And further alienate a giant portion of the playerbase in favour of an outdated game model that is raiding. Yes great idea. Many more negative changes to the loot system and I’m abandoning ship.
3 Likes
boy bye. if you think something drastically easier should reward better and more loot than something much more difficult we don’t need you. a +15 gives mythic loot out of the box. anything beyond that is epeening. do you think a +15 is anywhere near as difficult as the last boss of a mythic raid?
welp. that last paragraph went darker than your earlier post. Its not necessarily wrong, but im an optimist. I also believe in the iron law of blizzard’s unintended consequences (guild finder being the absolute prima facie case: Guilds are dying, how do we fix them? Lets incentivise belonging to them with a bunch of perks! It’ll obviously be better to be in a guild than not in a guild! Youre right! Make it happen!: Cue the birth of the cess-pool guild and the complete collapse of social guilds).
And to be fair to them, i think they want to square the circle, but its… well, its incredibly complicated. Even our little back and forth illustrates the issues (compounding on issues). Kevin Jordan says the meta group wants to flex. (groups 2-4) and have to do it in an indirect way because the game doesnt give them the legitimate content to do so (by which he means stratifying that player base through hard barriers of achievement - for example, you need to clear ssc before you can even tackle BT (TBC ref)).
Instead we have every guild being an heroic guild (normal is VERY MUCH meaningless since it has no attached achievement worth anything in the PUG world and so doesnt deliver as a hard barrier in the way it probably should), aotc being something a huge minority of players usually end up with, and absolutely no other measure outside of mythic (which they usually cant achieve unless theyre in the top 2 groups or pay for a carry).
Theres not only no in-game measure, theres also no visual measure. AotC is apparently too commonplace. CE is too niche. So theyre all stuck in this no mans land of differentiation. Thus, the logical progression is to punch down based on solipsistic emotion. You shouldnt have this! I earned it!
And this sort of strikes at the heart of another issue (ive already elaborated on the first one - moving people out of the LFD/solo game), stratification: Measures of accomplishment. This game sorely lacks these. As a type 5, pure casual, when i see someone preening in game right now, i have literally no idea if its a cool transmog or its because they did something current. I have no idea if i want to run the old raids they ran to get that set or if its something i need to work toward (in an expansion or two). Its all just noise. Zero signal.
So instead they punch down. And of course they will. Because thats how they can cement their position as someone who achieved something in game. Its a teensy bit tragic and its because the visual design has messed them over with no clear delineation against the 4 tiers of raiding with minor tints that no one really cares about, alongside the lack of actual accomplishment (anyone in tier 3 should achieve aotc (alongside anyone in tier 2 and 4 with gold). What can blizzard hope to do against that now that theyve decided every patch is a reset and a new raid making the old raid obsolete…
I ask because if you want IN-TIER stratification, this is what needs to happen. But i also ask because the answer is NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
It would cause a riot in the playerbase. So again, blizzard has no real way out of the corner theyve painted themselves into without seriously angering the brunt of their playerbase. Unless…
Unless they act in good faith and stop promoting raiding as the be all and end all of the game. Unless they actually put mythic and its ladder on the same footing theyve put both raiding and high end arena on. Perhaps then we’d see less emotive jockeying for position, and more maneuvering for position in the high end.
This is weird. I honestly had no idea id end up here. The degrading of mythic plus gear which i care not a jot about as someone who never plays mythic dungeons and is a hardcore level 5 casual, was a huge misstep. Then again, they probably know that if raiding wasnt on the arbitrary podium it is, they could never warrant the resources they devote to it. Thank god for LFR then! (a punchline i also never expected to make).
Afterthought: Blizzard, its so much more fun to talk about this game than play it. You need to fix that.
5 Likes
This is all true.
I think they can’t really come up with something that satisfies everyone, though. If they buff M+, raiders get annoyed and feel trivialized (“M+ is too lucrative for something that is spammable! It needs to be less lucrative or locked weekly like raids!”). It’s the same issue again and again, really, because at the end of the day you either come down on the side of (1) “yes, you’re right, hierarchy is everything, and nothing should ever even come close to raid gear” or (2) “sorry, you’re wrong, there are more people who play M+ than who raid, and therefore we’re going to reward the highest 5-man content lavishly to reward this large group of players”. You really can’t have both, I think. Someone is going to be put out, regardless of which way you go, and I think Blizzard does realize this. I don’t think they like it, but there isn’t really a way around it.
2 Likes
Spot on. And I think it’s not taking very long at all to become a big problem. I think the devs are already seeing alarms going off in their metrics.
3 Likes
That formatting tho. Dang.
1 Like
Totally agree. They have to annoy someone. The mystery is why it seems to be the casual playerbase this time around? I mean, i get on rants (see all posts above), but tier 5 casuals are just happy chilling along with the program. Feed us some fun things to do and some mild progression and we’re perfectly content.
