I love how self-important and judgmental everyone gets on this topic...
Originally Posted by Gravy
Lfr is a gateway to raiding. It helps the casual raider get better gear to make fights easier. Shows some of the mechanics. If you are not a casual raider then Lfria not for you. Don't complain about it it is it for you. It would be the same as a casual raider complaining that heroic raids are too hard and should be nerfed so all an do them.
I want to run lfr to get the gear to perform better in my guilds normal raids. We run a guild lfr group on tuesday but I can rarely make it so im stuck running it with all randoms or a few guildies later in the week. 3 weeks in a row I've tried the 2nd half of vaults and gotten pulled in on Will of the Emperor. !st week it took us four tries to finally kill it. 2nd week we wiped 4 times within 5 mins of ther encounter each time. 3rd week we wiped twice and the previous experiences just compounded and made me leave the group. This experience may not be common but its making me start to hate lfr with a passion.
I understand your point lore that it doesnt take much time to do lfr but it takes a lot longer if people are constantly wiping and screwing up consistently.
Really extreme compared to being robbed by having a gun put in your face?
Really Stupid thing to say that, being robbed is you have no choice, doing LFR and paying $15 a month is optional.
Do you go and do drugs because your mates are doing it? what about stealing a car or armed robbery?
That would not hold.
if dont enjoy it, dont play.
Last edited by ZorPrime; 11-08-2012 at 07:22 PM.
Simple answer - if, like me, you see this as an issue of social player interaction in some guilds and not game design per se - if you're competitive, you do EVERYTHING so you can compete at your best, if you're just relaxing and having fun, do what you want, when you want to. It's really that simple. If you're not enjoying the level of competition in your guild, talk about it, make your opinion heard, and if you are still not having fun, go elsewhere. It's a game - if it's not fun, you need to change what you're doing.
I'm basically okay with LFR at the moment. I knocked off all three LFRs in under two hours tueday afternoon and even got garalon on the third try prior to the hotfix. I agree with Lore that of all the things you can do to gear up outside of raids, LFR is the quickest and, in a solid group, least painful. At the moment people are motivated to get loot, so I've seen less instances of people actively not trying or outright griefing. Even so my experience improves greatly if I completely ignore raid chat.
Speaking only for my guild, which is small, tight-knit and pug-phobic, I do wish there was a 10 man LFR we could run together. We did a few guild runs during DS, but when at best half the raid is strangers it's not the same. I understand LFR is at its core meant to pugged and balancing for 10 is a legitimate issue, but it would be nice if the folks in my guild with limited play time (much less raid time) could experience even the heavily watered down version of raiding that is LFR. If the price of that is that it would share a lockout with the regular raids, I'd pay it.
If there a lot of people how likes to only raids, why so much old raid content takes server space for no purpose.
Since Blizzard are implementing level adjusting engine, why not use it to increase the level of the old bosses. That will give tons of stuff to do for the people who loves raiding and do not decrease their DPS.
Let them receive empty gear for transmog, gold and, for example, justice points. For these JP they can buy materials - no need to farm herbs or ore for hardcore raiders anymore.
Nobody is running old raids except transmoghunters. Let these old gear be something honorable again.
Personally I remember the days when you had to farm hours a week to gather the mats to raid, flasks, pots and buff food. I did not enjoy farming at all but because i wanted to raid with my team I did it every week for the entirety of vanilla and BC. So I don't think it's the LFR grind that really makes the hardcore complain, I think the biggest thing is having to run LFR forces them to play with lesser players. Unless you Que with 25 guildies you are forced to play with lesser players and sadly a lot of the time those lesser players get your gear (if no loot ends up in your bag). Truthfully it all boils down to choice, if you and your reasonably like minded guild mates want to be the best and have the edge then you choose to run LFR, just like you chose to fly in a circle for hours to gather mats back in the day. There really is no reasonable solution to the LFR you could get rid of it and displace the people who either don't have the skill or time to raid or maybe you could deflate the gear so much that it would not be desirable for the hardcore raider. I think you should leave it as it is and as it is intended one more choice for players who want to play...
Personally, for me lfr feels mandatory because I enjoy raiding and anything I can do to give my raid group the .1% better chance at killing a boss i'll do which means farming lfr, that being said unless the loot gods hate you it's mandatory for long. As much as I dislike doing lfr due to the people in it, I know if I keep at it eventually ill have all the drops I need from it or better from normal/heroic. already i'm down to 2 upgrades left in MSV lfr and both bosses i need an item off of we also have killed on normal so 1 of the 2 will drop the peices I need, it's a matter of time. So while it is required, I wont be stuck in it for long and in the grand scheme of things it's meant for the people not able to do normal or heroic modes. So use it as a way to fill gear gaps while waiting on drops with the thought in the back of your head that this could be the last time I have to que for it and it's bearable cause the only way to not make it mandatory would be to make it the same ilvl as heroics which I doubt the casual player base it was intended for would like as it's making their gear options worse and personally quite a few of the raiders who are complaining now about it being mandatory would dislike due to it slowing their gearing for normal/heroic modes. just my 2 cents though.
