I don’t think players should just be handed tier items either BTW. That’s literally the endgame: getting not only an item with a good high ilvl but also getting a set of them that tangibly improves your character’s performance. That should take effort and/or time.
I believe the main problem is the lack of alternative venues. As other people in this forum pointed out, you should still be able to get tier items if you invest 5x the time in solo activities, or do something solo that has a high skill ceiling (and something that most players can’t do). You still have time-gating and the person still gets a reward eventually. That way we protect the precious feelings of the raiders, too! Apparently there was this thing called Titanforging in BfA and many casual players liked it.
But it seems Blizzard hates the idea of giving the players a choice – and that’s my beef with them. Everything else I think I am fine with.
The catalyst does this, though. Also, being a solo player means the need for the power is more abstract and non-quantifiable. (edit: i dont want to be dismissive here, I know why people want tier and stuff, i just don’t exactly know what the threshold is or should be as to not devalue aspects of the game that incentivize group play)
I wouldn’t necessarily be mad if they just gave solo players acquirable tier immediately (though this looks like a step in that direction and likely will be an inevitable outcome based on the way people play the game), but I truthfully it wouldn’t be the way I want the game to go. If it were me, some gear (including tier) would only be available through raiding.
My fix would be to make raiding easier, further incentivizing group content to get the “fun” gear.
This may sound counter-intuitive, but hear me out:
I think solo content flourishes best when players are in healthy guilds that take on end-game challenges. I’ll bail out here and use MoP as an example, but normal (flex back then) was extremely easy, had incredibly good rewards, didn’t need dedicated raiders, and it allowed for people to combine solo and story content (i.e. legendary questline) with social interaction. The power you got from this relatively easy (and social) weekly interaction with the game made the other solo activities much easier (isle of giants, isle of thunder, dailies, timeless isle) because you had the gear that you got from an easy source.
Combining LFR (which was also much easier than current LFR) with a normal raid once a week gave everyone pretty immense player power that translated really well into the open world and available solo content.
I appreciate you being constructive I have seen a lot of anecdotal evidence that people who want to play group content will play group content even if that is not the most rewarding venue in the game.
So IMO the always-there assumption that “making something just as easy to obtain for not playing in groups will destroy group play” is, shall we say, over-dramatization. Same argument can be made in the opposite direction: heavily incentivizing group play has destroyed WoW’s solo playing but somehow Blizzard and the raiders are okay with it. Not sure why one gets more value than the other.
But even that is not what’s being argued here. Me and others would be quite OK if an average raider can get 4-tier set in, say, 10 weeks, and we the solo players get it after 15-20. The raiders still get to obtain it first. No harm done, no?
There’s another alternative: a gear that has powerful bonuses that don’t work in raiding or PvP. Only in 5-man Normal / Heroic (not Mythic) and in the open world. A raider’s 4-tier set bonus will still dominate there but raiders usually don’t go in this content anyway so again, what’s the harm?
I agree on your take of MoP btw. I played part of it – the beginning and the end – and it was super chill at the last patch. Not as chill as Cataclysm but almost. I enjoyed my time back then.
Make all player groups whose preferences are not compatible with one another segregated. It’s happening anyway, you might as well just officially acknowledge it.
I mean, I’ll just point out that the only reason I started posting in this thread was because people were upset that they weren’t going to be able to craft a 4pc from world quest drops 6 resets into a major content patch.
Nothing you’re saying is unreasonable at all, it’s just my observation that group play as a whole is worse than it’s ever been and solo play is incredibly strong compared to almost every point in the game’s history.
Right now, the incentive to form a group and go into a normal raid is pretty low. It’s a daunting ask that tend to draw the most toxic type of player, and I think the solo experience could be greatly improved by making the social parts of the game more accessible and enticing.
I just don’t think this is good for the game, and I think the fact that we both agree on the overall tone of expansions like Cata and MoP being better shows that there is a benefit to moving back in that direction rather than segregating the population. There is room to go in that direction and it’s a direction that is still viable. I also think that from a resource and game direction perspective having group play healthily intertwined with solo-play as I discussed above makes the game easier to design. There was nothing complicated about the MoP formula, we just live in the age of power/speed/cleartimes/AotC/rIO/RWF being king, and if that could change, the game would be better.
