Initially they said if you 3 chest the ilvl goes up, etc. But the alternative is more score for not 3 chesting.
OP, I’m not sure what you’re trying to solve with this suggestion. Are you trying to reward players, regardless of how they perform? Do well get more gear, do poorly get more points. That makes no sense whatsoever. How do you justify someone performing objectively worse, having a higher M+ score than someone who has achieved more?
I think the end game is keeping people from leaving groups by offering loot rewards to slower runs. It ignores that a good portion of runs exist outside the loot reward paradigm.
This might be the worst idea I have ever seen.,
That’s backwards. The suggestion buffs the group so that, good or bad, the group will complete the run close to the expected time. If the group is bad, easy mode kicks in. If the group is good, they never get to the point where easy mode kicks in. In the game, having gear IS easy mode. There are now two reward systems in the game, ilvl and rating. ILVL straight up unlocks easy mode for the game, which, good or bad, players all want to unlock. The good players didn’t think ilvl was a good measure of skill, so raider_io (players themselves) invented a new reward system, rating. With this new now-ubiquitous reward system, the players themselves lock other players out of content that they think those players are not good enough for. There’s no point locking bad players out of gear anymore.
So, yeah, I think we are at the point where everyone should just be handed gear, even with the stats of the very best gear, just for playing the game on even the easiest setting. All that gear does is make all settings easier, making the tiresome stuff less annoying. So what if they suck? Their rating reflects that and other players will not invite them to hard mode. So what if bad players unlock easy mode? That still doesn’t get them into hard mode.
Ilvl isn’t a replacement for experience. There are plenty of 249+ ilvl raid teams that are still doing 100+ pulls on mythic bosses. Some people, you could have a genned in bis character and they’d still do sub 5k dps.
Gear is intended as a reward. From the earliest forms of this type of game the paradigm has always been ‘kill the monster or beast (the actual meaning of the word “mob” in an rpg context) and take weapons and armor from it’s corpse to use as you’re own.’
It has never been ‘injure the mob, die and resurrect at the graveyard with new stuff.’
Ilvl as a measurement is valuable for just a few things; determining a players relative position in the tier cycle, and whether or not they mathematically have the power to overcome the content they are attempting. Knowledgeable players know you can’t rely on it to indicate a player’s relative skill level.
I think the problem is that ilvl is one of the few forms of “progression” that remains achievable when players reach their skill caps.
I think OP wants to make sure that is easier to do. When they can’t get ilvl by defeating harder content, they want the ilvl to come to them.
We already have that with valor though. 
Ilvl isn’t a replacement for experience.
Quite true, and rating now exists which provides a number that players can use to determine that experience/skill.
Gear is intended as a reward.
It is. But what is that reward? Either it’s stats, the effect of which is to make the game easier, or it’s pixels, when no more stats upgrades exist. It’s strange that a player should need to get good in order to have easier content. Isn’t easy content there so that everyone, including bad players, has something, hopefully fun, to do?
It has never been ‘injure the mob, die and resurrect at the graveyard with new stuff.’
I wouldn’t go this far, still gotta play the game to get the new stuff. More like: 'injure the mob, die, resurrect, get a buff, kill the mob, then get new stuff". That’s effectively how things work when levelling, except that the “get a buff” part often amounts to “get a level”. In group content however, telling the bad player to get a level in order to get a buff just annoys the other players, so just hand out the buff straight away so everyone can complete what the group is doing. Then, the rating reward deals with the question of whether a group should invite a player to hard modes.
I think OP wants to make sure that is easier to do. When they can’t get ilvl by defeating harder content, they want the ilvl to come to them.
Pretty much. Still gotta play the game though. And I’d prefer to avoid the other players getting overly annoyed when they find themselves stuck with players not as good as them.
Raiding starts at LFR and Mythic+ starts a key level 2. You’re intentionally ignoring this content because it doesn’t satisfy your need to achieve a ‘big boy’ ilvl without doing the work.
You’re entire argument boils down to a plea for high ilvl gear for performing poorly. You want Determination stacks for M+. In my opinion, that’s not a good solution to anything.
You’re intentionally ignoring this content because it doesn’t satisfy your need to achieve a ‘big boy’ ilvl without doing the work.
I’m not ignoring it at all. It’s in the progression path but that’s not where the path ends. If it does, that’s where the sub ends or, for some, that’s where they buy carries.
There is nothing “big boy” about an ilvl. You are still ignoring that the effect of gear is to make the game easier, an effect that is enjoyable for all players but not needed by good players to progress. It’s like putting on training wheels. The extremely good players actually complete the game within two weeks and that means they beat the game well before getting the gear. They beat the hardest mode without the gear. Locking easy mode behind hard content is just a scheme to convince bad players to quit before the game runs out of content.
Telling people to “git gud” has been tried again and again, and it has failed every time. It’s a leisure activity. People log in to have fun killing some monsters, sometimes with friends, and to be entertained by some interesting story and characters. Determination stacks and gear let people accomplish that.