The thing I find most humourous is Blizzard's response that LFR is 'not being necessary to progression', as if they have suddenly decided that a blue post can define the progression path. The progression path is and will always be self-defining. If something in the game gives you a chance to upgrade your character, it is part of the progression path, and there isn't a blue post that will change that. If you are a raider and you are not doing the activities outside of your raiding nights that can upgrade your character then, in my opinion, you are letting your team down. LFR is part of the progression path, and unless they change it in someway, will be probably remain part of it, even for heroic raiders.
In that part the CM communicates what developers says, and they said that 463 gear is enough to beat normal mode, therefore you don't NEED anything else. Where NEED means: "If you don't have you won't be able to", that statement doesn't address the self-imposing need of players to do whatever they can to make the content easier for them and it doesn't even try to.
Or to say it a different way: If you feel you must run LFR for better gear, that is YOUR choice, not something Blizzard forced on you. If you do it for your guild, or your guild forces you to, then that's part and parcel of your choice to be in that guild.
Simple. It's always your choice in the end.
For me, there are 3 different types of raiders, and I think the comments on LFR made by Blizzard's side has truth in it for a portion of the raiding community. I'll explain...
A) Cutting edge or 'hardcore' raiders:
These guys are the ones taking off work for a week every new tier, getting world top 10 kills and all that stuff. You know, the ones actually good enoguh to get sponsors. And in this case, Blizzard is right, for those guys, gearing through LFR isn't needed, because they are skilled enough to do heroics in blue gear. Heck, if they are unlucky on loot drops and/or personal rolls, they ARE doing heroic in blue gear.
B) Softcore or 'casual' raiders
These are the guys still doing normal progression when the next tier comes out, and they don't even care about that. These guys are can indeed progress by learning their class better than to gear up (although ironicly, the best learning ground for raiding playstyle probably IS the LFR system) and they won't run LFR half the time because they don't feel like drudging through 4+ hours of random strangers not thinking the same. It's the kind of raider that doesn't care about their progress between when they log off and are next invited to a raid.
C) Midcore, midrange, average, normal or whatever you call it type of raiders
Your average raider. 9 out of 10, if you are reading this, you belong to this group (or atleast aim to be). These are the guys dedicated to advancing their character in all ways possible. They want to clear normals and most of them are probably eyeing hardmodes to atleast get started on in between tiers. Most of these aren't playing perfectly, but for a lot of them, increasing their skill has become in increasingly difficult task. Perhaps their hand-eye coordination isn't at a muscle-memory level, because thissimply don't play enough hours of raiding to absorb this .. technique into your skillset. Or maybe it's simply because theirconnection isn't adequate enough to see everything and react to it in time. Whatever the reason, they are playing at maybe 90% of what a true hardcore could get out of their gear, but for a LOT of those people getting a gear upgrade in LFR signifies a far bigger DPS upgrade per time invested than increasing their skill level. Heck, maybe they ARE playing perfectly, but the friends they prefer to play with aren't, and they want/need to pick up the slack.
Regardless the reason, for the people in the last category, LFR is a requirement. It's not even about playstyle or guild requirements, it is simply that for these people, doing LFR for gear is a better time investment progress-wise than banging their heads on the boss for an extra 4 hours per week. And doing something in the game just so you can do the other you actually like doing better isn't fun, it's as logical as doing dailies to get rBG/Arena gear. The worst part is that for these people, LFR will probably have upgrades in the next tier through better itemisation on equal ilvl gear as those 3-4 slots of normal gear they still got, so the situation will not simply resolve itself in patch 5.2.
Personally, I'm in the last category (I'm not perfect, shocking, I know!!). And while I loathe LFR, both due to lack of connection to my fellow raiders as well as simply the raid format, I recognise the benefit of doing it anyway over farming 300 stat food and flasks for the entire in the same time bracket, so I drag myself through it. Because the better gear allows me to both occassionally make mistakes and compensate for someone else that makes a mistake and no amount of training 'skill' will allow me to regen the mana needed to cast an emergency heal on that one guy standing in the fires.
Meh, most likely I'll be doing LFR throughout the entirety of MoP, and I'll simply convince myself it's the new food/flask farming (because let's face it, with everyone in a guild pitching in, 275 stat tables are easy to get) and try to get atleast a few guild members along for the weekly horror show. Atleast I won't be needing to do dailies for extra gear rolls, because with the 5.1 faction farmed to Exalted, I should be sitting on enough lesser coins to last me untill end of July for my weekly handins.
