What would happen if raids are removed

[Windfury]

Where did you read that only 10% of wow subs raid normal/heroics? I'm curious, I'd like to see that.

You can see it yourself by looking at sites that track achievements from crawling through the Blizzard data. As above wow progress is the first that comes to mind.

[Nathane]

51% of all guilds have killed will of the emperor on normal.

4% on heroic.

Not sure where you pulled your numbers from. These are from wow progress. Like some one else said LFR is not raiding, it is a horrible abomination that is completely ruining this game.

[Deleted]

raiding is what i log on for. so at least i'd quit for sure

[Ryme]

strange that 90% of my guildmates raid, hmm, and there's same situation in every guild I know

Doesn't matter, the statistics show that it is a small minority of people that raid outside of LFR. People who are interested in raiding, however, is probably much higher.

[Kisho]

51% of all guilds have killed will of the emperor on normal.

4% on heroic.

Not sure where you pulled your numbers from. These are from wow progress. Like some one else said LFR is not raiding, it is a horrible abomination that is completely ruining this game.

51% of all raiding guilds.

There are plenty of non-raiding guilds that WoWprogress doesn't pick up. Indeed, the only guilds on there are those that have killed at least 1 boss on normal mode. Not to mention all the guildless players that get completely ignored.

As an example, here's my server: it's a fairly low population server, and we don't really have any uber hardcore guilds here. http://www.wowprogress.com/pve/eu/th...guild_progress

Even then, the lowest progress guild is 2/6 normal, when I know for a fact there are more guilds on our server than those listed on WoWprogress. Plenty out there who just don't raid at all.

Raiders are, far and away, the minority in this game. There are so many people who just don't bother with it, only doing LFR (and a lot of the time, not even bothering with that). That said, LFR saved raiding. Without it, Blizzard couldn't possibly justify spending so much time on developing raiding content, because the fact is raiders are the absolute minority. The research has been done several times, even by this very website.

So no, LFR is not 'a horrible abomination that is completely ruining this game'. It's saving raiding, ensuring Blizzard can justify developing decent, interesting raiding content for you. So yeah, less elitism and ignorance please.

As for what would happen if raids were removed? Personally, I'd probably either quit or reduce my playing hours considerably. Not because the rest of the game is bad by any stretch of the imagination, but there'd be a lot less need to get through the content ASAP, so I'd be much more able to just go through it at my own pace.

Big picture, yeah, some people would quit. Not going to deny it. Overall though... People would still play, I reckon. The game would be vastly different sure, but there'd still be plenty to do in it.

[Deleted]

Raiding is basically the "pinnacle" of a MMO. Everything you do outside of raiding has the purpose to get you into a raid or to improve your raid.

You level up, you farm herbs/ore/whatever, you do 5mans, you push your professions, you join guilds, back in the days you even did PvP to get gear for raids and you did hard attunements... everything just to be able to do raids.

Without raids, why would you play WoW at all? No reason to farm buffs, no reason to get gear, no reason to join a guild, no reason to do anything you usually do in a MMO.

There is enough "singleplayer" content right now... Pet Battles, Brawler Guild, LFR, Dailyquests, PvP, Challenge-Modes, Scenarios, Archeology, Leveling Alts or simply making money. If you want a game that is completely centered around singleplayer, then you should go play a singleplayer game.

[Deleted]

The 10% players would leave.
Sites like this and wowhead would become worse than the quality of Thottbot anno 2005.
The few people left in WoW would refuse to keep paying monthly fee for a game with no community and addons that aren't maintained.
Blizzard would switch to f2p and sell epics, boosters and xmog gear.
Any person still left to play would quickly burn and leave.
By now 10mil people have gone to Steam and PC becomes the rightfully recognised biggest gaming platform again. With all the addicted WoWplayers finally back playing the full range of game genres and also replaying the dozends of gems that they missed in the last 7years.

[Deleted]

I think a very big part of the player base would go els where. and then there would be mostly rp, lore driven and pvpers left.

pvp would be much easyer to balance

[yjmark]

If Blizz would just remove normal/hard mode raids, and leave a void, then they would lose a large chunk of their players. WoW is already an older game, and subs are going to decrease from that alone. Removing the largest part of being at max level will make an instant drop of a huge amount of subs. It would not kill WoW, but it would take a big bite out of the subs.

Just because 10% of the players raid, it does not mean that only 10% are interested in raiding.

[Aquamonkey]

This is from a year ago about FL and DS. http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/...lue-Posts-Poll

13% of characters (not players) with at least LFR, did it on Normal/Heroic.

[Deleted]

My guild master would probably cry and 90% of my guild would quit, along with me.
Even my guild master agreed, nothing beats WoW raiding, he acquired what he wanted in GW2 and then he had no more content.
When having a 9-5 job, having something fun to do in the evenings is good, which is why I even do my dailies in the train and early at the job when not much work has piled up.

Also, small-group based content is not fun enough for me, it's fun and exciting for the first month of the game, but then they get stale as they aren't "hard", only frustrating at most. Cataclysm's 5mans were good in the beginning (yeah, I'm one of "those") but far from perfect. They didn't require personal skill, perhaps only awareness from one person so he could shout at the rest.

Numbers aside, I think WoW's sub Count would burst upwards because of casual players, but general activity will fall Down within a few months because of the "nothing to do" syndrome.

[Wildtree]

13% of characters (not players) with at least LFR, did it on Normal/Heroic.

That means in reality even a lot less than 13% of actual players.

One could actually find out a somewhat accurate current number. Somewhat, but at least the tendency could be seen.
How?
Pick a number of realms... Take the number of guilds listed on http://www.wowprogress.com/
Then take the realm pop number from http://wow.realmpop.com/
Put those numbers against each other. To idealize one could even count every raiding guild listed on Wowprogress with their total number of guild member count.
That is not accurate, because there is no guild that has every single toon raiding. But it should make up for the non-guilded puggers. It would even exceed that number.

[Rivellana]

I have played other games, and I came back to this game specifically to raid. I didn't like that the other games didn't have what I considered an "end game" type of environment.

If they removed raiding, even if they left LFR, I'm quite sure I'd just go play a F2P instead. The subscription here would no longer be worth $15 if the game simply provided the same thing as other games do for free. LFR takes an hour or maybe two at most to complete all of the raids, and you don't get to do any "progression" because throwing 25 pugs together means they have to make it easy by default.

[Erolian]

If raiding were removed I would easily never log onto WoW again along with many others. Maybe I'm different but when my friend told me about WoW I was dead set on raiding before logging into the game for the first time. Never have I cared about anything else.

[Shennanigans]

The better question is "why would they even consider something so dumb"? They wouldn't......

[Terridon]

I think i would quit. Not entirely sure. It would after all give me more time for pvp, so i might end up doing that instead.
Right away it would probably just make me too annoyed if they did, since that has been the primary focus, so i would basically start over with gearing, several months into the expansion.
Depends a bit if i could find a nice group to pvp with. Doing things alone in wow isn't fun to me

[Olliver]

LFR relies on having normal raids.

This topic is so stupid.

[Deleted]

It would certainly be nice if they put less into raids and SOME effort into a single player experience. Quests are not a challenge, and neither are dailies. They're grinds in between the "real" game.

You want Blizzard to put more effort into single planer experience than they allready do? WoW is a MMO-game where raiding is a big part of it

[Nokami]

People would quit.

Pretty much this.

[Sharrel]

to be honest, even though i am barely raiding right now. (guild can't seem to keep a raid team up). i would probably quit after a couple months. raiding gives me something to strive for in the future. farming, pet battles and dailies are gonna get old soon.