So I’m a long time raider of wow since vanilla. I’ve watched the game evolve from 40 man raids to dynamic size raids. I’ve watched LFG channel be replaced by group finder tools and RaiderIO.
Let me preface my diatribe by saying performance measurement tools like warcraftlogs are perfectly fine for people like me that like to go back, measure performance, and see where improvements can be made for my raid. I do that for our heroic raids until on farm and all of our mythic raids and find it very beneficial for both my development as a player and my team.
The problem is there are quicker “flash assessments” that are used to measure players and sets a bar insanely too high or establishes an expectation of the player that shouldn’t be necessary. Whether its RaiderIO or DBM (yeah I said it!) this is true in my opinion.
This isn’t another anti-RaiderIO thread so I won’t go there. Its more of an anti mod thread. I think the game today is designed with mods in mind and the gamer culture expects a lot of players to know what these mods are or even have them to compete. Developers have even adopted this culture by responding to wails of class imbalance from the community.
What this inevitably does is “expect” players to have mods in game, worry about their IO score, and run simulations of their characters if they want a >1% chance of being picked up.
Raiding today almost requires someone in your raid to have DBM/BigWigs to monitor boss cast timers. WeakAuras is another such mod that lets people bypass the mechanic of heroic/mythic Mekatorque. Developers of the game now have to come up with new ways to trick and challenge players because of all of these crutches that make the game too easy. I think the game is challenging enough if you turn off performance mods. You even have rotation addons so people don’t even have to know the class to play it. I leveled a rogue as subtlety, turned on Hekili (rotation addon) and ran a mythic as outlaw doing competitive DPS (according to my Details addon that also measures my performance).
The TL;DR; version of this is if the player culture and the developers stopped letting simulations and handicapped learning curves run the show, this game would be much more enjoyable for the casual player base. These hardcore concepts are being applied to the casuals and I think it does the game as a whole a disservice.
Going to go ahead and say it since someone’s bound to say it: “If you don’t like mods, don’t use them.” I’m talking about the game and player culture as a whole, not my individual experience.
Thank you guys for listening if you’re still reading.
I don’t understand any of this. I’ve only ever seen performance metrics play a big part in competitive mythic raiding or high m+ keys. And many of those people enjoy the sims, the logs, the meters, etc. because it instills a fun, competitive environment as well as allows teams and players to improve as a whole.
Casual raid teams have minimal requirements (usually just DBM and attendance) so I don’t know why you’re saying these metrics are a detriment to casuals. If a casual raid team has parse requirements, well then they aren’t a casual raid team. If a player doesn’t have the time or willingness to check logs, learn how to use DBM, etc., then they shouldn’t expect to be invited to a mythic raid team.
While it’s true that Blizz has to make bosses harder because of WA’s and DBM, that’s their prerogative and it mainly only applies to mythic progression raiding. I don’t see how this is a dev or community thing.
Anecdotal counter point to your anecdotal point, I know anyone with a RaiderIO add on forming a weekend quest run for M0s will take players with higher IO scores first. I mean why wouldn’t they when given the option?
It’d help to define what you consider a high mythic key. Many casual players don’t consider mythic key pushing for “hardcore” players. In fact I would argue mythic key pushing is more tailored for the casual player since they can be much quicker than raids and can require less prep.
I agree but there are MANY more metrics other than parse. In fact parse is one thing I mentioned as beneficial and have no concerns with (warcraftlogs).
No disagreement here.
So this was the essence of my entire post. It is their prerogative and it is because WAs and DBMs make the encounters ridiculously more easy. I disagree that it only applied to mythic progression raiding. In fact I don’t think mythic progression and hardcore are synonymous. I think that’s where we diverge. I consider myself casual but yet I do mythic raiding with my guild. Hardcore in my mind denotes more than anything time investment coupled with goals. If I logged in to do mythic raiding a lot, sure I’m hardcore. But I log in twice a week and spend no more than 6 hours combined in a raid. But to come full circle it is a dev/community thing because:
All I’m saying is we’ve gone down this route and there seems to be no turning back. I think it makes content older quicker and we turn toxic quick against the devs and how long new content takes to come out.
