Time to redesign your game Blizzard

Community General Discussion
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I always say my achievements are not that great, but I have some and there are others who don’t even have what achievements I have. Having done the content I can safely say it’s actually not that good and needs a change.

And like I keep saying over and over, it’s not about it being too hard, because it’s not, nor do you need all the achievements to show you have done the content. The highest key I have been in is a +18 with no way of really proving it was me. I’m happy with what I have, I don’t need all timed +15 to be satisfied, knowing I can do it is enough. But does that mean I like doing it? Does that mean it cannot be improved on?

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Don’t kid yourself, you’re not trying to improve it.

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So by adding more to the game mode, adding bonus’s, adding more clear options, more chances for more people to participate rather than just 4 rotating affixes and a timer is not a suggestion for an improvement?

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Two criticisms here. First, none of these additions are well-defined. Second, and this may be anecdotal because I’m not on the forums 24/7, I haven’t seen anyone other than myself make a serious attempt to create a hypothetically functional model of any such additions.

Why is that?

125

Tick tock goes the clock, and all the years they fly. Tick tock and all too soon you and I must die.

126

This is what happens when you give in to idiocy. What they should have done is have all the remaining mobs in dungeons do 500% more damage/healing and be immune to CC after the timer expired, to make it an even allegory with raid bosses. No one is asking to pause raid bosses or remove their timers, because they’ve always existed. This is new, and Jonny 6 thumbs still wants loot even if he fails, so they give an inch, and now every day on these forums we’re treated to a barrage of bad players asking for their poor performance to not be measured, because it’s too stressful.

Give an inch, they want a mile. They should have closed the “failed key gives loot” loophole a long time ago, and headed off this entire debacle.

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Maybe because you are not on the forums 24/7, I’ve seen it, I’ve suggested it. But it gets shot down because players don’t seem to want to care about anything but a timer since it is in all honesty the easiest things to do.

Look at Visions, you remove the timer and it’s absolutely meaningless content that does not fit with the whole losing your sanity. Than the same with Torghast, which will nonetheless be balanced when it hits live that will do nothing but frustrate players and slow them down to the point they just don’t bother doing it. It happens already in Visions when you try the wrong 2 mask combo and some classes get locked down, players just decide to skip it.

I keep saying it and no one listens, changing M+ has zero to do with how hard or easy it is, like how I decided I am not doing anymore visions on my alts because I now need 8 easy pages for one upgrade, which will soon turn into 6 hard pages, it has nothing to do with how hard it is, but the fact I must go farm currency on all my alts who are at that point, than do all the runs, that is easy 2 hours per alt per week just for 3-4 runs, than 20-30 minutes each run inside visions. 2 alts right now even and that equates to some 6 hours each just for one cloak upgrade. 2 hours a day for 6 days, where do I get time for something else? There are many other reasons why people stop doing content and ask for changes, and being too hard is certainly not one of them.

What I want to do is add more options to if anything make it harder, but also give the option to make it longer and allow more people a chance to play with such things like:

  • Adding bonus objectives
  • Adding clear %
  • Mini bosses
  • Puzzles
  • Boss skips
  • % scaling mob/boss health and damage

And keep in mind that all the above would only determine what your next key is and how much loot your team would get with all but the last boss kill being the only objective to ‘finishing’ the dungeon.

There are other things I have suggested in the past, but the idea is to place a % on the dungeon, finish X% of the dungeon and you get a key upgrade and more loot (iLVL dependant on your key level). If you don’t do enough % you get a downgrade and less loot.

This would allow those who want to go fast to still go fast, get a higher % clear in less time, but still be able to discuss and decide what objectives are even being done before you start, to allow for a fast run with maximum loot chances. But also allow those who want to take it slower to clear enough % before killing the last boss to still get loot and a key upgrade.

Except I am still asking for my performance to be measured, just not always stacked against a big fat timer floating over my head.

1 Like
128

Well, if nothing else, the rest of your post convinced me that you’re discussing the topic in good faith.

