Should flex mythic raiding exist in DF?

[Tentim]

I will never understand this argument. When in the history of wow, was the game more catered to casuals than now?

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We don't technically "have to". But I also don't think introducing flex mythic raiding means "open the flood gates". Just because an encounter here and there might be slightly easier with lower/higher player count than 20, means that every casual out there will be mythic raiding.

Keep achievements for a player count of exactly 20, maybe lower item level drops by 3 or 6 if at another player count than 20, so there's still that "intended maximum difficult" at 20 players, but it gives players who achieve curve another challenge, without having to invite pugs to their guild raid / raid with friends.

It has always meant open the flood gates. It's why people drown out the mythic raiders pointing out we tried this and bosses need to have the room and number of players taken into account for their designs.

[Hctaz]

I will never understand this argument. When in the history of wow, was the game more catered to casuals than now?

Probably just Vanilla really.

The raids in Vanilla weren't meant to be super hardcore at first at least.

I don't know if they intended on having evergreen content originally or how they were planning their expansions to work, but it did seem like the difficulty of the raid also increased based on release as though they intended each raid to be harder than the last. Like you'd get all your MC gear and walk into BWL at about the same if not stronger than you were when you first walked into MC, but the raid would be harder.

I think it ended up getting to a critical mass with SWP, and that's when they decided to have more raid difficulties.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

Probably just Vanilla really.

The raids in Vanilla weren't meant to be super hardcore at first at least.

I don't know if they intended on having evergreen content originally or how they were planning their expansions to work, but it did seem like the difficulty of the raid also increased based on release as though they intended each raid to be harder than the last. Like you'd get all your MC gear and walk into BWL at about the same if not stronger than you were when you first walked into MC, but the raid would be harder.

I think it ended up getting to a critical mass with SWP, and that's when they decided to have more raid difficulties.

what are we basing this on? They took 40 people and were designed by EQ devs! they were definitely meant for the hardcore, just relative to what hardcore meant at the time (played a lot in huge group).

I think history has kinda warped everyone's perceptions of what raiding was like in the first 6 months or so of classic. People didn't even know what Onyxia was at first, and guilds like Conquest concealed their strats etc during successful MC runs lol. completely different day and age.

The game absolutely caters more to casuals right now than it ever has. You can get full set, specific normal raid pieces through LFR, etc etc. It's crazy!

I think most of the complaints are either from people who haven't actually played the game in quite a while

[Relapses]

We don't technically "have to". But I also don't think introducing flex mythic raiding means "open the flood gates". Just because an encounter here and there might be slightly easier with lower/higher player count than 20, means that every casual out there will be mythic raiding.

Keep achievements for a player count of exactly 20, maybe lower item level drops by 3 or 6 if at another player count than 20, so there's still that "intended maximum difficult" at 20 players, but it gives players who achieve curve another challenge, without having to invite pugs to their guild raid / raid with friends.

It means making the content that is intended to be difficult either indirectly less difficult by introducing the ability to optimize the challenge out of the encounter with a specific raid size or, conversely, making the very thing Flex is intended to help counteract -- attendance issues -- actually worse because now you need an even larger roster to offset the hypothetical situations where a larger Flex raid is easier. This also hamstrings encounter design because the scaling component needs to be considered for every mechanic. It doesn't really solve the issue it's intended to fix and simply makes Mythic raiding worse.

We're better off with the system that's worked just fine for the last four expansions.

[NineSpine]

what are we basing this on? They took 40 people and were designed by EQ devs! they were definitely meant for the hardcore, just relative to what hardcore meant at the time (played a lot in huge group).

I think history has kinda warped everyone's perceptions of what raiding was like in the first 6 months or so of classic. People didn't even know what Onyxia was at first, and guilds like Conquest concealed their strats etc during successful MC runs lol. completely different day and age.

The game absolutely caters more to casuals right now than it ever has. You can get full set, specific normal raid pieces through LFR, etc etc. It's crazy!

