So, item levels are getting spiked for no reason. Again.

[Qnubi]

If they don't up the ilvl for dungeons/world content and only introduce the new raid there is nothing to do for people like me. All I do is M+ and world content. I have 3 characters all 380+ and no interest in raiding (anymore). Currently all I do is a m10 each week and log out, I need new gear or I won't resub when my 6 months run out in a few weeks.

[kubaje]

If they don't up the ilvl for dungeons/world content and only introduce the new raid there is nothing to do for people like me. All I do is M+ and world content. I have 3 characters all 380+ and no interest in raiding (anymore). Currently all I do is a m10 each week and log out, I need new gear or I won't resub when my 6 months run out in a few weeks.

And that is what ruined the game. Blizzard tried to make everyone happy, which you can't in basically any aspect of life, and by doing that they made everyone unhappy. It's better to focus on the core audience and just make a good game. People will join and want to play more than just casually. When you make a game where casual players reach the end of the game with way less effort than "hardcore" players, it makes no sense to be "hardcore".

They shot themselves in the foot by trying to do that. Now they think they can't reverse that because they would lose to many subs. They are right, they can't fix that by "soft fixing" it. The game has to change drastically and have "unpopular" changes likes removing automated group finding, getting rid of at least 2 difficulties, slowing the games progression pace and sooo much more.

Will they do that? No, they just won't take that big of a risk.

[Jastall]

I don't understand why they don't just add 10 to every difficulty when a new tier comes out. That way <insert difficulty here> raiders can keep raiding their difficulty of choice and not have to clear it at a trivial difficulty first. Adding 30 iLvls to every difficulty invalidates everything that came before and you can now potentially find upgrades from a difficulty two levels below the one you're actually doing, what kind of madness is that!?

Because when they did that in WoD, people just redid Highmaul rather than transition to BRF.

[FelPlague]

To be fair, Mike didn't say anything of the sort (no mention of him saying ilvl does not fucking matter)

If I was to sum up the root cause of the issue in one word it would be: Scarcity.

ilvl is a symptom of the sick system. The flooding is the main driver but ilvl contributes to this.

If we're going to stick with LK as the examples. In one week, you could run one raid lockout per difficulty. At launch that was Naxx, OS, EoE (and I think Vault? Can't remember if this was at launch) with two modes 10 man and 25 man, offering two tiers of the same loot (can't remember if there were any special drops in 25 man). That was it. You were competing with up to 24 other players for your loot, to get your tier sets etc. Loot was unique because it was more scarce.

And you were done for the week. Profession gear mattered because it was harder to obtain raid-tier loot. The loot was also more unique because of the scarcity and often had power procs or on-use abilities on trinkets that would stay with you for most of the next raid tier as well.

Stats were more distributed and curbed your power levels, forcing you to make trade offs for hit, defense, ArPen etc which led to more choice and character investment.

Now loot is available from everywhere, its value is diminished, can tf to the point of being mythic raid-quality and this is where the ilvl problem comes into it. Blizz now has to increase the stats budget of every item available to keep the progression going. Now we've gone from Naxx 200 ilvl at base difficulty to ICC Heroic 25 284 ilvl for a total of 84 ilvls in the entire expansion, to LFR 340 to Mythic BoD 415, 75 in one tier. We only have 4 stats outside of our mainstat, no baseline sockets, no reforging, nothing outside of the ilvl matters now.

"(No mention of lvl ANYWHERE)"
because ILVL is nothing of the sort a problem, it is just a number, it literally means nothing.

[Gourmandise]

I've been thinking about this lately. Conceiving expansions as standalones allows them to ignore most continuity issues from one expansion to the next. Classes: temporary. Class skills/legendaries: Temporary. Content: Temporary and irrelevant once used up.

Well, the 4/26 Q&A talks about the GCD changes being for the longterm health of the game, and classes being designed with a base that can be added to every expansion to be reset at the end. So they've been upfront with this at least. Apparently, people had a problem with MoP bloat... who would have thought.

