Should flex mythic raiding exist in DF?

[NineSpine]

I've also given you an ultimatum before, I believe. I even put it in the short form you seem to prefer.

PUT UP, OR SHUT UP.

Tell me specifically what you want me to put up. I provided a series of points, and you larded up your response with philosophy lectures and generalized requests for evidence.

1. Respond to my points.
2. Be specific.
3. Provide either a rebuttal or a request for more information.
4. Stop responding sentence by sentence.

If you can make a single post that does that and doesn't do anything else, I will donate $100 to the charity of your choice.

[Biomega]

Tell me specifically what you want me to put up. I provided a series of points, and you larded up your response with philosophy lectures and generalized requests for evidence.

1. Respond to my points.
2. Be specific.
3. Provide either a rebuttal or a request for more information.
4. Stop responding sentence by sentence.

If you can make a single post that does that and doesn't do anything else, I will donate $100 to the charity of your choice.

Explain why and how the "mythic arms race" causes "balance problems" for non-mythic players; I specifically mean why it causes PROBLEMS - the fact that balance doesn't always change things equally across all difficulties isn't a sufficient explanation, because that is always the case by virtue of how those performances are stratified with respect to difficulty; even positive changes wouldn't always be uniformly proportionate. So what, specifically, causes PROBLEMS outside of mythic that is demonstrably BECAUSE it's balanced in mythic - i.e. please give an example of a change made for mythic specifically that wouldn't have been made outside/without mythic and has a negative effect outside of mythic but not within mythic.

Please demonstrate that class homogenization has increased BECAUSE of high-difficulty content. High difficulty content can cause homogenization, but so can other things like e.g. extending content longevity, increased convenience for playing solo, or lowering class/spec demand burdens on non-maximum difficulties. Show why it's the maximum difficulty SPECIFICALLY that is to blame for homogenization, and that it is not simply a result of other things.

Prove that Blizzard really is "designing mythic first" and then "watering down" for other difficulties, rather than designing for the broad masses and then adding on top of it to make mythic more difficult. Once you have proven that, demonstrate if and why this has a NEGATIVE impact outside of mythic; or, alternatively, why it having a neutral or positive impact is relevant. Specifically, I'd like an example or an explanation of how you can tell the difference between "design for mythic -> remove stuff to make heroic" and "design for heroic -> add stuff for mythic" in practice, why they would be different at all, and why one has a negative impact and the other doesn't (or why it having a neutral or positive impact is relevant).

Lastly, show that mythic has in fact caused a "throttling of rewards outside of raids". Explain what time frame you are looking at, and how you assess the number/quality of rewards you are talking about. Once you have done that, demonstrate that this has occurred "so as not to hurt the feelings of mythic raiders" rather than for alternative reasons, such as e.g. extending the lifespan of content to have people sub for longer.

I'd like specific examples or pointers to specific things, not vague generalizations like "game systems" or "game design". Make the examples concrete, and don't use unproven or unprovable premises. Please also avoid logical fallacies like argument from authority ("I'm a game designer, therefore X is caused by Y") or argumentum ad hominem ("Ion hates non-raiders, therefore he caused X").

Make the check out to the Environmental Defense Fund.

[NineSpine]

Explain why and how the "mythic arms race" causes "balance problems" for non-mythic players; I specifically mean why it causes PROBLEMS - the fact that balance doesn't always change things equally across all difficulties isn't a sufficient explanation, because that is always the case by virtue of how those performances are stratified with respect to difficulty; even positive changes wouldn't always be uniformly proportionate. So what, specifically, causes PROBLEMS outside of mythic that is demonstrably BECAUSE it's balanced in mythic - i.e. please give an example of a change made for mythic specifically that wouldn't have been made outside/without mythic and has a negative effect outside of mythic but not within mythic.

Please demonstrate that class homogenization has increased BECAUSE of high-difficulty content. High difficulty content can cause homogenization, but so can other things like e.g. extending content longevity, increased convenience for playing solo, or lowering class/spec demand burdens on non-maximum difficulties. Show why it's the maximum difficulty SPECIFICALLY that is to blame for homogenization, and that it is not simply a result of other things.

