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  1. #601
    Quote Originally Posted by Vaelorian View Post
    Actually while they don't care about the feature itself... ultimately they need to care. Why? LFR does draw people away from normal guilds = food for heroic guilds. While I don't count myself as being "THE" top. I don't regard 175/350 ranked being THE top, recruitment was very very hard. So hard infact that after 6 years of being GM of that guild, I threw in the towel. And I am not the only one. Recruitment was the nr 1 thing on my agenda every day. While before the days of LFR it was pretty doable to try and get people in once a week or even less. I wonder how that suddenly changed.

    So yeah while LFR as a raiding enviroment (if you can call it that) has no affect on heroic raiders or normal raiders - it affects their recruitment. And thus affect them.

    edit: just to clarify:

    these people that run LFR might not be suited for guilds that run heroics and are TOP of the world. But there might be other raiders in that normal guild that would make it in a TOP of the world guild. Now due to lack of recruits this normal raider gets less raids or his guild falls over. Now this player will need to find a new guild. Perhaps another normal guild or even a heroic guild. It is a snowball effect really. Less people get interested in "real" raiding. In my heroic guild we had people who played 100% a day almost (no work etc). This guy traded heroic raiding for LFR the day it came out. Just because he didn't want to be put on a schedule anymore. While he hated LFR vs Heroic... the no schedule was THE thing he was actually looking for.

    So it does draw away people from those high end guilds.

    Meanwhile people who play LFR do not like it but do it for the GAINS... not because it is fun. LFR has a lot of potential it is not currently fullfilling.
    There is a flip side to this. Difficulty. There is no middle ground at present.

    You have ONE extreme which is LFR,

    then you have Normal which is far harder than previously in Wrath.
    Heroic is just as brutal as it has always been.

    You also have 10/25 being the same lockout.

    So this kills pugs as sharing the same lockout means you are only going to turn to LFR for upgrades where as previously you could run a pug in 10/25 normal and get some items.

    Flex will help people who want a bit more of a challenge but a fairly pug-able experience. I can't remember if it will be on a different lock out to 10/25 (It better fucking be tbh)

    LFR does not kill guilds its merely the only option for a lot of people. We needed flex a long time ago to give that middle ground and a way for pugs to get going again on a big scale. Pugs help more people get into guild raiding and were quite a good bit of fun.

  2. #602
    Quote Originally Posted by khalltusk View Post
    There is a flip side to this. Difficulty. There is no middle ground at present.

    You have ONE extreme which is LFR,

    then you have Normal which is far harder than previously in Wrath.
    Heroic is just as brutal as it has always been.

    You also have 10/25 being the same lockout.

    So this kills pugs as sharing the same lockout means you are only going to turn to LFR for upgrades where as previously you could run a pug in 10/25 normal and get some items.

    Flex will help people who want a bit more of a challenge but a fairly pug-able experience. I can't remember if it will be on a different lock out to 10/25 (It better fucking be tbh)

    LFR does not kill guilds its merely the only option for a lot of people. We needed flex a long time ago to give that middle ground and a way for pugs to get going again on a big scale. Pugs help more people get into guild raiding and were quite a good bit of fun.
    Agree about the Flexraiding. That would have helped immensely. But the way it is currently with LFR from my experience, does draw people away. Shared lockouts of not.

    I actually (and yes that will hurt guilds more I take it) wish LFR would be a shared lockout. Just so people wouldn't "feel forced" to go do LFR for XYZ reasons. But I do see the "beauty" of a nonshared lockout. Hell I would even go as far as to have no shared lockout at all. I know that last bit is conflicting... I am just saying that if they do Y why not go all the way... there is beauty on either side.

  3. #603
    Quote Originally Posted by Vaelorian View Post
    Agree about the Flexraiding. That would have helped immensely. But the way it is currently with LFR from my experience, does draw people away. Shared lockouts of not.

