How LFR actually killed WoW

[swagster]

For many years and through many disappointing MMO releases, people have declared the next thing a "WoW killer." But those of us who couldn't seem to get away for the game after multiple failed attempts (I've "quit" wow more times than I've "quit" smoking) knew the only thing that could kill it was WoW itself. I was always super critical as I rolled my eyes at those doomsday gamers that declared this change or that would ruin the game forever. I felt this way too about people whom declared LFR would spoil the game -- how detrimental could it be to let casual players access more content and slightly better yet still worse gear? Turns out I was looking at it completely wrong, LFR is the worst thing to happen to the hardcore and average wow addict.


Now if you're not that familiar with the game, LFR is basically a super watered down 25man raid that you can queue with 24 other randoms. It's almost akin to playing with bots, except the quality of player is worse and bots don't link recount after finishing 2nd on DPS. You could kill every boss and possibly win loot tabbing out to watch episodes of Naruto.

Let me briefly summarize my last LFR experience that led me to this conclusion:

Queue for Raid -> Tab out and browse internet -> Hear queue pop -> Zone in -> No one says a word to anyone -> Kill all bosses in raid while tabbing out and browsing the internet -> Get a new item -> Repeat -> Get no loot but who cares -> Sign off -> Go out and Get Laid. PERFECT.

So why is this bad for the game? Well, the main staying power of the game is to get you hooked enough that you're wiling to spend countless hours and gold to access the best content in the game. The prestige of getting to the last boss in the expansion was the best part second to actually killing it. Excuse me briefly for being a rose-colored-glasses-wearer, but bragging about killing pre-nerf (Well, pre-pre nerf) C'thun is AWESOME. People still do it to this day.

People play and keep playing and the driving force behind it is being able to eventually access the endgame content. One of my biggest regrets in the game is not being able to kill anything worth mentioning in BC. I was in a friendly-casual guild at the time and we wiped so god damn much in Karazhan just trying to progress through the tier to eventually be good enough to enter BT/SW.


Consider this scenario: you're a somewhat casual player but could afford to raid 2 days a week. If you wanted to experience all of the content, if you wanted good gear (not to mention good looking gear), you had to raid. And to raid you had to join a raid guild. To join a raid guild you had to apply to a raid guild and get accepted. To get accepted you needed to work hard on your gear, gems, enchants, encounter mechanics. It was a commitment you made to improve your character enough to be worthy of downing an epic raid boss. Now lets say someone approached you and said, "Dude, relax. Just log on whenever you want to and queue for a dungeon while you tab out and go to a porn website to check out some sweet girls. You'll get to see all the raid bosses and get almost equivalent gear." That sounds pretty tempting. LFR was supposed to enable casuals to raid, and instead enabled everyone else to raid lazily.



LFR raids are a total zergfest and not even close to the real mechanics of a heroic fight. That's true - but they still get to see it. They might derp their way through but they still check out all the instances and get pretty nice loot. They officially have no commitment. Now they can finally teach their 8 year old daughter how to read!


I was actually arguing with a friend about this and that stupid bastard said "Yeah but the majority of people don't raid. They quest or collect pets or something." True, but a game without an actual, vast hardcore culture leading it is a terribly dead game. Make no mistake about it, the game is driven by the top end guilds down to the competitive guilds, down to the casual guilds, down to Tommy Questypants. Nobody is enticed to play a game where the most exciting happening on your server is that some kid finally collected 1,000 pets and is Pokemon battling in Durotar. The game dies when the hardcore contingent no longer wants to play...But we do want to play. Blizzard just sort of gave us an easy out, and for that I thank them. Bastards.

[Pull My Finger]

Wow. You really, actually, unjokingly, made another LFR thread. Don't you feel ridiculous?

[checking facts]

nothing killed WoW. WoW still has many times the amount of subs than their best competitor, and it'll still be profitable and survive even under 1 million subs. try harder.

[Pony Soldier]

For the 23984729384729784th time LFR did not kill WoW. So why don't you just jump off that bandwagon and just have some fun with the game. Besides why do you think WoW is dead? WoW is still going strong, still has more expansions planned and still has several millions of subscribers so I would say WoW is still pretty lively. Whenever I see posts like this it's like they're saying they don't like a certain feature in the game so therefore it's dead or is dying. You either like the game or you don't like the game. If you don't like the game then quit and move on, it's a game not politics.

