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

[ellieg]

According to this site, all of them want it. There are dozens of threads of people who do non group activities calling blizzard out for being casual unfriendly and complaining because they don't get mythic level gear.

I'm playing casual right now. Maybe 3 to 5 hours a week because I still have some gold. I have absolutely no intention of raiding, no intention of gearing through 15s and I'm sitting at about 250 ilvl on three toons. I do some dailies to slowly get my rep up, I run some low mythic + to get some 260ish and I target LFR token bosses. I absolutely punish the world content and feel no envy for the guys running around with 270 ilvl I still have stuff to do because blizzard has made it so easy for casuals to do things. This game is made for the 99% in mind.

Thank you for your input. You are how I imagine most "casuals" are. I personally do 1 M+15 a week. I will get a 278 if its in the slot i need. if rng screws me, so be it. I will never get any of the good raid weapons/trinks. I will never get the 6 or so pieces of 285 gear from final mythic bosses. This does not bother me at all.

[chickengoat]

Just a bit of history so that we are on the same page. The issue that blizzard noticed and tried to resolve is the following :
When a raid group goes into a raid of 10 bosses and manages after multiple wipes to down the first boss then the second then the third. They will want the following week to reach the fourth boss with more ease. But experience and knowledge isn't enough to dramatically reduce the numbers of attempt before a group is able to down these bosses again before reaching the new boss encounters.
To help the raid groups have a better experience the challenges have been made harder and harder as you progress into the instance and an increasing debuff was applied each week. The unfortunate side effect is that raid groups felt the challenge was lessen due too this increasing nerf, and the satisfaction was lessen as well.

In order to keep this nice and healthy, they changed from having an explicit buff/nerf to acquiring more power through gear rewards. As you progress through the instance, you acquire the gear to get with more ease to the next challenge.

TL;DR; gear is not the end reward, the challenge is. Gear is the tool to experiment end challenges without the hastle of wiping in chain on previous bosses.

So yeah maybe we should indeed have something in game that reflects a bit more that the accomplishments are more interesting than the tools we use to reach our goals. We already have achievements, mounts, titles and mascots but there might a whole new paradigm of rewards and exposure to explore in order to put the incentive on the accomplishments.

Is this kind of change something players actually asked for or is it one of those things Blizzard divined through stats? Don't get me wrong, it makes sense within the systems that exist that involves only evolving on already established progression systems. However, it seems like a very Blizzard solution which are often 1 step forward, 2 steps back. Yes, it resolves an immediate issue, but now we have several knock-on problems years later with a sense of general erosion. I don't fault them for not having crystal balls. I do fault them for not changing things when problems crop up unless there's some super clear-cut, overwhelming case.

[Celement]

I have seen more and more people come out saying this, and it SEEMS to have started around legion. I remember SoO. I had a friends and family guild we raided with on saturdays. When flex was released, it was AMAZING - people who previously were a real anchor for the group didnt really hold us back - with a couple of exceptions, it was very easy. Each saturday we worked further and further through the raid, starting fresh each week, until we had cleared it. It was really smooth sailing - shamans was a BIT of a block, keeping us busy for nearly 2 hours, and the final couple were the same. But this was a group MOSTLY full of people with little to no raiding experience, and a few experienced players on terribly geared alts.

That same group of players started to fumble late in legion, although we did get through. They had a really hard time in BfA, and most quit - not JUST because of the difficulty, but they no longer found it FUN, but more of a chore. If those palyers were to get together, with no experience or knowledge of the fights (how it was in SoO) and try to take on any of the raids from SL on normal, I doubt they would get more than a few bosses down before the same thing happened.

It seems glaringly obvious to me that there has been a substantial increase in difficulty over the last few expansions, but im not sure what the cause is. Sure, Mythic has increased in difficulty too, but the fights are generally quite different between normal and mythic, so im not sure how its happening. I dont know anyone who is asking for HARD normal mode raids, or even harder normal mode raids - it doesnt make any sense - if you want harder normal raids, go do heroic.

