Sorry for the missinterpretation.
Right before your quote I said:
And put your response as an example of what would happen if WoW went F2P. It was a response to Mjane that advocated for a F2P model.
So yeah, I read your post and agree with it. Sorry it was not stated clearer.
It literally didn’t. The only thing that took a long time to unlock was the middle part to empower your azerite gear. First of all it wasn’t mandatory and it didn’t take weeks of mindlessly grinding for it either.
You were able to use them when you obtained them on the spot. If you looted it week 1 without having done any AP farming you wouldn’t be able to fully unlock every slot, but that’s a minuscule issue.
I don’t doubt that. I’m sure there’s quite a lot of players like you who enjoy what DF is doing and think it’s an amazing expansion, but you need to realize that you’re in the minority. Most players want to play World of Warcraft not World of Lobbysimulator.
It wasn’t.
So you don’t dislike grinds then? So why do you think AP grinds are bad then??
That tiny bit of power gained wasn’t gonna make a difference either way tbf.
Yeah you’re in the minority though. If they removed gear from raids & m+ it would die over night. Even a lot of players who say they don’t care about gear would quit if they removed gear, they just don’t realize how reward oriented they are. We saw that this patch. Gear is the least rewarding it’s ever been in the game and the season is completely dead 
Yes and no. In terms of major increases it was capped by rank, but beyond that it also scaled with your heart of azeroth level up to a certain point. To give an example Vision of Perfection got an inreased proc chance or duration, I don’t remember which one, depending on your heart of azeroth level. This additional scaling capped out at some point though.
I personally don’t have an issue with the game making you play the entire game. I think it’s healthy for the game, the issue with essences imo was that they weren’t account-wide. Not that you had to go do PvP or PvE for a bit if u wanted specific essences. Again if it’s a huge deal, they can change the acquisition methods. That’s one thing I think borrowed power systems as a whole failed at.
It’s better than what we have right now.
Look if a casual player gets ilvl 447 gear from doing a WQ because they got extremely lucky and procced TF like crazy, I really don’t care? I think that’s pretty cool and healthy for the game.
You’re right. +16s giving ilvl 447 crafted gear which is better than 95% of the gear in the raids and only 3 ilvls lower than the mythic endboss is properly scaled
Normal raiding & low keys still have a big barrier to entry. There’s no natural curve anymore, there’s no way for casuals & new players to prog their characters after they hit max. They either hop into endgame content or quit, which is what’s happening.
Not to mention just getting invited is a hassle nowadays.
TF made gear WQs still worth doing. Right now if you have a 424 chest there’s never a reason to do WQs giving a 415 chest. With TF you would still do it because there’s a chance it could proc a upgrade, allowing you to still continue progressing your char.
The problem is your mentality in regards to it. You view the content as “check lists” in order to do what you personally enjoy, which I assume is raidlogging. For casuals and many other players that was viewed as content not a barrier to playing the game.
If playing wow, besides raids & m+, is so awful then maybe it’s time to move on from wow? Let the devs design the game for us who actually want to play wow and not treat it as a lobby for raids & m+.
It’s fear based decision making because it isn’t really what they want to do at Blizzard, they’re just doing it to please the vocal minority. Pleasing the existing fans because they’re afraid they will also quit like they did in Shadowlands.
They learnt the wrong lessons. They shouldn’t listen to the vocal minority because again it’s the vocal minority and most players really don’t know what they want. Lots of people online talk about wanting super fast gearing and no AP grinds so they can just do raid & mythic+. What is the end result? It’s the most dead season we’ve had since WoD.
It’s not. The devs have said it, this season is evidence of it, various content in the game being super popular when they provide good gear but dying after they stop giving good gear is even more proof.
The number of players who raid for 0 gear rewards or push Mythic+ are a tiny minority.
Casual players don’t raid mythic, why on earth would they care about it?
I get it. I’ve had hectic schedules as well, but the truth is that the game shouldn’t be designed for players who can only play a few hours a week.
There’s also the other side of things. Players who are so busy that they can’t play on a regular schedule has 0 ways of progressing their chars rn. Yeah they can pug mythic+ but imagine coming home from work and spending half of your playtime just getting declined from grp finder. Or when you make your own group you still have to wait ages for a healer to sign up. Same story with pugging raids.
