What's the point of LFR these days?

[ComputerNerd]

LFR is there to let people who are 1. Unskilled 2. Lazy 3. Entitled 4. Intimidated to "see" the raid.

So why do ignorant, elitist, and also "entitled" people demand that they are further catered to specifically and still do LFR ?

For those who refuse to do any social interaction with the other players of the Game.

Raising requirements, segregating the community more and yet it is us who are being "anti-social".
No.

Social is about choosing to interact positively with others.
There are more tools than ever, but more effort from some close themselves off in ever smaller groups while yelling that everyone else is to blame for it.

[Wingspan]

I can get better gear from WQ's then from LFR. The rewards in LFR are just fine for the difficulty level.

Has anyone else noticed that since they reduced LFR rewards, the number of LFR complaint threads (about having it in game) have really taken a dive? You still see them of course, but they used to be rampant on the official forums... and now they are all but gone.


Funny how decreasing item levels had such a profound affect on this when so many other reasons were always given for why it was bad. All of which reasons still exist, but somehow the rage has subsided. So it would seem that MOST of it was really about the gear all along.


And to support that theory, now all the player hatred has been turned towards RNG (mostly legendaries), probably because it is another possibe low-skill avenue for gaining power... while LFR seems forgotten by comparison.


I am not picking on you here, btw... your post just made me think about it.

[Deleted]

So my niece and nephew can complete current content.

Are they 3? Because I have never ever in my life had the impression or made the experience that young people have problems with coping with video game difficulty.

[Soeroah]

I will be more okay with LFR going away if they update the group finder to allow you to register interest in several things at once then forget about it until someone making a group selects your name and invites you.

The best part about matchmaking is the set and forget and play the game feature. Even with the improvements to the group finder, it's not as good because it turns finding a group into an active process, which means you can't play the game without constantly checking and refreshing and the like, and we're right back to having a spam-less version of Trade Chat group finding you can do from anywhere.

LFR is: queue for a wing, go do stuff, in twenty minutes or so get a pop, enter, do the thing. Group finding is search for the thing you want to do, select "join" for everything, wait for a confirmation, refresh if it's taking too long/you get denied, and continue, plus a good chance of having to wait around for more people once you join, resulting in an ability to do solo things like quests until the raid is ready to go.

[Snowmist]

What LFR lacks in difficulty, it makes up for in accessibility.
Not everyone has a guild they can raid with, or whose members go just for fun with no judgements.
Trying to PUG a raid, especially as dps, can be stressful. Try finding a good kara grp that way as a dps for example.

[Banquetto]

Surely the other significant difference between LFR and Normal is that LFR is sliced into smaller wings. I assume that most Normal mode PUGs would be expecting a longer time commitment than a single wing of LFR.

[Extremity]

So most reasons are simply that it's an easier tier that requires little to no effort, and a free extra chance to get drops? The most reasonable responses seem to be to let younger family members raid, which makes sense to me and is understandable, but the "another chance for loot" thing shouldn't really fly on its own. A tier should be there for more reasons than "so I can get a kill for no effort"

What LFR lacks in difficulty, it makes up for in accessibility.
Not everyone has a guild they can raid with, or whose members go just for fun with no judgements.
Trying to PUG a raid, especially as dps, can be stressful. Try finding a good kara grp that way as a dps for example.

Good luck finding a kara group on LFR, too. For most raid groups that are still doing normal, flex-sizable raids, the restrictions are very low.

[Wingspan]

I get that LFR is still the sort of "click and forget" thing that people want, a zero-effort way to queue up without making the slightest selection, but outside of "it's easier to get in" is there really any game-wide benefit to it at this point? Do we really need to spend extra development time tuning every single encounter for that additional difficulty level? Because that's all LFR is at this point; an easier difficulty. The method of queuing for it seems irrelevant now with the ease of the LFG tool.

