LFR and whether it still has a place in WoW

[TheRevenantHero]

I had a good laugh at this. "Then remove gear incentive from mythic too, then the only people who play it will be there for the challenge, then we'll really see how many will do it based on that alone."

You beat me to it lol

[aceperson]

i think lfr being removed would be good for the game in few major ways.

1. new players who do lfr and don't know what they're doing won't have their first impression of end game content be wiping for upwards of an hour, not knowing why, and having toxic people get mad at mostly random people because they don't understand what is happening either. instead, they will have their first raid be a more organized group as it was meant.

2. lfr gear isn't meaningful unless a trinket or weapon is overtuned. it isn't fun to go into lfr just to try and get a poorly balanced item and deal with said wipes and toxicity.

3. having to find a group causes actual social interaction (who would have thought) instead of just shoving people into a group and no one sharing anything in common beyond "kill boss". you are more likely to find friends and have a fun time.

that said, i don't think blizz will ever get rid of lfr. as much as i think it would be a good idea, it would be an immensely unpopular one.

[Sarethion]

I think it would be really interesting to see what would happen if they dropped LFR.

You want to know what would happen if they dropped LFR? They'd either have it back within two weeks or the next raid would drop Mythic difficulty.

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having toxic people get mad at mostly random people because they don't understand what is happening either

Yeah, because having the toxic people specifically target you and/or kick you out of the group is so much better.

2. lfr gear isn't meaningful

People don't do LFR for gear.

having to find a group causes actual social interaction

What interaction? Pressing a button in the LFG UI and getting a bunch of declines or time-outs?

i think lfr being removed would be good for the game

No, it wouldn't be good for the game.

Let's assume for a second that new players and people who do LFR would go into Normal PUGs, which in my opinion is very unlikely. What would happen is that Normal PUGs would get a big influx of inexperienced or bad players. This would significantly increase the chance of groups failing or falling apart, which would cause group leaders to be more restrictive with invites (i.e. make it harder to get a group) and increase frustration (i.e. make the environment more toxic).

End result? These new/LFR players would quit Normal PUGs and raiding in general, due to either not wanting to deal with getting a group or being detered by toxicity. Meanwhile, people who do Normal PUGs now would have their experience destabilized and made less enjoyable, possibly even after the new/LFR players quit.

[owbu]

Lfr is there for the many people who hate any kind of organized activity in the game.

So just switch around your argument (deleting mythic would free up dev time! Mythic raiders could just play Lfr instead and not have to deal with all of those terrible social pressures anymore! And so on.) and you can hopefully see that this type of discussion would never survive outside an echo chamber full of raiders.

I'm glad they made Lfr irrelevant for everyone who plays the game our way. Everything on top of that is just showing a lack of empathy and is never going to happen anyways. We are the few.

[Gaebryel Quintyne]

It's still a good way for most players to participate in raiding without the need to commit to organised raiding. However it's pretty useless as a means of gear acquisition - which IMO is a massive pity, especially since there was absolutely no need to nerf LFR gear this hard.



Let's be clear. M+ is high end content and requires some degree of organisation. LFR is easy mode content which uses automated group forming. The alternative gear path for LFR path is world quests, N'zoth assaults, low end horrific visions etc.



I run LFR on some of my alts in order to complete quests and stuff like that. But then again I am part of an organised raiding group. Overall I wouldn't say that LFR is a bad experience. Obviously the experience can vary greatly depending on the attitude of the people you're grouped. Which means there is the possibility of it being really poor, but in my experience it's generally fairly decent. I reckon that the biggest problem in LFR is assholes who join LFR just to grief the other 24 players there - the sort of player who likes to look down on LFR and call it a cesspit of terribles, oblivious to the irony of their attitude.

If you look at the final N'zoth encounter which I have now done 3 times (on 3 different alts), it's actually been a pretty awesome experience. There have always been helpful players in the group who are willing to explain the fight, often repeatedly after each wipe as new people come in. And most players who are there are keen to do their best and help the group prevail. The minority who just don't seem to care, or won't listen (or worst, purposely try and sabotage the raid) get weeded out pretty quickly, so that by attempt 3-4 the group is entirely filled with the right kind of player to make the experience enjoyable.