Me personally not finding the raids challenging on lower difficulties does not blind me to the overall increase in difficulty - i raided with the same casual players on off nights for nearly 15 years and watched and listened to them over the last few expansions start to struggle and explain WHY they find it so challenging, but not a single one of us has been able to figure out why Blizzard would do that.

I know you are speaking about mythic, but im trying to point out its not ONLY mythic that has been impacted - if anything, its the lower difficulties that have a greater impact of the overall health of the game as it impacts a far larger section of the community. I will also say that mythic is supposed to be the hardest PvE content in the game, so there is some excuse for them making it hard. I see no logical reason for making the entry level raid difficulties so challenging for beginners though, i see NO positive outcome at all for the players, or for Blizzard.

edit: dont kick yourself - there is nothing wrong with stating your opinion that its got harder, or that you dont like the increase in difficulty. Thats totally fine.

It's mostly because of alternative power systems.

Classes have far more defensive options then ever before even classes considered fragile like hunters can quickly reduce dmg by 40% by stacking conduits and select talents on short cds.

The more recovery classes have the far more punishing incoming attacks have to be to counteract that. The breaking point is while high end players are expected to fail these mechanics a few times.Newer players often are caught utterly unaware of their more passive or subtle defensive strengths and are killed outright or take unsustainable amounts of dmg.

That and blizzard moronic idea to try and make mechanics based around weakaura usage.

[arkanon]

It's mostly because of alternative power systems.

Classes have far more defensive options then ever before even classes considered fragile like hunters can quickly reduce dmg by 40% by stacking conduits and select talents on short cds.

The more recovery classes have the far more punishing incoming attacks have to be to counteract that. The breaking point is while high end players are expected to fail these mechanics a few times.Newer players often are caught utterly unaware of their more passive or subtle defensive strengths and are killed outright or take unsustainable amounts of dmg.

That and blizzard moronic idea to try and make mechanics based around weakaura usage.

I dont disagree with any of this - and i dont want to hate on any particular content types, but Arena was the beginning of this, and M+ made it "worse". Everyone needed defensives, or people only took certain classes. Everyone needed AOE, or you wouldnt take them. It became like an arms race, and I personally believe that is where most of the 'class uniqueness/flavor' went - the classes got smoothed out so much that although they PLAY differently, they all function very much the same - they have a big defensive, a big offensive, some sustain, and some burst, strong ST AND strong aoe.

Im not arguing that an ele shammy plays the same as a fury warrior, but there is not much one can do that the other cant.

[Greenmagoo]

I dont disagree with any of this - and i dont want to hate on any particular content types, but Arena was the beginning of this, and M+ made it "worse". Everyone needed defensives, or people only took certain classes. Everyone needed AOE, or you wouldnt take them. It became like an arms race, and I personally believe that is where most of the 'class uniqueness/flavor' went - the classes got smoothed out so much that although they PLAY differently, they all function very much the same - they have a big defensive, a big offensive, some sustain, and some burst, strong ST AND strong aoe.

Im not arguing that an ele shammy plays the same as a fury warrior, but there is not much one can do that the other cant.

They have been on this path for sameness for quite a while. We saw shifts with WotLK with launch WotLK while better was still missing the mark with ending WotLK being much closer in regards to 5 man content. Then the biggest shift was 2.0 healing that equalized many abilities in both power and timers. Tanks also saw a lot of normalization. AoEs for DPS was getting normalized as well. Devs just had to share the wealth of previously class/spec defining combat mechanics to all other classes. The community still made stink about needing to close the gap for all roles, classes, and specs. M+ if ever just cemented the need for what the community had been pushing for a decade.

