Not only that but back in the day you could spend hours upon hours spamming the chat to get into a group only it to be disbanded because try hards could not handle a single setback that could happen.
Ill take LFR every time over countless hours of trying to get into a raid group or building my own group.
I did like the more community feel of old style of grouping but i did and do hate to waste my time trying to get group together that might fall apart because people are too impatient and self centered.
Some people hate LFR because they think it makes their way better Heroic/Mythic gear less special. Because people won’t be inspecting them and worshipping them because they also have kinda ok gear. But what they don’t realise is no one cares about them anyway and no one is looking at their gear thinking Oh wow amazing player or whatever.
Same as when a new mount comes out either via store or just achieved in-game and it just so happens you find that person in somewhere like Orgrimmar or Stormwind (wherever there is lot of people) on that mount showing off to everyone. But although they think people care, hardly anyway even cares that this person is on this new mount, so it doesn’t make you special.
i don’t hate it as i don’t do it, doesn’t affect me
i ran NYA lfr a few times when i came back to WoW, somewhere in March 2020.
It was a fustercluck to say the least, witnessed 4 stacks of determination on simple bosses such as Vexiona. How do you get 4 stacks in there, when even the breath barely scratches you? IDK. N’zoth was just impossible to kill, 10 stacks of det and still no hope of defeating it. You can’t outperform MC mechanic with simple HP/DMG buff.
I just advise people to steer clear from it, as I see it as a huge waste of time. You need to wait an hour for the queue, then the raid is massive uncoordinated mess, with people playing half-asleep. I was #2 on DPS meter with ilvl that barely met the queuing requirement.
Plenty of casual guilds doing normal and heroic modes which are not demanding any min/maxing. Just basic knowledge of your spec, its toolset and the boss encounter abilities.
I look at them and think cool looking set might pick it up in the next expansion when i can just rofl rofl the raid by my self also cool mount ill take that too and i never have to compete against other people to get those.
Because people look back on those “horrendous” experiences from the past with a smile. “Hey, remember that time we spent 3h in Wailing Caverns, our bad tank kept pulling and pulling, we kept wiping, you had no mana left and then he rage quit?” “Yeah man, good times.”
Chances are you’ll never again have the same discussion about raiding or doing dungeons. Not because people are all super good at mechanics and know the game (there are some bad players still) but because LFD and LFR are ridiculously easy, require 0 communication and 0 effort. It’s basically auto pilot mode.
Like I said, I think it’s a good thing it exists. I mean, I played Classic but honestly I cba to run all the way to Scarlet Monastery, waste 40min gathering a group of randoms , wasting another 40min traveling, only to die to Hordes on the way, die to trash inside and also die to Herod couse running is hard.
Is RDF fast, easy, economic and way less headache than the alternative - yes! But it also takes away from the social aspect of the game. You might as well be playing solo with 4 bots in your party.
Might be so but i don’t have to listen the whispers from people who want everything they see drop from grey items to mounts.
That got old to me 10+ years ago and have not bothered to do raiding ever since atleast in LFR and doing legacy raids i can go and relax/do raids in my own pace.
It is limited to outside of content, not during it.
You chat before the pull in raids, you chat before the mythic dungeon. You try chatting during it and see what happens (remember, we’re talking with random here, as the thing being “lost” is the ability to be social with randoms, even the LFR hero can chat to people in a guild after all)
Nobody talks during mythic beyond bare minimum (in a PuG)
Nobody chats random rubbish during a PuG nor/her raid during the pull.
This stuff happens before the pull, before the dungeon. This is all stuff people can seek out on their own if they want to.
People chatting because they need to spam LFG or whatever is social in the same way calling an interaction with a checkout worker who goes through the “company checklist” of “Hi, how are you today?” social. It’s contrived.
Genuine interactions borne of player desire still exist in wow and always have. The only thing that is gone is contrived interactions - people making small talk in the waiting room.
The playerbase of MMOs has evolved from old EQ/DnD players into one of those guys aged plus the fortnite generation. That is why social interaction is different now. Adding an additional way to raid that has no impact on the others that still use the same old methods has not changed that.
Adding a cycle path next to a road doesn’t decrease the amount of cars being driven necessarily because they’re already getting to work on time, but it will increase the number of cyclists from the people who used to walk.
I always hated dungeons in vanilla with passion.
Mobs hit too hard, and had way too much HP pool.
I always preferred outside content even when I was playing with my guild.
I can safely say about 90% of this character life was played outside raids and instances.
I was a vicious circle.
Because I spent more time outside, I was inexperienced and made hundreds of mistakes.
Worst one was not calling my pet to stop attacking a ZG boss that required the whole raid to stop attacking the boss, except for the tank.
Hundreds of hours spending questing and I never had to call my pet off.
Needless to say we wiped and I learned the hard way to that you need to learn when to stop attacking.
In our days love queueing and do Dungeons.
They are easy to join and I love the experience of never knowing, what type of group I will be grouped with.
It can be a good group, that feels almost as you are being carried or it can be a challenging group where you are required to share your opinion, when things are not working.
I can safely say retail players are more used to play as a team than vanilla players.
Because they do it constantly.
That’s why none bothers to group outside.
It’s less engaging/challenging than a dungeon or a raid.
