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

[Sicknex]

Multiple difficulties results in us having 4 versions of the same item, this leads to us having very boring and generic loot which also feel less rewarding to grind for. We also have insane ilvl jumps every tier which results in ''play the patch'' where only the current raid is the relevant one and the loot you are currently using is obsolete.

Also, you don't need multiple difficulties to balance the raid. Ulduar is still regarded as the best raid of all time and it only had one difficulty. It had 10 man and 25 man instead so you could technically say it had two i guess, but it still had unique items that we don't have anymore. Solution is to use the Ulduar model with some very hard hardmodes for mythic players and balance the raid for everyone. More work for blizzard, but better result for everyone, except the mythic raiders. Make loot more fun and rewarding again. There is a reason why tbc raiding is more popular than retail raiding. More fun for casuals and the loot is crazy rewarding.

[Tyris Flare]

Yes it is. Just change the reward structure so that skill doesn't directly translate to more power for all eternity. Give out some grindy options, some timegated options, different ways to arrive at that destination that are less efficient.

I've said repeatedly in many threads that I have no issue with this. I don't personally care what level people end up with at, as long as challenging stuff gives it out faster and as long as there's still some prestige content (which there is, in spades, so we're all good). No one who's decent at the game should be worried about Johnny World Quest outdpsing him with "welfare gear" or whatever you want to call it. Despite the memes, the differences between players in the same gear is absolutely immense. No offense to Johnny, but he probably doesn't push his buttons (and that's fine! he doesn't need to for what he's doing).

Not convinced that queued content with currency is the solution to this, though.

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We also have insane ilvl jumps every tier which results in ''play the patch'' where only the current raid is the relevant one and the loot you are currently using is obsolete.
.

Playing the patch is good, though. i get that a lot of older players especially seem to hate seasonal content, but it isn't going anywhere. It is widely used across the industry because it works

[Elias1337]

Yeah that's a lie. Even way back in vanilla you could get epic gear purely from solo or queued content.

No you couldnt. There were some useless drops if you were super lucky but thats it. You had to play with others to get atleast decent gear. So that and now you can literaly gear up close to heroic raid itemlvl without saying single word or play with single person. So yes game currently is absolute joke of casualwet dream compared to past.

[Echocho]

No you couldnt. There were some useless drops if you were super lucky but thats it. You had to play with others to get atleast decent gear. So that and now you can literaly gear up close to heroic raid itemlvl without saying single word or play with single person. So yes game currently is absolute joke of casualwet dream compared to past.

So PvP gear didn't exist then?

[Gorsameth]

So PvP gear didn't exist then?

As someone that got to rank 11 solo back in the day (yay free epic mount) getting to rank 12 for the first pieces of epic pvp gear solo would be a nightmare.

[NineSpine]

Just No.

There is nothing stopping Blizzard from halving the ilvl difference between difficulties and rebalancing around the new numbers.
Where the additional challenge for a higher difficulty is extra abilities to account for and mistakes being made more punishing, for example having something just do high, but survivable damage on normal, 1 shotting on Heroic, and 1 shotting with raid AoE on Mythic.

Its not heresy to be able to clear Heroic in Normal gear if you play well enough.

Your argument is nonsensical. If Blizzard halved the item level difference and then rebalanced around the new numbers, you are in the exact same position you were before, just with different numbers. For example, if you half my damage output and also half the HP of every enemy, nothing changes except the numbers you see on the screen.

Four difficulties is far too many to balance encounters around mechanical, as opposed to numerical, differences. It means making 40 different fights fun in a 10 boss tier, which they already fail to do in the current model. They should just go down to two difficulties at most. Nothing is being gained with this absurd number of settings. We just end up with poorly designed fights.

[Tyris Flare]

What is gained is an enormous amount of power growth over a tier to allow lower skilled players to eventually defeat fights. So instead of the Lich King or WoD model of nerfing bosses by 30% over a period of weeks, gear does it instead. Which psychologically feels better to players than knowing the fights are wilting every week.

It's a perfectly fine solution to the skill stratification problem. There can be improvements, sure, but that's true of anything. The tuning of final bosses compared to everything else is frankly a bigger problem, but also much more easily solved.

[Gorsameth]

Nothing is being gained with this absurd number of settings.

