The best thing Blizzard could possibly do for the entire community (new players included) is to ban pugging.
Require all dungeon & raid groups to be people from the same guild, AND (and this is important!!!) put in actual analytics tools to point people towards guilds that will be a good fit for them.
Blizzard’s guild finder tool is trash. Blizzard has data showing WHEN we play, WHAT we do, HOW GOOD we are it, and so on. Blizzard could very easily take that data and point us towards guilds that play the TIMES we do, WHAT they do, and how SUCCESSFUL they are at it.
Match them up. There’s an entire data analysis industry that exists, Blizzard needs to tap into it.
Once you have that in place, BAN PUGGING. It’s really that simple.
There’s a night-and-day difference between people who play with friends/guildmates, and people who pug. We see it EVERY DAY on this forum.
First of all, I just want to say that I (keyword) consider myself to be fairly casual. I haven’t raided since WoD. Not because of the “toxicity”. I just don’t care, anymore. That being said, moving onto the next point.
Second of all, if groups are upfront, in what they expect, from their members, it’s not “toxicity”. Groups (or people, in general) do not have to play with (or even carry) you, if they don’t want to. It’s not your group. You didn’t put in the effort advertising/inviting others. What makes you the person of authority to demand a group of people (that you didn’t put together) to play your way/with you?
Third of all,
While Gearscore and item levels weren’t really a thing, in the beginning, but that doesn’t mean the beginning was “better” (according to what I assume by your standards), by any means. How convenient of you to not mention Master Loot which was there, in the beginning. I knew of Groups that did Reserves, Biddings, no loot at all, etc.
Fourth of all,
Lol
Oh addons (includig DPS meters) have been around since the beginning.
You know what they say, if someone is trying to point the finger, there’s always four pointing right back at them…
Lessening the RNG on activities and systems would do a lot to lessen peoples’ stress levels that lead to toxic behavior.
Running dungeon after dungeon and getting nothing or garbage makes mistakes feel worse. Getting a new thing to upgrade a thing only to have it upgrade your worst thing feels terrible, making mistakes seem worse.
I’ll just say that I’ve been playing a different game for a while with helpful rather than competitive systems, and I never feel upset while playing. And people are generally kind.
Treat your player base with respect and reward them, and people will treat each other better.
Because WoW wasn’t a good fit for them and they never should have played it in the first place. What they really wanted was to dress up in bunny ears and have a walk-through digital coloring book with all the gameplay depth of one.
No, I used it in a way to what I (keyword) consider Raiding (any difficulty) as “not casual content”. The fact you (personally) read it as “bad” says more about you than me.
Raiding (any difficulty) takes time, energy, resources, etc. Granted, the rest of this game is this way, as well, but I can always tackle solo content, at another time. I don’t hurl myself, constantly, once week to defeat a boss. Sometimes, I want to play this game, sometimes, I don’t. I don’t think it fair, I hog up a Raid slot due to my unpredictible desire to play this game.
The gameplay is not even on my list of what makes FF feel better than WoW. In that game you feel valued for your time. In WoW, most decisions feel like they are made to make you feel disappointed but addicted so you keep trying. Like a slot machine that occasionally trickles out cash but ultimately takes all your time and money.
It’s a brown bag rule. It’s technically not allowed, but no one’s going to care if you use one - including FF GMs - as long as you aren’t rubbing people’s face in it by spamming up chats with it or commenting on it.