WoW:Dragonflight sucks. Bring back the systems

[tomten]

First time in several expansions where I don't feel overwhelmed, have ticked off most "do once" things like loremaster, all glyphs, some renown grinding, side quests etc.
Also started leveling a 2nd char, willingly out of fun, which is totally unheard of from me first week, its already 64, i dont feel rushed, i just do the main story, mine, herb and log back to main, do some dungeons and repeat.
Its wonderful and I only play wow for m+ and raiding so if thats all they have to offer? Even better.
And with how its looking? It won't matter if I dont feel like playing wow for a week or two over christmas, i won't really miss anything.

Best expo since cataclysm but sure, it could change. I'm not really a fan of the 4 old dungeons but they're also removing some shitty dungeons that came so its give and take.
Ask me in january how i REALLY feel :P

[Biomega]

Quite frankly, the game designed this way is ass; it's not fun; players time is purposefully wasted time and again just to stall you; instead of introducing fun, meaningful content to the game...

Maybe it's just, uh, not a part of the game YOU like?

There's plenty people who enjoy a challenge, and who would most definitely quit if the game had nothing but easy-mode, faceroll content. Which IT STILL HAS, by the way - so if mythic or even heroic are too hard for you and not how you want to play the game, maybe don't do those and do normal mode instead? There's nothing wrong with picking your lane, and acknowledging that other people pick other lanes.

You know what's ACTUALLY "quite frankly ass"? Thinking that anything YOU don't enjoy doesn't need to be in the game, and somehow thinking that just because other people get something they like, it means they're somehow taking things away from you.

[cozzri]

-or-

You can realize that maybe bleeding edge difficulty just isn't your cup of tea.

Self-restrain is a challenge. But the moment you take the notch down a peg - you suddenly realize you don't really have to follow the meta or grind against extreme diminishing returns until your face turns blue.

Quite a bit of all that is a self-inflicted injury. People look at Twitch celebs and fill their heads with idea that that's how they should play... relax bro/sistah you're a fucking Heroic Raider level, if that, you don't really need that degen shit.

The problem isn't backing down from the difficulty, it's the stratification of the difficulty and lack of meaningful character progression. I've seen countless guilds implode over this divide of raid difficulties; the game design doesn't foster a sense of community. Having systems for ongoing character growth only work if you actually see the effect, meaning the game isn't designed with you having +100; the difficulty needs to be designed at +50; so that progression has impact on player power. I have nothing against difficult content, my issue is with the bad game design that is punishing to players.

[Lei]

-or-

You can realize that maybe bleeding edge difficulty just isn't your cup of tea.

Self-restrain is a challenge. But the moment you take the notch down a peg - you suddenly realize you don't really have to follow the meta or grind against extreme diminishing returns until your face turns blue.

Quite a bit of all that is a self-inflicted injury. People look at Twitch celebs and fill their heads with idea that that's how they should play... relax bro/sistah you're a fucking Heroic Raider level, if that, you don't really need that degen shit.

Just look how m+ changed the community. People are using skip routes in normal leveling dungeons. NORMAL! On day one. Day. One.
Even if you practice restraint (altough you said you are in a competition for ilevel in the other post), peer pressure and meanness is immense.
To me bleeding edge and restraint are paradoxons. If you want to be first, then you will do more than others (others you are competing with, be it Joe, your guildie, or that one guy in your competitor guild, or regionwide..). Competition exists even in normal mode players, even in tiny social groups, see the skiproutes in normal dungeons. People are just horrible. That's my take.
The wow community was never known about good hearts and friendliness. But I do believe m+ and the uncapped borrowed power culture changed it for the worse.
We are in a world now where kids live on pro wow players' streams who come up with skip routes on beta, and then they bring this to live, and eventually, whoever wants to participate in m+, has to learn it as well. This way this whole m+ culture trickles down to everyone.
I think I remember the devs saying regards of Legion that they never thought players would farm that much. We must remember that the devs are people just like us. They don't know shit about human behavior. They also said that the players almost never do what they anticipate from us. But this (and so through that they) shapes the communiuty. Funny.

