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.
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
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.
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.
Casual players go in lfr, and some of them like it
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.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
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 .
Last edited by Arbs; 2012-12-04 at 07:16 PM.
I don't always hunt things, But when I do, It's because they're things & I'm a Bear.
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
Last edited by DeathKnight Guy; 2012-12-04 at 07:33 PM. Reason: Spelling error
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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.
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.
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
"Peace is a lie"
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.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
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.
Last edited by poogle; 2012-12-04 at 08:41 PM.
I don't think LFR has been available for long enough to make that determination. LFR's life cycle started with an extremely easy, extremely quick reward raid cycle, which was a reaction to players feelings on the previous two tiers of content and subscription loss. The current LFR cycle is coupled to a much harder and much lengthier progression path, and we can observe how that has changed feedback, but we can't yet observe how blizzard will react to it, because the next raid tier will reflect their current mindset, just as the current raid tier reflects their mindset during 4.3.
I just wish the swing from easy to hard, and from too rewarding to not rewarding enough was not so extreme, and there was evidence they were in fact zeroing in on a reasonable target.
There hasn't been a boom in the desire to raid. There has been a boom in people going into raids. There is a very important difference. A lot of the people you see in LFR are not there because they want to raid. They are there because they want gear from raids. There is a significant difference in motivation involved. You also see a difference in the forms of the forum arguments, as many of the arguments arguing about accessing raids or making various levels of raiding accessible to the average player are not tied to the idea of raiding at all. They are tied to the acquisition of gear. You rarely see arguments about raid access, what you see is arguments about how X level of raiding is too easy or difficult for Y level of player and awards gear that is too good or bad to be commensurate with the difficulty of said boss or raid.
If you consider LFR raiding, then yes, the percentage of the gaming population that raids has increased. If you don't include LFR (and many people don't) then the actual raiding population likely hasn't changed or has shrunk. If someone could dig up solid numbers for the actual number of raiders that do normal or hard vs the population of raiders in Vanilla/TBC it would be an interesting comparison.
Another interesting thing to look at would be how many people who do raid in whatever form would be willing to stop raiding or would flat out stop raiding if raids started only giving cosmetic rewards (titles/mounts/transmog gear). What if all raid gear was attainable outside of raiding? How many "raiders" would there still be?
Finally, with regards to Karazahn - Karazahn being 10 man was actually a huge stressor for most raiding guilds as they'd already had to accomodate the fact that 40 man rosters would now be 25 man, but the first raid available was 10 man (which didn't accomodate a 25 man roster breakdown very well). Three 10 man raid teams didn't mesh well into one 25 man raid team and this caused a lot of guild drama and guild breakups in the early part of TBC. Was it a good raid - yes. It will be fondly remembered, but a great deal of that was due to atmosphere, memorable bosses and events (opera, chess, summoning Nightbane) and a unified vision and feel rather than the size of the raid. Early on in TBC Karazahn's size was a problem more than a benefit. And casuals didn't enter Karazahn early on because they couldn't beat anything other than Midnight and maybe Maiden.
Addendum:
One last thing to think about. The base idea behind raiding seems to have undergone a significant change over the last while. Raiding in Vanilla and TBC was based around the idea of repeated failure eventually leading to success. That idea changed with the introduction of toggled hardmodes in ToGC to one where in normal success was assured within a few attempts and for hardmodes success rarely involved more than a night of attempts (there are some noted exceptions). Then LFR was introduced and for LFR the idea was that success was basically assured and that wiping, even on first attempts, was the exception rather than the rule. These conflicting views on how success in raiding occurs is at the heart of a lot of arguments about raids and raid difficulty.
Would any LFR "raider" have been able to commit to the idea of stonewalling on a boss for days to sometimes weeks as certain old gateway bosses caused guilds to do (Vael, Twin Emps, Vashj, Kael, etc)? How many of the current crop of normal mode raiders would have lasted through that? How many of the old crop of raiders have left the game due to that change in philosophy?
What I'm saying is that the demand for raiding likely hasn't increased so much as the definition of raiding has changed so that more people see it as part of their playstyle, or as an easy enough path to reward that they're willing to do it despite it not being their preferred method of play due to greater rewards than their preferred style of play.
---------- Post added 2012-12-04 at 02:47 PM ----------
Before LFR you didn't need a raiding guild to raid unless you wanted to do the very cutting edge of content. Pugs did MC, BWL and sometimes even AQ in Vanilla. In TBC pugs did Kara, Gruul, Mag, SSC, TK, and once keys were removed they went into Hyjal and BT. In Wrath everything got pugged on normal and depending on server you also had pugs do varying amounts of hardmode content.
What LFR did was make the skill and effort to success ratio much lower. Before LFR a pug of average players in ICC would go at least 6 or 7 bosses, especially as the buff stacked. That same group of average players would clear a LFR version of ICC without breathing hard or paying attention. LFR didn't so much increase the access to raids as it did increase the success rate of bad raiders.
I'm not saying that all LFR raiders are bad, but a vast majority of LFR raiders were not good enough to get into average raid guilds. LFR allowed these players to be successful at the expense of devaluing the raiding experience within LFR. Raiders used to be special because they succeeded where others could not, but LFR made it so everyone could be special. And to paraphrase the Incredibles "when everyone is special, no one is." And where no one and nothing is special, you end up with nothing to really strive for, no sense of accomplishment or pride, and no real value. This will have a long term negative effect on the game both in terms of community and fun. Yes, whomping through a dungeon without time or effort might be fun the first few times, but the excitement and energy rapidly drains. People constantly belittle nostalgia, but nostalgia comes from remembering a good feeling that an experience entailed while the bad feelings are allowed to fade. This current model doesn't lend itself to nostalgia not because there are less bad feelings, but because there are less memorable good moments. The lack of nostalgia inducing moments in the current game is a bad thing, because nostalgia leads to attachment, and without that attachment, the desire to sub and stay subbed diminishes.
Last edited by Kissme; 2012-12-04 at 09:28 PM.