a not so grand last hurrah

[Merusk]

People don't want to be in a guild just to raid, but they still want to see raid content.

Paelos, this was one of YOUR biggest bitches. "Don't make me deal with 24 asshats when all I have is 10-15 people who enjoy each other's company!"  

LFR lets you do that, and when you *really* don't give a rats-ass about your ilevel e-peen it's the better tool for making it a game instead of a lifestyle.  

The amount of times I had people bitch they were left-out or replaced because they were 20-30 mins late because life got in the way was stupid. LFR stops that and also doesn't fuck people because your last healer had a family emergency so, hey everyone else.. no raid tonight.  Which also happened too often in raid guilds.

You also can't use WoWProgress to track use of LFR at all.
1) It doesn't track guilds unless you register. Guilds primarily concerned about LFR don't give 2 shakes.
2) It doesn't count LFR progression at all anyway.  All guilds listed on WoWProgress have killed at least 1 normal mode boss.

[Ingmar]

10man raiding has done more to kill "community" in this game than anything.

It kept my guild alive for years (and gained us new friends too) for years past when it probably otherwise would have lasted, so this seems like utter bullshit to me.

[Paelos]

Paelos, this was one of YOUR biggest bitches. "Don't make me deal with 24 asshats when all I have is 10-15 people who enjoy each other's company!"  

LFR lets you do that, and when you *really* don't give a rats-ass about your ilevel e-peen it's the better tool for making it a game instead of a lifestyle.  

It still is one of the biggest bitches I have, which is why I push for slider-style content rather than filling fixed limits for dungeons/raids. However, LFR is not a good solution. Now instead of dealing with 10 unreliable asshats to fill a 25 man roster that I know, I'm dealing with 24 faceless asshats who contantly rotate through the system.

It's not that LFR is inherently bad. It's just completely removed the motivation by what used to be the middle ground non-heroic raider to even try. They don't want to bother with rosters, schedules, etc when they can just queue and faceroll. Again, that's not inherently bad, and for many it would be fine. However, the reward structure is set so closely together that giving any effort at a 10 man beyond just doing LFR runs ad naseum makes zero sense. As a result, you don't have tight knit groups, which is the essence of what kept me playing for years. The moment that went away and was replaced by The Faceless 24? I quit within a month.

[Merusk]

No, if you're going to mandate raid times and can get the people to show, you're dealing with 25-(your guild size) random asshats.  With the inclusion of individual rolls you're also doing so without fucking-over your guild by gearing non-members.  My old guild did this quite often at the start of MOP since nobody would show up.

[Paelos]

Oh I'm aware, I've led them as well. It's why we switched to 10 mans, and even then people on the west coast were constantly showing up late. It got to be such a PITA we quit dealing with it.

That doesn't mean I'm willing to accept LFR as a solution in it's current form. I think the decline in participation in 10 man raids is directly related to people saying "fuck it" and doing LFR because the rewards aren't that different.

[Merusk]

Your Type-A is showing.

You're complaining people won't adhere to a schedule in a game, and instead are opting for the more convenient option.  In other business segments this is a no-brainer and understood that's what would happen. In MMO-space it means you're a noob or ruining... something.   

[Paelos]

No. I'm arguing that the reward structure is wrong.

Opting for the easier option is a natural and understood consequence in these games. I'm not saying that people are behaving differently. They are behaving exactly the same. When 10s and 25s were added instead of 40s, more people raided. When they were made mutually exclusive, more people picked 10s. When LFR happened, more people shifted to LFR.

The bar gets lower and more accessible, but the consequence is a more transient user, and a less "sticky" gameplay experience. I don't believe LFR has made the game better, it's made it more accessible. That would be fine if the unintended consequence wasn't the cannibalization of the social aspect to the game, which is really one of the only reasons WoW has had the hold on the populace for so long.

[Rendakor]

WoW has been heading this way for a while. Cross server BGs killed PVP for me; in Vanilla everyone who did PVP seriously knew each other, Horde and Alliance. We'd post on the forums, /wave in BGs, etc., and you knew based on who you were fighting against what kind of opposition to expect. When they made it cross-server they shortened the queue times but at the expense of some server community. The dungeon finder did the same thing for 5 mans, and LFR is just an extension of that.

[Lakov_Sanite]

WoW has been heading this way for a while. Cross server BGs killed PVP for me; in Vanilla everyone who did PVP seriously knew each other, Horde and Alliance. We'd post on the forums, /wave in BGs, etc., and you knew based on who you were fighting against what kind of opposition to expect. When they made it cross-server they shortened the queue times but at the expense of some server community. The dungeon finder did the same thing for 5 mans, and LFR is just an extension of that.

