Island Expeditions Soloable in Patch 9.1.5

[Julmara]

what spaghetti code do they have to release that with 9.1.5 ?

[Loveliest]

Im angry because Blizzard does virtually nothing for pvp and pvpers. Pvpers have been calling for solo queue for 7-8 years now. Meanwhile less than 1 year removed from BFA, Blizzard listens to 12 ppl and gives solo queue for Isles. It's just a dead on indication of the mismanagement and lack of attentiveness in providing what the game needs as opposed to what 12 ppl want.

You must realize the difference.
One is something you are requesting for current *endgame* content, the other is something that allows people to collect some older vanity items. Solo queue for old content has no ramifications, solo queue for endgame is a big change. They don't want to change this - probably because ALL endgame is a group activity. Maybe in time they'll allow it, but at the moment it still makes no sense to change it.
LFR and LFD are the equivalent for random BGs and skirmishes. Rated pvp is the equivalent of M+ and normal-Mythic raiding. It's a design philosophy, even if you don't like it. You can complain about it, but at least don't try to equate your request to some change to old collecting content...

[Cosmic Janitor]

what spaghetti code do they have to release that with 9.1.5 ?

This has nothing to do with spaghetti code. This is simply a trivial change (most likely a couple of variables in the queueing proceedure) that costs them nothing and players wanted for a while. They try to get some people back, because as much as the people here deny it, they lost way more than usual. We will most likely see some more changes, I wouldn't be surprised to see some old raid changes for legion as well or some other pain points. I bet they will remove conduit energy once the thing goes to the PTR, mainly because it serves no point other than to piss off a couple of people that play multiple specs more than the covenant system already needs to.

[Nnyco]

Another artificial gating change released as feature...

Me use buzzwords, me write witty comment.

[terminaltrip421]

i also hope they remove the aoe cap for this if you wanna solo? Or is that 2 much 2 ask for?

I'm glad you brought this up ...some spells were never aoe capped, right? can I get a reminder on which weren't as they'd be the obvious candidates to queue with.

[Jastall]

Legion raids still can't be done solo? That's a bummer.

They're doable if you're geared. My Fury War can solo anything on Mythic bar Kil'jaeden, Eonar, Coven and Aggrammar (well he's doable but you need drums and RNG on your side). Nighthold in particular is pretty easy now. Below Mythic is a faceroll so long as you're not 180 ilvl or something.

BFA raids, however, yeah gonna need a full group for those.

[Niwes]

i am happy for ppl awaiting for this. its better than doing nothing or some another SL systems shit.

that said, as some others said, and being myself a (lead) developer for 20+ years, i also know this is still cost effective development. its changing a few lines of code, it is straight to test, can not corrupt code fragments of actual gameplay and is therefore safe to change. this means its the result of a brainstorming with the title „how we can do something a bit impactful, what players want, with least risk and least effort“. thats ofc not a bad thing per se. but i wanna see way more of Blizz before i even consider giving them even 10% of my trust.

in short: its better than nothing, but not the investment and mindset i wanna see. i wanna see investments. i wanna see improvements (based on player feedback) of the actual xpac. i wanna see them REALLY investing in quality and the REAL wish/need to get players back. as Bellular quickly showed a few days ago, by calculating and analyzing the public reachable numbers/data (and i did the same in more depth and came to even harder facts), they are really in a bad situation in SL now, when it comes down to wow. so i wanna see the some real investments and not just some another form of cost effective development. otherwise they deserve with how it ends.

[TbouncerT]

This is weird, but I feel like wow (in-game) is waaay better than say months ago. I think the people that left were more often than not, the a-holes. I have seen a huge drop in my encounters with toxic players. The game has been more pleasant to just chill and play. Finally got my nephews playing the game and they're not the best (right now). But all the BFA dungeons we did, not once did the healer say anything mean. we had few wipes here and there and still just chilled like a champ. If this was a few months ago to pre-SL, they would have gotten ripped into for sucking hardcore. My wife and I PUG in and make them a lot and the drop in a-holes is huge. Are they all gone, of course not, but the drop in just the straight negativity has been very nice.

Heck, when we were doing Shrine of the Storm, the healer didn't know how to do the group ender boss (Lord Stormsong), we tried to explain it to them but either it was a language barrier or something else (drunk, high, bad, you name it) and we still ended up doing it (luckily rng was on our side on the 3rd attempt). No one said anything mean in chat. We need more of this.

