The Raiding Dilemma

[Kaver]

calling lfr raiding is a very very generous use of the term though.

Tbh I think LFR has an overall negative effect, it removes any kind of motivation to do actual raiding, finding a community or actually achieve something you're proud of.

When I started in wotlk, I would walk around dalaran looking at the people who had awesome gear and ask them: "How did you get that?". Then I eventually figured out what I needed to do and my journey started.

Ended the ICC tier with full 277 heroic (didn't get my LK crossbow QQ) gear and feeling like I'd earned every part of it.

However that's just the end of the journey, there were so many high points like my FIRST ever set piece I got from doing trial of the crusader which set me on the path to being able to raid ICC. Getting my first part of Tier 10 from VoA, finding a guild who was progressing 10man normal since I finally hit around 4.5k gearscore. Killing the lich king for the very first time etc.

You just don't get that experience anymore and LFR is one of the things contributing to the demise of that playstyle.

I agree. But I think the people doing LFR would never have been motivated to do higher difficulties of raiding either way.

I'm looking forward to classic.

[Otimus]

calling lfr raiding is a very very generous use of the term though.

Tbh I think LFR has an overall negative effect, it removes any kind of motivation to do actual raiding, finding a community or actually achieve something you're proud of.

When I started in wotlk, I would walk around dalaran looking at the people who had awesome gear and ask them: "How did you get that?". Then I eventually figured out what I needed to do and my journey started.

Ended the ICC tier with full 277 heroic (didn't get my LK crossbow QQ) gear and feeling like I'd earned every part of it.

However that's just the end of the journey, there were so many high points like my FIRST ever set piece I got from doing trial of the crusader which set me on the path to being able to raid ICC. Getting my first part of Tier 10 from VoA, finding a guild who was progressing 10man normal since I finally hit around 4.5k gearscore. Killing the lich king for the very first time etc.

You just don't get that experience anymore and LFR is one of the things contributing to the demise of that playstyle.

I'd say having all but the end of the game be piss easy is a bigger problem than LFR existing. The stark difficulty spike from before the end, and at the end, is why things like LFR have to exist in the first place as they are. Blizzard has seemingly never been interested in improving this, for whatever reason, and it's probably way too late now. Making all of the game be a 1 out of 10 on the difficulty scale until you get to Raiding/Mythic+ is crazy. All of the difficulty is so backloaded, it makes no real sense. Like... if at some point in the leveling process, if at least some very mild grouping was even just vaguely encouraged, it would have been nice. But it's not even encouraged. It's actively DISCOURAGED. You actually level slower if you play with other human beings. That's just wrong, IMHO, in an MMORPG.

[Battlebeard]

But you're ONE player. What about all the players who are actually bad? Should we all be tricked to waste hundreds of hours playing with them and wipe on bosses over and over again because they are not willing to learn mechanics etc?

Would you be willing to wipe on the same bosses over and over again everytime you joined a raid? Do you think you could kill heroic Jaina if you invited completely random people without looking at ilvl or anything?



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That's your problem. If you prioritize staying in that guild then it's your responsibility to put in effort to raid.

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I agree. Thank you for your input.

Yes, honestly I think I rather wipe with a friendly open minded group than kill a boss with an elitistic ignorant group. Equally important as "success" aka boss kills etc, is having fun. Being rejected over and over and over is not fun.

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It literally is that easy, lol

in modern WoW you can get raid-level gear from running 5mans, once you're geared enough you can just link a fake achievement to get into whatever pug raid you want.

Or just, y'know, stop being a lazy shit and join a guild.

I have a guild, but not able to raid with them, wrote reasons before, but to summarize, I don't have the hours for the Mythic team and the Heroic team raids saturdays, i can not play saturdays. But they are cool people, I don't wanna swap just to raid...

And we talk about raiding here. There are those who do both raids and M+, but I HATE M+ and will never do it. For all these years you survived as a raider only, and I rfuse to think M+ is mandatory.

[horbindr]

And if you don't want to swap guilds? What if you have long time friends in your guild and don't wanna leave them?

"find a guild" is only a solution for the guildless.

My guild is a mix, there are many casuals, who have no interest or skill for HC.

There is also the Mythic team that just killed Mythic Jaina, not top notch, but decent team. Still I can't join mythic, no way with my time schedule.

