This game needs to be harder

[Sindele]

It might sound unintuitive, but making things harder at the baseline in MMOs doesn't actually get rid of people who don't know how to play their class all that well, historically. It doesn't even really gate them very much, because there's always ways to slip through the cracks and get carried or get lucky or just plain bash your head into it until it somehow works. You can go all in on systems like mythic+, but people still find ways to game scores and sneak through there too, and you get a whole heaping serving of fractal toxicity along with it.

Basic competency testing for boosters, sure, that makes sense. Beyond that? Lot of babies in that bathwater - be careful what you're throwing out.

[Renathras]

It might sound unintuitive, but making things harder at the baseline in MMOs doesn't actually get rid of people who don't know how to play their class all that well, historically. It doesn't even really gate them very much, because there's always ways to slip through the cracks and get carried or get lucky or just plain bash your head into it until it somehow works. You can go all in on systems like mythic+, but people still find ways to game scores and sneak through there too, and you get a whole heaping serving of fractal toxicity along with it.

Basic competency testing for boosters, sure, that makes sense. Beyond that? Lot of babies in that bathwater - be careful what you're throwing out.

This.

People only say they want harder content until every standard dungeon roulette takes 2 hours. Then they start only doing them with premade groups, defeating the whole point of the roulette in the first place, and leaving a lot of very disgruntled players that can't clear once all the "good" players leave the ques, leading to pushback, lots of people leaving the game, which then leads to nerfs, which then upsets the people who ARE running the premades (and enjoying the difficulty, but only in their premade groups), which leads to them leaving the game, which leads to the most hated expansions in a game's history.

Standard content that is run over and over shouldn't generally be too hard since that just leads to this chain of disaster playing out. It doesn't actually increase player skill, it just makes people have to be even more tolerant of it or makes the game collapse.

Now, when it comes to OPTIONAL content (I wouldn't consider 24 mans optional at this point since they're so needed to unlock other stuff, nor 8 man Normals since they're so essential for a lot of the story and world building), there's more leeway. The optional, non-MSQ dungeons (there used to be one (Hard) each patch, now we just get the two in X.0 and then no more...), Extremes, Savages, Ultiamtes, sure. We really need something between 24 mans/8 man Normals and Extremes as a step across that gap, though. Hard dungeons and Hard Trials could work well for that, but for whatever reason, they don't.

[Shurrikhan]

You can go all in on systems like mythic+, but people still find ways to game scores and sneak through there too, and you get a whole heaping serving of fractal toxicity along with it.

This seems a bit of an overstatement. While, yes, players will find ways not to learn to the degree others would, it's not that huge a gap, nor a particularly large reason for toxicity as long as ilvl isn't the only way people have to estimate a player's likely performance.


In systems like M+, people finding ways to "game" scores and "sneak through" there... are simply progression slower. They're padding their ilvl more relative to the content than do more skilled players.

Which, given that they're still producing the necessary throughput (even if needing 20+% more gear to meet those needs than more skilled players would, and therefore having to spend far more time at each upgrade step so they can fill out their missing slots before climbing higher)... is fine.


While others learn to jump, some may instead --in part-- paint the soles of their shoes or step in shit until its stacked thick enough to walk over the hurdles as if on stilts, but... that's kind of making a mountain out of molehill from players simply progressing at their own pace.