I’m sure different people have different reasons for this. Selling carries probably accounts for some of it, but I do think there are a couple other things going on as well.
I’m sure some of it are people getting to feed a superiority complex. Anyone who gets priced out of mythic dungeons is one fewer person that might eventually reach their level or even surpass them.
Then I’m sure some folks have had bad experiences in keys with players who were completely unprepared. By raising the bar, fewer “bads” will be in keys to potentially impact them.
You caught us dude, the conspiracy is over. The only reason I do mythic raiding is because I’m getting paid, not because I enjoy doing challenging content with my friends.
I don’t think the damage ramp is really that bad. I geared my fresh hunter in the lfr raid and world quests, and then jumped straight into a +5 and +8. Didn’t seem all that difficult actually.
But did they ask for there to be the complete removal of every stepping stone between those untimed harder difficulties? I know you acknowledge the transition in the next sentence so you understand at least on some level the main problem with the implementation of this change, so I’m not saying you aren’t aware of the problem. I am just truly struggling to figure out who benefits from this execution; even the players that wanted harder untimed content only got one new level that they’ll probably be done with by July. This could be a case of malicious compliance by Blizzard - they’ve certainly been that petty in the past.
Let me say up front that I do NOT agree with the take about selling, but I do understand where such a statement would come into play. Anyone who previously could spend as much time as they felt they needed for gear/knowledge in level X before moving onto X+1, then continue that pattern all season. Anyone who was able to reach their goals doing so would have no need to buy any kind of boost.
But for anyone who is unwilling or unable to bridge the gap between heroic and M0 and cares enough about missing out on their goals this presents would need to seek out a service to overcome that. The idea is that this would increase the size of a market that is far smaller with many smaller steps instead of one big one.
m0 should be repeatable tho. m+ is and m0 is part of that. otherwise why even bother with something with a m before the number. if m0 was repeatable, it would be better for everyone to learn, to enjoy, to prepare, gear doesn’t have to drop every time. but locking it out means nobody is ever doing it unless u make ur whole group. so decide is m0 part of mythic plus or not.
You keep making a lot of assumptions here, you need to give this change time to play out.
Maybe take a few months off from the game too, might give you some time to calm down.
Remember, this is a throwaway season, a great time to try experiments like this one.
I want to ask you a question here. How could have Blizzard given players that wanted untimed hardish dungeons something to chew on, but at the same time keep the key levels you keep going on about?
Like so many have pointed out to you, the timer in keys from +2 to +10 in the old format wasn’t a factor one bit.
There wasn’t much difference from +8 to +12 to me.
Those lower keys just felt like a total faceroll, and this is sentiment is shared widely accross the community.
I personally think you are way too fixated on numbers here. I think the new system is going to be amazing for casual dungeon players that wanted some challenge without having to worry about some silly timer. A lot of folks need to step away from their keyboards during dungeon runs, with M+ this made this almost impossible. You are locked in for a solid 20-30 minutes.
Edit: I think you’re forgetting that they expanded M+ to +20 to cap out rewards, as opposed to +15 before, so this greatly inflated the amount of key levels, which I think they were trying to correct with this change as well.
20 levels is just stupid, you can’t even feel the difference from +2 to +4, they needed to smoosh this all down.
Does not teach players ANYTHING. You’ve clearly not been in a heroic dungeon in a very long time. They just fall over. It takes about 10-15 minutes to clear a heroic and that’s just going in and stomping anything that moves. It’s nothing.
So I should offer no feedback on what I can already experience about the new system that hampers the experience for myself and others?
I do agree with this; if there is a time to try something like this, now is the time. But the only way that experiment could improve for whomever the intended targets are is via feedback.
Your premise about the timer not mattering is just not true. That’s part of the reasons why we keep having these discourses basically talking around one another. It may not have mattered to you and your groups. But in the guild groups I keep referencing, there were times we depleted those 7s and 8s. The timer was relevant to us and our experience. We may have been in the minority, but that doesn’t make our experience any less valid.
As far as how I would have addressed untimed dungeons, I would have created a separate progression path for dungeons without a timer with a different branding from M+. Then have the two systems progress in parallel with levels along the M+ track and the untimed track. The scaling doesn’t need to be the same between M+ and untimed (so a +2 doesn’t need to have the same scaling in M+ and untimed), but I don’t really have a good way to determine what the scaling for each side could be.
They were, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people for which those keys were not a faceroll. I have made no assertion that players that struggle within some point of that range are the majority. But they are still paying customers, and it’s still very unclear to me what cost existed by keeping those low keys in the system. Rewards can be an issue, and I’ll touch on that in a moment with another quote of yours; but iron those out and I really don’t see why those difficulty levels couldn’t have still existed for those that wanted them.
