Horrible analogy. I earned flying without completing a single pet battle. There are numerous avenues to gaining rep in this game. You can’t say the same for story content or heritage armour that’s locked behind a raid.
Having said that, I have no issue with popping in a raid to complete a story. I enjoy doing it… the FIRST time around.
Do I care to repeat that experience over and over for better gear? No. I’d rather do something else. Anything else. If that means I can’t have the best of the best gear, so be it. I don’t need top of the line gear to enjoy this game.
If you’re doing everything you can be doing to have the best gear out there with the best optimization possible and not doing cutting edge mythic content you have no qualms to complain or the guild you’re in has any cause to complain.
It’s a self driven mindset that is getting horribly tiring.
Ah! I see. So boring tasks that give you BIS are beneath you and instead you come here crying to give you BIS but only from the content YOU like. Very considerate of you.
They just say stuff like this assuming that nobody will bother to fact check.
Over 60% of 120 players finished uldir on some diffuculty.
Over 25% of players stepped into mythic and killed Taloc / Champs.
Yes most players are casuals…
Casual =/= bad player who doesnt participate in group comtent.
Most casuals enjoy raids and M+
And mythic raiders, while the minority, are not some insignificant 1%. A good chunk of the playerbase steps into mythic, even if only 1% gets cutting edge.
Using 3rd party info makes your statement unreliable. Just so you know, many players take their alts to M+ and Mythic raids.
You are saying the casual player is automatically bad if he/she doesn’t want to put up with toxicity that M+ and Mythic content is plagued with?
Interesting statement! According to you, casuals are bad players and yet they enjoy M+.
They do say if you keep repeating false information, you may eventually believe it is true but that only applies to YOU - The one who fed himself false information
I didn’t say they’re “some insignificant 1%”. I even said:
I merely stated that raiding is not “the primary form of engagement for the majority”.
It’s important to remember that context is important. When you quote my post and then make claims that contradict points I never made, it can detract from the efficacy of your argument.
I can’t speak for others, but for myself, I full well know that people raid. I also know that it’s not the primary form of engagement.
Now, we can talk about 60% of 120 players finishing Uldir on some difficulty, but we ought to look at LFR and consider it’s impact. I don’t want to say that LFR isn’t a form of raiding, because it checks the boxes on a superficial level, but… when we talk about “raiding” as a community, we’re most definitely not talking LFR raiders.
I’m just saying that it’s important to differentiate people who go do LFR once to see the story, people who only ever do LFR, the occasional person who does a normal run, and the people who actively chase raids as their primary form of content.
The raiding “community”, when we’re discussing it, is the last of those people. Those for whom raiding is the primary form of content.
By way of comparison everyone has collected a pet or two and at least tried pet battling (or done it solely for the rep even if they don’t like it), but that doesn’t make pet battling a majority community. They may not be a insignificant community, but the people who only do it once or twice, or maybe forced themselves to do it for a specific reward even if they hated it, aren’t really the same as the people who actually make that community live and breath.
TL:DR
Just because 60% of characters have done some form of a piece of content doesn’t say much. Many of those could be alts (at least half a dozen were mine!), many of those only do it once for the story, and many people only do raids after their outdated so they don’t have to deal with the difficulty.
Saying that just because the majority has “shown up at least once” is like saying that pet battling is a majority community because everyone has at least a few pets.
There is no crusade against raiding/raiders. From my experience most of the raiders go on “crusades” on the forums to remove stuff from non raiders like LFR and such.
From what data I’ve seen, approximately 1/3 of those are LFR only. I also think the number is skewed with alts, is percent of 120s so does not account for people who haven’t bought the expansion, and I think the way they take those numbers (through guild and AH) probably does exclude the truly solo player but I don’t want to quibble over percentages on an estimate that likely has a very wide confidence interval.
I know I’m not included in that statistic since I do not have a level 120, but if I did I would only have done it on a couple of them so it probably does not introduce error that I am not.
In my personal experience over the last 14 or so years:
Something is usually invented to make catching up and getting to current content easier.
Raiders feel their previous efforts are devalued. “Why should our efforts be undermined?” or “What’s the point of raiding if we can just get gear next catch up cycle that’s as good or better?”
