Bad players don’t have an alternative to sneaking into groups they don’t belong in, and getting carried. Every bit of WoW’s toxicity in groups is 1st- or 2nd-order fallout from this simple fact.
Some people don’t belong in mythics. I’m one of them. But it’s not exactly fun to have to pay for carries to get gear. And if I want to not get gear, I can just not pay my sub, but that just passes the buck.
The design philosophy is that the bottom, what… 25%? as far as raw reaction time… should not be able to get meaningful upgrades or progression. If they all leave, a new bottom rung is created and nobody will be happy with them having gear, either.
When the bottom rung leaves, the game just becomes more difficult. This has happened several times already. In WoTLK, I was good enough for normal raiding. Rotations were simple enough that I could easily do 95% of my ideal DPS output. My reaction time is extremely low, but I could entirely make up for it by knowing my rotation and having a feel for all my CDs, which having a dump truck worth of procs completely ruins. Back then I had one proc, the one from Explosive Shot, and it was very easy to manage without clipping ticks.
Back in the day, bad players were perfectly content doing their whatever and it didn’t bother them.
Nowadays, wowhead is blasting 50 times a day with HERE’S WHAT OTHER PEOPLE WHO AREN’T YOU ARE GETTING IN THE GAME RIGHT NOW. So naturally people think, “oh - I want that, too!”
You can resign yourself to feeling like you “don’t belong in mythics” or you could find some friends/guildies that you just have fun with and get better/more skilled with over time.
I used to have such bad anxiety about m+ back in BfA because of the timer and not wanting to be the person to mess up. Or having to remember all the dungeon mechanics and affixes etc. But it does get easier with a group of friends who have fun no matter if you time or don’t.
There’s also been some minor creep where the gear you can get from the overworld… is not good enough to let you overcome challenges on the overworld. The rares in Dragonflight are a bit more punishing to try to solo than even the warbringers or whatever those wandering things that dropped the direhorns were, in Pandaria.
You could actually solo warbringers with valor badge gear only, and you could get valor badges by doing daily quests and never having to touch an instance.
toxicity exists because people think they are free from social norms when they are in seemingly anonymous situations in which personal consequences are essentially non-existent.
in such an environment, normal people will more or less continue to behave normally. people who desire to be toxic jerks in real life feel that they are free to act that way in-game.
Maybe I’m tired and not parsing this right, but is OP essentially saying that the blame for all of WoW’s toxicity is on the shoulders of bad players because elitists wouldn’t scream at them if they weren’t bad?
By this logic, the people should be just as toxic in Remix where everyone could win, and by far they were absolutely not. A few jerks, protected by anonymity like you said, but in Remix they were the vast, vast minority and I’ve never seen so many people just helping each other for no reason.
I can’t help but say, it was because everyone was, by design, welcome in instances in Remix. Whereas in retail, the design is that underperformers will ruin a group.
No. The blame is on the design that doesn’t give bad players an alternative but to sneak into content they don’t belong in. They, like the toxic players, are just doing what gives them upgrades, which is, at the end of the day, the main reason to play the game.
Nobody needs them. People want them. It’s fun to get more powerful and overcome new challenges, even if those are only rares on the overworld. It’s not fun to be stuck.
I have no idea but I always see lots of threads complaining about underperformers in mythics. My guess is that lazy group leaders post high requirements and then don’t check their applicants fully because that’s a lot of work. So you’d sneak in by applying to 50 groups until somebody doesn’t check, or making your own group and getting the carry that way.
You have been able to get up to heroic raid gear ilvl from decently easy content since a couple expansions now, delves will double down on this. Don’t see an issue with the best gear aka mythic track gear being locked to some of the harder content.
There is no issue if you’re okay with people being toxic. I didn’t say there was an issue. I just said it’s the reason people are toxic.
People want gear regardless of whether they have the skill to deserve it. If the game doesn’t give them an alternative but to sneak into content they do not belong in, they’re going to try to do that. When people are forced to carry them or kick them, and keys get wasted, toxicity ensues.
I’ve said this before, but I would love the return of the Wod proving grounds. Not as something difficult to do, but just as a way to nicely show players how mechanics work. With npcs helping out where the worst thing is to have to do it again.
People at the time may have complained about the proving grounds, but it did increase overall knowledge in dungeons.