But when did I claim to be good at the game, or when did I claim that other players were not good?
I post here to discuss game design, not the skill of individual players (including myself).
I would say the average player is where the most amount of players are. Where is that? 
But thatâs what I would consider the average.
If I had to guess I would say Heroic raiders and random BGers
The average player logs in, generally a bad mood, and complains about the game the entire time they are logged in while sitting afk in oribos or orgrimmar/stormwind
Right right⌠Your post totally wasnât a jab toward me lol⌠Get real and at least own up to it when youâre called out.
Lol⌠Nah, the average player doesnât even visit the forums, so the only ones we see here are the tiny whinny percent, but it makes them all seem that way with the whole vocally loud minority thing.
You are constantly making judgments about who deserves what gear. You do it several times in your post, in fact.
Gear rewards do not automatically generate an item level based on the health and damage of the enemies in that content. Game developers simply have to make arbitrary decisions about what rewards go to what content.
If you think that the gear rewards (or lack of gear rewards) for all Shadowlands content is appropriate, then good for you, you are thinking like an elitist Shadowlands developer that cares more about /time played and token sales than about player numbers and enjoyment.
WoW needs to go back to being a solid MMORPG again.
WoW expansions do well when they have systems where players over time can gear up beyond the base rewards that the content is offering.
WoW expansions also do well when they account for a wide variety of player types, including solo and casual players.
What do you get when you combine these two concepts? Hint: Itâs purple and it makes some elitists players disgruntled.
And by the way, this is not âmy problemâ, but WoWâs problem. Donât assume that I need the gear because I am bad. My retail main already outgears all the suggestions I have made regarding Zereth Mortis.
No, itâs not rocket science. Itâs game design. And proper game design involves more than just scaling up enemy mob and health and gear stats for multiple difficulties, then saying itâs a skill issue as millions leave your game.
WoW was good before and can be good again once elitism is no longer the primary driving force behind its system design.
No, I am explaining how the gearing system works.
Available rewards equivalent to the difficulty and/or effort expended.
Again, not rocket science.
No.
That is just you reframing the fair play ideal that a player deserves rewards equivalent to the difficulty they overcome and/or effort they expend as elitist because you want welfare gear.
(However, if I were I WoW developer, of course I would be looking at the bottom line my design generates because it would not just be my job to create content, but to create profitable content.)
I agree.
However, I do not think the present generation of gamers would have the patience for it, therefore it would not be profitable, so Blizzard is never going to do that as they are a business, not a social service.
And WoW did not do handouts vanilla thru Cata either so you would still up a creek without your welfare gear.
Yes.
And balanced game design supports rewards equivalent to the difficulty and/or effort needed to do the content from which the reward is available.
Not handouts.
People keep trying to push this narrative in their campaign for welfare gear but there is no proof that multiple difficulties in content that is either innately competitive or players have chosen to play as competitive is a defining reason of why people have left the game.
In fact, the majority of people who have publicized their reasons for leaving the game do not even mention this; they talk about the ridiculous amount of systems they need to complete in order to play in the content they want: PvP, M+ and raiding, which all have multiple difficulties.
So clearly players enjoy playing content with multiple difficulties so Blizzardâs multiple difficulty content game design is âproperâ for them.
Elitism isnât the driving force behind the gameâs designs.
The only content specifically created for top end players is:
- Dungeons: 16 and up Mythic+
- Raids: Mythic
- PvP: Top rated
For everyone (including the top end players):
- Role-Playing
- Questing: base game
- Questing: end game (ie attunements, campaigns)
- Questing: repeat dailies/weeklies/WQ (typically for reputation)
- Professions: gathering
- Professions: crafting
- Collecting: toys
- Collecting: mounts
- Collecting: appearances
- Gold gathering/playing the auction house
- Transmogging
- Pet Battles
- Achievements
- Dungeons: normal
- Dungeons: heroic
- Dungeons: mythic
- Dungeons: mythic+ up to 15
- Raid: LFR
- Raid: normal
- Raid: heroic
- PvP: open world, duels, skirmishes, ect (apologies as always to PvP players for poor presentation, I just donât know enough to further categorize)
And then there are World Events, Expansion features (ie treasure hunting in Draenor) and Timewalking which do not fit neatly into any of these categories.
So clearly the majority of WoW content Blizzard is making is for the average player as opposed to the top players.
You keep equating casual with âsoloâ or âbadâ and they are not the same thing.
2 Likes
Exactly⌠Iâm super casual these days, but Iâve spent a lot of time in the top 85th-95th for raiding and m+ in the past, during multiple tiers. Right now, I donât think Iâve even cleared a key above a 10 and I havenât even set foot into the new raid yet lolâŚ
I just donât have the time right now, so I enjoy a little content here and there when Iâm on. But make no mistake, thereâs still a high percentile player behind the monitor, even if my character is sitting in greens and blues. MANY other players are in a similar boat and that definitely doesnât make us bad. It just makes us busy⌠My progress averages out, much like the average WoW playerâs does. If you threw everyone into the same ilvl gear, thereâd be an uproar of elitists crying when they find out a bunch of âcasualsâ are rocking them and that they arenât as good as they think they are, they just get carried by their gear and the fact that they can spend 12-18h a day farming for it faster than an average player can.
Those two players archetypes are not even close in terms of difficulty lol. Challenger/rival is more accurate.
Why is that acceptable? Why must my progress be slowed down to encourage me to play more? Itâs done the opposite as I just recently came back after a roughly 8 month hiatus knowing that end of the expansion is when content is no longer gated and I can enjoy it at the pace I like.
How does Blizzard decide if content is being consumed too quickly? What internal data do they have that shows releasing everything at once makes players stop playing sooner?
Edit: on a side note, personally, because the game is a monthly fee, I take timegating/ unnecessarily slowed progress seriously as it means something I could maybe finish in 1 month gets extended to 3 months.
Fact is, we have no idea what the average player is.
You canât trust the forums because they are heavily biased toward players who love to hate what ever video game they are playing.
You canât trust the CCs because they all have agendas. Most common is trying to keep their click rate up so they can attract advertisers.
Blizzard probably has a good idea but they are not taking.
The only way to tell would be to identify an unbiased representative sample and conduct a poll but no one is doing that. Itâs not clear it would be possible.
So in the end, we have no idea what the average player is.