To people whom want LFR removed: What endgame do you propose for the casual players?

[Xiun]

We never even whisper said LFR player, it's more so people whispering me asking to raid or half-filling out apps saying "I'm better than everyone in LFR! accept me!"

So really, it's only a minor annoyance.

[Deleted]

Agreed, but Blizzard didn't want to create 5-mans for casuals. There are only 6 new 5-mans for MoP. Assuming you didn't do them while leveling up, you will probably have worked your way through every single one of them in under a week at level cap, even playing one or two hours a night. After that? Unsubscribe. That's why Blizzard gave casuals raids. They didn't want to create more dungeons, so they watered down the raid and threw it to casuals as pity content. I agree with you that it was a bad idea, but I understand the reasoning behind it. Without LFR there is very little in the way of content for casuals this expansion.

So what's the difference between blowing through all the 5 mans in the first few weeks, and blowing through all the LFR wings as they're released, if they're going to unsubscribe once they've seen them all either way?
And then you list of all these things you've already done or have don't enjoy doing, while claiming to represent casuals. But you don't sound like a casual if you've done that much stuff already.

[Zka]

I was pretty casual before cancelling my sub and I would never consider LFR "endgame".

[Deleted]

The only thing LFR needs is a tool that will auto remove people who are slacking and being AFK. I don't mind new players that suck at the game because they will learn sooner or later if they try but it's pretty frustrating seeing 5+ people at the back of the raid AFKing on trash and even bosses being absolutely worthless.

Vote to kick doesn't even work half the time because of some weird protection and the community is way too big and simple minded as a whole to get the fact that with enough vote kicks the players in LFR would eventually start playing and behaving normaly. There should be a limit to how much DPS and healing you can be doing to still stay in the raid. If you don't meet that requirement over a certain period of time you're out. It's really bad for the game that casual raiding means AFKing and just not giving a damn about 24 other people in the raid. I don't mind players dieing on encounters because they didn't know tactics to the boss. Usualy just moving your char out of the fire is enough on most encounters to survive. But it's really rage inducing to see players following others during trash and auto attacking on bosses with 10-20k dps just to not seem AFK.

[Normie]

Vote to kick doesn't even work half the time because of some weird protection and the community is way too big and simple minded as a whole to get the fact that with enough vote kicks the players in LFR would eventually start playing and behaving normaly.

There's no indication this would be the case. You might want to consider the contrary situation, where if you had unlimited votekicks, the group could kick everyone who had less than 90th percentile DPS or didn't reforge out of expertise or was a girl or whatever, and some groups would do that.

In general, it's easy to kick a single player, and very rarely do I see a case where multiple people need to be kicked from a group in LFR.

Kicks got restricted because players abused the system as much as it could possibly abused. This is why we can't have nice things, et cetera.

[Belisaurio]

The only thing LFR needs is a tool that will auto remove people who are slacking and being AFK.

Just create a difficult "in crescendo" curve, and put LFR something mid-top of this curve. This should be the end.game for all players. If you put an endgame at the lowest part of this curve, then you will allways have a bad evolving community.

[Pua]

Having internal discussions on how to best approach a fight is not really considered studying in my eyes. In every sport or team activity I have ever done in my life, I have always had to participate in discussions within the group on how to improve ourselves at whatever we are doing to get the best result.

I'm not really interested in another protracted argument with you, but we're talking about time spent outside of the game in order to play at the highest level in PvE or PvP. Forum posts discussing how to tackle a boss is most certainly external studying, just as reading up on how your class is played/geared is. Everyone at the top level uses the forums to figure out things like stat weights or haste break points because you can't work that out just by playing; the default UI isn't that clear. Perhaps you have a guild officer who does most of this work and passes it on, but study is still being done to get players up to their best.

This is a general observation that's true for pretty much every decent raiding guild. Hell, players don't even get into those guilds without being asked theorycrafting questions on recruitment applications.

However, this is probably pointless. I fully expect you to come back and say how you don't need external help to be the world's best paladin, just like how you raid at the top of the game without mods or voice chat. We've been here before, haven't we?

When I PvPed I made the few macros I wanted myself. Composition tactics should be fairly obvious to figure out and learning about other classes is not exactly hard either. You can learn all this by just playing the game, studying up a bit can for sure be helpful, but again, you can learn all that by just playing if you have a decent attention span. After playing against a retri paladin, bm hunter + healer 10 times, I would be quite stupid to not figure out that their comp revolves around popping all CDs at the same time and bursting someone down and that as a resto druid, it is probably my best bet to have my CDs up when their DPSers pop their CDs to counter that. It is not really rocket science.

Playing with whatever arena partners I had, it is also not that hard to figure out what their strengths and weaknesses are to figure out our composition tactics.

How many times have you been ranked gladiator?

Yes, exactly.

The point of lfr is to let people get loot (aka see the content) without needing to be particularly competent. Anyone who moans that people in LFR aren't playing well is an idiot, frankly. It's specifically designed for that audience.

I agree, but I think the problem is a little more endemic. I was laughed at for months when I argued that LFR was too difficult, and that success was only happening because of legitimate raiders or skilled casuals who could carry those not up to it. It'd be premature to argue that I was right all along, but it certainly looks that way.