I could make a subjective case that this might be hurting the overall game more than the advantages. To wit: Most of the criticism of BfA is expressed in "It used to be like this and why don't they go back to that." That misses the point. Developers who imagine that each expansion is more of a stand alone game are very likely to make most old concepts irrelevant. That extends to content and now apparently even to patches.

I think the design philosophy isn't necessarily detrimental to the game but their execution doesn't always seem to hit the mark. You have to be careful when messing with the core systems of the game. Catchups and prunes are more keenly felt than squishes and pathfinder.

WoW is still at heart a raiding game and if you're not raiding (as most aren't in any organized way) the game just sweeps you along on all of its changes while concepts like "the world" and "RPG" no longer apply. Catchup mechanics are specifically designed to do two things: 1) Make it easy to qualify for a raid spot in the newest raid and 2) for non-raiders the progression pace is breathless and more or less constant.

It's a profound shift in thinking and explains much.

RoI for Content development has always been an issue probably since raids were introduced. Player segmentation is likely exacerbated by Ghostcrawler's information about your average player. As you said, catchup does a decent job at desegmenting the core player base but I'd say the current cadence of catchups for gear/AP+AK has been turned up to an apathy-inducing level. That, or I've grown bored with the game.

[Th3Scourge]

"(No mention of lvl ANYWHERE)"
because ILVL is nothing of the sort a problem, it is just a number, it literally means nothing.

ilvl determines the stats budget, so it means plenty. ilvl isn't the cause of the problem, it's a symptom. It wouldn't be an issue if WF/TF and the millions of ways to get loot didn't diminish the value of gear (which is the point of the video about players not caring about gear anymore)

[Drewbacca]

The squish is due to 32-bit integer overflowing in some events.

Here's the dev watercooler with their original design philosophies (it's missing pictures, since Blizzard web team is incompetent, but I think you get the idea)
https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/ne...ot-of-pandaria

See for those reasons I completely agree with the squish.

2 things :

1)first ofc extremly outdated systems wow runs on .

2)rewards seems more worth to chase then its on low itlv gear - for example in legion we were hiting such high levels of gear that it seemed worthless to chase extra 5-10 itlv if gear was 1000 - yes mathematicaly it was worth it but 15/1000 is 1,5 % - 15 / 300 is 5% upgrade - psychologicaly its bigger reward although mathematicaly they would be the same .

I don't agree with it on this standpoint. Sure, add the squish for technical reasons, but when people start demanding the squish because they feel that certain numbers seem too big... which is what the OP seemed to be doing, then you lose me in the argument. If you're numbers-obsessed enough to care that much about your ilvl, you should be mathematically inclined enough to like an increase regardless of how big the numbers are.

[Alkizon]

bloodkin
Sure, hit and expertise are certainly not sexy stats, but at least you felt gear progression as you went up in tiers and had to gem/enchant less and less hit/expertise and more of your favorite stats. This type of progression, of hitting caps in hit, expertise, haste etc. is currently missing. As long as you know your soft/hard caps, you didn't need to sim every piece of gear you got, back then you had to enchant and gem most items, which also fed into the (server)economy of the game, and most people I knew always had a few spare gems/enchants for loot during raids, so waiting wasn't that much of an issue.

I already answered this part many times. Last time it happened here:

Isiolia
*Like today most of the stats were useless. Hit / defense / expertise were just stats to cap then they were useless. Separate spell crit from physical crit just made gearing longer. Armor pen and spirit are the only stats that are to be missed in my opinion but they were not wrath material to begin with.

They weren't useless, they were at same time: players strength's grows limiter + timegate/requirements + catch-up mechanics. They limited number of "reinforcing" characteristics, created certain requirements for participation in a specific level/area of content (separator on demand and required quantity), at the same time were more (faster) accessible over time (expansion progress, due to professions and variability of already available equipment).

Isiolia
*Socket you were filling with the same gem. Oh no, you had meta gem that was hard /think /thankelitistjerks
*Elitist jerks again.

