what do you mean by non-competitive? it that slang for people who dont raid or pvp? or is it for people who suck. perhaps people who just farm and like to make gold? maybe achievement oriented individuals? what is it meant by non-competitive?
And those people have the exact same opportunity that the so-called competitive people have. If you want to progress your character after ilvl 200 then the way is PvP, Raid or Mythic Plus.
Not using this opportunity is a CHOICE and while you are free to make that call, it ridiculous to then expect the game to bend over backwards and give you the gear to progress your character anyway.
Take responsibility for your own decisions. If you can't be arsed to do the content the game offers then don't complain that you aren't getting the rewards that come with doing this content. What even is this attitude: "I dun wanna work, but I demand to be paid."
If this is the mindset of the so-called non-competitive crowd then we will be much better off with them unsubbing. I don't expect it being many anyway.
No. Letting players progress for sake of progressing without that progression being linked to effort or atleast beating some new or harder content do not make players have fun or play more. Its complete myth. Progression has to be tied to new or harder gameplay experience otherwise its meaningless progression and players will stop care aka quit playing.
Yeah that's not true at all. Unless you're lucky enough to get on a guild team, your gear progression essentially stops entirely at a certain point. LFG is filled with people expecting ridiculous ilvls for content like normal raids. The fact that you think it's so easy to just participate in higher end activity shows you either don't play the same game or have gotten really fortunate with your guild.
And it IS a lot of people unsubbing. Because the gear progression in Shadowlands is utter garbage. Nobody is going to want to play a game where they will likely never increase their character's power until the next patch.
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It's a myth huh? Tell me why the majority of the playerbase really only does LFR then.
There are plenty of incentives in higher end content like mounts and exclusive transmog that there is no reason to make high ilvl gear restricted as well. The only reason people want gear restricted is so they have one more thing they can lord over "casuals". Casuals getting gear doesn't impact hardcore players' playtime whatsoever because they will likely never play with someone who isn't a hardcore player.
PVP gear was the true catch up in TBC. I was maybe 12yo when finally leveled to max, in last 4 months of TBC. Just did bgs for a week or so and I was in full epics comparable to T5 is it? Or T4?
Then joined a pug for kara and we demolished it. Can barely remember anything about that.
Last edited by kukkamies; 2021-05-18 at 09:23 AM.
PvP gear wasn't good catch up gear because you didn't get enough hit chance to hitcap against raid bosses. It was fine to use PvP gear for the occasional slot where you didn't get lucky with PvE drops. Being full PvP geared in a raid made you rather weak, though. It only really worked out for you because you got S3 gear, which was the equivalent of T6 and went into T4 content with it.
Yes I am in a guild, a casual raiding one. Is that something special these days? What stops you from joining one too?
However if you expect that just being in a guild means you get gear left and right for free then that is nonesense. If you want to be invited into high-level M+ runs even with the guild then you need to prove yourself capable of doing it, sure, people will help out but if you keep messing their keys then they won't want to run with you anymore, even if you are in the same guild.
But apart from that, I am at the moment gearing up a new character pretty much on my own. 195 atm mostly from Coveneant gear and the one legendary. I have joined several Normal Raid run this week with no problem. Usually they expect 185 to 190 gear which is easily attainable even solo. Sadly most of these runs ended in failure because halve the group always expects that they get a free ride, don't need to know mechanics and don't even know the basics of the game (like "interrupts"), so what makes these runs frustrating is people that do not want to put in effort.
Finally, ALL gear progression ends at some point. No matter if you are competitive or not. My main is 226, there is basically no way to get past this limit. The difference is that I am not CHOOSING to stay at this limit, it's the hard cap for this patch, give or take an ilvl or two.
You people are just not getting tired of claiming this, are you? First of all:
YOU. DO. NOT. HAVE. THE. SUB. NUMBERS! NOONE. OUTSIDE. OF. BLIZZARD. DOES.
