Dokthar - I don’t have a regular schedule that’s the problem. I can;t commit to any raiding times. I rely on pugging when i am able to play as do many many other players … who are screwed by the way SL has reverted back to scarce loot with massive cumulative advantages for raiders.
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Well written post and spot on. Blizz is about to get a wake up call.
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Really well written post and really captures it - I wish they had you in the boardroom at Bliz.
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Great post, Ippo! You explained everything so accurately and eloquently and are fair to all sides.
Community managers: Pass on Ippo’s essay to the devs!
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To be fair, hasn’t the raiding community been bad since the introduction of lfr? If you take away skill/community and let casuals to just mow through content, why would those casuals feel the need to repeat the content in a higher level of difficulty?
And no, I’m not praising Ralph.
there was so much garbage pve gear dropping they literally made a scrapper last expansion in an attempt to make all the useless gear a little less useless.
Wildstar - where the housing was absolutely amazing and the gameplay was a never ending series of kicks in the 'nads. Oh yes, I played it.
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The annoying thing is there is a solution. Or at least a raft of changes that would deliver a solution.
The first and most obvious: Break down the perception of the hardcore game being some kind of impenetrable psychological wall.
How?
Think about vanilla (in ye olde days, not meta gamed classic), and how players found guilds and how guilds found players? Usually in one of the dungeons or a wsg (pre multi-server). Almost always in one of the end game dungeons (LBRS/UBRS/BRM/Scholo/Strat). There was a healthy combination of hardcore players and less hardcore players. They mixed in the same content.
Compare now… the playerbase has split up and rarely intermingles. LFG players do LFG things (and if they REEAAALLY have to, some LFD/world things). Whilst the LFD players do LFD things. Its two ships passing in the night.
But… we HAVE something that COULD perform that exact function in mythic dungeons. And to some extent it has worked for those folks wanting to push through. But the LFG tag… its kind of a barrier.
Sooooo… obvious solution: Mythic 0-3 on LFD. Voila, barrier smashed. Once youve done mythic 3 a few times, even if its on LFD, not only will you be more confident of the actual difficulty curve and your ability to handle it, you’ll also be more confident in posting and leading your group in LFG. Literally nothing changes. Most people who want to do higher keys get to ignore 1-3 and leapfrog as they already do. No one gets more gear than they deserve. They still have to complete the key and do everything a PuG group would have to do. No one gets put out at all.
But suddenly mythic dungeons are now on the table as a hybrid of LFD/LFG content. And the incentive is now there to move up where you will start to actually engage in the real end game content. Which of course increases the available talent pool of potential guildies and raiders helping stem attrition and burnout or wholesale server ditching from lack of players.
Again, blindingly obvious solution to the blindingly obvious problem.
Oooh ETA: One more advantage… and its a biggie, it pulls back the need for meta systems as a means to counter the cyclical sub. People unsub (mostly from the casual playerbase) when they run out of stuff to do or the content becomes overly repetitive and boring. The more players you can transition into the real end game, the less likely they will hit a wall of devoured content, and the greater likelihood they will retain their sub.
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I can’t possibly like this post enough. Sums up very nicely how I feel about the current expansion.
I resubbed for 6 months just prior to SL launching cause I figured, like most expansions, I’d play longer than that and I already regret it.
SL is going like WoD for me, I played for the first few months and then didn’t come back till the next expansion.
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If they want to subscribe to continue to repeat the content they like at the same level of difficulty they like, what’s wrong with that?
All of which has been nerfed to make it pointless as anything but chores.
The path to transition from the casual game to the hardcore game must be optional.
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I would never argue otherwise.
Ah so much time wasted to have the commant flagged into no show. Thank you GD it was a TL;DR lol
Speaking as a filthy casual, not they didn’t
Doing normal/heroic raids or m+ is not hardcore in no way shape or form, is just playing the game. People have 2 options to get into it:
- Play with the same group of people when available, you dont have to schedule every single day, just invite them when you see them online.
- Make your own group.
The only barrier is the one people impose upon themselves, no one is going out of their way to keep people from progressing.
