The part where you failed to time a 20 seven times and still have that level key in your bag. If you fail to time for whatever reason do the 19. I’m not sure what started this debate, is it the weekly 15s, people trying to push score in keys they don’t belong in, or the feat of strength dungeon portals? If you’re failing at that rate you do not belong there.
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Extending a lock out means you are doing the same boss until it’s dead. In keys that means continuously rerolling your key to NW and failing everything else until it becomes NW. Downgrades are the fail condition. People wish to create a system where there are only ups.
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That’s not really answering the question though.
I’ll disclaimer that I’m certainly not advocating FOR it as such, but what about that is “silly”? You haven’t timed the 20, why would it be “silly” that you can still just try to time it again?
If anything, one could argue it’s entirely more consistent with every game mode of its level. If you failed to kill Mythic Denathrius, no one tells you to go pull Heroic Denathrius, or Heroic Stone Generals to earn your next try. If you lose in PvP, you aren’t told to go do something else first. If it would be “silly” if keystones didn’t downgrade in Mythic+, why?
I’m not sure what started this debate, is it the weekly 15s, people trying to push score in keys they don’t belong in, or the feat of strength dungeon portals? If you’re failing at that rate you do not belong there.
Not sure what you mean. As far as I can see scrolling up in this thread, the OP’s complaining about being “screwed by other people” who are apparently “leaving after first pull” amidst some other incoherent anger, and from there you were the one who went into imagining “A world without depletes”.
Extending a lock out means you are doing the same boss until it’s dead. In keys that means continuously rerolling your key to NW and failing everything else until it becomes NW. Downgrades are the fail condition. People wish to create a system where there are only ups.
Extending a lockout is a weekly decision to go kill/loot inferior bosses that are on a weekly lockout. The expected/normal gameplay IS to do the same boss until it’s dead, which is why when raiding I can just keep pulling Mythic Sylvanas. or Mythic Painsmith, or whoever. For M+, the GV and the new key given at the weekly reset effectively operates as the weekly lockout mechanism, especially with it being the only wat to get the best version of items; there’s no actual equivalence between extending lockouts and keystone degradation during the week for individual runs; lockout extensions aren’t about “pulling the same boss until it’s dead”, it’s about “trading off a potential round of upgrades because it’s currently more valuable to maintain focus/momentum”. It’s the sort of thing that only comes up when you have a very significant boss in its last phase, or in the last few %, or something like that, AND the weekly reset comes along, not on individual boss pulls.
Beyond that, failing to time a key IS the fail condition. Downgrades are a current additional consequence attached to that. If downgrades went away, there still remains a fail condition - especially given that loot is also affected when you fail to time a key (less so now than before, but still. That could/should probably be reverted back so that it’s worse loot if downgrades were removed), just like on any boss or raid. If you don’t kill Mythic Sylvanas, you’ve failed and have to pick yourself up and try again. The fact that you CAN try again hasn’t somehow removed a fail condition, or “created a system where there are only ups”, and acting as if it would for M+ is weird AF.
It’s fine to say you like downgrades. You could just say that, and not come up with bad equivalences, or calling things “silly” and sidestepping any actual reasoning.
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When you lose an arena match, you lose rating. You then fight worse teams that give worse gains when you win. A string of losses can set you back quite a bit.
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We went over this in another thread iirc.
An individual loss in Rated PvP does not mean that you fight worse players/teams. People who have 13 or 20 or whatever less rating than you aren’t necessarily even “worse” teams, and certainly aren’t people who have 8-10% less health and damage. Also, at most rating brackets, after a loss it’s entirely possible you’ll simply queue up and fight the exact same team again, or even other teams of the same/higher rating than the team you just lost to.
Also, both rating and loot rewards don’t work as “neatly” as you’re making them out to. It’s perfectly normal to lose to a team, fight a worse-rated team (compared to the team you lost to), win against that worse-rated team, and come out ahead on overall rating. It’s not like winning against the worse team simply gave you the chance to try fighting the better team, to then have to NOW beat them before you progressed.
And if you start bringing up “a string of losses”, then you’re just getting into “X tries before depletion” territory for equivalent comparisons, which is one of the more common suggestions on this topic.
