be devoid of tanks if they can’t be wall to wall gods!” “How will healers get time to DPS?” You know who doesn’t worry about these sort of things? Groups of friends where the tank isn’t trying to stress the healer out, by pulling sanely, where the healer enjoys the skill expression of actually healing. I know these sorts of people! I play with these sorts of people! Hell, I AM these sorts of people, and this kind of symbiosis with people you actually care about is what MMORPGs are ideally meant to feel like, which brings us to the idea that ties it all together.

WoW will continue to present and support a game for well-meaning groups of actual friends that want to enjoy a group adventure, be it scheduled or not, with their friends, who will play like friends (or professionals in the case of Esport teams) and not as a bunch of randos there to outdo each other. For everyone else: Groups as small as 2 or even 1 are now more supported than ever, there is honestly no need to PUG unless you are ready to tackle the actual “no really, you should have a team” tier of content, so… late M+ and Mythic raiding. That’s literally the tip of the pyramid and a pyramid is narrowest at the top.

So, yes, in that environment, WoW can and should just throw in systems that say “you don’t have to PUG” at a community as diverse and jaded as WoW’s. The fact that we won’t necessarily be civil to each other is a variable they can’t control, so they will give us options to not have to subject us to each other. Friends can play with friends, and those without online friends right now CAN try to make friends, but failing that, the game still serves them until they are geared to attempt literally the highest tier of the game… which not every player belongs at. I certainly don’t, and I can accept that. I think perhaps more people need to reach acceptance.

The writing on the wall, in both content options and tuning angles says this: Play with friends, actual friends, or play in a lane that scales to how many friends you have. If that’s just you, it will scale to that too. WoW can only give you the tools to do that, it can’t control the community.

Anyway, glad I got that off my chest. If you’re still here, have a nice day!

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Happy or sorry that happened

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too many words

yes. the game is better with friends. 100%

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is clearly much better than the writing in the books lately.

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Blink twice if Chat GPT is in the room with you right now.

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Everyone that read this is now dumber

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At this point each passing season seems to get harder and harder for pug groups to find success or any form of enjoyment from m+ and I think it’s pretty apparent in the numbers season to season and how they are continuously dropping off.

At the end of the day there will always be far more people pugging keys than there are that have a premade group of 5 to consistently run with, and if blizz wants to make pugging more frustration than it’s worth, then let them kill m+.

They just better be careful because pvp has been on life support for a while, and raid numbers have also dropped hard over the years to the point many guilds can’t even field a roster for raid nights. People are older now and not willing or able to commit 2-3 nights of their week to raiding in a video game. So if they make m+ not worth pugging on top of it, then the 3 pillars the games built upon are going to be in a horrible state, which can’t be a good thing for the game

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Good thing I didn’t read it then.

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You, my friend, have the best mog on the forums.

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how’d that vault turn out for you?

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The only thing Blizzard has abdicated responsibility on, is the maintenance of the social gameplay that made WoW popular in the first place.

In fact, they’ve gone out of their way to repeatedly kick guilds in the balls, over and over again. Then they turn around with bewilderment and wonder how their community got “so toxic”.

It would be VERY EASY for Blizzard to help people find like-minded people to play the game with.

Blizzard knows:

  • What times we regularly play.
  • What we like to do.
  • What challenge level we like.
  • What success rates we have.

There’s a whole data management industry that looks at this kind of data and matches people up with others that match. Blizzard should take advantage of this to steer people towards other people to play with.

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Yeah they shouldn’t feel responsible. They left it up to players to play the game how they want, and people are often selfish and/or looking for the path of least resistance to rewards. What do you think is going to happen? They shouldn’t be heavy handed about it.

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Too long; didn’t read.

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is it fair to use the final season of an xpac in your measurements though? Participation in this season dropped off a fair amount because there was nothing really new added…?

I’m in favor of them putting in some more player agency for when we do have to pug rather than letting it be the wild west but I think that’s all they can really do.

  1. Protect people’s keys. I would be a bigger fan of not allowing keys to deplete for failture to time. Just have the key stay the way it is and let the player decide to drop it if they can’t handle it.

This one change would eliminate having to put in dungeon deserter debuffs for people who leave keys and screw the other 4 people on the team.

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wut

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I think one thing you and I definitely agree on is, as I’ve said elsewhere, “they have the telemetry.” Where you and I differ is that I’m absolutely willing to believe that they DO know all of those things and have figured out that:

-Our playtimes are all over the place.
-We like to do a bunch of things but, since the move from scenarios, to world quests to islands to torghast, to dragonflight’s open world when given the option we choose to own our time instead of co-ordinating with unwieldy communities.
-We take the path of least resistance because LIFE is hard and after 20 years in WoW it doesn’t “have the right” to tell us we’re not good enough if the game wants us to stick around in this now highly competitive market for our time.
-That when challenged we fold up because there are other things we could be doing.

My point is, what if the telemetry is what’s made them give everyone agency over their time with “one to five” systems with variable difficulties, while leaving everything else “MMOish” in the game present for those that make friends the way most people do on the modern internet: outside this one game.

Guild interdependence is outdated. Guilds still exist but, at least in north America, people would perhaps like to rely on service from the company they’re paying, not on other players met only in the game, with bonds based only on those goals in that game.

In short: Blizz are selling game time, they can’t sell other players’ time. So they build to that now.

Guilds still exist, the game’s just serving smaller groups now because… well I’d imagine because of the telemetry.

Maybe I’m wrong, but the writing on the wall is pretty plain to me, personally.

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Based on everything else Blizzard does, I’m going to go with them being lazy and stupid, instead.

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And yet you pay them to play their game.

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The pug interface could need a rework to be honest.

Right now when you scroll the groups, there are so many that just don´t fit to me, either because they use voice chat, ask for achievements or an ingame score.

I would like to filter these out.

Another aspect is, that there is no benefit in playing with a pug. You never see the people again and it is a common trend with humanity that those who you don´t see again, just have less value to you than those you see again and rely on in the future.

Some MMO´s, reward players for social activities with strangers, this could be a start. But with the huge pool of players, how common is it to see someone twice?

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Well the hope has been that Microsoft is going to clean house.