Prove that Blizzard really is "designing mythic first" and then "watering down" for other difficulties, rather than designing for the broad masses and then adding on top of it to make mythic more difficult. Once you have proven that, demonstrate if and why this has a NEGATIVE impact outside of mythic; or, alternatively, why it having a neutral or positive impact is relevant. Specifically, I'd like an example or an explanation of how you can tell the difference between "design for mythic -> remove stuff to make heroic" and "design for heroic -> add stuff for mythic" in practice, why they would be different at all, and why one has a negative impact and the other doesn't (or why it having a neutral or positive impact is relevant).

Lastly, show that mythic has in fact caused a "throttling of rewards outside of raids". Explain what time frame you are looking at, and how you assess the number/quality of rewards you are talking about. Once you have done that, demonstrate that this has occurred "so as not to hurt the feelings of mythic raiders" rather than for alternative reasons, such as e.g. extending the lifespan of content to have people sub for longer.

I'd like specific examples or pointers to specific things, not vague generalizations like "game systems" or "game design". Make the examples concrete, and don't use unproven or unprovable premises. Please also avoid logical fallacies like argument from authority ("I'm a game designer, therefore X is caused by Y") or argumentum ad hominem ("Ion hates non-raiders, therefore he caused X").

Make the check out to the Environmental Defense Fund.

The mythic arms race causes problems for non-mythic players because I believe Blizzard balances the game around the highest end content in the game. I believe this because when I look at patch notes and compare them to performance, it looks to me like the changes they make or more often than not geared toward correcting balance in those activities with little regard for how that effects everyone else. The simplest example is AoE caps. A lack of AoE caps has little to no effect on anyone that isn't doing extremely high end content. It is a change that takes fun out for average players in order to balance content they don't play.

Homogenization only has one coherent explanation: Difficult content. There is simply no other reason to homogenize, as the problems solved by homogenization don't exist in easy content. For example, you appeal to playing solo convenience, but it is just plain unnecessary to homogenize for solo convenience. There is almost nothing solo in the game where utility even matters.

It has been stated by the developers that they design mythic encounters first and then scale them down for the other difficulties. I read this awhile ago and I'm not going to spend ten hours reading interviews just to prove it to you. When you design a piece of content, you try to make it match a certain vision you have for what the content should be. These are moving parts that all interact with each other. When you do that and then try to make another version of the content by removing some of those pieces, you are necessarily creating a less complete version of the content and it can be felt very starkly in LFR where the fights almost universally lack thematic-mechanical cohesion.

WoW endgame is currently designed around heroic+ raids, mythic+ dungeons, and rated pvp. The reward structures are almost entirely located in those activities. There is almost no progression path outside of that. When you hit max level, you cap out rewards almost immediately if you don't do any of those other activities. That was not the case until around WoD-ish. It was a slow change in some ways. This is what I am talking about when I say that reward structures have been throttled.

It is not a problem to say "Hey I worked in game design, so my experience tells me that X is caused by Y" because I am not stating that I am infallible or that my conclusion is absolutely certain. By your logic, it would be a fallacy for me to say "I know my wife, so I know that when she doesn't call me before she goes out, it is because something is wrong". This is what I mean when I keep saying that you have internet debate-lord brain rot. You are discounting the normal ways that normal humans come to reasonable conclusions and replacing it with this kind of absurd, comically unwieldy and unrealistic level of formal logic that is inappropriate to apply here.

Similarly, if you ask me to show that Blizzard is doing things FOR A REASON, it is totally reasonable for me to appeal to the attitudes of the people doing those things. You are creating a standard whereby Ion would need to literally state "I did X because of Y" before we can come to any reasonable conclusion. Again, this is unwieldy and unrealistic, and not how normal human beings move through the world.

[Relapses]

As an aside, why are you talking about FF 16?

Lysdexia's a bitch.

[Xath]

It would crater them, but why encourage it further at all?

