And even if they would look at it they would still stop palying it. Issues WoW have are completly different then some stupid ap grinds or w/e system you blame next.
You want to know why WoW retail sucks ? Becouse its not mmo. Why are seasons still thing? Why we still have quadrizilion difficulty level what causing this insane powercreeps what then has to be fixed by constnat catch up systems what ruin players progression? Why is leveling still so brain dead easy and fast? Where is yourney? Why is game still so covinient that i can literaly finish entire game withing 24h while playing solo? Where is desing to create community like content where players actualy need each other? Why are items and specialy epics still rain from the sky? Why are we all consntaly getting all this welfare mounts, pets and gear what we all put into our collection tabs and 5 seconds we all forget about them?
Maybe people havent quit for your nonsense ap/borrowed power nonsense. Maybe they quit becouse WoW is bad mmorpg in its core and has been for several years.
The problem with statistics like this are that you have a conclusion you want to drive home and you pull out a graph that you thinks supports it.
An equally legitimate take is this: That graph states “Guild boss kills”. It’s entirely possible that because normal is so easy lots of people just pug it now. There may be more kills taking place, just not in guilds.
You’re not objective and you aren’t making an honest attempt to do objective analysis.
In wrath, I had options to bash reps while doing dungeons. Farming AP in M+ was only efficient running MoW again and again.
And at least wrath reputations offered the same “enchants” at different level, so exalted were stronger than revered. But I’d rather play with a low-end version for quite some time while grinding rep instead of not having anything.
What if numbers stayed the same but blizzard kept AP ?
There are others way of making fun content outside of raids and M+, which I’ve always been advocating for, without sticking a damn carrot with it. It’s like carrot makes content “good” when it actually sucks. Again, what’s the difference between killing 10 boards in a free AP expansion with killing 10 boars in an AP expansion ? It’s the same core gameplay loop !
There is not a good way with that. I mean, either catch up makes it irrelevant so you might aswell not play (but what would be the point ?) or it’s as grindy as early legion/BFA and you’re pretty much creating barriers. As for account-wide then sure but that would kinda defeat the idea of progressing every single character.
Kinda reminds me of classic players saying retail has less raid logs than classic without realizing that more and more guilds are privately logging while M+ logs also massively increased :x
Also I don’t really see raids as a metric to gauge how many people are playing.
I’m currently not raiding or doing M+. My guild are on a raid break. I’m doing other things in game because this is lovely downtime for me. That does not mean I’m not active.
If the discussion was about how many people engage in raid content throughout an entire tier it might be somewhat relevant. Although I’d want to see the source of the data etc. Not just a random graph with no context.
thats because incompetent cluelss people are almost always the loudest ones.
thats partialy a reason why we as humankind arent explorins stars yet only we discuss if 60 genders are neough or if we need more plus in 21 century we have a war almost in middle of europe proving that no we didnt reach end of history like some claimed.
Lots of people pugged raids also in shadowlands, bfa and legion si data are actualy correct and whats kmore important than absolute numbers are trends.
You can look at the Heroic & Mythic numbers as well. They’re all equally as bad my friend.
In the first 4 weeks only 14,079 guilds killed the first boss in Vault vs 14,227 guilds doing it in Sanctum. So DF’s launch did worse than Sanctum on Heroic.
And here are the Mythic numbers where DF is still lower than Sanctum. In fact it’s barely higher than BFA’s final patch.
Then that would obviously mean that the problem wasn’t the removal of AP, but something else entirely? But it’s pointless to discuss “what ifs”. As it currently stands the issues that I, and many others mind you, have identified with the game is a lack of character progression which is what AP provided.
What are these other ways? I don’t know how long you have played wow, but this game has always been about the “carrot”. If you removed gear from raids & mythic+, the content would die over night. There’s a reason why in Mythic+ there is a massive drop-off at the key level that gives the max rewards. This happens every single season.
Wow is a game driven by player power & character progression. It’s an RPG so obviously progressing your character is going to be a massive motivating factor for players. It’s a massive source of fun for players.
The reason why everyone was farming rares at the start of this xpac wasn’t because everyone suddenly thought it was super fun to kill rares, it was because it was the best way of gearing up prior to the season launching. Same with pvp in SL season 1, players didn’t suddenly start loving wow pvp. People did it because it was the best source of player power.
The way they had it worked extremely well. If you absolutely hated doing any content besides Raids/M+ then you could skip 90% of it and you were completely fine. Unless of course you were a WF raider. If you skipped 1-2 patches and returned to the game, the catch-up allowed you to get caught up very well but it didn’t catapult you to the top so there was still good reason to get AP as a regular player.
