STOP making the game for the top 0.01% of the players! It’s killing this game

[arkanon]

If the content is not fun, engaging, or worthwhile, can we really call it casual content?

To be fair, those are all entirely subjective terms. Whats fun, engaging, and worthwhile for me might be absolute trash to you - hell, whats worthwhile for ME can change - i have made it no secret i havnt done mythic raiding for a while, as i just dont find the time investment worthwhile for me personally as my job has become extremely busy. And I have said this for the longest time - THAT is the issue with designing content for "casual" players - not only can casual players not agree on what is suitable - for example some want to be able to farm 1 normal/heroic ilvl piece per week through running heroic dungeons / queued bgs, and others want Mythic or higher (yes, higher) quality loot from WQ, and are only willing to wait a few weeks after release to have the full bis set. But as i said, not only is THAT an issue, they cant even decide if they are causal, or what casual is.

Mythic raids is 20man raid content, with a weekly lockout, and loot is on the bosses with a drop chance. Its the hardest pve content in the game, and rewards the highest quality pve loot in the game (with a few exceptions each tier).

Casual content is.....everything, depending on your mindset, but no actually its depending on how much you play, well actually no it depends on how frequently you play, not how much you play, well actually no it depends if you play with planned groups or pugs, but actually it depends on how serious you take the game, but, if you take it serious but only play a few hours a week you are like.....casual but not if those few hours are doing mythic raids because now you are hardcore but not if you dont take it serious but................

Meaningful, engaging, and worthwhile all fall into the same catagory as "casual"

[cparle87]

Normal mode raiding needs to be made significantly easier to try and steer people into organized content, IMO.

This. Normal was supposed to be the friends, family, and casuals tier like they said at the end of MoP when they introduced mythic. It's way too high right now. It's heroic with slightly lower numbers and one or two less mechanics. I'm not saying this is a bad thing. One new mechanic or changing how a mechanic works, like turning Skolex's tank swaps into cones so they have to be within 10 yards but not clip each other cones or making Xy'mox's traps unbreakable are fun changes. But normal should be closer to LFR and further from heroic.

[WowIsDead64]

To be fair, those are all entirely subjective terms. Whats fun, engaging, and worthwhile for me might be absolute trash to you - hell, whats worthwhile for ME can change - i have made it no secret i havnt done mythic raiding for a while, as i just dont find the time investment worthwhile for me personally as my job has become extremely busy. And I have said this for the longest time - THAT is the issue with designing content for "casual" players - not only can casual players not agree on what is suitable - for example some want to be able to farm 1 normal/heroic ilvl piece per week through running heroic dungeons / queued bgs, and others want Mythic or higher (yes, higher) quality loot from WQ, and are only willing to wait a few weeks after release to have the full bis set. But as i said, not only is THAT an issue, they cant even decide if they are causal, or what casual is.

Mythic raids is 20man raid content, with a weekly lockout, and loot is on the bosses with a drop chance. Its the hardest pve content in the game, and rewards the highest quality pve loot in the game (with a few exceptions each tier).

Casual content is.....everything, depending on your mindset, but no actually its depending on how much you play, well actually no it depends on how frequently you play, not how much you play, well actually no it depends if you play with planned groups or pugs, but actually it depends on how serious you take the game, but, if you take it serious but only play a few hours a week you are like.....casual but not if those few hours are doing mythic raids because now you are hardcore but not if you dont take it serious but................

Meaningful, engaging, and worthwhile all fall into the same catagory as "casual"

I don't agree. We know well, who casuals and hardcores are. Hardcore game is more like job or sport, where it doesn't matter, if you want play or not - you have to. Hardcore game requires some sort of discipline, if you want to achieve some goals. Hardcore game requires minimum time investment per day - one hour for example. Hardcore game requires minimum playing session duration quantum. If you don't have at least 30 minutes of free game time, then it's pointless for you to log in, as overhead costs are too high. For example flying from Covenant Sanctum to other location can take up to 10 minutes. Casual game is opposite. Casual game is designed according to "If you don't want to play this game now - you can do it". Casual game - is game, that doesn't require you to play every day. You want to play other game today? Ok, your choice. Casual game - is game, that supports any play session duration. Even 1 minute. So, casual game is incompatible with such things, as FOMO mechanics. Because FOMO mechanics force you to play every day.

