You do understand that this is the current system, right? I log in, press the LFR button...and get my gear. I keep seeing people defending blizzard's stupidity bring this up. But that is the system right now. I talk with no one, I interact with no one. I log in, press the LFR button and afk until it pops. Then I sleepwalk through LFR only needing to open my eyes in time to catch the bonus roll pop-up. I literally was in the top-10 dps in LFR and I went through it while eating my dinner, watching tv, and with all my addons broke.
That is what we have now.
ICC? So much better. I made a new 80, ran him through heroics til he was geared enough to step into the newest raid that, which is the one people were running. Then boom, I was raiding and spent 2 years playing the game because of it. Because the moment I hit 80, the raid part of the game the rest of the playerbase was playing was within sight.
Now? I make a new 90 and...I can do heroics do earn valor! But I can't spend any of that valor because every piece is gated by a daily quest rep. Okay, how about I use my JP to buy some gear to get into raiding? Oh, those are also gated behind rep and worthless. Hm. Okay. So how about I grind heroics and just walk into an old raid. Oh, no one is pugging old raids because, why would they. Hmmmm. Oh, I got it! I'll log in and spend 1-2 hours every day do daily quests to buy the previous tier's valor items so I can get into LFR and have a chance at gear once a week(MORE IF I DO DAILIES YAAAY)! And then I can do that once, every week, until I get lucky enough to get enough drops to get my gear to the point where anyone would consider asking me to participate in a throne of thunder raid. Or alternatively I could hate myself and my life enough to do daily quests on every alt so I could piss way the meager 1000 valor a week I can earn buying out of date gear that will have to be replaced the moment I an able to participate in the next tier. It is a garbage system.
And next time I make a 90? I have to do the same thing, except I will now also have to run ToT LFR in order to be geared enough to do Siege of Org.
Nothing about that sounds fun. If this, bullshit, was what I experienced when I first started playing the game during ICC, I would not have played this game for as long as I did.
Catch up for current content, whatever you like to do, it doesnt really matters.
The game needs an effective catch up mechanism, and LFR is not one.
Progression does exist, but progression doesnt need others not to progress. Normal guilds are havign their progression, and most Normal guilds were unable to progress in the past tier, so no, you aare wrong when you say only a few heroic guilds are having progression. EVERYONE is having progression, even those that LFR, but a very small amount of midcore (because they are not even hardcore, hardcore doesnt care about what others do) cried too hard about others actually having fun so Blizzard implemented this crap instead of the real catch up mechanisms we had.
Some people, like you, are too busy watching what OTHERS are doing instead of just enjoying what THEY are doing.
---------- Post added 2013-03-19 at 02:40 PM ----------
What made WoW as big as it is was the fact that it was the most casual friendly MMO in the market.
Every other MMO had your bloved "progression", yet they were all aimed to a very hardcore community.
WoW destroyed them by giving the gamers accesibility, by making the game LESS hardcore, by giving the gamers MORE chances to "win" the game even if they were doing other things beside playing it.
"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?"
That is the whole point of the game. Many people on MMOchamp just don't understand that on a philosohical level, the entire idea of convienience and getting things quickly in a MMO is slightly insane. Do people realize where that type of thinking leads? I mean this is a video game, we are not bound by the rules of reality here. If Blizzard wants, they could today make it so you just login, push a big shiny button in the middle of your city, and instantly get every achievement, pet, mount, gear, title, rank, FoS etc that ever existed.
To many posters here, that would seem to be ultimate game: fast, efficient and rewarding. Whats not to like?
Obviously the entire point of any game is to consume time, to *not* be efficient. To make players work for what they get. It is ridiculously easy to make a game that says "You win!" just for pushing a button, its much harder to make a meaningful journey in a game that provides reward through genuine challenge.
Honestly if people don't like the idea of progression, and they don't like to take time to gear, or learn lore, or see the world, why are these people even playing MMOs in the first place? Thats what an MMO is. If you want simple, mindless smashing of buttons and instant rewards for doing nothing, go find a arcade and play whack-a-mole. Leave MMOs to people who actually appreciate what an MMO is.
*~To change one's life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.~*
I certainly didn't. I knew they were tuning up normal mode in T14, so, knowing what was coming, I decided to not bother trying to find a raiding guild. It was LFR or nothing, and so far LFR has been enough to keep me playing.
The trajectory of raid participation and progression in this expansion has been consistent with what I thought would happen. I project further decline, even if Blizzard panics and starts nerfing (I doubt they will, btw).
What I am most interested in is WHY Blizzard chose this path. I'm wondering if it isn't substantially their attempt at a definitive experiment, to see how many players really want harder content.
"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?"
I don't think its harder content so much as epic content. Meaning that the 'epicness' of heroic mode doesn't really exist anymore because every noob on the server has killed the boss already in LFD or normal. I think the real thrill of old raiding was just the fact that you were in a place that was really hard to reach, and you were doing things that were really hard to do, that made it special. When everyone can do everything with no effort, its just not special regardless of if the boss has a few more HP.