I know a lot of people would think that wiping on the boss 5-10 times before killing it in LFR just goes to show how useless people in LFR are. But the opposite couldn't be further from the truth. N'zoth is not a boss in LFR who will just fall over. It totally requires people to have a decent idea of what they're doing. And just like in regular progression raiding where many wipes are part of the process, the same applies in LFR (just in a far more condensed amount of time). People do learn, they get better, and they earn that kill.



I cannot say that has been my experience at all. LFR has a kick function which, used correctly, is highly effective at keeping those elements out



I highly doubt it.

LFR was created because the target audience had no motivation to join guilds for the purpose of raiding even when there was no alternative. I see no reason to believe that has changed. It serves an important need in the game for a significant chunk of the playerbase.

Honestly, I find it asinine that some people keep wanting to suggest its removal. And if you're just looking at pure numbers, if they had to remove any modes of raiding, those that would make the most sense would be Mythic and Heroic (not that I am suggesting that they do, just trying to put things into a proper perspective)

I agree with everything you said. I have seen exactly the experiences you have described in LFR and I actually haven't done LFR for the current raid yet (But I will do it though eventually, definitely before the xpac ends).

[Aggrophobic]

"Small" is relative I suppose (and also the size doesn't actually matter for my argument in any way), but I find it unreasonable to assume there's enough people who only see the raid through LFR to call it anything but "small".

Why would that be unreasonable? I see it as much more reasonable that most people do not take part in organized raiding.
There is a good reason why boosting is such a big thing after all.

[Biomega]

Why would that be unreasonable? I see it as much more reasonable that most people do not take part in organized raiding.
There is a good reason why boosting is such a big thing after all.

Who cares how many there are, and whether to call it small, large, medium, whatever. It's irrelevant to the argument I was making.

[Shaetha]

In that note, if LFR was removed from the game, would people (who only raid casually) feel motivated to join guilds that run Normal mode raids. There are plenty of such guilds who are willing to try out casual normal raiding. At least you can get a personality match with organized team and raid with a group of similar minded people with similar wow raiding goals.

It's more to do with group matchmaking than anything else. Some people will not do content that isn't matchmade.

LFR is for those people, which are a larger portion of the population than you'd think.

[MoanaLisa]

I suspect if one could grab the numbers of who runs what that LFR is still far and away the most utilized of all the raid difficulties. So yeah, it has a place. It's end game for a lot of players. It's not really about gearing as such so high-end M+ is irrelevant to the topic. It's a guaranteed spot in a raid group for players who don't bother with guilds or pugs.

I've been saying this for years but people need to get onboard with the idea that many people, perhaps most, aren't overly interested in being challenged. They play to relax and that's OK. LFR is for them.

[Shaetha]

Why should people be expected to have to repeat content rather then progressing past it?

Every multiplayer game ever made is about repeating content.

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As long as the content is bad, I will use LFR because I am not commiting to the requirements of anything else on a bad game. You put out low tier content, ill play the bare minimum if at all. You put out good content and ill put in the time and effort to play the harder difficulties. If you dont even care about your own game, then why should I.

Why are you playing a game you don't like?

[exochaft]

Every multiplayer game ever made is about repeating content.

Depends on the game. When you hear from older devs from vanilla WoW, much of the content was designed to be useful for a time, then discarded. Constantly recycling the same content is a more recent phenomenon, but it has taken root in the industry quite a bit. In the short term, constantly recycling content and making you need to do it will keep your playerbase engaged. In the long term, you stress out, bore, or exhaust your players... the game feels like work or chores, leading a good portion of your playerbase to quit. Of all the players I've played with over the years, almost all of them have quit in recent years because of this content recycling.

Part of what's missing with the game is a lack of social interactions, and LFR isn't really conducive to a social experience. All of my great WoW memories are accented with social engagements, not necessarily just the events but the people I experienced events with. Good or bad experience, it's all still a social experience.