Just imagine two extremes. Ultra-hardcore game, you need to play 24/7 and ultra-casual one, like Tetris or something like that. And then interpolate between this two and imagine, where Wow needs to be placed.

[arkanon]

Just imagine two extremes. Ultra-hardcore game, you need to play 24/7 and ultra-casual one, like Tetris or something like that. And then interpolate between this two and imagine, where Wow needs to be placed.

So the world record holder for tetris is.........casual?

edit: sorry, ULTRA casual?

[VinceVega]

Edit: Nevermind. Don't know why i engange with this again. Delted everything.

[crusadernero]

But there is more casual content right now than ever before. The problem is they showered casuals with basically a free 252 ilvl set that makes half of the casual content worthless when it comes to progressing your char.

That doesnt even make sense. Your character in wow never reaches a stage where its "finished", fully geared & progressed. With LFR, normal, HC & Mythic quality gear its just not going to happen for most players. The only ppl that feels "done" progressing a character are probably mythic raiders & high m+ key players.

For everyone else, the players never finish progressing. Its always progression, it never halts between patches. Its a neverending catchup that players never reach.

I think this feeling of never being "done" with a character makes people sick and tierd over time. Theres never a reason to get excited for LFR/normal gear and to some extent HC gear, cause its going to be replaced very soon and your character wont be BiS anyway.

Players gets showered in gear, but 95% of it is useless shite most of the time and in fact; you dont even need most of it if you are only playing outside of raiding/m+/arena.

Having a sense of progression were theres a somewhat reachable goal between big patches & xpacs is important. As it is now, nothing really changes between seasons. For alot of players. Thats a problem.

[Coldkil]

I assume so since dungeons,raids,torghast, and mage tower don't instantly vanish...

The issue isn't really the content but a intense burning jealousy that other people have higher ilv then them.

I would argue for this type of player content honestly comes second compared to how they see themselves stacked against their peers.

Not really. If anything, getting mythic ilvl is pretty easy via m+ and now we have all sorts of ways to bypass raiding. To me it seems people actually want to keep others away from loot because they don't do the same things in game.

I mean, i fully agree that reaching high skill levels and beating the hardest challenges needs to be rewarding, but ilvl is something that's completely broken and irrelevant right now as an indicator of the objectives someone has reached. Just check PvP gear for DF - when you buy it it's automatically max ilvl because it simply doesn't make sense to be otherwise.

To me this kind of players are the first very willingly to ditch any kind of group activity if max ilvl gear was rewarded from WQs for example. And if gear power is actually taken out of the equation, suddendly your ability to beat content is completely dependant on personal skills. Which will make a lot of people unable to beat ceratin encounters.

[crusadernero]

Edit: Nevermind. Don't know why i engange with this again. Delted everything.

You are seriously of the belief that Blizzard spends little dev time on creating & tuning mythic raiding? We can literally see what mythic raiding has done to the whole raiding scene(LFR, normal, HC & Mythic). Every difficulty is now harder because Blizzard creates fights for mythic that in turn gets lower numbers & less mechanics. But still, the fights keeps getting harder in each mode.

Thats because they gotta create insane hard & complex fights for mythic raiders and they cant just remove all of it in the other difficulties.

WotLK had lots of things to do and it will have this time around too. The big difference is that you can choose what to do. If you want to park your main for the week and gear up your alt, great! If you want to farm rep, dungeons or do pug raids on your main, cool!

Since Legion players have had things to do because they had to, not because they wanted too. Thats a big difference and its not really a healthy approach if you want to keep players playing over time.

And its true, Blizzard do spend alot of time creating difficult content that most people dont really give a shit about. They never have, never will. If they did, we would always see high numbers in mythic raiding. But we dont. We never do and never will. So at the very least it begs the question - why even bother when most players wont do it?

[VinceVega]

You are seriously of the belief that Blizzard spends little dev time on creating & tuning mythic raiding? We can literally see what mythic raiding has done to the whole raiding scene(LFR, normal, HC & Mythic). Every difficulty is now harder because Blizzard creates fights for mythic that in turn gets lower numbers & less mechanics. But still, the fights keeps getting harder in each mode.