[arkanon]

They have been on this path for sameness for quite a while. We saw shifts with WotLK with launch WotLK while better was still missing the mark with ending WotLK being much closer in regards to 5 man content. Then the biggest shift was 2.0 healing that equalized many abilities in both power and timers. Tanks also saw a lot of normalization. AoEs for DPS was getting normalized as well. Devs just had to share the wealth of previously class/spec defining combat mechanics to all other classes. The community still made stink about needing to close the gap for all roles, classes, and specs. M+ if ever just cemented the need for what the community had been pushing for a decade.

Yup, like i said it BEGAN with Arena, but it was still acceptable to have ST only dps in arena. But the defensives, and from a healing perspective, that was a big shift. IMO, and anyone is welcome to disagree, M+ is what really caused the issues. Now, i do NOT want M+ removed or think it was a bad addition to the game, it just had some unfortunate side effects, just like Arena (which i also dont want removed).

Personally, I LOVED the dramatic differences between specs/classes, but I do understand many in the community wanted their assassination rogue to be able to AOE - not denying that - i just personally always thought of it as a "you think you do, but you dont" kind of deal. And yes, im aware how that quote aged.

[Coldkil]

And yes, designing for the RWF and working down, rather then designing Normal (or Heroic) and working out from there would be that change in design philosophy I mentioned. Getting rid of difficulties won't change your issue. They would still design for the RWF and gut the fight for whatever other difficulty.

They said they design fights exactly this way - from the top to bottom - and it just shows how fights are becoming unnecessarily complicated especially for lower difficulties. It's a shitty design process, because while a Mythic fight is fine the issue is that you cannot simply scale down numbers and be done for the most part. A lot of mechanics require high degree of awareness and coordination normal/hc groups may not have, and you cannot remove that otherwise the mechanic is basically killed.

They need to design things from normal upwards. Each difficulty should be standing up on its own and not depend on some gimmick. Adding more things to do is better than gutting stuff to make it work. This tier the raid got so much nerfed is insane, especially in lower difficulties, mostly because some bosses you couldn't simply overgear/bruteforce. Which is fine on paper but actually it's not for difficulties that are considered a pass-through.

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I think the problem is the reverse. WoW thrives as a competitive game always had and likely always will.

It has never thrived because it was a comyoetitive game. Hell, it was the "casual MMO" back in time, compared to EQ and other games.

It's players that want their made up competition to be relevant because it validates their efforts. It sucks for them to have no audience watching them "winning".

Competition is good and all, and fun to watch. But the game shouldn't be designed around that, because, guess what, like the whole playerbase also the competitive scene is shrinking over time, and you really don't want te game designed around what a handful of guilds do.

[Aphrel]

it all boils down to blizz trying to design a game for their kpi values.

Theyll do anything to make the game last as long as possible. Rather than trying to make it as fun as possible for a shorter period.

Their goal should be to aim for "player returns" each patch and expansion, rather than player retention. A player having a blast for a month then leaving to come back 3 months later for another blast is a far more healthy approach than the depressing way they are trying to force players to do what very few players wants... To play the same game forever, every day...

[Ashana Darkmoon]

I have never been top of the top. I have a few cutting edge achievements under my belt, but they were usually obtained during the last few weeks of a raid tier. I agree that the shift seemed to happen around Legion. My guild was mostly comprised of long-time raiding buddies and friends. There were some notable gaps in skill, but nobody really cared because we were able to clear content. Our best players always made up for those who were maybe a little bit too busy with life to stay at the top of their game. Then Legion rolled around. Emerald Nightmare was an easy clear, and like most guilds we killed Mythic Xavius with plenty of time to spare. However, going into Nighthold and ESPECIALLY into Tomb of Sargeras, the difficulty shot up dramatically. Personal responsibility became such a tax in raiding. Our top half could no longer carry our bottom half through the content. And when I say bottom half, these weren't bad players. They just weren't getting any legendary parses and maybe couldn't spend as long in M+ as everyone else. Parents, business owners... raid loggers. Fantastic people and perfectly capable at piloting their spec, just not as dedicated as us no-lifers at the top. It just didn't become as glaring of an issue until Tomb of Sargeras, really.

We hit a brick wall on Mistress Saszine Mythic. That fight was just a storm of mechanics, noise, and stuff you weren't supposed to stand in. As we got even further into the tier, there was some animosity building at our GM for not finding fresh blood to get into these fights because the same few people caused 70% of our wipes. However, the guild had been raiding for 6 years at that point with those people always showing up to raid nights and being generally awesome people to play with. After a few weeks of "progressing" on Avatar of Sargeras Mythic, we decided to stop raiding for the tier. After a few months, the guild essentially disbanded. New leadership took over, the roster was all new, but that iteration fell apart shortly after getting into Antorus. I quit after that, and didn't return in any real capacity until mid-Shadowlands. And now, apparently, the new raid is even harder than what I was going up against in Legion.

I think that Mythic should be hard -- no doubt. Maybe I am a conspiracy theorist, but I feel like the spotlight that the race to world first has gotten has caused Blizzard to tune these fights too tightly so that it's a longer, more drawn out affair instead of a 3-day stomp. But if I am having to commit 200+ wipes on half of the raid tier, that's just a tad too much for me.

Other people have mentioned a few things, but I also think it is replicating some aspects of the knowledge gap in the real world! Like how you used to be able to get a good job with the high school diploma and support a family, now basically have to go to college to get a job like that. World is more complicated, skills are more specialized etc.

In wow terms, there's just so much extra knowledge a player can get from time and experience and looking stuff up, watching hours of streams etc. People who invest in that "education" are so far beyond random Joe who just wants to raid Friday night or whatever. In the past that gap just didn't mean as much because there was a limited amount to learn

It's late I'm not sure that makes sense but hopefully it does.

[Relapses]

Why would Blizzard change the game like that? if you can't find a guild but you are still willing to play the game, they will receive compensation from you xfering to another server, or going solo and "lose" time, eventually you start playing less and less and you cancel, but until you quit you still pay your subscription, meaning Blizz still earns money, so what we see is a conflict of interest, Blizz does not change some clearly shitty part of the game because they still get your money.

No game company intentionally makes their product worse. This pointless cynicism is part of the reason it's so difficult to discuss ways to improve the game.

[arkanon]

it all boils down to blizz trying to design a game for their kpi values.

Just for those who might not know, a KPI is a Key Performance Indicator - its a term commonly used in business, in particular large businesses, and is typically a major contributing factor to bonuses etc.

Some examples of what a KPI might look like in, lets say a manufacturing plant - lets say they make hats.

Their KPI's might be:

- Production - number of hats produced
- Quality - Number of rejects / waste / rework
- Health and Safety - number of accidents / incidents
- Budget - how did you financially perform? Over/under budget

In this oversimplified example, you might have a $10,000 max bonus, or, as they are now known, incentive payments. $2500 for each KPI listed. Perform perfectly in all areas, and youll get $10,000. Obviously it works on a scale, and these are intentionally simplistic examples, but just trying to clear it up for anyone who maybe hasnt heard the term, knows it as something else, or simply isnt in the workforce yet.

WoWs kpis Might be something like budget, player retention, MTX purchases, MAU's, etc etc etc.

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No game company intentionally makes their product worse.

This is something i really struggle with - people genuinely, unironically claiming ANY games company would intentionally bomb their own product. I just dont get it. Now, to be fair, it is VERY well known that certain manufacturing companies intentionally reduced the quality of their product to encourage multiple purchases / repeat businesses. Mercedes is a well known example, where early models were so reliable, so over engineered, that they would sell each person one, MAYBE 2 cars, simply because they lasted decades. It was disguised as 'cost saving' but everyone knew what was REALLY going on.

