STOP making the game for the top 0.01% of the players! It’s killing this game

[crusadernero]

I honestly could not agree more, and have been saying this for YEARS.

FLEX was by far the best introduction to raiding - it was straight forward, for the most part, wasnt overly difficult, and if a particular player was dragging the team down a bit, adding a couple more dps was usually a good solution, which allowed them still to learn the ropes. Flex was the greatest introduction to raiding, and now its a clusterfuck. The difficulty is much, MUCH higher now in normal than it was when flex was first introduced.

I know many will disagree, but my "solution" would be, as many have said, to reduce LFR to a STORY ONLY mode, which can be done solo, or with up to XYZ friends, and the rest are bots. You get to see the story, and maybe if you complete the whole raid you get a nice set of gear at the end, which is enough to get you started on normal mode raiding. People get to see the story, and experience the expansion in its entirety, which i think is a good thing.

Part 2 of this though, is to reduce the difficulty or normal back to an ENTRY LEVEL experience, where new players dont feel overwhelmed, and raid leaders dont feel the need to form a heroic raid group for normal. Anyone claiming normal mode hasnt greatly increased in difficulty since SoO (flex) is simply wrong - i dont care about the math, i dont care about the numbers, it has changed a LOT.

Now, to be fair, I typically raid mythic, so i dont PERSONALLY find normal to be "too hard", but, im the minority and i know that. Many people i play with in friends and family raids have been commenting on it for quite some time, starting in legion, and just getting "worse". There have also been some tiers that were quite easy, and that same group did a bunch of heroic bosses as well, but those are exceptions to the rule.

TBH, i would be fine with the removal of ONE of heroic / normal, but really, it would need to be heroic, which is a fucking shame because its the real NORMAL difficulty, and i think THAT is what has been forgotten. What we know as heroic now, was once the STANDARD difficulty of all raids. Comparing Heroic now to early raids, its glaringly obvious the difficulty has gone through the roof.

Remember that - what is now heroic was once just RAID. They have since done a variety of things - they added 1 difficulty above it, and 2 below it, and yet even the one BELOW it is harder than nearly everything that came before.

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.

Yeah, theres really no need to have LFR as it is now. Something gotta change. Its just plainly a bad feature, even more so for new players coming into this game. Imagine doing LFR and thinking this is how raiding is. Hah.

A simplified storymode is all that mode needs. No one goes there to gear up anyway, atleast not people that actually wants to progress the character via gear. At the same time, as you said, there needs to be an easier version of normal. We already got REALLY hard fights in this game, why do normal and HC gotta be so difficult to? Makes no sense.

And yeah, I remember back in the day were a raid were just that, a raid.

I think way to many people in this community overvalue that things gotta be really hard in order for it to be worthwhile. Atleast in a pug scene thats a nightmare.

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Nothing you said argued against what I said. You just agreed with me, you know.

What do you mean?

[Osmeric]

Seeing some reaching across the divide here, very good.

I agree Flex was a much better way to go than LFR. With LFR, in MoP, there was little reason to be in a casual guild.

The tragedy with Flex was they immediately tuned it up again in WoD. Flex SoO was noticeably easier than Normal Highmaul. I had a character in a casual guild of players that came to WoW (from Rift, then SWTOR) at the end of MoP because of Flex. When WoD came along, they couldn't clear N Highmaul, and gave up on WoW (and MMOs in general) not long after. They just weren't having fun.

[arkanon]

Seeing some reaching across the divide here, very good.

I agree Flex was a much better way to go than LFR. With LFR, in MoP, there was little reason to be in a casual guild.

The tragedy with Flex was they immediately tuned it up again in WoD. Flex SoO was noticeably easier than Normal Highmaul. I had a character in a casual guild of players that came to WoW (from Rift, then SWTOR) at the end of MoP because of Flex. When WoD came along, they couldn't clear N Highmaul, and gave up on WoW (and MMOs in general) not long after. They just weren't having fun.

I have ALWAYS had the same stance that there needs to be a way for XYZ players who dont like group content to be able to experience the story in a comfortable, stress free way. I have also always said LFR is a TERRIBLE introduction to raiding, and gives all the wrong impressions to new players trying it out. I have ALSO always said Flex, in particular during SoO (its introduction) was a great difficulty middle ground, where you really needed a group of players with SOME knowledge of their own class, but very little knowledge of the "meta" game. They just needed to know what taunt was, what brez was, etc etc. Now a group FULL of players at that level would still struggle to clear it, but, because of the nature of flex, when all other difficulties had fixed player counts, it was appealing to players of a variety of skill levels.

