Yeah, having the game designed around forcing players through LFR and losing non-raid content because LFR exists is definitely having no impact.
It's not, by definition. It's created by removing content and reducing difficulty to a point that it becomes nearly impossible to fail. The content is designed first on heroic and then mythic and it's intended to be done at those difficulty levels. It's then obliterated in difficulty to create LFR.
This is why most of the mechanics don't make sense in LFR.
That's not how that works. The content is intended to be done in a certain way with a certain difficulty. It's then completely nerfed into triviality because not everyone can do it as intended. Is it also intended for every LFR group to wipe until they have 10 stacks of determination because determination is in the game? Is it intended that you always vote kick people in groups because vote kick is in the game?
Your reasoning would mean that the developers involved in creating the Heartbleed bug should be criminally culpable for the damages it caused.
I like Hot Pockets although I rarely eat them, and if I ran out of Law & Order and informative murder porn I might watch Gunsmoke, and I definitely play WoW. So it's certainly possible, if unusual.
Whether I want to wait for loot to arrive in my mailbox, I dunno, I don't actually mind playing the game, as long as it's enjoyable.
I'm not bashing raiders, I'm bashing windbag complaining raiders.
High end raiders sometimes make the argument that their presence is good for the game, which justifies the focus they get. Well, if Blizzard is designing it so those raiders now have an incentive to do LFR, they shouldn't complain too much. Being preferentially served as they are, sometimes they have deliver on that argument by improving the game for others.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
The day you run out of Law and Order shows to watch is the day the Earth stands still. The demographic group that would watch old episodes of Gunsmoke is at complete odds with someone who would eat Hotpockets and at odds with someone who would be playing WoW, Then you are really adding a 4th level by saying that demographic is also streaming it to their PC. Hotpockets + WoW + Steaming, all work together. Gunsmoke doesn't work with any.
The mental image I paint in my head completely gets derailed with by the old shows of Gunsmoke. I could go as far as the Brady Bunch or the Beverly Hillbillies, But telling me Gunsmoke with Hotpockets and WoW is like telling me you have video of a leprechaun taking a bubble bath with a Unicorn, the mental image just gets broken by the absurdity.
Now back to watching My Favorite Martian reruns, enjoying this delicious Tofu burger while waiting for my Mythic Raid group to form
I probably do more LFR then most of you. At the moment, I have one Main Hunter and thirteen 100 alts. I hate looking for a group, and I am not a fan of dungeons. As mostly, they have no real value after the first week of hitting max level. My raiding schedule is Tue-Wed-Thur 8:30-11:30. This means I raid 9 hours a week against whatever our group can tackle. The rest of the time I am in game, I normally log over to an alt and work on it's gear.
Since, dungeons are useless and I am not going to go wandering in the pugging queue. LFR is really the best way for me to gear alts.
Unless you killed Archimonde mythic without the legendary rings that argument is a fallacy. You selectively branded easier content "not intended to be played that way". The same way someone could blame you that you "do not play the game as intended" if you are not a pro PvPer or a pro PvEr and they would be wrong.
It's not selective. They took the encounters, disabled most of the mechanics, tuned things down that were killing players in full mythic gear to the point that someone in 640 gear could stand in them without risk, and lowered tank damage so much that a DPS pulling threat on the boss could actually stand there and take the hits, without a mit. That's not even remotely similar to killing a boss with at most 15% more DPS, where every single mechanic is still relevant.
No, it's been made clear that they can't, because if they wanted to spend less time doing content, they'd be doing normal.
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
I guess you dont understand the problem of rewarding mediocrity in an MMO. I wonder how successful Vanilla or BC would have been if there was LFR ZG or LFR Karazhan.
Rewarding players for sucking at the game isn't good game design, it diminishes the efforts of people who want to get better at the game.
Content being gated behind difficulty is actually a good thing. It creates longevity for content on Blizzards part and it forces people to get better at the game or quit.
But i've never been a typical LFR player in this game. When i saw a player in full t6 in Orgrimmar, i didn't think to myself, oh man this game is bullshit. I realized that in order to get that gear and that reputation, i had to get better at the game. So did the 12 million other players who were playing at the time.
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Wouldn't you prefer it if you had 1 main character only that you could slowly work gearing up on instead of having 14 different characters that you gear up pretty quickly?
Last edited by Jensxo; 2016-06-23 at 11:11 PM.
LFR is fine. It serves as a great fallback for when you don't have a guild or group ready to tackle Normal+.
Those are times I don't want to see us return to.
I served my time living under the shadows and settling for the scraps of the game during the EQ, Vanilla and BC days. No longer.
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How? Those who want to get better will do so and push forward. Those guys are still getting better rewards than the LFR folks.
Or are their efforts "diminished" because they don't get to feel super special getting to see content that no one else can? I can't say I feel pity for them.
There's no dishonesty there. The content is not designed for LFR, and so by definition it's not intended to be done at that level. Things are disabled which would be too difficult to deal with in LFR, and anything that could kill you is either removed or nerfed to the point that it doesn't matter. It's not even tested by players. They just nerf things, have some internal team run through it (who ostensibly could actually do it on heroic, and so found the LFR version trivial) and hope that's enough. By contrast, we actually test both heroic and mythic, fairly extensively, to test that mechanics work, to find what tuning is reasonable, and to find bugs. The only exception to this is final boss bonus mythic mechanics since testing this would undermine the world race and surprise that Blizzard wants to keep intact, so as we saw in Archimonde, some things end up with tuning issues.
You can see this just this last tier in LFR Archimonde. The fight was identical to normal/heroic but with certain mechanics disabled or nerfed to the point that they didn't matter, but because the effect of some of these were intended to cause raid wipes in heroic, not just due to a single blow to one person or the raid, their interactions made their way into LFR and caused that same effect there. Shadowfel Burst was causing enormous damage since players in LFR are generally unaware of their positioning and the timing of mechanics and it was multiplying a small amount of easily survivable damage by 10+ and instantly killing half the raid in extreme cases. The nether was both killing tanks because nobody went down to kill the mini or the star while simultaneously healing Archimonde, reliably causing wipes. They had to completely change how the mechanics worked and redesign the fight for it to even be reasonable for most people in LFR, even if it was just a trivial version of what's in heroic. You can also see it in the way they force a group comp of 2 tanks / 6 healers / 17 DPS. How many times have you seen a tank (or even a DPS) tank the boss after one of the tanks dies to a successful kill? How about 3 of the healers dying or not healing at all and yet the raid having zero risk of dying due to damage? They prescribe a fixed raid comp that should just work always but which is excessive in virtually all cases but don't design the content to require that or anywhere close to it. And that's detrimental to the queue times, often times massively so (sitting in a queue for 30+ minutes waiting for the 6th healer). Meanwhile in mythic, the devs actually say that if you're running less than 4 healers on progression that they screwed up the tuning. They intend for you to have at least 4 healers playing 100%, though of course this sometimes varies fight to fight, you definitely don't 1 tank and 1 heal fights in progression reliably.
I don't really care if people around here take me seriously because 99% of you are so bad or ignorant about things in this game (and playing well in games like this in general) that you can't possibly have a clue what you're talking about. You can see this readily in this very thread, someone made the analogy that LFR is to mythic as mythic is to mythic with a little more gear than the world first guild has. That's the kind of ignorance you'd expect to see out of someone who has 1 wing of LFR cleared and otherwise hasn't done anything else in WoW on the official GD forums.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"