If you head down the youtube rabbit hole you will find some amazing mini docs about Rolls-Royce and Mercedes as well as many other manufacturers intentionally toning back the quality of their products. Locally, there was a company that offered a lifetime warranty on K9 Televisions - it bankrupted them. Turns out those TVs were so well built, with such an amazing parts catalogue, that they could almost always repair the TV. It literally bankrupted them because 20 years later, people were still sending their TVs back for repair. Now you are lucky if a TV lasts a decade.

Those are unique and extreme examples though, and not entertainment based - its as logical as saying a director intentionally bombed their movie because............reasons.

[Biomega]

No game company intentionally makes their product worse.

To be fair, that's a bit of an inherent truism, because "worse" is a vague and subjective metric of any number of factors on both the side of the consumer and the company.

What'd probably be more accurate is "no game company intentionally makes their product fail" (barring The Producers-like shenanigans).

But they absolutely can make certain user experiences worse intentionally, if they think that's going to increase their overall profitability in a chosen time frame. That's not surprising either: given the huge spectrum of possible user experiences in a big, horizontally segmented consumer product, it's very easy to find instances of experiences intentionally made worse - that doesn't mean it's reflective of the aggregated experience at large, of course. But even that is possible, if e.g. market presence is so strong there's no real competition and even an overall reduction in quality can increase profits (e.g. by cutting costs), or if market presence is waning but there's high user retention and a reduction in quality occurs over time e.g. through less investment into new content.

Those are all "intentionally making the game worse" by some kind of metric, and for sound business reasons.

I do agree with the rest of your sentiment, though: the vast bulk of those comments aren't meant to comment on economical and financial mechanics of long-term business strategies in the gaming industry, but are likely just hyperbolic rants from people who perceive any slight change not exactly aligning with their overblown and unrealistic expectations as the literal end of the world and a corporate conspiracy designed specifically to ruin their own personal life.

[Celement]

They said they design fights exactly this way - from the top to bottom - and it just shows how fights are becoming unnecessarily complicated especially for lower difficulties. It's a shitty design process, because while a Mythic fight is fine the issue is that you cannot simply scale down numbers and be done for the most part. A lot of mechanics require high degree of awareness and coordination normal/hc groups may not have, and you cannot remove that otherwise the mechanic is basically killed.

They need to design things from normal upwards. Each difficulty should be standing up on its own and not depend on some gimmick. Adding more things to do is better than gutting stuff to make it work. This tier the raid got so much nerfed is insane, especially in lower difficulties, mostly because some bosses you couldn't simply overgear/bruteforce. Which is fine on paper but actually it's not for difficulties that are considered a pass-through.

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It has never thrived because it was a comyoetitive game. Hell, it was the "casual MMO" back in time, compared to EQ and other games.

It's players that want their made up competition to be relevant because it validates their efforts. It sucks for them to have no audience watching them "winning".

Competition is good and all, and fun to watch. But the game shouldn't be designed around that, because, guess what, like the whole playerbase also the competitive scene is shrinking over time, and you really don't want te game designed around what a handful of guilds do.

I simply disagree with you. The whole wow is a casual game has always been a fallacy. It was more casual then everquest in that it didnt have as harsh of death penalties and didn't have skill degradation ( I'm not sure everquest still had that when wow launched).

WoW had competition in its communities since vanilla people knew who was who on a server by it.

[Coldkil]

I simply disagree with you. The whole wow is a casual game has always been a fallacy. It was more casual then everquest in that it didnt have as harsh of death penalties and didn't have skill degradation ( I'm not sure everquest still had that when wow launched).

WoW had competition in its communities since vanilla people knew who was who on a server by it.

Then it's fine to have the game in its current state where you either are competitive or you can stop playing. Point is (and you confirmed it) that the competitiveness comes from players themselves and not the game, because apparently people is unable to get validation from a videogame if there's no audience to see how good they are - in fact most people don't really care abut the competition, they just want the phat loot.