    I actually (and yes that will hurt guilds more I take it) wish LFR would be a shared lockout. Just so people wouldn't "feel forced" to go do LFR for XYZ reasons. But I do see the "beauty" of a nonshared lockout. Hell I would even go as far as to have no shared lockout at all. I know that last bit is conflicting... I am just saying that if they do Y why not go all the way... there is beauty on either side.
    I think shared lockouts _ARE_ the problem.

    Before the 10/25 shared came along we had multitude of pugs running and casual guilds galore. Now most of those casual guilds struggle or just go to LFR.

    LFR as it is, has a huge delay from it opening. So I don't think it hurts raids too much at present. We must remember more people raid in LFR than ever raided before so its + outweighs the - in this respect.

    It could do with some tweaks, though certainly. I think also adjusting the loot table like so.

    LFR has items you can get that cover all inventory slots including the tier set.
    Flex has new/unique items and upgraded ilevel versions of LFR items.
    Normal mode has all flex items with upgraded ilevels and unique items + mounts
    Heroic upgraded ilevel items of all other modes unique mounts and a special phase/boss for heroic only.

    give incentives to the modes.

  4. #604
    Quote Originally Posted by khalltusk View Post
    Before the 10/25 shared came along we had multitude of pugs running and casual guilds galore. Now most of those casual guilds struggle or just go to LFR.
    Also a great time for alt runs, though if you're in a decent guild carrying alts isn't all that much worse today I guess. Just not as good as back then.
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  5. #605
    Quote Originally Posted by Notos View Post
    Also a great time for alt runs, though if you're in a decent guild carrying alts isn't all that much worse today I guess. Just not as good as back then.
    I agree. I think flex will give us a huge boost but is it a case of damage already done in some cases?

  6. #606
    Quote Originally Posted by khalltusk View Post
    There is a flip side to this. Difficulty. There is no middle ground at present.
    That's the true heart of the problem. LFR isn't scaring away real raiders. The difficulty of recruiting new players to tackle normal modes is.

    Quote Originally Posted by khalltusk View Post
    Flex will help people who want a bit more of a challenge but a fairly pug-able experience. I can't remember if it will be on a different lock out to 10/25 (It better fucking be tbh)
    I agree, and it will be, as stated at the Flexible Raiding Preview:
    This new difficulty also has a separate Raid lockout from Raid Finder and Normal difficulty, allowing you to take part in all three if you so desire.
    Quote Originally Posted by Vaelorian View Post
    I actually (and yes that will hurt guilds more I take it) wish LFR would be a shared lockout. Just so people wouldn't "feel forced" to go do LFR for XYZ reasons.
    I don't personally know anyone from the raiding guild I was in who felt compelled to do LFR. In fact, half the players outright refused. I was one of the weirdos who actually enjoyed doing LFR for quick valor. It helped that I was a healer so I got faster queues. The separate lockout is the way to go because then you can go back to the days where you had training teams farming the easier content and a core team beating their head against progression. If people dropped away from progression they could always downgrade to the training raids and you had a big pool of players to replace them from.

  7. #607
    Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
    I don't personally know anyone from the raiding guild I was in who felt compelled to do LFR. In fact, half the players outright refused. I was one of the weirdos who actually enjoyed doing LFR for quick valor. It helped that I was a healer so I got faster queues. The separate lockout is the way to go because then you can go back to the days where you had training teams farming the easier content and a core team beating their head against progression. If people dropped away from progression they could always downgrade to the training raids and you had a big pool of players to replace them from.
    Apart from the whines on the forum when LFR just got out, I too felt forced to go LFR even tho LFR is the only option for me. I cannot commit to a normal mode or heroic mode guild anymore. So my only option is the braindead LFR. To progress my character I feel FORCED to go do LFR.

