"Solo Players" Help me understand...what kind of content are you truly looking for?

Community General Discussion
143

A perfect MMO, does not differentiate between solo and group players, but unites them all.

What this means is quite simple.

You can go out in the world and hunt a bear and find the best item in the game, as that bear did swallow it. just like you can meet 19 friends and hunt down a dragon and find the best gear in a treasure box.

When MMO´s were invented, this was the way of doing it and you had no advantage by playing in groups. It was quite the opposite, it had a major downside, as you could be killed and robbed by them.

In Vanilla WOW, we still had glimpses of that left, some recipes like Crusader Strike could be found in the open world. However, as more time passed, WOW turned into a group or die system. So unless you group, certain rewards were not available for you, which is a terrible design choice.

Back then, humans were in general more kind and you had a reputation to lose on your realm, so that group play was not as toxic as it is today.

So if we look at WOW today, then we see a system in place, where you have to hit a button to group up and after you did, you are rewarded more than when you don´t hit this button and remain solo.

Delves have copied that system, by tuning it for groups. Yes I know, you can do them solo, but the balance is for groups, which makes the entire system look stupid and who knows, maybe they come up with a Mythic Delve system soon, that you can only enter in a group like they did with Scenarios.

To come back to your original question “what kind of content people are looking for”, well it´s simple.

Joining a group should not be mandatory to find the best gear in the game, or to craft it, or to reach a pvp rank. Everything that you can achieve in a group, must be available for players that solo.

So if a player decides to specialize in crafting, then he should be able to gather all materials and patterns solo, just like a player who want´s to find the best weapon for his class, should be able to do so solo.

It´s a silly system that joining a raid with 19 people, offers you more rewards, than playing an entire year solo, doing all the quests, discovering all the areas…

The entire system of going out into the world, hunting down animals for leather, looking for herbs, entering caves with a chest is broken and needs to come back like at the start of Vanilla, where exactly this was rewarding content for solo players.

If groups no longer gain better rewards, then this would also help the community, as I do believe that many grumpy and toxic people in groups, don´t even want to be there and only join because they are forced to do so.

This would create a less toxic atmosphere if we could get rid of them as then, only people would play in groups, who want to socialize with others.

I agree with this,

playing in an MMO means, you interact with others. The question is just, on free will or by force and right now, WOW is doing it by force, when all rewards are locked behind the group system.

2 Likes
144

I like delves in theory. In execution they fail on 3 major points.

  1. They are a less productive method of farming valorstones (the most obnoxiously tedious resource in this xpac) than wax farming (I hate wax farming).
  2. They don’t provide enough of an economic incentive. Which is to say, wax farming is a better source of gold/herbs/ore/etc than delves.
  3. This is the most major point. All the rewards from engaging with delves are basically equivalent to green items aesthetically/xmog wise. The sets suck. The dirigible mount sucks. All the cosmetic rewards are the equivalent of spending 500g buying random greens on the AH. They should have been awesome enough to provoke engagement from players across the board and instead they were lame enough to make me sigh and conclude “so this is how little they ACTUALLY think of solo players…”

That’s what I think about delves,.

1 Like
145

i dont know if your referring to the 2 vendor guys that use the delve currency… i looked at everything and saw absolutely nothing that i would ever want lol! Prob some others out there found cool stuff on them hopefully!

146

They need to put the world back into World of Warcraft. Retail WoW is basically a glorified hybrid ARPG that allows grouping.

The developers copied so much from Diablo 3 over the years, and most of it hasn’t really made WoW a better MMO.

I think its funny how WoW turned into this aggressive seasonal live service game in order to try to drum up interest for patches, but I think this model has actually hurt the game.

WoW started out with a little too much focus on instance content, and it has only doubled down on that design philosphy over the years.

The game is basically a lobby game that relies on a small amount of content to keep players busy. The rest of the game is kind of left to rot, it is just window dressing in order to sell expansions, but at the end of the day, WoW has become a M+ simulator.

1 Like
147

New player here.
Love rpgs.
Wow is first mmo.
Learned hard way need time machine to play game or enjoy it solo. Or buy gold and solo.
Those are only options.
You cant do dungeons as new player, only quests, will be kicked. Even from low level normals dungeons. People act like its life or death event. Even on normal at levem 20. So much so makes game unplayable other than solo. Have to buy gear and solo or will never learn anything.
Theres no other options.
Player base made it so.
You cant learn in this game. Youll be kicked and have to wait 30 minutes for nothing.
Maybe watch yt videos with that time you spent 15 dollars on so when the toxic players call you trash you can at least say you tried.
Wont matter though

2 Likes
148

Not if the content takes a long time. If this is really the model, elites only want rushrushrushGOGOGO and if you give easy content that drops 1 piece of gear and takes an hour, they will avoid it like the plague.