[swagster]

Wow. You really, actually, unjokingly, made another LFR thread. Don't you feel ridiculous?

This is my first LFR thread. What are you talking about?

[Deleted]

Don't like LFR? Don't do LFR. I can still raid my normal/heroic even with LFR in-game. So how did LFR kill WoW?

[termgp20]

nothing killed WoW. WoW still has many times the amount of subs than their best competitor, and it'll still be profitable and survive even under 1 million subs. try harder.

so a game going from 12 million subs down to 1 millions is still successful considering it just lost 92% of its players????

[Deleted]

This is my first LFR thread. What are you talking about?

Maybe about the fact that there are already a million of QQ-LFR is the plague of the world-threads around at the moment?

[Shampro]

[Well]

LFR is bad because:

-there's no communication (WoW's an MMO).


LFR is good because:
-new healers get to experience how it is healing more than 1 person at a time.
-new tanks need to set things up with the other tank.
-new dps need to dps in new enviroments where they can't stand still and have their healer just heal them back if they fail (there's no insta-death in any dung).
-no distractions except for "beam kills, move".
-gear that is not super good, but not super bad either (as in blues).
-anyone can finally see how things end, lorewise (you afterall are paying to see it).


Out of those VERY basic things, Goods>Bads. Normal & Heroic raids have no correlation whatoever with lfr (other than what noted above).

Conclusion: LFR's a success for what it is meant and it stays.

/thread

[Deleted]

I still see players everywhere, my server is even full and I need to queue in the evenings. What's your definition of killed/dead?

[Deleted]

This is my first LFR thread. What are you talking about?

Oh, it's your first LFR-thread? Wow, that's great - but why didn't you cry in one of those two thousand other LFR-QQ-threads instead?

[Thage]

The funny thing is LFR probably saved raiding. Look at Cataclysm's raid environments and design--by Firelands and Dragon Soul it was blatantly obvious the raid team's budget was getting reined in pretty tight, never mind War of the Ancients getting scaled down to a 5-man themed around the Well of Eternity and the Abyssal Maw raid getting scrapped in its entirety. Then DS LFR turned out far more popular than expected, and we've got the big, epic, sweeping environments in t14 and t15 with some pretty interesting mechanics thrown in to boot--even world-first guilds like Method were saying Throne of Thunder is Blizz's best-designed raid to date.

[Deleted]

How can LFR kill WoW after WoW was killed by Daily Quests was killed by lack of new cotent was killed by SWTOR was killed by LFD was killed by Naxx Easy Mode was killed by Warhammer Online was killed by Shamans for the Alliance was killed by Paladins for the Horde?

Come on, stay dead, you sick World of Warcraft, it's really annoying!

[Unalorian]

so a game going from 12 million subs down to 1 millions is still successful considering it just lost 92% of its players????

It is very subjective. If the game is still leading in number of subs and 2nd best option is a game with 300k accounts, for example, then yes the game is still successful. Because the issue there is that MMO market died, not the game got worst.

On the other hand, if the game has lost 92% of its player base and a new release suddenly has 4-5 million accounts, then game got worst.

On the same logic: dropping from 12m to 8m subs sure is not ideal, but when you see who else is left in the MMO market it is safe to say WoW is still light-years from being a "dying" game

[XDurionX]

No, lfr didn´t kill wow. You´re wrong on every level. Move on, there´s nothing to see here. just another lfr-qq thread.

[DrSteveBrule]

nothing killed WoW. WoW still has many times the amount of subs than their best competitor, and it'll still be profitable and survive even under 1 million subs. try harder.

WoW subs are on the decline and are at the sub numbers they were in TBC. That's a step backwards, not forwards or even stagnant.

And if it will still survive at 1 million subs then why cater to casuals? What was all the fuss in Cata when we lost subs and it was all pinned on the difficulty of dungeons and raids?

I think the subs will keep dropping before they hit a stable number of subs that enjoy their "fast food" experience.
The question is what number that will be and if it was worth the trade of killing off your most prized and amazing feature of the game: raiding.