The people raiding whatever difficulty you want to remove you likely disagree with that assessment. As does Blizzard who can see participation numbers per difficulty.

Cutting out difficulties is also unlikely so solve fights not being 'fun'. They are not 'unfun' because of 4 difficulties. we've had plenty of fun fights with these difficulties. The issue is more likely changes in Blizzards design philosophy between when you considered fights be to 'fun' and now 'not fun'.

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What is gained is an enormous amount of power growth over a tier to allow lower skilled players to eventually defeat fights. So instead of the Lich King or WoD model of nerfing bosses by 30% over a period of weeks, gear does it instead. Which psychologically feels better to players than knowing the fights are wilting every week.

It's a perfectly fine solution to the skill stratification problem. There can be improvements, sure, but that's true of anything. The tuning of final bosses compared to everything else is frankly a bigger problem, but also much more easily solved.

its a solution to help players getting stuck, but increasing player power rather then nerfing the content comes with its own problems. Its creates large gaps between those with the gear, and those without (or with less).
Like trying to play some PvP without the latest gear and facing opponents with three times as much hp and double your damage.

[Echocho]

As someone that got to rank 11 solo back in the day (yay free epic mount) getting to rank 12 for the first pieces of epic pvp gear solo would be a nightmare.

Today it would be for sure but back then it wasn't because most people didn't play the game as seriously as they do now.

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What is gained is an enormous amount of power growth over a tier to allow lower skilled players to eventually defeat fights. So instead of the Lich King or WoD model of nerfing bosses by 30% over a period of weeks, gear does it instead. Which psychologically feels better to players than knowing the fights are wilting every week.

It's a perfectly fine solution to the skill stratification problem. There can be improvements, sure, but that's true of anything. The tuning of final bosses compared to everything else is frankly a bigger problem, but also much more easily solved.

Yeah but today they do both.

[NineSpine]

The people raiding whatever difficulty you want to remove you likely disagree with that assessment. As does Blizzard who can see participation numbers per difficulty.

We can see participation per difficulty too through the armory. It's about 70/20/10/3.

Removing a difficulty tier doesn't mean removing someone's ability to raid. If we had 8 difficulties, the number of people raiding wouldn't double.

Cutting out difficulties is also unlikely so solve fights not being 'fun'. They are not 'unfun' because of 4 difficulties. we've had plenty of fun fights with these difficulties. The issue is more likely changes in Blizzards design philosophy between when you considered fights be to 'fun' and now 'not fun'.

A lot of encounters these days are lame on lower difficulties because they are missing the mechanics that make them fun, which end up relegated for higher difficulties. The need to create mechanical distinction between 4 different tiers is the reason for this. They design an encounter for mythic, and then by the time they are down to LFR the substance of the encounter is gone.

[Tyris Flare]

Yeah but today they do both.

They nerf fights but it's not quite as clear as "this thing will get nerfed 5% per week on a schedule" like it used to be, which felt pretty bad to a lot of people. Pretty sure that's why they moved away from it.

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its a solution to help players getting stuck, but increasing player power rather then nerfing the content comes with its own problems. Its creates large gaps between those with the gear, and those without (or with less).
Like trying to play some PvP without the latest gear and facing opponents with three times as much hp and double your damage.

It's definitely not perfect, but it's also much easier to get gear later in the patch once valor gets uncapped and whatnot, especially with help from a guild or even just a few friends to carry

[Drudi]

“ If that person saves for several years and finally saves enough in 2024 to buy a 2018 Infiniti with 200,000 miles on it”

Yes do exactly this. We had in in LK, we had it with mop. Different tiers of badges (heroism/courage/valor) as currencies, with current patch level gear being available only through current patch level badges only dropping in current patch level content. With price shifts every patch, so that a previously-top-tier gear (badges of courage) now gets sold for lower tier badges (badges of heroism) and you can finally afford your 200k miles 10 years old Infiniti.