But frankly mage tower sort of disproves your model. Every scrub has it, and it’s quite often you will see people with mythic dungeon completions that think mage tower was hard.

I think you’re partly right. Your noobs though, are far more willing to fail multiple times where your elites want it one-shotted and every skippable pull skipped or they start kicking.

149

I just like pushing keys until I’m forced to find an actual group/static. Some seasons are better then others, you can get pretty high pugging. Others not so much.

150

So far, in my experience, I think I’m losing gold with delves, not gaining.

1 Like
151

Gunnar - “I don’t understand what you want.”

Atticus Noble - “Well, it’s simple. I want everything.”

152

Solo content, hmm can I have a house (solo or grouped) to decorate with maybe a farm and lake too?
#minecraft #palia #animalcrossing

153

t8 delve vault gives 3/6 hero track gear that can be upgraded to 5/6 which gives mythic appearances. :smiley:

so to answer your question, i like transmog, they give transmog. but to be fair i havnt really done much of them because i know not to jump into new features unless i want to be paying my sub to bug test their poor implementation.

since they’re completely optional i am excited jump into them once things things have settled, no rush. pvp gearing alts and keeping up on weeklies for upgrade materials is taking most of time rn anyways.

154

I enjoy the delves. I like the concept of dungeons, but I don’t care for toxic players. Open world bosses are awesome too. Raids are meh to me. Compelling story lines are cool, but I prefer ones that have to do with fighting and conflict, not personal emotional growth. I love crafting too. I miss smelting. Something about that was very satisfying.

155

I can totally relate to your experience. I have a slightly different history, up until Shadowlands, I’d usually push through heroic progression for the first raid and then step back once we got the kill.

These days, I just don’t have the patience for the community … or maybe I’m just not willing to sacrifice the time anymore. More often than not, my interactions when trying to raid or run M+ tend to be negative, which has taken the fun out of it for me.

What I’d really love to see is a queue system for all raid difficulties and M+. Ideally, it would be driven by player metrics and data, creating a sort of hidden “MMR” system. This wouldn’t just look at item level or kill history, but also at combat activity and other meaningful metrics … kind of like what WarcraftLogs does with its data. Blizzard has all the information they need to use machine learning and group players based on their true skill level, so they’re well-matched for tougher content. Guilds can still operate as usual, so nothing would be taken away from that aspect of the game.

I’m optimistic that within the next 12-24 months, we’ll see the beginnings of a system like this.

For context, I’m a software engineer with a focus in machine learning for innovative legal enterprise products. As a data enthusiast, I challenge Blizzard to leverage their vast pool of data to create a lasting, evergreen system like this. Not only would it enhance gameplay, but it would also build a bridge to all PvE group content, ensuring every player, regardless of their social standing in the game, has access to challenging content that matches their skill level.

156

Yes, I like Delves.
It’s the kind of content I was expecting. It just needs a little adjustment in terms of numbers. But mechanically and in terms of gameplay, it’s what I was looking for.

157

Stuff like the weekly events in DF would be perfect, surges, rifts, etc. I prefer being out in the actual world in this game, not having to constantly feel there is no other choice besides instanced content to progress my characters. That is why I really enjoyed Legion, and BFA also. The game has always had more than enough dungeons, raids, bg’s etc for players to enjoy. Doesn’t need more of it in my opinion. Plus, those events in DF there was usually a bunch of players around doing them also, and that is what a mmo should be where you see others out, and about doing things, not just huddled in faction hub waiting on a queue to pop. Delves are just another Blizzard gimmicky toy to lure people into more instanced content. Dabbled with some dungeons, and LFR in DF, but the weekly world events was the primary method I went with to gear up my retail characters. Never needed mythic item level stuff. Upgraded my weekly event stuff, and it was fine. If they don’t get around to adding things like a dreamsurge, rifts, then I’m perfectly fine with holding on to my $15 a month until next xpac pre launch event :crazy_face:

1 Like
158

Right? And it’s always ends up being that person 2-shotting the elite, and then immediately flying away in a hurry.

I don’t want to go back to the days of competing with other players for mobs via tagging, always hated that.

159

Where is that listed at? In-game?

160

So much this! /chefkiss

161

When you’re at the entrance and select the dropdown for tier level, the tooltip should tell you the recommended gear level for that tier.

1 Like
162

they are not intended to be a method of farming valorstones

they are not intended to provide economic incentive.

they’re intended to be an alternate endgame pillar in the vein of m+ or raids. raids only make you gold if you get and sell BOEs, otherwise you spend gold to do it. same with m+, except not even a chance at BOEs there.

just like m+ :slight_smile: