Why is the wow community in general so adverse to losing?

[Log Cabin]

I can understand being annoyed, frustrated, and angered by losing it is only natural after all but does anymore else find the wow community in recent years has taken the idea of losing to such extremes that many don't even try anymore?

The obvious example of course is mythic plus and groups disbanding instantly on a wipe even when the key level is low enough to allow it to still be successfully completed. It doesn't stop at there though I have seen people just... give up and it confuses me on how you can approach a game like that.

It just strikes me as bizarre. Raiders wipe hundreds if not thousands of times a tier. PvPers lose a hundred or more matches till glad. Yet the idea of failing and simply dusting yourself off and trying again almost seems lost in a large part of WoW's community and I am curious as to how this came to be. Has it simply always been this way and I am only now noticing it going outside of my own closed off community with my alt?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The WoW community is old. The game has been out for... what? 17 years now? Most WoW players aren't teenagers with unlimited free time anymore. WoW players have jobs and families. They have little free time, and losing that precious free time to an unsuccessful run feels really bad, so ofcourse people don't want their time to be wasted.

[Log Cabin]

The WoW community is old. The game has been out for... what? 17 years now? Most WoW players aren't teenagers with unlimited free time anymore. WoW players have jobs and families. They have little free time, and losing that precious free time to an unsuccessful run feels really bad, so ofcourse people don't want their time to be wasted.

I can understand that. What I was trying to get at and I admit I am terrible at starting a topic and far better at carrying on an existing one. Is that I feel a large portion of the playerbase just doesn't try for fear of failure.

[Toybox]

Because since Cataclysm, the game has taught players that they cannot lose. Right from level 1 right until queued for current expansion dungeons & raids, there is absolutely nothing that poses a threat to anyone at any point. Leveling went from slower & more punishing to being able to whack anything over the head with ease, & instanced content became the same after the pushback against launch Cataclysm heroics.

People aren't used to failing anymore. Some recent content, like Warfronts, are designed so losing is nigh on impossible unless > 50% of your team are AFK/trolling. Don't have to interrupt, don't have to worry about what you pull, don't have to worry about where you go - you just don't lose.

The skill ceiling may have shot up in recent years, but the skill floor has plummeted. The gap between good players & bad players has never been bigger, & it's only going to continue to get worse.

[Redroniksre]

Because since Cataclysm, the game has taught players that they cannot lose. Right from level 1 right until queued for current expansion dungeons & raids, there is absolutely nothing that poses a threat to anyone at any point. Leveling went from slower & more punishing to being able to whack anything over the head with ease, & instanced content became the same after the pushback against launch Cataclysm heroics.

People aren't used to failing anymore. Some recent content, like Warfronts, are designed so losing is nigh on impossible unless > 50% of your team are AFK/trolling. Don't have to interrupt, don't have to worry about what you pull, don't have to worry about where you go - you just don't lose.

The skill ceiling may have shot up in recent years, but the skill floor has plummeted. The gap between good players & bad players has never been bigger, & it's only going to continue to get worse.

I don't even think it is necessarily that. I think it is a lot of players who are used to doing higher content pugging lower stuff and getting pissed when it doesn't go as well as a guild run. I'm hoping they add more ways to filter groups and categorize groups, since you can't really punish people for leaving. At least make it very clear -A LEARNING RUN WILL PROBABLY FAIL A LOT, DO NOT JOIN IF YOU JUST WANT A QUICK KILL-

[Toybox]

I don't even think it is necessarily that. I think it is a lot of players who are used to doing higher content pugging lower stuff and getting pissed when it doesn't go as well as a guild run. I'm hoping they add more ways to filter groups and categorize groups, since you can't really punish people for leaving. At least make it very clear -A LEARNING RUN WILL PROBABLY FAIL A LOT, DO NOT JOIN IF YOU JUST WANT A QUICK KILL-

True, that's definitely a thing. There's more reasons than just the ones we gave, but I do think they're two of the bigger ones.

[Biggles Worth]

It just strikes me as bizarre. Raiders wipe hundreds if not thousands of times a tier.