See stats and talent trees comments, especially because it's inextricably linked with professions consumption

As for ilvl... scaling calculates number (size of force) of characteristics drawn on item during its generation, that in current "stupid" RPG customization realities (which is almost non-existent, due to fact that all characteristics don't affect normalization of outgoing digits, but their absolute growth - burst) is main indicator of item “usefulness”, and since "characteristics” (stats, holes for jewels) themselves aren't part of items, but are randomly drawn at it, so basically player has no control over what wears (luck and randomizer are only conditions alone). Before you start denying this, answer the question "Which indicator they use as a pass for automatic search system?"

So ilvl and its growth, as this generally means growth of strength (they tried to add AA as an alternative for "without stats progress", but only confused everyone, since only character must contain everything "class"-related; sets were exclusive and I already talked about my attitude to them, but okay, this is another theme) -> and therefore "imbalance" between characters of different levels -> and therefore "imbalance" between characters of different progress levels, etc., etc. - is an important part of game design. It has always been like that and it always will be and they will have to turn very strongly to cut it out of its design and players memory.

Although, to tell you the truth, I don't see any special positive moves in this, since all this game elements so far, without looking at all persistent attempts to destroy ties, are interdependent. Therefore, either they will follow design and not fool people, or they will fight with system and exacerbate current situation... I don’t see the third option in current conditions.

Therefore, problems with characteristics growth are naturally associated with design approach which I have already designated earlier "content vs progress" and of course this has a direct bearing on forge items as a source of inflation, analogy of which we have already discussed for example here:

OK, lets talk about some more true analogy:
It'll be presence of easy, fast and sufficiently cheap opportunity to produce counterfeit money inside the country. Someone was caught (not lucky on RNG) - jailed and delete money, but someone didn't (lucky on RNG) - money remained in daily use. What follows from this? It follows that serious non-payment of taxes (no one pays money from "false" earnings, country doesn't receive real money, sometimes "warring parties" were engaged in such way of destabilizing economy, country becomes insolvent on international scale) and increasing inflation (money depreciation). And now think about those people who honestly earn this money, those who really affect GDP - in what condition they will be, what motivation they will have for diligence, faith in state values, other people and government (which (in our case) ironically are main source/generator of this problem) in general. Uncontrollable, irreparable and ever-increasing trends within society will begin. Therefore, volume itself isn't important, even presence is already important and bad.

Don't you think that normal honest people will try forsake this mess by all available means?
And how will this affect average composition decency of remaining population?
...it's social behavior norms and psychological climate in society as a whole?
I don't claim that this is only single and main factor, but one of stones on neck that pulling body on bottom direction.

So...
1) If devs take into account t(w)f, then ilvl overgrowth, and therefore attributes, and therefore gap between players forces.
2) If they don't, then part of content overlaps each other (in progression), and therefore cuts carrot size, and therefore needs/desire to perform more complex/expensive for progress/design content with this, and therefore generally the point of creating/participation/significance/need of such content.

I wanted to draw you picture showing how strongly it overlaps (= replaces each other) part of content in terms of progress for different cases, and how cancer tumor (ilvl) incredibly swells, but this is probably unnecessary and you have sufficiently developed spatial thinking yourself for at least noticing trend. This doesn't increase carrot size and its life expectancy, but only reduces its price for purchase by the state, but it also depreciates it to all other citizens, so it ceases to be a valuable item and since there are no "carrots", then there is no control/motivating(except drug addicts) mechanism... with all ensuing chaos.

If you'll sit down now and think well, you will understand that current game design trends (adding multilayering difficulty, RNG, "attribute-less" AA+, x-forge, all forms of scaling and other disgrace) are just attempts to solve this problem, but they are wrong and cheap&profitable only in short run (are bandages, not real treatment), but in long run destroying game integrity in general. And this is without even going into particular details of projected consequences.