[Mace]

generally agreed.
one of the biggest failings of WoW as a game from a macro perspective is the fact there are only two character progression systems in the game: level, and item level.
IMO the complete lack of any sort of means of advancing your character within the game that isn't just chasing ilevel is a huge reason why the end game has gotten to feeling a bit stale over the years.

anyways, i enjoyed the 'borrowed power' systems since legion, because in their own way each one granted some form of character progression that wasn't simply tied to ilevel, which meant you could do busywork but have that actually be contributing to your advancement within the world over time.

the "reset and start over" aspect of it was also great because it helped curb what is a known bad habit by the game devs: power creep and mudflation on a comically sped up timescale for absolutely no reason that requires massive fiddling with the structure of the game on the back end to fix every few years.

i will never understand why people on these forums piss and moan so loudly about systems that gave players rewards for playing.

Because they are the public, they get bored, and complain - and forget how bad it was before and why it changed to this.

I am in agreement with burrowed power, playing since the start, it was a massive issue that all you had was ilvl once you hit max level. especially when you hit max level in a few hours of the expansion launching.

To have only item level was the way of progress was not very interesting, legion certainly changed that. but the people that play these games, don't sit back and reflect. They got tired of the grinds - despite 7.3, and 8.3, even 9.2 having pretty much refined the process to a very fair level, - those who got bored and exhausted of the grind never forgave the system process itself, even when it was more than reasonable.

They just continued hating on it as some do, because typically they like to moan, and often, don't go back to see how it has changed, then spread their discontent amongst others.. have you not noticed how much worse you think wow is when you come on to a forum with all the complaints.. you never felt so, but now you do .. it's classic example and shows you that most of it isn't real It's people taking a lot of their frustration out on the game because they are in a community they can vent, so the actual legitimate issues are a fraction of what or how it is portrayed din some of these responses.

And they would never come back, well the st majority would never come back and praise the changes or say it is better. And while some do, they won't, mostly out of pride rather than honesty, walk aback their earlier diagnosis that burrowed power is bad.. it's a cultural thing. once we take a position, we don't change it, even though it's not longer true or it has changed. That would mean admitting we were wrong or if not (because we were right at first) it would mean in essence apologising, and now supporting something we criticised, and these people are too proud to do it.


But , the developers are the ones that changed it. why? you should ask them, burrowed power worked. those who moaned, kept playing, they didn't stop because of borrowed power, ad changes were made and it got better. sure they liked to moan about it on forums, sure there was some truth it yes, it is a grind, but it is an acceptable grind, like levelling, it's part of this type of game system. They all know that - i mean what else do they expect? Blizzard even made it such that if they only wanted to come in and raid or m+, they would gain enough "borrowed" power - and didn't have to "grind out world quests." - they made the gains of chasing every last burrowed power small enough for you to not feel you had to keep ahead. Though if you did you had some advantage, but it was small enough. then they had the catch up system.

Devs know they didn't need to change, but did anyway. Maybe they also recognise, even if a system isn't broken, the ADHD, ADD crowd get bored quickly, and face it a lot of gamers suffer from these psychological conditions that exacerbate things like this, so they have to juggle this and refresh entire new systems just to keep them occupied. Or do something dynamic when their product loses subscribers after a public incident.

Truth is, a form of burrowed power still exists, however it's just not essential in the way it was before - perhaps they reckon after 3 expansions of burrowed power, the return to the classic style might win more peeps back.. but tbh, it's an inferior model mostly, you have the classic program for the old model if you like it, and it's hugely popular, those who liked retail may not like that things are like that now, especially if they joined wow from WoD onwards.

[cozzri]

Maybe it's just, uh, not a part of the game YOU like?

There's plenty people who enjoy a challenge, and who would most definitely quit if the game had nothing but easy-mode, faceroll content. Which IT STILL HAS, by the way - so if mythic or even heroic are too hard for you and not how you want to play the game, maybe don't do those and do normal mode instead? There's nothing wrong with picking your lane, and acknowledging that other people pick other lanes.

You know what's ACTUALLY "quite frankly ass"? Thinking that anything YOU don't enjoy doesn't need to be in the game, and somehow thinking that just because other people get something they like, it means they're somehow taking things away from you.

