What caused the sudden "boom" in everybody wanting to raid?

[Destil]

The greed of the company caused it. Blizzard decided that creating content for each group of people was not profitable so they shoe horned every player in every aspect of the game.

People who were fine with doing heroics and grinding Sha'tari skyguard/Tournament mounts were told by GC that they HAVE to raid. At 7:10 he explains that he wanted "everyone to see the raid content"

Everyone has to do a tedious leveling, grind dungeons (less and less every expansion), grind dailies, grind raid gear and now grind valor to upgrade it. So they keep their subs active.. but it's backfiring.

Ohhh joy, the first post claiming Blizzard is greedy.

This boom for everyone wanting to raid is because people simply want to see the content.

..Which is what LFR is for.

Yet people seem to forget that.

Oh, wait this post is from Cybran. Nevermind I know why he's calling Blizzard "greedy" then.

[Osmeric]

Still means approxx 6-8 million do not raid.

We have no idea how many people raid in China. The tracking sites never include China stats.

---------- Post added 2012-12-04 at 05:02 PM ----------

The greed of the company caused it.

Every time someone complains that a corporation wants to make money, Adam Smith kills a kitten.

[Destil]

We have no idea how many people raid in China. The tracking sites never include China stats.

---------- Post added 2012-12-04 at 05:02 PM ----------



Every time someone complains that a corporation wants to make money, Adam Smith kills a kitten.

I feel like a lot of people do for some reason.

Call it a stereotypical view if you want.

[MoanaLisa]

I don't know that there was a sudden boom in people wanting to raid. More likely, it built up over time. I think the Lich King raid contributed a lot to this in fact. Raiding got to be more accessible in WotLK than with previous expansions and ICC was an enormously popular raid at the time. Pile on top of that more and more people with at least one character at endgame and subsequently much less to do in Cataclysm than previously and you had a situation in which LFR was a natural outcome, badly implemented as it was.

Once LFR was on the scene, more people than ever could at least see what the raids looked like and experience them to a greater or lesser degree. So if there is a recent boom, I suppose it has to do with LFR more than anything. But it didn't suddenly happen out of nowhere.

Re Greed: Blizzard wishing to make more of their content playable by more people is simply good business. Blizzard exists to make money. People who call them greedy are pretty much oblivious to how things in the real world work. Blizzard isn't a charity and people shouldn't be criticizing them because they don't give the game away for free.

[Rivelle]

I think a lot of it started with WotLK and Naxx 2.0.

Prior to that, you had many casual 10m guilds that were more than happy to simply do KZ and ZG. There wasn't much for a push to go beyond that, but there was also some serious gating that prevented people from even thinking of moving up the raiding ladder. Consistently, we would have to go back and do attunements for new recruits in our 25m guild.

WotLK and Naxx 2.0 really changed that. It introduced 10/25 content that was easy enough that nearly everyone could go in there and knock it out consistently. From that point on, at least in my opinion, you have a larger percentage of the population that wants to raid, see the content, and have it be geared towards them.

ToC is really evidence of Blizzard's reaction to the raiding boom. There was a lot more people who wanted to raid, but didn't want the trash. The reaction was ToC. Personally, any serious raider that I knew hated the idea before they had even seen it. It was pretty easy to figure out what was going to happen before it did.

I agree with this.

I started playing at the very tail end of Vanilla and yet I was in a small, casual guild so the only raiding I did through BC was Karazhan and ZA. We managed to get another guild to collaborate with us for a couple of Gruul's Lairs but that was about it.

It wasn't until Ulduar that my guild could field enough people to pull together a 25 man and I raided 25s until Cataclysm when they separated lockouts. Been doing 10s ever since, casually, for fun. I still enjoy and have always enjoyed LFR since they added it and 25s as well but population wise my server doesn't support them.

In all likelihood the ease of LFR and some of the raids (particularly DS) has just made it easier for more casual players to raid and players who were probably always at least a little interested in it now found they could fit it in.

[SherbertLand]

The greed of the company caused it. Blizzard decided that creating content for each group of people was not profitable so they shoe horned every player in every aspect of the game.

People who were fine with doing heroics and grinding Sha'tari skyguard/Tournament mounts were told by GC that they HAVE to raid. At 7:10 he explains that he wanted "everyone to see the raid content"



Everyone has to do a tedious leveling, grind dungeons (less and less every expansion), grind dailies, grind raid gear and now grind valor to upgrade it. So they keep their subs active.. but it's backfiring.

It's not backfiring. They're back at 10m

[Kantoro]

Naxx 2.0 in my opinion. It was the beginning of softcore raiding. Everyone could do it, you didn't need amazing gear or dedication.

[Zhab]

Casual players go in lfr, and some of them like it

[Lolercaust]

For some reason raiding became the core of this game at the expense of all other forms of content, for most of WoW's lifecycle at least.

[Osmeric]

For some reason raiding became the core of this game at the expense of all other forms of content, for most of WoW's lifecycle at least.

That's because it's on weekly lockout. Little else in the game is.

[Lolercaust]

That's because it's on weekly lockout. Little else in the game is.

I don't understand how that explains the pervasive lack of non-raid content up until recently.

[Archdruid Dehydrate]

Blizzard gave the minority & casuals a voice and this is the mess we get, But I am enjoying MoP and Blizzard is standing firm on CRZ & Rep for Dailies which makes me happy. People wanted to raid and started the whole I pay 15 bucks a month at the end of TBC and Blizzard made Wrath more accessible.