    Not anymore tho. I got out of that mindset and I rarely do LFR at all. I hate it. But yeah you sometimes want a new item. Where can I get that apart from LFR? Valor? Yeah I have that already. How did I get that valor? Yeah mostly LFR... why? Efficient.... There is another option tho... dailies/LFD/scenarios. But thats inefficient. And tbh also very boring and easy. Sure you can do it efficient ONE time every day. Yeah thats why I do those one timers... when I get to play. Which is mainly only during the weekend = missing out on valor during the week.

    So yeah... apart from raiding guilds "forcing" their players or players themselves feeling they OWE it to their guild to be prepared best they can for raids... this is another way of being forced.

  8. #608
    Quote Originally Posted by Vaelorian View Post
    Apart from the whines on the forum when LFR just got out, I too felt forced to go LFR even tho LFR is the only option for me. I cannot commit to a normal mode or heroic mode guild anymore. So my only option is the braindead LFR. To progress my character I feel FORCED to go do LFR.
    When I came to the realization that normal raiding had gotten too painful on my server and that the only content that Blizzard was going to release in the foreseeable future centered around raids I unsubscribed. I'm not going to pay $15 a month of a game that I don't enjoy.

    Quote Originally Posted by Vaelorian View Post
    Sure you can do it efficient ONE time every day. Yeah thats why I do those one timers... when I get to play. Which is mainly only during the weekend = missing out on valor during the week.
    This was another slap in the face that Blizzard reinstated in MoP. In Cataclysm they had the sense to make valor bonuses weekly so that knocking out seven heroic dungeons on a Saturday yielded the same rewards as knocking out one a day. Now players who don't have the luxury of playing weekdays have to work almost twice as hard on the weekend to get the same benefit. I deliberately said "work" because that's how it begins to feel. That's yet another reason I decided to quit the game. I like being able to do what I want on my own schedule instead of feeling enslaved by dailies and raids.
    Last edited by Ronduwil; 2013-07-18 at 02:48 PM.

  9. #609
    The Unstoppable Force Jessicka's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
    This was another slap in the face that Blizzard reinstated in MoP. In Cataclysm they had the sense to make valor bonuses weekly so that knocking out seven heroic dungeons on a Saturday yielded the same rewards as knocking out one a day. Now players who don't have the luxury of playing weekdays have to work almost twice as hard on the weekend to get the same benefit. I deliberately said "work" because that's how it begins to feel. That's yet another reason I decided to quit the game. I like being able to do what I want on my own schedule instead of feeling enslaved by dailies and raids.
    To be fair, at this point there are so many ways to gain Valor that the 'one a day' thing isn't really an issue. You can do a heroic, a scenario, a heroic scenario, the Champions and Barrens weeklies and be a long way toward your cap.

    I'd also argue that in reality knocking out 7 Heriocs on one day in one sitting is probably actually less work and effort than logging in every day to do one. That's why players preferred to do it.

  10. #610
    Quote Originally Posted by Jessicka View Post
    I'd also argue that in reality knocking out 7 Heriocs on one day in one sitting is probably actually less work and effort than logging in every day to do one. That's why players preferred to do it.
    It's not just heroics. They introduced coins that give bonus loot rolls and those are only available once per day as well. Besides, how do you figure doing seven heroics in one sitting is less effort than doing one a day? As far as I know there is no short-term buff that shortens the time it takes to do your next heroic. In both cases the process is the same: queue, wait, and do the run. Very few people in pugs are looking to chain heroics, and the odds of finding someone in your guild who is willing to chain heroics with you are about the same as finding someone to do one a day with you. I don't see a significant time advantage either way.

  11. #611
    Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
    It's not just heroics. They introduced coins that give bonus loot rolls and those are only available once per day as well. .
    What? The charms are available from a quest tjat can be done once per WEEK. The 50 coins that feed into that quest are available from a variety of sources (dailies, drops off mobs).

    I am finding it's not hard to valor cap on one character for the week by thursday, or at the latest friday. That gives the weekend to play alts with 50% extra VP generation.
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  12. #612
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Seefer View Post
    Their data can't show if people LIKE something in the game, I can't stand LFR but I do it on my alts, people bitch about dailies but they do them...........see?
    If you don't like LFR, why are you running it?