AP allows those players to progress their chars, it gives them character progression which is the biggest motivating factor in this game. Instead what we have right now is a completely dead open world because there’s no reason to do any of the content. Casual players aren’t playing wow anymore because the game is designed for raidloggers.
AP wasn’t a small system tbf. I don’t disagree that the game needs more innovation, but what they’re cooking up rn with DF really ain’t it.
It should impact all content.
MMORPGs are built on character progression. Grinding for player power is a fundamental part of the game and it has existed since the dawn of MMORPGs.
It added content, not layers of complexity. The game is 10x more complex now with it’s class design than it was in Legion.
Right we should all just close our eyes and act like it’s a coincidence. DF launch without AP = super low participation for an xpac launch. Patch 10.1 releases and they basically remove the gearing progression with the upgrades = the most dead season we’ve ever had. But it’s just a coincidence, right? An MMORPG without character progression will surely work.
Not relevant to what we were talking about.
Do you prefer how DF is now? Where the patch launched and there was nothing to do until the season started? I’m sorry but that’s just not good imo. I enjoyed doing the open world content for player power before the season started, it was fun.
I think if wow remains this way it’s just a lobby game and you prefer this current state over when we had AP.
The problem is that by completely separating everything there’s little cross over and players wont naturally try out different content. Imagine you spend a ton of time progressing your char solo as a new player and then realize you have to start over with your char progression in order to do Raids/Mythic+. They’re far more likely to just quit.
The issue with cosmetic rewards is that you do em once and you’re done. There’s also a diminishing return on cosmetic rewards. If all casual content rewards you cool looking gear, then none of it is cool anymore.
MT worked because it was aspirational solo content, not just casual content. They re-introduced the Mage Tower as well. It was really cool and lots of ppl did it for a while, but go there now and it’s dead.
But why do you compare AP to grinds in Korean MMOs then? If you’ve never played those you don’t know what they’re like.
Difference is that AP is an actual solution whereas flapping your arms while falling accomplishes nothing.
So casual friendly that nobody’s playing it 
I mean, you’re just plainly wrong. You will likely see the implosion of WoW if they implement AP again. They removed it in response to popular demand.
Because of how unbalanced it is, not because of gear.
If I ask some people I know who play high keys why they’re not playing, it’s because they’re not able to fit in what they need to actually play high keys. Why continue playing when their progress is impeded so severely that they can’t really go higher, because of not having the right classes while groups with the right classes just breeze through? The season is pretty much done for them because they can’t really go higher because of being the wrong classes.
If nothing is done about spriest utility & aug evoker, it will likely continue next season.
Is this popular demand in the room with us right now?
Because if they really did listen to popular demand, why is this expansion a complete fiasco? With numbers down across the board.
M+ numbers were alrdy down by 50 % before Exodia. Nice try but no cigar.
We really going to do the entire come up with terrible excuses for the failure of Dragonflight all season?
S1 it was affixes (even though M+ affixes were significantly worse in Legion and BFA).
S2 it is Exodia (even though Exodia was first released in the .5 patch roflmao)
S3 it will be ?? (please do me a favour and tell me what awful and wrong excuse you come up with already so you can save us all a lot of time).
How about just admitting the game is terrible. The forum posters with 10k posts and the RWF players and content creators got what they asked for. Turns out their interests are not aligned with the average WoW player. Who could possibly have guessed 
Spriest was mandatory before exodia’s emergence.
Ah okay, Spriest singlehandedly ruined M+ by dropping numbers by 50 %. Impressive.
You can be a doomer if you’d like.
I’m not going to be. The game is in a better state than during Legion & BFA, by miles.
The 10k post forum poster is happy. Who better to represent the popular demand of the WoW population 
Doomers gonna be doomers.
This guy’s best argument in a discussion earlier was blaming me for calling an ability “greater heal” instead of “heal”, and he accused me in the lack of knowledge, saying “wow man you’re so stupid greater heal is a pvp ability, our discussion is over”, but the thing is “heal” was called “greater heal” very big amount of time from classic till wod (if i remember correctly) and later renamed to “heal”. Sorry for being too old I guess So this was this guy’s best argument to stop the discussion.
