Where have all the Raiders Gone?

[Firebert]

You have accepted LFR as a legitimate form of raiding. I do not, it really is that simple.

Then you will remain in denial of a definition. I don't know how you'd find

You say you have raided in the past, I suspect that may not be accurate. If I am wrong (possible), would you care to explain what attracted to you towards raiding and why you started raiding for the length of time that you did?

What attracted me to end game content was that it's what you do when you've finished running 5-man heroics. Why I raided for the entirity of WotLK was because it advanced my character and my guild and I was getting what I was paying monthly for. Neither affect the definition of raiding (I hope that you understand this).

3 wings of Naxx before Ulduar, everything before Freya (including Freya) with the first 4 on heroic before TotC, 2/5 in TotGC and 5/5 TotC before ICC, first 4 bosses on Heroic and full Normal clear in ICC before the Cataclysm patch.

---------- Post added 2013-03-20 at 08:27 PM ----------

Without enough warm bodies using it, content becomes ripe for deletion. We don't know what "enough" is, but every person avoiding the content bring us one step closer to it not being so.

From my signature:

LFR justifies the creation of more raid content when millions of players are able to see content. Only a few thousand people actually saw Kel'thuzad, but millions saw Deathwing. The reason Mists of Pandaria is starting with 18 bosses and adding larger raid tiers than we have had previously is because many players are going to see the raids through LFR.

[Galaddriel]

There's certainly been a significant drop in the US.

T11 28479 guilds
T15 6219 guilds

That's an 80% drop in warm bodies in one expac.

http://www.wowprogress.com/pve/us

[HardCoder]

Ok fine. I will state the obvious though, my impression has been that you are likely taking 3-6 alts through looking for raid each week, and actually spending as much or more time than you did when you raided. I just do not understand why you could not just stay with 5 mans as they are the same skill level as LFR. Raiding and LFR are entirely different, the only similarities are the number of players in each.

I heal and 5-mans are much harder than LFR, or can be, depending what kind of a group shows up.

Plus there are no useful gear rewards from 5-mans.

Anyway, the reason people don't run 5-mans is that there is no reason to run them unless you are a tank with instant queues.

[Grogo]

Then you will remain in denial of a definition. I don't know how you'd find


What attracted me to end game content was that it's what you do when you've finished running 5-man heroics. Why I raided for the entirity of WotLK was because it advanced my character and my guild and I was getting what I was paying monthly for. Neither affect the definition of raiding (I hope that you understand this).

3 wings of Naxx before Ulduar, everything before Freya (including Freya) with the first 4 on heroic before TotC, 2/5 in TotGC and 5/5 TotC before ICC, first 4 bosses on Heroic and full Normal clear in ICC before the Cataclysm patch.

---------- Post added 2013-03-20 at 08:27 PM ----------


From my signature:

LFR justifies the creation of more raid content when millions of players are able to see content. Only a few thousand people actually saw Kel'thuzad, but millions saw Deathwing. The reason Mists of Pandaria is starting with 18 bosses and adding larger raid tiers than we have had previously is because many players are going to see the raids through LFR.

You raided because thats what was next? Ok fine. If you did not like raiding, I say you wouldnt of continued raiding because you did not like what it was about. If you continued raiding, you knew what you liked and why it appealed to you. What I am saying, is raiding and LFR are different. What you can experience in raiding is not what happens in LFR. Vastly different experience.

[Firebert]

If you did not like raiding, I say you wouldnt of continued raiding because you did not like what it was about.

I would have continued raiding if my guild did not disband as Cataclysm hit. I also would have continued raiding if I didn't like raiding, because raiding progresses my character at the very least, and that's what this game is about.

What I am saying, is raiding and LFR are different.

They're not.

What you can experience in raiding is not what happens in LFR. Vastly different experience.

The definition of raiding does not depend on what kind of experience you can extract from it.

[Deleted]

They were taken.


To Isengard.

But seriously now, I think they are just bored after all this time.

[Resentful]

They were taken.


To Isengard.

But seriously now, I think they are just bored after all this time.

Been bored for 7 years :P obviously I wanna mess around in the new patch but I don't have money so sad face

._.

[melodramocracy]

A stupid, mindless little system, you mean. You know, world is not really covered in two colors - black and white. Where do that people belong, whose skills are too good to farm mindless LFR, but too bad to run new tier normal modes?

If a person is skilled enough that LFR is mindless for him / her, then it's likely not a lack of skill that is keeping them from some level of success in normal modes. Odds are it's more along the lines of not wanting to raid on a consistent schedule, not wanting to possibly deal with high numbers of wipes while learning content, not wanting to contribute in terms of consumables etc.

[Tomana]

T11 28479 guilds
T15 6219 guilds

That's an 80% drop in warm bodies in one expac.

Then again, your 28479 figure covers a period from Dec 8, 2010 to Nov 28, 2011. T15 does not have that kind of hindsight yet.
So 80% is an unrealistically high drop rate.

