Wrong. Mythic plus didn’t start the speedrunner mentality. It existed at least as far back as Wrath of the Lich King. (Some) people complained loudly about how the dungeons were aoe-fest speedruns.
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Speeding has nothing to do with a timer, it’s:
- The realization that time is money.
- Your finite lifespan should not be wasted standing around waiting for someone else to figure out what they are supposed to be doing.
- One of the oldest expressions of skill, I was speedrunning NES games when I was 8 years old.
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this swings both ways, ive seen plenty of m+ players DEMANDING that all other content, especially delves, be removed
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Incorrect. The vast majority of players in Wrath were perfectly fine with dungeons being an AoE-fest. They were seen as little more than stepping stones on the path to raiding, not as something worthy of consideration unto themselves. A vocal minority wanted them changed.
Now, having said that, I would suggest you go back and read the post you replied to. You’re either willfully misrepresenting its contents, or you made a decision to misinterpret what’s written. I don’t know how much clearer I can be about the current state of affairs having several causes. And yes, despite your protestations, M+ is a contributor.
Aight, lemme put it this way. I’m one of those people that rush through dungeons, and I do it explicitly because M+ has conditioned me into that mindset. Damn near everyone else I know who does this will tell you the same thing. It’s simply what we’re used to. Has nothing to do with “expressing skill.” Who wants to express skill in non-endgame content?
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I sure as hell don’t want basic leveling dungeons to take 30 minutes each because I know they can easily be done in 5-10. That has nothing to do with M+ conditioning. It’s because I’ve been there. Done it. And done it much faster. On all roles and classes.
I was also speedrunning WoW dungeons in WRATH. Long before M+ was dreamed up. Doing that daily heroic was quick and easy, and if someone tried to take it slow and careful I’d be pissed even back then and even on fresh 80s. Go-fast mentality clearly was not invented by a timer hanging over anyone’s head.
M+ timer isn’t even horribly restrictive, it mostly means you can’t dawdle, need to take a few risks because otherwise it’s not living up to difficulty, and need to have appropriate damage output. It’s not outrageous, most keys below +13 were prob going to be done in that amount of time regardless of a ticking clock.
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This happened because getting 40 people geared for a resistance-focused raid took time, and OG Naxx came out right about the time they announced BC and that future raids would no longer be 40-man. It changed everything, and we didn’t have time to clear Naxx. The last fight we did in Vanilla Naxx was the Four Horsemen before BC dropped.
In my old Vanilla guild in particular, people immediately moved from Alliance to Horde after BC’s announcements were made. We moved from Stormreaver to Tichondrius and rushed to level one or two toons to level 60 on a new server with a new faction AT THE SAME TIME we were gearing our mains for frost resist for Naxx.
That is my memory of how all of that went down, and it’s a big part of the reason so few players actually ran the final raid of Vanilla. It wasn’t about Naxx being sweaty (although it was more difficult than previous content had been, I remember it being doable for us and we were progressing at a reasonable pace). It was about Naxx being replaced by preparation for Burning Crusade’s launch and the reorganization of guilds from 40 man to a 10 and 25-man structure.
The cause isn’t mythic plus.
We speedrun normal and heroic dungeons because they’re trivial. We speedrun normal and heroic dungeons because we can.
And since we can, why waste our time? Blast the dungeon.
It’s really that simple. And this mindset has been around for a very long time.
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Capitalism is really to blame if you want to dig up a root cause analysis.
Gotta get tasks done as fast as possible to get onto the next task. Gotta make efficient use of each day’s time to make room for work.
LOL. ROFL.
the difficulty ladder (as you put it) is not why many people dislike or hate M+.
in my opinion, it’s the timer and or the toxicity. and quite possibly other reasons.
difficulty is not even on the list.
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Mythic+ is optional content. Those that do not like it can choose to do something else. I do not do this kind of content, but I do not complain about it either.
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It’s funny though, so many times the people who complain about people leaving their keys so often… all it takes is one look at their warcraft logs page to understand why.
Bro, we have better things to do with the next hour than carrying you through content you have no business playing.
- not YOU (Toddorbert) btw, just the common “you” of the people who generally make such posts
Eh, maybe I misused the term “sweaty”… but it applied to both the difficulty and absurd time commitments. Leveling 1-2 alts on a different server & faction – during Vanilla, meaning it likely still took several days of playtime even going optimally (and well before the level boost, no less) – to prepare for the new expansion, and still raiding on top of that.