The game doesn't need so many difficulty levels and ilvls. Look back to MoP; challenge modes provided difficult content to those that wanted to participate. You've seen how this plays out with guilds splitting, having the various difficulty levels is detrimental to guilds. Mythic took the challenge mode and added ilvl to it, you can't deny that this is a huge problem; look at how the community gates this content, this wasn't too big of an issue in MoP challenge mode where ilvl is capped. It's been detrimental to social aspect of the game.

[Az0na]

No thanks if any of those systems comes back I wont play. I do not have the time for grind mandatory bullshit. Real life got in the way.

I want to raid with my friends and if I cannot then I quit and thats what I did at start of shadowlands. Legion was okeyish but after that was no fun bullshit.

DF i can just gear up at my pace and join 2 raid evenings a week and thats more then enough.

And I think blizzard noticed the drop off from players like me to get rid of these systems. They do more harm then good.

[JustaRandomReindeer]

Legion is the only expansion where AP felt rewarding and fun at the same time. They should have just kept artifacts in the game instead of coming up with inferior replacements that were neither fun nor felt as rewarding after all the grind. An endgame progression system other than raider.io is necessary to keep players interested.

[Palapop]

No issue, BFA and Shadowlands would have been better expansions if they cut those systems out the day before launch.

Strangely, I agree with this.
ESPECIALLY for BFA essences. (Or at least the way how they were acquired + the fact they weren't acc-wide)

[Exkrementor]

What systems exactly ?

I wish there was some kind of overpowered buff that only lasts an hour or so so you cant play the game the whole week.

Also buying gold... sorry, farming consumables 20 hours a week to use in raids you can clear in grey gear would be a nice system.

[Biomega]

The game doesn't need so many difficulty levels and ilvls.

I agree. Normal and heroic dungeons as well as M0 are kind of superfluous now, and should all just be rolled into the M+ system with adjusted levels. LFR raid is also debatable, but I guess some kind of "story mode" is something many people do want.

Look back to MoP; challenge modes provided difficult content to those that wanted to participate.

It also had spectacularly LOW participation rates. While M+ is an almost unequivocal success. Why point to a failed system when we have its strict upgrade already in the game?

You've seen how this plays out with guilds splitting, having the various difficulty levels is detrimental to guilds.

I don't think that's an easy statement to prove. How do you know it's difficulty levels specifically that are the cause here? Also: is it necessarily a BAD thing that guilds focus mostly on the highest difficulty levels, why the lower ones are serviced by PUGs? Especially among casual players, gaming has shifted over to ad-hoc activity rather than scheduled - entirely understandable that people would be less and less willing to get together for raids at fixed times, rather than having the option of just sitting down and raiding whenever they feel like it. That doesn't have to be framed as a problem, it's just different than it used to be.

Mythic took the challenge mode and added ilvl to it, you can't deny that this is a huge problem; look at how the community gates this content, this wasn't too big of an issue in MoP challenge mode where ilvl is capped. It's been detrimental to social aspect of the game.

No question there are problems; but simply removing M+ wouldn't fix those problems. In fact, when you think about it, you're actually proving people WANT to play M+ they're just complaining that they can't do it as much/as easily as they'd like. So your "solution" is entirely counterproductive, because people have responded very positively to the concept of M+, it just has kinks to work out.

And by the way, the ACTUAL problem behind the "gating" issue is something else entirely: it's the massive tank shortage. The whole reason people can afford to gatekeep like crazy is because any M+ group that pops up gets 50 dps applying within two seconds, and so why WOULDN'T you take the most geared players and best classes, even if they're only better by tiny margins. It's not like you're scrambling for players when it comes to DPS, you can just pick the best of the best because they're easily and constantly available.

You don't really seem to know what's actually going on in these systems, so it's no surprise your solutions seem heavy-handed and completely missing the mark. Turning WoW into an easy-mode snoozefest without challenges or scaling difficulty is a sure-fire recipe to just get everyone but the most casual people to quit REAL fast, because they run out of stuff worth doing.

[cozzri]

I agree. Normal and heroic dungeons as well as M0 are kind of superfluous now, and should all just be rolled into the M+ system with adjusted levels. LFR raid is also debatable, but I guess some kind of "story mode" is something many people do want.