This is the first time anyone has brought up loot. Try staying on topic.
And when you get on a win streak, you’re fighting ever higher teams. When you’re on a loss streak you fighting ever worse team. The arena game to game doesn’t line up perfectly to the m+ prog path, but it is close. You can downgrade all the way to 1k and you’re highly unlikely to face gladiators in that bracket (outside those who intentionally use this mechanic for paid carries, but that’s off topic).
Furthermore, the equivalent scenario in mythic raiding is when you hit a wall for months and lose 1-3 players to stagnation (whether they leave the raid group or stop playing altogether). This can set you back several bosses of prog while replacing with less experience players. Again, no one is saying 1 to 1 here, but the idea that m+ is unique in that progression isn’t strictly linear is absolutely asinine.
Both are highly abusable and one of the major complaints that come from the pvp scene.
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Well, first, no it’s not. Second, the only reason it’s in that sentence is to be very explicit that EVEN IF you extended it to both loot and rating, you’re stretching.
And when you get on a win streak, you’re fighting ever higher teams. When you’re on a loss streak you fighting ever worse team. The arena game to game doesn’t line up perfectly to the m+ prog path, but it is close.
This isn’t true unless you don’t think about it at all. When you get on a win streak, you may fight higher rated teams, or keep getting paired against lower rated teams, depending on who’s playing at the time. Your win streak might be against the same team (x5), or against teams they’re beating.
Unless you’re actually dropping brackets or comparing wildly mismatched brackets (e.g. the Gladiators in 1k that you mentioned are off topic, or 3200 vs 2400), most rating differences don’t mean anything. Low Duelists teams beating High Duelist teams, then swapping victories, blah blah, is very par for the course; if anything comp is a much bigger barrier, and the RNG of coming up against comps you have an advantage against vs comps you’re severely disadvantaged against.
Ok, hold up, this is a wild switch. You’re switching goalposts from “extending a lockout” to “hitting a wall and losing players”.
Like, first of all, hitting a wall and losing players, especially if they stop playing altogether, is not intended or designed-for gameplay. If anything, Blizzard goes out of their way to try and prevent/remove that. Secondly, it’s not even a thing that any healthy progression guild will encounter as part of progression, whereas failing the odd key is literally a fundamental part of the learning/progression process.
Finally, you’re completely skewing the narrative if you try and boil it down to “isn’t strictly linear”. The setbacks in progression you’re talking about across different game modes are:
- Hit a wall for months and lose players from the raid team as a result of potentially hundreds of failed attempts. (Mythic raiding)
- Go on a severe loss streak of multiple repeated failures. (Rated PvP)
- One failed attempt (M+)
This isn’t just a case of not a 1 to 1 comparison, it’s a wild outlier.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to by major complaints from the pvp scene about loss streaks? Like, there’s plenty about carrying, the loot system, class balance, etc., but I have no idea what you’re talking about with that comment.
X tries is abusable how?
That people will somehow progress by doing 20 runs to Kryxis, complete the dungeon, perfect that, then do 20 more to perfect Tarvold, then 20 more to Berylla, then another 40 to finally finish Kaal? Like, I’m failing to see how anything like that’s “abuse”, not to mention it’s literally a ton of additional work to opt into. Lastly, do you think people aren’t already rerolling keystones and stuff to make sure they can chain as many runs of the dungeon as possible when they’re trying to defeat that as a group?
(Never mind that in the pug scene, people literally can and will just find as many groups as possible for that dungeon until they find a group that beats it)
To get loot drops? Anyone can just go run 20 DoS runs if they need an item from DoS right now, they don’t need this to pull that off.
What is highly abusable? Is there a modification/improvement that can also be made to temper this hypothetical abusability? Is it a better system even if there are X and Y problems still present? Will that abusability impact fewer or more players? To what degree? Maybe we can actually come up with some solution, if you stop trying to dig a hole on the false equivalency part.
There has to be a punishment mechanism in place imo. You can complete a mythic+ and reap the rewards from the end of dungeon, as well as the great vault…
Raiders on the contrary - if they can’t kill a boss, they get zero, zip, nada.