Like I said, these numbers don’t tell the full story. But we can draw a very clear picture by combining the PvP, raid & M+ numbers with the shared experiences of so many players in the open world and how it’s empty. Then there’s also the fact that Blizzard admitted to DF selling worse than previous xpacs.
It’s not a coincidence that BFA & SL launch had the highest number of guilds playing, it’s obviously because those were the most hyped up periods for wow in the last couple of years.
The source of the data is Raider IO. The graph is made by Bellular from his last video talking about DF’s player numbers.
It’s crazy how they don’t realize they’re the minority. If the vocal players online were to be believed then Diablo Immortal is an awful game and yet it’s one of the most profitable mobile games ever made. People don’t realize just how few people actually engage with online content about video games, let alone spend time discussing it on forums.
I am the highest geared rogue in the world and yet here I am still raiding. Curious isnt it?
As for M+: Is that why so many people are playing past +16s although +16s reward the highest level of gear through Vault? Or past the plus that drops the highest base ilvl outside of vault? Like the pushing scene is completely disregarding the loot aspect because they cant get any loot from it in the first place
+16s give you vault gear that you can upgrade to 447
You get spammed with crests left and right. Especially if you only do 16s for vault.
Edit: Apparently you have to do 17s. Big whoop. Shows how much I care about M+ and its “loot”. Its so pee easy to gear up this patch its absolutely hilarious. Especially in combination with crafted gear.
One could still say 3 epxansions of AP killed DF before it got even out people assuming they would keep this kind of crap.
There are other ways of progressing without adding some kind of endless grinds. Wow is not Diablo !
Make FUN content like in FF !
Wrath !
Well, either be it reputations and gear from wrath to mop, once reputation were done they were. Even MOP and Wod legendaries had the idea of you being done. AP sadly was not made with this idea. And as I’ve said before, you could get less powerful of bonuses from rep, which with AP, you couldn’t. How is that a great design ?!
So wrong. Maybe that would kill casual mythic raiding guilds, aka the ones killing 3 bosses per tier, but as far as I know, people are still pushing keys even if doing them wouldn’t reward any damn gear. Same applies for raiding, I still am raiding Heroic despite my main not needing it, alongside many players every single week, because… WOAW, it’s fun !
Nah it’s not, it’s just addiction like mouse running on a treadmill only to get their dopamine shot. That’s not healthy. And I was way more excited by looting gear than being like “I can add some artifact traits”.
Like in most of previous expansions…
2 issues :
-Sucks to be a PVP player.
-The mere 35AP at the end of dungeon was not enough.
So no, couldn’t skip.
Ap was fine in 7.3 and 8.3 but…what’s the point ?! By doing so, you’re pretty much telling people that played from .0 patch that they’ve lost their times running on these endless treadmills, so what’s the point ?!
wrong, you do 17s.
You’re literally swimming in them.
That I agree so that weekly andies would stop running 20s.
Oftenly we cN only possibly know what ourselves, and the people we talk to think regarding this type of subject.
However u do have to question why Ion went from dying on a hill regarding borrowed power at the stsrt of SL, to blizzard panic deleting the entirity of open worlds purpose such shift would indicate a problen
Was AP the problem likely not. What was the problem was any content blizzard thought was “uninsteresting” or half baked they fixed a AP grind to.
Island expeditions were half baked concepts thrown together thst just revolved around speed running.
Warfronts again were very half baked and became mundane, it become very common for half ur raid to just be afk lol.
Torghast kinda joined the ranks, it had potiental but it rly turned sour quickly.
And? You’re the exception. I assume you also play in a guild, that means you gotta keep raiding unless you’re ok with losing your raid spot in the next raid.
Because 16s don’t reward the highest ilvl gear? You need to do 17s to get gear that scales up to 441 and before the last patch you had to do 20s to get max ilvl vault. As soon as they made it so you only need to do 16s/17s almost everyone stopped doing 20s. It became way harder to find players for 20 keys as a result.
Are you really gonna try to use the pushing scene as an indicator of how the average player plays? Barely anyone pushes keys lil bro, they’re a minuscule minority of players.
We didn’t have AP in Shadowlands my friend.
I’m open for suggestions. If Blizzard can cook up something good that makes everyone happy i’m all for it. I’m not hard locked on AP, I just don’t see any other solution personally.
FF is going through the exact same issue right now, lol. Players there are complaining about a lack of meaningful content outside of endgame because they have nothing like the Adventuring Forays in Endwalker.
