Huh? i’m not sure if you meant to reply to me. Who said there would be no loot at the end?
I think you might have misread what i said. This is how it works on live. If you don’t finish the dungeon you get no loot.
I made no suggestions to how things work. Just pointed out that the punishment for key level lowering is not necessary because you are already penalised by not finishing the key (aka you don’t get the loot chest).
People want to time keys to upgrade them and get better rewards. So, the incentive to time it is there as well. The key lowering is an added punishment that brings more problems than whatever benefits it may bring (which imo are none).
I remember having a very long conversation with an ex guildie, where the whole downgrade when you deplete a key is a huge waste of time and an annoying design.
His point of view was that if you aren’t good enough, you deserve the downgrade and should practice it lower and then try again on the higher (original) difficulty.
My point of view was the old Challenge Modes from Pandaria/WoD. You had a set timer, gold, silver or bronze, basically +3, +2 or +1 these days. You had a certain % you needed to complete the challenge, so that’s the same. You had tactics, cheeses and routes so pretty much the same.
The only major difference is that you could run a CM, fail and all you had to do was go outside and reset.
Being punished by having wasted your time on a failed key is more than enough. Most keys get depleted like what? 10-20 minutes into the dungeon? Not counting the time it takes some people to get an invite to start with. There’s no viable reason to make people waste another 30-40 minutes just to retry their original key.
Take into consideration that M+ isn’t the most friendliest of places. People are impatient, don’t tolerate mistakes, are quick to judge other people’s mistakes (not their own though for some reason) and are quick to leave when they feel it’s a waste of time.
Just let people reset their key, get a friendlier group and finish their key in peace without having to push what once was a +21 all the way up from a 16 again. And if it really is too hard for them well then good thing they can lower it by talking to an NPC.