Thats all gone now, normal and heroic are a wasteland.

[cparle87]

What do you mean?

This bit.

"People are half afk, some are 100% afk, some dont know anything about the class they are playing, some refuse to play good, lots dont know/care about boss mechanics, some goes mad when others tell them "Hey, you should do X instead of Y", 1 wipe = half the raid leaves and you gotta wait. The gear that drops is useless most of the time, especially if you actually want to progress your character. The downsides are numerous.

Whats the upside? You see the inside of raid and you can finish the main storyline. Thats the only plus of it."

The whole first part is just you saying my whole "nobody tries so I'm not going to try" statement in different words.

And the second part was you agreeing with me that its major point was to see the storyline.

[ellieg]

What content would keep someone around that is not in a guild outside of launch material and maybe mounts and mog? I am confused to what this would look like I guess

I'm guildless. I enjoy pugging my way up to 15s on multiple alts. Abt a 2 month grind to ksm on my main getting a few keys a week and trying to do at least 1 key a week on each alt for vault. Then after ksm, I focus on a dif alt and run 1-3 extra keys on them.

M+ is the greatest casual content they've ever added

[potis]

I have ALWAYS had the same stance that there needs to be a way for XYZ players who dont like group content to be able to experience the story in a comfortable, stress free way. I have also always said LFR is a TERRIBLE introduction to raiding, and gives all the wrong impressions to new players trying it out. I have ALSO always said Flex, in particular during SoO (its introduction) was a great difficulty middle ground, where you really needed a group of players with SOME knowledge of their own class, but very little knowledge of the "meta" game. They just needed to know what taunt was, what brez was, etc etc. Now a group FULL of players at that level would still struggle to clear it, but, because of the nature of flex, when all other difficulties had fixed player counts, it was appealing to players of a variety of skill levels.

Thats all gone now, normal and heroic are a wasteland.

LFR was fine for how it was introduced because it was based on the fact that the better players will use it to farm what they wanted faster (Tier sets/Legendary Quests) and it worked the way Blizzard intended it to.

Many people started "raiding", then they saw that people that arent braindead were joining, they would die/afk and the boss would still die with 10 people, and this became acceptible and a trend 2 tiers after.

Even the newest player can read "I am doing 20% of the damage the others are doing and i die, and i get free items, why bother playing lol".

Then the better players complained about putting rewards that they had to do (like weekly Valor cap, or generally caps that had you going in LFR), and they removed those, then they removed tiers, and the incentive for any better player to even bother disappeared.

And then LFR became unplayable for almost 3 years until 9.2 cause people went back to being "forced" to do LFR for tier sets, and the quality returned slightly, but also the slacking.

As example on my main, we killed Jailer (not a tier set boss, but there was a tank bag at 23:30 and i was bored) from 50% to 0 with like 8 people? 1 tank 1 healer 6 proper DPS, so he melted, but thats not the intended way.

Everything they add to the game, has a reason, but the community finds a way to completely destroy it for themselves.

[Raisei]

In a vacuum or isolated none of those individual items you've listed should be used to judge the degree to which somebody is a casual.

First of all, I have not judged anyone to be casual or not. I was just repeating the complaints of the people calling themselves casual. They claim that it is impossible to take part in any of these activities and I pointed out that if casual life is soooo hard I would find a different game, because everything fun about the game is apparently inaccessible for casuals.
Not that I am also implying how absurd this is, because the game does not in any way prevent people from doing these things. Only the casuals themselves are doing that.

However all of the combined with the fact that you are seemingly on a daily schedule for a fixed amount of time with what appears to be a regular group of players defending game that is wholly casual unfriendly on the not even official forums makes me think that you are probably not a casual and in fact might be ion hazikostas himself.

Lol. If I was Ion I would have to fire myself, but only after poisoning Danuser's coffee with laxatives. I am actually not defending the game, I know it has issues, but none of them are preventing people from joining in content.

It is just a mark of our time that all the snowflakes demand that the world turns around them and if the world refuses then the internet terror starts and never stops. Just look how many changes have been made by Blizzard in the last years to make the game more casual friendly, but it is still not enough for the casuals, and it never will be until they get everything that Mythic Raiders get from playing 80 hours a week.
Because this is not about casual or not, it is about some people being unsatisfied with what they can get in the game and wanting more without investing the effort the other people do.

Casual: "I want that Mythic Jailer mount"
Blizzard: "Raid Mythic then"
Casual: "I don't wanna"
Blizzard: "Then you are not getting the mount."
Causal: "You are a horrible company and are in no way casual friendly!!!!"