Now, that said, I’ll state outright that I still think you should leave M+ well enough alone. The timer is the core of the mode, and there are plenty of people who like it, and that’s enough reason for it to remain.

If you want something that uses dungeons and scales them, I would encourage you to suggest it as a new dungeon mode entirely separate from M+, as that will completely defuse any possible derailment of the thread. If the idea you pitch has more merit than Mythic+, then that will become clear if/when it is implemented due to the difference in engagement between the two, and that discussion will not be needed at all.

Most of what you have here isn’t very fleshed out, though – for example, I do like that you included puzzles, although I worry that puzzles have little point when the answer can be found via Wowhead or Google – and that’s a problem.

Boss skips are another problematic example. Good idea in theory, but it limits the potential design of the base dungeons. The mode becomes functionally impossible unless every dungeon made to be compatible with the mode includes methods to skip bosses. That creates a design hurdle, which is bad.

I’ve given up on my own attempt because the vast majority of posts (I think it got to 260 or so) were me responding to people, but you’re welcome to use my thread as fodder for ideas.

I tried to do a fair job updating the OP as people contributed, but if you can spare the time, I’d say read the whole thing. It helps provide a picture of the perception problem people have with a timerless mode’s mere discussion, and paints a better picture of where the thinking those who are happy with M+ in its current state is at.

All I would ask is that you don’t actually revive the thread, because in all honesty, I don’t want to maintain it anymore. It was an experiment, and one I consider to have failed. I wanted to see if those who wanted a timerless dungeon mode could support and refine the idea themselves, and I feel it’s been made clear to me that they cannot or will not.

By all means, please change my mind about that if you can. I’d be genuinely pleased. If you decide to tread that path, I’d suggest a new thread, a disclaimer, and a very patient attitude toward the dozens of people who will come into the thread, not read it, and drop one-liners about how you’re bad or M+ is fine despite the fact that you’re not trying to change M+ but rather create an alternative.

129

Well there are those Kirin Tor puzzles from Legion, while the answer is obvious, doing it is another story. There is also that endless halls one from Lucid Nightmare, that could certainly not be cheated. And even if there are options, like the last part of Hivemind, you still need to actually do it, the idea being that you could spend time doing them for a larger reward, or choose to skip for less completion and less reward.

UBRS? You could skip half the dungeon and still kill enough bosses to satisfy the group. Boss skips are not just whether all classes do it, but you place some mechanics in place to force a skip, like killing some enemies over yonder and activating a trap door to block off the boss, open a new path through, but at the same time block a portion of the dungeon so you miss out of a % of the clear, meaning you need to discuss which route you would take for the best optimisation for the group you are in and the class combination you have.

You might have a bonus boss that needs you to find parts randomly scattered around the instance to activate, meaning you cannot simply follow a guide, but need to decide as you are going if it is worth trying to find the remaining parts, think Timeless Isle where you need to do X to activate boss Y. Even the crane ‘boss’ where you fly high to land on those platforms for loot, the more you collect the higher the %. Or Mechagon where you use the drills, you would need to roam around finding parts to open the cave to find a boss.

You could combine already used features and add countless more to make a D&D style dungeon sprawl that allows the speed running community to still go fast, get an optimal route, still push one dungeon per half hour, but also allow others to go slow, explore, do some bonus stuff and get rewards equivalent to the amount % you cleared.

Right now I run and time an M+, I get a chance at loot, I might need to run 3 dungeons to get loot, that’s 2 hours taking into account time to run them plus time to find a group. Run an objective style dungeon and you could take 1-1.5 hours, finish enough % to guarantee all players get loot.

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That’s because the current WoW developers are only concern with coming up with content that that they can market as an E-Sport. I wouldn’t mind content like that being in the game if there was a balance it and a way for people to play without timers. But when Blizzard starts designing content like Tor’ghast all around the top 1% of players they’re just punishing the other 99%.

