Does the 'LFR pays for Raid Development' argument make sense?

[Jtbrig7390]

Until now at least when pretty much everyone who plays at endgame has to do it. The appeal is probably the same but the participation is higher because of lack of options.

You do realize before LFR less people raided right? Because of LFR more people have seen HFC compared to people seeing Sunwell in TBC.

Once again facts stated by blizzard.

I feel like I'm going in circles here. I state facts and people ignore them...

/LoveTheInternet.

[Deleted]

The thing is this game is full of people who do not have the slightest interest in the multiplayer gameplay of it, but yes in the multiplayer wallmart effect, they want to see people there, but not interact with them.
The single player content that the game has is bland, and has like zero replayability, so LFR provides those single players, which are the majority of the population, a content, that although not being at all on par with raiding, it is at least content.
LFR pays for raiding, because if removed, a lot of those single players would simply leave the game, and therefore the general budget for the game would plummet.

[Nermo]

The thing is this game is full of people who do not have the slightest interest in the multiplayer gameplay of it, but yes in the multiplayer wallmart effect, they want to see people there, but not interact with them.
The single player content that the game has is bland, and has like zero replayability, so LFR provides those single players, which are the majority of the population, a content, that although not being at all on par with raiding, it is at least content.
LFR pays for raiding, because if removed, a lot of those single players would simply leave the game, and therefore the general budget for the game would plummet.

As you say, "i'm a single player" of this actual wow. I've been playing vanilla in one of the best spanish guild that defeated everthing on the classic (even with a spanish first kill), that is tired of timetables, farm, etc.

I grow up, i have more responsabilities than before and i just want to see content, see lore (this is more important to me because i have all the books and read evertything about all raid content) and just play whenever i can with all that high guild responsibilty for see content.

BTW you are allow to join a guild and be part of that high content, but if you don't, you can play the last raid of the game without that effort to reach it

[Deleted]

So the main counter-argument from the LFR parasites is that "a dev said it so it must be true"

Ever heard of argument from authority?

OP makes an irrefutable argument

[Jtbrig7390]

So the main counter-argument from the LFR parasites is that "a dev said it so it must be true"

Ever heard of argument from authority?

OP makes an irrefutable argument

Can you prove what the devs said to be wrong? Didn't think so.

Everything made in WoW is on a budget and LFR justfies that budget. When it comes to money you do realize its illegal for them to lie right?

Shareholders are not going to want there money spent on something a small few will use. The return on that is crap even more so when your player base keeps getting smaller.

[Vetis]

I think LFR kills sub numbers because it allows people to see all the content they want without making a single friend. Its the friendships that compel people to stay subbed even when the content is lacking. Once people unsub, its easy to forget the game.

I think this game could go to 30 million subs but the antisocial tools must go. Unfortunately, they added ANOTHER antisocial feature in legion with the DISASTEROUS Suramar quest system. That's yet another thing that needs to be removed but it wont be.

Without LFR, subs would be dramatically higher and you'd have more raiders overall, even if a lower percentage were actually raiding.

Not really, with LFR it also gives these casual players - who are more likely to have multiple characters - chances to run through with different specs and classes and to give them at least some gear. Not having LFR would have them quitting sooner than alting would. 30 million subs is clearly silly - the nature of games has changed, people are far less willing to pay for subs and invest the time and schedules traditional raiding requires.

[ItachiZaku]

There will always be some sort of "top end" generic PVE engagement, all games. The original MMO (in these terms), Ultima, had Despise, Destard for lower things and then Doom for your tops, then they came out with Peerless bosses, Paragons etc. Those who do these things like getting more people into it, since that's what an MMO is about, people and interaction. WoW was never about raiding, it's just a side game like PVP. Everything is a side game, add it all up and you have a game. Quite simple, really.

[Tomana]

The funny thing is though, the more they take away from raids and diminish raids the worse wow will be in relation to other MMOS. It would SEEM that wows niche in the MMO market IS RAIDING as a strong endgame and if not for that why would you not just play another MMO that does the non raiding things better than wow which is free to play with no subscription cost.

Yes, raiding in WoW, is kind of an Ouroboros thing. On one hand, it is indeed one of the niches that WoW can offer compared to some other MMOs. On the other hand, developing content for a minority is not a good business model either. Frankly I don't envy Blizzard right now. They either need get their crap together and develop alternatives to raiding or accept customer losses.

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Sure for full clear groups. Lets not ignore the many groups targeted for progressing players and even the experienced raid leaders who advertise in the forums making groups for newbies. Groups are available. While the average requirements of groups will naturally go up as the majority of the population progresses there still will be groups for starters.