[Exxord]

In the past I was a semi-hardcore (in effort, if not in skill) raider, so I know what "serious" raiding is like. And still, since it was introduced in DS I do like running LFR with my alts (and now my main, as I quitted the raid scene in BfA) and never really had bad experiences form it. I don't know if the EU scene is so much better than US, but outside of some very rare occasions the LFR experience is decent. Perfect? Absolutely not, but far from terrible. And still, I absolutely HATE running M+ dungeon. They just aren't for me.
So yes, LFR still has an audience and his place in the game. And in my opinion, it doesn't hurt the game or the raiding scene in any way. Most of the players running it are alts, or people that know it's not serious raiding but for their reasons just can't or don't want to play at an higher level, or bads you don't really want in your hardcore raid team.
Just play what you like, as nobody is forcing you to run it just ad nobody is forcing me running M+ dungeons, and I just ignore them instead on making threads asking to remove them from the game. This game has a vast audience with very different tastes.

[Balbuto]

send LFR to the scrap heap and implement encounter/boss training like FFXIV

[deenman]

The point of LFR was for players that do not raid to see the raid. How is that point any less today?

well why are some bosses so hard?

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

Obviously LFR needs to stay because WoW reached its peak sub numbers while it was in the game...

Seriously though, LFR is in the place it should be now which is; completely unnecessary but still there for people that want a horrible example of a raiding experience.

That's not even correct anyways. LFR came out with DS and at that point WoW had already dropped from 12m to 9.1m players.

[Shaetha]

Depends on the game. When you hear from older devs from vanilla WoW, much of the content was designed to be useful for a time, then discarded. Constantly recycling the same content is a more recent phenomenon, but it has taken root in the industry quite a bit. In the short term, constantly recycling content and making you need to do it will keep your playerbase engaged. In the long term, you stress out, bore, or exhaust your players... the game feels like work or chores, leading a good portion of your playerbase to quit. Of all the players I've played with over the years, almost all of them have quit in recent years because of this content recycling.

Part of what's missing with the game is a lack of social interactions, and LFR isn't really conducive to a social experience. All of my great WoW memories are accented with social engagements, not necessarily just the events but the people I experienced events with. Good or bad experience, it's all still a social experience.

It doesn't need to be conducive to a social experience. It doesn't remove anything from the game by existing. You can do all those other things. You just need to accept that some people like the gameplay of WoW and don't want a social experience. LFR is for them. Not everything in a game as big as WoW needs to be for you.

Don't worry about what other people want to do with their spare time. You can choose to do as much or as little of the content in a game as you want. Some people want to grind? Let them. Some people don't want to do non-matchmade content? That's fine too. Some people just want to make gold? Okay, I guess. Why do you need to take something away from others because you don't like it?

[Feral Druid ist Op]

What benefit is there to removing LFR?

people start playing the game with 2 hands maybe? I do not know

[Lex Icon]

This, add some incentive to people learning the game instead being able to say they "beat the final boss" while afking with a finger up their noses.

what if they don't want to "learn the game"? not everyone wan'ts to be a raider. how about instead you nag blizzard to stop trying to force players into crap they don't want to do by having the story being a part of it?.

[Ragingheadache]

3. having to find a group causes actual social interaction (who would have thought) instead of just shoving people into a group and no one sharing anything in common beyond "kill boss". you are more likely to find friends and have a fun time.

About 5 years ago I used to be of this view as well. However you are not going to take the game back in time to the mid 00s where this was an accepted necessity. Times have changed and retail wow is no longer what it was, which is why nearly every other major MMO provides the means to randomly group up with others and not be judged for your equipment.

[Lex Icon]

I have already stated several times in this thread I think they could improve the "see the raid-experience" for players who dont wish to interact with other people or do "hard" mechanics like raid-encounters can provide. They could rebrand it "cinematic mode" and have the player able to queue up instantly with a raidgroup of NPC's for any role he likes, be guaranteed victory and provided the same reward as you can get today.

that's still trying to shove people into content they don't want to do just so that they can continue justify making the content very few are actually into. also probably not as simple as you think it would be.