This said, competitive environments are good to have. It's up to Blizzard to make the game cater more towards the competitive players or the casual crowd and we have not much choice in that other than giving feedback. It's just a fact that people playing is less and less, and with it competitive guilds are going away aswell because it's basically a tough commitment requirement and way too many people don't want it anymore.

There's nothing to agree or disagree here. It's just a fact that WoW was designed to appeal more people than the old-school hardcore MMOs, as it is a fact that people started competing in it as soon it launched because they simply had fun in it.

The actual point of discussion is exactly that - a lot of modern WoW features point towards competitive gameplay. Actually i think it's for the most part perception about the fact M+ (which is the hands down biggest thing introduced post Vanilla launch imho) is based on a rating and is extremely popular. For players who don't care about pushing high keys even running lower ones can be pretty difficult due to the community focus towards a meta (for all the wrong reasons) and the actual gameplay type (timed runs) that may not appeal them.

Before continuing: i'm not asking for changes to M+. I don't like them that much but i think they're fine in every single aspect. It's raids that are outdated as a format and world content that's for the most part useless (excluding pet battles which funnily enough are completely self-sustained).

My point (cause i don't speak for others and i only state my opinions) is that WoW has troubles in juggling all the different content types to make them balanced in terms of progression and effort while also maintaining them relevant, functional and rewarding. And they cannot simply do it because in an efficiency driven game like WoW people even before release will make their maths and find the optimal way to play, ignoring whatever change Blizzard may do.

Competitive players are not what you should focus WoW on because a) they're a fraction of the playerbase and b) they don't care about the content at all, they only live and play for the race. Until they decide it's what they want - and at this point they shouldn't waste time in designing anything that's not PvP arenas, new dungeons for M+ and new Mythic raids. Because that's the only thing competitive players do.

EDIT: not saying they should throw free gear to everyone for doing world quests aswell. I have ideas i'm willing to share if people want to, but while they would work for me i don't think they're good in a general sense. I would just be fine if people would get to ilvl cap for a patch via open world content, like 3 or 4 months in the patch because at that point it wouldn't matter and would be better than to have an arbitrary catch-up system each patch that invalidates everything that came previously. Point is, if they made the perfect balanced and relatively hard content that gave people the perfect reward for the difficulty but it could be done basically solo and at will (which seems to be the major point towards casual gameplay), most people would just spam that and ignore the rest of the endgame because in the end, it's way better/faster than waiting for queues or having to actually behave like a normal person and/or find a guild to do organized raiding.

It's just how people play nowadays. Not wrong or bad by itself. And for the Nth time sorry for the long post.

[Echocho]

No game company intentionally makes their product worse. This pointless cynicism is part of the reason it's so difficult to discuss ways to improve the game.

So they're just stupid and incompetent then and can't tell that it's worse? I'd rather have a malicious but competent team tbh.

[Celement]

Then it's fine to have the game in its current state where you either are competitive or you can stop playing. Point is (and you confirmed it) that the competitiveness comes from players themselves and not the game, because apparently people is unable to get validation from a videogame if there's no audience to see how good they are - in fact most people don't really care abut the competition, they just want the phat loot.

This said, competitive environments are good to have. It's up to Blizzard to make the game cater more towards the competitive players or the casual crowd and we have not much choice in that other than giving feedback. It's just a fact that people playing is less and less, and with it competitive guilds are going away aswell because it's basically a tough commitment requirement and way too many people don't want it anymore.

There's nothing to agree or disagree here. It's just a fact that WoW was designed to appeal more people than the old-school hardcore MMOs, as it is a fact that people started competing in it as soon it launched because they simply had fun in it.

The actual point of discussion is exactly that - a lot of modern WoW features point towards competitive gameplay. Actually i think it's for the most part perception about the fact M+ (which is the hands down biggest thing introduced post Vanilla launch imho) is based on a rating and is extremely popular. For players who don't care about pushing high keys even running lower ones can be pretty difficult due to the community focus towards a meta (for all the wrong reasons) and the actual gameplay type (timed runs) that may not appeal them.

