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Blizzard is scrubbing through its new World of Warcraft Mythic Plus Dungeon top-1% rankings for people who paid for carries, World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas says.
The timed dungeon mode offered its first-ever rewards at that level this past season in the Midnight expansion, which ended August 11. Unlike similar high-end rewards in PvP combat, this ranking level in Mythic Plus dungeons was a flat percentage of players, rather than a set score they had to achieve.
Some players paid for the privilege, and the glowy red-and-black bird mount that came with the title. These boosts were particularly controversial, as the percentage cutoff meant that every successful carry removed a player that legitimately earned the score.
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“The team is doing a thorough scrub of this for Season 1 and will share more with the community soon about how we approached that review, as well as the final results,” Hazzikostas said.
A constant grind to keep a reward in sight
“I hit 1% M+ rating yesterday and it lasted for 5 minutes,” wrote one typical person on Reddit just before the end of the season. “The 1% cutoff is going up by about 2 points every day. Ninety percent of +21 [level] groups in the group finder are ‘note’ keys where you need to pay the keyholder to be invited. People are also buying actual boosts en masse because of the new 1% title and resilient keystones making it possible. Playing organically is no longer possible.”
The 1% rewards have not yet been awarded in game. Hazzikostas and associate game director Paul Kubit said they are popular and will continue.
Blizzard recently removed the Mythic raiding mount from the accounts of players determined to have paid for them in the game’s large-group content, primarily with real-money transactions, which are forbidden by WoW’s terms of service.
Carries paid only in gold to specific guilds or individuals appear to be legitimate, based on past Blizzard posts and enforcement actions, but some players caught by the corrective wave in raids say they paid in gold and had their mounts removed anyway. (That’s happened in the past when the sellers who got people a ranking or reward took in-game gold in some cases and real money in others, or when cross-server boosting communities were involved.)
Sales are not the only part of the new Mythic Plus rewards that players are heatedly discussing. The decision to make the cutoff a percentage rather than a fixed rating means that people near the cutoff had to play nearly continuously at the end of their season to keep their ranking.
A percentage cutoff to keep things exciting—but did it work?
Kubit, who is in charge of the Midnight expansion, said making the cutoff percentage-based keeps people playing even as their numbers increase over the course of a season.
“This is aimed at the 1%, which is by definition pretty elite, one of those people who really like to push the upper end of what mythic plus gameplay is all about,” he says. “We want to make sure that you do truly feel like you can do that, as opposed to laying off the gas.”
Numbers suggest that goal may not have entirely played out as expected, however. Raider.io, which tracks Mythic Plus Dungeon statistics, shows that more people played Mythic Plus dungeons at the start and end of Midnight’s first season than did the first season in The War Within expansion (about 5.2 million, compared to about 2.5 million), but the drop-off at the end of the season was actually steeper in Midnight than it was in War Within.
Just 12.3% of players were still doing the dungeons at the end of Midnight Season 1, versus 16.8% in War Within. Those numbers of players remained fairly static for the six weeks at the end of both seasons.
Players enthusiastic about a new reward, but mixed on how it was awarded
Players’ reactions were decidedly mixed.
“That uncertainty makes the end of the season feel more stressful than exciting,” said one typical poster on Reddit.
“The reason a percentile is used is because it correlates with season difficulty. In this particular case 3900 is feasible this season but may not be feasible in others,” countered another in the same post.
The addition of “resilient” keys, which don’t drop in level once you’ve completed that difficulty in all available dungeons, has made pushing ever-higher levels—and selling those timed dungeons—easier.
Player versus player rewards were initially based on percentage, as well, near when World of Warcraft first launched. In the Burning Crusade, the top .5% of PvP arena players were awarded Elite mounts. After players complaints about the grind and rampant sales, that was changed to a fixed rating in the Mists of Pandaria expansion, then eventually to the modern system, which requires a fixed rating plus a number of wins above that rating, to help keep the number of sales down.
Class balance makes earning the bird tougher for some players
The composition of groups that are successfully timing Mythic Plus dungeons has also become more homogenized than ever before. While Raider.io charts show a broad variety of the 40 possible character classes and specializations, the vast majority of Mythic Plus keys over level 20 (required for the 1% title) contain some combination of the same seven “meta” specs in each five-player group: guardian druid, unholy death knight, devourer demon hunter, mistweaver monk, augmentation evoker, restoration shaman and retribution paladin.
You shouldn’t feel forced into any particular meta spec.
Paul Kubit, associate game director
The top tank specialization, guardian druid, was seen 518,467 times in dungeons recorded on Raider.io at that level over the course of the season. The bottom tank, blood death knight, was seen 7,635. Since many keys are run over and over again by the same players, that boils down to an even tinier number of players who actually completed dungeons at this level.
“When we’re thinking about world record folks, then some of the fun of that gameplay is identifying, ‘What if I switch to this character in this particular spec, and solve the puzzle that way?’ But when you get closer to the 1%, ideally for anyone there, we want you to play the classes and specs that you like playing, that you feel like you’re good at,” Kubit says. “You shouldn’t feel forced into any particular meta spec.”
“Obviously players are going to gravitate toward certain specs when we’re talking about the 1%,” says Andrew De Souza, lead encounter designer. “Ninety-nine percent of players are able to get to Keystone Myth [3400 rating, compared to about 4000 for the top 1%] with any given comp.”
Dungeons are designed for all classes to play, but 1% mounts may get more specific
They do watch dungeons to make sure they don’t require a specific class, he says.
“In some cases that’s going to naturally fit—poisons and curses in Altar of Fangs [dungeon], that’s probably going to lean towards [having] a shaman,” he says. “We are saying okay, but what if there’s not a shaman? What does this pack look like? So we’re absolutely making those considerations. It’s okay if this class dunks on this trash mob. They’re allowed to be awesome here—just within reason. We are trying to serve the largest audience possible.”
Blizzard is now figuring out how to implement specialization-specific 1% cutoffs, Hazzikostas says, though it won’t be this season—Season 2 just began—and the details remain to be hammered out (including, for example, whether it would still be the top 1% in that scenario). He mentioned the possibility in an interview with PsyBear that ran earlier this week, then kept an eye on the discussion.
“While the spec-specific title reward is something we’re excited to explore,” he tells us, “there are still a number of logistics, factors, and scenarios we’ll need to account for as we build out that capability, to ensure fairness across the board. But it seems from our initial discussion of this idea that this is something the community is equally excited about, so we’ll share more when we can.”
