Originally Posted by
HuxNeva
What you are not seeing is the feedback loop.
There is content, you do that content, you get gear. The more difficult the content the better the gear with better stats. The better gear with stats, the easier the content, so the more better gear with stats, so the more difficult the content has to be ... This creates a bifurcation, a split, where above a certain threshold you are accelerating through the ever increasingly difficult content, and below which you are falling further and further behind.
In systems terms you have created "balance" around an 'unstable equilibrium', meaning that if you get slightly to the left or the right of the balance point, you are falling further and further away from it.
As a game designer this is the opposite of what you want. You want a system the has a stable equilibrium to balance around. Rather than accelerate away, a deviation from the point the trajectory the game had in mind it requires more and more energy of the player the further they are away from balance to maintain the imbalance. So 'better' players can run ahead, but face increasingly harder odds to get better gear, while 'worse' players will fall behind, but will have increasingly better chances of catching up. At the very least you want variance in player power from gear to be within a rather tight range at the drop of a new expansion, or you'll face ever further disparity and soon find you can not possibly accommodate such a wide range of player power within the same game.
In the 'old days', the way this worked was through encounter nerfs. You just reduced the health/mechanics of encounters to give the stragglers a chance to get with the program again. It works on some points, but failed dramatically on player psychology. Those that had 'failed' before the nerf came in felt bad, as they had obviously failed and were exposed as such, those that had defeated the content before the nerf, now had even less content as even repeating a kill was now even more trivial than it had become already with the better gear they now had.
Modern systems are more subtle. Rather than nerfing the encounter explicitly with a certain reset, they provide continual statistical gear catchup as an implicit gradual nerf over time as long as you are not close to the current cap. So stragglers now will get improved odds at beating the content over time, and there is no real "you failed" moment, besides CE or AotC, but those are far more accesible things than 'pre-nerf" ever could be.
Titanforging was mathematically a beautiful systemic solution. If you studied the implementation you couldn't but marvel at how good it was done. What they had completely forgotten was human psychology. They way less systemic, less mathematically savvy players would experience the system was ofc not 'objective', but fed by the outliers in a massive social echo chamber, just like everything else in society. So cries on the forums about 'my freind of a friend saw an LFR dude get a cap ilvl TF' were ofc treated with a reserved reasoning on probability and fact checked with available data from the armory and warcraftlogs and ... no, it was a shitshow, obviously no data, no rational argument would convince a rabit mob of players that getting Mythic geared through LFR wasn't possible before the heat dead of the universe, nor that TF did not mean the end of meritocracy but just a way to converge on content, just like the old ways but better.
So TF had to be sacrificed to the angry mobs shouting 'off with it's head', and instead we got 'Corruptions', a system funnily enough hailed as 'better' by the pundits, which just required one look at the implementation to realize that rather than sophisticated this was just a completely blunt and near unbalancable sledgehammer, and that was even before you realized it would be on BoE's to.