Of course my loot idea is utterly idiotic, but it's the only decent solution to that problem.
My solution is to simply keep mythic raid lockouts the way that they are.

A solution to something that isn't a problem very blizzard of you. Better idea get rid of boes and consumable absurdity and boosting will die overnight and get rid of the lockout stupidity. Boosting is huge because of how expensive raiding and high end mythic plus is.

[Biomega]

The simplest example is AoE caps. A lack of AoE caps has little to no effect on anyone that isn't doing extremely high end content.

Easily demonstrated to be false. Mass AoE pulls were especially prevalent in MIDDLE-tier keys, not in high-tier keys. It created an unhealthy meta that disqualified weak AoE specs, and those ramifications were felt especially in the MIDDLE tier, not the high tier where restrictive metas are the norm almost no matter what. High-end players have repeatedly said this, and also said in general that they'll be gravitating towards extremes no matter what, so changes like these don't actually affect them all that much. It's the MIDDLE-tier players that are most affected by this, because meta perception problems affect them the most - at the high end meta is always restrictive, and at the low end it's always lax, so it's really only the middle that's going one way or the other. This can be easily checked using historic data such as e.g. Subcreation's recent M+ spec distribution data where meta shifts are prominently visible at the MIDDLE tier.

Part of that change was also to create a healthier MDI meta, where massive AoE pulls were the norms for a while - specifically for the reason that the MDI does not use top-end keystone levels (unlike, say, TGP). You can't do this kind of pulling at the top level because you don't survive those numbers. The amount of pulls that actually have 8+ mobs in them at the top key level are very few, and were very few before the change, too.

Homogenization only has one coherent explanation: Difficult content. There is simply no other reason to homogenize, as the problems solved by homogenization don't exist in easy content. For example, you appeal to playing solo convenience, but it is just plain unnecessary to homogenize for solo convenience. There is almost nothing solo in the game where utility even matters.

Also provably false. Interrupts for example exist at all levels, and are a major annoyance in casual play if they're absent - that was one of the biggest steps in homogenization in WoW's history, way before top-end difficulty ever existed; and in fact very little to do with raid content in general, because there are very few interrupt-relevant fights in raid both now and historically. SOME aspects of homogenization are due to difficulty, no doubt about that. But to say there is "no other reason" is demonstrably false.

It has been stated by the developers that they design mythic encounters first and then scale them down for the other difficulties. I read this awhile ago and I'm not going to spend ten hours reading interviews just to prove it to you.

Let's just assume this to be true, then, despite the obvious lol moment.

When you design a piece of content, you try to make it match a certain vision you have for what the content should be. These are moving parts that all interact with each other. When you do that and then try to make another version of the content by removing some of those pieces, you are necessarily creating a less complete version of the content

That's self-evident and trivial. If your "complete" version is mythic, everything else is necessarily less complete; but that's a definitional problem. You could just as well define heroic to be the "complete" version, and have mythic be "extra features" beyond that. Which means it's not an argument, because this is about definition, not substance. Shifting the definition doesn't actually CREATE more (or fewer) content, it just CALLS it more/fewer content.

To give an analogy: if you pour 1 liter of water into a 1 liter glass, you have 1 liter of water and the glass is "full". If you now pour 1.5 liter of water into a 1.5 liter glass, and pour 0.5 liter of water back out again, then you have 1 liter of water and the glass is "not full". But do you have MORE or LESS water than before?

and it can be felt very starkly in LFR where the fights almost universally lack thematic-mechanical cohesion.

That would be true either way, mythic or no mythic. That's not an argument against mythic, it's an argument against LFR.

WoW endgame is currently designed around heroic+ raids, mythic+ dungeons, and rated pvp. The reward structures are almost entirely located in those activities. There is almost no progression path outside of that.

Is there a reason you're excluding normal mode raids?

When you hit max level, you cap out rewards almost immediately if you don't do any of those other activities. That was not the case until around WoD-ish. It was a slow change in some ways. This is what I am talking about when I say that reward structures have been throttled.

