This isn’t a good example of anything but the kind of conspiracy theories your addled mind comes up with.
This isn’t an either or situation. There is content at every difficulty level. Some players just throw tantrums over not being able to achieve whatever specific thing they want to achieve instead of enjoying the content that exists at the difficulty level they prefer. The issues you have are entirely in your mind.
There are complaints about the state of M+ and raid difficulty right through to the actual, by the numbers, top players in M+ and world first raiding. You are just wrong about the players you’re targeting with those comments. We’re worried about the community as a whole, not just our own little bubbles of engagement. Unhealthy, receding community population is not a good thing, despite how happy you are in your ivory tower up there.
Agreed. It would be a concern if this season hadn’t coincided with a change to the game that was guaranteed to put a big dent in the M+ population. The people that track the data say that the ebb and flow of the playerbase that does exist is par for course. It’s just a smaller playerbase, which is entirely expected.
Definitely not in an ivory tower. I haven’t even timed all my 10s yet because I’ve been focusing on raising new specs to gain a deeper understanding of the M+ environment in general; this is my first M+ season so I have a lot of information to absorb.
I PuG 99% of my keys as well, so I spend most of my time with the (actually) average M+ player. I would put very good money on my having the most experience in this thread with the 40th-60th percentile players and keys.
So you have no first-hand experience with past seasons then. You actually have no idea what you’re talking about. Noted.
What’s trivial to one person can be incredibly difficult to another. Everyone is different.
Rofl. So first my analysis was void because I’m an elitist, but now it’s void because I’m an actually new player with regards to M+. Clearly these are good faith dismissals and not you being a disingenuous moron.
And I don’t need first-hand experience when I can parse data correctly and decipher the drivel spouted by people who, e.g., think that tanks are too squishy. I know for a fact that they are not due to my own experience this season, with every single spec of both tank and healer at 80, and with that information I can extrapolate that tanks were previously an imbalanced, immortal mess. Same with healing “problems”. I also know that the average player is using builds that put far too much value on damage, and far too little value on durability, healing throughput, and utility, when such builds are at minimum not necessary until you are pushing into prestige keys.
You’re commenting on 11’s, climbing the io ladder, class balancing at the high end, with this arrogant attitude, all the while having never actually interacted with any of it. Dropping these incendiary comments with absolutely nothing to back it up.
It makes sense why you’re defending these things, if this is the only season you’ve ever known. Unfortunately, this is pretty widely accepted as one of the lowest points in the history of M+. I’m sorry you don’t have better experiences to compare it to.
Let me help you with this. Videogames usually have multiple ways of playing the game provided by the game designers. But they draw players who are absolutists, who think that there is only one way to play the game, and everyone who is not playing it that way is not only playing the game wrong, but they are doing life wrong. And so we constantly see threads about how others are playing the game wrong, and the game needs to be changed to force them to play it right, even though a fair number of these players aren’t playing the game that way themselves. Or even at all.
I call these players “videogame tribalists”. It’s a hardcore attitude when someone judges other players who are playing the game in a legitimate way provided by the makers and finds them to be failures. The casual attitude is that everybody should be able to play the way they want to, because there should be room in a game this size for everybody to have fun. “Big tent” vs “small tent” or even “tiny tent”. And so our game enters the season of our discount tent.
The problem that lbizzard removed tent for a certain portion of player base in hopes to drive them in the higher difficulty, which resulted in the flopped M+ season.
Hence we know that developers are inept and doing bad decisions.
I actually think you can say the same about players. Over the past 10 years it’s been nonstop requests to “respect my time”. They made leveling trivial, added “quality of life” enhancements ad nauseum. Each one in itself seemed great but over time you now have the laziest experience ever. You can literally stand in the hub city and engage in nearly all aspects of the game through menus.
The reason people are flocking to the classic and anniversary servers is that people actually want a challenge. They want to experience a version that hasn’t been tweaked and optimized into the ground.
BlizZard is afraid of easy wins.
They more they try to control player fun and agency the more players slip away from retail.