And then there is the HC team, sadly they only ever raid saturdays, the only day i can never play on. Sadly, I have no use of my guild raidwise. But they are cool guys and we talk alot, I don't wanna leave them for a few more HC raid invites, nor should that be required.

thats a choice you have to make.

but "making your current guild better" or stuff like that doesn't work, your team of friend will stay and all the other people will move on. seen it happen a dozen times.

and on the other side, it does become harder to maintain friendships if you swap guilds. so it's a bit of a catch22.

my personal advice: switch guilds, make new friends there, if you are real friends with people form the old guild the friendship will survive.

or, if you are only interested in heroic, raid heroic with another guild without joining them, or join a community (or pug discord) if those happen to have caught on. lots of options and flexibility in the game now for heroic or lower difficulty. even mythic is xrealm pretty early now so you can probably get a bit of that in too without actually having to join another guild.

[aceperson]

Guys, how do we progress in raids etc when no one is willing to take us?

make you're own. unless you're somehow declining yourself to your own raids.

[Kaver]

Yes, honestly I think I rather wipe with a friendly open minded group than kill a boss with an elitistic ignorant group. Equally important as "success" aka boss kills etc, is having fun. Being rejected over and over and over is not fun.

Most people would not be willing to do that. They would not find it fun to wipe on the same bosses over and over again when they had to reclear the raid. It would be the end of pugs which I’m actually not against because playing with completely random people that you will never meet again will never be as fun as playing with people you know.

What you fail to understand is that YOU are a RARE case. Most players in your situation are not good players. Removing peoples ability to filter would remove their willingness to create random groups.

[Marrilaife]

An interesting thing about game design is that "players should just X" is NEVER a valid defense of a design.

Players, in aggregate, will do whatever it is they do, and the game designers have to accept that and work with it. They don't get to redesign their customers, or insist that the customers are responsible for a failure. The customers are paying to play, not vice versa, and responsibility flows in the same direction as the money.

Yes, the game could do better job at teaching people instead of just betting on people reaching into external sources, websites and videos to "do the research".

On the other hand it can do nothing about the masses of lazy, entitled players who want to put no effort, learn nothing, and receive the best rewards because "my 15$ per month is the same as everyone else's". It's a lose-lose situation because if the devs cave in and give what these players ask for, basically full reward for zero effort, they will get quickly bored and unsub, because they already got everything quickly and effortlessly (what they asked for in the first place) or the game will go down p2w mode where not skill or effort, but how much money you paid decided what rewards you got.

We already see what happened when easy rewards were given, stuff like mission tables chugging free gold in the past 2 expansions, world quest / emissary etc. effortless "login reward" gear matching gear from dungeons or raids (to this day lfr / normal mode is dwarfed by all the solo content in magnitude of rewards), people just grab the easy stuff then complain about boredom and nothing to do.

Every single goddamn thread on these forums about people "unable" to get into raiding / m+ / you call it ends up with revealing masses of people who expect themselves to get a group in "plug & play" mode, tailored exactly for them, available when it suits them time wise, being filled with people who basically already climbed the ladder (have gear, experience, etc. necessary to clear the content) and just roll the red carpet for Jimmy the "returning player" or Johnny the newbie who have nothing to their name and 5, 10, 20 of these people together couldn't kill anything except the super easy content (which they don't want to do anymore because it's "beneath them"), but they feel deserving to be invited to a group that will basically clear content for them and maybe even teach them a thing or two along the way, but not too much because "don't tell me how to play, it's just a game lol, I have a life and I play how I wanna".

You can basically:
- commit to a guild if you expect to be hand held through the content (there are many guilds that don't mind just telling people what to do so they don't have to do any research on their own, especially mid tier and semi-casual guilds)
- renounce all the hand holding and jump into deep water of pugging

Can't have both, and people demand it, then get upset it doesn't come their way. With pugs you can also have either:
- experienced fast group which will NOT invite Timmy the "just subbed after 3 month break"
- open for newbies group that will reach much higher wipe count (but just watch how many people insta drop group after couple of wipes or even 1)

People complain content is too easy, and then when content gets harder (maybe 10% or less of the game) they complain they have to do homework or put effort, or lead people, or earn experience first, but if you slapped 20 randoms 0 xp players into a hc pug they would insta jump at each other throats instead of learning anything or figuring out how to progress through the content.

That's why we can't have good things in team based games. Solo games yeah, you get win or lose depending on your own effort, you can even cheat your way to the end credits and nobody cares, but every team game is the same problem, toxicity, entitlement, blaming everyone else but themselves, etc. You could play a MOBA or a team based shooter, and it would be exactly the same problem, for every person that tries their best to win and maybe tries to learn something in the process there's easily double, triple amount of people who will complain about "shit team, elo hell, unfair matchmaking" and whatever else because all they wanted is to have red carpet rolled for them towards victory.