As for symptomatology... I won't call them so, rather "illness complications", since connections here isn't direct, but mediated, but these are purely my semantic reasoning (although friends tend to hold opinion that this was not even symptom or complication, but underlying cause, which, together with “medical error”, led patient to coma (this at least I see from their logical reasoning, not sure); maybe they're even right, don’t know; I'm still getting used to role of the one who explains, because it's usually other way around). Same true for overall game design (from here):

They are strongly connected because first you break logic of what is happening spoiling one of regulation systems (content consumption/force growth rate), then you try to restore it with help of illogical "crutch" (for current thread this is new itemization and loot distribution systems), crutch in own turn requires load redistribution for the whole organism, which means slow, but inevitable and predictable changes in skeletal system, which affects cardiovascular, nervous, and ultimately, psychological systems (it's enough to imagine some form of neglected osteochondrosis or may be rickets). This is metaphorical of course, but I think you grasped the analogy. Everything is interconnected, as I already said.

[Solbera]

Blizzard Motto

"Must increase welfare and add power spike to make casuals feel happy, MUST ASSIMILATE PLAYERS"

It's a short term happiness spike, Blizzard is psychologically manipulating people to f33l good for 5 minutes. You get your welfare, feel good and then it slumps hard because you know it means nothing (as next welfare will obsolete it) and you run out of content. GG retention.



Oh yeah. They are keeping Uldir relevant guys! No welfare from those pesky world bosses!







https://i.imgur.com/pGKDZ09.jpg

So your saying rpgs use upgrades as a reward to make players feel good like thats a bad thing? lol wut.
+2 sword better than +1 sword was news in 1974, feel like its a part of games as a whole and has been forever.

also people in any game will reach a point of power or skill that its no longer possible to get any stronger the gear/skill hardcap. the better the player the faster they will reach this point. Please tell me a good game that has a point in infinite progression?

best example i can think of is diablo 3's paragon system...and thats super fun..../s please grind more rat runs ugh.

[Xath]

Not really no. People are more likely to stay if they have no content to run? Raiding was always a niche activity, and everything below raiding was easily finished very quickly. The longest lasting non-raid content was rep grinds that lasted a few weeks at most. If dungeons didn't get updated they wouldn't get run, if world quests didn't get updated they wouldn't get run. This is how the game is, and I assure you it's better this way. Nobody is unsubbing because have more content that's worth running. You think if they ran WQs and hit a wall at below raid item levels they'd ... what? Keep playing just because? Of course not.



This is a huge misconception that people wearing nostalgia goggles have. People quit in large numbers during vanilla and bc as well, it's just that it was a newer game and a much easier sell, and people were constantly streaming in to replace them so we didn't get to see that in the sub number reporting. The number of people coming in was greater than the number of people going out until cata, that doesn't mean that huge numbers of people weren't leaving. There's a blue quote somewhere about that from the MOP era I believe.

They have content to run though. There was always content to progress on in bc all the way until the mega nerf patch unless you were one of the few guilds doing sunwell.

Now there is basically no content to run outside what is newest.

[MoanaLisa]

If I was a cynical person, I'd say that the monthly subscription fee is your season pass to a competitive eSport platform where you can choose to run seasons of PvP Arenas, M+ dungeons or if you truly want, go for that elusive Best Guild in the World raiding title.

Not quite sure if I'm that cynical yet, but there are days when it's close...

That's another angle in all of this that I'm just not knowledgeable enough to really understand what to think. I personally don't care for PvP (but do enjoy city defense) and view the PvE game as solo/co-operative instead of competitive. So I've just really ignored all that. Someone in this thread or elsewhere was talking about how the skills purge was to set the game up for e-sports. That whole idea was new to me. Just really hadn't thought about it like that.

I don't believe your cynicism is misplaced. I simply don't know and perhaps don't want to understand how the general design has catered to that. I've expressed my dislikes elsewhere (too much math...not enough soul is the TLDR for that) and have come to the conclusion that whatever the design was supposed to do at the start they've lost that. Whether it was because they felt it was in a rut or a reaction to very casual players running out of stuff to do in Warlords I can't decide. I don't hate BfA but I think it a disappointment and the more I play it the more ambivalent I am about it. I'm playing more Guild Wars 2 in any seven day period than WoW and finding that I like it better (for now).