Thats because they gotta create insane hard & complex fights for mythic raiders and they cant just remove all of it in the other difficulties.

WotLK had lots of things to do and it will have this time around too. The big difference is that you can choose what to do. If you want to park your main for the week and gear up your alt, great! If you want to farm rep, dungeons or do pug raids on your main, cool!

Since Legion players have had things to do because they had to, not because they wanted too. Thats a big difference and its not really a healthy approach if you want to keep players playing over time.

And its true, Blizzard do spend alot of time creating difficult content that most people dont really give a shit about. They never have, never will. If they did, we would always see high numbers in mythic raiding. But we dont. We never do and never will. So at the very least it begs the question - why even bother when most players wont do it?

No. It didn't LFR just caused people to not have to engange in even the simplest tactics or care about anything. Because they can get by without caring. No dmg? Someone else will do it. No healing. SOmeonelse will do it.
Is it more difficult than TBC or classic? Sure. But honestly TBC bossfights... you cannot put something like that out anymore. Barebones. No mechanics. Except the endboss everything is faceroll and boring as fuck.
Wotlk got better in that regard and the start of actually hard stuff.

I agree with the "have to"-stuff. But that has absolutly NOTHING to do with mythic raiding. They actually have been quite against this becuase they had to do enough allready an now are forced to do even more. (please nonone go again into the "you are not forced" discussion, you know what i mean)

And no i don't think mythic raiding has much dev time behinde it. The raids are allready there. There are no secret phases anymore. You get maybe one ability more and people act as if 50% of the dev time go into one fucking ability.
And they develop it becuase people like it. Follow it. And it is not much effort to iterate on an allready existing system. If you would remove raiding completly. Then yes. Then they would safe on dev time. But if someone actually advocates for that. Just leave.

[crusadernero]

No. It didn't LFR just caused people to not have to engange in even the simplest tactics or care about anything. Because they can get by without caring. No dmg? Someone else will do it. No healing. SOmeonelse will do it.
Is it more difficult than TBC or classic? Sure. But honestly TBC bossfights... you cannot put something like that out anymore. Barebones. No mechanics. Except the endboss everything is faceroll and boring as fuck.
Wotlk got better in that regard and the start of actually hard stuff.

I agree with the "have to"-stuff. But that has absolutly NOTHING to do with mythic raiding. They actually have been quite against this becuase they had to do enough allready an now are forced to do even more. (please nonone go again into the "you are not forced" discussion, you know what i mean)

And no i don't think mythic raiding has much dev time behinde it. The raids are allready there. There are no secret phases anymore. You get maybe one ability more and people act as if 50% of the dev time go into one fucking ability.
And they develop it becuase people like it. Follow it. And it is not much effort to iterate on an allready existing system. If you would remove raiding completly. Then yes. Then they would safe on dev time. But if someone actually advocates for that. Just leave.

Sure, and having LFR is also detriment to the game overall. Personally I think they just should have LFR as a solo experience were you go in with bots and see the raid then leave. Maybe give some shite gear from each boss. Cause thats the only thing we get out of it - seeing the raid & bosses. Its not really a enjoyable player experience at all. Its most of the time a total shitshow and the gear is shite anyways.

Its just not a great grouping experience.


I know mythic raiders got fucked over by Blizzard too by the things they had to do increased. Thats also wrong.


I think the overall raiding structure with 4 modes, were the easiest one dont even matter and the hardest one is barely done by players aint a healthy approach for the game overall. It also doesnt help that each tier the previous raids are put in the bin forever.

Personally im at the point were I dont even clear raids on LFR to see them. I either complete it on normal/HC or dont bother.

[arkanon]

Sure, and having LFR is also detriment to the game overall. Personally I think they just should have LFR as a solo experience were you go in with bots and see the raid then leave. Maybe give some shite gear from each boss. Cause thats the only thing we get out of it - seeing the raid & bosses. Its not really a enjoyable player experience at all. Its most of the time a total shitshow and the gear is shite anyways.

Its just not a great grouping experience.


I know mythic raiders got fucked over by Blizzard too by the things they had to do increased. Thats also wrong.


