I mean almost 30 years of MMOs sort of says that yes grouping together to overcome the enemy IS the central idea of the genre.
There is more than 5 man content though. You have your 5 man content and your 20 man content. Now many MMOs would have even larger raids available but that is even further from the idea being posed in this thread.
If people want to have a solo game experience I can name about 50 games that would provide a better solo experience because they are entirely designed to do so from the ground up.
Well, when people are near heroic gear, and wanting better gear, kinda leans towards the upper tier of gear in my eyes.
And Blizzard I doubt will ever change the model of how gear is obtained. Even when they did valor tokens etc, the higher tiered ones were locked behind a raid on a certain difficulty. The ones wanting the gear, still won’t be happy, honestly don’t think they ever will be.
Can they offer it in a connected world where I can make friends as I run around playing the game?
Because if they can’t, they’re not what I want out of this.
The same argument was made against mythic+. Just sayin’. When people back in cata were like ‘I want a way to play dungeons and gear up’ people said ‘Blizzard will never change it so raids aren’t the only way to get great gear’ and… well… things changed.
You can encounter people in the world just fine right now. I group with them occasionally to do WQs faster or kill other faction. Outside of that there is very little MMOs do to encourage the multiplayer content. If anything WoW is probably the most solo friendly in that most of the world content can be overcome without a big group whereas most MMOs would have multiple things that would require help to kill (the amount depending on your skill).
I think you misunderstand what solo players want. Either inadvertently or intentionally, not sure yet.
Solo friendly would be meaningful content that can be done solo. If they just made every mob on the overworld level 1, sure I’d be able to do everything solo but that wouldn’t be solo friendly.
Time and again players have explicitly stated that this is not what they’re asking for. What they want is a progression path that gradually upgrades their gear over the course of months of active playtime as opposed to the current method of time gating it behind an hour’s worth of playtime per week for six weeks at the beginning of the patch drop. I don’t know why that’s so hard to understand or why it gets interpreted as, “Giev mythic raid gear nao!!!”
That’s already the case though. As new tiers of content are released with each patch, new gear is available not only to raiders etc, but through other means, higher then the previous tier.
Don’t waste your time. There are people in this thread who are offering meaningful discussion about the topic like Sarama. This one isn’t going to ever offer anything meaningful to the discussion, so best to just not engage and let his replies simply serve to bump the topic back into peoples’ eyes.
This is just not true though. The only reason wows open world content is solo-able is because you can kill almost everything in two globals, but this content is neither fun nor rewarding, which is the point of a lot of these complaints. And second, other mmos most definitely have more endgame content than just a rotating 20-world quest for players to work on when their friends aren’t online.
To be honest, I don’t know. The solo gear was gated so far away that I didn’t really try to gear an alt just yet in this game. I have an alt monk and I was playing it, but the world just felt annoying and the growth of my character too slow.
But I’m not discussing the feeling of threat so much as I am the time it takes to kill something. As we get power, that should reach a more acceptable level. I liked when the world started tough and then eventually became something I could chain pull and AOE down or something.
I guess I just don’t really like scaling at max level. Imagine if raid kept scaling based on your ilvl. It’s a weird design in this sort of game.
If the threat continues to grow with your gear then what’s the point of better gear? So we’re constantly chasing the dragon to feel powerful.
I understand why they did it. They wanted to keep the content feeling somewhat relevant, but the way they did it only made the reward structure feel irrelevant.
Sadly, it does suck in a way that it scales that way. But that’s how every MMO is currently where gear is the progression.
If there are better means, no ones discovered the right method of it yet. You’ll see claims that other MMO’s offer different, but it’s blatantly false or through ignorance of them not actually playing that MMO fully.
Did you not read what I said about time gating and active play? What is fun about unsubbing until July, when your two hours a week will once again trickle in gear upgrades for six weeks? It’s not just about being handed gear upgrades eventually. It’s about being able to actively earn them over the entire course of a given patch.
I don’t think WoW’s (mediocre) support for solo play is that big an issue, for something that was sold as an MMORPG.
The bigger problem is that the entire industry is now convinced that every single game ever made for any reason has to have, if not be centered completely around, multiplayer modes.
That’s a discussion for a different thread entirely.
It really is. Why? Let’s take a reason for meaningful solo content that COMPLETELY disregards the people who are in this thread who PRIMARILY want to play solo. Let’s focus on a theoretical player here:
In a week this player might do a few m+ and a few bgs… that’s only like… say 5 hours(5 M+ and 5 BGs). If a person is only playing five hours a week… they’re probably not gonna be able to justify that subscription for very long.
Because even people who like grouping can’t be grouping 24 hours a day. People group occasionally for specific content. They need stuff to do between those group activities. And solo content is supposed to fill that gap. Right now… it sucks.
Most people I know, unless they like pet battles or alt leveling, log in for their M+ day and their raid day… and then log out and don’t come back. That’s not a good thing for the game long-term.