*~To change one's life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.~*
Harder raids and less catchup welfare gear is better for the game. It's just 30% nerfed Dragon Soul allowed every baddie to kill H Deathwing and feel epic, only to get slapped in the face by 0% nerfed normal modes in MoP. 30% nerfs should NEVER happen. It's not Blizzard's fault you're in the bottom half of the skill bell-curve.
"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?"
LFR allows for somebody who wants to commit say <10 hours a week to the game to have some path of progress in pve beyond dungeons. If you are going to spend 20+ hours a week on the game then why wouldn't you be in a raiding guild? If you want a challenge, why don't you join a heroic raiding guild? It seems like the game offers many different options for people that want to play the game across a wide range of time commitments.
And don't say that you aren't rewarded for doing heroic raids over LFR. On my main i can kill a 500k hpt mob on the Isle of thunder in about 3 to 4 seconds, on my alts that are LFR geared it takes probably 3 times as long. If you just do LFR you will have a 502 ilvl weapon, raiders are running around with 2/2 upgraded heroic weapons from last tier that are already 15 ilvls higher than this, and pretty soon they will be running around with heroic thunderforged weapons that are 39 ilvls higher than LFR weapons, casual players probably wont have access to this level of weapons until the next expansion.
Last edited by Venant; 2013-03-19 at 06:25 PM.
Most people would rather die than think, and most people do. -Bertrand Russell
Before the camps, I regarded the existence of nationality as something that shouldn’t be noticed - nationality did not really exist, only humanity. But in the camps one learns: if you belong to a successful nation you are protected and you survive. If you are part of universal humanity - too bad for you -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Using LFR allows most players to see content they would normally miss because of gear/guild limitations. Not sure how a "reduced" raiding feature like LFR really affects "hardcore raiders". Most "hardcores" are already in raid guilds, get their gear by any means necessary, and continue to see reg/heroic content. More people than ever before are finally raiding through a raid finder and seeing content they might have otherwise missed out on.
Maybe, people should just play their game their way and stop worrying about what someone else does with their $15 a month Just my 2 cents.
---------- Post added 2013-03-19 at 11:24 AM ----------
Perfectly said and falls right in line with what I was saying. So many choices and NONE of them harm someone else's play time.
I would rather gear up by doing the appropriate raid in LFR, then by farming (and later, facerolling) the same 5 man dungeons for the entire duration of an expansion.
Especially by the end of the expansion when you outgear the dungeon by like 60 ilevel points, everything is faceroll, and you still get upgrades.
At least with LFR there is some sort of ladder system where you unlock new and more rewarding raids.
While I understand your general concern, you are embellishing quite a bit. I hit 90 on my DK this weekend and had gear good enough to run the intro LFR in less than 20 hours from hitting 90. Between crafted gear, crafted PvP gear, auction house items, a couple of dungeons, and finishing quest chains while leveling that is all it took.
It's just as easy to be LFR raid ready the same day you hit 90...people keep saying that part has magically changed. When the game launched it was a huge problem, but it just isn't anymore. Now you are completely right that you still have to depend on RNG to get up to current content, which sucks. For all I know my DK will be stuck in the lowest LFR tier for over a month because I have bad luck, who knows.
That's the part that's awful, but let's not embellish the intial stages anymore...we're past that.
BAD WOLF
The low participation has more to do with the high difficulty of normal raiding. Over 40k guilds started MSV normal, only 13k finished HOF normal, and thats after item upgrades "nerfing" the content.
No effective catch up mechanism coupled with a continuation of hard normal raiding in ToT will lower that number.
People are trying, and they are failing because content is too hard for them.
You can now grind out large numbers of elder charms by doing the treasure room solo scenario. Using those, you should be able to gear up in LFR very quickly.
Also, honor PvP gear is ilvl 476, which should help plug holes in your gear on the way to the 480 needed to do ToT LFR.
"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?"
Also they are in talks of implementing a bad luck buff, as in when you get gold you get a buff that next time you have 5% higher chance to get loot and it stacks. Idk if it will have a buff icon though. (That number was made up blizz will decide how high)
---------- Post added 2013-03-19 at 06:55 PM ----------
No, no it won't. Millions of subs, nope. Sorry but they don't lose a million players over less catchup (especially since a catch up method is ingame. just people don't like it)
"I hated hating Garrosh before it was cool."
FOR THE HORDE!!!
The real problem with this system is going to be pretty obvious in 5.3, 5.4 and maybe 5.5 if we get that far.
Having to spend one week doing MSV, then another week doing MSV, HoF and ToES, followed by 2 more weeks to get to 480 ilvl, then 2-3 weeks of ToT, then 2-3 weeks of Siege of Org to get geared up is going to get old real quick.
People liked the HoT heroics because you could jump into raiding after grinding out a full set of gear. Raids don't work the same, since you really can only do them once per week. Sure, you can get more rolls with coins, but sitting in an hour long que just to get another coin chance seems pretty tedious.