Plus the deplete system is more “noob friendly”, because if a team is in over their head for a certain level key, it depletes so that they can actually succeed in timing it. Getting rid of depletion would be a win win win situation - except for players that are struggling imo…then it’s just a lose for them
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Yeah, I mentioned this a couple of posts above, if we were hypothetically in a world where keystones didn’t deplete, I cannot imagine failing a key would continue to award loot. At the very least, we’d probably go back into a world where the only loot that dropped in an untimed run would be for lower levels than the “completed” but “untimed” dungeon.
That said, one thing to keep in mind that is the best loot in Mythic+ can only be achieved through the Vault. There is no amount of defeating Mythic+ bosses that will award you Mythic-raid-equivalent gear, except through the weekly Vault dispensary. Even now, getting any end-of-dungeon loot past Normal-equivalent (between normal drops and normal end-boss drops) can only be done by spending Valor, a season-limited currency, except for now when we’re in a content drought. That will get you to Heroic-equivalent at the cap of upgrade ranks.
When I refer to what started the debate scroll to see how many posts on this topic exists. In referring to who is having problems with the key downgrading because in any given key I run if it isnt going well we typically just downgrade and run again or disband and run it again.
Is it a question of you have a 15 and now you have a 14? It’s an infinite scaling challenge system unlike raid. You do progress the levels a lot like raid but you could argue that timing a certain level of key can exceed the difficulty of the most difficult raid encounters. You climb the levels until you can no longer succeed, having to modify strategies for different group comps and affixes. Am I going to pull this boss with trash on it? I have incarn, do i quad pull? Anything that could give you a time edge.
People time AND time again believe that at a certain iLevel or a certain level of timed keys give you unlimited access to an arbitrary difficulty of key. If you can time a 20 halls you cant say that the same group can time a 20 dos or SD, especially if they time nw last week on fortified and now you hold a tyrannical SD. So you have a place to start this week but success is not a given, see if you can time the 19 and get a 20 of something else.
M+is supposed to be a fun challenge, you learn a little with every run to progress your dungeon knowledge along the way. The mentality of “I’m 2k score therefore anything below a 16 isnt worth my time” has got to go. Its that mentality that has people leaving keys or being upset that it downgraded. The system isnt broken, the mentality is. I cannot and will not try to tell anyone how to play this game, but that is the way it was designed and having the deplete system in place makes every key attempted more meaningful.
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If you’re talking about keystone downgrading, it’s been around for a while, usually from several different types of people.
From everything I’ve seen, the people who don’t like downgrades are varying different kinds of people. For this OP, it’s apparently because someone else left on the first pull. For other random people, it’s someone leaving after the first boss, wipe, whatever. For others, it’s disconnects. For yet others, it’s because they want to do X dungeon, and chucking keystone RNG on top of downgrades, getting back to the point where they can actually DO X dungeon becomes a longer chore.
Which is why you see some threads focused on “penalties” for leaving, some people talking about depletion, some people talking about some form of leeway for freak accidents (X tries until deplete etc.), or whatever.
RE: just downgrade and run in again, or just disband and run it again, I imagine people’s attitudes towards that would largely depend on things like free time and schedules. Some people play 2-3 hours a day on a regular basis, some people only play a couple of hours on a weekend, some people get sporadic moments when they have an hour or whatever to get and finish a run. People on the former side of that spectrum might do 10+ runs weekly on a regular basis, on the latter end may typically do 1-2 a week if they get the chance. I’d imagine “extra effort” of just running again is pretty negligible for the former crowd, whereas for the latter crowd adding another run to their schedule is a pretty damn big deal, or may not even be possible. It also depends what the motivation is, right? If you have 2 hours, and you wanna knock out 1 +15 (optimal Vault option), even with failure trying again you can probably do 2-3 shots and might achieve your goal. If the first failure means you have to spend 40 minutes in a +14, then another 35 minutes in the following +15, you’re going to be more frustrated by a random person quitting or w/e, since your goal might not be achievable, and if you only have time to finish the +14 you now have worse loot for the week through someone else’s shenanigans.