    The reasons you're running it are why you like having the feature. It's like if your local coffee shop offered free donuts, and you were complaining because you were getting fat and hating yourself because of all the free donuts you don't even like that much. Obviously, part of you does like the LFR system, even if it's just the rewards you're doing it for.

    I really don't have any patience for the "I hate this stuff but I keep playing it every day/week anyway" argument. That's either peculiarly masochistic, or you're not being totally honest about your motivations.


  13. #613
    Quote Originally Posted by Birkhoff View Post
    This has to be the most infuriating tweet I have ever seen from Ghostcrawler
    Either the community managers are doing an atrocious job, or the designers are pretending complaints don't exist
    So you know something about the entire WOW playerbase that Blizzard does not know?

  14. #614
    Quote Originally Posted by Osmeric View Post
    I am finding it's not hard to valor cap on one character for the week by thursday, or at the latest friday. That gives the weekend to play alts with 50% extra VP generation.
    I wouldn't know because my subscription ran out shortly before 5.3. Back then you could easily valor cap by Thursday through dailies, but whenever I was unable to log in during the week I could play all weekend long without valor capping. Maybe the situation is fixed now. The fact that this imbalance existed at release, however, was a mistake on Blizzard's part. I agree that no one should be able to valor cap in 3 hours, but it's also not right for consistent players to valor cap in 6 hours while weekend players spend 14 hours doing the same.

  15. #615
    Quote Originally Posted by Ronduwil View Post
    Maybe it's better now. I wouldn't know because my subscription ran out shortly before 5.3. Back then you could easily valor cap by Thursday through dailies, but whenever I was unable to log in during the week I could play all weekend long without valor capping.
    I cap mostly through LFR + heroic 5 man + scenarios. Random heroic + scenario give you 130 VP the first time you do the pair each day. That's 390 VP in three days. Add four LFR for 360 more VP (plus some extra for some of the minibosses, but ignore that). We're then at 750 VP. The last 250 VP can come dailies, more heroics/scenarios (65 for each additional pair on a day), IoT rares, or the 5.3 weekly quest (200 VP). I don't do heroic scenarios or 5 man challenge modes.

    The advantage of this is that you can queue for a scenario, a heroic 5 man, and LFR all at the same time, so there's very little downtime waiting in queues.
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  16. #616
    Quote Originally Posted by Endemonadia View Post
    Have u got evidence that its the minority and not the majority?

    In my very long Wow forum use the subject with the most complaint threads ever in the history of Wow has been LFR. No other issue in Wow has ever generated such a massive amount of forum pages.

    Now, at the very least that shows LFR isnt functioning as well as it could be ingame and it needs some fixing/rebalancing. At the very worst its a total disaster.

    What that doesnt tell us is that everthings fine and dandy.
    It is the most talked about subject. But how many players are complaining vs people enjoying it? What the threads shows is there are people who does not like its implementation. But what is the reason why they do not like? How is it affecting raiders? How is it a total disaster? How is it not functioning correctly?

    You raid LFR. You kill an easy boss. You get lowest quality gear.
    You raid Normal. You kill a harder boss. You get better quality gear.
    You raid Heroic. You kill hardest boss. You get the best quality gear.

    What is particularly wrong with this?

    If people prefer LFR than Normal or Heroic, that is their choice. If that impacted your raid team, well, sorry then. But making others raid so you can raid is kind of selfish, isn't? Enjoy your game, enjoy your mode of raiding and stop prevent others from raiding at a lower level than you.

    It is like a professional sportsman complaining about amateurs playing the same sport because it isn't in the same league as theirs.

  17. #617
    Quote Originally Posted by khalltusk View Post
    I do agree with a lot of what you say but you are wrong about wrath. Not everyone raided in wrath, Raiding while at a larger% than vanilla/tbc and even cata was still lower than the amount of players doing raiding now.