I think most of the complaints are either from people who haven't actually played the game in quite a while

This is what the game looked like for casual players in vanilla:

1. An incredibly long, exploration-oriented leveling process that was so broad you could level multiple characters and see very few of the same quests until higher levels.
2. A massive number of leveling dungeons to run along the way, and running one of these dungeons could be a whole night of playtime.
3. Lots of class-based content and radically different playstyles for every class, making leveling multiple classes feel very dynamic and interesting.
4. Very long endgame quest chains.
5. Reputations to grind that were not locked behind strict time gates for progression.
6. An endgame dungeon gearing progression that took a very long time to cap out, since one dungeon run was easily your playtime for the day.
7. Very substantive profession rewards that took a long time to work toward.
8. Rewards that did not feel negated in every patch.

That's pretty substantial. Just the leveling alone took casual players many months. Today, almost all of those things are completely reversed. Everything is either very fast, time-gated, or based on rapid repetition of the same content. That may seem casual-friendly for someone who looks down on casuals and thinks that they are just inferior players who want a shallow, uninteresting game. However, what casual players generally want is long term progression and stuff to do. They don't want their accomplishments to be flushed every patch.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what casual players want by people who are desperate to negatively portray them as a means to self-validation. The one thing casual players don't want to challenging content based heavily on intensive mechanical performance.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

This is what the game looked like for casual players in vanilla:

1. An incredibly long, exploration-oriented leveling process that was so broad you could level multiple characters and see very few of the same quests until higher levels.
2. A massive number of leveling dungeons to run along the way, and running one of these dungeons could be a whole night of playtime.
3. Lots of class-based content and radically different playstyles for every class, making leveling multiple classes feel very dynamic and interesting.
4. Very long endgame quest chains.
5. Reputations to grind that were not locked behind strict time gates for progression.
6. An endgame dungeon gearing progression that took a very long time to cap out, since one dungeon run was easily your playtime for the day.
7. Very substantive profession rewards that took a long time to work toward.
8. Rewards that did not feel negated in every patch.

That's pretty substantial. Just the leveling alone took casual players many months. Today, almost all of those things are completely reversed. Everything is either very fast, time-gated, or based on rapid repetition of the same content. That may seem casual-friendly for someone who looks down on casuals and thinks that they are just inferior players who want a shallow, uninteresting game. However, what casual players generally want is long term progression and stuff to do. They don't want their accomplishments to be flushed every patch.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what casual players want by people who are desperate to negatively portray them as a means to self-validation. The one thing casual players don't want to challenging content based heavily on intensive mechanical performance.

See its not a fundamental misunderstanding or looking down on casual players, that is almost comically insulting lmao. You've explained this exact same thing repeatedly over and over. The issue is just that people disagree with it, not that they don't understand lol. They are just opinions, not facts!

I mean it's probably true that classic had more for casuals - fair enough. But that is primarily a result of a 5+ year development budget that no game will ever be able to replicate again! You aren't getting a 200+ hr leveling experience in an expansion in any game without an insane amount of grinding that no one in 2022 will tolerate. ESO has been releasing expansions every year, yet even put together it is probably less story content than the original game at launch (because it was hundreds of millions and years in development). The original SWTOR class stories are still the best the game has to offer 11 years later for the same reasons.

But more specifically

3. Lots of class-based content and radically different playstyles for every class, making leveling multiple classes feel very dynamic and interesting.

-Classes are super different now!

4. Very long endgame quest chains.

-If you take out travel time, this is not really true!

5. Reputations to grind that were not locked behind strict time gates for progression.

-This is true, though the meaningfulness is debatable

6. An endgame dungeon gearing progression that took a very long time to cap out, since one dungeon run was easily your playtime for the day.

-Also true, but no one will tolerate this in 2022. Even people who play classic don't play like this anymore lol

7. Very substantive profession rewards that took a long time to work toward.

-Also debatable but maybe? Most if not all still negated by raid gear, just like today

8. Rewards that did not feel negated in every patch.

-Also debatable. Most modern players actually like seasonal gameplay, as shown by their ubiquity across genres. But even if you don't (which is fine, but it is just an opinion, not a fact!), the game still had new gear every patch. Again consider how classic has actually played out! Stuff is dead and left behind pretty fast when new things come out on classic realms today. Even classic is seasonal!