The game had this system and it worked fine - before it was skewed towards the same stupid “we pay equally as much, we are entitled!” crowd

[Echocho]

“ If that person saves for several years and finally saves enough in 2024 to buy a 2018 Infiniti with 200,000 miles on it”

Yes do exactly this. We had in in LK, we had it with mop. Different tiers of badges (heroism/courage/valor) as currencies, with current patch level gear being available only through current patch level badges only dropping in current patch level content. With price shifts every patch, so that a previously-top-tier gear (badges of courage) now gets sold for lower tier badges (badges of heroism) and you can finally afford your 200k miles 10 years old Infiniti.

The game had this system and it worked fine - before it was skewed towards the same stupid “we pay equally as much, we are entitled!” crowd

We had it in cata too right? It's a great system.

[Gorsameth]

We can see participation per difficulty too through the armory. It's about 70/20/10/3.

Removing a difficulty tier doesn't mean removing someone's ability to raid. If we had 8 difficulties, the number of people raiding wouldn't double.



A lot of encounters these days are lame on lower difficulties because they are missing the mechanics that make them fun, which end up relegated for higher difficulties. The need to create mechanical distinction between 4 different tiers is the reason for this. They design an encounter for mythic, and then by the time they are down to LFR the substance of the encounter is gone.

Your not directly removing someone's ability to raid, but indirectly you are. If you get rid of Heroic for example your going to lose a portion of the people for who Normal is to easy, but mythic is to hard. They could just steamroll normal but they get bored. And their not interested in running into a wall in Mythic.

And yes, designing for the RWF and working down, rather then designing Normal (or Heroic) and working out from there would be that change in design philosophy I mentioned. Getting rid of difficulties won't change your issue. They would still design for the RWF and gut the fight for whatever other difficulty.

Blizzard needs to change how they design fights and work more on making them fun rather then frustrating.

[Skildar]

Your not directly removing someone's ability to raid, but indirectly you are. If you get rid of Heroic for example your going to lose a portion of the people for who Normal is to easy, but mythic is to hard. They could just steamroll normal but they get bored. And their not interested in running into a wall in Mythic.

And yes, designing for the RWF and working down, rather then designing Normal (or Heroic) and working out from there would be that change in design philosophy I mentioned. Getting rid of difficulties won't change your issue. They would still design for the RWF and gut the fight for whatever other difficulty.

Blizzard needs to change how they design fights and work more on making them fun rather then frustrating.

availability of players and mastery of the game push for different challenges.

I've raided mythic for a couple of expansions then my available time changed and today I stop at heroic. Having my couple of difficulties (NM-HM) to run is great, especially since flex was introduced.

Removing one would only divide by two the time people will be able to enjoy a raid for some.

Rethinking difficulties for an endless system like MM+ has could be the future that blizzard will opt for but I'm not sure it has its place there.

[cparle87]

On the topic of LFR: I am fine with the current system (assuming you can get Tier tokens without being forced to do LFR). People who want LFR to be easier need to accept that with easier content come worse rewards.

No LFR needed. You can turn key gear of any level, Antros 259 WB loot, and the 246 stuff from the sandworm relics into tier.

[zysis]

Blizzard being bad at making non-challenging content fun?

As we've all been saying; how do you get to decide what fun is? All you seem to say is it's not fun... How does one make non-challenging content fun?

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Needing four different raid difficulties is an admission of total failure in game design.

Says the guy who has likely never and will never have anything to do with game design. But let's pretend that all this waxxing will prove useful.

Game is very well designed. The numbers prove it. Your ideas are BC level and ignore the full spectrum of players. WoW caters to all levels of player and that's a VERY good thing. If Blizzard adhered to your poorly thought-out ideas, there would be a HUGE loss in subs. There's much you miss in your thinking, you just think WoW should copy/paste FF and the very systems Blizzard have in place allow many skillsets of player to enjoy the game at a glance.

If WoW isn't fun, if it's too hard, then WoW isn't the game for you. Stop trying to make WoW into Final Fantasy. It's never going to happen.

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As someone that got to rank 11 solo back in the day (yay free epic mount) getting to rank 12 for the first pieces of epic pvp gear solo would be a nightmare.

Guildie did HWL twice over in Vanilla solo. It wasn't about grouping AT ALL it was about spending 18 hours a day playing. It could never be done as a group lol

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There is a reason why tbc raiding is more popular than retail raiding. More fun for casuals and the loot is crazy rewarding.