[lockedout]

endlessly spamming trade to find 1 more dps or 1 more healer for raid.

I hate doing this. Our server is dead and its even hard to find that 1 person and when you do they usually are terrible. Either I am going to xfer to a high pop server or stop playing.

[Otimus]

This whole LFR is not raiding thing is so god damned snooty. It's basically WoW's take on that whole no true scotsman thing. It's arguing semantics to make one group feel better about themselves/to put themselves above other people for arbitrary reasons.

[Grogo]

The 'elitist" remarks that is regularly thrown around is such a load of crap. I would bet that most raiders get excited for others and want them to experience what it is all about, what raiding has that attracts them. I do not want to keep others from raiding, I want more to see what it is all about, the essence. A bastardized version of it is just lame. Many are labelled elitist just because the person throwing it around usually has nothing else to fall back on.

OK, I guess I have said enough on this, agree or not thanks for your opinions. I will finish off saying that LFR should be called LFU " Looking for Uninspired". hehe ... I kid I kid

[yjmark]

There's certainly been a significant drop in the US.

T11 28479 guilds
T15 6219 guilds

That's an 80% drop in warm bodies in one expac.

http://www.wowprogress.com/pve/us

So you are comparing 2 weeks to 2 years? That is apples to oranges.

You should have gotten data from T12 a few weeks into it for a real comparison.

[Bling]

I have actually stopped raiding after being an almost hardcore/professional raider.

Back in Vanilla I was in a top 25 US raiding guild. I had a top 10 US C'thun kill, and top 25 BWL and Naxx clears. I was one of the 2 raid leaders for that guild and also the healing core lead. During this time I also managed to hit rank 12 in pvp. I was the first person on my server to complete their Tier 3 set. I was hardcore.
During TBC I continued to try to be the best of the best. I hit gladiator during the first arena season, and my guild had all the server first raid clears though was probably only top 200 US on raiding. After that first arena season though I started to give up on PvP. Which I actually enjoyed, not because I stopped enjoying it, but because in order to compete you had to have resilience gear. I enjoy'd PvE and PvP equally in vanilla, because pvp gear was pve gear and pve gear was pvp gear. I found I was having to literally play 100 hours or more a week if I wanted to be competitive in both after the gear seperation. So because I couldn't compete the way I wanted to and actually have a job and a life, I dropped pvp.

Now during this time I actually began to see my life suffer. Being that hardcore in vanilla caused me to have to quit my part time job in college in order to even be able to raid. Why did I raid? Because if I wanted to have epics I had to raid, only other way to get epics was pvp, and it was almost impossible to get those epics in pvp without already having pve epics. I wanted to have a badass character and this game was a blast. I also loved the lore having played the previous games and the only way to see the big name characters like Illidan, Vashj, Kael'thas, Kil'jaeden was to raid. And the only way to raid AND see them was to basically waste hours upon hours of my life raiding.

WotLK comes around and I continued to hardcore raid until I realized my life was falling apart around me because I had to commit so much time in order to be a "elite" player. I wasn't elite because of my skill, I was only considered elite if I had enough gear to trivalize things really. So I raided hardcore until around the time Ulduar came out. It was then that I ended up getting divorced because I played too much WoW. I moved and got another job and ended up having to live somewhere at the time where only dial up was available. I still played a ton, but I stopped raiding. I was still addicted to WoW, but I couldn't raid due to my connection. During this time I realized something about this game, I was sacrificing my life, to be what was the equilivent of a pompous e-jerk. I believed myself better than other people before because i was in a ranked raiding guild and had the best gear on the server, yet at the end of the day that meant nothing. All that gear? Gonna just get replaced in a few months, so you just wasted hours upon hours for what amount to almost zero return. Also, many of the people that were in these top in raiding guilds were jackasses. They felt they were better than anyone else on the server and literally made WoW their life. They would mock people who didn't have the same level of gear as them, when really all it amounted to was that these jerks wasted more of their lives than those with lesser gear.

I joined a casual guild that had a 10 man raiding team, yet less than half of guild raided. Mostly it was composed of stay at home moms and people with real lives that were actually fun to hang out with. Fun for them wasn't wiping on a boss for hours on end, it was simply having fun in guild chat or vent. With the new badge/point system and LFG I was able to get enough gear to see the game and have fun. I hear the arguement that nonraiders don't need epics, but I don't believe that, this game is balanced around people having epics as expansions move foward. And getting purples is fun even if they aren't as good.

Then LFR came out, I was freaking stoaked. The only thing about this game at the time I wished I could do is atleast see the raids. Suddenly I could and it was awesome. Personally for me, LFR was the best thing ever, it is what kept me from cancelling my subscription. And no I'm not some scrub in LFR, even though I don't have a single piece of normal or heroic gear, I still am normally always top 5 damage or healing every boss, if not first. Just cause you don't waste hours of your life every week for pixels doesn't mean you can't be good at this game. In fact it probably means you now have a hot girlfriend, a large house, and a six figure job, because you decided to finally stop wasting your time for worthless pixels and decided to live life instead. I've tried to get back into raiding this xpac, but after spending 3 hours of a night when you have tons of other stuff you could or need to do, and all you do is wipe on a boss, it pretty much opens my eyes to how not to waste my time.