Honestly, I feel this is bad game design to have thousands of wipes.

[Biomega]

I don't think it's so much about not wanting to lose. WoW has perfected the art of designing for rewards, rather than for activities. People do things they don't particularly enjoy simply because of the rewards attached. As a result, there's a natural tendency towards being efficient with your time when going for those rewards - anything that looks like it might waste that time is avoided, or aborted.

If dungeons were fun to just do, people would stick it out. But for many people, what's fun is the rewards you acquire, and the acquisition process is mostly a chore. They'll take any route that promises to save time, because that's all they care about.

Quitting on M+ keys that run into trouble is part of that equation. You're absolutely right that not all M+ keys who have a hiccup or two automatically fail the timer. But when all you care about is efficiency, downward trends like that can very quickly spoil your perceived EV. This is doubly true because of a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy at work here: because people tend to leave keys quickly upon failure, people are MORE likely to leave at the first hint at failure because they don't want to risk investing more time and then have OTHER people leave at the next failure. So people leave because they know people leave.

Also, this issue is more common at the lower key levels. At very high key levels, you have less and less "ragequitters" as people generally understand that fuckups happen, and are more trusting that someone who got into a +20 is not an idiot that'll keep wiping ten more times. When you're in a +10 or even a +15, the proportion of shall we say less-than-maximally-skilled players is a lot greater, and so people's expectations are far less optimistic as well. In addition, key participants (as opposed to hosts) risk very little in a key - time, basically, and that's it. Abandoning a group and hoping for a better "roll" with the next one is a comparatively low opportunity cost - especially if you're an in-demand spec like tank or healer.

So, low opportunity cost for abandoning a group and high incentives to maximize time efficiency equals a propensity to leave at the first sign of trouble. It's really no surprise.

[Rayr]

A mixture of both playerbase and blizzard imo. Players changed how they played wow at the end of wotlk where the majority of players min/maxed the hell out of everything and then blizzard leaned into that game style. Everything became GO GO GO. So now it’s engrained in the game in every way you can think of, so when something fails or even goes slowww then people rage.

[Kittahsmash]

The WoW community is old. The game has been out for... what? 17 years now? Most WoW players aren't teenagers with unlimited free time anymore. WoW players have jobs and families. They have little free time, and losing that precious free time to an unsuccessful run feels really bad, so ofcourse people don't want their time to be wasted.

The average age of a PC gamer is 37. We're all old, but yet there are still a ton of varying reactions to losing. So...I strongly disagree with this point of view. "Old" people generally have more understanding than younger people, and we all know that sometimes things happen and shit goes sideways. Getting angry about that doesn't help anything and only serves to cause you to lose your temper more easily in the next short while. "Old" people who don't want their time wasted wouldn't log on in the first place because the entire design of the game is to waste your time. "I don't want my time wasted while I'm wasting my time..."

So with that in mind, age has nothing to do with it. It's all about the mentality of the player, and how the developer helps create player mentalities. The entire game is designed around losers die and winners keep on living to fight the next battle. I mean, for one completely random exmaple: you get punished when you die by having to run and get back to your corpse...you're introduced to that mechanic from the very start of the game. So therefor, dying is bad and I should do what I can to avoid it, so anybody causing me to die is bad and "wasting my time."

[Ryzeth]

Honestly, I feel this is bad game design to have thousands of wipes.

It's "bad game design" to have raiders actually learn fights, and not just try bruteforce their way through everything with more gear?

I imagine you'd really, really hate playing something like Super Meat Boy.

Personally, I'm just gonna leave if I genuinely don't think we can clear something. Like wiping 3 times on the first boss of Plaguefall because people don't want to CC the adds or move out of slime wave. Despite not having the DPS to just power through him consuming all the adds. One or two deaths? Fine. Three+ to the exact same mechanic every single time? Nah, unless I'm progging a raid.

