I have a few thoughts on this.
Probably most importantly is that there seems to be this all or nothing kind of attitude with the change. That the only options were keep status quo or make the change that was made. But there was a middle ground here. I have suggested making new +2 = old +4, new +3 = old +8, new +4 = old +12, then moving from there. I also would’ve been fine with a slight variation like +2, +7, +12, and so on. Or we could just half the number of keys (double the scaling between each level). There were ways to cut down the slog without completely eliminating all low keys.
But even when considering the slog, how bad was it, really? And just to be clear, I am not asking because I never did it, every character I put any time into in the season I go through it myself. The level in which keys are utterly trivial takes like an hour, hour and a half tops to burn through. It’s far less than the slog players who need any amount of help to get to the current level of M0 will face within heroic.
Lastly, I’m not really sure we can truly say the majority of players will avoid a slog with this change. For starters, from one season to the next within an expansion, that slog doesn’t exist for any characters that completed a remotely respectable key near the end of the season. But even beyond that, how many players are good enough to take a fresh character in a season straight into an old +12, save for those being carried? For those that aren’t, they will have to slog through heroic (or other gearing sources) now, which is objectively even easier than when they had to blitz through 2 - 11 keys. It’s certainly true that the players hard stuck below the level of a current M0 is a minority, but I don’t think we can say a majority of players wouldn’t have run any key in that level when preparing a character for the season for gear and/or learning. I really don’t think the slog problem was solved for the majority of players; it was solved for some, but for the majority I’m pretty certain it just shifted to even more trivial content.
For players who have a good handle on their characters in a dungeon environment, sure. But what of the players who don’t? I’m focusing a lot on the players hard stuck today because that is an issue that definitely exists. But honestly I think the bigger problem is 5 years down the road.
Every game, no matter how good, has attrition. The players making up the bulk of key runners will eventually leave those keys for one of any number of reasons, and having a fresh crop of new folks is the way to keep that population up. The idea that any player except for the absolute best of the best can just walk into dungeons and have a great handle on what to do is frankly delusional. And while players might be able to piece those skills together through lower difficulties, guides, videos, training dummies, and the like, all of those things lack the combined usefulness of running a low key that used to exist. It requires players to dedicate time outside of the game mode they’re looking to prepare for, which almost by definition will reduce the pool of players willing to do it.
It’s no secret that WoW is comically bad at teaching new players the game. But the previous M+ system was unquestionably the best effort they have ever had at teaching players an aspect of the game, even if that was by accident. There were still major gaps in communication, but having a low bar to entry and laughably small scaling differences from one key to the next created one of the best environments for learning a game mode that I have ever seen in any video game, not just WoW.
M+10 was not trivial content to most players until they outgeared it. It was never trivial content to players who were content running lower levels even before it. The entire premise that trying to assign a singular skill level to players like this is foolhardy. By the end of the season you might be able to convince me that the majority of M+ players found them easy; but I don’t think the term trivial would apply to most players that weren’t pushing well above +15. And many of the people who were pushing +15s and above likely passed through that +10.
Like I said, that opportunity was during the design or possibly shortly after the release of M+ nearly 8 years ago. For better or worse, Blizzard designed M+ to suit basically everybody, and kept it that way for the better part of a decade. Redefining the target this late after its release, especially given how popular the mode has become in that time, was always going to create a major stir.
I still do not understand who was harmed by the old system outside of gear economy and the slog you mentioned. I could not care less if they restructured the rewards to more equitably give loot around the ease of low keys; I’ve said for years M+ has been too lucrative from a risk vs reward perspective. And I already talked about the slog earlier where I don’t think as many people as you’re portraying are going to be able to avoid it, it’s just shifted where it occurs to even more trivial content.
To try summarize my overall point, what’s most challenging for me to wrap my head around is that I’m still struggling to find who the change really benefits. I work in software development myself; I understand fully that some changes will be made that negatively impact me in some way that I wish wouldn’t be made. But I genuinely try to figure out who the change would benefit and if that’s clear, I can certainly accept that it just wasn’t for me.
But I am truly unsure who this change is targeting based on the lack of a clear beneficiary. The only beneficiary that isn’t a “yeah but…” situation are players who want an easier time getting decent gear - heroic gear is better than it has ever been. But with every other benefit that I can come up with or has been shared doesn’t even appear to be a win for those it supposedly helps.
- Players who have the skill to take a character straight into new +2s at the start of a season are completely unaffected.
- The “slog” of low keys for experienced players shifts to heroic (which is even easier) for many even who are pushing higher keys by season’s end.
- Once passed the key range that was removed, the scaling is the same as previous seasons so keys won’t feel any better to move up for the people who were already at those higher levels to begin with.
- The low level keys worse players spent significant time on were basically skippable by the better players anyway. Outside of bumping some elbows at the start of a season, the higher level players wouldn’t even even be affected by most players in the low level keys.
- If the goal was to raise the level of the game in keys, removing all learning opportunities before +12s is potentially the worst possible way to do it. Players who need the help getting to those levels of keys aren’t going to learn much about performing in keys from heroic dungeons that mediocre geared tanks can solo with ease. It’s unrealistic to expect players to stick with tangentially related chores for gear long enough to become useful in keys; they’re more likely to just quit.
- Even the players who wanted harder dungeon content without a timer gained very little. Does one dungeon that carries a scaling level that already existed in the game that you yourself are telling me is a low bar to clear really justify all the negatives with the change? So now we encourage both those players and the lesser skilled players who want to get into keys to quit after a month or two of a season…