What rewards does raiding need to make it more appealing?

[huth]

yeah, there will definately never be a time when players argue about having to raid to get gear when all they want to do dungeons. who could imagine such a thing!

It didn't incentivise more people to actually raid, either. So it didn't "work" in any way.

[Delekii]

It seems to me that a great deal of the responses in this thread come from people that already like raiding more than alternatives, and just want their play style more heavily incentivised. I can understand the sentiment, since m+ was 13 odd years later than I would have preferred.

Raiding is often held up on a pedestal as being the best the game has to offer, but it's not because it's intrinsically better or harder - that's just the way the game positioned it for a long time. For me, the reason I dont raid is because it's simply not fun for me. I used to do it because I functionally had to, but never because I wanted to. The organisational aspects of raiding are not difficult, but they are tedious. Tedium and difficulty are not synonymous, despite their frequent conflation in this sphere.

My answer for the topic "what does raiding need to make it more appealing" is nothing. It needs to be balanced in a time vs reward sense, and that's it. If it remains increasingly unpopular then accept that it's because people fundamentally dislike the structure of raiding, and either change that structure or leave it as the niche that it is.

The answer is absolutely not to force people back into doing an activity they dislike for hours and hours a week again.

Balance the output of each content type and let people enjoy what they enjoy.

[kaminaris]

Tier sets? Better gear than you get from doing dungeons and quests? Worked for the first ten years.

Actually it didn't work at all.

[Echocho]

Actually it didn't work at all.

Actually it did

[kaminaris]

Actually it did

No, it didn't. Like, zero impact on participation.

[Sammonoske]

Valor-like points rewarded only from raiding, and of course, the one thing we all love to fight over is to bring back legendary weapons.

[Echocho]

No, it didn't. Like, zero impact on participation.

Yes it did. Huge impact on participation.

[Kaesebrezen]

Yes it did. Huge impact on participation.

No, it never had that effect.

Vanilla participation was extremely low(and classic wow is no representation of how it was). That's why BC reduced the raid size to 25 man.
BC raid participation didn't warrant the development cost, that's why we got 10 man in WotLK.
WotLK participation in 25 mans was extremely low, that's why Cata and MoP had 10/25 man award the same loot.
WoD had raid-or-die Hellfire, and people picked death. That's why Legion brought M+...

Raid Loot always had very little impact on participation. There are many reasons people don't raid, and the loot incentive never has been enough to overcome any of it.

[Queen of Hamsters]

My class being fun to play vs the content.

Raids with creativity and visuals that aren't boring after 1 run.

No need to chase power progression outside of raiding other than for the first raid of the expansion. If I wanted to do dungeons, I'd do them.

I'm not a loot-whore, I raid for the experience, long-term rewards that matter (Titles, FOS, Mounts) and the memories from raiding with others. I'm easily motivated to raid. If my class isn't fun and the raids are visually void of imagination, I'll lose gameplay and visuals from the "Why-I-Raid!"-list. If between raids I'm expected to partake in content I don't enjoy to get Essences or AP or a chance at titanforged BIS, I'll have involountary shit added to a separate list, the "What-I-Do-To-Raid"- shitlist.

[Echocho]

No, it never had that effect.

Vanilla participation was extremely low(and classic wow is no representation of how it was). That's why BC reduced the raid size to 25 man.
BC raid participation didn't warrant the development cost, that's why we got 10 man in WotLK.
WotLK participation in 25 mans was extremely low, that's why Cata and MoP had 10/25 man award the same loot.
WoD had raid-or-die Hellfire, and people picked death. That's why Legion brought M+...

Raid Loot always had very little impact on participation. There are many reasons people don't raid, and the loot incentive never has been enough to overcome any of it.

Got a source to go with that fact?

[Tech614]

Tier sets? Better gear than you get from doing dungeons and quests? Worked for the first ten years.

Not really, it was just the only end game gearing system so it didn't need to appeal to anything. Options are good for the game, not bad for it. Even when raiding was the only game in town it still had ridiculously low participation numbers compared to number of players.

Really all raiding needs is cool cosmetic rewards, that become very difficulty or impossible to acquire once the tier is over. Gear is whack and gets out dated, cosmetics are always good. Limited windows to acquire said cosmetics gets people off their ass and attempting to raid.

[kaminaris]

Not EXACTLY a source, but a pretty good guess:

WoW progress currently lists kills on Lady Jaina Proudmoore and Ghuun mythic modes as near-equal to the number of people who killed Mythic Argus the Unmaker. (Note: I realize this is an inaccurate comparison at the moment - We'll have to double check it again around the end of BfA for accuracy.)