What does that have to do with mythic? I'm not saying you're wrong - WoW has a serious horizontal progression problem. But it's not because of mythic difficulty, and it would present the same way if there only was normal or heroic difficulty. Which you admit, because there WAS NO mythic difficulty for most of WoD. Also, I'd argue Cataclysm had that system, too, as there was almost nothing to do outside of dungeons/raids/instanced PvP in Cataclysm either. It's really WotLK's badge system that you're talking about.

It is not a problem to say "Hey I worked in game design, so my experience tells me that X is caused by Y"

Yes, that is in fact a logical fallacy (argument from authority). Authority doesn't exempt you from explanation, it just means people should listen to your explanations especially carefully. As soon as you refuse to provide an explanation, you're committing the fallacy - and I do mean refuse, not just "not give". We usually trust experts without them giving an explanation EVERY TIME they say something because we operate on the assumption those explanations WILL, in fact, be provided on request. And I am requesting an explanation.

By your logic, it would be a fallacy for me to say "I know my wife, so I know that when she doesn't call me before she goes out, it is because something is wrong"

That's not a good example because that is not an argument; it's inaccessible to objective verification of any kind. It's also trivial - most people would just accept it because the evidence requirement is mundane in most cases. But not always. You could e.g. have that situation in a criminal investigation, where investigators would NOT simply believe such a claim, especially if it is attached to stakes (such as e.g. "I could not have murdered my wife because I know her, so...").

Also: the statement isn't necessarily true, either. You don't KNOW that she didn't call you because something is wrong; you can't. You infer a high probability that something MIGHT be wrong, but you can't exclude her forgetting or her phone battery running out or she telling someone to call you instead and them forgetting, and so on. And it's still not something others could verify because they have no way to tell if that's actually how your wife behaves all the time; they accept it as true because the claim is trivial and you lying wouldn't be big enough of a deal to bother - unless it is (see above).

You can't give a trivial example of mundane importance and then apply the same standard to every argument you make. Not all claims are created equal.

You are discounting the normal ways that normal humans come to reasonable conclusions and replacing it with this kind of absurd, comically unwieldy and unrealistic level of formal logic that is inappropriate to apply here.

And you are trying to reduce everything you say to the level of "I had a burger for lunch today". You're not making quotidian statements of trivial import, so stop trying to pretend you do.

Similarly, if you ask me to show that Blizzard is doing things FOR A REASON, it is totally reasonable for me to appeal to the attitudes of the people doing those things.

Only as a first step in the investigation. You see Ion harping on non-raiders, you take a look at whether or not he's actually doing things to harm non-raiders. You don't just ASSUME he is. That's not only grossly fallacious, it's irresponsibly negiligent.

You are creating a standard whereby Ion would need to literally state "I did X because of Y" before we can come to any reasonable conclusion.

That's just not true. I already said what I want: show me some EFFECT of his biases, not just the fact that he HAS them. Show me something that Ion did that is biased against non-raiders because that's his personal position, rather than something that could be explained otherwise too. You seem very sure of this, so it must be easy to demonstrate.

P.S.: Can you post the receipt for your $100 donation on here, I want everyone to see it.

[Hctaz]

A solution to something that isn't a problem very blizzard of you. Better idea get rid of boes and consumable absurdity and boosting will die overnight and get rid of the lockout stupidity. Boosting is huge because of how expensive raiding and high end mythic plus is.

Not sure what you're suggesting. Boosting isn't huge because raiding is expensive, boosting is huge because raiding is difficult. I was selling boosts in Mists of Pandaria for Heroic only Garrosh Hellscream mounts back when Heroic was Mythic. This isn't something that only recently became a thing, this has been going on for a long time.

Mythic raids should maintain the way that they currently work in terms of size and weekly lockouts.

