Blizzard, I know you’re trying to give world content/solo players more content to do, and I’ve been excited since your pre-DF interview saying so (especially the part about gear progression), but I gotta say this isn’t how it should be done.
The solution to more world content isn’t more group world content. Not to this insane degree.
I know it’s an MMO, and ideally there would be events like the Tuskarr Feast that make the world feel populated. But a big problem with Dragonflight is the sheer amount of group-mandatory content, especially to get certain rewards. And the real worry is that, unlike dungeons or raids which you can theoretically do with fewer people or solo in future expansions, a lot of these events simply won’t be. And those that can… it’s causing issues with the current Dragonflight experience for primarily world content and solo players.
DF to date has several times as much group content outside of instances than any other expansion did. And that spreads players out. It might have been alright at the start of the expansion, but assume for a moment you’ve got a player who wants to do literally anything to progress their goals in the outdoor world. They can make a group, or they can list a group. But depending on the half hour they want to make a group, they’re competing with:
Dragonscale Keep
Grand Hunts
Tuskarr Feats
Primal Storms
Cobalt Assembly/Imbu grind
Primalist Future
Forbidden Reach rares
Zaralek Caverns rares
Researchers Under Fire (once most people stop doing it it’ll be impossible to do solo at any given point of the day)
Fyrakk Assaults (Even if you can spawn the boss, it’s way too overtuned, especially for world content players)
Time Rifts (Even a few initial attempts with a full raid have shown me it’s next to impossible to get the purple bag unless you’ve got more than a single raid on your shard, or maybe they were bugged. Either way, you’d better do them now. Like all the other things you better do now.)
In BFA and Shadowlands there were a few rares that took groups, in Legion you had the Assaults but they were smart-grouped scenarios at the end of a soloable segment. In MoP you had the Timeless Isle rares and reputation grind. This expansion has way too many more, and they’re just adding up. It wouldn’t be as bad if past patch content was retuned to be soloable or doable with far fewer players, but it’s just not. The end result is the players it’s primarily meant to service - those who don’t do raids or dungeons - are having a much harder time doing it than people who don’t focus on world content as much. It’s backwards.
I’ve enjoyed the game as a world content/solo player for 15 years, since I stopped raiding, and it’s been fine all this time. It’s disappointing to me that now there’s a dedicated team focused on making world content it’s less fun and more stressful than I’ve ever found it before. If I want something from a piece of content I’m essentially as forced to do it now/when Blizzard says as raiders were when they complained about Artifact Power, because if I don’t do Time Rifts at the start of each weekly reset instead of waiting until my Australian weekend, there just won’t be as many groups capable of getting blue boxes, let alone purple, as at the start of the week.
And that’s a design problem. I don’t know what the goal is here, but it’s not serving the players who have chosen to focus on world content as much as past expansions were, even with all the extra work put in - especially on lower population realms, especially at odd hours of the night, especially later in the week. I don’t think world content should be designed to encourage scheduled high-player count bursts of play for a few hours at a time and then be impossible to do later in the week as players spread out to do other things. I imagine raiders wouldn’t like it if they still felt pressured to run every raid in every tier of the expansion - not because of choice, but because the game was designed to encourage it.