And I think you’re too focused trying to tell me the right way for players like my wife to play the game.
I DO NOT CARE ABOUT THE NUMBERS. It’s about the experience that was lost. The level of engagement with a dungeon with the scaling of a +7 and whatever affixes are active is an experience that myself and several others would enjoy as a group together. Now we cannot. If this experience was assigned a new number, I would have been fine with that. If this experience was moved to some other game mode, I would have been fine with that. That may not have been important for a lot of folks, but it was to us. And now that experience is gone.
Creating an experience with similar scaling, meaningful reward, and no timer did not require purging this keyed experience. To quote Iron Man, is it too much to ask for both?
I’m not forgetting that, I didn’t agree with Blizzard creating a new loot level for each key level. I don’t think every bump in key level requires a bump in item level possible from that key. Don’t get me wrong, there should be levels where the loot does go up, but it doesn’t need to be every key level. If this is genuinely part of the reason why Blizzard squished the keys at the low end as much as they did, I would have much rather seen them pick one item level of reward for the entire range 2 - 9 but kept the scaling. Keys in that level served three purposes, with gearing only being one of them. The loss of the gear avenue was addressed in a different way, but the other two purposes were completely removed with no substitution provided. And those two purposes were by far more important than the gear.
You’re either intentionally misrepresenting my point or intentionally ignoring it at this point. It was tough to spot the differences between from 2 to 4, but not from 2 to 9, especially amongst the players who needed those keys for learning the dungeons. My issue is not that they reduced the number of keys in that range, it’s that they removed them entirely. They left players in that range stranded both in terms of their preferred experience AND on helping them get better to be able to move up the level that exists in this new world.
I’ve said numerous times now I would have been fine with them reducing 2 - 9 to two key levels somewhere within this range. Keep the floor the same and then compress the difficulty jump into 5 key jumps. That would have removed a significant number of the keys where there wasn’t much of difference between each one without completely eliminating the learning environment that was valuable in that range. It’s far more tenable for a player to improve at most 3 key levels at the low end to make it to the next step than for them to improve 9.
But in a practical sense you can filter players simply by the information you have both when building your group and when you join. Your choosing to fill your group with the players that join you on your keys and your accepting the group members by staying in the group once you zone into the instance. You know the players item level and you know their io rating and more in many cases. It’s not a proven exact science but there are red flags you can see and should avoid if your goal is to avoid the bads.
Granted you cant determine mechanical finesse from those values but, if your at least checking that stuff first the mechanics are a bonus.
There’s no filtering taking place and the bad players who don’t care how they impact their group are signing up and running these regardless as long as others allow them into the groups.
The changes they made don’t help filter those players out of the pool.
I think the reasonable conclusion is that the a large segment of those players feel they were misunderstood. They didn’t want you to take out the easier dungeons that existed to do it, they wanted you to remove the time and count element of those lower difficulty dungeons which to them were harder difficulties. The changes are like I said previously like a demented corrupt a wish when you don’t fully quantify the stipulations of what you mean.
Players who know the mechanics and whom excel at executing them tend to feel this way. Doing the mechanics without error trivializes a lot of the content in WoW not just M+.
I’ve referred to it as gate keeping because of people explicitly stating that these changes “Filter” out people that shouldn’t be there. The last part being in those individuals opinion. When these difficulties have existed for years and those people have become accustomed to being there. In that sense - the gate keeping is taking away that content people had been dong and basically telling them if they can’t do the new difficulty then the M+ isn’t for them. When M+ used to have an easier range of difficulties people did do successfully and did enjoy running.
There won’t be any money in it if no one except the top 1% of gamers play the game. No one will be watching those streams or buying guides to content. You can be the most gifted individual at the world but if you don’t have an audience your nothing.
As long as M0 drops champion gear, they can’t feasibly make it spam able. That would remove any incentive to run +2 to +6 and then those keys would be literally dead except for people who like the challenge. Because you could just farm 0s for gear.
M0 needs to be dropped far enough to put the rewards into the high end of Veteran Track. Giving players an easier time to do the dungeon and a step to get into the M+ dungeons.
Then it would probably make sense to bring the +2 down to the current 0 difficulty tuning OR better yet just add a +1 and put it where the 0 was.
The net result would be that you can farm champion gear but only in the M+ eco system where your getting 1 piece of loot per run for the group if you can’t complete the timer. And groups that could do the 0s already but struggled to move higher can now do more of the 0s in a week with muted progress.
For everyone else it pretty much stays the same.
This goes both ways - the people saying it’s fine are making assumptions too.
For me this goes the other way - the feedback is then all the more important because if you don’t address it now - your stuck with these undesirable changes during future seasons.