You are the perfect example of why this problem exists. This “You don’t actually play the game, so I’ll tell you what and how to play and you will play it or else” mentality is going to be responsible for massive unsubs.
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Next time OP should use a power point presentation.
Lets be real, people mostly want the loot, they dont care about anything else. Is not hard to get into raiding or m+, just a little time consuming depending how far you want to go.
I never said people doing WQ or what ever are not playing the game, I meant that raiding/m+ is just the same thing, you just have to put your time into actually getting into them and not just doing “casual” content as people put it in this topic.
If you never put the time or effort beyond applying to a couple of m+ groups beyond your ilv, you wont ever break into regular pugs.
Blizzard actually careens between catering to one of the groups, and then to the other one, as between expacs. You can easily go through the expacs since TBC and categorize them as “casual” or “hardcore” oriented, and it tends to play out and ripple into who retains subs as well. Blizzard has a very hard time balancing the content in a way that is equally appealing to both sides of the playerbase for an extended period of time, because the two sides are to some extent incommensurate in their expectations/wants/demands – that is, the core of what one side considers “good, healthy design” is the epitome of what the other sees as “toxic” and vice versa. There really is very little middle ground between the two here.
Vanilla was different because the game was new, leveling was time consuming itself, and the game was not metagamed to anything like the degree it is now, so the approach taken there doesn’t work in today’s gaming community.
This is a case in point. The hardcore will balk at this, precisely because a part of the “difficulty” is not having the content be LFD. Philosophically, the hardcore players believe all LFD content should offer mediocre at best rewards, because it is easy to get into, and that there should be a bright line drawn between that content, and its rewards, and non-LFD content, and its rewards. In other words, the dividing line between casuals and hardcores. You’re proposing violating that principle, which will be objectionable to hardcores – for the hardcore, you shouldn’t get vault gear for running LFD content, even if that content is a M3, because it’s LFD, and putting together groups is a part of the challenge that justifies better rewards.
Note, I am not defending that perspective or advocating it, but merely pointing out the difficulty with even what you have proposed – the attitude I describe has, in fact, been expressly spelled out by any number of hardcore posters in GD over the past week as the number of conversations about this constellation of issues predictably increased when the “bulge” of the playerbase started to try to gear.
Blizzard would be worried that the hardcore subs would be jeopardized by this approach, at least to some degree. You’re correct that currently the “sell” to casuals to stick around is to slowly get more content over time via X/Y/Z systems. The “sell” to hardcores is to stick around through a slow progression curve that both keeps them occupied longer (avoids them unsubbing once geared, because they aren’t geared for a while) and gives them the satisfying feeling of being superior to other players who don’t have that gear, which also encourages them to keep subbed (the status means nada outside the game after all, and you only get regular dopamine hits from it if you are in the game regularly).
This is where the zero sum problem comes along. The more you narrow the gap between casuals and hardcores, the more satisfying you make things for the casuals but the less satisfying you make then for the hardcores, because the hardcores thrive precisely on that “separation” between them and everyone else. It’s why there is the incommensurate problem of the endgame design in WoW, and the main reason why expac designs have tended to lean towards one side of the playerbase or the other.
Shadowlands leans rather heavily towards the hardcore side of the playerbase, clearly. Legion and BfA leaned the other way. It’s like a pendulum. It’s almost like politics, really, because expac design has a similar effect on one’s experience in the game, and perhaps a stronger one, as an election does in the real world. Of course, thankfully, unlike in the real world, in a game you can opt out if you dislike the result of the expac’s design, and I suspect we will see more of this from the casual side of the playerbase in the next 2-3 months. The hardcores will be chipper and happy, though, because they know that this expac is for them, and so they are very happy to tell others that “the game is not for you” or “MMOs are not for you”, despite the game being more or less entirely differently designed in its endgame for the past 4 years while still being an MMO …
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What is this nightmare format of this post
just sent a ticket in and told them i did 4 normal bosses and 2 mythic+2 with 0 loot. GM replied me saying that this is the new loot system, and he himself got nothing out of 11 mythic+ runs. I replied him " Then why am I playing?"
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