Perhaps that's my biggest problem with LFR. It's got nothing to do with casual players, because casual players can also be very good. It's aimed squarely at bad or new players that the levelling game hasn't educated well enough, and then tuned with the assumption better players will be there to pick up the slack. When General Nazgrim went through his round of nerfs, I was honestly amazed at how far Blizzard took it.

Boss encounters honestly do not get much simpler than "prioritize adds, don't stand in axes, don't DPS him in Defensive Stance".

Is that really too much to expect? And if it is, where does the blame for that lie? A section of the playerbase likes to blame 'The Casual' (who is fast becoming a bogeyman character), but I blame Blizzard for making a mess of their expectation management. New players simply can't fail on the way up to 90, not matter what they're doing, and the game makes no attempt to counter-leverage the system of guaranteed rewards and success pre level cap.

It really needs to.

I propose player housing, oh wait kill 2 birds with one stone! Wildstar (now with 100% less fake raiding then then the warcraft)

I've always liked the idea of housing, but Blizzard just aren't keen on it. It was originally promised to arrive soon after launch, but Blizzard went cold on it pretty quickly.

So LFR is good for those HC/Norm raiders for their own guilds progression but its destroying the game for everyone else?

That's not what he's saying. He's saying that LFR is tuned with the worst available players in mind.

Just because it's a quicker way to do things in the game in no way means that it is in fact better for the game, community or developers. Only for completely impatient players that want instant gratification. And oh look, what do you see? People bitching left right and center about why they can't get things EVEN FASTER. The difference between then and now is that Blizzard DIDN'T give people what they wanted and yet they still continued to come in droves. Now that Blizzard has catered to them the game is hemorrhaging subscriptions.

I do think convenience has gone too far. Even things like more graveyards and mailboxes contribute to everything requiring far less time to do. Levelling crafting professions used to be a ball ache, but now it's trimmed down to be done as quickly as possible so you can get your blacksmith sockets for raiding.

And in that post you're quoting I specifically called out your post in this thread as being the exception to all those other non-constructive responses. I'm sorry that you didn't take it as the compliment that I intended.

It's the Internet, bud, shit like that happens all the time.

For what it's worth, I've enjoyed the majority of your contributions in this thread. I think we view the most important things very similarly.

Or offer justice vendors with catch up gear on it and valor gear with current pieces on it and WITHOUT the obnoxious rep requirements.

There's a compelling argument to making most (if not all) gearing currency-based. It works fine in PvP and, if done intelligently, could work fine in PvE.

Also... I've missed too many pages to catch up. I'll try and stay on top of this from now on.

[Ronduwil]

So what's the difference between blowing through all the 5 mans in the first few weeks, and blowing through all the LFR wings as they're released, if they're going to unsubscribe once they've seen them all either way?

The difference is that with 16 5-mans chances are you're only going to see a given one every two to three weeks, assuming you're only queueing for one a night. With LFR it's the same miserable grind week in and week out, and you're chained to a new group of players for the next 1-3 hours. Every once in a while it's a pleasant experience, but more often than not it sucks. Assuming 10% of the people in the game are absolute jerks you're going to have 2-3 of them in your LFR group on average. Half the players in the group can't even distinguish the trolls from the people who are trying because they lack knowledge of the boss mechanics. For that reason it's hard to manage quality control on 25-man LFR. In 5-mans it's easy to do. With only five people in the group it's also much easier to spot the bonehead who is deliberately screwing everything up. You can initiate a VTK and give a reason like:

Deliberately pulling trash into the boss

And everyone immediately knows what you're talking about. In 25-man arguments break out:

• Pallyjerk: HunterX pulled
• HunterX: No, I misdirected and then feigned death for good measure, as planned. Kick Pallyjerk! He put a HoP on the tank so he couldn't get threat.
• Everyone else: ???

And then you list of all these things you've already done or have don't enjoy doing, while claiming to represent casuals. But you don't sound like a casual if you've done that much stuff already.

That wasn't my list. Those were alternatives offered in another post. I was listing them to explain why they're not a good replacement for 5-mans. I never said I'm a casual, but I prefer the casual style of play. I played casually in WotLK, but that playstyle hasn't been viable since Cataclysm. Now it's even less viable than ever.

- - - Updated - - -

Usualy just moving your char out of the fire is enough on most encounters to survive. But it's really rage inducing to see players following others during trash and auto attacking on bosses with 10-20k dps just to not seem AFK.

These days that's not enough; you also have to know which fire to move into. Most wipes on Malkorok, for example, happen because the tank incorrectly "reminds" everyone to stay out of the bad stuff about two seconds before pulling. On that fight there are three types of "bad" ground effects. Players have to soak up the first type to avoid massive raid-wide damage, everyone has to move out of the second type, and the third type appears without any visual warnings on the spots where the second type appeared before. By the time it hits it's too late. Even Cataclysm didn't screw players like that. As for auto-attacking, bad DPS these days is on the order of 30-40K. Stat inflation has gotten absolutely ridiculous. Much of that is pure gear too. A heroically geared player going all out will pull almost three times the DPS of a LFR player going all out. That's why DPS is a poor indicator of whether or not someone is AFK.