In the comments of a BlizzCon article a few weeks ago, there was an interesting discussion about content. One commenter argued that it didn’t matter whether Blizzard made Mythic+ dungeoning more accessible because anybody who couldn’t already do it “wouldn’t step into dungeons anyway.” To which a whole bunch of people pointed out they looooove dungeoning but felt cut out of the content because it’s not LFG-friendly.
I thought the discussion was illuminating because it reminded me that what people consider “difficult” or “accessible” varies so wildly. The raider types scoff that the content is barely more difficult than a heroic dungeon, but that wasn’t actually the barrier for the dungeoner types in the first place – it was the social and time requirement of assembling a group, of herding cats. As Eliot adroitly remarked, there’s nothing inherently good about a sign in front of a dungeon that essentially says “you must be at least this gregarious and outgoing to play the game”; it’s just a holdover from more ancient constructions. “Whether or not I feel like painstakingly coordinating a group should not be the determinant of whether or not I’m capable of playing the game,” he argued.
What do you think? Are we privileging the “gregarious” when we nuke LFG tools to cater to old-school movements? Is the movement against LFG just privileging a different type of MMO player?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
