I already do M+ for gear; I can’t even bear most rep grind activities or the like personally so I have no need for such a system, but neither would it affect me if it existed. Solo players do not participate in group content by definition.
The premise is founded on providing an extension of that gameplay loop you mentioned above for solo content of which currently does not exist to retain solo players throughout a full patch; they enter “maintenance” mode much faster than raiders / M+ and may simply leave. Is support of such systems cost effective from Blizzards perspective? Probably not, but neither is an outflow of players.
The point is really about player retention; if they have nothing to pursue through activities they find appealing, they won’t play. This may not matter to the group centric player base as neither really interact, but if nothing else it’s a valid reason why player population continues to dwindle.
You’ll get no argument from me that the solo player cycle is far too fast and far too generous; Blizzard should stretch out the gearing over 6 months like they do for content that gives RNG rewards.
We initially saw this with covenant gear, where the entire ‘casual’ playerbase suddenly turned on a dime from “there’s no anima!” to “there’s no gear progression!” once the playerbase mass-unlocked covenant gear at renown 40. (Seeing the entire general discussion narrative change overnight was really something to see…) Blizzard stretched Korthia out a little bit longer, but as we’re seeing it was too too fast and too short. They need to draw these things out longer.
I’m in agreement with you there with the caveat that the solo progression path is more varied than looping through Korithia for hours on end; I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.
For Korithia specifically however, I do think the incentives to get people in that zone at least make the rare farm cycle easy to join so the balance has to be in providing palatable avenues for progression at reasonable rates without scattering every individual player across the game in pursuit of a random pet battle.
Torghast wasn’t complained about for being hard, it was complained about for being completely boring and them deciding to add a baked in timer, despite when they revealed the entire Torghast system, one of their bullet points explaining the tower was that it was specifically not timed, and you could take it at whatever pace you wanted.
Then when players said Torghast was boring, they decided to remedy this by tossing in a time-attack mode effectively… which is literally what people were tired of “Speed-run bullcrap” is what I call it.
Torghast is still pretty boring, because they didn’t do anything with it, and people are upset because they lied about what the content was going to be.
They didn’t complain it was hard, outside of people trying to push the very very last area when it first came out, which was tuned for higher item levels than people (Generally) had at the time.
Even then people still cleared it first week.
The last time we had actually “Challenging” solo content, was Mage Tower… which surprisingly people seem to be clamouring to come back… funny that.
The people pushing the top layers at the start weren’t the ones complaining.
It was the enormous numbers of players who, frankly, struggle with everything in the game, and complain that everything is too hard. The same sorts of people complaining they should get max level gear for doing trivial content in this thread.
Which is why we got the huge across-the-board nerfs to Torghast in mid-December, a few weeks after Shadowlands launched. The forums were flooded with complaints that Torghast was too hard.
No, you are confusing things here. All players need a progression system available to them even those who don’t do group content. I know people are surprised but solo content can be just as difficult as group content.
Let me know when WoW has had a increase of subs. You can’t be because the game has been declining since WotLK. This is true and a fact. I will continue to bring up that the lack of progression systems is one of the reasons for the huge decline over the years.
So, you don’t have anything to worry about then with more progression systems.
I don’t need to you just said it wouldn’t cause group content to fall apart.
You might want to limit your terminology to MMORPG instead of MMO. In any, case I don’t really care about your claims here. WoW has been losing subs “declining” for over a decade now. So yeah, some changes need to be made obviously the “group” content progression thing you love isn’t working.
You’re underestimating the tenacity of a small number of players to complain, complain, complain, complain on this forum.
It doesn’t matter if most people can do it or not. All that matters is that a tiny number of people keep complaining that they can’t.
Just like most people are perfectly able and willing to do difficult group-based content to get stronger rewards… yet we still get threads like this one from a small number of people who refuse to do so.
That is why I suggested solo activities that would reward vault loot. Since vault loot is tailored to playstyles. Right now its only group content. Norhing for solo players.