Even if CRZ is a sham or badly implemented there sticking to it and not listening to the idiots who plague the WoW Forums. Thats why I love MMO-Champion we have are trolls yes, but atleast 88% of people here have a brain & have something good to say .

[Wollveren]

It's actually quite saddening, I know this may seem slightly selfish or one sided. But because now players are being spoilt by simple raids, they just find more and more reason to complain. First they complain everything is hard, Blizzard downscales, then they complain that it is hard to find groups, then Blizzard adds LFR. But that isn't enough, now I see players complaining that the LFR should come straight with the game, not 1 week into the expansion etc... Whats next, they want to do LFR at level 1.

Blizzard seriously needs to stop giving the players everything they want because "they pay $15 a month".

IMO the player base is like a group of children. There are the tough "elite" kids, the kids which are appreciative and the kids which are easily spoilt. You keep giving those easily spoilt kids what they want, they will only get worse.

Just my opinion

[Cambria]

There isn't really anything else interesting to do. There have always(BC) been dailies. There have always been 5 mans and pvp. Scenarios and pet battles are two new things which can take a lot of time.

It seems like there is more to do now than ever before, but for some reason it feels like less than almost every single expansion in the past. I think with dailies being chore instead of feeling like you are working towards a reward, 5 mans being almost a waste of time, pvp being so unbalanced, scenarios being too long for no real reward, and pet battles only favoring a small niche, lot's of people want to raid because it's one of the only ways to truly feel like you are progressing towards something.

At least to me that's how it is and I always found a ton to do past expansions between raiding, dailies, pvp, and other pve.

[Fourjane]

Let's address this from another angle. Why did I quit raiding in vanilla? 40 man MC. Granted, I wasn't in the most skilled, geared, disciplined guild, but organizing, gearing, and keeping 40 people focused for the 8 to 12 hours we would spend in there was too much. There was a reason why only the most dedicated, hardcore guilds could pull it off, and that reason was why I quit. I had progressed as far as I could, the next step required too much time, effort and pain, so I found something else to do.

Similar thing happened with dungeons. Before LFD, there was a system I called Groveling for Groups. Standing in Org, spamming general looking for school, or strat. Spriests didn't get much respect back then. The result was I spent most of my time in BC doing dailys, farming rep, making cloth... My gear was ok because frozen shadoweave was pretty good, and I ran Kara with my guild, but there just wasn't much to look forward to.

What brought me back to raids? LFD. Being able to easily find a group, learn the fights, get geared, get heroicable, get heroic geared and get valor made all the difference. A lot of people bemoan this as the beginning of the end, but for me it was a new beginning. If it wasn't for LFD, I would have quit about md-wrath. LFR is just an extension of that. You could see the fights (sort of) and get a little more gear (maybe) and be slightly more prepared for normals.

A lot more people in vanilla wanted to raid than were actually successfully able to. Shrinking the raid from 40 to 10/25 lowered the bar a bit. LFD/LFR provides a gentler slope up. The result is more people raiding and less people quitting because they hit a progression wall and got bored. The only people offended by this are the pseudo-hardcore and their fevered egos who feel the 'casuals' are intruding in their domain. I seriously doubt DREAM Paragon is worried about being upstaged by people like me.

[davesurfer]

People felt the internet was getting boring, so they figured they would demand to see the raid content since they pay $15/month. They figured that this might cause 100s, if not 1000s of new threads to read on the topic

[Priestiality]

More people playing and Blizzard realizing that in order to maintain a larger playerbase, they had to make raids easier as well as the game in general. That's why wow is still the most popular mmo out there because they've improved on the grindfest. Also I think that the game has developed to a certain point where it's more about the mechanics/interesting fight than it is about pure difficulty. They decided it was a better model to put fire on the ground than make people farm buttloads of NR gear.

Edit- And what the guy says below me. I didn't start playing til the very very end of BC and I know that I did not understand the concept of raiding at all until 1-2 months after finally maxing a character. I ground out gold for epic flying before I hit 80 because I thought the game was over and you'd won when you got to max -_-

If you think WoW was EVER a "grindfest", literally every Korean MMO ever made would like a word with you...

[StationaryHawk]

I don't remember that ever being a popular complaint before LFR arrived. And when it did, people used such a complaint in order to explain to others who didn't understand the concept of LFR what it was about.

[Osmeric]

I don't remember that ever being a popular complaint before LFR arrived. And when it did, people used such a complaint in order to explain to others who didn't understand the concept of LFR what it was about.

Before LFR, if you wanted to raid, you pretty much had to be in a raiding guild. And if you complained a lot on forums about the raids being hard, that could well have damaged your ability to get into a raiding guild. The presence of LFR removed that suppression of complaint.

I suspect Blizzard didn't take into account this bias when it was using forums for feedback about what the player population wanted.

[poogle]

In vanilla a good deal of people didn't even know what raiding was for a long time, also there was the issue of the amount of time it took. These days a casual raid group can make steady progress with a few 1.5-2hr raids a week, but back in vanilla you were lucky to clear the trash and get a few pulls on a boss in that much time while you were learning MC. Then there is also the grind issue - the game was tonnes more grindy before so actually getting prepared for raids took a long time, and relative to general income raiding was very expensive which meant extra grind time just to afford raiding.

Also there was the progress issue - the gap between MC & BWL was very intense in both numbers & boss execution. Keeping a guild together while you tried to crack razorgore without your geared people jumping ship was very tough. When they did leave you had to somehow recruit new people, which often meant more and more MC runs to get those people geared, which in turn stalled progress and put people off even more. I think for most raid guilds that could operate smoothly in MC, progress ended after MC/ZG/AQ20 largely due to razorgore.