Honestly, time spent in game is the only thing that matters to Blizzard. Hopefully you enjoy your time playing the game, but they don’t care what individuals do with their time in it so I can’t see why anyone else should either.
1 Like
Just give people a polished game experience outside of instanced content across various traditions that players are pursuing on their own (like collecting, exploring, professions, questing, reputations). Reward them gear for steady progress therein. Tailor the gear being rewarded in such a way that it is inherently superior than all other gear for that form of content.
This game is not a fixed point stretched out over 17 years in terms of design. Many sacred cows have been slaughtered and birthed along the way. “It isn’t this way right now so it shouldn’t change” is just a myopic stone wall of a counterpoint. WoW is not appealing to the majority of its core audience as is. Judging by the rate by which raiding guilds and an entire faction are disintegrating, I doubt even the endgame crowd are satisfied with the current state of things.
Give people something fun to play and goals to work toward on their own terms and they’ll be more interested in playing. Trying to force people into content they hate because “that’s just how it is” isn’t serving anyone, creators nor players.
5 Likes
The problem is that games like this are designed with group content in mind when it comes to gearing. Solo content was never meant to be anything other than a stepping stone to reach that content. As it is, the world quest gear is fine for world quests and transmog runs.
SoO:
528 LFR
540 Flexible (normal)
553 Normal (heroic)
566 Heroic (mythic)
Unrated conquest that can be earned by solo queueing bgs: 550
Weekly Ordos kill: 559
I guess the entirety of mop raiding was devalued because of solo casuals having access to high ilvl gear or something
4 Likes
Current design not landing with the modern audience isn’t a strong argument against changing design to accommodate them, though. That group content would still be there and not minimized by what I have outlined in this thread. Group content would still remain the best gear for doing group content.
I don’t think the modern gaming audience is that big into MMO’s to begin with. I’m not sure how you make gear from group content the best for that content, which it already is, and then make gear from solo content the best for solo’ing. Solo content is already impossible to fail with the gear provided from it. The group content gear would still be better in solo content.
Only way to do it would be to have movement benefits etc in open world.
Doesn’t that then impact world pvp? There’s so many moving parts. Even if you added some tier bonus against quest mobs, I’m just not seeing the benefit to it.
That’s a fairly trivial process no different than conditionally disabling set bonuses. Consider it an inverse shard of domination system that only works in open world unflagged content. Raiders would have no interest in it, and solo players can have something to pursue that offers continuous progression.
Then you’re not really buffing solo gear, you’re nerfing group gear…which is harder to get. That’s going to be a tough sell.
Yea I hadn’t thought about pvp. I guess you could have them be damage increases that don’t work against other players but Yea it seems pretty minor to me. It’s not like I bother changing my dom sockets to do korthia dailies atm. I just do it in my m+ gear
Correct. The part they continue to ignore in favor of bashing a game they play every day.
1 Like
Yeah…it’s just a level of min/max that isn’t necessary for that content. Imagine having to carry all that gear around lol.
This genre won’t see numbers like 12m as a watermark for a single game again, but there is still a lot of hunger out there for a good MMO. FFXIV is pulling a massive audience from somewhere. New World pulled a massive audience from somewhere.
It wouldn’t be hard to tailor gear to specific content. The tools to do so already exist across the board with tier sets, raid-specific enhancements (like in Eternal Palace), skill bonuses, increased mount speed in open world content, increased resource gathering rates, and so on.
Also, to be clear, I’m not necessarily arguing for group content to not exist in these other lanes of content. I think the game is better off when design supports communities, but I also recognize the current system of transient mutes and worse doesn’t accomplish that at all. That’s probably a more complicated fix than I can spitball on a forum.
Time spent tuning things like set bonuses can be significant yes. The most basic approach is really just ilevel scaling. If given the choice between M+ key progression ( week or two for an invested player) along with a repeatable 30 minute run for heroic raid gear, or a large daily variety of solo content over a week for the same, I’d think any group-centric player will just say screw it and stick to M+ runs. If they feel like they must invest their time in solo content for that 1 extra drop, then WoW is likely doing the community as a whole a disservice in terms of mental health.
I played a good amount of FF14 and the basic model is the same. Sure, you can grind a relic weapon, but that still requires a lot of group content and an incredible amount of your time. There’s a certain number of people that are willing to dump the time into an MMO and those players are spread out amongst those games. I doubt that there are 12 million players total even if you add the number of WoW, FF14, and New World subs. Time marches on and it’s just not a popular genre anymore.
The people that want better gear for solo content aren’t going to be happy with faster node gathering. Sooner or later, they just need to play with other people.
1 Like
False.
Haven’t touched the game in weeks personally.
No MMO does this though. Because that fundamentally breaks the way MMOs are designed to be played. You shouldn’t lower the incentive to grouping by making soloing equally as lucrative. That’s not an elitist take at all; that’s just what would happen.
Your post shows that, in MoP, solo players got gear that averages to about where heroic gearing was. Isn’t that literally Korthia (233 gear with 239 from weekly Maw boss kill) vs. heroic (239 ilvl) today? With 262 legendaries in the mix?
And you can still be a solo player and run M+ or M0 during the weeks where it gives you 239 gear. I’ve been guildless for most of this game’s lifespan, and the only person I play with semi-regularly is my brother, but I often play alone. I don’t raid and I rarely PvP, but I’m still able to get geared.
I would never say that gear being effective for solo players devalued anything. However, I will say that I don’t see this enormous gear disparity in Shadowlands that was apparently smaller in Mists. To me, it looks the same. The system works for me, so I’m trying to not be biased here, but I’m a solo player and I just don’t have these issues that everyone else seems to be having.
1 Like
I disagree. I think if you give them gear that is objectively better for the content they pursue, they won’t look at rewards from content they don’t want to pursue with some measure of envy or contempt. It can’t just stop at reward structures, though. There needs to be a more satisfying breadth of content on the plate to pursue as well.
If M+ and heroic gear was available from world quests, people would just do the world quests. Keys and raids still have a chance of failure, quests don’t. Maybe some people will stick with raids and keys, but most people will take the path of least resistance. It’s just how people are.
1 Like