It's even worse in pvp games because in pve you can make things deliberately easy enough so win rate is high, but in pvp either the win rate is around 50% or it's a blatant p2w game where whoever pays the most $$$ gets indeed a free ride towards victory. And sadly so many mobile and browser games are exactly like that.

[Battlebeard]

Most people would not be willing to do that. They would not find it fun to wipe on the same bosses over and over again when they had to reclear the raid. It would be the end of pugs which I’m actually not against because playing with completely random people that you will never meet again will never be as fun as playing with people you know.

What you fail to understand is that YOU are a RARE case. Most players in your situation are not good players. Removing peoples ability to filter would remove their willingness to create random groups.

But it has worked fine over the years. The best time ever was in WotLK. We had gearscore then, sure, but getting gear was fairly easy. Much easier than to get experience. Sure, we had achievements, but no Ahead of the Curve or Cutting edge yet. Back then, if you had decent gear, you didn't really need much achievements to get invited. And by decent gear, it wasn't even super good required.

I remember doing so many ICC pugs on like 5 characters and basically no one ever bitched about things to get invited. People had a more laid back attitude back then, and I think it was because there were less elitistic tools back then. And guess what, the pugs were succesful!

Though, they messed up the difficulties in the game since the end of MoP. MoP was PERFECT, we had Heroic as the hardest, then Normal, then Flex and then LFR.

Now LFR is the same, but Mythic is harder than old Heroic, which is bad, but not the end of the world.

Heroic now is MUCH harder than old Normal, and this sucks.

And todays Normal is harder then the old Flex, which also sucks alot. They should have kept the difficulties of MoP.

[Zantera]

I don't think we need 4 different difficulties of a raid but I also don't think it's that much of a problem. Nobody with self respect is gonna do LFR and think "hey i cleared the raid now, no reason to do normal, hc or mythic". If you have that opinion that clearing LFR fills that satisfaction of doing a new raid then you're too far gone and raiding is probably not for you.

[Kaver]

But it has worked fine over the years. The best time ever was in WotLK. We had gearscore then, sure, but getting gear was fairly easy. Much easier than to get experience. Sure, we had achievements, but no Ahead of the Curve or Cutting edge yet. Back then, if you had decent gear, you didn't really need much achievements to get invited. And by decent gear, it wasn't even super good required.

I remember doing so many ICC pugs on like 5 characters and basically no one ever bitched about things to get invited. People had a more laid back attitude back then, and I think it was because there were less elitistic tools back then. And guess what, the pugs were succesful!

Though, they messed up the difficulties in the game since the end of MoP. MoP was PERFECT, we had Heroic as the hardest, then Normal, then Flex and then LFR.

Now LFR is the same, but Mythic is harder than old Heroic, which is bad, but not the end of the world.

Heroic now is MUCH harder than old Normal, and this sucks.

And todays Normal is harder then the old Flex, which also sucks alot. They should have kept the difficulties of MoP.

I think the difference is that in Wrath the average max level character with pre-raid gear was much better than compared with todays max-level players. Getting to max level (80) was much more time consuming than getting to level 120 today (plus you didn't have the free character boosts from every expansion). Getting the right gear was also much more challenging.

Today every idiot can get to level 120 and get ilvl 400 gear without any effort. This results in a much larger "raid ready" player base. The chance (or risk) of encountering a bad player is therefore much larger.

In Wrath, getting to level 80 and get pre-raid gear was in itself a filter for really bad players. Today we don't have any in-game filters. If you just invite completely random players it will most likely be a shitshow.

This is the problem with levelling having no "effort requirements" and having no learning curve.

[potis]

I remember doing so many ICC pugs on like 5 characters and basically no one ever bitched about things to get invited. People had a more laid back attitude back then, and I think it was because there were less elitistic tools back then. And guess what, the pugs were succesful!

Its not the tools, raids are simply harder, and if you dont have someone to counter certain things, you will wipe because no one has a clue.

Some mechanics are not puggable for the average player.

They are outside of their skill level/experience/reaction times.

Conclave was a massive road block the first 2 months for the pugs because the healers had to know what to do, where to stand, how to move.

Obviously average pugger wont know/do that, aka wipes.