[kamuimac]

I don't agree with it on this standpoint. Sure, add the squish for technical reasons, but when people start demanding the squish because they feel that certain numbers seem too big... which is what the OP seemed to be doing, then you lose me in the argument. If you're numbers-obsessed enough to care that much about your ilvl, you should be mathematically inclined enough to like an increase regardless of how big the numbers are.

erm thats not what im talking about- im talking about how people percive numbers on psychological level - and how you can manipulate "numbers" to get better percived resoults. the most basic case would be 0,99 on prices in shops , other is how you present data - for example 14600 can be presented as "nearly 15k " etc etc - here you "percive" +15 itlv upgrade as much higher if it goes from gear that has 300 itlv then 1000 whether you like it or not . in case of 1000 a lot of people woudl simply cba with 5-10 levels of WF because - "ye who cares" - in case of 300 - hm maybe this 10 itlv is worth it. and they jump on gear threadmill.

[FelPlague]

ilvl determines the stats budget, so it means plenty. ilvl isn't the cause of the problem, it's a symptom. It wouldn't be an issue if WF/TF and the millions of ways to get loot didn't diminish the value of gear (which is the point of the video about players not caring about gear anymore)

yes warforge and titanforge are the major issue.
but when people say "ilvl is going up faster then any other expansion and thats bad" thats not true is the slightest... that is not the reason for the issue...
cause ilvl is literally just a fucking number, its the catchups and the RNG of titanforging and sockets/etc that is the issue among many other things.
ilvl are literally not just "spiking" they are going up now the exact same amount they went up in wotlk for example (then 13, now 15) but we have another difficulty to deal with.

[Forogil]

I don't think that's quite true. Vanilla WoW was designed with BC and Wrath expansions in mind. They knew that's where they wanted to go. They knew what story they wanted to tell. I think they had some very definite ideas about that across that whole series of expansions and while their plans were flexible I think they had a roadmap.

In terms of story, yes, they had an outline - but even the stories are mostly self-contained within one expansion; and I even feel that expansion tie on to each other at least as well now, maybe even more.

But in terms of game-play they either planned to be disruptive (TBC and Wrath were on separate continents) - or didn't have a plan, and unsuccessfully tried to just add more - until they realized that they had to be disruptive.

- - - Updated - - -

From one tier to the next. If we follow the same logic, we can assume that 8.2 will have a further jump to 490 and 8.3 to 565

You are literally unable to add 1 and 1 together and get 2 (raid tiers), and that's why your predictions for the future are completely off. And trying to hide behind "from one tier to the next" is just a failed attempt to justify your error - since you don't compare one tier to the next, but the lowest of one tier to the highest of the next tier; those differences are within 2 tiers as 1 one plus 1 is 2.

Since wrath there has been two trends for loot in raids during expansions - an increase with difficult in the current raid - it was 13 during Wrath and is now 15 (the difference between 13 and 15 could be due to titanforging; so stop blaming it for everything) - and an increase between raids, but not so that the entry level for the new raid exceeds the final level in the previous raid.

During Wrath the entry level-loot for the new raid was between the top two difficulty-levels for the previous raid; now it is equal to the heroic difficulty level-loot from previous tier.

OS: 200, 213, 226
FL: 219 226-232 239
Jaraxxus: 232 245 258
Marrowgar: 251 264 277
(Yes, there were four difficulty levels for these, but 2 of them had the same level of loot.)

Uldir LFR 340, Normal 355, Heroic 370, Mythic 385
BoD LFR 370 Normal 385 Heroic 400 Mythic 415

This will likely continue - possible with
8.2 AEP LFR 400 Normal 415 Heroic 430 Mythic 445
8.3? LFR 430 Normal 445 Heroic 460 Mythic 475

I have some vague memory of some side-raid as well, that might push up main raid 5-15 levels, unlikely more - and clearly not 45 levels in 8.2 and not 90 levels for 8.3 (assuming 8.3 will come with a raid).

