I used to love raiding many years ago when I was in school/college and had infinite time and energy to mess with guilds, but raids are effectively dead content to me now when I don’t engage with any of that. I don’t want to send applications, join Discords to look at cliques spamming memes and apply for scheduled raid times, and I don’t want to schedule my personal time around it so I just stopped raiding.
I was able to muster some energy for it in DF to at least see and beat normal tiers, but this time it’s just too much to go through that again. LFR is the only queued raid content and it’s effectively non-content because it has no purpose aside from seeing the raids and completing the quests. It’s too easy, nobody puts in any effort because they don’t have to, and the fights are slower than playing with a normal group on normal difficulty. But there’s really no reason for it to be this way, and no reason why we don’t have normal or even heroic as queuable difficulties provided there are some qualifiers to queuing.
I’m willing to bet there are many people with a skill level that would allow them to beat normal and even hc, who don’t want to play to a certain schedule, and being able to queue would give them actual gameplay for an area of the game that devs put a lot of work into. Give people a proving ground-type challenge to make them eligible to queue so you don’t get LFR dwellers, and let people play the game. Also, why are M0s still not queuable?
Raids outside of LFR are not queue-able because in wow you cannot have difficulty and an automated system putting together groups. This is because the moment there is one the blame for groups failing will be Blizzard’s responsibility to fix.
Just look back on the history of how LFR difficulty changed over the expansions.
It is for that reason why m0s are not queue-able either. It would mean Blizzard has to nerf the difficulty to the ground so the failure rates do not go above a certain percentage.
Not to mention that m+ dungeons scale off from the base stats of m0, so Blizzard can’t even nerf it without needing to detach it from the M+ system.
As far as I recall there was a massive negative backlash on the last time a proving grounds system was in place, so I doubt Blizzard will go back to it, even though it could help gradually increasing player knowledge.
Pugging is your only option there if you do not want to commit to schedules, or joining a community where raids are announced ahead of time and anyone can join it, but those raids have a first come first serve policy with raid spots.
I do think there is a gap in the market for some kind of queueable dungeoneering that isn’t M+.
But the PuG scene is just so toxic that I don’t know how one could be developed that would be fit for purpose. Randoms just can’t do challenging content in groups. So the content would end up being less challenging content.
But a large part of why players want to do M+ is for the rewards so you have to make this as rewarding as M+ to get players to move from m+ to this new system.
Then there’d be arguments of fairness in effort / reward ratios.
You may have people with a skill level that would allow them to clear normal or HC with there guild no problem but that simply does not translate to random groups.
Who is gonna be the leader?
The shotcaller?
There are a lot of thing that are different when you raid with a group of friends/guildis