--

Compare this to wow today. Casual players who don't have a lot of time but have friends or enjoy group content can grind the best gear in the game over the course of a few months with m+ pugging. Casual players who only do group queued content can do LFR and get up to 3 specific raid items from vendors by clearing the raids every week for a couple months. Casual players of any type can buy their full tier set - something that has never been possible without raiding before! And casuals who just want to farm still have a billion mounts and stuff to get from ZM

[NineSpine]

See its not a fundamental misunderstanding or looking down on casual players, that is almost comically insulting lmao. You've explained this exact same thing repeatedly over and over. The issue is just that people disagree with it, not that they don't understand lol. They are just opinions, not facts!

I mean it's probably true that classic had more for casuals - fair enough. But that is primarily a result of a 5+ year development budget that no game will ever be able to replicate again! You aren't getting a 200+ hr leveling experience in an expansion in any game without an insane amount of grinding that no one in 2022 will tolerate. ESO has been releasing expansions every year, yet even put together it is probably less story content than the original game at launch (because it was hundreds of millions and years in development). The original SWTOR class stories are still the best the game has to offer 11 years later for the same reasons.

But more specifically

3. Lots of class-based content and radically different playstyles for every class, making leveling multiple classes feel very dynamic and interesting.

-Classes are super different now!

There's certainly an argument to be had about how classes play in challenging endgame content and how different they feel compared to how they felt in similar content in vanilla, but that isn't what we are talking about. We are talking about casual players. When it comes to a more casual play style, the classes feel remarkably homogenized, especially for leveling. Leveling any class feels virtually identical now. In vanilla, the approach to leveling was very different for every class. Rogues could sneak in and take out named quest targets or grab quest items. Warlocks could carefully solo elites.

This isn't strictly because of class mechanics themselves, but because of how much class mechanics are negated by the outdoor enemies being made trivially weak.

4. Very long endgame quest chains.

-If you take out travel time, this is not really true!

Having to move through the world to get to things is a design decision. Having to travel is not a meaningless annoyance. It is intrinsic to how the content was designed and how it felt to play it

5. Reputations to grind that were not locked behind strict time gates for progression.

-This is true, though the meaningfulness is debatable

It's meaningful to people who enjoy that content and don't like being throttled.

6. An endgame dungeon gearing progression that took a very long time to cap out, since one dungeon run was easily your playtime for the day.

-Also true, but no one will tolerate this in 2022. Even people who play classic don't play like this anymore lol

You aren't totally wrong, but that's because raiding was made extremely approachable in classic to a degree it wasn't in vanilla. But we are talking about vanilla, not classic. I don't think the vanilla dungeon mode would fly today, but the approach of "Running X dungeon is what I want to get done with my time tonight" is not tied exclusively to the vanilla model. It's not "Dungeons are rapid-fire repeatable, teleport-to-the-door" vs "exactly like vanilla". There's nuance and middle ground there.

7. Very substantive profession rewards that took a long time to work toward.

-Also debatable but maybe? Most if not all still negated by raid gear, just like today

Casual players were rarely raiding. We are talking about casual players.

8. Rewards that did not feel negated in every patch.

-Also debatable. Most modern players actually like seasonal gameplay, as shown by their ubiquity across genres. But even if you don't, the game still had new gear every patch. Again consider how classic has actually played out! Stuff is instantly dead and left behind when new things come out.

It's also a common critique of modern games. Microtransactions have also become ubiquitous but that doesn't mean everyone likes them. Casual players are the ones most punished by seasonal gameplay, because it means their progress if flushed before they can really achieve anything and taking a break results in coming back to feel like you wasted time last time you played. Constant fresh starts feel great for hardcore players that have the time to get everything they want in every season.