131

Okay, now that I have a free moment at work to actually sit down and make a comprehensive post…

This makes sense to me. Puzzles that are execution checks aren’t a bad idea, as you point out. I typically don’t think of puzzles as involving an execution element, but that’s an issue with my understanding of WoW’s puzzles, not your explanation.

UBRS is a good example of an ideal dungeon crawl (probably not as good as original BRD, in my opinion, but still good), but I don’t think I properly conveyed what I meant. A new system for dungeons relies on new dungeons. The reason I don’t think boss skips are necessarily a good thing to plan around is because doing so forces dungeon design to also ensure that there are paths around bosses, and that’s a limitation that I wouldn’t want to impose on designers, as it’d reduce the freedom they have to make good dungeons. It works in raid environments too, like Karazhan, for example, but if we’re talking about dungeons intended to be available to both M+ and a hypothetical new dungeon crawl mode, then we’re forcing future creative decisions into a narrow design path.

I think that extra optional paths and minibosses (functionally, rare spawns within the dungeon that act as bosses but aren’t required for completion in other modes) are a good idea too, and while there’s still a limitation on design there, I don’t think it hits the same extent as requiring paths around boss encounters that would be required in other modes.

Ideally, this is what I’d be looking for too. I’d rather have a group of friends hang out and crawl a dungeon for a few hours as well, but dungeon crawls get fishy when one considers that there needs to be scaling difficulty to the dungeon to justify the scaling rewards that come with Mythic+ – otherwise, we end up with an easy dungeon that takes a long time, and only gets played at launch because the loot from it is only worthwhile early in any given content patch’s raid tier.

That’s one of the big hurdles I sought to address in my thread, and while I got a lot of good ideas from other people, I still don’t think we pinned down a perfect concept.

For me, the takeaway of strong ideas here is as follows:

  • Numerous optional objectives to increase the chance that everyone in the group obtains an item.

  • Puzzles/Execution checks as part of the objectives for the dungeon. I also think a single rotating affix could add some variety here, such as movement speed penalties (or increases, like ice physics), or perhaps a tether that snaps back if players move too far from one another.

  • ‘Hidden’ boss encounters that require tertiary objectives to be completed, among which could be finding interactive objects in the dungeon environment with random placement among a large number of spawn locations. I think this would greatly encourage exploration, especially if the value toward overall loot-completion is high, more than a mandatory boss would be.

Still, I think the biggest hurdle here is going to be ensuring that any design principles you come up with don’t also require developers to design dungeons around the mode rather than allowing them to design the dungeon and then adapt the mode to suit the dungeon. Some variety is also important, so not requiring dungeons tailored to the mode reduces the devtime cost and makes the mode more attractive to developers and accountants.

Let me know if I missed anything!

132

Alright, got me there. I feel like soft enrages do have a point, so you’re not in combat fighting the boss forever and force a win through attrition if he can’t kill you (although upon typing it I think it’d be funny to see).

Being chased by Arthas was a special thing, that Halls of Reflection dungeon didn’t really have anything else like it. Deathwall HoR dungeon was cool, but I honestly remember players not liking it very much, still to this day it’s avoided in Timewalking. Though this is probably just due to the room beforehand, the one where you have to LoS and some players just can’t be bothered.

I guess in sparse amounts it’s alright, gives variety to the player between kill and fetch quests, I’d be like “oh crap” for the one that has a timer on it.

Timers were far and few though, I’d argue the Baron timer was more of a Hardmode in and of itself, if you fail it just becomes a normal dungeon run.

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You do if you want to get invited into groups. WoW is an MMO. Timing is what everyone is forced to do.

In the same way Covenant abilities are forcing players to play the Covenant they don’t want is the same way Raiderio forces players into playing within times. You can’t say “it’s optional” because that’s like saying playing a bad spec is ok.

NO one is saying technically you can’t. We get that.

The whole point is to change the community. So that timers are gone and don’t go on records. Blizzard IN GAME tracks your times so therefore it’s not just a “psychological” timer. It’s something forced on the playerbase.

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I have done heaps of keys over time, even have a couple of 2 hour runs, I still get invited to groups.

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