I was curious and I looked it up now. I think you are completely wrong. The reason why there is such a huge player drop off is the following: You can gear to 447 in 1-2 months, and if you raid mythic, even earlier. I think people just got the gear they want and cleared the content/achieved the rating they want way too fast. That’s all. The reason why the previous expansions you talk about kept people playing was something negative imo: They were forced on a treadmill that kept them playing artificially by forcing people psychologically to waste their time. This current version of wow is way better and respects the life of their players.
If they bring this system that you suggest with AP, I’m immediately gonna quit the game. I watched a youtube video about this and this seems mental and disgusting. This version of wow we play is way way way way better, and if people stopped playing faster, this doesn’t mean that it’s worse. Engagement metrics are not a direct indication of quality.
So yeah, I think I actually completely disagree with you.
Can their be some system like this “corruption” that makes open world content more important and gives more fun game mechanics? 100%, but if and only if it’s not forcing people into content they don’t wanna do, and if it’s not some huge infinite grind. I hate repetitive grinds.
All these people have is bad faith arguments. I have already declared victory in another post. We were all right about the issues facing this expansion all along. The numbers are so awful people are not even trying to deny it anymore. Instead they have reached the point where they make ridiculous excuses.
Sadly of course, we have not won anything at all, since this game we all really wanna play and enjoy now sucks because Blizzard had to listen to these geniuses, some of whom literally get paid to play the game, yet were unable to comprehend that their suggestions would kill it.
Very interesting theory you have there. Blaming gear for the 50 % drop.
There are some people in this thread that suffer from the delusion that people don´t play for gear because they do not personally do so. I think you should try and argue with them and take over from Curvyboi before he loses his sanity (although anyone posting on the WoW message boards is probably alrdy clinically insane, myself included).
I’m very sure about that. Gearing is one of my main motivations to do content, but I also want the content to be good and somewhat challenging, so I feel better about overcoming the challenge and get the reward for that as a trophy. That’s how I like the game the most. Now that I basically beat the game, got max ilvl of 446 for me without mythic raiding, I just enjoy the fact that I can just do play through the story, collect some stuff and not play as much. I also like to play alts now and level them to go through campaigns from previous expansions that I didn’t experience.
If I was playing the game for many years, I would have quit ofc and waited for next patch, which is a good thing.
Spot on, but they refuse to admit.
Yep. We were both vocal about it super early lol.
Although to be fair, some of them still just do not understand they were wrong because they are so bad at maths that they think ppl will run around in Mythic raid gear from LFR and WQs if we bring back titanforging.
These are the same people of course, that do not understand the maths behind the many different mechanisms to AP, and thus do not comprehend how much of a waste of time grinding AP was if you were not a world first raider.
Yep. Player power is the main motivator to do all content in WoW, and historically has been since the games inception.
That´s what this entire thread is about.
I just wonder how many times so called “community feedback” has to back-fire in other for devs to learn damn lesson and to stop listening irrational and in same cases genuinely stupid people.
I think you’re wrong about AP though. I don’t think this AP system is healthy. What they should do imo is making mythic raiding way easier, so people feel like they are able to progress through the mythic raid and keep playing the season. I genuinely think people, who clear heroic first week, should all fully clear mythic at the end of the season.
I think that’s where they can make the season last longer by making mythic raiding more approachable, and maybe even puggable without spreadsheets
Yeah I hate being mean, but most WoW content creators are genuinely thick. There is no way to really be nice about it. You can see it when they talk about titanforging. It isn´t just that they don´t understand human behaviour or the most basic game design. They can not do basic probability.
Like how did Preach gaming and Bellular make WoW vids for like 10 years or something, and not manage to understand the WoW playerbase at all? Their dedication to being wrong is kind of admirable.
My big worry is all the terrible excuses we are seeing. I don´t have faith in current WoW content creators or Blizzard to be able to diagnose just why this expansion is such a massive failure.
Just go to Twitter. They all blame Exodia and Aug. But as the numbers show, S2 was alrdy terrible before .5…
The game had more subscribers before AP was implemented in the game. When WoW had peak subscriber numbers, Legion with its first iteration of AP was some 6-7 years away.
Conclusion when applying your logic: AP decimated the playerbase.