And the less like FF wow is the better. So many players in that game just log in and have it on in the background while they play other games. I don’t want wow to turn into what FF14 is.
Back then it took a long time to max out your char. In this patch you finished 95% of your gearing on day 8 if you played a decent amount.
LOL, you can’t be serious. Ion literally said in an interview how Mythic+ killed heroic raiding in Shadowlands because of how much better M+ gear was. HC raiding died because the gear wasn’t worth it. What does that tell you? It means players play for gear, it’s a massive motivating factor. So yes, removing gear from raids & m+ would kill those game modes over night.
Here is a link to the interview, timestamped it for you.
It isn’t an addiction, it’s players being rewarded for the effort they put in.
In which expansions? In every other expansion the best source of gearing was dungeons and reputations prior to the raids releasing. Not farming the same rares everyday for 2 weeks.
It sucks to be a pvp player regardless. You also got way more than 35AP at the end of your dungeon.
It was fine in every patch. Players who it didn’t matter for just gaslighted themselves into thinking it matters for them as well because they copied their favourite WF streamers and parroted their takes.
I don’t understand why you people think Shadowlands is in the same category as Legion & BFA when it very clearly isn’t. There was no AP grinds in SL and the reasons why that expansion sucked wasn’t because it had borrowed power. It sucked because they made bad decisions with their systems and they opened the xpac with a 7 month content drought. Only to release the worst patch in wow’s history which also lasted for 8 months…
Wow was at it’s lowest during SL and Blizzard made a mistake giving players what they asked for instead of what they needed. DF is a product of that mentaility. They are designing wow around fear-based decision making instead of believing in their own vision and innovating the game.
Imagine you’re a new player in wow right now. What is there to do for them? They level up to max, they do WQs early on and maybe some HC/m0 dungeons and then what? They either get competitive and start pushing, which is rare for new players to do, or they do content like Fyrakk Assaults which is just killing the same rare over & over until a big dragon spawns. Or they do one of the boring zone events like community feast, where you barely do anything or Time Rifts which are just AFK simulators.
Legion was the last time we saw a surge of new players not only come to wow, but they stuck around. Why? Because the game had a lot of good casual content, a lot of ways for new players to continue progressing their characters until they got more invested into wow making them more likely to play more competitively. Even if they didn’t start pushing or raiding, the game still had a ton of meaningful solo & casual content allowing them to progress their chars.
It’s not a coincidence that Legion revitalized the game. Meanwhile DF which is a “good” expansion is barely hanging on to any players. Even the existing players who “love” DF are barely playing it, lol.
No I dont have to keep raiding. I could quit now or go on a break til ptr testing and still have my spot next tier regardless. I raid because its fun. Despite being incapable of getting any kind of gear upgrade. You said M+ and Raiding would die. It would not. Would the amount of players decrease? Most certainly. Would it die? Most certainly not.
You have to 16s for 441 in the vault which you can upgrade to 447. And still people do higher than 16s yet alone 20s. People do it because they like it. Any key done past 20 is done solely for fun and/or personal gain.
Not even remotely.
It was the same in previous seasons when It were just 15s as well. Every season I hear the very same whining from players like you regardless of difficulty.
I am using this scene yes. Because it completely negates your point that M+ would “die”.
Telling people what is and what is not fun and healthy when you are playing the Mario Kart of competitive video games and posting on the WoW message boards
You are dopamine addicted like the rest of us buddy. The sad part is that you are such a delusional person that you don´t even realize it. It´s like listening to a person who thinks that because they eat Burger King they are better than someone who eats McDonalds.
Yeah that’s pretty rare. Either way, you’re the exception not the rule.
16s don’t give you max ilvl loot from the end of dungeon. If you don’t need any 441 items then 16s is the most efficient. Players push above 16s because it gives you higher ilvl loot.
There’s extremely few players who push above the level giving your maximum loot. You’re just completely wrong if you think most players would continue playing if they removed loot from raids & keys.
Yes they did. The number of +20 keys in the dungeon finder dropped considerably after 10.1.5 went live and you only needed to do 16/17s for weekly keys.
Who’s talking about difficulty? Almost everyone that was doing 20s for weeklys stopped doing those and started doing 16s & 17s instead.
Lmao, how does a handful of players pushing for score negate the fact that the majority of players do M+ & Raid for gear? When people say XYZ content would die it doesn’t mean nobody’s doing it. It means it’ll end up the way PvP is right now with barely anyone left playing. So few play that it’s a struggle to even find players to queue with.
Don’t take my word for it. Ion said in an interview that if they make M+ gear too good it’ll kill raiding. What does that tell you? That the majority of players play this game for gear.
