More difficulty levels

[Dvaldin]

That Ion Hazzikostas interview is pretty enlightening, particularly the stuff about organized raiding. Bullets as posted on the mmochamp news front:

# The devs would like to see more organized raiding, such as the organized PuGs that existed before Raid Finder.
# There is a group of players that wants to do group raiding, but they aren't well served by the current difficulty choices. This would include the friends and family type guilds that don't remove players because they aren't performing at their best. In Wrath of the Lich King, 10 player normal difficulty raiding served these players well, but there is now a gap between Raid Finder and Normal difficulty.
# When 10 and 25 player had separate lockouts and different loot, they were really different difficulty levels as well. Things were somewhat easier in 10 player difficulty, as it had the lower tier of loot and should be more accessible.
# Now that both 10 and 25 player difficulty offer the same loot and have a shared lockout, there is a need to ensure the difficulty is similar for both raid sizes. This eliminated the lower difficulty 10 player raids, which left some players with no content to raid in a more casual organized group.
# Removing shared lockouts would just make people feel that it was mandatory to do the raid on both sizes every week to get gear faster.

Basically confirms that 10-man difficulty was ratcheted up and shared lockouts implemented because of dropping similar iLvl, and that if a "friends and family" type difficult was added between LFR and Normal, it would have to drop an iLvl less than current normals and also share a lockout with current normals to prevent the mandatory running perception. Also confirms that previous "more difficulty levels needed" blue post at least partially referred to difficulty gap between lfr and normal, if not completely referring to that.

Nothing that's too surprising, but it's nice to see they realize that gap between LFR and normal exists. Be nice to see it added for the friends and family eventually, but it'll still be problematic...do you share the lockout with the friends and family level with lfr? If so, there's the folks that run lfr early that then aren't available for their guild run which may be later in the week before reset. If not, then there's the 2x loot...but I suppose that occurs anyway with the way it is now. And what about achievements, many of which are based on boss mechanics. Do you remove them from friends and family mode or have a couple per boss, 1 of which can be completed in all the friends and family, normal and heroic levels, and a second only obtainable in normal and heroic.

Whatever the case, there sure is a lot to consider. If they can figure it out, it'd be a good thing for the friends and family guilds...and perhaps organized pugs also. Done correctly, it wouldn't affect the current stance of raiding much — other than making less people available from the recruiting pool.

[hablix]

It's very encouraging and a strong affirmation to me that they are paying attention to player feedback. I'm excited to see what they have in mind and wonder if we'll see changes in 5.4 or if they will unveil it for the next expansion.