State of the game as a casual player

Community General Discussion
1

I want to give my opinion as once a mythic raider and now a casual player with much less time to play wow.

I do not have any data that would back up my opinion, everything is my subjective opinion on a game through a casual gamer in a casual guild. I just want to hear others how they feel about the game.

Gearing process

2 months ago I would start gearing my character and so naturally I did delves then some lower level mythic plus and some profession gear. All of that could get to me to 623 ilvl. Right now it’s really hard to progress any further.

The most notable problems that I see are:

  1. Queue times to join +8 keys. That is just the biggest time consuming thing, you can’t even automatically join these keys, you have to manually search, apply with limit of 5 dungeons.
  2. Reward for depleting a key. The depletion is actually really frustrating as you receive only 5 crests and 70 gold.
  3. Leavers that will waste your +40min of time (queue + dungeon)
  4. The amount of preparation to complete a dungeon as any role. That would include watching a guide for every dungeon, getting weak auras, addons for boss timers, addons for your own CDs. This is just skill issue, but the problem is that casual players need to spend a lot of time outside the game itself to be a better player.

Almost all of these issues are solved by playing with premades/guild members. No problem with queue times, no problem with leavers, slight problem with depletion but voice communication helps a lot, especially for roles like tanks and healers.

Unfortunately that is not the game that many people play, they don’t have time to commit to join a guild, they don’t have friends (my friends don’t want to commit so much time into wow).

Community response

To combat these issues players that are more experienced figured out a way to help casual solo players. Individual players started boosting people for one wow token (I did that too) and then these small groups turned into huge boosting communities that would profit on non existing progression system for casual players.

The boosting is not a problem, the root cause of the problem is the lack of system that will allow casual players to progress the endgame content.
Emergence of a whole boosting discords and huge amount of gold that they make shows how many people actually want to play dungeons/raids and experience harder content. It is just easier to farm gold than join a guild, read guides, learn to play, download addons, make weakauras, make UI

My proposition

  1. There should by a matchmaking system and a progression system that would allow players to queue for dungeons and also raids (even mythic).
  2. There should be an ingame system that would teach players of important game mechanics
  3. There should be more visual cues when something bad is going to happen
  4. There should be no raiding addons and dev teams should not rely on people having them to design encounters

The main goal is to teach people how to play the game in the game itself and do not require complicated addons. Blizzard should allow completing all endgame content by a willing casual player.

Sad truth

I removed every emotional paragraph from the text above and I’ll just leave it here.

Blizzard is of course aware of all these problems, they all hate boosting in their own game but the amount of money required to fix it is too much.

Wow from revenue perspective is obviously a huge success. Millions of copies sold, millions in sale from a store mount. Any profit from wow is put into other projects there won’t be any innovation in wow.

I specifically didn’t mention pvp state up to this point to show that this game mode is already dead. Blizzard lost an entire community of pvp players and sadly nobody cares about it.

The casual players are left with farming gold for boosts, the m+ enjoyers are left complaining that nobody wants to play higher keys, the pvp elite streamers should already find a new job.

4 Likes
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As long as there’s a limited resource, the Key, I vehemently oppose to the idea of an automated system that’s susceptible to trolls and time wasters.

If there weren’t keys then sure.

3

I would like to have some more generic visuals of certain mechanics. Like a certain swirly is a soak and another a dodge. Or casts/channels show it is a tankbuster or a regular bolt with specific colors of the castbar.

Overal not a fan of a queue. As a healer i would never ever use it and i think a queue would only result into a dissapointment.

Build ingame it would be nice to have better customisations of buffs and debuffs, and probably mob-nameplates. What would be wrong with something like an icon on a mob with a wizard hat when it is a caster?

4

good lord man, you ever seen a bad pug group? people will be leaving higher raid groups just like they leave M+ when things go wrong.

yasss, I agree with this one, tho I’m sure some people will be upset about it “i´ve come to play and to learn with experience alone, not to be told what to do” (but they be the ones with dbms and rotational addons :dracthyr_hehe_animated:)

5

I can only partially agree with that.

Queue times may no long be a thing, but you also can’t play when your premade ppl aren’t online, also forcing you to wait during that time. That’s usally my problem even if I have contacts to form a premade or am in a guild; it limits your flexibility regarding play times & which characters to play greatly.

Leavers; seems like a clear win, but on the other hand, you’re also stuck with “bad” ppl because it would be “mean”/unsocial to tell them to get better or to simply refuse to play with them, which - while reducing the leavers problem - leaves you stuck with teammates that hamper your progress.

Depletion is still the same problem - you’re forced to play a key you don’t gain anything from - and voice reduces the fun while playing if your mates keep blabbering about off topic/personal nonsense.

I no longer think that’s a good idea, or it would require a very good matchmaking system and blizz has proven time and again that they are incapable of such. M+ comps require more than just Tank + Heal + Dps, and with the genius idea of putting interrupts and utility abilities into talent trees (which means many ppl don’t skill them) it wouldn’t even suffice to keep trakc of the DPS’s class to fill upt those spots with an adequat amount of cr, bl/ht, interrupts, dispells etc etc…

Yes; target dummies should be remodelled to allow access to dungeon/raid encounters in a pracice mode fashion, so one can actually train dealing with that stuff specifically while not endangering the progress of a whole raid/dungeon group.

Yes and no - but they certainly should make up their mind whether “huge circle on me” means I have to run OUT of the group or INTO the group to prevent deaths etc.

I can totally agree on that one. Having to artifically increase the game’s diffculty just because many players use (partially extremely complex) addons to make it easier, while others don’t (for what ever reason) is utterly silly.

6

All of my points are very difficult to implement and each of them would involve many hours of discussion.

My goal would be for blizzard to focus on solo play, queue systems and matchmaking instead of guild communities. I also understand that simply adding m+ queue is not enough as the problem is much more difficult.
My POV is subjective because I am a pug player. I don’t want to commit a fixed time of my day to raiding, doing m+ etc. I would like to login at a normal day time, play some m+ and log out.

There is also many negative effects that may happen and without any data it’s impossible to predict how players will react to these ideas.

7

That’s an important root cause and it was confirmed by Blizzard. Because of addons popularity, they had to review their boss designs which was not challenging enough for players. The result is an escalation of the problem, like the old chase between cops and thieves but on another level.

Unfortunately a ban of DBM, WA or other addons would be difficult to put in place now. And the only real way to fix it, is to just not care anymore about these top players. But since they are using these players as advertisement and marketing materials for the game, it would be shooting yourself in the foot…