Suggestion:
Remove automatic downgrade of M+ key when failing the timer or someone leaves the key.
You can still downgrade manually via NPC in town
Reason:
Will stop the griefing by players leaving keys and will give a good group the chance to retry a good attempt or retry if they get a DC etc.
Please vote Yes or No
I vote YES
Personally I agree. There is even an NPC for manually downgrading keys now.
But I would like to point out some issues that others have told me when I was asking the same that would need to be ironed out.
Scenario #1: People getting a very high key and then repeating with like 1 tank and many healers. This could be avoided by forcing roles (1 tank, 3 dps , 1 healer) to start the key.
Scenario#2: People restarting the dungeon too many times because they wanted a perfect run. I think if people are so competitive, it is on them though.
I see d3 as a role model. For not too long I see again and again posts on different media such as Reddit and WoW forum this proposal. I’m glad more people start realising the problems that will be fixed.
I had also considered an automatic group composition for m+ because of penalties and to avoid rejections. But if the key is not lowered, leaving isnt too bad. No one would really care if no key is lost. Then you don’t have the feeling that something valuable was taken away from you by the leaver and you don’t long for a punishment anymore. The rejection is also fixed by this. Everyone has his own key, can practice this and try to push and is therefore less dependent on other keys ( applications for other keys and groups).
Automatic downgrade of keys goes contrary to a core design principle of this game. It is essentially removal of progress, and when this game was in production in the early 2000s, Blizzard wanted to get away from similar punishments for failure that was common in MMOs of that time. For example, de-levelling players for dying was a common mechanic in other games.
Players do in fact downgrade their keys at the NPC, so give them the agency to do so and stop forcing such punitive gameplay on them for factors that are, sometimes, not in their control.
I dont do m+ basically at all, but my view is that the key should not actually even exist at all. I might actually do m+ every now and then, but I dont have a key. I would have to do m0 first so I think “no”. I dont want to do someone elses key, because I want to do the group so that its the sort of group I want. All that “make your own group!!”.
So what if you can grind it endlessly? Put some limitations if it matters, but even as it is you can just keep doing the keys over and over again, yes?
Have a, say, pilar next to a dungeon… a “keystone”. Select difficulty and go. If you want to do higher key do it by unlocking previous levels. In fact, I personally wouldn’t even care if such limitation didnt exist. Just have a stone where you can select difficulty.
I would not mind if this is implemented, if in exchange you get one or no loot from the dungeon if you do not time it. You can still get a vault for it, just little or no loot if you do not time the key.
I know it is not a popular of an opinion, but so far the only drawback of not timing a key is the key downgrade. There needs to be an incentive to time them.
Can you imagine if you lose something when you die other than couple of gold??? 
with the WoW community???
We would have had new asylums for WoW players only
Doesnt really bother me, but doesnt really take from my gaming experience. I wouldnt mind.
Stares in Soulborne games
i vote no. i want them to completly remodel the system ,
wht they should do is go with thorgast system - where you have menu and you pick the difficulty you want like in thorgast when entering m+ .
people choose 1 dungeon then ? make sure you tune all dungeons correctly then people wont be just runing 1 dungeon like they want to run SBG now - blizzard is not small indie company .
keystone system has been nonsense since its implementation
The reason why M+ are designed the way they are instead of just having players to choose what difficulty they want to run in what dungeon, is that even after whole shadowlands mass exidus for ff14, blizzard still didnt completely adapt their mindset and are afraid to actually let players gear up too quickly.
There is still a little bit of that mentality that players need to have stockholm syndrome with the game, otherwise they will stop paying subscription.
But dont worry, with how the dragonflight is going, it will tkae maybe 1 or 2 more quarters of players going back to FF14 temporarily, to fix all these issues.
well i certainly can
thats why wow was such a huge success . i was genuinly shocked when i leveled back then that when i died i didnt loose like 3/4 of level and like half of gear/gold to other players in the area who would loot my corpse.
because thats how all other popular games operated.
over the years people stopped realising why wow was popular - and it was because it was easiest most casual friendly mmorpg on the market.
kinda why FF14 is king now and wow is close to dying.
I vote to keep the current system.
It is better then Legion’s.
It also doesn’t allow for the reset and reform the party nonsense MoP had with challenge mode.
I agree 100 %, i made a post about this some time ago, and while there were some good points brought up like people would do 1 pull, kick a low performer and simply re queue, the benefits outweigh the losses. This would only really happen at higher levels, where you cannot just carry someone, or is too inconvenient to do so.
Look, no offense but if you are a low performer you shouldn’t even be in m+, you should be learning your rotation, and mechanics.
And if you don’t like that, cry me a river and build a bridge over it.
Automatic dowgrade is terrible, at the very least there should be a charge to it, like fail 3 times and your key will finally downgrade. If not just no downgrade at all other than the key downgrader.
But i guess if someone does a bad pull wipes the group and leaves that somehow means that this dungeon is above my level and clearly i should be double punished for it.
Some people are so focused on minor problems like people kicking low performers and then re grouping that they can’t see the massive elephant in the room.
Kicking low performers is a big deal now? Id say that it’s action and consequence.
That’s the whole point of it though.
Which is, you have to go in there with friends (if you don’t have any, make some) and time the key.
Eventually, when you and your friends become a bit more proficient at doing the M+ dungeon, one of you will have the brilliant idea to try MDI.
I keep telling the fix but they never implement this. They made it by mistake in S1 SL:
In the vault you’d receive the highest key you did, regardless of in time or not.
What could change?
People will still starve for score but they will stay till the end to get the key level for the vault. If you keep leaving you’ll get a lower key in the vault.
Simple as that.
At this point with the trading post, they now encourage players to stay subbed even in drought periods to get all the monthly and long term cosmetics from the post.
They no longer need gear progression to maintain a captive audience if they work hard enough on having good stuff in the trading post
That’s actually not a bad idea.
To basically do the key at that level once and then you simply decide the level of key you wanna do after you achieved it once.
That’s probably the best of both worlds, no downgrade, no bs, you simply select the key and go.
Some people would just do the weekly, but that’s already the case, i for example do that, because i wanna play a lot of alts, so i don’t really have the time to invest on 1 character anyway, and other people would do a lot of keys on a single character.
This quote right here is the star of the show in my opinion.
I think that, when looking to WoW’s future, one should seek to find justification in its past. We are, after all, carrying forth the legacy of that wonderful game from 2004.
That doesn’t mean it can’t change of course, but this quote makes it so obvious that the current M+ isn’t something anyone who designed this game at its peak would have ever wanted in it.
And from a personal perspective I also agree. I think M+ has a very stressful tinge over it. There’s nothing wrong with outrageously challenging dungeons - in fact I welcome them - but I do think this type of gameplay going “hurry hurry hurry or you shall be severely punished!!” is pretty sad.
This is true, however I like trading post. Beucase that is somethign that actually brings somethign of long term value to people who want to play, compared to gear, that is always pain to get and is always temporary.
Trading post is cheap battle pass trick, yes, but it is also non invasive. And I dont even like the items in current rotation. But the idea that IF you want to, you cna go and buy soemthing, is good. They should put in more great stuff like this and less timegating on temporary content.