The way new gear worked in vanilla was not "All your gear is now shit, go replace it with trivially-obtained new gear". They didn't replace the dungeon gear with a new set of higher ilvl dungeon gear every patch. Instead, they added a long, extensive quest chain to upgrade your dungeon gear. That's nothing like the current model.

My points here are not that the vanilla model was universally superior, flawless, or would be well accepted today by a broad swath of people. However, that doesn't mean that it wasn't more friendly to casual players.

[Hctaz]

This is what the game looked like for casual players in vanilla:

1. An incredibly long, exploration-oriented leveling process that was so broad you could level multiple characters and see very few of the same quests until higher levels.
2. A massive number of leveling dungeons to run along the way, and running one of these dungeons could be a whole night of playtime.
3. Lots of class-based content and radically different playstyles for every class, making leveling multiple classes feel very dynamic and interesting.
4. Very long endgame quest chains.
5. Reputations to grind that were not locked behind strict time gates for progression.
6. An endgame dungeon gearing progression that took a very long time to cap out, since one dungeon run was easily your playtime for the day.
7. Very substantive profession rewards that took a long time to work toward.
8. Rewards that did not feel negated in every patch.

That's pretty substantial. Just the leveling alone took casual players many months. Today, almost all of those things are completely reversed. Everything is either very fast, time-gated, or based on rapid repetition of the same content. That may seem casual-friendly for someone who looks down on casuals and thinks that they are just inferior players who want a shallow, uninteresting game. However, what casual players generally want is long term progression and stuff to do. They don't want their accomplishments to be flushed every patch.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what casual players want by people who are desperate to negatively portray them as a means to self-validation. The one thing casual players don't want to challenging content based heavily on intensive mechanical performance.

Yeah, I probably should have included all of this in my response as well.

Raiding and endgame wasn't the mainstay of the casual audience like it is today.

But also, it was clear that the raid difficulty ramped up over time as well. I'm fairly certain that they wanted the beginning raids to be easy for a number of reasons, but I'm sure casual players were considered for Onyxia with it being a single boss with little to no trash.

But yes, the rest of the game was very much made for casual play.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

Even if you agree with all that stuff in vanilla (which is contestable!) I definitely disagree that it was true afterwards - so like 95% of the game's lifespan. TBC was significantly more hardcore than classic in terms of difficulty and rewards. Yeah, you could grind badges or honor for the previous season's gear by grinding dungeon, but as I explained, you can also do a version of that now with the raid dinars, set pieces, and so on (all through queueable content). You couldn't get set bonuses in any previous expansion where they existed without raiding at least LFR, and in the case of WoD not even that!

(And seasonality really came in with arena)

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Yeah, I probably should have included all of this in my response as well.

Raiding and endgame wasn't the mainstay of the casual audience like it is today.
.

This is true but I think it's mostly a combination of
1) the aforementioned issue that the original versions of the game have 10x the time and budget of any expansion to develop other content
2) modern audiences are different.

Most MMOs expansions these days (at least that I'm familiar with, GW2/ESO/SWTOR) all have story content you can plow through within 10ish hours at best, and then it is all grinds, solo and/or group related.

Now, a lot of people seem to like the lack of seasonably in GW2 and ESO, but it's actually a big reason I rarely play them anymore lol. Super boring to have the same gear years after years with nothing to chase, on top of having imo poor group content and clunky gameplay

[MoanaLisa]

Mythic difficulty is designed in a specific way for a specific number of participants. Adding flex will by necessity water the difficulty down and as a casual non-raider now who used to raid a lot I believe that it should be left alone.

[Nymrohd]

I think if what we want is to give Heroic raiders who cannot cross into Mythic something to do, what we need is LEADERBOARDS. Every week for the current raid there is a leaderboard; points go for speed of completion, number of deaths and perhaps an event that changes encounters like the Fated system does. It could be something completely unique, it could be downranked versions of some Mythic mechanics. At the end of the week people get a reward based on their regional ranking. You could do the same for M+ rating and PvP rating as well; have the top X players/teams get TWO items out of the Vault instead of just one. Give the top Y people a few strong crafting mats from the next tier of play and some consolation price for everyone else as long as they played.
Beyond that, give the Vault the same ilvl bump for raiding that M+ gets; so people who clear LFR get normal from Vault and people who clear Heroic or above get Mythic. If you clear 3 Mythic raid bosses in a week you get the double loot from Vault aswell regardless of leaderboard performance.