[Gref]

What bothers me even more is that my tanking gear and my dps gear is exactly same.
I just switch shield and sword from two hander.
1k io both as tank and dps.
I am hardly beaten in dps in m+
I do not even bother changing traits, i simply pick the ones that benefit both specs.

oh I have 6 pieces of TF. 383ilvl.
got 370 weapon from pvp at the start of bfa which i used until 3 weeks ago.

i do not know the names of any of my items. except the trinket which got 395tf. big red button or something i guess.

absolutely retarded design or way clever, i cannot understand.

[Whitedragon]

You're new to this game i take it? Badges were a thing since BC.

Heck even before that they had some of this in place in Vanilla too (Old argent dawn turn ins with the Nax patch, BG's adding some easy rep loot, Addition of the Tir 0.5 set, ect)

[Th3Scourge]

In terms of story, yes, they had an outline - but even the stories are mostly self-contained within one expansion; and I even feel that expansion tie on to each other at least as well now, maybe even more.

But in terms of game-play they either planned to be disruptive (TBC and Wrath were on separate continents) - or didn't have a plan, and unsuccessfully tried to just add more - until they realized that they had to be disruptive.

- - - Updated - - -


You are literally unable to add 1 and 1 together and get 2 (raid tiers), and that's why your predictions for the future are completely off.

Since wrath there has been two trends for loot in raids during expansions - an increase with difficult in the current raid - it was 13 during Wrath and is now 15 (the difference between 13 and 15 could be due to titanforging; so stop blaming it for everything) - and an increase between raids, but not so that the entry level for the new raid exceeds the final level in the previous raid.

During Wrath the entry level-loot for the new raid was between the top two difficulty-levels for the previous raid; now it is equal to the heroic difficulty level-loot from previous tier.

OS: 200, 213, 226
FL: 219 226-232 239
Jaraxxus: 232 245 258
Marrowgar: 251 264 277
(Yes, there were four difficulty levels for these, but 2 of them had the same level of loot.)

Uldir LFR 340, Normal 355, Heroic 370, Mythic 385
BoD LFR 370 Normal 385 Heroic 400 Mythic 415

This will likely continue - possible with
8.2 AEP LFR 400 Normal 415 Heroic 430 Mythic 445
8.3? LFR 430 Normal 445 Heroic 460 Mythic 475

I have some vague memory of some side-raid as well, that might push up main raid 5-15 levels, unlikely more - and clearly not 45 levels in 8.2 and not 90 levels for 8.3 (assuming 8.3 will come with a raid).

Ah yes you are right, I was supposed to add 30 to the top tier. Either way, with the same comparison, we're going from a 77 ilvl increase to 125 ilvl in BfA

[DeusX]

All I read in the OP is a more clear and loud definition of the "carrot on a stick" concept, which has been driving WoW since TBC.
However, now it seems exacerbated. Not going to stick around to see if it ends well for Blizz, but that's something I want to do for some time now. In my "low WoW love" periods, I was still logging for the raids, but now I just prefer to watch a Brooklyn99 episode or something.

[kamuimac]

What bothers me even more is that my tanking gear and my dps gear is exactly same.
I just switch shield and sword from two hander.
1k io both as tank and dps.
I am hardly beaten in dps in m+
I do not even bother changing traits, i simply pick the ones that benefit both specs.

oh I have 6 pieces of TF. 383ilvl.
got 370 weapon from pvp at the start of bfa which i used until 3 weeks ago.

i do not know the names of any of my items. except the trinket which got 395tf. big red button or something i guess.

absolutely retarded design or way clever, i cannot understand.

which means you player since launch till now.

seems to work as intended - kept you on hamster wheel all this time.

[PreparedFor]

Oh look another elitist is pissed about welfare epic item level being increased.