All of which would be fine for a free-to-play game but for a sub fee you want more stickiness.

[Mithas]

Honestly cross server BGs, dungeon finder, and LFR are probably the biggest reason I stayed subbed as long as I did. I was never going to hardcore raid. I had no RL friends playing WoW and was friendly with a small group of people from a guild (of which only 2 of us are left). I was never good at PVP and never had a group to go with. Now I have a young child and even less time to play.

Blizzard is obviously is costing themselves some server community. I think they are gaining more in casuals who stay subbed for a lot longer.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I'm having a hard time believing "casuals" ever stay subbed for long. There is a natural churn rate to these games that always occurs and I believe blizzard really missed the mark and tried to retain everyone but ended up losing that core.

[Mithas]

Maybe casual is the wrong term. I knew several people that started out playing a lot more that tapered off because of RL challenges but kept staying subbed because the game was more accessible and they liked having a good time grouping or just chit chatting with buddies. Does that fit the definition of casual? I think that there is a lot of gray area between casual and hardcore.

[Merusk]

Yep.  I don't care about "sticky." I care about play experience.   Subscription is a nice barrier for keeping out trolls and I see why Nebu argues for it after playing DDO a bit since release, but I certainly don't give a crap about the community as a whole.  That's not what keeps me involved.

You have a hard time believing casuals stay subbed, but all we can do is trade anecdotes until a dev decides to share info.  My Horde guild was packed with folks who didn't raid but played for years, staying subbed and playing when they had the time.  

That also gets in to the 'what is a casual and what is a hardcore' nonsense.  Plenty of 'casual' non-raiders play for 10-13 hours a day between alts, socializing, etc.

[Paelos]

I have a hard time arguing the play experience of LFR is good. If anything it's worse than not raiding, and having advancement options through 5 mans that weren't tied to about 15 fucking faction reps.

[Mithas]

I have a hard time arguing the play experience of LFR is good. If anything it's worse than not raiding, and having advancement options through 5 mans that weren't tied to about 15 fucking faction reps.

I don't do LFR for play experience. I do it to see some of the content I normally wouldn't be able to see and to help me gear up in the offhand chance I might raid. For play experience I do other things.

[Zetor]

I have a hard time arguing the play experience of LFR is good. If anything it's worse than not raiding, and having advancement options through 5 mans that weren't tied to about 15 fucking faction reps.

I don't do LFR for play experience. I do it to see some of the content I normally wouldn't be able to see and to help me gear up in the offhand chance I might raid. For play experience I do other things.

Yep, this. I actually like PVP (in moderation) for a play experience, and running heroics is good too. I'd run challenge modes, but nobody wants to do them, so meh.

BTW, a good cure for being bored in LFR is playing a healer. 

[Lakov_Sanite]

How about just making content that doesn't require 24 asshat strangers?

[Paelos]

How about just making content that doesn't require 24 asshat strangers?

That's my point about LFR as well. If you don't do it for the play experience, and it's just a meaningless chore that doesn't provide anything fun, why is it seen as a good thing in the game? Because you get to see the content? Who gives a shit if the content sucks?

[Lakov_Sanite]

Think of it this way.

1.You can watch a movie in a theatre filled with friends.
2.You can watch a movie home alone.
3.You can watch a movie with a group of people you don't know and who will likely talk/disrupt.

[Mithas]

I don't know if the content sucks until I try it. The experience might not be the greatest, but seeing the encounters that I normally only get to read about is pretty cool. I don't want to run it hundreds of times with 24 asshat strangers. A few times is fine. If LFR was around during Ulduar, I would have been very excited. All I wanted to do was see that place but couldn't because I would never be able to catch up or have the time to do it.

Also, I don't have that much trouble with idiots in LFR. There will always be a few, but I can probably count on one hand the number of times an idiot totally screwed up our LFR.

[Rokal]

It's not that LFR is inherently bad. It's just completely removed the motivation by what used to be the middle ground non-heroic raider to even try. They don't want to bother with rosters, schedules, etc when they can just queue and faceroll. Again, that's not inherently bad, and for many it would be fine. However, the reward structure is set so closely together that giving any effort at a 10 man beyond just doing LFR runs ad naseum makes zero sense. As a result, you don't have tight knit groups, which is the essence of what kept me playing for years. The moment that went away and was replaced by The Faceless 24? I quit within a month.

The remaining motivation (aside from better gear) for doing normals is to overcome reasonable obstacles with a group of friends. If you don't like LFR and want to play with friends, do normals. They're still there, still doable with average players and some perseverance, and still pretty fun.