It also had spectacularly LOW participation rates. While M+ is an almost unequivocal success. Why point to a failed system when we have its strict upgrade already in the game?


I don't think that's an easy statement to prove. How do you know it's difficulty levels specifically that are the cause here? Also: is it necessarily a BAD thing that guilds focus mostly on the highest difficulty levels, why the lower ones are serviced by PUGs? Especially among casual players, gaming has shifted over to ad-hoc activity rather than scheduled - entirely understandable that people would be less and less willing to get together for raids at fixed times, rather than having the option of just sitting down and raiding whenever they feel like it. That doesn't have to be framed as a problem, it's just different than it used to be.


No question there are problems; but simply removing M+ wouldn't fix those problems. In fact, when you think about it, you're actually proving people WANT to play M+ they're just complaining that they can't do it as much/as easily as they'd like. So your "solution" is entirely counterproductive, because people have responded very positively to the concept of M+, it just has kinks to work out.

And by the way, the ACTUAL problem behind the "gating" issue is something else entirely: it's the massive tank shortage. The whole reason people can afford to gatekeep like crazy is because any M+ group that pops up gets 50 dps applying within two seconds, and so why WOULDN'T you take the most geared players and best classes, even if they're only better by tiny margins. It's not like you're scrambling for players when it comes to DPS, you can just pick the best of the best because they're easily and constantly available.

You don't really seem to know what's actually going on in these systems, so it's no surprise your solutions seem heavy-handed and completely missing the mark. Turning WoW into an easy-mode snoozefest without challenges or scaling difficulty is a sure-fire recipe to just get everyone but the most casual people to quit REAL fast, because they run out of stuff worth doing.

I'm not suggesting M+ be removed. Challenge modes need to come back. The low participation in MoP mostly had to do with having no tools for easily making and advertising groups at the time. I understand what M+ provides, the effects and problems of it are known. The design of challenge modes was actually challenging content. To me M+ has felt superfluous in difficulty design and attracted players by holding the ilvl carrot up.

[Ekis]

It also had spectacularly LOW participation rates. While M+ is an almost unequivocal success. Why point to a failed system when we have its strict upgrade already in the game?

To be fair, Challenge Mode had low participation rates because outside of cosmetics and achievements (and maybe teleporting to the dungeon) it offered nothing. It's not a good comparison to Mythic+ simply because most people play Mythic+ as another means of gear progression outside of of the raid atmosphere (no need to adhere to a schedule, not worry about getting unlucky with gear drops and be locked for the rest of the week, etc.).

It's not really a fair comparison; if Mythic+ only offered what Challenge Modes in MoP gave, you'd still see low participation rates. It's one of, if not the, primary reason people are complaining about high-end Mythic runs not giving the same gear one could get in a Mythic raid (well, until now having to reach 20+ to get Mid-Mythic raid equivalent gear whereas before it used to be on-par or in some cases, better than what could drop in raids).

Many people do not simply do Mythic+ for the sake of challenge, we all know it's because it's an extra avenue towards gear progression.

Now if there were Challenge Modes baked into the Mythic+ system, I'm inclined to think we'd see even more participation. I haven't played in a while, but does the group finder port people into M+ dungeons?

[Biomega]

I'm not suggesting M+ be removed. Challenge modes need to come back. The low participation in MoP mostly had to do with having no tools for easily making and advertising groups at the time.

That's not what Blizzard found. They had low participation precisely because they offered no "real" rewards - simply adding valor points at the end dramatically increased participation (but still nowhere near what M+ is getting). The idea that we should go back to not offering power when that was precisely what kept participation down seems completely counterproductive.

I understand what M+ provides, the effects and problems of it are known. The design of challenge modes was actually challenging content. To me M+ has felt superfluous in difficulty design and attracted players by holding the ilvl carrot up.

Are you saying M+ is NOT "actually challenging content"? CMs were faceroll content for skilled players. It's not even close to comparable to higher M+, or even just moderately high weekly keys. Between M+ and CM, it is not CM that is the "actually challenging content", not even close. The name and the nostalgia are perhaps clouding perspective here, but CMs were not in fact particularly challenging.

