I’m not going to argue with the “always been that way” crowd, but I feel the same.
I think it’s just that the emphasis on M+ and the vast power discrepancy created by multiple tiers has left the more “I’m going to log in and run some randoms because I don’t have time to grind” folks like me without much content to stand on that feels meaningful in anyway.
A fresh 70 in random BG is one shot, a fresh 70 in a random dungeon is basically following a tank soloing for a free carry… there doesn’t seem to be a “low effort” path to maintaining even a not-very-powerful character that is any fun for me.
Then they killed level locked BGs, so trying to do it at lower levels like I have the last 2 expansions means ignoring PvP as a thing and just running random dungeons or rerolling endlessly.
I’m not even saying how I’ve played in the past is good for the games future, what do I know, but for 6 years I found a way to play this game that fit with the time and effort I could commit to it, and then the framework changed in a way that kind of kills what made that play loop feasible. It just kind of sucks when something you enjoy changes and doesn’t leave room for how you use to enjoy it.
Not saying the game is bad, or anything of the sort, only that it kind of squeezed out what I’ll call the “random queue crowd” by adding so many layers of ilvl.
Hasn’t this been the case for almost all of wows life? At least now they can get a full PvP honor set fast + have craftable items.
Are we shooting for the expectation of a fresh 70 to be geared competitively in an hour? I think it took less than a week to get my last new 70 to 390 ish and I was pretty happy there considering how little I actually played to get there.
I agree that the very high geared toons can negatively impact queuable content for some folks, and removing the incentives for them to be there would be ideal, but it would also potentially blow those queued up to a point where nobody wants to wait hours for a dungeon, so which poison is worse?
As for the ilevel difference outside of queued content, why does it bother you? (Genuinely asking, I’ve been down here in the open world ilevel zone for a while and the chads running around haven’t been an issue for me but maybe I’m missing something?)
Ngl m+ and raiding in wow is like the only pve gaming I still really enjoy. I don’t do mythic or go too far above 20s. But I appreciate the content being there if I ever decide to try to push. However, I think the new player leveling experience is TERRIBLE in the current state of the game. Blizzard really needs to revisit that.
The amount of rose tinted glasses people wear making these posts is wild. No, WoW was not a better game before. No, it did not have better content for casuals. No, the game isn’t losing subs because they balance mythic raids and M+ and you have literally no means to prove this. If you want a game that primarily focuses on casual world quest gameplay that you can complete on your own, on your own time, there are lots of RPGs out there to explore.
I think the only thing I actually miss from older WoW days was the pvp area under dalaran in WotLK. Since you had to queue there it was a primary hangout spot for the pvp folks. Lots of people dueling and chatting. But Val has been a huge step forward in bringing back some life to a hub area.
I’m sure this has been stated somewhere, but to just resuscitate my own thread, at 1M keys in a season, which nowadays is around 8 weeks, and most players doing their “8” each week, that would be 15k characters. For 1M keys. For 5M keys, that would be around 78k players. Sure, there’s going to be a lot of “hey they did 1 key” but that’s obviously not what the conversation would be about. When you talk about people that eat at restaurants you don’t include grandpa jim and grandma june and their anniversary dinners.
Brink back decaying rank PvP and manually walking to the PvP spot. Same with actually walking to the instance otherwise you can rep grind in world quests or whatever. Which is a substandard version of other games that do it way better. So, pretty much don’t do the content is the only answer as it’s going to still be there anyways.