How would you like to handle the "gap" between LFR and Normal raiding?

[Shahad]

You seem awfully confident about that. But I know this community. It drops gear that's subnormal, so people who run it will be subnormals. Yes, I just complained about the item level. Bite me. Blizzard loves to create "solutions" that only cause more and more problems.

What. The. Fuck. Does. This. Even. Mean.

[Firebert]

What. The. Fuck. Does. This. Even. Mean.

He thinks that the quality of the loot that a raid drops, and the quality of the player that owns said loot is positively correllated.

I disagree.

[Lumineus]

It doesn't matter what I think. It matters what serious raiding guilds think. If this existed today, recruiters would look at your achieve, then look at your gear, see that your only Normal items were from SPA rep, and deny your app. That would be like Heroic guilds recruiting from Normal, where a majority of Normal guilds will never see past, say, Durumu before Siege is out. Except they don't even have to inspect your gear: no Lei Shen kill = deny app. This won't help anyone advance in the social strata, it will just create another thing for hardcores to belittle people over.

[Otimus]

It doesn't matter what I think. It matters what serious raiding guilds think. If this existed today, recruiters would look at your achieve, then look at your gear, see that your only Normal items were from SPA rep, and deny your app. That would be like Heroic guilds recruiting from Normal, where a majority of Normal guilds will never see past, say, Durumu before Siege is out. Except they don't even have to inspect your gear: no Lei Shen kill = deny app. This won't help anyone advance in the social strata, it will just create another thing for hardcores to belittle people over.

This is pretty much what I imagine is going to happen, too. Essentially, there's really nothing Blizzard can do short of offering mentoring guilds on a wide scale, or something, that lets anyone raid.

In short! WoW's community, when able to do the worst, it will do the worst.

[Floopa]

It doesn't matter what I think. It matters what serious raiding guilds think. If this existed today, recruiters would look at your achieve, then look at your gear, see that your only Normal items were from SPA rep, and deny your app. That would be like Heroic guilds recruiting from Normal, where a majority of Normal guilds will never see past, say, Durumu before Siege is out. Except they don't even have to inspect your gear: no Lei Shen kill = deny app. This won't help anyone advance in the social strata, it will just create another thing for hardcores to belittle people over.

Actually most heroic mode guilds are willing to try out people geared in full normal mode gear, or worse, when on farm. Recently our guild has taken on 4 new Warlocks each with an item level of sub-522. Within 1 week they're all (I think) above 530 item level. Most have their heroic 4 piece. I think 3 of them will fail personally due to the way they sucked at Helm of Command, but that's what recruitment is about. Gear doesn't matter.

[Blur4stuff]

sometimes it has nothing to do with skill. a casual friend of mine on another server wanted to get into normal raiding. problem was, all pugs and guilds he's seen require experience to attend a raid. but he needs to raid to get the experience and achievement. some folks are stuck in a catch 22.

[Maelstrom51]

sometimes it has nothing to do with skill. a casual friend of mine on another server wanted to get into normal raiding. problem was, all pugs and guilds he's seen require experience to attend a raid. but he needs to raid to get the experience and achievement. some folks are stuck in a catch 22.

Why didn't he make his own pug group?

[Shahad]

Why didn't he make his own pug group?

Guessing it's because the person making the pug group may feel like they have to also raid lead, which many are not comfortable doing.

[namelessone]

I "handle" it by avoiding any organized raiding and players usually associated with it like a wildfire.

[Deleted]

Much better than:
- Rolling a 'downgrade' that someone in the raid could have used.
- Rolling the same item for the X time that again at least someone else could have used.

Normal loot systems spread the gear out semi sensibly. The LFR system spreads it out randomly. That is obviously worse for your raid.

It will use the LFR loot system to give people at least some kind of incentive to do normals. They don't want this to replace normal raiding for everyone

[Turandot]

Ideally, some metric that looks at damage taken/damage dealt/healing dealt, and influences your gear reward based on that. So for example, every dps in LFR who does mean damage or below has some base loot rate, and if you're above average, your drop rates start increasing.

[Pua]

This is pretty much what I imagine is going to happen, too. Essentially, there's really nothing Blizzard can do short of offering mentoring guilds on a wide scale, or something, that lets anyone raid.

In short! WoW's community, when able to do the worst, it will do the worst.

I think you have a point, but don't believe it's so cut and dried. A full flexi clear will still look better than a full LFR clear, and the gear difference will be worth the effort alone. That said, there will still be flexi-PuG raids that will demand item level and full clears; no doubt.

Alas, that's the community we've got. When Blizzard inadvertantly smashed the community going into Cataclysm, this is the end result - a small group of players at the top sneering at everyone below them.