[NineSpine]

Easily demonstrated to be false. Mass AoE pulls were especially prevalent in MIDDLE-tier keys, not in high-tier keys. It created an unhealthy meta that disqualified weak AoE specs, and those ramifications were felt especially in the MIDDLE tier, not the high tier where restrictive metas are the norm almost no matter what. High-end players have repeatedly said this, and also said in general that they'll be gravitating towards extremes no matter what, so changes like these don't actually affect them all that much. It's the MIDDLE-tier players that are most affected by this, because meta perception problems affect them the most - at the high end meta is always restrictive, and at the low end it's always lax, so it's really only the middle that's going one way or the other. This can be easily checked using historic data such as e.g. Subcreation's recent M+ spec distribution data where meta shifts are prominently visible at the MIDDLE tier.

Part of that change was also to create a healthier MDI meta, where massive AoE pulls were the norms for a while - specifically for the reason that the MDI does not use top-end keystone levels (unlike, say, TGP). You can't do this kind of pulling at the top level because you don't survive those numbers. The amount of pulls that actually have 8+ mobs in them at the top key level are very few, and were very few before the change, too.


Also provably false. Interrupts for example exist at all levels, and are a major annoyance in casual play if they're absent - that was one of the biggest steps in homogenization in WoW's history, way before top-end difficulty ever existed; and in fact very little to do with raid content in general, because there are very few interrupt-relevant fights in raid both now and historically. SOME aspects of homogenization are due to difficulty, no doubt about that. But to say there is "no other reason" is demonstrably false.


Let's just assume this to be true, then, despite the obvious lol moment.


That's self-evident and trivial. If your "complete" version is mythic, everything else is necessarily less complete; but that's a definitional problem. You could just as well define heroic to be the "complete" version, and have mythic be "extra features" beyond that. Which means it's not an argument, because this is about definition, not substance. Shifting the definition doesn't actually CREATE more (or fewer) content, it just CALLS it more/fewer content.

To give an analogy: if you pour 1 liter of water into a 1 liter glass, you have 1 liter of water and the glass is "full". If you now pour 1.5 liter of water into a 1.5 liter glass, and pour 0.5 liter of water back out again, then you have 1 liter of water and the glass is "not full". But do you have MORE or LESS water than before?


That would be true either way, mythic or no mythic. That's not an argument against mythic, it's an argument against LFR.


Is there a reason you're excluding normal mode raids?


What does that have to do with mythic? I'm not saying you're wrong - WoW has a serious horizontal progression problem. But it's not because of mythic difficulty, and it would present the same way if there only was normal or heroic difficulty. Which you admit, because there WAS NO mythic difficulty for most of WoD. Also, I'd argue Cataclysm had that system, too, as there was almost nothing to do outside of dungeons/raids/instanced PvP in Cataclysm either. It's really WotLK's badge system that you're talking about.


Yes, that is in fact a logical fallacy (argument from authority). Authority doesn't exempt you from explanation, it just means people should listen to your explanations especially carefully. As soon as you refuse to provide an explanation, you're committing the fallacy - and I do mean refuse, not just "not give". We usually trust experts without them giving an explanation EVERY TIME they say something because we operate on the assumption those explanations WILL, in fact, be provided on request. And I am requesting an explanation.


That's not a good example because that is not an argument; it's inaccessible to objective verification of any kind. It's also trivial - most people would just accept it because the evidence requirement is mundane in most cases. But not always. You could e.g. have that situation in a criminal investigation, where investigators would NOT simply believe such a claim, especially if it is attached to stakes (such as e.g. "I could not have murdered my wife because I know her, so...").

Also: the statement isn't necessarily true, either. You don't KNOW that she didn't call you because something is wrong; you can't. You infer a high probability that something MIGHT be wrong, but you can't exclude her forgetting or her phone battery running out or she telling someone to call you instead and them forgetting, and so on. And it's still not something others could verify because they have no way to tell if that's actually how your wife behaves all the time; they accept it as true because the claim is trivial and you lying wouldn't be big enough of a deal to bother - unless it is (see above).

You can't give a trivial example of mundane importance and then apply the same standard to every argument you make. Not all claims are created equal.


And you are trying to reduce everything you say to the level of "I had a burger for lunch today". You're not making quotidian statements of trivial import, so stop trying to pretend you do.