Casual: "Blizzard gief more content!"
Blizzard: "Here are Raids, Dungeons, WQs, Weeklies, Dailies, PvP, Torghast, also join a Guild and make friends, enjoy!"
Casual: "Ya, I don't like any of that so it doesn't exist."
Blizzard: "But it is right there... we can't like make content for every individual player..."
Casual: "You are a horrible company and are in no way casual friendly!!"

This is literally what is happening. It is both sad and amusing to a point. It becomes worrying when Blizzard actually tries to cater to these people, because they must know that there is no way to please them.

[arkanon]

LFR was fine for how it was introduced because it was based on the fact that the better players will use it to farm what they wanted faster (Tier sets/Legendary Quests) and it worked the way Blizzard intended it to.

Many people started "raiding", then they saw that people that arent braindead were joining, they would die/afk and the boss would still die with 10 people, and this became acceptible and a trend 2 tiers after.

Even the newest player can read "I am doing 20% of the damage the others are doing and i die, and i get free items, why bother playing lol".

Then the better players complained about putting rewards that they had to do (like weekly Valor cap, or generally caps that had you going in LFR), and they removed those, then they removed tiers, and the incentive for any better player to even bother disappeared.

And then LFR became unplayable for almost 3 years until 9.2 cause people went back to being "forced" to do LFR for tier sets, and the quality returned slightly, but also the slacking.

As example on my main, we killed Jailer (not a tier set boss, but there was a tank bag at 23:30 and i was bored) from 50% to 0 with like 8 people? 1 tank 1 healer 6 proper DPS, so he melted, but thats not the intended way.

Everything they add to the game, has a reason, but the community finds a way to completely destroy it for themselves.

Yeah, my friends and family alt tank was a blood dk for quite a long time, and the number of bosses i solo tanked, intentionally or otherwise, with MAYBE 1 healer hotting me from time to time with half the raid dead was insane. Some bosses simply could not be solo tanked, but many of them can, especially since that toon was a mix of normal/heroic ilvl gear and i have a pulse so was doing mechanics as best i could by myself. The other issue is when you queue with the right number of healers, then all but 1/2 of them swap to dps because they dont actually want to heal.

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Casual: "Blizzard gief more content!"
Blizzard: "Here are Raids, Dungeons, WQs, Weeklies, Dailies, PvP, Torghast, also join a Guild and make friends, enjoy!"
Casual: "Ya, I don't like any of that so it doesn't exist."

Hell man, i have tried so desperately to explain this to people, even in this thread, but you personally not liking a particular content type does NOT mean there is no content. I dont like pet battles, but that doesnt mean wow doesnt have pet battles........

It follows on from my other argument, that blizzard CANNOT create content for a specific group of players, when those players cannot even decide who is or is not in that group, what the group wants, or how to define the group at all.

"we want casual content!"
im a casual and i do M+15s for gear
"you are not casual then, that doesnt count"
ok so what DO you want?
"meaningful progression"
meaningful how? like decent ilvl?
"yes"
ok well you can get stronger gear now than you have EVER been able to get, outside of final patch free-for-alls
"no, i want mythic gear"
then raid mythic?
"no, im casual, casuals cant raid mythic
im casual, and i raid mythic? i dont get edge, but i try
"no, you are hardcore"
im casual and i dont want mythic gear, just normal raid gear to get me started
"you are not casual then"

it just goes on and on forever

[crusadernero]

This bit.

"People are half afk, some are 100% afk, some dont know anything about the class they are playing, some refuse to play good, lots dont know/care about boss mechanics, some goes mad when others tell them "Hey, you should do X instead of Y", 1 wipe = half the raid leaves and you gotta wait. The gear that drops is useless most of the time, especially if you actually want to progress your character. The downsides are numerous.

Whats the upside? You see the inside of raid and you can finish the main storyline. Thats the only plus of it."

The whole first part is just you saying my whole "nobody tries so I'm not going to try" statement in different words.

And the second part was you agreeing with me that its major point was to see the storyline.

Theres a difference between going into LFR not trying and not doing LFR at all.

[Skildar]

The core issue that I have with the game currently as a casual is that, max gear is accessible and easy to obtain through mm+ and not through raiding because we don't have the time to go higher than heroic. Very little pieces of gear drop and there are no way to increase their level.

With this you end up with people dropping from raiding activity because of the lack of reward and power progression through gear improvement.

[Syncr]

So casual is entirely subjective? Then how are Blizzard supposed to make content for those players.

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So.....Literally everyone.....

Of course it's subjective. Everything that is a label is subjective. That doesn't mean that you still can't create content for the subgroup just because you can't specifically define it lol. What a toddler way of looking at things.