That’s insane.
… and just proves the point. It’s still a small percentage of players doing the top-end content, even if further reduced by the next expansion looming. And I’m sincerely hoping it was less common than what you were implying.
Regardless, Blizz has always had this notion that EVERYONE wants to do the raids and other top-end content.
That’s wrong. And it’s always been wrong.
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True. I spent a lot of time (and still do when in Classic) doing solo stuff. Even back in Vanilla, we had a lot of world to explore and a lot of questlines and stories and activities (like fishing for things) that many players did outside of or instead of the endgame content.
People spent weeks and even months riding through the world making story videos. Do you remember those? At the birth of YouTube, WoW videos became a huge thing. Some of it was RP. Some of it was showcasing BGs. Some of it was storytelling. Some of them were slapstick comedy…but I highly doubt that many of those folks were raiding, too. There just weren’t enough hours in the day to do everything, and that’s even more true in current retail.
I didn’t mean to insinuate that everyone in Vanilla did that. I was simply trying to address why the participation in Naxxramus was so low compared to previous Vanilla raids. We had access to MC and BWL and ZG for literally years (plural). People had time. Even AQ had more than a year up before we left for Outland.
Naxx came out in the summer of 2006. BC dropped in January of 2007. The first full clear of Naxx happened literally months after the raid opened, and I think my own guild didn’t even start going in there until August or September.
Anyway…long story short: Naxx wasn’t available for as long as the other raids before it had been. It was more difficult by a country mile. Excitement for Naxx was totally eclipsed by the excitement for BC.
I’m glad they brought it back in Wrath so that everyone had more time to get into it.
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M+ isn’t content though. The dungeons are the content. You don’t call a heroic difficulty raid, content if the raid is already there.
Degrees of difficulty is not content. Never has been.
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This is an excellent point.
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Is it though? Is content just the character models and art assets or is it also the experiences those things create? Different difficulties provide wildly different experiences.
Ah yes, the glory days of WoW Machinima.
… wasn’t that a website where you could download the videos directly? No idea if it’s still around, maybe it went by a different name.
Regardless, I’m pretty sure many of them did raided… but they rarely got past BWL, you only really saw AQ40 and Naxx gear as cameos in those videos.
But for fun, here’s a blast from the past:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUsF8weJJWs
The original video was from 2006, I think.
Sadly, WoW Machinima in general died with Vanilla.
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Yes, but it’s not the same as a new raid, a new dungeon, a new quest campaign, a new zone, new collectibles, etc.
Difficulty tiers exist (in my way of using the game) to enable players to experience that piece of content at their own preferred level.
Normal raids and LFR are not terribly fun for me because they are a faceroll for the group I play with. Heroic raids are the sweet spot for both our raid size and our raid group’s ability/accessibility level. We don’t have four raids. We have one raid with four difficulty levels.
If you do Mists of Tirna Scythe, for example, as a leveling dungeon, a heroic dungeon, a mythic zero, a mythic + at several key levels, and then later as a TW dungeon, You haven’t done five separate pieces of content. You’ve done ONE piece of content at five different difficulty levels.
Is that not the point TL4 was making?
Edited to add: I love M+ just as it is and my personal opinion is that if you remove the timer, you may as well remove the entire thing. That said, doing keys is not quite the same thing as receiving new content.
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I’d say some are similar enough, but the experience of doing a mists 15 is so utterly incomparable to a heroic m0 or levelling dungeon I’d happily call them different pieces of content. I don’t think there’s an answer that suits everyone and it’s largely going to be case by case. In essence I think the statement that difficulty isn’t content is reductive.
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M+ as a mode…with affixes and timers and scaling difficulty…would definitely have to count as content because it’s a whole thing, so that’s fair. I just agree that calling a new M+ season “content” is a different bag than introducing actual new things to the game.
I don’t understand the strong negative emotions people have about M+. Most of what I hear people complain about with it is either about bad pug experiences or else is indicative of someone who has only rarely (or never) run a key.
A lot of what I see is people who cannot run 15’s (I’m in that number) upset that they can’t do it. I mean…to me, that makes no sense. I can’t do mythic raids, but I don’t want them removed simply because I don’t engage with them. Same with M+.
I will be very upset if they remove the timer from M+ because if they do, there is no longer any point to it. Like several others, I think they need to remove or reduce the death penalty from it and spend more effort on making affixes interesting and fun to engage with.