Only as a first step in the investigation. You see Ion harping on non-raiders, you take a look at whether or not he's actually doing things to harm non-raiders. You don't just ASSUME he is. That's not only grossly fallacious, it's irresponsibly negiligent.


That's just not true. I already said what I want: show me some EFFECT of his biases, not just the fact that he HAS them. Show me something that Ion did that is biased against non-raiders because that's his personal position, rather than something that could be explained otherwise too. You seem very sure of this, so it must be easy to demonstrate.

P.S.: Can you post the receipt for your $100 donation on here, I want everyone to see it.

I asked you repeatedly to knock it off with the sentence by sentence responses and long winded diatribes, and still you give me a sentence by sentence response with more than twice as many lines as what you were responding to. Done now. I respected your time, and you clearly have an obstinate refusal to respect mine.

[Biomega]

I asked you repeatedly to knock it off with the sentence by sentence responses and long winded diatribes, and still you give me a sentence by sentence response with more than twice as many lines as what you were responding to. Done now. I respected your time, and you clearly have an obstinate refusal to respect mine.

I'm not going to dumb down my responses because the words are too hard for you, or the sentences too long. I humored you once because you put a $100 bounty out, which I'm still waiting to see you pay.

I don't really care about your problems with my formatting. I'm giving you detail, and depth. You are not engaging with my objections, you are looking for excuses not to - as you have been from the start.

Feel free to just drop the conversation; I've said repeatedly that you aren't interested in actually discussing what you're saying, you just want people to hear you make your points. You can just admit that, and then we can move on.

[NineSpine]

I'm not going to dumb down my responses because the words are too hard for you, or the sentences too long. I humored you once because you put a $100 bounty out, which I'm still waiting to see you pay.

I don't really care about your problems with my formatting. I'm giving you detail, and depth. You are not engaging with my objections, you are looking for excuses not to - as you have been from the start.

Feel free to just drop the conversation; I've said repeatedly that you aren't interested in actually discussing what you're saying, you just want people to hear you make your points. You can just admit that, and then we can move on.

A conversation is an opportunity to understand each other, not an opportunity for you to mentally masturbate and use other people as a platform for your own arrogance and excess. You make yourself more difficult to understand with your long, meandering tirades and pretentious explanations of simple ideas. You aren't helping anyone understand anything. You are ironically making yourself difficult to understand because you are preoccupied with your obnoxious sense of self-importance.

I've tried repeatedly to turn this into a conversation and every time I get you back down to Earth it takes two posts before we are back to obscenely bloated responses that read like caricatures of a pretentious grad school student who thinks they are the first person to ever read a book. You don't know how to talk to people. You just know how to condescend and make yourself feel clever.

You are every grad school schmuck that writes a 30 page paper about a simple topic, adds nothing valuable to the issue, and then scoffs at and mocks the other student who said the same exact thing in three sentences.

[Xath]

Not sure what you're suggesting. Boosting isn't huge because raiding is expensive, boosting is huge because raiding is difficult. I was selling boosts in Mists of Pandaria for Heroic only Garrosh Hellscream mounts back when Heroic was Mythic. This isn't something that only recently became a thing, this has been going on for a long time.

Mythic raids should maintain the way that they currently work in terms of size and weekly lockouts.

The scope of it is much bigger now that's why communities formed far more players feel the need to boost to keep up with in game gold costs.

Mythic raids should only have per boss loot lockouts like every other difficulty it would also make pugging much less risky.

[Biomega]

You make yourself more difficult to understand

You've demonstrated several times you do not understand some of the elementary foundations of logic or discourse. I am explaining things because there is evidently a need for explanation. You can be facile and imprecise all you like - I won't.

You aren't helping anyone understand anything

Clearly! But not for lack of trying

You don't know how to talk to people

I know how to conduct a proper argument. This isn't a tea party. Do small talk somewhere else.

You spout bullshit, I take you to task for it. That's how it works. If all you're interested in is bullshit, just tell me. Then we don't have to continue.