This is such a bizarre series of posts coming from you after all your complaints about Cata 5-mans. So what if LFR is mindless, boring, and full of strangers? That's Wrath/4.3 Heroic 5-mans as well. It's what you wanted. Your old argument that content is too exclusive when it isn't tuned for PuGs doesn't evaporate when it's applied to content designed for more players. As long as other options exist in the game you are free to ignore LFR/LFD.

[Paelos]

You can ignore whatever you like if you are willing to rework your entire social connections 8 years into a game.

Also 5 mans in Wrath weren't full of strangers for me at all. It was full of people I knew from various guilds, and a network of friends I made through 10 mans, dungeons, pvp, etc. Five mans should be the bar. That's the low end of content where you can run it with 4 other people for a slow reward. Those people evaporated in Cata. If they are still around now, all they care about doing now is LFR because it's easy.

In my ideal world, everything would be scaled. Short of that, I would like nothing but running 5 mans. No more raids, no more LFR, just a series of 5 man content that naturally progressed up tiers. You could make them harder and harder as you went, but I'm basically tired of dealing with all the cross-referenced anonymity the game is obsessed with now. But the developers don't even want to support 5 mans anymore.

[Miasma]

They made five mans easy because that's what the majority wanted and then they created a whole new level of five mans called challenge mode to satisfy the more hard core who "don't care about gear just the dungeon experience and more difficulty".  Then rewarded them with a cosmetic set of gear.  No auto matchmaking for those.

Then they created an abusrd number of scenarios which are three mans in case you're missing two buddies and don't want to have to rely on a tank and healer.

Now they're coming up with herioc scenarios, which have no auto matchmaking lfd/lfr functionality.

I'm pretty sure your raid team broke up over an expansion transition (which many, many do) and are now putting all of that blame on blizzard no matter what.  If I recall you quit fairly soon into cata, sometime after those horrible troll dungeons, were you even subbed when lfr was released in the last tier?

[Paelos]

I was around for the first and last 3 months of Cata, and the first few months of Mists.

I'll admit a lot of it is the fact my friends quit, and the reasons they quit. Some of it is the fact I've done the first few tiers of LFR, and I didn't care for it. In my mind, raiding with strangers removes 85% of what makes raiding interesting. Some of it is the fact they barred rewards behind reputations. Some of it is the fact that they added guild rewards which makes working with other guilds onerous and slaughtered my smaller guild. Some of it the fact they consider dailies and reputation grinding actual content. Some of it is the fact that they seem intent on gating the crap out of everything now.

The fact that it's a bunch of smaller things I used to enjoy that slowly homogenized into what we have now is what drove me and my friends away.

[Lakov_Sanite]

wow is just not fun when played with strangers.

[Simond]

Also 5 mans in Wrath weren't full of strangers for me at all. It was full of people I knew from various guilds, and a network of friends I made through 10 mans, dungeons, pvp, etc.

Your experience was not typical and using it as a basis for argument about how the game should work is selfish.  For the vast majority of the playerbase there is no functional difference between how WotLk Heroic LFD worked and how MoP 25-man LFR works.

[Rendakor]

LFD wasn't introduced until the end of WotLK, so when a lot of us think of WotLK 5-mans we think of grabbing the Heroic Daily then grinding however many more we needed or whatever, all by forming groups in Dalaran the old fashioned way. For me, this meant an annotated friends list, my guild, and a few friendly guilds that I would contact before spamming chat. I met people, made friends, and recruited some people for the guild; it was a much more social experience because these were people you would see regularly. If someone was a dick, they made at least 4 people's ignore list and getting groups would be harder for them, encouraging people to play nice.

Similarly, pre-LFR and when you could do 10 and 25m raids, our guild like a lot of others could field almost 2 full 10-man groups but not quite a 25, so we'd PUG what we needed. Good players joined the guild, bad players never got invited again, but they were people. We all got on vent together, talked, hung out, etc. instead of the faceless masses you play with in LFD or LFR now. Putting 10 and 25 raids on the same lockout made you choose between being a 10 or 25m guild, and LFR made it very, very difficult to actually recruit new players to your guild since anytime you're playing with a stranger odds are they aren't even on your server. You're stuck spamming trade chat or posting on the forums now, because the only time you run into others from your server is in town (even the leveling areas are full of people from other servers).

I'm not getting into the casual/hardcore debate, but WoW has moved to focus on the solo player who just wants to experience the content; they also still support the really high end guilds (challenge modes, heroic raids, etc.) but there's very little room in the middle for those groups of people who want challenging but not dick-punching content and who's numbers don't perfectly equal 10 or 25.