Of course, there are exceptions. Still, for an average player with limited playing time, the process of searching for a group takes a non-zero time compared to getting into an LFR group.

I think catering to the lazy entitled "I want everything because I pay a sub, I don't want a challenge I just want loot" is what made LFR such a bane of contention for other people. In its original form LFR was still "raiding" in MoP it was still a viable route. Now its just a joke and offers no challenge or even resembles a real raid. You zone in, rush through, ignore everything going on and collect shiny

Ofc it looks like a joke, its loot is more craptastic than baleful stuff from Tanaan. You can't honestly expect MOP-level stuff when you get crap worse than open-world content.

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You have to understand the reason the LFR became a joke is because when it dropped tier and trinkets in SoO, raiders felt obligated to do it for missing items. Blizzard felt it was a poor design for them to have players who would normally have no interest in doing said raid difficulty feeling like they were behind the ball if they didn't do it.

Which is frankly a stupid logic. By that logic, you are feeling obligated to do split runs on alts to gear your mains as well. Yet curiously, much less people complain about it.

[AmboWambo]

Post launch dungeons for the specific reference.

We had post launch dungeons in the past and more raids so that doesn't sound like a good reference...

[Osmeric]

With that logic, we might aswell fire the designers and get the investors designing the game. But during the bigger spikes of revenue from WoW there was no LFR. Coincidence? I think not.

This is a well-debunked argument. It's like saying 1960s cars were better than today's cars because car ownership rates were increasing then.

Presence of LFR was not the only thing that changed between pre-LFR and post-LFR WoW, and the decline in subs started before LFR was added, so claiming the correlation implies causation is not warranted. If anything, the causation more plausibly goes in the opposite direction: that the decline in subs led to LFR, not vice versa.

The big change between early and current WoW is market saturation. It's hard to keep growing when most of the people who would have tried an MMO have done so. Trees don't grow to the sky, exponential growth eventually stops, and WoW's growth ended even before LFR appeared.

[Tomana]

Stupidest topic on here.

Yet you registered just to reply? What does that make you, then?

In Vanilla and Burning Crusade raiders were blessed with the most raid content the game had seen.
Subs were going up, people were playing and paying, Peeking in Wrath.

Dude, use your goddamn brain! If raiding was only accessible to a minority, then why subs kept going up and people were "playing". Because by definition, they were playing something else than raids. Maybe it was something else that drew players. Like - shocker - the fact that the game was new and much more casual-oriented compared to its direct competitors?

Then LFR reared its ugly head at the end of Cata and the subs have dwindled since. Coincidence? I think not.

First of all, your facts are all wrong. Subs in Cata started plummeting from the start on, before LFR was even in place. Why? Well, among other things, because there was nothing to do in the goddamn game besides stupidly tuned 5-man (and stupidly tuned healing). That's what made people leave (among other things).

Second, the introduction of DS 5-mans and DS-LFR actually slowed down the dwindling of subs. Not entirely - because 1 year of content draught and DS being... not well received by raiders.

Raiding existing long before you arrived and will return to its former glory once you leave.
So no LFR doesn't pay for raiding. Raids were here long before LFR was. Get over it. Learn to play. Or go play elsewhere.

Yes, raiding existed before, but was a financial sinkhole that had to be changed in some way. When our dear EQ neckbeards running the pony circus called Blizzard WoW crew sunk millions into Sunwell so it could only be seen by 1-2% of the playerbase, they probably recieved a huge and well-deserved thwack on the head and were invited to redesign their development model.

Can't stand casual scrubs

Get a job (and if that's still not enough, a family), you'll suddenly change your mind.

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This entirely ignores the fact that raid dev costs have increased exponentially since Vanilla and TBC where voice-acting, encounter-design, and the dungeons themselves were incredibly basic. The 'inclusion doctrine' of raid-design started in TBC because they couldn't justify making places like SWP where a disappointingly tiny part of the playerbase ever saw past the first trash.

Precisely. I'd like to add that even if the raid development costs didn't increase, making 95% of the players pay to develop content for <5% of the players reeks of feudalism and is frankly wrong.

[Sencha]

Remove LFR = more dev time to develop other content that are more interesting for non-raiders. win/win

[Nermo]

Remove LFR = more dev time to develop other content that are more interesting for non-raiders. win/win

Or just get more devs and get content for both!