Raiders then request that these catch up mechanics are weakened or removed. Sometimes it’s a legitimate concern they feel, like gear being “too” good and undermining an entire raid tier, sometimes it’s sheer entitlement and feeling that any gear of quality should be restricted.
Casual players who’s primary form of engagement is world quests, reputation grinds, leveling alts, etc, then feel threatened. Casual players want a long term form of progression as well. They want something to show for their game play. (It doesn’t have to be raid gear, or even as high ilvl as raid gear, it just needs to be something better than what they have.)
Casuals then post arguments about how raiders are attacking their only form of progression, and seem to think that casuals don’t deserve anything. They’re upset, and they get snippity because they don’t want their way of playing to disappear.
Raiders view this as hatred for raiders, and begin to genuinely resent casuals. They start making threads about the issue, and it just begins to devolve.
Finally, both sides are making posts about the other side being wrong about something, and you’re where we are now.
The Truth:
Casuals want a progression system. It doesn’t have to be raid level gear, it doesn’t even have to be close. Casuals, like all other players, want to feel a sense of progress, growth of power, and value to their efforts in the game world.
Casuals don’t care to raid, they just don’t want raiding to dictate how they play. Blizzard has been very tedious about gearing systems, and when they make a gearing system for casuals, it tends to step on the toes of raiders. This causes raiders to feel that casuals asked to step on their toes, when really they just want a way to progress.
I’ve made many suggestions over the years, ranging from zone specific gear, over world specific gear, or separate “set” gear that operates differently between outside content and raid content.
Imagine if you could do ~2 month long quest for a set of gear. This gear has multiple bonuses related to the outside world. Killing an enemy nets you a speed boost, enemies are more likely to drop resources, you get a small amount of bonus rep, 5 combo point attacks from stealth stun the target, etc.
That same gear would have some combat bonuses, but it wouldn’t be equivalent to raid gear. Even if it was the same item level, the gear bonuses would either not apply in instanced content (no speed boost from murderation, no chance to stun the enemy, etc), or would simply be weaker than the actual raid gear (“Judgment’s cooldown is reduced by 1 second instead of 3 seconds”).
This would give casuals a way to progress their gear into something meaningful, and could invalidate ilvl concerns. You’d have outdoor gear for casuals, which could still be used to go into early difficulty raids and dungeons to get better gear (allowing cross pollination), but wouldn’t be as good as raid quality gear even if the stats provided were comparable, the bonuses would be specific to their respective play styles.
It needn’t be defined outside of gear, though. There are avenues that could be taken to allow casual players to progressively feel more powerful without stepping on the toes of raiders. Most casual players are interested in feeling more powerful, which is why I focused on the gear aspect.
Honestly, I’m not sure I’d call transmog and mounts a form of progression in most cases. Yes, they are nice rewards, but unless you’re specifically a mount collector or want that specific transmog, they’re not “progressing” anything. Now, if you are a collector, that can count, but so does any other transmog.
A lot of people really liked the mage tower, and mounts/transmog transcend gear resets. Maybe toys that provide some advantage in travel. But, yes, gear should be a part of that equation for sure. So long as people feel they’re progressing their characters.
Maybe heirloom pieces or BoA currencies for altoholics and gold for bankers.
" make LFR drop only Blues. make LFR story mode only and drop no gear"
a personal favorite “give non Raiders sloppy seconds that drop no gear and then I’ll cry about getting death threats because one of my guild he’s probably made themselves look like a casual”
There was no warforging/ titanforging at that time and LFR was a severely nerfed mess that dropped vendor trash.
I didn’t mean to devalue the mage tower, don’t get me wrong. I thought it was absolutely amazing.
It was difficult, it was challenging, but it was also something you could see active progress on sometimes. This failure you got X far, that failure you get Y far, and so on until you succeed.
That’s really the ultimate point, yeah.
I just think that the current system steps on toes in a way that causes all these disagreements. If the “catch up” system didn’t give gear that could compete with raiders I think raiders wouldn’t care regardless of what the item level of the gear was.
I think a big concern raiders have is they feel the need to run other content when it drops gear higher level than the current raid. If they scale back to the previous raid tier for WQs etc I think it would eliminate that concern and still alow for casual gear progression. I do feel for them as raids drop the best PvP gear and I really hate that.