And yes this might feel unfair for people who clear M 25s. M+ has NO balance beyond 15.You can probably clear Mythic raids with all specs as well; you will need some meta specs ofc but outside the tanking spots were the worst tank spec for the season can really be a problem, you can carry several non-meta specs without much issue. You can clear +15 with all specs. You will seriously struggle to clear +20s with all specs. Good luck doing +25s with out of meta groups.

Mythic raiders will still get loot at a much better pace than everyone else but by the end of the tier, Heroic/M+/PvP players will have a solid chance to catch up to the same ilvl with them. The bragging rights should remain with unique transmogs, titles and mounts.

[crusadernero]

Hardly anyone does mythic raiding, so I would guess most people dont care one bit if theres flex or not there. % of the playerbase that engage in mythic raiding is so low that you could probably do a whole lot with mythic raiding and most players wouldnt even know or care.

So I say, do it.

[Osmeric]

I think if what we want is to give Heroic raiders who cannot cross into Mythic something to do, what we need is LEADERBOARDS.

Making the game more competitive is the last thing they need.

Wouldn't those leaderboards be dominated by M raiders, btw?

[TOM_RUS]

Fixed size sucks.

[jeezusisacasual]

People say they want all kinds of players but in practice they form small groups in who they want to play with and overall tend to not broaden that group much at all. My problem with raiding is that it requires more time commitment and provides a very rigid way to interact with it on a consistent basis compared to M+ which gets me so very close to that gear altho slower and with its own unique reward so i have no reason to chase the raiding paradigm. With them keeping a creation catalyst going forward ( or so they have said ) what reason is there to set aside 3 hour blocks when i can spend 45 mins doing a dungeon and work towards that goal while getting the tier set that was previously only from raiding.

[Relapses]

People say they want all kinds of players but in practice they form small groups in who they want to play with and overall tend to not broaden that group much at all. My problem with raiding is that it requires more time commitment and provides a very rigid way to interact with it on a consistent basis compared to M+ which gets me so very close to that gear altho slower and with its own unique reward so i have no reason to chase the raiding paradigm. With them keeping a creation catalyst going forward ( or so they have said ) what reason is there to set aside 3 hour blocks when i can spend 45 mins doing a dungeon and work towards that goal while getting the tier set that was previously only from raiding.

If Blizzard keeps putting items like the Jailer weapon and Sigil in raids and keeping them exclusive to raiding then that's all the motivation needed.

[Garymorilix]

Do you want split Mythic raids?

Because this is how you get split Mythic raids.

They could still easily open up this function once cross-realm Mythics are available.

I mean, at that point, if any guild wants to do splits it's on them.

[Relapses]

They could still easily open up this function once cross-realm Mythics are available.

I mean, at that point, if any guild wants to do splits it's on them.

Again, "flex later" requires every encounter to be designed around the possibility of every mechanic flexing. We're better off not hamstringing the encounter designers.

I'm dumb, see below.

[RobertMugabe]

I just want 10 man raiding to be a commonly played size by pugs.
Ever since flex raiding has been added, all pugs are groups of 14 or 20 and this annoys me a lot. I have really liked the much smaller 10man size.

It's also ironic how even though flex raiding is a thing, all pugs always choose to play with a fixed number of players. The raids aren't even optimized for 14 people, but they still do it, because Siege of Orgrimmar was the easiest with this size.

[Garymorilix]

Again, "flex later" requires every encounter to be designed around the possibility of every mechanic flexing. We're better off not hamstringing the encounter designers.

What flex?

I ain't said nothing about flex.
What I replied to was about having the same lock-out rule as Normal/Heroic.

Opening that up after cross-realm would let a lot of players play Mythic who are without guilds.
In fact, that's the whole purpose of Cross-realm.