For context: currently if you kill a boss in a mythic difficulty raid, or just enter raid zone on mythic where some of the bosses are dead and press “Yes, accept lockout”, you will be:
Unable to even enter raid zone, where some of the bosses you're locked out of are alive. Not just unable to acquire loot from them, like it currently works on normal and heroic difficulties. This is a direct consequence of next item
Unable to enter raid zone with any other raid leader except your original one, or yourself.
The first restriction is not a big deal. What really ruins my experience, is the second restriction
I did some research and actually found out that some people defend this roster lock system. I feel like this system’s drawbacks outweigh its (alleged) benefits, therefore it shouldn’t exist. I’ll go over what I see as its drawbacks and what I’ve seen others claim as its benefits:
Drawbacks:
It severely limits players from participating in mythic raiding by presenting them with a choice: either join a stable raiding community (or create one), and commit to its schedule, or have only a single shot with a single group per week at mythic raid. I'm sure I'm not the only person, who enjoys the flexibility of not having to show up to the raid at the same time every week, instead just raiding when I feel like it, but who is also AOTC and done with heroic difficulty, and would like to meet more difficult challenges on mythic difficulty.
It severely limits guilds ability to temporarily adjust/complete their roster with pugs from LFG, due to there being less pugs due to drawback #1.
After joining a group and accepting lockout, you might get kicked, event without pulling a boss once. In this case you stay with lockout you accepted for a week. This feels unfair.
Benefits:
It prevents people from getting boosted in mythic. Firstly, to my best knowledge, paying people to get help with completing in-game task isn't a violation of ToS, as long as its not RMT. Secondly, if we assume that boosting is an issue to be dealt with, and we also assume that imposing roster lock upon people, completing a difficult task together, preventing them from completing the same task with different people for some period of time, then the same roster locking mechanic should also be applied to M+20 and higher, high ranked BGs, maybe heroic difficulty raid, and so on. This sounds absurd to me, so maybe there is a contraiction in our initial assumptions.
It encourages players to join together and form guilds, giving advantage to stable raiding groups over pugs. Firstly, guild groups already have big enough advantage over pug groups:
Exclusive to mythic raids - guild groups are able to attempt mythic raids before hall of fame is full - which is several weeks prior to mythic difficulty unlocking for pug groups
Applicable to any kind of group content - guild group has better coordination/communication than pug, and same people will be able to achieve more in a coordinated guild group, than in a pug group.
I have nothing to say against artificially making guild mythic raiding more attractive than pug mythic raiding, but it should not be done by means of severely limiting the ability to pug mythic in general. Maybe what could work better is limiting total weekly number of boss pull attempts. Think Ra-Den from Throne of Thunder, but shared across all bosses. If you would only have, say, 100 shots at killing all bosses, you would think twice before risking spending pulls with random people from pugs.
A variation of this "benefit" I've also seen is that "Mythic raiding is not designed for/intended for pugs. Only for guilds". I see no fundamental reason why mythic difficulty can not be enjoyed in a pug group the same way heroic difficulty can. If so happens that blizzard employee comes to this thread and confirms that dev team does not want me to mythic raid, unless I'min a guild group, I'll just accept that.
It prevents people from trading IDs. I do not really understand the issue here, so can't comment on this much.
Insofar, Blizzard hasn’t changed their stance on this. The subject comes up sometimes though on reddit and other places that Mythic raiding should change (including Mythic+ keys) but it remains targeted as the hardest content for a fixed group of players.
Thx for giving link to that support article, but I don’t think it is a statement of opinion - merely an explanation of how it works now, how to play around it, and that customer support won’t reset your lockout.
It doesn’t contain any argumentation as to why it works like this
Oh wow, yes, this interview contains exactly that type of statement
lockout is an example of “healthy friction” in that joinng a Mythic raid is a bit of a commitment
I’m not completely against such a friction and commitment. In my text, I propose a system with attempt count limit, so that randomly joining different pugs, hoping to get lucky, is a suboptimal strategy.
I just want “friction and commitment”, that doesn’t completely take away my agency over when to raid in a week
The problem with the notion of ‘healthy friction’ is that it seems purposely designed to force people to play the game in whatever way the devs currently running things want them to play it. Here’s an example of so-called ‘healthy friction’ for melee specs casting their CR:
DK needs resources, but it’s instant cast.
Pala has to cast but has an immunity they can use to stay alive while casting.
Druid (feral) has to cast while going out of form and having (at best) 50% DR.
The refusal to make mythic raiding more accessible (by changing or removing restrictive systems) is just an example of stubbornness on the part of the devs and their attempts to force people to play in a particular way.
This would actually kinda solve my initial problem. My initial problem is “I’m AOTC, heroic is on farm and is boring, want bigger challenge, but doing mythic for more than 2-4hrs/week requires a guild, which I don’t want to commit to”.
The only issue is that +X%DMG +Y%HP is not the only thing that mythic brings to the table - mainly it’s new challenging boss mechanic changes. Otherwise heroic+ is a good idea IMOP.
Also “exactly 20 people” restriction is not an issue at all, given cross-realm availability