Idk i mean first 2 weeks of BoD i forgot to download latest of DBM and only realized that i probably needed it to verbally call out mechanics to those who aren’t good at the game.
Me personally would be fine playing without DBM/Bigwigs as long as i only had myself to worry about.
Alas this is a multiplayer game so inevitably someone will need their hand held.
I don’t think this is a good example. You’re talking about pugging, and that’s an entirely different discussion. I’m of the opinion that pugging NEEDS a metric of some sort strictly to avoid people from having their time wasted. Yes, that is absolutely detrimental to casual players, but not having that metric is at the same time detrimental for more hardcore players. It’s lose-lose either way, which is why the best system is always to just run with friends or guildies.
We do diverge here. A casual player, for most people, never goes beyond AOTC or a +11 or 12 key. Semi-hardcore is what I would consider myself. Two days a week mythic raiding possibly going to get CE, going keys over +15. Hardcore is basically CE or bust, three+ nights/week raiding, and doing +20 or higher keys.
so there’s nothing wrong with raiderio and it’s not going away.
people get so upset when they get declined for keys, but forget they can have their own key, and when you start forming groups count how many dps apply! it’s a lot and sometimes when you are declined it’s because the party simply needs a ranged or a melee or a specific class like idk rogues.
Also anecdotal but anyone using IO for the weekly is trolling and you’re probably better off just ignoring that group.
I don’t pug much but I do scroll through LFG pretty often just to see what ridiculous stuff I can find…and I just don’t see this very often. Maybe 1 out of 100 groups on average.
IO is primarily used by people pushing +10 or higher, and even then I see plenty of high keys on offer with no mention of IO.
I understand what you’re getting at. Bosses, particularly in heroic and mythic require some sort of timer mod at this point. The devs are 100% taking advantage of the fact that people use these mods to make harder fights. I’m not saying you couldn’t do them without the tools, but that’s the equivalent of doing a Cirque du Soleil performance perfect without ever practicing. It is technically feasible… but the chances of it happening are asymptotic to zero.
I don’t necessarily disagree with anything you said, but unfortunately, that particular genie has been out of the bottle for quite some time and I don’t think it would be possible to ever get it back in, at least from BfA and going forward. They could lock the API for Classic->future iterations of the past game, but I don’t know if that would anger even the Classic purists as there were addons even back then.
Honestly the only thing I think they could do is just disable mods in some circumstances that are 'competitive and thus make the field equal. But the reality is that people would just use other tools to make it happen. Even if it’s just a piece of paper and a friend with a stopwatch.
To the first, of course. If you want to step into raiding dbm is a well known and valuable tool. To the others, i have never done either of those things and i get along fine.
Yeah, I am sure they could do it, I more meant a “Could they do it without it being less damaging to the longevity of the game than leaving them be would.” I rather imagine that an awful lot of people would be peeved if they woke up tomorrow and there were no more addons.
That said, I agree that people who want to measure themseves will do so with or without addons. I play FFXIV for example and there are absolutely zero addons, but those raiding high-end content still have access to a site that is pretty much the exact same thing as warcraftlogs. The info is there for those who need it but (this is going to come out really awful and I don’t mean it to, but I don’t know how to express it better), those who don’t really know what they are looking at aren’t having the knowledge shoved in their face by addons.
That includes me and as aforementioned I think people would just find ways even if it was just having a friend with a piece of paper with the timers and a stopwatch on discord call it out.
Ironically, I would as well even though as mentioned I give equal time to a game with no addons at all. Probably makes absolutely no sense, but for whatever reason it is different.
I think the difference is for addons/paper is that one would have to know what they were doing, and as such would likely be able to adequately interpret the results, whereas the same can not be said for (likely) the majority of addon users. They see the numbers and judge good/bad without having any inkling of what the numbers mean and how good/bad can be completely relative to a particular situation.
Oh yeah, unfortunately this is the trend with any ‘metric’ in the world. People will optimize for the metric.
One of my criticisms of Raider (DOT) io is that it favors people that do lots of different keys vs. people that push keys (even if they are the same dungeon) hard.
But yeah any metric will lead to over optimization towards that metric.
Basically this. I agree with the anti-modders, but not because I want the mod features to go away, its because I want Bliz to make the core game functional.
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