Several things to consider here:

* We don't really know how much money/time is tied up into LFR production, so it is very possible that it has a fantastic cost/participation ratio. Without that knowledge we can't assume that spending resources on it is a bad thing. Actually, I haven't seen any LFR stats yet this expansion... have any been data mined?

* We have little evidence to support the theory that people would step-up into Normal raiding if they were to eliminate LFR. Some obviously would, but most probably would not, which would take a lot of the value from the game for those players (get bored faster, burn out faster, etc.).

* As long as there is a human factor to grouping, there will ALWAYS be trouble with exclusion. Exclusion is not cost-effective when creating material. If we had stats that concluded that regular raiders spend 10x the amount in shop transactions than LFR people, then maybe you could make this claim... but we have never heard anything along those lines.

So, while not saying there are no pros/cons to LFR vs the LFG tool, can we really still argue that it's something the game needs? It feels like we still have it simply because it's already there; why remove something that's been there for ages any people are used to? What if some players only use LFR and won't know what to do without it? Even considering that, there could always be some LFG tool improvements helping guide players towards the raid of their choice.

An interesting thing to note is that almost nothing that Blizzard has ever done (other than making things easier) has ever had any real impact on raider percentages. This includes best gear, exclusive achievements, titles, crafting patterns, mounts with guaranteed drops, whatever. I have no specific data to give here of course, but at least as far back as when the achievement systems started (which could be used to get some reasonable non-official numbers) the percentage of raiders in difficult content has changed very little.

Amazingly, despite the fact that LFR did not work like Blizzard thought it would (as a major stepping-stone to organized raids), nothing has had a BIGGER impact on raiding than LFR. And after all the disdain concerning LFR and no matter how much they nerf rewards, people still seem to be doing it, so why bother fixing what isn't broke? The point of being in a game is to play it... and there seems to be some playing going on in LFR.

So, again, are there enough pros to LFR to make it worthwhile at a time where finding a Normal-mode run is just as easy and, frankly, usually faster?

Another important note is that if you were to somehow coax all of those LFR folks into Normal... the runs would cease to be faster. "Faster" is a benefit of selective exclusion.

[Hctaz]

LFR got made because people weren't stepping into any form of raiding.

Blizzard had two options: Make lots of non-raiding content and stop focusing on raiding, or make raiding queuable. They think raiding is very important, and they themselves love raiding, so they went with the latter.

TBH, I don't even care about the difficulty. I imagine a lot of people don't. If I could queue for higher difficulties, I would do them.

But the point of queueing partly is the fact that they assume you won't be able to actually sit around and fight a raid for a couple hours. Non queueable raid content is designed to take hours to complete with wipes and whatnot. If you took the LFR crowd into normal it would be HORRIBLE...

Why do you see it as an issue to not be able to queue into higher difficulty even if you'd seek to do it if it was?

[belleflop]

Because as a company they want to make money. They have gathered data over the years and it's overwhelming, the majority of players ONLY do LFR/LFD/queue-able content. To insinuate ANY logic or reason beyond this data just turns into personal opinion and social arguments, both subjective in nature.

[Luko]

LFR can be pretty bad for the game since it offers the easiest possible way to see all of the content and, as such, will cause some players to think they've experienced everything so stepping into a harder version of the same thing is completely unnecessary.

Nothing about what you just said is "bad for the game." If someone only wants to see the story, then they have a gameplay mode for just that. If someone wants to play competitively, they've got modes for that. If a player isn't interested into entering harder difficulties than they ARE completely unnecessary for that player.

Failing to see how there's a negative to that.

[iamthedevil]

If you are asking what the point of LFR (or anything for that matter) is then you probably are not the target audience.

Play and let play.

[melodramocracy]

1) Augmented runes
2) Trying out a different class, and /or
3) A different spec, and / or
4) talent / gear combination.

You're welcome.

[Hctaz]

Nothing about what you just said is "bad for the game." If someone only wants to see the story, then they have a gameplay mode for just that. If someone wants to play competitively, they've got modes for that. If a player isn't interested into entering harder difficulties than they ARE completely unnecessary for that player.