"Well guys let's create a tax break to help the people living in poverty"

"Okay but can you define poverty exactly?"

"Not really poverty to someone else might not be someone else definition of poverty but we can still..."

"Then the system is impossible"

Like is this the back and forth that happens in your head lol.

So.....Literally everyone.....

I don't even think you understand what your point is to this after all this time. What is it?

[arkanon]

Of course it's subjective. Everything that is a label is subjective. That doesn't mean that you still can't create content for the subgroup just because you can't specifically define it lol. What a toddler way of looking at things.

"Well guys let's create a tax break to help the people living in poverty"

"Okay but can you define poverty exactly?"

"Not really poverty to someone else might not be someone else definition of poverty but we can still..."

"Then the system is impossible"

Like is this the back and forth that happens in your head lol.



I don't even think you understand what your point is to this after all this time. What is it?

Absolutely TERRIBLE example, how unbelievably ironic. There are CLEAR definitions for poverty, its called the poverty line. When tax breaks are given, they are given for people who fall within an EXTREMELY clearly defined range. You could not have proven my point any better if you tried.

What we have here, is a HUGE amount of people claiming they suffer from poverty, and yet some earn 20k a year, some 200k. Some 50k, some 80k. Some are trying to earn more, some are not. And they are all bickering with each other saying the others do not suffer from poverty, but they personally do, while demanding they get something, but that something is different for everyone.

What you are actually advocating for is a system where anyone who CLAIMS poverty can get the benefits, regardless of their actual wealth.

Honestly you could not have helped my argument any more if you formed a team to specifically try and help me.

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Of course it's subjective. Everything that is a label is subjective.

Left is left, up is up, right is right, down is down. Temp is temp, a mm is a mm.......seriously mate, you are doing very poorly here.

[Syncr]

Absolutely TERRIBLE example, how unbelievably ironic. There are CLEAR definitions for poverty, its called the poverty line. When tax breaks are given, they are given for people who fall within an EXTREMELY clearly defined range. You could not have proven my point any better if you tried.

It was just an example to make you think it wasn't to be used as a literal 1:1 comparison, if this 'makes' your point then you had no point lol.

The point of the comparison was that to some people poverty means a certain number and to other it means another. If you truly require a closer example in order to process this in your head then you can say they were making a program for people who are tall. Tall is subjective. I can't believe I have to spoon feed this to you so hard but alright man.

The point of that comparison was to show how stupid it is to think that just because you can't specifically define something or specifically narrow something down to a definition that everyone agree with doesn't mean that it's impossible to create a system for that category anyway. That's dumb. Like really, really, embarrassingly stupid dumb.

Left is left, up is up, right is right, down is down. Temp is temp, a mm is a mm.......seriously mate, you are doing very poorly here.

Wow I seriously am going to have to spoon feed this to you.

Ok sweetheart let's look up what some people attempt to define as a casual gamer.

The term casual gaming refers to video games which do not require a major time investment to play, win, and enjoy. A casual gamer is a player who enjoys any video game without investing significant time to it, playing it spontaneously, irregularly, or infrequently.

This is a standard definition I have come across multiple times. The issue is within this definition no one can define 'significant time' or 'spontaneously' or 'irregularly' or 'infrequently' because those words mean different things to different people.

The thing about it is, everyone can recognize a casual gamer. You don't need to know exactly how many hours someone plays in a week in order to make a system that requires less time to 'finish'.

If you made a system that requires way less time spent on the game, that's casual friendly. You don't need to know if casual gaming is 10 hours a week or 2 in order to digest that. (well maybe you do, but you clearly aren't firing on all cylinders if you know what I'm saying)

So I will ask once again, what is your whole point behind not being able to define casual because if it is truly "You can't make a system because you can't define casual" you are truly, hilariously, out of your mind.

[Jmurrs]

I’m a former world top-50 raider in WotLK/Cata who took an extended break from the game before returning to play more casually about a year or so ago. Along the way, I would resub for a few months and quit again pretty much each expansion. I don’t think the game should be tuned for hardcore players.

HOWEVER, I genuinely don’t think that’s the issue. There are so many different ways to do PVE now, even for casual players like myself. There are so many facets of the game that we couldn’t even dream about 10 years ago back in the “golden age” that everyone loves talking about.

To me, it all comes down to player expectations. For those longtime players here, do you remember how long it took to get a single gear upgrade? Or, god forbid, level and gear an entirely new alt? I loved the game in part due to the fact that each piece of gear or each achievement I got required some effort. Yeah, it was frustrating to deal with RNG, but everyone did and everyone was happier.

