There is something to be said about illusory difference. It’s easy to feel like a timer is arbitrary (even if it isn’t) when it’s in your face, like M+ is. It’s much easier to ignore when it’s like a raid’s hard or soft enrage.
Simply knowing something explicitly can change a lot. You know you’re going to die, but if you know you’re going to die in ten days, you’ll likely act accordingly.
Because its true. Content is designed for the hardcore guild Sweatlords. If you’re not in a hardcore raiding guild and spending 24/7 on WoW, then you are forgotten and told to leave the game all the time.
Because a solo player, with Dungeon and Raid Finder, puts in just as many hours and money as the “group-orientated” players do, we just don’t dedicate our lives to WoW and do things like have lives, families, jobs, relationships, go outside, touch grass, etc.
Zm was pretty on par with korthia’s gearing system. Zm was probably better since you could grind it in a reasonable time. Both just as tedious though lol.
Well folks, you heard it here, looks like my time in WoW has come to an end. Hopefully a super sweaty, hardcore raid guild invites me soon otherwise I won’t be able to play. 
Correct.
There is, however, major issue with the ilvl we were able to achieve in Season 4 of Dragonflight compared to group content.
Interesting how you are referring to a future event in the past tense, given that S1 of dragonflight starts next month.
Now if you were trying to talk about SL S4, would you rather that they had simply done nothing? There was not going to be a new zone/world system. SSL S4 was mostly done by 2 people.
If you want world ilvl now, go farm the anniversary event bosses for 272s.
I’m curious here, too. Would love to know in what way anyone’s experience was harmed, as well.
I’m not sure that the players who complain that they didn’t get something in S4 when they chose to not partake in what small amount of stuff that S4 had, is that the other option was to do nothing, and just have S3 last until pre-patch.
I think the Mage Tower was a pretty decent bit of content for solo players. I was disappointed when BfA didn’t have anything of the sort.
I genuinely thought Torghast was going to address that, but we all know how it ended: mandatory, disliked and overall disappointing.
Hopefully in the future this will just be improved upon, rather than abandoned in its entirety. I only learned recently there’s a Torghast-adjacent implement in DF (it’s not tied to power progression, promise.) I think they had something good and unique in mind, and just executed poorly.
I hadn’t heard about that, I’ll be keeping an eye out. Thank you for letting me know.
It’s called the Cobalt Assembly. I’m going to keep myself mostly in the dark on it, but what I did see seemed good. Cosmetic reward focused atm.
I think the turd got flushed, the water should have cleared by now, probably still toxic though, might need to run some bleach through.
I think that is Blizzard in most cases until they strike a gold mine for the expansion.
To be frank, that’s most people. Ideas are worth next to nothing until executed, and you can expect early attempts at something new will be bad. You’ll get lucky on occasion, but you can’t rely on it. That’s why we iterate.
ZM’s system sucked, imo. I hated the stats on the gear, had almost no choice, kept having to change out pieces and the system was not interesting to me.
I much prefer getting the pieces I want with the stats I want that have an upgrade rank on the pieces themselves, where I can pick and choose how to upgrade and I get every single slot to rank up. I keep my pieces and upgrade the ranks to upgrade the stats. I don’t pray for random drops that might be stats I want if I’m lucky.
I think a lot of the issue is we want an engaging solo progression path, yeah ZM was a nice catch up but it was still just mostly WQ and running from rare to rare hoping you were fast enough. People are asking for something a bit more involved and ongoing that can be done without a group being required.
some iterations have lessons, sometimes we learn those lessons, or we repeat. 
I mean myself Im not asking for mythic equivalent gear for anything, heck Im running around at like 270 or so and Im content with that. But being able to feel like you’re progressing your character without a group in something engaging would be nice cuz WQ suck
For me the big factor when it comes to timers is how long it is. A 1 minute timer? Cool 60 attempts an hour. A 10 minute timer? 6 attempts.
A 1 hour timer? 1 attempt.
The shorter the timer, the more willing i am to lock myself into it, and the more open to failure i am.
I wasnt bothered by the lack of item level for season 4. I was bothered by lack of anything to do. That was the real killer.
To answer the question of what id want for open world content… basically just ZM cypher system.
But with a lot more content that gives out cyphers.
Sure up the ammount needed in proportion to the extra cyphers being given out.
But in ZM you ran out of content within 30 minutes. It wasnt fun for an end of expansion patch.
Item level? Probably between lfr and normal.
Like literally between. If lfr gives 10 and normal gives 20, i want 15.