[NineSpine]

You've demonstrated several times you do not understand some of the elementary foundations of logic or discourse. I am explaining things because there is evidently a need for explanation. You can be facile and imprecise all you like - I won't.

Clearly! But not for lack of trying

I know how to conduct a proper argument. This isn't a tea party. Do small talk somewhere else.

You spout bullshit, I take you to task for it. That's how it works. If all you're interested in is bullshit, just tell me. Then we don't have to continue.

A proper argument is not a bloated Gish gallop full of pretentious excuses to ramble on your favorite pet topics.

Easily demonstrated to be false. Mass AoE pulls were especially prevalent in MIDDLE-tier keys, not in high-tier keys. It created an unhealthy meta that disqualified weak AoE specs, and those ramifications were felt especially in the MIDDLE tier, not the high tier where restrictive metas are the norm almost no matter what. High-end players have repeatedly said this, and also said in general that they'll be gravitating towards extremes no matter what, so changes like these don't actually affect them all that much. It's the MIDDLE-tier players that are most affected by this, because meta perception problems affect them the most - at the high end meta is always restrictive, and at the low end it's always lax, so it's really only the middle that's going one way or the other. This can be easily checked using historic data such as e.g. Subcreation's recent M+ spec distribution data where meta shifts are prominently visible at the MIDDLE tier.

Part of that change was also to create a healthier MDI meta, where massive AoE pulls were the norms for a while - specifically for the reason that the MDI does not use top-end keystone levels (unlike, say, TGP). You can't do this kind of pulling at the top level because you don't survive those numbers. The amount of pulls that actually have 8+ mobs in them at the top key level are very few, and were very few before the change, too.

"Mass AoE pulls are a bigger deal in mid-tier keys, not high end keys, and mid-tier keys are what the MDI is based on."

That's all you had to say. Not one word beyond that is valuable or furthers the conversation. It's just you wanting to yammer on and on and on and on because you think that what makes a good point is big words and big sentences. It may make you feel very, very, very intellectual, but it is a waste of time for anyone you are talking to. It is disrespectful and causes needless confusion and tangents because of all of the additional information that isn't relevant.

You need to learn to speak to people, not speak at people.

[Biomega]

That's all you had to say.

I'm giving context and explanation, and I'm providing a way to verify my argument empirically through data. I'm not just stating something I think is the case, but explaining why I think so, how and why it engages with the claim you presented, and how it can be proven.

That's all important information in a proper argument. It's what I want from YOU.

What's especially interesting is that your abbreviated version made it sound like the MDI was the main argument; it's not. The main argument is that this affects the most prevalent demographic of M+, mid-tier keys. The fact that the MDI also does this isn't irrelevant, but the problem existed independent of the MDI. The MDI only made it especially visible.

This is why I explain things. To make clear where the problem lies, so it's not misconstrued from simplistic, single-sentence answers. Not a perfect, solution (QED) but it's the best I've got.

[NineSpine]

I'm giving context and explanation, and I'm providing a way to verify my argument empirically through data. I'm not just stating something I think is the case, but explaining why I think so, how and why it engages with the claim you presented, and how it can be proven.

That's all important information in a proper argument. It's what I want from YOU.

What's especially interesting is that your abbreviated version made it sound like the MDI was the main argument; it's not. The main argument is that this affects the most prevalent demographic of M+, mid-tier keys. The fact that the MDI also does this isn't irrelevant, but the problem existed independent of the MDI. The MDI only made it especially visible.

This is why I explain things. To make clear where the problem lies, so it's not misconstrued from simplistic, single-sentence answers. Not a perfect, solution (QED) but it's the best I've got.

Nothing you said conveyed any further valuable information than my one sentence did. You dedicated a whole paragraph to something that you now say is not an important part of your argument. If I was to respond, my main point would be about how balancing for the MDI is exactly the problem I am talking about, and then there we are on a tangent that you didn't even consider an important part of your argument. This is why pretentious, bloated writing is not constructive.

[Biomega]

Nothing you said conveyed any further valuable information than my one sentence did.

Then read my previous reply again, slowly. Use your finger if it helps.