I’m glad for the good discussion though, it’s given me a different perspective that I will definitely think about going forward. I really appreciate it <3
Perverse incentives. Making content where it matters even if you don’t pop a performance-enhancing potion at the right second brings out the worse in people. Elitism, gatekeeping and being douchebags – all hallmarks of competitive gameplay since before virtual gaming was a thing (reading about the Soviet balerinas is one super egregious example; it was a practical torture to be there).
If there are so many issues with the group play then maybe it’s time for the drawing board. Corporations not having balls is one of the top reasons they become irrelevant and die (albeit slowly and that gives excuses of millions of professors in the forums to claim that you’re wrong for saying it).
I believe we’re mostly saying the same thing but at the same time I believe the population is already heavily segregated anyway. So I don’t think things can get much worse than now. And that Blizzard might as well just make “world content solo player” gear and be done with the eternal conflict because solo players find all sorts of creative ways to get good gear regardless (much to the ire of the Mythic+ and raiding players because they “don’t want to see my kind there”). So again, the conflict is there, the segregation is there, there exists a fix and I say feck it, let’s try that fix – things can’t get worse than they are now.
And as a programmer, the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my work are exactly on that vein: agonizing over a fix not being perfect, delaying any fix until we find the perfect one and oops, some months later the business closes doors because our CTO was an idiot who didn’t manage to stomp his foot at the floor and say “SHIP THIS HALF-WORKING FIX RIGHT NOW!”. I learned my lesson but somehow Blizzard doesn’t. It’s sometimes super disheartening to watch a big corporation with big budget be unable to to do what teams of 5 good programmers can.
well in my opinion it should be for patch progression because only 3 tier loots per boss in a 20 man raid with personal loot where you can’t trade the piece unless you already have it is bad design imo
i would also like to add that them not adding the universal tier token on the jailer was a big mistake and is also why you see guilds completely skipping him
By asking a full 4 set crafting without restrictions you are just basically asking for more renown, player power that everyone unlocks at the same time for everyone without having to do anything for it.
That is all we know. How it will work out in practice, we will see.
I would imagine we’ll have one a week initially so as not to gear people too quickly. But alts will get all those charges available in one go. So if you decide to gear an alt in a months time they’ll have several charges ready to go.
Maybe the tier should not give 30-50% increase. I am afraid tier is broken and is breaking the game. The current tier just have way too much influence.
Really dont want to suck a fat one tbh. That being said if 44+ tier bosses are down and you received a big fat 0 that would be the craziest example of bad luck i have ever witnessed - and again is an example of an extremes outlier.
The wow team cant win i guess. I mean back in the day Tiers was for raiders only ( i know you could buy pvp tiers as well with resilience so maybe this example is not for you as a pvp’er). In this patch they made tiers avail for all and from next week Freaking free of charge. And ya’ll still complain.
Would be nice if you posted on the character who made those 44 runs though. oh by they… You can suck a big fat one
Its been like that since Vanilla RNG will always be a thing in mmo’s. Havnet you heard you create your own luck ? At least do what you can to minimize the bad luck. At least law of profitability you would have a better chance the more you play the game. But to expect that all players should have the same items at the same time would destroy any incentives to play the game imo
This is true but at the same time Vanilla didn’t have 14 levels for a single piece of Dungeon gear (Normal/Heroic/Mythic 12 levels of m+ gear per season) and 4 per Raid (LFR to Mythic). Gearing was much simpler because once you had your piece that was it. This makes RNG an even more bitter pill to chew.
In other words: we don’t know how it all works.
Therefore it’s wrong to claim:
It surprised me when you said that, because I also had no idea how it accelerates, and when you claimed it’s all explained, despite me looking for it and not finding, I wanted to find out.
I’m surprised that you (and others) are not willing to accept the information that is already out. The things you are asking is the equivalent of ‘when will mythic cross realm be available’ or ‘when will the valor cap be removed’. That kind of stuff is never known in advance. What we do know is that initially it will be one item a week. Later it at some unknown date it will increase in frequency to serve as a catch up system for alts.
The information about the catalyst is out on sites like icy veins and wowhead and even today Blizzard have done a blue post.
I have seen a lot of anecdotal evidence that people who want to play group content will play group content even if that is not the most rewarding venue in the game.
And that Blizzard might as well just make “world content solo player” gear and be done with the eternal conflict because solo players find all sorts of creative ways to get good gear regardless (much to the ire of the Mythic+ and raiding players because they “don’t want to see my kind there”). So again, the conflict is there, the segregation is there, there exists a fix and I say feck it, let’s try that fix – things can’t get worse than they are now.
Have a friend above 2800 score and guess what 0 tier sets 