I'd like to see evidence of BC raiding being more popular. It's certainly NOT casual friendly at all. Not even sure why you'd say that...

[Necromantic]

As someone that got to rank 11 solo back in the day (yay free epic mount) getting to rank 12 for the first pieces of epic pvp gear solo would be a nightmare.

My guild master got rank 13 solo by 100% AFKing. His computer was set to jump ever so often and his computer just played AV all day long. He openly told people he did it and was never banned for it.

[NineSpine]

As we've all been saying; how do you get to decide what fun is? All you seem to say is it's not fun... How does one make non-challenging content fun?

If Blizzard makes a quest to get the best weapon on the game, and the quest is to kill 500,000 raptors that all have 1hp and a 5 minute respawn timer, and you say "This isn't very fun", would you find it productive for someone to say "WHY DO YOU GET TO DECIDE WHAT IS FUN, HUH!?!?!?!"

I'm not quite sure how to respond to the contention that something needs to be very challenging to be fun. It's easy to watch a movie, but often very fun. This is not as complicated as you are trying to make it out to be. Do you honestly sit around in life utterly bored until something extremely hard to do comes along?

Says the guy who has likely never and will never have anything to do with game design. But let's pretend that all this waxxing will prove useful.

I worked at Vicarious Visions for four years in the late 2000s, shipping multiple titles.

Game is very well designed. The numbers prove it. Your ideas are BC level and ignore the full spectrum of players. WoW caters to all levels of player and that's a VERY good thing. If Blizzard adhered to your poorly thought-out ideas, there would be a HUGE loss in subs. There's much you miss in your thinking, you just think WoW should copy/paste FF and the very systems Blizzard have in place allow many skillsets of player to enjoy the game at a glance.

The numbers have been tanking. We can see that through armory statistics. The game is in a free fall. WoW is NOT catering to all levels of players. That's exactly the problem. It only caters to people who want to do very challenging content. The game sucks for almost everyone else.

If WoW isn't fun, if it's too hard, then WoW isn't the game for you. Stop trying to make WoW into Final Fantasy. It's never going to happen.

I'd like WoW to succeed and it is failing. I don't like Jar Jar Binks, but I didn't childishly fold my arms and refuse to ever watch Star Wars again. If you like things, and they are important to you, and they are being fucked up, you advocate for them to be fixed.

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Your not directly removing someone's ability to raid, but indirectly you are. If you get rid of Heroic for example your going to lose a portion of the people for who Normal is to easy, but mythic is to hard. They could just steamroll normal but they get bored. And their not interested in running into a wall in Mythic.

And yes, designing for the RWF and working down, rather then designing Normal (or Heroic) and working out from there would be that change in design philosophy I mentioned. Getting rid of difficulties won't change your issue. They would still design for the RWF and gut the fight for whatever other difficulty.

Blizzard needs to change how they design fights and work more on making them fun rather then frustrating.

The reason they aren't fun is because only Mythic is getting a complete experience, and that experience is mitigated by being crushingly difficult. If a designer says "I have this amazing idea for a fight, it has mechanics X, Y and Z" it is because adding those three mechanics together creates some kind of experience. They create that fight and then tune it for mythic difficulty, because that is the difficulty that has to get all the mechanics or else it won't make sense. They then have to scale it down for everyone else which means removing the mechanics that the fight was designed for. This means that the only complete version of the fight that matches what the designer envisioned is the mythic one that very few players ever get to see.

There is nobody for whom normal is too easy but heroic is too hard, because heroic isn't a discreet difficulty. It almost always overlaps with normal and mythic. If you can do the second half of normal, you can easily do the first half of heroic, and if you are doing the second half of heroic, you can do the first half of mythic. This isn't true in every case, there are outliers, but the vast majority of the time that is the case.

[Necromantic]

If Blizzard makes a quest to get the best weapon on the game, and the quest is to kill 500,000 raptors that all have 1hp and a 5 minute respawn timer, and you say "This isn't very fun", would you find it productive for someone to say "WHY DO YOU GET TO DECIDE WHAT IS FUN, HUH!?!?!?!"

I'm not quite sure how to respond to the contention that something needs to be very challenging to be fun.

You could have saved a lot of typing and just showed active user numbers by expansion. You'd have won and there would be nothing to reply to.