Starting with T17 (Highmaul and Blackrock) - We see a massive drop in completion rate for mythic mode. Garrosh was killed by 9000 profiles on Mythic mode - But Margok was only killed by 5000, and Blackhand even less at a measly 2000. This number continued to Archimonde, who had only 2850 profiles kill him - More than Blackhand, but that's not surprising considering Blackhand was known as the Guildbreaker in comparison to Archi.

However, in Legion, we had nearly 6000 profiles kill Mythic Xavius, 2439 to defeat Helya, and 2000 profiles were able to defeat Gul'dan on Mythic. Tomb of Sargeras had another drop in completion (892 profiles), and Argus ended the expansion with similar kill numbers to today's Mythic numbers - 1748 profiles.

Finally, for BfA so far, we have Ghuun at 1753 profiles, Jaina at 1890 profiles, Uu'nat at 175, and Azshara at 675. (with more being added as more clears are made)

If we were going to presume that the removal of Tier had an effect on people wanting to raid, we would expect today's kill numbers to be lower than last expansion's. Which, currently they are, and they may still end up that way - Given that we're on the second tier of BfA, I expected the kill numbers for Jaina and Ghuun to be higher than they currently are since people outgear the content. (And the fact that Argus is an end-of-expansion raid - He's supposed to be tuned harder than Jaina or Ghuun were.) But we'll see if that number rises any further with the introduction of even higher level gear in Ny'alotha - Since all of these numbers are taken after all tiers of content and new gear for the expansion are released, it's only fair that such a comparison is made after the fact for BfA as well.

But all of this said: We can't draw a fully accurate conclusion without the full data set, so we need to have Ny'alotha released and in full swing and Shadowlands released before we can say with certainty that less people are raiding, and not just that people have less gear. But the current data set supports your supposition: Less people are currently raiding and completing current content than there were completing content in Antorus. Since both Legion and BfA both had Mythic+ mode since the start, there are two main differences to keep in mind: The changes to Master/Personal loot, and the removal of Tier from raids.

And while I'd like to say that the changes to Master/Personal loot caused half of the raiding population to give up and never try it again... I mean, it's a stretch to begin with, let's not even go down that route.

Now you are operating on a guesses? Heh.

No. First of all it is incomparable considering difficulty of those bosses. Xavius was a walk in a park. Argus lasted very long and was nerfed several times. Last nerf was so hard (actually a buff to weapons) that people farmed him on alts. People playing 8h a week who barely killed him on time.
Not to mention you need to compare that numbers to entire population as with it's raw form are simply useless.

While my good guess, based on empirical evidence is simple, people don't want to progress bosses over 4 months. Its a magical barrier that makes people leave the game because of boredom. I have never ever heard from mythic raider that the reason he left the game was because of gear. Never.

Most frequent reason was boredom, 2nd being "family matters".

Lets face it, people never really raided for gear. Even if they say so, it is simply a lie. At best people wanted best gear to be able to make high ranks in logs.


In legion, while being in ~200 guild, squad changed 3 times - completely. Couple of people left for even better guild. The rest? Left for good.
This expansion I had 4 guild merges with ~6 people still being from original squad. So a comparable number of overall raiders.

Tier sets? Nobody gave a shit since we all had it in 3 weeks and treated it as "gear to never replace".
Master loot? Well, there as some complaints but maybe once or twice. Since we have "master loot" once everyone is geared to 445.

And I don't blame people for being fed up with raids taking 6 months to progress. It gets really boring, especially with no skips.

[Echocho]

Not EXACTLY a source, but a pretty good guess:

WoW progress currently lists kills on Lady Jaina Proudmoore and Ghuun mythic modes as near-equal to the number of people who killed Mythic Argus the Unmaker. (Note: I realize this is an inaccurate comparison at the moment - We'll have to double check it again around the end of BfA for accuracy.)

Starting with T17 (Highmaul and Blackrock) - We see a massive drop in completion rate for mythic mode. Garrosh was killed by 9000 profiles on Mythic mode - But Margok was only killed by 5000, and Blackhand even less at a measly 2000. This number continued to Archimonde, who had only 2850 profiles kill him - More than Blackhand, but that's not surprising considering Blackhand was known as the Guildbreaker in comparison to Archi.

However, in Legion, we had nearly 6000 profiles kill Mythic Xavius, 2439 to defeat Helya, and 2000 profiles were able to defeat Gul'dan on Mythic. Tomb of Sargeras had another drop in completion (892 profiles), and Argus ended the expansion with similar kill numbers to today's Mythic numbers - 1748 profiles.

