I guess the question is: how do you strike the balance between not demolishing group content and not burning out solo players with a ridiculously long grind that’s motivated by gear? I’m not saying you personally have to have the answer here or your point is invalid.
It can’t be just making the grind exceptionally longer, because people will indeed burn out. But it also can’t be making solo play more challenging, based on 1) Torghast being so woefully unpopular due to imbalances, being forced to do it, and the difficulty for many players, and 2) the overwhelming responses in this thread saying that nobody is asking for solo play to be challenging.
If they don’t make the content longer or harder in order to get those rewards, then the downside is negatively impacting the group experience by forcing those players to solo for gear. And, much to the chagrin of some of the commenters here, that actually matters and is going to take precedence over favoring a system that never existed.
If you can find some way to reasonably make it work, I’m all for it. I genuinely don’t think it’s possible, however.
That is largely why I keep saying gear rewarded for content should be strictly superior for that content alone. Gear from any content can get you to a baseline starting point (enough to get you in on the ground floor of other content) but no matter how good your gathering set is, it will never compete in a raid environment with gear that drops from the raid environment. Nor would the raid gear compete with the gathering set.
I don’t think all of this is as easy as changing gear and reward structures—there has to be a comprehensive shift in how players approach content. The current model is more interested in funneling people into content they don’t particularly like, though, in order to maximize their gains. I don’t think that’s a player-friendly formula, as it serves to reinforce unhealthy self-policing within the community and ultimately burns people out when their frustration grows to eclipse their FOMO.
Also, and as a general note somewhat related to the subject at hand, it’s okay for players to take breaks between content releases. I think a hidden, somewhat unreasonable assumption here is that players require enough content to keep them playing nonstop rather than completing their favorite lanes of content and then waiting for the next round.
I posted a couple of ideas up above, as convoluted as they may be from brainstorming.
In open world non-pvp flagged content, they can progress this system though a variety of solo content they enjoy until they are satisfied. Whether it’s just to have or just to clear content that much more efficiently makes little difference as it is solo content.
The solo gear would basically scale down in M+ above a +5 (late patch after a fair investment in partially time gated solo content) or normal raiding to the point of being worthless. With the valor system also incentivizing high performers to run low keys, this results in a very stress free and lax barrier of entry when they already outgear the content up to a +5 for example. Participation in M+ or normal (albeit with crutch) would allow them to experience mechanics that are not so easily overlooked in LFR / heroics and earn “real” loot that can be used to progress further than a +5 / normal if they find that content enjoyable. If they don’t have any interest in group content, then at least their time spent doing the activities they do enjoy paid off well for that content going into the next patch.
The main difference with a DnD campaign is that is is very possible to overpower your players relative to the content presented to them simply by the roll of the dice. A casual solo player in 252 gear doing what is already considered trivial content is no more powerful than a skilled player in the same gear which does not break the game. This is not to imply that max level gear would be rewarded any faster than the current pace to 233, but it should be extended to greater potential especially if done in a way to incentivize solo players into very low level group content that might be completely adverse to without the perceived sense of power as I mentioned above.
This is one of the reasons why the progression raiding model is so successful; in fact GC said that raiding was the most cost-effective method by far that Blizzard had ever found for player retention (which is why they created LFR, in an attempt to expand that retention model to a wider playerbase).
Let’s take 9.1 as an example. It goes through phases:
You’re going very hard at the start, learning a new raid, doing lots of M+ to get the new season gear, and plowing through the new zone to unlock socket upgrades.
The zone is done in about a month, you’ve seen all the bosses, now you’re working on mastering the harder difficulties. M+ continues until you get what you need, then you slow down or stop.
You get into the “raid log” area where you’re still working through progression, but don’t do much else except maybe 1 or 4 dungeons if you still need them.
Once progression is done, you’re into maintenance mode as you continue to do farm for gear, to meet new people who want to join the team, and just to stay in fighting shape until the next tier.
New tier comes out, repeat.
It creates a natural cycle of intense play tapering into less intensive periods where you spend time doing other things, then it starts up again after that.
Yea totally its just a way that casual players can get good gear without it effecting people that do hard content too by making them have to do the easy stuff too
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.