I’ve been running keystones since they were introduced in Legion and it’s been great fun, over time though I notice the community has become increasingly toxic. It used to be that everyone involved knew you were taking a risk, that everyone was investing their free time to overcome a challenge. It wasn’t always pretty but there was an unwritten respect for what it was we were doing that for whatever reason has gotten lost. Inexperienced players get flustered and panic when they keep making mistakes and experienced players decide that their time is actually worth more than that of the other four people in the group.
My solution is simple: Pay me in WoW tokens for playing with these people. Now, I, personally, honor the old ways. You will never catch me bailing on a pugged stone, I always try and keep morale nice and chipper, and I never just sit back and watch in vain as an identified noob predictably flubs the mechanics. Unlike the rest of the filth here I actually know how to temper my capacity for schadenfreude. The question is, how many of us are expected to maintain such good graces entirely voluntarily. Now I realise how arrogant this reads, I am of course being satirical, but I think you’ll find that many people are thinking this way! Maybe it doesn’t have to be a WoW token you slip in my pocket, what about an extra great vault reward if you’ve completed a dungeon with complete strangers? Perhaps get a streak going that rewards you with additional stygia at the end of the week, the more you engage positively with the community the greater the amount is at the end of the week, but if you get caught bailing on a stone or if you get reported for toxic behaviour then the stygia goes down drastically.
Everyone I know who has mastered keystones this tier seems fed up with it. Nobody wants to push stones bc the rewards are so slim and certainly nobody wants to do unpaid adult daycare (PUGGING.) Maybe it’s time to concede that ol’ Zitzie here has better ideas for keeping your ailing franchise afloat than the whole pack of you corporate raiders put together? Recognition has been a long time coming and I won’t take it personally, but you should definitely take my suggestions into consideration and do them as soon as poss. THANKS!
tl;dr: nobody’s going to do anything to make this a nicer place without an incentive so put one in already! What’s the hold up?!
The question should be: what is wrong with the content if I need to repeat the same thing over and over to the extent that I no longer have the patience to play with new people?
Of course there will always be new people doing the content for the first time. That is inevitable. Should people be re-running the same dungeons over and over to begin with? Is this an issue with a lack of content? Or, is this an issue of lack of patience and understanding?
This has nothing to do with “being a decent person” I don’t pug into keystones to have my soul measured for its moral weight, I’m here to have fun playing computer games and not stress about the people I’m playing with.
Look at the world you’re living in. You don’t think systems of networking people together can be adjusted to incentivize one type of behaviour against another? The community you encounter in these games exists in the way it does by the choice (or lack there of) of the developers, it has absolutely nothing to do with the individual moral choices of the end user. If you don’t think a computer game can alter your behaviour and bring out your worst qualities, you’ve clearly not been pugging enough stones!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you can’t fix the internet. This game is online, and its competitive, people will be toxic regardless of what you do. Hell the internet without competition is toxic. Just look at Twitter.
Yes Blizz, I too would like to get paid to play. I’ll happy hunt down toxic players, bots, anyone who dares to play a rogue, all will get the ban hammer!
This is true! And it’s also something I’m sure Blizzard themselves are entirely aware of as they profit from it directly! Who is it that’s really selling the carries, hm? You and your mythic raider buddies get paid in gold, but who is it that gets paid in cash?
You guys might not be ready for that conversation though