    Still you're bang on about Cata changes it made things a lot more difficult for the more casual raiders to get going and in MOP the difficulty in normal mode was still quite high and the only alternative was LFR. If we had flex + FLR during these times I think raiding would be in a real sweet spot.
    That is where we differ because LFR isn't raiding to me. What I was trying to show is that given a good level of entry content, tons of people would be raiding if they could but since there is a sever lack of good opening raid content now, LFR reigns supreme. 2.3 million people raided in Wrath(Using ICC), it is obviously an estimate due to the limitations that WoW Progress had back then. So some of those are double people and some people aren't counted because it only counted guilds and not actual players raiding in said guild. So I would assume those numbers balance out around where it's guessed at.

    And I guess that's really my point, given the right real raid balancing, LFR isn't needed. The only reason LFR has a niche is because Blizzard isn't doing good things in the raid balancing department.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Deficineiron View Post
    Folded, or were forced to fold too quickly, because, in essence, the lvl 85 content tuning was teh only game aspect which blizzard was willing to reverse course on. Also, given how LFD worked, I am not sure why they thought they could put challenging, brain-on content into such a sausage grinder system.

    10/25 lockouts could have been reversed and weren't. other changes would have been harder or impossible to change - linear 'no-choices' questing, for example. I think there were many things which collectively managed to annoyed a fairly broad cross-section of the playerbase.
    Blizzard over reacted to 300k people leaving in a quarter since it was their first quarter losing people and that's what I was getting at. While, at the time, 300k seemed like a lot. If we had a 300k loss now, people would say things are going great. That is what I was getting at. They should have stuck it out at the time, taken the mil or two loss and stabilized with an overall better game(in my eyes) and kept more subs overall. I think we'd be in a much better place now and would have the massive sub bleeding we currently have because of all the decisions they started to make in Cata+.

  18. #618
    Legendary! Deficineiron's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by brunnor View Post

    Blizzard over reacted to 300k people leaving in a quarter since it was their first quarter losing people and that's what I was getting at. While, at the time, 300k seemed like a lot. If we had a 300k loss now, people would say things are going great. That is what I was getting at. They should have stuck it out at the time, taken the mil or two loss and stabilized with an overall better game(in my eyes) and kept more subs overall. I think we'd be in a much better place now and would have the massive sub bleeding we currently have because of all the decisions they started to make in Cata+.
    it may have been their worst loss-from-peak ever (the q1 2009 peak of 12m commented on by vivendi ceo/a/b chairman would imply they had similar drop after wotlk's firswt few months), but something sure spooked them. they had already gone and made 90% of the game almost insultingly easy, hard to die, etc (leveling, both outdoors and dungeons, etc), but I bet their completion stats on LFD heroics at 85 was just atrocious - how could it be otherwise? Now I don't think necessarily that the aggregate losses were even 50% due to the issues with lfd at 85, but it WAS the only thing they chose to quickly address.

    As others and myself have mentioned, the 10/25 lockout decision was, in my opinion, at least as harmful.
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  19. #619
    Quote Originally Posted by Endus View Post
    If you don't like LFR, why are you running it?

    The reasons you're running it are why you like having the feature. It's like if your local coffee shop offered free donuts, and you were complaining because you were getting fat and hating yourself because of all the free donuts you don't even like that much. Obviously, part of you does like the LFR system, even if it's just the rewards you're doing it for.

    I really don't have any patience for the "I hate this stuff but I keep playing it every day/week anyway" argument. That's either peculiarly masochistic, or you're not being totally honest about your motivations.
    means to an end, just because you like the end doesn't mean you enjoy the means.

  20. #620
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by jakeic View Post
    means to an end, just because you like the end doesn't mean you enjoy the means.
    In the case of MMORPG design, they're the same. You like the rewards from LFR, ergo you like the existence of the LFR system. You might prefer something else, but LFR is clearly satisfying some of your needs, or you wouldn't be running it in the first place. Plenty of people don't, you know.


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