Why do you think everyone was killing rares at the start of this expansion? It’s because they gave the best loot at the time and as soon as it stopped being the best source of gear, everyone stopped killing them.
Same with pvp in Shadowlands season 1. It was by far the most popular pvp season we’ve had in ages, why do you think that was? It wasn’t because players suddenly found out they really love pvp. It was because pvp was the best source of gear in that season and as soon as it stopped being the best source of gear it completely died.
But nah, I guess you know better because you don’t care about gear. Just ignore all the evidence and even Ion himself talking about how extremely important gear rewards are.
I said Vault. +16 is required for the vault. Ye you can do go higher and do higher if you want a higher base ilvl. A 17 is what you would require to get it to max non vault ilvl. And people still do higher keys than that.
And you said that the scene would “die”. Please check the definitions of the words youre trying to use before attempting to converse with others. I said “would the amount of players decrease? Most certainly. Would it die? Most certainly not.”. Not once have I used the word majority.
Not everyone treats the game as a job like your guild does.
Please learn what “almost everyone” means.
Did a lot of people stop? Ofc they did. Path of least resistance. Especially raiders who have no interest in doing M+ to begin with. Almost everyone however? Now thats a far stretch.
Path of least resistance. As old as humanity itself. You could make a +2 the max vault and people would be spamming this instead.
Because you said it would “die”.
Use the proper wording or deal with people pointing it out.
Ion also thinks hes any good at the game still while hes nothing more but a walking meme.
Ye. So? People would still do it regardless. What do you want? That everyone heavily plays every aspect of the game? Thats wishful thinking mate and never coming to pass.
A: It was a time killer.
B: It made the start of progress easier.
C: It was fun to do for some. Not everyone did it. Some, me included, found it enjoyable. Others didnt. Same amount of enjoyment when people were camping huolon back on timeless isle. Especially with everyone communicating with one another in the open world.
It was the best source of gear if you liked versa and/or if you were good enough to get into gladiator range for the max ilvl weapons.
Gear rewards are important yes. But even removing all sorts of gear would not cause everything to die. It might even cause a shift. For example how many M+ers had to “waste” their time in raiding because of the raid items so that they could push? Quite a lot. And I am not exclusively talking about the title pushers. Or raiders that had to do M+ for their trinkets?
And gearing this tier has been an absolute joke outside of specific overpowered items.
Since you claimed AP existed in a way or another before legion then tell me what the hell were conduits slots locked behind renown and soul ashes ? Weren’t they progression system requiring some grinds ?!
I’ve always said Blizzard shouldn’t scrap thorgast, because some ideas could have been saved. I know SL legendaries weren’t good in any shape or form but something could have been done.
FF still has way more actual casual content outside of raids.
Just say you want wow to be your job !
I agree gearing is probably a bit too fast this patch. Does not mean progression should be gated behind arbitrary grinds, such as AP.
And I stand with what I’ve said.
Ion, aka the guy that was competent as raid designer but is failling hard as game director. Remember “meaningful choice” or “we’d rather you didn’t play demonology” kinda tells a lot about him. The worst he ever said is that as a shaman main, he felt like Ankh was the strongest defensive CD. He clearly does not know what he’s talking about so whatever he says should be taken with a massive grain of salt.
So why is the idea of Mythic not rewarding higher ilvl being proposed then ? Probably because there are 2000 guilds in the world going for CE and that’s the only thing they care about !
What, efforts for doing easy and trivial content ? Then why M+ only gave a fraction of what trash content like islands would give then ? Would have been that bad if I could simply farm AP while doing raids and M+ ?
In Nazjatar, I was doing rares for damn perls, since benthic gear was stupidly op (And it shouldn’t have never been in the first place). I also happened to farm rares in Legion hopping to get my hands on legendaries.
Before hand, they also did reward some items but I was only running 10 Normal so…I didn’t care.
Not in freaking BFA. If not 35 then it was ridiculously low, which didn’t rewarded me accordingly of doing a 15 key, which…is way harder than clicking on 10 items in Tiragarde sounds.
Wrong, both 7.0 and 8.0 were awful.
Then you clearly don’t know most of guilds’ rules. I mean, given your guild being 9th world wide, I quite understand why you simply can’t grasp the idea that even AOTC guilds were enforcing such rules, because…That’s how it worked. AP also sparkled some drama between guildmates since some people were religiously farming AP while some others didn’t care.
Such system promoted toxicity inside mid to low tier end guilds, which represent the vast majority of guilds, wether you like it or not.
