So the other day, an interesting topic came up in our feeds: Apparently, at least if you go by the survey, World of Warcraft’s designers are thinking about stripping out the timer limits for Mythic+ as a gameplay mode and replacing it with a death counter, more akin to how Delves currently work. And wouldn’t you know, I have some thoughts on it because I think the timer relates to a lot of why Mythic+ as a gameplay model is a particularly destructive model for the developers to prioritize.
Now, it’s not all of the problem, but I’m not interested in rehashing old points today. Let’s talk in the abstract about timers as a progress gate vs. using deaths instead, the ways that the game is currently tilted to reward efficiency, and what changes could theoretically mean for the game as a whole. But first, let’s talk about the meta that we’re not talking about, because talking about not talking about it is interesting in this case.
The details of the meta for which specs are doing the best or the worst in Mythic+ at any given moment aren’t really important when discussing the design of systems and how they interact because what matters more is the shape of what that meta is going to look like. No matter how dungeons are designed or how the Mythic+ timers are structured, so long as the primary switch between success or failure is a timer, the meta is going to shape around efficiency first and foremost.
To a certain extent this is always true of any meta in any video game; the biggest advantage comes from the most efficient strategy. But what that efficiency means can be different depending on priorities. If you could make a build in a Soulslike game that took no damage, it would be the best build in the game – even if all you could do was plink away at a boss slowly – because you can’t actually lose. That is efficient.
Having a timer, of course, already disincentivizes players from dying because dying slows progress down, and that is, in fact, less efficient. But it also very heavily incentivizes a meta where the key to not dying is always going to be taking the fastest route and killing things as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Swap to death counters, and your priorities switch rather notably. You’re still looking for the fastest route and killing things as quickly as possible, but a slower and safer route becomes better than a faster or riskier route. In fact, notably, the slower and safer route becomes a viable option if you don’t have the player specs or the gear for the faster route. That faster route becomes nice to have instead of functionally mandatory.
It seems pretty obvious to me that this is one-half of the motivation the designers have for floating the idea in the first place; otherwise, there are always going to be some specs that are just not worth using in M+ groups. It opens up more design space to let players be viable even if they’re not slamming through the dungeon as fast as possible, after all. (The other motivation is just design consistency, since Delves already work this way.)
But there are downsides as well, albeit not the ones that people seem to argue are conceivable. For example, if you have your progress limited only by deaths, you can give time between each pull for everyone’s cooldowns to fully cycle… but really, do you expect that to happen? I don’t think a player culture that has long pushed to go as fast as possible is going to be cool with just waiting around for everyone to fully recharge between pulls.
No, I think the more realistic drawback is that the existing problems of demanding flawless performance gets compounded. It’s possible to carry bad players in an M+ run at the moment even if they keep doing things that will get them killed; if you know that your friend is just not good at the game and is going to keep dying, well, you can at least theoretically play around that. But if everything is gated by deaths, it becomes a lot harder.
That might sound like a complete non-problem (“oh no, it’s harder to be bad and get carried!”), but it does have two knock-on effects. The first is players who are genuinely trying but just aren’t playing at their best, or maybe their best just isn’t super great. Instead of being able to work around it and plan for it, those players will be left on the bench. Or they need to stack up on survival tools to the exclusion of all else, which makes them less useful in most gameplay.
And the other problem is… well, Blizzard has kind of tooled a lot of the game’s economy around the idea of people selling these runs, you know?
Look, you and I don’t need to like it (I sure don’t), but this is an indisputable fact right down to the time when Mike Ybarra, former president of Blizzard, was proudly advertising selling M+ runs to other players. And selling those runs for gold has a direct financial benefit for the studio. This is one of the reasons a lot of MMORPG developers have resisted the possibility of RMT like the WoW Token: because it creates a perverse incentive set whereby making it easier to carry a person or two affects the bottom line of the game.
Does that mean that it’s all the developers are thinking about? Of course not. But like it or not, it is there, and if you think that it’s crazy that part of the game’s design could be pushed in one direction or another based on that exchange rate… well, here we are.
Swapping the system to a death counter does push back against this idea and makes selling runs harder. Not impossible, sure, but harder. And that sounds like a good thing on its face, right? But it also runs up against the fact that this is one of the few ways a lot of gamers can really engage with the game’s endgame loop at all. You can argue “there are always Delves,” but if you’re someone who can’t stay alive in a dungeon run, you are probably not doing great when on your own, either.
That doesn’t mean that I think it’s a bad idea; on the contrary, I think it’s a good one. While there are drawbacks, I think that it at least evens out the gradient somewhat and opens up to less-meta picks in group composition without people feeling like they’re inherently sacrificing rewards or prestige. Speedrunning every dungeon is part of what makes M+ such a destructive format in the first place.
My point with the drawbacks is, as always, to be honest and also to point out the ways that in some ways you can’t just solve the problems by changing the conditions for failure. It can help, but it isn’t a uniform solution.