If I wanted to now, I could probably spend an entire weekend on the game, buy a level boost, spam M+ keys with overgeared/high rated players looking for valor, and get completely geared out in 262 (minimum) by the time I go to work on Monday. That’s insane to me. Unfortunately that’s changed our expectations as a player base. Things like gear, boss kills, achievements, etc are an expectation and not an aspiration like they should be.

[Karawaka]

Currently, without stepping into a raid or dungeon, players can get a full set of 252 gear, with 246 tier, wep, and trinkets. For bare minimum dungeon content (timewalking and M0s) you can get a normal and heroic raid item every few weeks. And with legendaries that's an additional up to 2 291 pieces. For a single, solo player it is amazingly easy to gear up. The game is extremely casual friendly right now. If this is too much for you then you should not be playing the game.

Right now, its alt unfriendly that is the issus

[Syncr]

Currently, without stepping into a raid or dungeon, players can get a full set of 252 gear, with 246 tier, wep, and trinkets. For bare minimum dungeon content (timewalking and M0s) you can get a normal and heroic raid item every few weeks. And with legendaries that's an additional up to 2 291 pieces. For a single, solo player it is amazingly easy to gear up. The game is extremely casual friendly right now. If this is too much for you then you should not be playing the game.

Right now, its alt unfriendly that is the issus

How much time does this take if you only play a couple hours a week? That's the biggest issue imo. I mean that's great if a casual can get full 'heroic' level gear, but how long does that take? From start to the end of a season worth? That's not very casual friendly imo.

[ellieg]

How much time does this take if you only play a couple hours a week? That's the biggest issue imo. I mean that's great if a casual can get full 'heroic' level gear, but how long does that take? From start to the end of a season worth? That's not very casual friendly imo.

Well doing the steps he listed plus 1 crafted piece and 1-2 world boss pieces, youll be at about 255 ilvl in 3 weeks.

If you want "heroic geared", i.e. 265, you'd probably need abt 15ish hours of grinding m+.

Why would a casual need to get heroic geared quickly in order for it to be casual friendly? Getting normal geared near Instantly is great.

[Echo of Soul]

I have ALWAYS had the same stance that there needs to be a way for XYZ players who dont like group content to be able to experience the story in a comfortable, stress free way. I have also always said LFR is a TERRIBLE introduction to raiding, and gives all the wrong impressions to new players trying it out. I have ALSO always said Flex, in particular during SoO (its introduction) was a great difficulty middle ground, where you really needed a group of players with SOME knowledge of their own class, but very little knowledge of the "meta" game. They just needed to know what taunt was, what brez was, etc etc. Now a group FULL of players at that level would still struggle to clear it, but, because of the nature of flex, when all other difficulties had fixed player counts, it was appealing to players of a variety of skill levels.

Thats all gone now, normal and heroic are a wasteland.

Maybe LFR could be the same as normal (assuming that normal be made easy again) but with bots so you can learn the encounters in a controlled environment?

[Syncr]

Well doing the steps he listed plus 1 crafted piece and 1-2 world boss pieces, youll be at about 255 ilvl in 3 weeks.

If you want "heroic geared", i.e. 265, you'd probably need abt 15ish hours of grinding m+.

Why would a casual need to get heroic geared quickly in order for it to be casual friendly? Getting normal geared near Instantly is great.

Because to me a casual friendly game opens up all difficulties of the game. Just because a casual can get normal gear quickly doesn’t really make that super casual friendly imo. Like wow it opened up super easy content for me how fun.

Destiny 2 is a great example of casual friendly. You are able to do literally the hardest content in the game and all it takes is like 3 weeks of 2-4 hours a week of play

[cparle87]

The core issue that I have with the game currently as a casual is that, max gear is accessible and easy to obtain through mm+ and not through raiding because we don't have the time to go higher than heroic. Very little pieces of gear drop and there are no way to increase their level.

With this you end up with people dropping from raiding activity because of the lack of reward and power progression through gear improvement.

The power progression eventually ends for everyone. Max keys and mythic raids just have the longest path. Eventually hitting a point where there is no more progression is a natural part of the game and not a bad thing.

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How much time does this take if you only play a couple hours a week? That's the biggest issue imo. I mean that's great if a casual can get full 'heroic' level gear, but how long does that take? From start to the end of a season worth? That's not very casual friendly imo.

Took me about two weeks to max out my cypher level, which takes quite a bit less than maxing out the entire console, which made 252 gear rain from the skies in ZM. Practically every chest you opened and rare you killed dropped a 252 piece. The Unity belt was tied behind about an hour a week of storyline for a few weeks.