[Ethas]

It alway has been the case. I remember this situation being the same back in WotLK. For some reason people think they are the most competent at the game and the cult of being optimal that Blizzard cultivated over the years made it so people just don’t want to spend their time on suboptimal activities. They want to get the most out of their playtime. This is why the game moved to short play session times overall. It is tied up to the people and their mobile devices, information overload and stuff like this in a modern info world. I don’t really think this is about wow community in general.

[Arewn]

I think the problem is that these players aren't really enjoying those elements of the game. If the content is fun, wiping and re-doing it isn't that big of a deal. When the content is a chore which is only being completed to attain a carrot, wiping means wasting time.

Losing in PvP or while learning a raid encounters is inherently part of the process. You'd prefer not to, but it's fun so it's fine. Wiping in a key, which you are only doing for a reward, is frustrating because now this thing which is essentially a chore to you just got extended.

[MrLachyG]

Honestly, I feel this is bad game design to have thousands of wipes.

are there guilds out there that wipe over 1000 times a raid tier? that's pretty hefty.

[munkeyinorbit]

I can understand that. What I was trying to get at and I admit I am terrible at starting a topic and far better at carrying on an existing one. Is that I feel a large portion of the playerbase just doesn't try for fear of failure.

It is a pug issue. Why put yourself out for randos? If you cannot achieve anything then why are you even there? This only seems to be a "new" issue because the ability to pug all content is relatively new.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

This kind of thing happens all the time in BGs, not really specific to mythic.

[WowIsDead64]

I can understand being annoyed, frustrated, and angered by losing it is only natural after all but does anymore else find the wow community in recent years has taken the idea of losing to such extremes that many don't even try anymore?

The obvious example of course is mythic plus and groups disbanding instantly on a wipe even when the key level is low enough to allow it to still be successfully completed. It doesn't stop at there though I have seen people just... give up and it confuses me on how you can approach a game like that.

It just strikes me as bizarre. Raiders wipe hundreds if not thousands of times a tier. PvPers lose a hundred or more matches till glad. Yet the idea of failing and simply dusting yourself off and trying again almost seems lost in a large part of WoW's community and I am curious as to how this came to be. Has it simply always been this way and I am only now noticing it going outside of my own closed off community with my alt?

This is nature of competitive content. Sometimes after hundreds of runs you become experienced enough to see, that it's pointless to continue, i.e. continuing is just waste of time. This problem started in Cata, when all of a sudden content became ultra hardcore. No room for mistakes. One mistake = wipe and corpse run. And whole run was taking about an hour due to too long dungeons. So, players had learned, that if wipe happened on first pack, then it was pointless to continue. It's downside of competitive content. Don't like it - don't play it. I don't even try to play such content exactly due to this reason.

[Sansnom]

It just strikes me as bizarre. Raiders wipe hundreds if not thousands of times a tier. PvPers lose a hundred or more matches till glad. Yet the idea of failing and simply dusting yourself off and trying again almost seems lost in a large part of WoW's community and I am curious as to how this came to be. Has it simply always been this way and I am only now noticing it going outside of my own closed off community with my alt?

There are two reasons that I can see. The first is that for some, WoW is a loot gathering game. Not one that present a challenge to overcome. Yes. Raids are difficult. But remove loot and people will just ignore it. Put loot in a easy content and people will flock to it.

The second is PUGs makes it easy to leave and rejoin another group. People in a guild progression raid group do not quit because one, there are new loot and second, quitting would mean losing their place in the group.

[Myradin]

It is a pug issue. Why put yourself out for randos? If you cannot achieve anything then why are you even there? This only seems to be a "new" issue because the ability to pug all content is relatively new.

If that were the case FF would be extremely toxic since all its content is puggable too.

[T-34]

The obvious example of course is mythic plus and groups disbanding instantly on a wipe even when the key level is low enough to allow it to still be successfully completed. It doesn't stop at there though I have seen people just... give up and it confuses me on how you can approach a game like that.

I am curious as to how this came to be. Has it simply always been this way and I am only now noticing it going outside of my own closed off community with my alt?

I see this happen very rarely, but on the other hand I do my due diligence when I join groups or make my own = I check people so they match me in experience.
Be more critical of yourself and the groups you join/the people you invite.