Meaning you do not have a friggin clue if "a lot" of people are unsubbing, you just WANT this to be true, because it would validate your grievances.
Secondly:
Even if that was true, then you have not the slightest clue if it is because of the gear issue. As all the other people that use this fake argument you just take whatever your issue with the game is and blow it up as the one and only reason why people are unsubbing and thus it proves you right. It's an amazingly foolish way to argue.
It's completely normal that a huge part of the playerbase unsubs after the first patch. Many just come to play the story, then leave until the next patch. That is expected. Others might have unsubbed because the content draught we experience atm. The possible reasons are endless and 99% of them have nothing to do with your problems.
So, in general, I would say stay away from this argument, using it just shows that you understand very little about the game.
Again, where are you getting these numbers? You just claim there is this majority but it only exists in your head to support your own assumptions. While I know many people are doing LFR I would never assume they do that exclusively. Why? Because it is friggin aweful. People that do that for fun must have a strong masochistic streak.
The complete lack of effort and understanding people display in that game mode is amazing. It is clear that people only do that mode when they can't be arsed to put effort into their gameplay and the result is an extremly painful experience for everyone involved.
I'd say WoW has way WAAAY more casual things to do than high end. High tier M+, PvP and Mythic Raids are about the only thing to do at cutting edge. For the casual tho you have TONS of raids you can farm for just seeing them, collecting mounts and transmog, farming in Pandaria, questchains that you haven't experienced etc etc etc. There is a metric ton of content in comparison that you can do, as opposed to a player pushing high end content. And every bit of this content has some convoluted achievement connected to it. So don't go yapping about stuff not being there.
"DIE, INSECT!" - words to live by
There are thousands of guilds. Normal and heroic raids are both relatively easy and have flexible size restrictions unlike pre-WoD era. Getting into a raiding team has been made so much easier than before, if you aren't raiding mythic. There are guilds that literally just fill their rosters with everyone and then organise raids for those who wants it. It has nothing to do with luck. If someone is lazy to open the guild finder feature, its their problem, and not bad luck. You can fund guilds that suit your preferred activites, skill level, aspirations, timetable and etc. You don't even have to submit an application form like it was before.
What do you expect of group finder for raids? People who make groups there want to roll through the place, nobody wants to progress there; or they make a group to get boosted themselves. Either way its completely out of their interest to invite undergeared or inexperienced people, hence the requirements. Imagine previously there was no group finder at all, but there was always a set of requirements for pug groups.
Shadowlands gearing doesn't structurally differ from any expansion gearing - you do harder content, you get better gear. All the catch-up mechanics were new patch content and never got you above new raid tier ilvl. Your claim that people won't play the game where they will never increase their power until the next patch, is completely false because that's how people have been playing the game since the begining. There is always a ceiling that depends on your time/effort spent and content difficulty. My main is 226 8/10 mythic; I highly doubt that my guild will kill Sire mythic before 9.1, and since I don't need SLG loot - my character's power will not increase until the next patch (fortunately we don't have the infinite AP grind). I've been in that state for over a month, and I keep playing almost every day. And so does most of my guild, we just switch to alts, do other in-game activities.
Honestly, don't be so dilusional and complain for the sake of complaining, make some effort and reap the rewards.
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1) It actually does in many ways. You'll get people in 226 ilvl who have never cleared hc raid or m+15, claiming their right to be able to do that content, and wasting everyone else's time. Seen it before when people bought accounts with geared characters, managed to get into decent guilds and then completely fail every single time, making the rest 24 people pretty unhappy.