[Tomana]

Remove LFR = more dev time to develop other content that are more interesting for non-raiders. win/win

Nope. Time to create another difficulty of the same raid is fairly small compared to creating the raid to begin with. On the other hand, it allows your to spread the development costs of the whole raid to a much bigger playerbase.

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Or just get more devs and get content for both!

Hey, hey, that's Blizzard we're talking about here, not CCP Games or NCSoft. -_-

[Raelbo]

Participation figures in current tier raiding are (data from SoO, using current terminology):

LFR: 70%
Normal:40%
Heroic: 25%
Mythic: 10%

It is safe to assume Heroic players will have taken part in Normal, and Mythic players will have taken part in Heroic. Taking out the overlap, I would guess that about 50-55% of the playerbase raids N/H/M.

I think this is where your analysis falls short.

Participation means to have killed at least one boss. It doesn't mean that said players are spending a lot of time there, and it doesn't mean they're killing the boss while it's current content (eg a bunch of LFR players might come back on do HM normal with HFC LFR gear).

Secondly I suspect the vast majority of mythic and heroic raiders have killed at least one normal boss, normally a whole lot more. Which means that your N/H/M playerbase is around 40%.

Ultimately it's not just about the raw number of players who have touched N/H/M vs LFR, but about how much time has been spent collectively by players in the various modes while that raid tier is current. I expect that LFR has 2-3 times as much actual participation as the other 3 formats combined. At which point the primary evidence supporting your premise is gone, so not much to say.

[Relapses]

Which is frankly a stupid logic. By that logic, you are feeling obligated to do split runs on alts to gear your mains as well. Yet curiously, much less people complain about it.

You can call it stupid logic, but it's literally what the developers stated in their roll out of WoD's LFR.

[Deleted]

As you say, "i'm a single player" of this actual wow. I've been playing vanilla in one of the best spanish guild that defeated everthing on the classic (even with a spanish first kill), that is tired of timetables, farm, etc.

I grow up, i have more responsabilities than before and i just want to see content, see lore (this is more important to me because i have all the books and read evertything about all raid content) and just play whenever i can with all that high guild responsibilty for see content.

BTW you are allow to join a guild and be part of that high content, but if you don't, you can play the last raid of the game without that effort to reach it

I am spanish myself, and i started playing this game exclusively on private servers and only the single player part of it.
Eventually i finished the massive leveling i was doing, and i got hooked with the multiplayer gameplay, dungeons and raids, so i moved to retail in MOP, joined us servers (spanish ones), and i enjoyed a lot the organised raiding at first.
I end up burned out of the massive issues that come with the raiding, and it was 10-man not 25, and quit.
I came back mid WOD just to make as much gold as possible, for making the game buy to play, and i think i have enough gold for affording the subs whole legion, but unlike you, seeing that content and the lore it is not good enough even being free of subs.
I am gonna give those new mythic+ a try, but if it does not work out, i dunno i think i should leave.
Part of the problem is Dark souls 3, it is so good to be able to play whenever you want, challenging content (not so challenging to tell the truth, but compared to wow questing....), the atmosphere is much more appealing to me, and the most important one, i have to make absolutely no scheduling for enjoying it.
My biggest problems with multiplayer gameplay, are the need of scheduling for challenging content, and the sometimes zero rewards, for putting effort into it, because it is a group thing.

[Pieterman]

A big part of that argument also comes from the assumption that participation = success. LFR is easier than any other content in the game, among the most accessible pieces of content in the game, and among the most rewarding pieces of content aswell. You don't really have a choice in what you want to do as a bad or casual player.

Seriously ask yourself what the participationrates for LFR would be if it rewarded normal 5-man quality gear. Especially after the first two weeks. Something that's ment to literally show you the content without the option of failure has become part of character progression. That's why participation rates are so high.

The statement "LFR pays for raid development" makes some sense, but is pulled way out of proportion. The driving force behind the raid development is people that love raiding, not people that love wellfare epics.

[Tomana]

You can call it stupid logic, but it's literally what the developers stated in their roll out of WoD's LFR.

I know, it was explicitly stated by the devs. Unfortunately, that doesn't make that logic less stupid. What they said between the lines is that LFR players are considered second-class citizens and are getting screwed because the Raider "ruling class" does not wish to be bothered with running LFR. That, added to complete lack of open-world content, managed the awesome exploit of halving WoW's playerbase in 6 months.

[Osmeric]

A big part of that argument also comes from the assumption that participation = success.

Participation may not imply success, but lack of participation (at the level needed to justify the cost of the content) does imply failure. Players are not entertained or retained by content they don't do.