You dedicated a whole paragraph to something that you now say is not an important part of your argument.

Correct. Because your simplistic reduction made it SOUND important, when it wasn't. Why did I make sure of this point?

Well to avoid exactly THIS...

my main point would be about how balancing for the MDI is exactly the problem I am talking about

That's something YOU put in there by making your one-sentence answer about the MDI. The MDI is not why they changed this. The fact that mid-tier keys were dominated by AoE spam was, something that is verifiable by looking at historic spec representation data (you know, the thing I mentioned but you somehow think was "not an important part"). That the MDI provided a visible outlet for that problem may have accelerated the fix (or not, there's no way to know for sure save for some dev telling us), but it didn't create the problem. The problem was already there. And it was a problem that predated the MDI - AoE spam in dungeons has always been an issue, even during leveling people complained about it (you can go back and check during the various squish eras that changed AoE availability levels, and how people hated not having AoE before another class).

[Sonnillon]

@Biomega and @NineSpine please stop the back and forth pickering, since some of it is completely off topic.

[Aphrel]

I don't think removing the raid lockout would necessarily be a good idea because I can totally foresee some weird shenanigans happening as a result that I wouldn't be cool with. Like boosting services could go through the roof.
Imagine if the best guilds could just endlessly sell mythic clears to people because they can endlessly reclear content. I don't think I really like that idea, and that's something that could happen as a result unless you make it so that no loot drops if even ONE player in the raid has already cleared that boss that week.

I do think it should just be cross realm immediately. Server identity really hasn't been a thing in a long time now, so it doesn't make sense to force people to be all on the same server.

Could be fixed with a personal upper limit of induvidual bosskills, perhaps 2 or 3.

Or a lower limit of players that needs to be eligible for loot (etc 10ppl) and if req not met noone gets loot on that boss. Either or both of these would make it very hard o boost to any larger degree.

As long as we get rid of this opressive Raidlockout. It would be a step in the right direction.

[Lolites]

If Blizzard wanted to make a certain ability like Blessing of Protection mandatory for a fight, then they could just give an extra action button or put an orb in the room or something that grants a character the ability to cast Blessing of Protection to cover it. Or something that activates a bloodlust effect, etc. Then they could design the raids around 10-man comps and then allow all difficulties to flex to 20 if they want to. I don't see them putting in that kind of work though.

they might just let all people smash the boss with axe or throw wand at it and all the abilities healing included would be via quicktime events...
or maybe they could not fuck up raiding bcs of few people who think its the amount of people that keeps them from achieving cutting edge rather than their skill...

and yes, i know, there are some people who dont want to raid in big group but... 20 is not a big group, 40 was a big group, 20 is relatively small, but if its still too big for you M+ is there for you, beingalternative to raiding was pretty much its point since begining...
its not exactly what youd like? tough luck, world doesnt evolve around you (and thank god for that)

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This game was better when it catered to the casuals instead of the try hards.

fair enough, so we should not cater to people who want to raid mythic but are not good enough for it so want it watered down, bcs they are tryhards...

[neescher]

This game was better when it catered to the casuals instead of the try hards.

I will never understand this argument. When in the history of wow, was the game more catered to casuals than now?

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Why do "a lot" of players need to raid Mythic? I don't think anybody will disagree with the notion that Mythic raiding is becoming more and more of an isolated endeavor but I really don't understand the need for it to have high population numbers. We have KSM-level M+ for the masses which allows you to get rewards roughly 95% in effectiveness as Mythic raiders, why do we have to open the flood gates for Mythic raiding?

We don't technically "have to". But I also don't think introducing flex mythic raiding means "open the flood gates". Just because an encounter here and there might be slightly easier with lower/higher player count than 20, means that every casual out there will be mythic raiding.

Keep achievements for a player count of exactly 20, maybe lower item level drops by 3 or 6 if at another player count than 20, so there's still that "intended maximum difficult" at 20 players, but it gives players who achieve curve another challenge, without having to invite pugs to their guild raid / raid with friends.