2) Why do casuals need higher ilvl than is sufficient for the content they do, given that any type of content in wow gives higher ilvl than what is enough to do that type of activity?? Not a single casual has given any response. Because they don't have a reason, they just want it. Player power progression? Get into the content that gives those rewards
3) Gear is a raider's salary. They are rewarded with better gear for beating content. Everyone get paid for their skills and effort. A restaurant chef can't be paid same as delivery boy or a burger-flipper. Having end-game players and solo questers wear the same ilvl, will simply make all of effort made completely obsolete and will ruin end-game as we know it. I can tell you that cosmetic rewards aren't even remotely enough to keep players progressing, most people that I have played with don't care about those at all. Even more so, no regular raider will even stop to think that he has higher ilvl than the casuals around him doing the same world quest. We're just happy that we get more powerful by defeating harder content. There are jackassese here and there, but most don't give a shit.
And yet, here we are. 16 years with the system of rewarding effort and "alienating" the lazy and the game is still running strong. Meanwhile the games that cater exclusively to these 85% like SWTOR are basically dead, with just a bit of single-player story content now and then to keep people playing and buying from their cash shop.
The thing is, WoW did not change. It is doing what it always has. High Content gives high gear. That was always the case and no one had a problem with it.
Now suddenly we have this surge of people demanding to be given everything without having to put in effort for it. This wave of sheer lazyness and entitlement is a new thing and it is a very worrying development. We can only hope these people will never be asked for their opinions on any important matter.
That is just the thing. They are not catered to. Being a casual player is easier this expansion then it was ever before while high-level players need to run tons of stuff every week to hopefully get a small upgrade in the Vault.
The entire problem is made up from the get go, by people who feel the game owes them free gear because they are too lazy to do the things that give them gear. Their experience isn't diminished in any way, they just aren't getting things without putting the work in like everybody else and that they cannot accept.
They'd be about T5, but with a lot more stamina and less of other stats, so about T4.5 in terms of raiding utility, if I'm remembering right. That stuff was excellent for levelling in Wrath if you didn't have T5 or better, too - all that Stam made over-pulling when questing much less of a problem.
It took more like several weeks to get a full set unless you were completely no-lifing it, though.
Ultra competitive players suck the fun out of stuff. Just like they do in raids.
They’re the loudest people and all they care about is crunching numbers and maximizing results. Like fuckin’ robots. I got news: robotic content is not fun. It’s soulless.
WoW should re-evaluate what it defines as “fun” because now they’re full of “systems” designed around people who think of everything in a dry mechanical way. To keep total dweebs playing like crack addicts, while dumbing everything down for everyone else.
Facilis Descensus Averno
That's why it's 'catch up' gear. It gets you to the point where you can start gearing properly in progression. Also, you could get reasonably close as melee by gemming just for hit. Not ideal, of course.
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The initial stuff was strange and weird and seldom worth it. Later badge gear was good, Isle of QD stuff was amazing (but not as good as what was actually inside Sunwell).
Rewarding effort is not the same as being catered to and your definition of "Hardcore players" is veeeery brought. I would not call myself hardcore by any means with only a few hours of playing in the evening. Still I am comfortably able to get my Curve and my Keymaster achievment. Hardcore starts when you want to raid Mythic for real and get your Cutting Edge. Everything else is doable for everyone that puts the effort in.
You are right. They want the same things. The problem is they don't want to put in the same effort, they want to be given the rewards and not earn them like the "hardcore" people do. They feel they should be getting the same stuff despite not doing the same work (as you yourself admit) and that, my friend, is entitlement in it's purest form.
Again, most things in the game are easily achievable without being a super high-end Mythic raider. Curve and KSM are doable without becoming hardcore. It just takes effort.
I am not a Mythic Raider myself and I do not own any of the Mythic Transmogs despite being addicted to transmoging, do you see me opening threads about the Mythic raiders diminishing my experience? No. Because I do not feel entitled to things I did not earn.
I do not have the time and frankly the patience to wipe 200 times on a Mythic boss so I am not doing Mythic and thus I do not expect to be given Mythic rewards. It's really that simple.
People are putting dozens of hours into earning these things and that is reflected in the quality of the loot. Either join them and earn it yourself or don't, but stop pretending like their achievments are somehow diminshing your experience. You are simply jealous, nothing more.