Now if there were Challenge Modes baked into the Mythic+ system, I'm inclined to think we'd see even more participation. I haven't played in a while, but does the group finder port people into M+ dungeons?

The group finder doesn't port people to M+ (and quite frankly, it should), but much like with the old CMs they've been adding dungeon teleports if you complete certain M+ levels (at least they did in the last SL seasons, not sure if it's in DF as well). So in a sense, half of the old CM reward is there, along with the seasonal mounts.

M+ being an alternative gearing progression is a GOOD thing, by the way. It opened up a whole different way of playing PvE, and significantly alleviated scheduling problems by offering competitive ad-hoc content with rewards comparable to raids. Taking that away would cripple substantial parts of the community.

[rhorle]

I'm not sure if I like the new approach or not. Multiple renown factions is nice but it feels worse sometimes because everything is all spread out and sort of just gets thrown at you. There is no real central thing binding them all. Then we have the important but not renown factions that feel like they are just thrown in because they don't work on the same system.

They really should have introduced limited player housing. Have a garrison-style tower we could decorate and call home for our dragon. Give a little something to bind all the threads together. It really makes me wonder how patch content will go. The usual small zone won't cut it with how big the zones are and designed for Dragons. It really doesn't seem like a full expansion worth of content is possible to come out every 6 months and Dragonflight heavily leans into grinding for a million collectibles.

[Glorious Leader]

Legion is the only expansion where AP felt rewarding and fun at the same time. They should have just kept artifacts in the game instead of coming up with inferior replacements that were neither fun nor felt as rewarding after all the grind. An endgame progression system other than raider.io is necessary to keep players interested.

It was fleshed out alot more. It felt like their was more behind it. Because the artifacts came along with the class order hall story and cool skins and quests. The subsequent iterations were all pale by comparison. It's a necklace...who gives a shit...who gives a fuck...

[Ekis]

M+ being an alternative gearing progression is a GOOD thing, by the way. It opened up a whole different way of playing PvE, and significantly alleviated scheduling problems by offering competitive ad-hoc content with rewards comparable to raids. Taking that away would cripple substantial parts of the community.

Oh I don't disagree, I was just giving a bit of counter to the fact that CM's had low participation. Once useful rewards came into play (in the grand scheme of the the game -- to get useful gear to progress with -- even in raids), Mythic+ exploded whereas if Challenge Modes even had just a little gear (versus nothing at all) it probably would've been just as popular and would've probably been what Mythic+ is now (although a bit easier IMO, M+ ramped up the difficulty IMO past certain keystone levels). CMs were deemed useless to a lot of people who didn't necessarily care about cosmetic gear sets but rather the feeling of getting stronger so they inevitably weren't played as much (I only did them once and maybe helped out guildies to get Gold on a few but other than that I never touched them again).

And that's actually pretty awesome they at least put the ports in after completing a certain keystone level, that's what I missed the most about Challenge Modes. Honestly might be one of the things that could bring me back.

[kranur]

No thanks. I want to once again be able to log in and do whatever I feel like doing instead of having to first grind x power and y whatever or fall behind.
Also not a fan of throwing it away and have them replaced with a shittier system right after it was fleshed out a little.

[JustaRandomReindeer]

It was fleshed out alot more. It felt like their was more behind it. Because the artifacts came along with the class order hall story and cool skins and quests. The subsequent iterations were all pale by comparison. It's a necklace...who gives a shit...who gives a fuck...

It's kinda mind-boggling how with each new expansion they are removing more and more of the features that made Legion so fun and successful. How is it so hard for Blizzard to understand why people liked it so much. Every expansion since has felt inferior in every way because they just keep "fixing" and removing features that made Legion fun. We only have M+ left and even that feels inferior because ever since Cathedral of Eternal Night they keep designing dungeons to be utterly unbearable in M+. I predict the Legion nostalgia is gonna hit hard during Dragonflight.

[Boddhi]

I wish there was some kind of overpowered buff that only lasts an hour or so so you cant play the game the whole week.

Also buying gold... sorry, farming consumables 20 hours a week to use in raids you can clear in grey gear would be a nice system.

You are onto something here.