Are you referring to both mythic raiding and M+ as the generic mythic above? There's like levels of min maxers at play here too. I'm sure there are SOME min/maxers that would be just fine with cosmetic rewards. But on the other hand there is 100% a contingent of people who feel if they don't get a tangible power reward for doing the hardest content- it just is not worth doing. Admittedly the worlds first crew has a niche of a niche take- but they aren't wrong. If it's a purely a mercenary transaction- the cost/benefit of doing Mythic stops making sense without power gains to start the next patch. Completely outside of the sponsorship or winnings from whatever for coming in first.
Sorry, I was talking about mythic raiding. M+ dungeons have their similar, but slightly different challenges, as they are seen as an alternate power progression path, which at this point they don't really know what to do about them. Hence the reduction of the item level.
Max had a convo with his stream yesterday discussing the interview thing with Ion where he discussed game 1 and game 2. The context was about PI. Ion's post below
Here's what I think: The world first race has become a mutation of its own through incestuous inbreeding and self-selection, and become an abomination, and is therefore a major detriment to the health of the game in its current form. So, let me explain:
There is too much money involved, both external and in-game. The way the world first raids are presented has an influence on the community, and a lot of wannabe world first raiders follows the out of the box strategies like sheep. It normalizes buying gear and carries. Blizzard should not cater to that, at all.
Also, how much development resources (as in: developer time) are wasted on making a complete raid for the world first race, when everyone is just interested in the race at the last two or three bosses? Only for Blizzard to tune fights and fix bugs on the fly? I have a feeling that it has become an ego thing between Blizzard developers vs. world first raiders, to the detriment of the normal players,. Developers seem to be afraid to tune anything spec-related during the world first race, solidifying the community perception of performance of certain specs even more.
Should the game have harder content for this target audience? Absolutely, but don't make it
the same content, but harder. Blizzard had the right idea with the Mage tower challenges, so why can't we get one or two specific super-hard encounters for the world first raiding crowd, and leave the normal/heroic raids to the majority of their audience? We had that already with Algalon, what the fuck happened?
I think there is an internal feart at Blizzard that only a few select players are engaging with that kind of content, and that they therefore can't justify the costs of developing that content to the bean counters. This is probably how everyone got The Maw + Torghast forced down their throats for power progression. I guess no one explained to them how this works at car companies, where they have super luxury cars (or brands) that never recoup their development costs, but are there simply for the halo effect.
Also, about that "game 1" and "game 2" discussion: At some point the game developers of "game 1" have to acknowledge that there is emergent gameplay and a certain metagame. This is basically inevitable, but I find it totally disingenuous to talk about how Blizzard has nothing to do with "game 2", when they leaned themselves into the community metagame aspect themselves with their own version of raider.io. They previously did the same thing with GearScore. Now you can't wash your hands of it, especially when you see it reinforcing toxic behavior in the community.