Ladders make us worse at enjoying the game, and we keep climbing anyway
Every season I watch the same thing happen. A ladder appears, a number appears next to a name, and a perfectly happy player turns into a person who checks a website before dinner. I say this as someone who does it too. This piece is my argument that the ladder, whether in rated PvP or in Mythic+, is a tool that works best when you decide what it is for.
It is also a place where the conversation about outside help comes up most often. Some players, particularly those short on evenings, look at World of Warcraft Boosting as a way to get past a stretch of content they do not want to spend a month on. I do not think that is a scandal. I think it is a symptom of how much weight we put on a rating, and that is the thing worth arguing about.
The number is a story we tell ourselves
A Mythic+ rating or a PvP rank is shorthand. It says “this person can usually do this”. But shorthand gets mistaken for identity. I have seen a skilled healer apologise for being “only” at a modest rating, as if the number were a character flaw. The number does not know that she keeps three strangers alive through a bad pull every week.
In a season like Season 2, with the dungeon pool changed and the new gear available, ratings reset or shift, and so the whole community goes through the same emotional cycle together. First excitement, then comparison, then a quiet envy. Recognising that cycle is the first step to not being ruled by it.
Example one: the key that was fine until someone said it was not
A friend of mine ran a dungeon and finished it in good time. Nothing went wrong. Then a stranger in chat said, “you could have done better.” My friend spent the next hour wondering what, exactly, had been wrong. The answer: nothing. The stranger had a different yardstick.
This is the pattern I dislike most in Mythic+. A run can be successful by every reasonable measure and still feel like a failure because someone raised the bar in public. Keys are meant to be a shared challenge, not an audition for strangers.
What I do instead
I decide, before the run, what I want from it. Sometimes it is a clean finish. Sometimes it is learning a dungeon. Sometimes it is simply an evening with people I like. When the goal is clear, comments from outsiders lose most of their sting.
There is a quieter version of this too. Some players simply stop applying to groups, because they have decided in advance that the answer will be no. The ladder did not say no; they said it for it. A great many people shrink their own season this way, long before anyone else has a chance to be unkind.
Example two: the PvP player who played for the climb and lost the fun
I know a player who loved arena fights in the early part of the season. Then he began tracking his ladder position every night. By the fourth week he said, with a tired laugh, that he had not enjoyed a single match in days. He was playing to protect a number.
The pattern is not unique to PvP, but PvP makes it sharper, because every loss is visible and personal. The fix he found was dull and effective: he set a limit on how many matches he would play in an evening, and he stopped looking at the ladder until the weekend. The fun returned in about a week.
It also changes how we talk about teammates. When a rating is the currency, a dropped run becomes a debt, and a mistake becomes an invoice. I would like to go back to the older habit of saying “good try” and meaning it.
Example three: the group that carried a rating and forgot to talk
One of the best groups I ever joined had a high rating and almost no chatter. They did their jobs, finished the dungeon and left. It was efficient and, frankly, a little lonely. A few weeks later I joined a group with a lower rating and a lot of laughing. We did not finish quickly, but I remembered the evening.
I am not saying one is better than the other. I am saying that the ladder rewards one of those experiences and ignores the other, and that if you only follow the reward, you will miss half of what the game offers.
To be fair to the ladder, it created some of the best moments I have had in the game. The first time a group of strangers and I solved a tricky dungeon together, the rating barely mattered, but the fact that there was a goal made the evening feel like an event. The trouble is not that goals exist, it is that they quietly multiply until the game feels like a to-do list.
Where outside help fits into all this
So what about those who choose to hand part of the climb to someone else? I think the useful frame is intention. If your goal is to be in the best seat for the raid, and a particular piece of gear or a particular achievement stands between you and it, then asking for help is not strange. If your goal is to prove your own skill, then it defeats the point, and you will know that better than anyone.
What bothers me is the way these conversations get moralised. People talk as if there is one correct way to play, and everyone else is cheating themselves. But a game of this size has room for people with very different lives. A parent with an hour on Sunday and a student with a free summer are not playing the same game, even if they share a realm.
A reasonable test
Ask yourself: will I be glad of this in a month? If the answer is yes, whether you did it yourself or with help, then it was probably the right call. If you will feel hollow, rethink it.
Consider the example of the weekly vault. It is another number-driven system, yet most people treat it kindly, because it rewards variety rather than a single high score. A little of that spirit would help the ladder: reward the person who tried three different dungeons, not only the one who repeated the easiest.
What the ladder is actually good for
I do not want to be one of those writers who tells you to ignore the numbers. The ladder is useful. It shows you where you stand, it sets a common language for groups, and it gives you something to aim at. A Mythic+ rating helps leaders choose whom to invite, and a PvP rank helps matchmaking feel fair.
But a tool is only useful when you hold it, not when it holds you. If you check the ladder out of curiosity, good. If you check it out of dread, put the phone down.
A modest proposal for Season 2
Here is what I will try this season, and what I suggest you try too. Choose one goal that has nothing to do with a number: finish all eight bosses of Venomous Abyss, or run every delve at least once, or learn a new class to a competent level. Then treat the ladder as background noise.
If you do that, the season will feel longer and kinder. And if you still want the rating, it will probably come anyway, because you will have enjoyed the practice that leads to it.
I will end with a small confession. Last season I let a rating get under my skin for about two weeks, and I stopped enjoying a class I had played happily for years. What cured me was not willpower but a delve with a friend, a long evening of nothing in particular, and the realisation that I was smiling. The ladder will be there next week. The smile is the part worth protecting.
That is the argument. The ladder is a mirror, not a judge. Look at it when you want to see yourself, and leave it alone when you want to play.