I think the overall raiding structure with 4 modes, were the easiest one dont even matter and the hardest one is barely done by players aint a healthy approach for the game overall. It also doesnt help that each tier the previous raids are put in the bin forever.

Personally im at the point were I dont even clear raids on LFR to see them. I either complete it on normal/HC or dont bother.

Remember when they changed the visuals of the LFR sets to be more basic and the entire "we need lfr to experience the story" argument went straight out the fucking window immediately?

[crusadernero]

Remember when they changed the visuals of the LFR sets to be more basic and the entire "we need lfr to experience the story" argument went straight out the fucking window immediately?

Hah yeah.

I dont really get why LFR excist as it does today. It quite literally does nothing good beyond seeing the inside of a raid and the completion of a story. Its not really a fun grouping experience most of the time and I would bet players just want it over with when doing it.

[VinceVega]

Sure, and having LFR is also detriment to the game overall. Personally I think they just should have LFR as a solo experience were you go in with bots and see the raid then leave. Maybe give some shite gear from each boss. Cause thats the only thing we get out of it - seeing the raid & bosses. Its not really a enjoyable player experience at all. Its most of the time a total shitshow and the gear is shite anyways.

Its just not a great grouping experience.


I know mythic raiders got fucked over by Blizzard too by the things they had to do increased. Thats also wrong.


I think the overall raiding structure with 4 modes, were the easiest one dont even matter and the hardest one is barely done by players aint a healthy approach for the game overall. It also doesnt help that each tier the previous raids are put in the bin forever.

Personally im at the point were I dont even clear raids on LFR to see them. I either complete it on normal/HC or dont bother.

LFR is useless. I agree with the story mode. People don't learn anything from it and just think raiding is this horrible mess of people doing bullshit and probably don't engange with it because of that anymore.

And i still think people underestimate how many people engange in one way or another with mythic raiding. There are over 14000 differnet guilds who have at least one boss killed in Mythic Castle.
Lets say everyone has exactly 20 players (most guilds have more) That are 280.000 players who have done SOMETHING in mythic raiding. Doesn't matter when how or why. They did. This obviously dropped of over the later raids because... well... shadowlands happend^^

But that is NOT an amount of players you can just push to the side as irrelevant. Completly ignoring that raiders are one of the most consistently subbed people in wow.

Arena for example has about 140.000 ranked characters in EU and US. But that doesn't mean players. We don't know that sadly as we have no way of knwoing that i think. But if you are looking for a not much used feature. Look at PvP.
Wow PvP was always... underplayed.

[WowIsDead64]

So the world record holder for tetris is.........casual?

edit: sorry, ULTRA casual?

That's why being hardcore or casual isn't about difficulty or game time - it's about some combined thing called effort. Hardcore way of playing can be found for any game. But is it [b]REQUIRED[b]? Playing session duration quantum is about "If I play for <X minutes today, then I just waste my time". You can play Tetris for just 1 minute and be satisfied. In Wow 1 minute isn't enough to even get to nearest flight path.

[arkanon]

That's why being hardcore or casual isn't about difficulty or game time - it's about some combined thing called effort. Hardcore way of playing can be found for any game. But is it [b]REQUIRED[b]? Playing session duration quantum is about "If I play for <X minutes today, then I just waste my time". You can play Tetris for just 1 minute and be satisfied. In Wow 1 minute isn't enough to even get to nearest flight path.

This all 100% perfectly supports my claim that you cannot make content for casuals, because noone can agree on what casual even is. There are people in this thread who completely disagree with you, and you even contradict yourself.

[crusadernero]

LFR is useless. I agree with the story mode. People don't learn anything from it and just think raiding is this horrible mess of people doing bullshit and probably don't engange with it because of that anymore.

And i still think people underestimate how many people engange in one way or another with mythic raiding. There are over 14000 differnet guilds who have at least one boss killed in Mythic Castle.
Lets say everyone has exactly 20 players (most guilds have more) That are 280.000 players who have done SOMETHING in mythic raiding. Doesn't matter when how or why. They did. This obviously dropped of over the later raids because... well... shadowlands happend^^

But that is NOT an amount of players you can just push to the side as irrelevant. Completly ignoring that raiders are one of the most consistently subbed people in wow.