Failing to see how there's a negative to that.

The negative is the fact that you're taking people out of the raiding pool and the experience is very very cheapened. LFR should really only be an option after the tier has been out for a while to give an incentive for people to try the other modes. I'm not saying it shouldn't exist entirely it's just that it's taking people out of the raider pool.

[Luko]

The negative is the fact that you're taking people out of the raiding pool and the experience is very very cheapened. LFR should really only be an option after the tier has been out for a while to give an incentive for people to try the other modes. I'm not saying it shouldn't exist entirely it's just that it's taking people out of the raider pool.

I don't understand. People run LFR because they want to, not because it sates all of their raiding needs. Are you actually suggesting that you'd rather people feel forced into more difficult raiding to see the content? Because in your "after it's been out a while" scenario, we'd still have the same people in the "raiding pool" they'd just have to wait longer to see it.

[melodramocracy]

LFR can be pretty bad for the game since it offers the easiest possible way to see all of the content and, as such, will cause some players to think they've experienced everything so stepping into a harder version of the same thing is completely unnecessary.

And for those players, it is unnecessary. Because aside from the rather infrequent hidden / extra boss, nothing actually changes related to the story or amount of bosses faced between LFR and non-LFR modes.

It's sort of like your first playthrough of D3 back in the day, where the game forced you to complete it on normal before moving up in difficulty. Story-wise, you were done with the game the second you completed the easiest mode.

This in and of itself isn't a problem, until the player believes that the game no longer has nothing to offer them because he / she is unwilling to do higher difficulties. It's at *that* point that you see people creating threads demanding equal reward for unequal game investment, or believing that they're forced to do something against their wishes.

[Hctaz]

I don't understand. People run LFR because they want to, not because it sates all of their raiding needs. Are you actually suggesting that you'd rather people feel forced into more difficult raiding to see the content? Because in your "after it's been out a while" scenario, we'd still have the same people in the "raiding pool" they'd just have to wait longer to see it.

But there are plenty of players who don't go into normal or higher simply because they feel like the game has nothing else to offer them. It happens and it isn't good to have LFR out so quickly because of this. People just wait the extra two weeks to see the whole raid when they should have to wait a month or two after mythic opens to be able to walk in. This means that they can wait if they want to but they also have some incentive to walk into normal to see the fights earlier than that. Right now, the wait isn't long enough to justify them wanting to.

[High Marshal Sigismund]

A lot of the WoW playerbase is lazy.

There you go. That's it. That's why LFR exists.

[Wingspan]

But there are plenty of players who don't go into normal or higher simply because they feel like the game has nothing else to offer them. It happens and it isn't good to have LFR out so quickly because of this. People just wait the extra two weeks to see the whole raid when they should have to wait a month or two after mythic opens to be able to walk in. This means that they can wait if they want to but they also have some incentive to walk into normal to see the fights earlier than that. Right now, the wait isn't long enough to justify them wanting to.

I think you have a bit of a disconnect here about the goals and desires of a typical LFR player. It was stated several times back in the Ghostcrawler days that LFR was mostly populated by people who had never raided before. And although they never outright said it (that I know of), it was obvious that very few of them were choosing to move up to the next difficulty, despite all of the rewards in progression. Blizzard failed to understand that these players were not motivated by the same drives that exist in typical raiders.


Although it was not what Blizzard envisioned, this is not a bad thing. The result here was that they opened up a bunch of new material that a lot of people never had before (simple raids), so it gave more people something to do... and it had to be WAY cheaper to develop than more questing zones to keep most of those same people busy.


I am sure there are some people in LFR that actually feel like there is nothing more to do after LFR, but odds are those people aren't moving up to Normal raids anyway if LFR were delayed/removed, so delaying it further would just bore them quicker. There is not much of a reason to delay it longer than it is... really, since you get better gear in the world zones now, there is barely a reason to delay it as long as they do now.

[Aquinan]

Defiled runes