[exochaft]

This has nothing to do with spaghetti code. This is simply a trivial change (most likely a couple of variables in the queueing proceedure) that costs them nothing and players wanted for a while. They try to get some people back, because as much as the people here deny it, they lost way more than usual. We will most likely see some more changes, I wouldn't be surprised to see some old raid changes for legion as well or some other pain points. I bet they will remove conduit energy once the thing goes to the PTR, mainly because it serves no point other than to piss off a couple of people that play multiple specs more than the covenant system already needs to.

Of all the things announced for 9.1.5, this change does appear to be a more recent decision based upon the wording of the blue post. Could just be a ruse, but I'll take the post at face value for now.

There could be 'spaghetti code' issues with changing how you queue for IE's, as it really depends what is going on behind the hood. May be similar to changing how LFR queues go solo eventually, but there may be some internal checks that occur (such as ilvl, presence of Azerite neck, questline completion, etc.) which could cause some issues to adjust. If we go by what 'spaghetti code' even implies, it's typically non-intuitive coding issues that occur due to IE's and its queuing system interacting with other systems or using functions/variables that have been disabled, altered, or depreciated depending upon certain character conditions and coding changes in Shadowlands. As such, one issue issue that they probably are concerned about is how the lvl and damage scaling values will potentially act with solo queuing, where the system was built upon BfA values that may not be used anymore. If such issues don't necessarily show themselves if max level people queue for the system, then the chances of some issue of this nature popping up is much lower.

As a comparison, this would potentially be easier than making solo queues for PvP, which would have to deal with cohesion with current content, PvP rating/assignment issues, and a bunch of other factors that the self-contained content of IE's don't necessarily have to worry about. Regardless, the entire reason they're even assessing such changes is because the initial assumption even by the devs is that this probably wouldn't be too hard to implement in time for 9.1.5 release... whenever that is.

Personally I'm fine with such a change, especially in the context that 9.1.5 isn't likely to add anything in terms of large content changes as shown by previous X.1.5 patches. Considering how many pets, mounts, and cosmetics are found in IE's, being able to solo farm past content is just a good thing to add to the game. It's not adding a lot of the big, sweeping changes the game ultimately needs, but it's not adding systems to the game that hurt it. If there is still a wishlist, an Explore option would be kind of nice, even if you can't get the cosmetic items... I suppose Normal is kind of close (at least it was when it was current content), but there are still remnants of the original IE system in place that would be neat to explore or discover.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Hoping scaling/unsoloable fixes for Legion content and maaaybe some slight scaling fixes for BfA content (Mythic dungeons, normal raids) will be next. Oh, and solo-able Warfronts or all the transmog sets added to the vendor for badges we can grind in the Warfront daily zones should we so please.

With those 3 fixes, I'd have my time spent in SL cut out for me.

[Niwes]

This is weird, but I feel like wow (in-game) is waaay better than say months ago. I think the people that left were more often than not, the a-holes. I have seen a huge drop in my encounters with toxic players. The game has been more pleasant to just chill and play. Finally got my nephews playing the game and they're not the best (right now). But all the BFA dungeons we did, not once did the healer say anything mean. we had few wipes here and there and still just chilled like a champ. If this was a few months ago to pre-SL, they would have gotten ripped into for sucking hardcore. My wife and I PUG in and make them a lot and the drop in a-holes is huge. Are they all gone, of course not, but the drop in just the straight negativity has been very nice.

Heck, when we were doing Shrine of the Storm, the healer didn't know how to do the group ender boss (Lord Stormsong), we tried to explain it to them but either it was a language barrier or something else (drunk, high, bad, you name it) and we still ended up doing it (luckily rng was on our side on the 3rd attempt). No one said anything mean in chat. We need more of this.

maybe this is subjective experiences.

i experienced the exact opposite. i never ever saw so much toxicity (no clue what the correct spelled english term is) and stupidity in wow than in the timespan of „since ~2 weeks before 9.1 release till today“.

so i assume its randomness, which ppl you meet and which experiences one makes.