But instead we’re caught in the crossfire of some indirect war between the tier 2 aspiring-hardcore and the tier 3-4 average player over delineation and bragging rights. Blame us, i suppose, for making the game dumber because your actual end game isnt fit for purpose, (and the game has no way at all of incentivising players to perhaps bother to break out of the warm comfy environs of solo game play and hop on a ladder that seems to make you all miserable?)
I dunno. The game is fun. Its been fun almost (until 8.3 for me) all the way through BfA. Covenants are fun. Covenant stories are fun. Torghast (torments notwithstanding - and please dont restrict me to either aggroing a maw rat on my rogue or tiers 1+2) are fun. The maw is annoying fun. The gear sucks. But then again, being undergeared and still doing the stuff is FUN. I dunno. I really like SLs. But im genuinely worried about 2 months from now when things really start consolidating and we return to the errors of the past.
3 Likes
its beautiful, right.
1 Like
It’s true enough, I think. I suppose the thought Blizzard had in targeting casuals to be annoyed in this expac is that they think they can get casuals (your cat 5 players) to remain subbed long enough via covenant story and renown growth, while limiting their gear progression. That’s obviously an experiment, and we will see how it turns out I think, one way or the other. For now they will stick to the terms of the experiment, likely, to see how it plays out.
2 Likes
we both know how it’ll turn out. Watcher knows how it’ll turn out. One of his first big actions as a game developer was to douse the hell-fires of no-flying in WoD.
Its not quite on the same level (with a mass riot and unsub). But once players hit that wall where the LFG demand exceeds the ilvl drops in mythic… we’re basically just repeating history. Which should be genuinely embarrassing for professional mmo game designers who should know this is OBVIOUSLY whats going to happen because they’ve literally seen the data of it already happening barely 5 years ago.
3 Likes
How are you defining casuals here? I still believe the MAJORITY of players are casual not this “hard core” moniker that seems so sought after in this game.
Raiding alone does not make you hard core anymore than pvp does.
Hard core are the players in guilds that push world first clears of new top end content. That’s small percentage compared against the whole playerbase.
3 Likes
Likely true.
2 Likes
Something I have learned about Ion is, he will take an idea that is interesting and make it close to as unfun and or unreasonable as possible. By the time his ego fades away due to reality and he does listen to the community they try to make changes but it is usually too late.
I am talking about the really obvious stuff like Azerite Armor, Legion Legendaries, “choices being interesting”, no flying, and personal loot. The lack of loot is something they can fix easily. Even though the toxic people say it is fine, it’s not.
But will Ion fix it before it is too late? History says no.
4 Likes
How so? This loot drop system worked fine for vanilla-cata why is it suddenly now a problem? Casual players existed back then aswell
Imagine believing this xD
https://i.imgur.com/7tPk6Es.png
Don’t judge a book by it’s cover, even if some items are only item level 200-210, versus 213-220 Heroic, they are still BiS for most classes. M+ drops some pretty insane trinkets and optimal pieces of loot versus raid.
also you’re neglecting this:
https://i.imgur.com/rUWMuJj.jpeg
Where I get to choose from 6 items up to item level 223
So it will probably literally just be by the second great vault (1 week from now) until I am fully geared in decent leveled gear.
1 Like
Mythic+, the Meta community, dungeon finder, raid finder, and world quests were a lot of fun in Vanilla and BC. Yep same exact loot system. I really enjoyed the Mythic+ in Wrath.
Don’t you remember the meta Analytic back then?
1 Like
Well, you are forgetting not everyone likes Mythic+ Dungeons. It’s Mario speedrunning multiplayer. No thanks.
Im an unabashed huge fan of ion. I would love to sit in his head and listen to his thoughts. I dont subscribe to the idea that he is hardcore or gtfo. But i think theyve painted themselves into some corners they cant quite get out of. I would LOVE it, if instead of chatting with players like sloot or preach (where the audience is looking for reassurance on min-maxing), he went on hazels channel and approached the concerns casual players have with the direction of the game currently.
I think we’d maybe see a more nuanced approach to issues like gear and skill gaps, or mechanisms to transition players out of the solo game and into the ‘three pillars’ of the core game (or even, if they feel this to be the right direction, rewarding different types of players purely for the content they choose to engage in - the breaking up of the theme park philosophy). I expect he has genuine thoughts about it and would love to share them. I just wish he would, instead of leaving it to paranoid idiots like me to try and ascertain them.
cant forget there’s a raiding section above that M+ section where I get to choose from 3 loot pieces:
This is one of the truly weird things i struggle with.
In vanilla-tbc i would literally spam trade for groups. Id also run my own groups with absolute impunity. It was literally just the way we played the game. I genuinely wonder why i wont put myself forward nowadays. I mean this was basically a proto LFG. Indeed, when mythic dungeons were first announced in wod, id happily hit the trade channel and find/make a group. There seems no rational distinction. Perhaps something has changed…