[Simond]

Just replace brutal with "tedious and unfun" and it applies just as well.  Vanilla or BC gear grinds were indeed brutal and this is fluff in comparison but it's still unnecessary and boring.

"Between all of these sources, an adventurous player should be should be able to walk right into the Raid Finder Throne of Thunder within a week or two of hitting level 90, even without touching any of the mainland reputations."

Such a terrible grind.

[SurfD]

Just replace brutal with "tedious and unfun" and it applies just as well.  Vanilla or BC gear grinds were indeed brutal and this is fluff in comparison but it's still unnecessary and boring.

"Between all of these sources, an adventurous player should be should be able to walk right into the Raid Finder Throne of Thunder within a week or two of hitting level 90, even without touching any of the mainland reputations."

Such a terrible grind.

Seems about right for most alts.  I would put it at probably a month tops for a fresh 90 main (since you wont have all the faction +bonus things unlocked to speed things along).   I mean, my shaman alt hit 90 about a month ago, and I am pretty sure I was decked out in nearly full 480 or better gear within 2 weeks or so, what with how easy it is now to get first tier Elder charms, and the massive iLevel boost you get from buying the valor gear freshly available on the island.   Throw in some tricks the old hats learned along the way (like spending valor on useless high level items to break the iLevel threshold so you can queue and then refunding it after the dungeon run, or converting useless JP to HP for iLevel pvp gear and the like) and bringing up an alt isnt nearly as hard as people make it out to be.

And with the new change makeing mogu runes 50 charms instead of 90, that makes one of the WORST grinds if you have lots of alts you want to min max much less painfull.

[Paelos]

Also 5 mans in Wrath weren't full of strangers for me at all. It was full of people I knew from various guilds, and a network of friends I made through 10 mans, dungeons, pvp, etc.

Your experience was not typical and using it as a basis for argument about how the game should work is selfish.  For the vast majority of the playerbase there is no functional difference between how WotLk Heroic LFD worked and how MoP 25-man LFR works.

And? So what if it's selfish? Every one of our suggestions in this forum is selfish by nature. We all want the game to be what we want personally. I make no apologies for that.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Well to be fair, blizzard is very, very rich but the game has been declining at a steady and surprisingly fast pace. I know people just want to say attrition and pretend nothing else is the cause but clearly some things are not being handled well.

[Paelos]

It's because the game as a solo/faceless experience is very easy to put down without consequence. You can sub month to month and then you can quit. Nobody will care. Nobody will miss you, and you won't miss anyone else.

That's the WoW we have now.

[Lakov_Sanite]

It's because the game as a solo/faceless experience is very easy to put down without consequence. You can sub month to month and then you can quit. Nobody will care. Nobody will miss you, and you won't miss anyone else.

That's the WoW we have now.

I couldn't have said it better and shockingly surprised no one else seems to realize this.  Even if guilds/raids weren't your thing I remember rich communities that sprung up around the pvp scene which are all but killed.  There were rolkeplaying guilds at war with opposite faction guilds creating storylines and battling it out open world.  They knew each others names and were either friendly or hated but now? Now you'd be lucky to know people on your own faction for how much you ever interact with people on your own server. 

How are guilds supposed to form when the majority of a players time is spent cross-server with people they will never see again?  I mean if you step back and really think about what blizzard created here, a completely unconnected experience, it's a wonder how anyone still feels connected to the game world.

[Merusk]

They connect the same way they do in other games and social media.  Blizzard is shifting to that paradigm with battle tags and cross-realm raiding.  Or did you miss those additions?   How did you meet the people you liked in your guild in the first place? 

Your complaint is one of an older generation of games. It works the same as it ever did, you can still friend that guy who was awesome in LFR or LFg and do raids and dungeons with him just as easily as before.  The stickiness is the same, spread-out across more servers with different tools for social sticiness.

If you can't find people to socialize with, it's your fault, not LFR's.

[Fabricated]

For me the answer was much simpler; I wanted to do small group content (5/10 mans) exclusively with my guild.

We muddled through Vanilla/BC, then had a lot of fun in wrath, then cratered out in Cata. The main reason was that the content was too hard for us to play with the people we wanted to play with. You couldn't carry 1-2 terrible players anymore, and them getting better was absolutely 100% not an option. Then it shifted from not being able to carry 1-2 bad players to literally not being able to have a single even mediocre member to do normal difficulty raids.

So we all quit. Being able to actually run the content via various means is NICE, but I couldn't do that with the people I wanted to do it with so I quit. You can make the raid bosses die in one hit and mail me epics like the fucking retarded piece of shit grognards whined would happen but I wouldn't resub for it because my friends are GONE.