[Very rare pepe]

This is weird, but I feel like wow (in-game) is waaay better than say months ago. I think the people that left were more often than not, the a-holes. I have seen a huge drop in my encounters with toxic players. The game has been more pleasant to just chill and play. Finally got my nephews playing the game and they're not the best (right now). But all the BFA dungeons we did, not once did the healer say anything mean. we had few wipes here and there and still just chilled like a champ. If this was a few months ago to pre-SL, they would have gotten ripped into for sucking hardcore. My wife and I PUG in and make them a lot and the drop in a-holes is huge. Are they all gone, of course not, but the drop in just the straight negativity has been very nice.

Heck, when we were doing Shrine of the Storm, the healer didn't know how to do the group ender boss (Lord Stormsong), we tried to explain it to them but either it was a language barrier or something else (drunk, high, bad, you name it) and we still ended up doing it (luckily rng was on our side on the 3rd attempt). No one said anything mean in chat. We need more of this.

I tend to almost agree but i'd throw in that people just tend to not say anything anymore, the only time people really talk is when something bad happens or a small hello before you start a run. WoW and maybe this goes for other MMO's too? Are really becoming anti-social experiences IMO, where people want to play in their own little world, in a world. One of the few reasons IMO why MMO's is a dying genre.

[Pakheth]

Unironically

It will indeed since now I can take my time an enjoy it how it was originally designed: Exploring it at my own leisure. Before they butchered it into an aoe fest.

[Cosmic Janitor]

It will indeed since now I can take my time an enjoy it how it was originally designed: Exploring it at my own leisure. Before they butchered it into an aoe fest.

I mean there is still the other team ..

[Nzx]

this is still cost effective development.

Which is exactly what they should be doing. Spending more money for less return is objectively a bad thing for the longevity of the game.

I've often seen you post things like this here, and I always wonder why you think Blizzard is the company you should be railing against for this kind of thing.. The mobile game market is beyond absurdly profitable right now, and the idea of "content" that you should pay for in that market is reskins. This forum has an active thread for Genshin, which is a literal unashamed slot machine. At the other end of the scale you have games like Path of Exile which add an entirely new mechanic, rebalance the game, add new skills, and potentially add entirely new endgame progression every three months, but then get forums full of crying because someone's meta build 3 months ago isn't as good now.

Game devs literally cannot win anymore. It's either create a mobile game where people will pay you $20 to get five more spins of the wheel and then praise you for blessing them with a "legendary" recolour, or its spend thousands of hours of cross-functional development effort to create an update that gets released for free and then have potentially tens of thousands of people complaining that you made their particular niche take 1% longer and therefore you're the Hitler of developers - so it's no wonder there's a race to the bottom to make trash mobile games.

[Cosmic Janitor]

There could be 'spaghetti code' issues with changing how you queue for IE's, as it really depends what is going on behind the hood. May be similar to changing how LFR queues go solo eventually, but there may be some internal checks that occur (such as ilvl, presence of Azerite neck, questline completion, etc.) which could cause some issues to adjust. If we go by what 'spaghetti code' even implies, it's typically non-intuitive coding issues that occur due to IE's and its queuing system interacting with other systems or using functions/variables that have been disabled, altered, or depreciated depending upon certain character conditions and coding changes in Shadowlands. As such, one issue issue that they probably are concerned about is how the lvl and damage scaling values will potentially act with solo queuing, where the system was built upon BfA values that may not be used anymore. If such issues don't necessarily show themselves if max level people queue for the system, then the chances of some issue of this nature popping up is much lower.

The person I quoted clearly implied some SL related issues that now affects the last expansion, which I very much doubt. Solo queues as a system already exist for the old scenarios as well as LFR of old expansions, so it was clearly already possible. Edit: Not to mention torghast .

[Sinured]

"PLX guys dont leave all, we add all the stuff you wanted for years, we will add everything, pls we cant afford to drink during workhours anymore." -A blizz dude

I´d rather buy another copy of skyrim from Todd than resubbing to this "game".

[Pakheth]

I mean there is still the other team ..

Still but it's really hard to lose most of the time. And they usually don't start rushing before you have collected so and so amount of azerite.

[Kagthul]

I have no issues on my fury warrior soloing legion raids, mainly Mythic Guldan..

Bfa raids however.....

Because it usually takes at least two xpacs to out-Stat/overpower the content.

[Cierah]

Sweet - there's still some stuff I need out of them for cheevs, pets, mounts, and mogs.