Arena for example has about 140.000 ranked characters in EU and US. But that doesn't mean players. We don't know that sadly as we have no way of knwoing that i think. But if you are looking for a not much used feature. Look at PvP.
Wow PvP was always... underplayed.

Yeah, LFR is most likely a horrible first experience for newer players that want to raid. I've played this game since launch way back when so I know the drill with all of this. But imagine being a new player and join in on a LFR run.. oouuuf. No big motivation to progress into normal & HC.

It should just be a story mode that is eeasy to clear, especially since its so tied to the main story.


I think theres many things with raiding that together has made it what it are now. We cant really point fingers at one thing and proclaim "this is the issue". Its rather complex and there aint really a easy solution.

Well, fixing LFR into a easy story mode feature could be one. Just to see the effects of it.

[Johnjohn]

I think LFR was made because they kept making raiding harder and more exlusive at the highest difficulty level.

Get rid of LFR, but get rid of Mythic as well.

I don't even like 2 difficulty levels, but it's better than 4.

[ellieg]

That doesnt even make sense. Your character in wow never reaches a stage where its "finished", fully geared & progressed. With LFR, normal, HC & Mythic quality gear its just not going to happen for most players. The only ppl that feels "done" progressing a character are probably mythic raiders & high m+ key players.

For everyone else, the players never finish progressing. Its always progression, it never halts between patches. Its a neverending catchup that players never reach.

I think this feeling of never being "done" with a character makes people sick and tierd over time. Theres never a reason to get excited for LFR/normal gear and to some extent HC gear, cause its going to be replaced very soon and your character wont be BiS anyway.

Players gets showered in gear, but 95% of it is useless shite most of the time and in fact; you dont even need most of it if you are only playing outside of raiding/m+/arena.

Having a sense of progression were theres a somewhat reachable goal between big patches & xpacs is important. As it is now, nothing really changes between seasons. For alot of players. Thats a problem.

I'm not exactly sure what that has to do what I said.

No one, not even mythic raiders and high m+ players are ever full bis. Theres always some drop that eludes them. Or if you go on the resto druid discord, they literally want every piece to have leech on it. Having at least 1 item that players haven't gotten yet keeps them logging back in to try.

Even if you hit your full BiS, patches last 6 months so in a a month or 2 you have to restart anyway. Thats the nature of the game.

The point i was making is that the heroic dungeons, random battlegrounds, lfr and all the other casual content that ppl used to enjoy is still there. The reason ppl say it's worthless now is because of the reward structure. Heroic dungeons give 223 ilvl. Lfr is 239. Honor gear can be upgraded to 242. If you really really enjoyed the content it would be fine, but most ppl like progressing. But when you can do some daily and kill some rares for a few weeks in ZM, and get a full set of 252 cypher gear, it invalidates the previously mentioned content in terms of gearing.

I'm not opposed to "casuals" having decent gear or progression, but the reward structure is off. Getting normal raid ilvl gear from non difficult solo activities, has thrown off the balance of gearing from the previous methods of casual gearing.

Some casuals don't want to hear it, but the cypher 252 gear should either be time gated more heavily or have its ilvl reduced. That way you can do the random bgs, heroic dungeons, and lfr side by side with that content so you'll have longer progression.

[arkanon]

I think LFR was made because they kept making raiding harder and more exlusive at the highest difficulty level.

Get rid of LFR, but get rid of Mythic as well.

I don't even like 2 difficulty levels, but it's better than 4.

So bump heroic to mythic difficulty, and drop normal to lfr? or just........fuck lfr players (the majority of raiders) and fuck mythic raiders?

[Coldkil]

Some casuals don't want to hear it, but the cypher 252 gear should either be time gated more heavily or have its ilvl reduced. That way you can do the random bgs, heroic dungeons, and lfr side by side with that content so you'll have longer progression.

But it's already like this. It's literally been like this from Legion (or even before, though before Legion there was nothing besides raiding that could give you personal progression).

And guess what? Game is in shambles. Blizzard is doing exactly the opposite aswell. So that's what you get for trying to make a system artifically elongated and less relevant for the bulk of the players.