That is why classic is gaining popularity. But the consequence of that is of course the splintering of the player community.
They still do not respect player time which is the problem with retail. They try to invalidate all the time and effort players put into many things. Is this not a MMORPG afterall where time investment is everything…the lifeblood of a MMORPG where you grow over time, achieve and conquer?
Classic is 200000% easier than retail, what are you on?
The challenge of classic is you better know your class inside and out. That is not the case with retail and that is the difference.
You see retail is hard with mechanics, trash NPCs and bosses.
Classic is hard based on knowing every intricacy of your class. Classic classes are easy to learn but hard to master.
This is why they at BlizZard did a mass pruning in legion because they wanted to make harder and harder encounters. A greater focus on the encounters and less about knowing your class and rotations.
And they are still on that course but now classes are too complicated too. That is why retail has been put into a quagmire.
Eh… hard to say at this point.
In case you didn’t notice, that was a reversal of the infamous line from Blizz:
“You think you do, but you don’t.”
And the issue being raised is that Blizz misinterpreted the requests for “respect my time” by essentially cutting out the non-endgame aspects of the game… because they think players want to reach endgame faster.
Sure, there is a few who actually do want that (possibly disproportionately represented due to everyone else leaving the game), but we’ve pretty much hit the saturation point for how much the non-endgame activities can be minimized. So they’re spending time trying to make more endgame focused-activities that aren’t as demanding in terms of single sittings.
Blizz thinks players want endgame activities. Many of us don’t. And no amount of shortening the time to reach endgame nor making the associated activities “more accessible” is going to change that.
That’s the problem with Classic… it IS optimized into the ground. Arguably worse than retail in that regard. Everything has been solved, and has been for some time.
It’s not Vanilla, when no one knew what they were doing. It’s just a very sluggish version of retail, but at least it doesn’t feel anywhere near as rushed.
Honestly, they should tone a lil bit down.
Trying to find the specific weak auras to be able to kill a boss is meh.
This alone shows you have no idea what you are talking about, it’s actually better now since we lost the bottom of the ladder if you want to look at just the % you sit at for your score.
The equivalent key in the last season that we had the old key levels in DF S3, someone how could complete M20s would sit around 15% to the top, now that same person having completed M10s would be sitting around 12% to the top.
The numbers at the bottom of the ladder are not the only people who have “Stopped doing keys due to delves”, across the board there are less people, but there are also even less people in comparison hitting the M20/M10 levels of keys.
Even with those who do enjoy M+ and want to do M+, there are less of a percentage of them hitting higher keys.
Remove gear, then nobody will be mad that other people have / can do things that award gear they don’t have.
Probably want us all on our mobile phones since we’d spend more money.
OP:
FF14 might be a better game for you.
I feel like, even though Blizz has all of these “tuning knobs” to dial in different aspects of difficulty in dungeons, if they wanted to make them a little harder and keep people from pushing as high/as easily… they still don’t know how to finely tune things. Instead they turn several knobs in different directions and get adverse affects.
Personally this M+ season is the least I’ve played or enjoyed M+ since even shadowlands. The various changes to tanking,healing, mob abilities, stun interrupts, dungeon design etc., just made it not fun this season. I hit my goals and gtfo of that cesspool. Delves probably contributed to some of that since I could get a challenge on my terms. I don’t lolly gag through a T8; I run it like we used to run M+ before this season. I find that stuff fun. If I want to make a T11 harder than it is, I pull more stuff…simple.
My swap to main Monk following DF was met with BrM being made of paper, so one of the things I was looking forward to (getting back into tanking more) was made far more sketchy than if I had decided on my druid, pally, or warrior to tank the same dungeons. So my opinions might be jaded a little.
Just look at the way they changed multiple things going into this season between healing, tanking, and dungeon design. Look at the feedback of people saying then, this isn’t going to work the way they think it will. The people that called it, that tanks would indeed be squishier despite Blizz saying it wouldn’t affect their survivability and only take the ability to sustain away from tanks.
I digress. They just need to dial a knob or two at a time and not going twisting dials like they’re searching for a good radio station.