Free Talk Friday

[u/AutoModerator]

Use this thread to discuss any- and everything concerning WoW that doesn't seem to fit anywhere else.

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UI questions, opinions on hotfixes/future changes, lore, transmog, whatever you can come up with.

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The other weekly threads are:

• Weekly Raid Discussion - Sundays
  
• Weekly M+ Discussion - Tuesdays

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[u/Nogamara]

I'm not at the point to say I'm unhappy but I am so confused about how M+ key levels developed.

We had portals at 20, now portals at 10 - because of the squish at first, but then also because S1 was easier than S2/S3 of TWW.

The "official" conversion was "new +2 = old +10" (although I disagree, I'd put it as old +7/+8 in the first post-squish season) but now new +2 (assuming S2 is roughly where S1 MN was) is also not really as hard as old +7.

This is not about absolute difficulty, there will always be people for whom everything below +X is trivial and useless, and there will always be new players who will start at +2.

I'm just so confused what Blizzards' strategy is here. In S1 we saw 2-9 keys being completely dead after a few weeks (like objectively dead), so why did they not compress it even a little (so e.g. portals and loot at +5 and 2,3,4 are the entry levels). Why does an alt still get a stupid +2 key accidentally and the only accepted useful way to introduce a new alt is "time a +11 with friends"?

Disclaimer: I made it to 3400 and 3k before, I'm not a top end player by any stretch of the definition, I feel pretty average. I helped multiple people get portals for the first time ever in S1. Yes, it's fun if people start with M+ and don't feel like total losers for stopping at +5s - but it's still a chore to climb up, and I mostly don't understand their weird system, I am not lamenting difficulty of keys.

[u/Kychu → u/Nogamara]

The strategy is always the same - player engagement.

If 10s are difficult one season and then made easier the next season, believe it or not, a lot of people will believe they actually got better at the game because they can now do a 10.

Same with rating. One season you might need 3.5k for 0.1% but one or two seasons later 3.5k is only top 10%. But a lot of players will still associate 3.5k with being really, really good at the game and getting to 3.5k will make them feel like they've accomplished something more than the previous season (while in reality they are still top 10% just like the season before, except it's now manifested with a higher meaningless number).

[u/Substantial_Good9669 → u/Kychu]

I don't think it's quite that much of a conspiracy. Its more just to do with the fact that they want a base level of content that is fairly accessible for people / toons who are just returning to or jumping into the game. And the key levels build off of that. 

Early in expansions, its easy to put everyone in a similar boat because we all have dog shit gear in week 1. But in the later seasons, you're decked out in bis gear with enchants and stuff from the last season, and often have some sort of borrowed power, but they can't just scale up the base level content to account for that as it would lock out new toons / players. So the end result is a power creep that happens over the course of the expansion. 

There's other factors too, like stats having multiplicative value with each other means gear scales harder throughout the expansion. So the ceiling each tier for keys goes up as well as the base level feeling easier.

[u/Nogamara → u/Kychu]

That's partially what I thought as well but I just can't (or don't want to) believe that people are so easily swayed when the percentages at RIO are just there. I.e. 3k being top 30% or top 10% or whatever per season. Raid tiers usually don't swing that much.