I also wouldn’t mind doing casual content for gear. It takes a while to get into groups when the weekly mythic event isnt up, I wish that weekly quest to do 4 mythics to get heroic raid gear was up every week. Outside those weeks people barely touch low keys and takes a long time to get a group going sometimes. I do prefer the autoqueue system but heroic gear is useless tbh and we cant even grind valor or badges through heroics like past expansions just premade groups around raider.io rating locking you out of power rewards unless you grind the score… on every character… and make you do 2 affixes for each dungeon…
A solution to this would be for timewalking to be up all the time. We can pug heroics via timewalking every week for a chance at normal raid gear weekly and have more dungeons to play all the time.
And the mythic weekly event quest would be nice to up frequently. Perhaps adding a quest that rewards 1250 valor for 4 dungeons a week. Something to encourage at least doing low level keys all the time.
I would prefer solo dungeons to be rewarding like torgast. But I also think they can fix issues by making it feel more like old systems that rewarded casual play like frost badges in wotlk. They put valor in for mythic plus players only and locked it with rating. When they should have let players upgrade gear if they had the valor and higher keys rewarding more valor.
And doing your first herouc dungeon a day gave a decent chunk of valor.
Group content doesn’t engage enough, and isn’t fulfilling enough for the effort to reward ratio.
Further, interactions with pugs are absolutely garbage these days, and many casual players refuse to leave social friend guilds for PvE orientated ones, just for the sake of a side hobby.
Solo play is being nerfed further by offering even worse rewards in 9.2 for the effort put in for whatever grindy system they are going to put in again. Mythic+ is not enjoyable, raiding is a slog and pvp is a toxic cesspool.
It’s a small wonder blizzard hasn’t’ bled out more for their absolute lack of attention to the world and non-instanced “End game” content.
Sounds like wow is a 17 year old game and needs to figure something out besides the same old game over and over again.
Mythic+ is just reusing dungeons over and over again, and adding timers to make it more “E-sports” friendly.
Raiding is just a bloated mess at this point, and is not engaging anymore, and PvP’s not changed… like… ever… it’s still the toxic cesspool of imbalanced teams and lack of major direction.
Wow needs something different for end-game preferably something that doesn’t require high coordination with strangers online whom are only out for themselves and have zero interest in anything outside of their own self-interests.
I said this earlier and y’all said you weren’t asking for challenging solo content. And also the forums screamed about Torghast. You guys don’t actually want difficult solo content. You want gear. That’s what this thread’s about.
I don’t care about WoW’s sub count.
WotLK’s progression system: raid, PvP w/ a dead stat for PvE, weekly valor point system.
SL’s progression system: raid, PvP, M+ with unlimited valor point system, sandbox area with full sets of gear, weekly vault, weekly quests from various activities, world bosses, solo play legendary system
You have no idea what you’re talking about so I’ll cut my reply short, lol. Subs are declining, but they’re not declining because people who refuse to participate in group content are leaving. That’s why the game has never worked the way you’re whining for it to work.
Or people who don’t want to play WoW anymore can go do something else, rather than demand that WoW change into something completely different than it is.
So, you’re perfectly fine with the game dwindling away into mediocrity, because you cannot wrap your brain around the idea there could be more than three different end game activities?
Wow’s stagnant, but people still enjoy the world. People are well within their rights to advocate and request wow do more than just keep to the exact same tired old things for over a decade.
Glad to know you’re so easily pleased, but wow’s stagnant, and despite that plenty of people still enjoy the universe and want it to do better.
And people will continue to advocate for it to get better and do more, despite the fact you’re so easily placated.
I literally don’t understand the mentality. When I get tired of a game, whether it’s boredom or actual grievances, I go play something else. If I genuinely found everything bad about the game, why would I ever, EVER engage it any longer? And no, they don’t just “want to make the game better”, they basically want WoW to not exist at all and be an entirely different game, then get mad when it’s not. Why?
They are doing something else. Playing other games O.o. That aren’t 15 dollars a month and expect you to do chores to maintain your character, or other stuff.
Wow is a heavy investment game that punishes you if you aren’t elite in stuff like pvp. Who would want to play pvp like that in WoW unless they are into competitive pvp?