If one is looking to flex their “big boy” status, even with the distortion of boosting, io rating is a much more meaningful display. Heck, at my usual camera distance I don’t even see anyone’s fancy pixels, they’d be better off with a title that is their rating if they really want to show off.
I think you’re very confused about gameplay loops.
Gear gives you stats, which then enable/prepare you for higher levels of content. The idea is that there’s constantly higher content for you to do by the time you run out of content. In the case of something like M+ which is infinitely scaling, that’s guaranteed.
So by doing M+15, you’re getting gear from there which should make you ready to tackle M+17. As you get even more gear, you’ll be able to move onto M+19. Alongside gear, you might also level up in skill and experience, and so move onto M+20, +21, +22, etc. That’s the design.
The way you’re casting it, you’re making it sound like people are doing M+15, to make it easier to do M+15. Which is … not how games work.
Gear gives you stats, which then enable/prepare you for higher levels of content.
At first glance, sure, by providing stats that simplify their next level of the game down to their skill level. So long as there are still gear upgrades, simplification is still possible. But suppose a player’s skill level is such that they are only good enough for a +8 if they have +13 gear; for them, gear from a +14 is there to make a +9 possible. At the other end of skill level, some might clear +15 with +8 gear, why wouldn’t we then say that it’s the +9 that is supposed to prepare one for +16? With such a broad range of skill levels, all we can conclude is that gear (and levels while levelling) simplifies all content levels, that is, prepares players for their personal next level of content. Why should the lower skilled player be locked out of simplification? They aren’t locked out of levelling. They gear and level more slowly if they bother to at all, ending up putting in even more time to accomplish a lower maximum level as the skilled player, to the point that upgrades still exist to let them do so.
You’re using a lot of words, but your fundamental premise is off. There’s no such thing* as “simplify the game down to their skill level”.
Any individual piece of content gives you a certain requirement to get it down. It leaves it up to you if you can get there with improving your gear, improving your skill (whether that’s class/spec or general game skill), or employing a specific strategy. Any player can choose to do any of them, or even all of them. In response, harder content doesn’t get “simpler”; if anything, even after you have the gear and skill required, it remains an objectively harder and more complex accomplishment to fulfil (than easier content).
A lower skilled player can improve their skill at any time, just like they can improve their gear. There’s no such thing as being “locked out”, except maybe at the very very top end where someone can look at M+35 and conclude that that may just be mathematically impossible for now.
*Within reason, if people get to the point like with Sarth or certain Mage Towers where you can overpower phases completely and just zerg, that’s content destroyed, but none of those are really intended or designed for.
Aside from what was discussed above, this is sheer nonsense. Harder content and levelling serve very different functions, and no player is “locked out” from doing harder content anyway.
You’re confirming that you’re extremely confused about how gameplay works.
But suppose a player’s skill level is such that they are only good enough for
A person’s meant to end up at the content that’s their natural skill level over time. If you’re a Mythic raider in a guild that normally sees the last boss down, you’ll probably spend the entire patch working your way through the earlier bosses, to then get the last boss down in time for the new patch. In the new patch, you’ll be starting with earlier bosses once more, you are not the person who’s going to get World First and go “I have end boss dead within a month”.
Similar progression works in content like M+. It’s a little more nebulous since seasons don’t directly equate to each other, e.g. in one season +12 ends up at roughly the equivalent difficulty of next season’s +16, or the season after that’s +9.
Side note: I wish they’d stop the seasonal scaling to m+. Leave s1 m+ alone (ilvl drops and affixes) and make that the 1-15 key range, swap to s2 seasonal at 16 in s2 and add the next whatever ilvls. By the end of the expac, top teams are doing +85 or w/e and the progression ladder remains throughout.
Sure, the key climb will be a little daunting in alts, but you already get the same key level completed the previous week as a starter key the next week anyway.
Why do you think you are entitled to gear for not completing content?
It would be more than a little “daunting” for alts.
And the whole idea comes with its own set of problems; I can see 2-3 technical issues offhand, not to mention the scaling curve would by nature be wonky AF - you’d basically have to superimpose several different formulae onto each other, it’d be a mess to figure out and work with.
I have my own preference for how they should handle seasons, but if I had to choose between status quo, and that idea, status quo seems better to me in just about every way.
So two groups start +15 Theatre of Pain at the same time. Group one finishes 10m under timer while group 2 finishes 10 minutes over timer. And group 2 gets better loot?? Um no.
And rating going down while taking longer is how it already works. M+ is fine. And its only one level. You can make that back up easily. People dropping keys happens but its not nearly as bad as the forums make it out to be. Although I have noticed a minor increase. When M+ first came out dropping someones key was a huge taboo and hardly anybody did it. Now its slightly more common. In the lower keys mainly, 10 and below IME.
cracks knuckles My solo key opportunity is HERE!
“I award you no points and my god have mercy on your soul”