2 months after, because they create groups of 410 gear, they get run over but 3-5 people out of 20 still die.

HC Guldan in Legion was the same, there were 2 standard overlaps, always at the same time, where if the healer knew he could save 1-3 people, again i wiped over 100 times trying to get my curve the first week or two because healers didnt know, and wouldnt accept being told what to do in order to not lose people.

And your pugs werent successful, killing 3-5 bosses/12 isnt "Successful", most groups disbanded after Saurfang cause it required people to do mechanics after that.

Unless by pugs you mean "My guild on alts was 80% of the group and we cleared normal 10 with HC ICC gear."

Its the same reason right now, there is a massive number of players in 410 gear, where you can see "6/9HC" because Mekkatorque is not puggable for the average player, no matter how much gear he has.

[Illana]

Yup im pretty sure most pugs were lootship and done cause most groups didn't have the healing or dps for saurfang. Festergut might have been done a couple times but not really.

I remember most of our runs were of icc normal and main raid was heroic only, but back then normal was about equal to difficulty to today's heroic and LFR obviously didn't exist.

[Twdft]

Yup im pretty sure most pugs were lootship and done cause most groups didn't have the healing or dps for saurfang

Anecdotal, but the few times I remember pugging on an Alt the raid disbanded after Saurfang because Deathbringer's Will was ninjad lol.

[Otimus]

But it has worked fine over the years. The best time ever was in WotLK. We had gearscore then, sure, but getting gear was fairly easy. Much easier than to get experience. Sure, we had achievements, but no Ahead of the Curve or Cutting edge yet. Back then, if you had decent gear, you didn't really need much achievements to get invited. And by decent gear, it wasn't even super good required.

I remember doing so many ICC pugs on like 5 characters and basically no one ever bitched about things to get invited. People had a more laid back attitude back then, and I think it was because there were less elitistic tools back then. And guess what, the pugs were succesful!

Though, they messed up the difficulties in the game since the end of MoP. MoP was PERFECT, we had Heroic as the hardest, then Normal, then Flex and then LFR.

Now LFR is the same, but Mythic is harder than old Heroic, which is bad, but not the end of the world.

Heroic now is MUCH harder than old Normal, and this sucks.

And todays Normal is harder then the old Flex, which also sucks alot. They should have kept the difficulties of MoP.

The main reason ICC pugs were so laid back back when is because it got pretty hard nerfed near the end and split raiding was still a thing. Split raiding is what made pugging thrive until Cata killed it, and it didn't really get reborn until Flex raiding. SoO pugs were also pretty much as laid back as the ICC ones.

(Still, though, most disbanded after the ship)

If anything, I'd say the GoGoGoGoGo GIMMEGIMMEGIMMEGIMME attitude is what has crushed pugging/WoW community in general. People are tremendously rude, impatient, and don't want to deal with anything even approaching adversity and will leave at the drop of a hat and spit on you.

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Yes, the game could do better job at teaching people instead of just betting on people reaching into external sources, websites and videos to "do the research".

On the other hand it can do nothing about the masses of lazy, entitled players who want to put no effort, learn nothing, and receive the best rewards because "my 15$ per month is the same as everyone else's". It's a lose-lose situation because if the devs cave in and give what these players ask for, basically full reward for zero effort, they will get quickly bored and unsub, because they already got everything quickly and effortlessly (what they asked for in the first place) or the game will go down p2w mode where not skill or effort, but how much money you paid decided what rewards you got.

We already see what happened when easy rewards were given, stuff like mission tables chugging free gold in the past 2 expansions, world quest / emissary etc. effortless "login reward" gear matching gear from dungeons or raids (to this day lfr / normal mode is dwarfed by all the solo content in magnitude of rewards), people just grab the easy stuff then complain about boredom and nothing to do.

Every single goddamn thread on these forums about people "unable" to get into raiding / m+ / you call it ends up with revealing masses of people who expect themselves to get a group in "plug & play" mode, tailored exactly for them, available when it suits them time wise, being filled with people who basically already climbed the ladder (have gear, experience, etc. necessary to clear the content) and just roll the red carpet for Jimmy the "returning player" or Johnny the newbie who have nothing to their name and 5, 10, 20 of these people together couldn't kill anything except the super easy content (which they don't want to do anymore because it's "beneath them"), but they feel deserving to be invited to a group that will basically clear content for them and maybe even teach them a thing or two along the way, but not too much because "don't tell me how to play, it's just a game lol, I have a life and I play how I wanna".