The same sort of thing scales up as you add more time. Sure, someone might play 3 days in a week, but if they’re trying to knock out 10 dungeons, that’s a lot of time they’re investing, and having more time added is probably going to feel draining. By contrast, the person who’s basically always logged into the game is naturally not going to care at all; it literally changes nothing for their player experience.
I’m not really sure what sort of solution you’re talking about for this “mentality” here. Like - if the mentality has to go, the question still remaining is what makes a +13 or +14 or w/e worth it to someone who IS 2k IO? Especially so if it’s someone who does want to progress score.
If it’s something vague like “strategy” or “experience”, I don’t see it happening, especially when you’re fighting a significantly easier version of the dungeon. Not to mention we’re talking about multiple seasons of the same dungeons; there are probably people who’ve done these dungeons 200+ times at this point. Is there really that much dungeon knowledge for them to get in a downgraded dungeon?
It’s hard to call someone’s mentality broken if it’s just a natural result/expectation the system leads to.
I mean, on the surface, this has the risk of sounding an awful lot like Blizzard’s “we want meaningful choice” mentality that drove their Covenant design. Things don’t just mean something (or mean more) because you’re facing a negative consequence or lose out of something or w/e.
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I like your viewpoint. I agree that playing a game with strangers will have struggles. In your conclusion you mention the “meaningful choice”. I’m more closely trying to praise the risk/reward.
The stress and anxiety of running the +20s for the dungeon portals only existed because I knew it would probably be my only chance for that specific dungeon for that particular week. Especially when you have a decent set of affixes to help ease the difficulty a bit. I feel like I had more fun and felt more accomplished knowing that failure meant I missed my shot for the week. The relief of timing my first 20 isn’t the same without the downgrade.
If someone is just experiencing a slight annoyance for a key that they’ve ran dozens of times i get it, but on the progression keys having the threat of failure looming over the run feels good.
And again, sometimes someone has a key they really have no business beinging in because a friend carried them the previous week or they purchased a boost. In which the downgrade system is perfect for getting them back around the level they should be, one failure at a time.
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There’s a few things that come to mind for me there.
First, that sort of thing can’t really go away. If you’re playing on Sunday till 10pm, you’re going to come up to your last dungeon for the night, and pretty much have that same exactly feeling - either you clock this now, or your play session ends and you don’t get it done. Whether keystones deplete or not doesn’t remove the existence of that, just when it happens, e.g. if keystones didn’t deplete, you’d have that feeling at 9:15pm, when they do, you might feel that at 8:30pm, but that’s conditional on running your own keystone. If you’re open to running pugs or whatever, keystone depleting doesn’t change ANY of that, since right now you’d fail the first run, go fish for a group in the GF, whereas maybe in the imaginary no-deplete world, you’d instead fail the first run, list your own keystone instead of finding someone else’s. Any which way it gets sliced, scheduling and stuff that comes as a result of that doesn’t ever go away, it just changes in context.
The next time thing that sticks out to me is the wording and emotions you’ve felt. Excitement, adrenaline, anticipation, satisfaction - those are all great emotions for a game to engender in people, and I think most people here would love more of that. The words you chose through are stress, anxiety, relief. Which gives me pause. I’m absolutely acknowledging that you felt you had more fun and felt more accomplished as a result, but it evokes more the sort of psychological manipulation tactics we’ve seen far more of in games nowadays - up the frustration, give someone a crumb, they feel good about it and thankful for things being worse. Or the lottery aspect of giving people terrible luck, so that they’ll get a dopamine hit now and then, and stay hooked. I don’t know you, I’m not going to speculate on your personality, but if you hadn’t done that, maybe you’d still feel the same about the system you engaged with, or maybe you’d be more in the camp of people who express frustration, I don’t know. But I think it’s not wild to acknowledge that we get a different perspective when things work out for oneself, as opposed to not working out at all. Like - I’ve felt a lot of adrenaline and excitement and those good feelings when we had Heroic Lich King down to 14%, or were possible realm-first candidates for Sinestra, blah blah, I can’t imagine knowing that we had to go back and kill some irrelevant boss to earn our next try would have ever improved that. If anything, building on that momentum and feeling like we were doing much better as a team for it gave the kills a much better feeling (to me).
