Mark my words , this is going to become like that other thread about P2W where the definition was stretched so thin that it applied to every game ever made.
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Interesting. I never thought someone here would have played it.
Il be honest though, I never played that game. I just googled âworst P2W games of all timeâ and that one came first on the list. And then looked it up on Wikipedia to see exactly what they meant by P2W.
The point I wanted to make is that unlike WoW, in those games you could pay for player power that was impossible to achieve by any other means. No matter how long you played.
That thread was gold. I hope this one transforms into that as well.
Also, if the definition is stretched to every single game ever made⌠that is a conclusion on its own. It means its a bad definition. A good definition manages to separate things into categories. A bad one⌠does notâŚ
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Well we have most of the posters from the previous one here sooo⌠
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Well if you want to play that way, its up to you, noone stops you? I rather try pull my worth than watching others play the game for me.
Boe gear u mean the 2-3 items for 16 slots.
Seems op way to get geared (its not)
Agree, tokens were a mistake, but again people then just use rmt more.
While the games are you mention not the same genre, there are obviously rmt trades go behind.
In Poe2, people already selling boost for âsanctumsâ to get extra talent points.
I mean how could we forget great quotes such as âwell that definition does not fit WoW, so we must find a definition that does so we can say that WoW is P2Wâ. Truly peak content.
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Archeage was huge when it launched in the west, it was like nothing that existed in the western market. It was probably the only truly open world game; maybe still is. You could literally sail to the other continents.
At some point though, you reach the realization that youâre doing everything correctly and play your character flawlessly, but you keep wiping because Johnny over there keeps standing in the fire. And when he gets replaced itâs Bobby who wipes the raid. And it goes on and on and on.
At this point in WoW the encounters are mostly made for organized raiding guilds who can maintain the same roster, because the process of incrementally learning a boss fight relies on trial and error over the course of many attempts. That environment is really difficult to create within a PuG because people donât stick around for a whole night or several nights to learn an encounter. And the moment a player gets replaced, then the learning process for the group goes back to the beginning again.
Thatâs why everyone wants people with proven success and experience on the encounters so that they donât have to go through that learning process. But that in itself makes it impossible for people who havenât done the encounters to find groups where they can learn them.
Alas people find themselves drawn to boosts because the encounter design just doesnât accommodate the PuG scene. Raids are almost entirely made for organized raiding guilds.
The level of complexity and overall difficulty of raid encounters would need to be dropped to the level of Legion or so, for the boosting demand to go down.
But itâs hard to see that happen when Blizzard seems to specifically design the final encounters of a raid to be extra difficult and complex to provide an even greater challenge to the hardcore progression guilds and the Race to World First.
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Dang. I was worried that this thread might die down and lose steam and then we have our Jito coming in to save the day! 
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Peak players on steam of 6k in 2015⌠and 2 players as its current 24h peak is nothing short of a failure.
Would not call that huge. Unless you are referring to some other game:
https://steamcharts.com/app/304030#All
The game never launched on Steam until far later in itâs lifecycle.
Thatâs interesting considering it closed down!
I am waiting on a panda mage to join before i rejoin the affray again !
What do you mean âat this pointâ? It has always been like this. The whole point of raids even back in ye olden days was to find a guild and raid, encounters back then were barebones mechanic wise buuut people were new, we didnât have widespread information so clearing MT was a big deal for people and it was mostly done with organized groups. If anything the notion of PuG-ing is what changed the ecosystem, the game is no longer âI need to find like minded peopleâ and is more âI need to find disposable peopleâ, which on itself deteriorated into several off-shoots of âI need to get carriedâ or âI demand to get invitedâ.
I wouldnât say that.
I think the PuG scene was thriving back in Legion, in part because Blizzard designed and tuned most of the encounters to be rather simplistic and pretty forgiving.
There are a few exceptions of course, but for the most part you could blitz through it all on Normal and Heroic with little worry. Many PuGs were even open to alts because the raids were so easy.
World Tours as they were called, were basically just people blasting through all the raids on multiple difficulties in a single night with random people and very little in terms of requirements to join.
It was pretty good. Iâd say Blizzard had lightning in a bottle there.
But of course the consequence of all that was that the top guilds, especially the Race to World First ones, complained that it was all too easy. The Emerald Nightmare in particular got called out for being way too easy.
So Blizzardâs approach for Battle for Azeroth was to make the encounters way more challenging and complex right out the gate, and then just increase the challenge with each new raid.
And that pretty much brought the PuG scene back down to its knees where itâs kind of been ever since.
I think Blizzard hit the goldilocks sweet-spot back in Legion as far as creating raids that were fun and accessible to a much wider audience.
So I wouldnât say itâs always been like this.
Well you should. Amonet is right.
And more forgiving encounters than in Vanilla and TBC ? The encounters back then were the easiest most simple ones ever. And yet⌠no PuG sceneâŚ
Also Legion ? As an example ?
Fallen Avatar ring a bell? And KilJaedan ? Simple ? Or the dude with the lasers⌠that either you used a WA or it was impossibleâŚ
You smoked a good hit of the nostalgia blunt there JitoâŚ
Iâm going to say that thereâs a pretty noticeable difference in design accessibility between The Emerald Nightmare and Uldir. And I would extend that to Legion versus Battle for Azeroth as well, just to make the point that Blizzardâs raid design is not consistent across expansions, let alone across patches.
And the overarching point being that lower complexity and lesser challenge makes the raids more accessible and doable to a broader audience, which then has the adverse effect of decreasing the demand for boosting.
Thereâs a higher demand for boosts if the Heroic boss is called Ansurek and not Xavius.
Ergo Blizzard can design their way out of a boosting-driven raid scene if they want to. But evidently the interests of the high-end raiding guilds (and WoW Token sales) weigh heavier on Blizzardâs minds than the PuG environment.
I mean, the Silken Court and Ansurek are not made to cater to the interests of PuGs. Theyâre made for Echo and Liquid and Method.
It is what it is.
Never needed curve during Shadowlands and havenât either so far, i have no problems making my own group, alto i play tank maybe get some friends and stop expecting for some kind of miracle.
Emerald nightmare is an extreme outlier though. It isnât indicative of legion at all.
Heroic?
Now compare him to Helyah/ Gulâdan/Kilâjaeden/Argus the Unmaker all the same expac and notice the ramp up i remember there was very little pugs for KJ and Argus.
In early weeks maybe, I feel like I was pugging heroic raid bosses a lot in legion. I was killing some bosses multiple times over in the same week in pugs to spend my reroll coins.