[Pastures]

so a game going from 12 million subs down to 1 millions is still successful considering it just lost 92% of its players????

Hmmm.... you may want to check your numbers there chief. Maybe they lost 1 mil subs in the last quarters, but I'm fairly confident they are not down to 1 million. Source would be nice.

Also, please read other LFR hate threads rather than creating your own. We've read it all before.

[ShimmerSwirl]

LFR is a misnomer, there is no actual 'raiding' involved.

[Grof]

For many years and through many disappointing MMO releases, people have declared the next thing a "WoW killer." But those of us who couldn't seem to get away for the game after multiple failed attempts (I've "quit" wow more times than I've "quit" smoking) knew the only thing that could kill it was WoW itself. I was always super critical as I rolled my eyes at those doomsday gamers that declared this change or that would ruin the game forever. I felt this way too about people whom declared LFR would spoil the game -- how detrimental could it be to let casual players access more content and slightly better yet still worse gear? Turns out I was looking at it completely wrong, LFR is the worst thing to happen to the hardcore and average wow addict.


Now if you're not that familiar with the game, LFR is basically a super watered down 25man raid that you can queue with 24 other randoms. It's almost akin to playing with bots, except the quality of player is worse and bots don't link recount after finishing 2nd on DPS. You could kill every boss and possibly win loot tabbing out to watch episodes of Naruto.

Let me briefly summarize my last LFR experience that led me to this conclusion:

Queue for Raid -> Tab out and browse internet -> Hear queue pop -> Zone in -> No one says a word to anyone -> Kill all bosses in raid while tabbing out and browsing the internet -> Get a new item -> Repeat -> Get no loot but who cares -> Sign off -> Go out and Get Laid. PERFECT.

So why is this bad for the game? Well, the main staying power of the game is to get you hooked enough that you're wiling to spend countless hours and gold to access the best content in the game. The prestige of getting to the last boss in the expansion was the best part second to actually killing it. Excuse me briefly for being a rose-colored-glasses-wearer, but bragging about killing pre-nerf (Well, pre-pre nerf) C'thun is AWESOME. People still do it to this day.

People play and keep playing and the driving force behind it is being able to eventually access the endgame content. One of my biggest regrets in the game is not being able to kill anything worth mentioning in BC. I was in a friendly-casual guild at the time and we wiped so god damn much in Karazhan just trying to progress through the tier to eventually be good enough to enter BT/SW.


Consider this scenario: you're a somewhat casual player but could afford to raid 2 days a week. If you wanted to experience all of the content, if you wanted good gear (not to mention good looking gear), you had to raid. And to raid you had to join a raid guild. To join a raid guild you had to apply to a raid guild and get accepted. To get accepted you needed to work hard on your gear, gems, enchants, encounter mechanics. It was a commitment you made to improve your character enough to be worthy of downing an epic raid boss. Now lets say someone approached you and said, "Dude, relax. Just log on whenever you want to and queue for a dungeon while you tab out and go to a porn website to check out some sweet girls. You'll get to see all the raid bosses and get almost equivalent gear." That sounds pretty tempting. LFR was supposed to enable casuals to raid, and instead enabled everyone else to raid lazily.



LFR raids are a total zergfest and not even close to the real mechanics of a heroic fight. That's true - but they still get to see it. They might derp their way through but they still check out all the instances and get pretty nice loot. They officially have no commitment. Now they can finally teach their 8 year old daughter how to read!


I was actually arguing with a friend about this and that stupid bastard said "Yeah but the majority of people don't raid. They quest or collect pets or something." True, but a game without an actual, vast hardcore culture leading it is a terribly dead game. Make no mistake about it, the game is driven by the top end guilds down to the competitive guilds, down to the casual guilds, down to Tommy Questypants. Nobody is enticed to play a game where the most exciting happening on your server is that some kid finally collected 1,000 pets and is Pokemon battling in Durotar. The game dies when the hardcore contingent no longer wants to play...But we do want to play. Blizzard just sort of gave us an easy out, and for that I thank them. Bastards.

ffs can you ppls stop qq and write posts about lfr, if you dont like it, dont play, and yes i play lfr ,normal and heroic tot and enjoy in all off 3 !!!