The final thing to think about is the other factors/problems you incidentally touched on. Bad affix balancing, for example. If somoene has free time on a week where the affixes are good, it obviously makes more sense that they’d want to spend more time on that week doing actual progress, not spending time on busywork to get back to the progressy part. In fact, that’s the one aspect I didn’t go into about that whole extending lockout nonsense above. Extending lockouts allows players to specifically make the choice to skip irrelevant busywork (clearing earlier bosses they don’t need) to focus on the progression they want to do. For the guilds that were at those choices, it was a great thing to be able to make that choice, as opposed to having no choice in the matter, and losing large chunks of time on boring, irrelevant content. The game is arguably better when players have the agency, rather than being constrained by arbitrary (often dated) systems.
None of this is even getting into bugs. Every patch, some dungeon or other is bugged for the first couple of weeks. ToP still has long-standing bugs that some players still don’t know about (and others do). Spires with Devos, any vehicle causing DC, etc. I’d imagine if you had that last run fail due to a bug, there’d be some fury there, not any good feelings.
Whether keystones downgrade or not, any progression attempt always has a threat of failure looming over the run. If you’re doing a +26 and your group is trying it out for the first time, do you seriously think there’s no threat of failure when you could end up getting brick-walled at … idk, Tarvold?
This is probably why the “X tries before deplete” is one of the more common suggestions. It’s people acknowledging there is some benefit to depletions, and coming up with a compromise to ensure that a player truly out of their depth WILL be told to take a step back at some point, while mitigating any frustration or misfortunate for the remaining set of players.
Ultimately, any system has to consider who it’s affecting, how many there are, and how much it’s affecting them.
How many people are actually in keys they have no business belonging in, and need prodding to lower they key level? 10%? 20%? 2%?
How many people are feeling negative impacts from key depletes as a standard course of play? 10%? 20%/ 2%?
If the first set is 2% of players, and the latter set is 20% of players, does it really make sense to have a system that’s giving a negative feeling for an orders of magnitude more people, in the name of a tiny fraction of people who still have choices they can take (e.g. just talking to an NPC and lowering their keystone), even if they are possibly bad at taking those choices? Is this whole system being designed on the idea that most people are buying carries, therefore non-carried people should be affected? If true, doesn’t that seem a bit off? Like - “legit” players should be the core focus and audience of any design, right? Those are typically the players you want to cultivate and encourage.
If people from LFG are screwing up your key, then don’t use LFG. find a guild, and run keys with guildies.
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This sort of reply is so unhelpful. You’re not even trying to see the other points of view that have been brought into this thread.
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How is it unhelpful to give a solution to the problem presented? People don’t have to like the solution, but it is valid and solves the issue that OP was ranting about
It is certainly one very viable solution for some, but it will not work for everyone, especially so late into the expac and season. They may be very content in the guild they are in, but perhaps the guildies are not on the same playing level as the keyholder, thus the keyholder must pug.
The other option they have is to make friends. Liked one of the guys you pugged a key with? Try adding them as friends, worse case scenario is they say no and you likely never see them again (which is the same outcome if you don’t try). Before long you’ll have a list of people you can trust to run keys with.
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Your conclusion isn’t supported by the facts you present. The keyholder doesn’t necessarily need to pug just because they don’t want to leave their guild but also don’t want to, or can’t functionally do M+ with their guildies.
There is a wide chasm of other options between “playing with guild members” and “pugging random strangers”.
This is exactly what I have done, and it’s worked well for me. But there are some here who stubbornly dig their heels in and refuse to see any other point of view because if a key is failed, it obviously means KEYHOLDER SHOULD GIT GUD!
Case in point: just last night my husband and I were in a 15 Spires (with guildies and friends, by the way.) Our house lost power briefly and we took several minutes to get back into the game. We had been on track to time it, but because of that disconnection, my guildmate lost their key. There is absolutely zero reason that particular key should have been downgraded, and that evening was the only time that week that my guildmate had time to run it.
I fully understand that m+ is at-your-own-risk content. I simply wish for a system that would allow a keyholder to try again without the risk of abuse.