Before continuing: i'm not asking for changes to M+. I don't like them that much but i think they're fine in every single aspect. It's raids that are outdated as a format and world content that's for the most part useless (excluding pet battles which funnily enough are completely self-sustained).

My point (cause i don't speak for others and i only state my opinions) is that WoW has troubles in juggling all the different content types to make them balanced in terms of progression and effort while also maintaining them relevant, functional and rewarding. And they cannot simply do it because in an efficiency driven game like WoW people even before release will make their maths and find the optimal way to play, ignoring whatever change Blizzard may do.

Competitive players are not what you should focus WoW on because a) they're a fraction of the playerbase and b) they don't care about the content at all, they only live and play for the race. Until they decide it's what they want - and at this point they shouldn't waste time in designing anything that's not PvP arenas, new dungeons for M+ and new Mythic raids. Because that's the only thing competitive players do.

EDIT: not saying they should throw free gear to everyone for doing world quests aswell. I have ideas i'm willing to share if people want to, but while they would work for me i don't think they're good in a general sense. I would just be fine if people would get to ilvl cap for a patch via open world content, like 3 or 4 months in the patch because at that point it wouldn't matter and would be better than to have an arbitrary catch-up system each patch that invalidates everything that came previously. Point is, if they made the perfect balanced and relatively hard content that gave people the perfect reward for the difficulty but it could be done basically solo and at will (which seems to be the major point towards casual gameplay), most people would just spam that and ignore the rest of the endgame because in the end, it's way better/faster than waiting for queues or having to actually behave like a normal person and/or find a guild to do organized raiding.

It's just how people play nowadays. Not wrong or bad by itself. And for the Nth time sorry for the long post.

The issue is the utter lack of challenge and pointless grind currently. There is this notion in modern wow that wasting people's time and boring them is a positive.

Nothing is challenging or worth while to do in the world and while it was always easy it's been pushed into increasing high levels of tedium.

WoW has just slowly become a more Koran grind mmo and is suffering for it.

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So they're just stupid and incompetent then and can't tell that it's worse? I'd rather have a malicious but competent team tbh.

In the past it was incompetentance and arrogance. They would constantly try to prove the math of the top end players wrong citing some super accurate internal data that never panned out and ignored warnings on broken systems.

They have gotten a lot more hush hush since dismantling most of the hidden forums ( least they finally kicked my banned out if they exist).

They are a very touchy crew these days slow to admit fault and downplaying it when they do.

[Miffinat0r]

Then it's fine to have the game in its current state where you either are competitive or you can stop playing. Point is (and you confirmed it) that the competitiveness comes from players themselves and not the game, because apparently people is unable to get validation from a videogame if there's no audience to see how good they are - in fact most people don't really care abut the competition, they just want the phat loot.

This said, competitive environments are good to have. It's up to Blizzard to make the game cater more towards the competitive players or the casual crowd and we have not much choice in that other than giving feedback. It's just a fact that people playing is less and less, and with it competitive guilds are going away aswell because it's basically a tough commitment requirement and way too many people don't want it anymore.

Agree. These statements check out

There's nothing to agree or disagree here. It's just a fact that WoW was designed to appeal more people than the old-school hardcore MMOs, as it is a fact that people started competing in it as soon it launched because they simply had fun in it.

We know this as a fact as many played original EQ and UO and all the devs were in agreement the strict death, dropped loot, and open world nature of those two games is something they sought to distance themselves from.

The actual point of discussion is exactly that - a lot of modern WoW features point towards competitive gameplay. Actually i think it's for the most part perception about the fact M+ (which is the hands down biggest thing introduced post Vanilla launch imho) is based on a rating and is extremely popular. For players who don't care about pushing high keys even running lower ones can be pretty difficult due to the community focus towards a meta (for all the wrong reasons) and the actual gameplay type (timed runs) that may not appeal them.