Edit: Post turned out longer than expected, sorry for the wall of rant if you read throughit all
Protection Warrior Spreadsheet
This argument is flawed, because by Blizzard's own design, not every option is available to me. Heck, I'ld love to read with 15 or maybe 20 people in a raid group, but Blizzard FORCES me to raid with 10 or 25. I can already hear the counter-argument of "But 15/20 man raids don't exist, so that is not an option!". Well, on a lot of lower population servers, there is no raiding guild capable of doing normal clears (within a tier's normal lifespan) that doesn't require LFR runs. For a lot of the people on that server, that means there is no option to NOT do LFR either. And yes, they could start up their own guild, but talking from experience, starting a new guild on a small server requires more time and effort than just doing the bloody LFR every week, so again, not an argument that can be held against those people.
I do understand that they want to reduce the feeling in the general public that they don't necessarily need to run LFR, but they approached it the wrong way. If rather than saying "you're not good enough to be hardcore, so you don't need LFR if you're in a raiding guild", they explained it more as "We designed normal raids with only heroic gear in mind. It's cool if you do LFR to progress faster, but chances are, you'll just be farming everything for weeks untill the new tier comes out because you progressed too fast", I think a lot of raiders would understand that the timing of new raid tier releases is as important a factor as the progress through them.
Protection Warrior Spreadsheet
For someone who claims to follow public forums, I'm surprised that your using raiders as the main complainers.., while that was true for Cataclysm it's certainly not the picture I'm seeing from both public forums, but also other wow-related forum sites.
The wast majority I've seen being hissy fit little babies since launch of MoP are players who barely even do LFR complaining about how there's no venue for character progression because they refuse to do X, Y, Z and how MoP is the worst expansion ever.., to me that only translates into how they miss Cataclysm because you could literally sit on your ass all day and get gear, and mid-way you could pug heroic raid content with a 99% win rate because the nerf made it another version of LFR (Only bosses had less health then the actual LFR mode due to the nerf)
You can say effort =/= time or flipflop it, it really don't matter, the overall issue I see so far from everyone crying about "issues", is that they're really terrible at managing they're game time or setting up some form of priority on what they want. (Because they want everything inside of a week max)
No game should ever have to compensate for players inability to manage what they want to go for, if that happens they might as well stop releasing new content and just make everything Cataclysm which I'm sure will look great for a fraction of the subscriber base, but it'll also cost tremendously in terms of players moving on.
Buttom line is, LFR isn't required in any way, shape or form in this expansion.., while it was in Cataclysm for tanks at least due to the raidwalls it really isn't in MoP.
For an entire 10 / 25man group dream scenario where every single player might get 1 upgrade in 1 reset from LFR, that would add some additional output across the board on any given fight yes, but it's output you can easily find by making minor tweaks to an approach, or in most cases having players actually use the options to change a talent for a given fight which a lot don't do, at times it even comes down to something as stupidly simple as using a defesive cd at the right time to avoid having to move from point A > B where your able to pump out more dps / hps, and if enough does that, the increase across the board is greater then if your dream scenario happened.
I know there's not been accountability in the game since TBC to accomodate the super-hardcore leave me alone I only play solo even in raid content casuals, but seriously.., take some freaking responsibility for your actions and stop blaming everything that you refuse to do on Blizzard.
You want to raid progressively = Do what's requiried, your choice! Just don't label yourself as semi / hardcore material if your struggling in normal modes and think your being forced to run LFR or do dailies.., the only reason that happens then is because you can't play the game to the required extent that others can and your thinking to highly of yourself, and instead of complaining you should be trying to learn from more experienced players!
Last edited by Banzhe; 11-10-2012 at 05:00 AM.
Hi LORE:
I agree with alot of your views but had to jump in here:
The key words in the posts stating they dont want to do LFR and other content in addition to raiding is:
I = one person
DONT = a negative
WANT = an optional case which infers an opinion (aka HE doesnt WANT to do the content). and not a case where he is FORCED to do it without question.... he and others have a choice to ENTER LFR or not. They are not hindered by the game itself. They are making a META choice.
The reason the blues responded as they did is they are correct. Wether people get BENEFIT or not from LFR and other content...they may exercise a right to not do the content or do it....case closed.
its still his OPINION and choice.
If Blizzard takes it away then OTHER peoples opinion and rights to DO the content are taken away and hindered....so THAT is okay?
Limiting content and choice really is not the answer .... this person and others can type a magical command called "/quit" And magically they dont have to think about it anymore.
Please Lore, i think you are a better player and journalist than to side with limiting content when in the end its limiting choice for players. Just because you dont "want" to do something doesnt mean its "wrong".
I don't see what the big issue is with running LFR every week.... It doesn't take terribly long and already the bosses are dying much easier as a larger percentage of people get to know the fights... Do it on Monday/Tuesday when it resets. This way you run it with other normal/heroic raiders who are in similar situations and actually understand the mechanics....
Personally I find it a good test of what HPS I can do and can measure the delta from the week prior.
Could they not just do this by allowing a normal raid group to set "LFR mode" like the choice between Normal and Heroic. Then this would be available for 10 or 25 mode guilds. Even if it shared a lockout with normal I think it would appeal to a lot of casual guilds. If it shared a lockout it would make sure hard core raiders left it alone, but either way has merits. Play with your friends and do something fun.
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