Finally, for BfA so far, we have Ghuun at 1753 profiles, Jaina at 1890 profiles, Uu'nat at 175, and Azshara at 675. (with more being added as more clears are made)

If we were going to presume that the removal of Tier had an effect on people wanting to raid, we would expect today's kill numbers to be lower than last expansion's. Which, currently they are, and they may still end up that way - Given that we're on the second tier of BfA, I expected the kill numbers for Jaina and Ghuun to be higher than they currently are since people outgear the content. (And the fact that Argus is an end-of-expansion raid - He's supposed to be tuned harder than Jaina or Ghuun were.) But we'll see if that number rises any further with the introduction of even higher level gear in Ny'alotha - Since all of these numbers are taken after all tiers of content and new gear for the expansion are released, it's only fair that such a comparison is made after the fact for BfA as well.

But all of this said: We can't draw a fully accurate conclusion without the full data set, so we need to have Ny'alotha released and in full swing and Shadowlands released before we can say with certainty that less people are raiding, and not just that people have less gear. But the current data set supports your supposition: Less people are currently raiding and completing current content than there were completing content in Antorus. Since both Legion and BfA both had Mythic+ mode since the start, there are two main differences to keep in mind: The changes to Master/Personal loot, and the removal of Tier from raids.

And while I'd like to say that the changes to Master/Personal loot caused half of the raiding population to give up and never try it again... I mean, it's a stretch to begin with, let's not even go down that route.

Well if anything that supports my theory. Gear has become less and less important over the years and WOD was the first time it became apparent for a lot of players. The time and commitment it took to clear mythic didn't warrant the small gear upgrade.

You didn't get any better in the outside world and you didn't get any better in PvP. Better raid gear was only usable for doing harder versions of the content you were already doing.

With the introduction of m+ and titanforging it became even more apparent. Why bust your ass doing incredibly hard content when you can get close to the same power level by just running easier content and fish for procs.

To fix raiding you need to fix other things first. First of all the outside world must pose a challenge that can be overcome by getting better gear. Secondly your gear needs to matter a lot in PvP. And third the best gear needs to drop from either hardcore raiding and/or hardcore PvP.

When people feel that they actually have to progress their character in order to make their every day lives easier they will.

[kaminaris]

Well if anything that supports my theory. Gear has become less and less important over the years and WOD was the first time it became apparent for a lot of players. The time and commitment it took to clear mythic didn't warrant the small gear upgrade.

You didn't get any better in the outside world and you didn't get any better in PvP. Better raid gear was only usable for doing harder versions of the content you were already doing.

With the introduction of m+ and titanforging it became even more apparent. Why bust your ass doing incredibly hard content when you can get close to the same power level by just running easier content and fish for procs.

To fix raiding you need to fix other things first. First of all the outside world must pose a challenge that can be overcome by getting better gear. Secondly your gear needs to matter a lot in PvP. And third the best gear needs to drop from either hardcore raiding and/or hardcore PvP.

When people feel that they actually have to progress their character in order to make their every day lives easier they will.

You contradict yourself. And again no. Gear is and never was a problem. Time commitment is.

To make raids more a lot more appealing, blizzard would need to do 3 things. Make sure that every raid tier has skips. That 1000th guild can clear it in 4 months (possibly by ongoing nerfs). And reduce number of people needed from 20 to at least 15 or maybe even make it flexible 10-20.

[ydraw]

Got a source to go with that fact?

The source is Blizzard themselves. They said when LFR was released that raiding participation was not high enough to justify the costs of raid development. LFR was their solution - make raiding easily accessible and break it down into smaller time chunks.

The result is that LFR participation dwarfs all other forms of raiding combined. Even though the gear is worse than you can get from doing daily quests.

[Specialka]

I would love to have a mythic version of outside word content. But it would split the outside world even more than it is today. Or maybe the mobs could scale even more to you?

I did raid in the past while it was the harder "part" of wow but was never a big fan because of time commitment. I prefered small group content but 5 man dungeon were a joke when you were geared. I really like the addition of m+ in Legion. It was a great boon. The removal of tier set in raid was one as well since I did not need to raid anymore to get the "must not replace gear".

[Echocho]

The source is Blizzard themselves. They said when LFR was released that raiding participation was not high enough to justify the costs of raid development. LFR was their solution - make raiding easily accessible and break it down into smaller time chunks.

The result is that LFR participation dwarfs all other forms of raiding combined. Even though the gear is worse than you can get from doing daily quests.

AH great, could you link that source for me then?

[Delekii]

Find it yourself, you lazy sod.

[Tehalbino]

AH great, could you link that source for me then?

It's common knowledge. You're an idiot.

[Echocho]

It's common knowledge. You're an idiot.

You said that Blizzard say that raiding participation was not high enough to justify the costs of raid development. Surely you must have a source to point to where they said that otherwise you could just as well be making it up.