[Otimus]

The 'elitist" remarks that is regularly thrown around is such a load of crap. I would bet that most raiders get excited for others and want them to experience what it is all about, what raiding has that attracts them. I do not want to keep others from raiding, I want more to see what it is all about, the essence. A bastardized version of it is just lame. Many are labelled elitist just because the person throwing it around usually has nothing else to fall back on.

OK, I guess I have said enough on this, agree or not thanks for your opinions. I will finish off saying that LFR should be called LFU " Looking for Uninspired". hehe ... I kid I kid

Considering, at least from my experience, 9 times out of 10, raiders are a very exclusionary bunch, and want to keep raiding for raiders who are already raiding, I tend to disagree with this sentiment. If you're absolutely new, you have a massive uphill battle to get into raiding in any decent capacity. People don't want new, inexperienced people, 9 times out of 10.

[Lord Blackmore]

Ok fine. I will state the obvious though, my impression has been that you are likely taking 3-6 alts through looking for raid each week, and actually spending as much or more time than you did when you raided. I just do not understand why you could not just stay with 5 mans as they are the same skill level as LFR. Raiding and LFR are entirely different, the only similarities are the number of players in each.

Obvious to who?

In any case, for me, at least, you're wrong. I have lots of alts, but only one has been in LFR and that one only a couple of times. The rest have never run LFR. The only character I play is my main. It's the only character doing the new dailies, it's the only character running LFR and dungeons.

Putting all that aside, you're missing the larger point. The number of hours someone plays doesn't really apply to this discussion. I may play as much as I did when I was actively progression raiding, but I'm no longer held a willing hostage to a specific schedule. If I log on and just don't feel like doing anything, I can just log off. Before if it was a raid night, I'd have the responsibility to my guild mates to show up and raid. Just to emphasize the point again, it's not about hours played, it's about not having a set scheduled.

As far as LFR vs. 5 mans. I like both and run both. Pretty much mostly for valor, since I'm usually a victim of the RNG, even with extra rolls.

---------- Post added 2013-03-20 at 03:14 PM ----------

You raided because thats what was next? Ok fine. If you did not like raiding, I say you wouldnt of continued raiding because you did not like what it was about. If you continued raiding, you knew what you liked and why it appealed to you. What I am saying, is raiding and LFR are different. What you can experience in raiding is not what happens in LFR. Vastly different experience.

I like raiding just fine. However, doing so on a set schedule no longer appeals to me. This is the key point you keep missing.

[Arbs]

Its just like Vanilla / TBC. Only that small percent that is good anough is raiding, The rest are doing LFR.

[Dargon]

I quit to play League of Legends. MoP forced me to do dailies. I hate dailies. There are more entertaining games out there, so they lost my business.

[Eisenstein]

Considering, at least from my experience, 9 times out of 10, raiders are a very exclusionary bunch, and want to keep raiding for raiders who are already raiding, I tend to disagree with this sentiment. If you're absolutely new, you have a massive uphill battle to get into raiding in any decent capacity. People don't want new, inexperienced people, 9 times out of 10.

This is an absolute farce. The raiding community will accept new people with open arms if they are willing to put in the effort and time to become good at their craft. In my pretty extensive experience recruiting and training people to raid the hardest thing to get players to do is take the time to learn their class. The ones that do have always been able to step up and fill in a role. As a matter of fact I am excited when a new player comes to me who has never raided and says they have interest. Generally at that point I have sat down and discussed with them what is needed from them. I even go as far as to go over their rotations, give a bit of my knowledge out and also go over the resources that are available for them to learn about their class. Problem is most of them just want to bitch because they aren't good enough and try to whine there way in instead of giving a little bit of effort. Anyone who raids at any level has started some where. Of course if you just started playing WoW and have no clue what you are doing but your uncle Bob hands you a level 90 toon then you are not going to be first choice. Now if that same person shows up asks questions, reads a little (which I know is asking allot) maybe even hits the dummies then they will find a spot.

Now in the case of full on hardcore raid teams, yes they are pretty exclusionary but these guys are the pro level teams Unless you are well in tuned with the game and carry a high amount of skill you may not make it into these type of groups. That goes the same for any walk of life because some people are just on another level when it comes to certain aspects of life. I know our new society looks down on success and ability but the fact is that is only because of jealously. You jelly?

[Deleted]

Groups of 6 or more players are raids, and they're in an instance that can handle a group of larger than 5 players, making it a raid instance, and they're killing bosses, so they're raiding.

no, raiding is organzied play, with tactics, guild effort, flasks, food, raid leader, loot rules, updating your status on wowprogress, wiping on a boss for couple of weeks.
Thats raiding and not stupid LFR that is just bigger 5 man full of anonymous people.