Back to the topic I like LFR.
It’s not like you can go there AFK abd get free loot access.
If you AFK people will notice and kick you.
None likes a slacker.
You can go there, wipe for hours and coming out with empty hands, just like a normal raid with the difference of being 430 instead of 445.
I still miss the LFR Azerite, chest, helmet and shoulders on several of my characters.
The rest I can live without, because of TW gear.
Also the main point where LFR wins over Normal: it’s an automated system that can put everyone together no matter how many players queue.
In normal mode you are limited by the amount of people making groups and you are scrutinized by your gear/achievements.
Why people hate LFR ?
I guess:
It removes the exclusivity we had in vanilla.
I can say I only got to see MC and ZG and AQ 20 during that period.
You don’t have to join a guild in order to see content.
Makes their epic sets less valuable.
They probably have less people applying for their groups as a result of that.
They only want good/best players on their groups and believe LFR is removing a substantial amount of player base from their content.
I can say for me at least LFR is the only chance I have to practice raiding.
Without it I wouldn’t even be able to play in a raid as my time is short and my character and skills is suffering from that.
I think the hatred towards LFR is completely overrated, because it’s easy to ignore it completely. But I also think LFR is a very bad decision. It pushes players, especially new ones, to see all content in the game as something you queue for, and that’s a lie. When you finish the questline, you get a quest that says “kill the last boss in the raid”, and how do you do that quest? You queue for the last wing in LFR and just get it. Congrats - you beat the game… by skipping 3/4 of the last raid and also not engaging with any of the game’s mechanics. The game lied to you, and now it hides its endgame from you. There’s no introduction to higher difficulty raiding. New players are forgiven if they don’t know how to change the dungeon or raid difficulty. There’s no introduction to core mechanics, like M+. You’re expected to know them, but if you’re a new player you can’t learn about them, unless someone tells you. And nobody likes explaining basic mechanics to players, it makes you feel like a noob to have basic gameplay explained to you.
And all of this stems from LFR and the mentality surrounding LFR. That the game should be beatable by people who don’t know how to engage with its mechanics. Again - I don’t hate it anymore, because I can just ignore it, but it is there.
Isn’t it a subjective idea that you ‘beated the game’ by killing the last boss? People do whatever in this game and have their own goals You maybe finished the storyline, but that’s it.
It also takes 6 weeks till the last wing opens, by the way.
I totally agree with this but the game confuses players with LFR. It conditions them to believe that raids are content you queue for, that dungeons are content you queue for. I have the exact same problems with LFD. Imagine this - you get the quest to kill the last raid boss… and there’s nothing to queue to go and beat it. You have to figure things out on your own, how to get that quest to completion.
There’s a thread right now by a player who is completely confused by WoW’s endgame and in my opinion the reason is that WoW misleads players when it comes to that subject. The entire game you’re conditioned to believe content is something you click “queue” and it finds a group for you, and at endgame you never really do that.
If auto Qing raids diminishes players finding their way to higher difficulties, wouldn’t the inclusion of heroic Q dungeons negatively impact M+ attendance?
And yet M+ remains a popular avenue at all levels. Players find their way into these difficulties if they want to. That’s the key, if they want to.
If LFR-exclusive players wanted to do normal, they would. They don;t, because they don’t want to.
So scrubbing LFR simply leaves them with no raiding whatsoever. It won’t create a wave of normal/heroic/mythic raiders. They’d be doing it already if they really wanted to, it’s not a great mystery how to get into normal/heroic raids.
And I see the usual arguments once again crop up that are so easily shot down
“LFD LFR MADE ME ANTISOCIAL!!”
No. YOU did that. A bad worksman ALWAYS blames his tools.
“LFR players don’t need to see the raid, they dont put in the same effort as mythic”.
Ok two points there. You in fact don’t give a stuff about the conclusion to a story, as all the effort in the story was in fact done during questing. You just care about “da lewtz”.
2nd. OK fair enough. If that’s what you want to play. The only. ONLY raid is mythic, and even then, the race to WF. Because sunshine, unless you have WF, you put in less effort than they do, ergo you don’t get to raid either.
Deal?
Oh what’s that you say? You pay a sub and that’s unfair because it would be denying you some content?
Amusing. LFD and LFR users would like a word as they hand out 20k or more gold just to get the privilege of being allowed to mingle with the pros.
Oh how entitled they are the scabby noobs!
Go and watch youtube!
Its animeweeb. It just likes to think it can tell people what it can do or cant do, tells them if it doesn’t do what it does it’s lazy and needs to “git gud” and how much it affects its game and then gets offended if someone calls it elitist, seemingly blissfully unaware why they did so. I wonder if it’s Benjamin’s alt or vice versa, they both seem to spout the same garbage in the same thread.
Have you done Blackwing Lair yet or are you still wondering what my original question meant?
It doesn’t properly introduce people into raiding and can actually do the exact opposite, in letting people see the raids with no effort put in what so ever, which in turn can lead to people feeling like they’ve seen what the game has to offer and feeling done with it, even though in reality they’ve not even really started.
It’s also part of why (having so many different difficulties) gear scaling and stat inflation are so out of control, which can cause imbalance and is why we’re having to have stat squishes every other expansion.
You maybe finished the storyline, but that’s it.