This is the crux of the issue. The problem is Modern Day WoW focuses far too much on competitive play. Hell they turned pretty much every IP they own into a competitive game and only competitive game. I'd say this isn't an issue exclusive to WoW but to Blizzard as a whole as a company.

Problem is that this mindset worked from 2008-2016. For 8 years we had nothing in the MMO space outside of a few gems, but all wound up just making competitive content only. This soured on the consumer who was yearning for a MMO they used to enjoy where they would log in and play without having to worry about performance.

WoW lost the ball and other MMOs like FF14, GW2, and ESO picked up that ball because they understood the market better than WoW did, and WoW is only either #2 or #1 currently not because of current content, but because of legacy.

[potis]

The actual point of discussion is exactly that - a lot of modern WoW features point towards competitive gameplay. Actually i think it's for the most part perception about the fact M+ (which is the hands down biggest thing introduced post Vanilla launch imho) is based on a rating and is extremely popular. For players who don't care about pushing high keys even running lower ones can be pretty difficult due to the community focus towards a meta (for all the wrong reasons) and the actual gameplay type (timed runs) that may not appeal them.

Rating has nothing to do with competition though, this is a complete false statement down to fallacy levels, rating is there to showcase that you at least run the dungeon before, i dont understand why people cant accept this.

Just because the average low skilled player feels emasculated by an irrelevant number, OR HE COULD MAINTAIN CONNECTIONS AND PLAY WITH THOSE.

They have never focused to competitive players, ever, maybe the dungeon design is compressed by 30% area wise to make it "harder" for the M+ tournament, but again, all these are non-existent problems.

WoW has 1 problem and is the fact that people expect to play a single player game in it after having the knowledge to blast through it.

[Coldkil]

The issue is the utter lack of challenge and pointless grind currently. There is this notion in modern wow that wasting people's time and boring them is a positive.

Nothing is challenging or worth while to do in the world and while it was always easy it's been pushed into increasing high levels of tedium.

Agree. To me casual content isn't correlated to easy content - but apparently so far the whole open world has been designed with this assumption in mind. And this made the whole at least irrelevant to the point even casual players tend to just ignore it.

- - - Updated - - -

Rating has nothing to do with competition though, this is a complete false statement down to fallacy levels, rating is there to showcase that you at least run the dungeon before, i dont understand why people cant accept this.

Oh, but i agree with what you're saying and never said rating means there's competition - that's why i mentioned perception. We know that rating has nearly no value until a certain threshold, but due to how most players use it in the wrong way, it creates nasty side effects we camnot simply ignore. It's mental barriers, both from outside and self imposed, not the game fault for being what it is.

The funny part is that with a few targeted runs you can exploit the system and climb rating ultrafast. You can search my character on r.io and see my rating and actually how many runs i did to achieve it.

[Relapses]

So they're just stupid and incompetent then and can't tell that it's worse? I'd rather have a malicious but competent team tbh.

What the actual fuck is "malicious but competent"? This sounds like somebody who has never worked a day in their life would say. Blizzard is neither stupid nor incompetent. They're a company of human beings who sometimes make mistakes like all human beings. The point is that when we let rote cynicism dictate the conversation we're removing agency away from the developers by presuming hostile intent when none has been stated. (ie, "Blizzard doesn't want to make finding a guild easier because they want to sell server transfers") Conspiratorial thinking helps nobody and very rarely moves the conversation about ways to improve the game in a positive direction. It's a way for people to validate their negative opinions with one another without actually exercising any critical thinking and understanding the reasons behind the decisions Blizzard does or doesn't make.

Once again, I digress. If we are to talk about areas of improvement, their communication has left a lot to be desired in recent expansions; though frankly I don't blame them for being radio silent when the moment any developer tries to reach out in good faith to interface with the community its met with death threats from people who take this game way too fucking seriously.