You can basically:
- commit to a guild if you expect to be hand held through the content (there are many guilds that don't mind just telling people what to do so they don't have to do any research on their own, especially mid tier and semi-casual guilds)
- renounce all the hand holding and jump into deep water of pugging

Can't have both, and people demand it, then get upset it doesn't come their way. With pugs you can also have either:
- experienced fast group which will NOT invite Timmy the "just subbed after 3 month break"
- open for newbies group that will reach much higher wipe count (but just watch how many people insta drop group after couple of wipes or even 1)

People complain content is too easy, and then when content gets harder (maybe 10% or less of the game) they complain they have to do homework or put effort, or lead people, or earn experience first, but if you slapped 20 randoms 0 xp players into a hc pug they would insta jump at each other throats instead of learning anything or figuring out how to progress through the content.

That's why we can't have good things in team based games. Solo games yeah, you get win or lose depending on your own effort, you can even cheat your way to the end credits and nobody cares, but every team game is the same problem, toxicity, entitlement, blaming everyone else but themselves, etc. You could play a MOBA or a team based shooter, and it would be exactly the same problem, for every person that tries their best to win and maybe tries to learn something in the process there's easily double, triple amount of people who will complain about "shit team, elo hell, unfair matchmaking" and whatever else because all they wanted is to have red carpet rolled for them towards victory.

It's even worse in pvp games because in pve you can make things deliberately easy enough so win rate is high, but in pvp either the win rate is around 50% or it's a blatant p2w game where whoever pays the most $$$ gets indeed a free ride towards victory. And sadly so many mobile and browser games are exactly like that.

Like, what you say isn't wrong, but most every multiplayer game does work in this way now, via matchmaking: "masses of people who expect themselves to get a group in "plug & play" mode, tailored exactly for them".
It just hasn't worked out with, like, hardcore shooters, MOBAs, and MMO's. Blizzard's biggest failing is trying super hard to attract nothing but ultra casuals and doing fuck all with them.

[gioderpington]

Join a raiding guild.
Solves literally every problem people post on this site with M+, raiding, and PvP.
Consistent progression. No worries about group randomly falling apart. Consistent access to players of your skill level and higher for groups; whether is arenas, battlegrounds, grinds, or M+. Knowledgeable player base that will help you find/understand game mechanics and lore/events.
They don't play at times you play at? Server transfer or suck it up. I raid then get up 6 hours later to head to work twice a week. Don't want to do either? Well you can't control other people, guess you are stuck in a pugging nightmare.

"They said they are full or I am not good enough". First one is never true, they are lying to you or themselves. Second one; get better at the game by asking to join their guild and learn.
"My computer can't handle mythic raiding or some even heroic raiding". That is 100% a you problem
"They want me to show achievements for content" Also BS, they are not a guild you want to be a part of. Better mythic guilds that aren't top 100 will literally pick you off the street cause you looked at them with a little twinkle of hope and bloodlust in your eyes.
"They are to hardcore for me and yell at me for screwing up literally once". Can be a real problem but its rare. Stick with them until you can slide into a different guild.
"I am shy and don't want to talk in discord" Thats fine, every guild has 6-10 players that don't talk. I am one of them, i only talk in /i or /g. All you need to do is listen.

[Marrilaife]

Like, what you say isn't wrong, but most every multiplayer game does work in this way now, via matchmaking: "masses of people who expect themselves to get a group in "plug & play" mode, tailored exactly for them".
It just hasn't worked out with, like, hardcore shooters, MOBAs, and MMO's. Blizzard's biggest failing is trying super hard to attract nothing but ultra casuals and doing fuck all with them.

Yeah because this kind of thing can only work in a game that isn't designed around competitive play.

Plus on a side note I don't understand what's the obsession of making every game nowadays a group based game. Even Diablo 3 when it was during its glory days was balanced in a way groups had advantage over solo player. Except hearthstone Blizzard haven't made any game that was aimed at solo player. And when you make people play in groups, you subject them to judgement, peer pressure, toxicity of the internet, prejudice ("you picked x hero / class / talent etc. therefore you suck") and whatever else. I mean ok, go forward with your always online mtx ridden game as a service since you have to make monies somehow, but why everything needs to be also group play.

It's fascinating to behold how big portion of wow playerbase wishes to play solo, and while you can't change wow formula easily because it will upset many players who signed up for something else, what's the last Blizzard game released? Overwatch. Again, group play. Why?