---------- Post added 2013-06-09 at 11:15 AM ----------

Ideally, some metric that looks at damage taken/damage dealt/healing dealt, and influences your gear reward based on that. So for example, every dps in LFR who does mean damage or below has some base loot rate, and if you're above average, your drop rates start increasing.

They can't really do that. DPS players will start scumbagging, healers will start spamming, etc.

It'll just promote extraordinarily bad habits.

[nekobaka]

Alas, that's the community we've got. When Blizzard inadvertantly smashed the community going into Cataclysm, this is the end result - a small group of players at the top sneering at everyone below them.

My realm was largely unchanged in Cata. Still a lot of PuGs with a variety of requirements and the occasional group for new players. LFR did heavily cut into the PuG population in Cata and only rebounded when the raid nerf made DS normal quite trivial to even ToC and made DS feel all the more horribly designed. Things didnt go downhill until MoP came out and that is where the really high requirements started popping up. At that point ether you was a nolifer that did all your dailies and did PuGs on day one or your left behind, this did not happen in Cata on my server. The only crashing of the community I noted in Cata compared to WotLK was from the random queue side of things. All the spoiled apples that would of gotten a bad rep and bared from groups on their realms was disrupting groups.

They can't really do that. DPS players will start scumbagging, healers will start spamming, etc.

It'll just promote extraordinarily bad habits.

Use of fail meters and such. Definitely a lot of trouble though to deal with disruptive players and Blizzard would rather give in and nerf shit so that these players are less of a disruption for the rest of the players who actually want to be there. At least those who queue up as heals will actually have to heal.

[Jessicka]

I think you have a point, but don't believe it's so cut and dried. A full flexi clear will still look better than a full LFR clear, and the gear difference will be worth the effort alone. That said, there will still be flexi-PuG raids that will demand item level and full clears; no doubt.

Will absolutely look better, the latest tweet spam from GC is saying it will be tuned closer to Normal than LFR with a target of offering something like a boss a week of progression. If we look on the principal that LFR is actually intended to completed in an evening without risk of failure, I guess the target audience is those who raid one night a week total, or those of us who, one night a week run a raid on an alt. Either way, it will show a player isn't there with an expectation of immediate success, unlike LFR.

If only this had come with MoP launch...

[Lumineus]

That just shows how out of touch they are with reality. @ one boss progress a week a 10s guild likely won't have 4pc on all 10 mains in time for the next tier. If they think that's too fast for Normal, no wonder the raiding scene is tanking.

[Jessicka]

That just shows how out of touch they are with reality. @ one boss progress a week a 10s guild likely won't have 4pc on all 10 mains in time for the next tier. If they think that's too fast for Normal, no wonder the raiding scene is tanking.

I doubt it would be that slow if you're going 3 nights a week. At that point you're organised roster.

[Pua]

My realm was largely unchanged in Cata. Still a lot of PuGs with a variety of requirements and the occasional group for new players.

I'm more talking about the dismantling of 25-man guilds which, in essence, were entire communities in and of themselves. Moving into Cataclysm, 25-man guilds took a monstrous hit through a lack of raid leaders and officers willing to put in the extra work for little to no incentive (I still don't believe that, suddenly, more people liked 10-man).

I think the shared lockout has a lot to answer for here, too. Rather than Wrath's understanding that 10-man was casual content or a stepping stone and 25-man guilds recruited from this pool, 10-man guilds hit Cataclysm and were immediately "competition" with an awful lot of arguing about just how relevant it was. I honestly don't think that helped.

Oh, also: I'm not disagreeing with what you said, just trying to clarify my comment a bit.

Use of fail meters and such. Definitely a lot of trouble though to deal with disruptive players and Blizzard would rather give in and nerf shit so that these players are less of a disruption for the rest of the players who actually want to be there. At least those who queue up as heals will actually have to heal.

Linking a fail meter leads, typically, to a response such as this:

"lol"
"rofl"
"whatevs dood"
"healerz heal"

You know what I'm talking about. It's not an exclusive response by any stretch, but Blizzard know (as do we) just how badly players can behave when given the chance.

An opportunity for outright douchebaggery is seldom passed up.

[Deleted]

I'm more talking about the dismantling of 25-man guilds which, in essence, were entire communities in and of themselves. Moving into Cataclysm, 25-man guilds took a monstrous hit through a lack of raid leaders and officers willing to put in the extra work for little to no incentive (I still don't believe that, suddenly, more people liked 10-man).

I think the shared lockout has a lot to answer for here, too. Rather than Wrath's understanding that 10-man was casual content or a stepping stone and 25-man guilds recruited from this pool, 10-man guilds hit Cataclysm and were immediately "competition" with an awful lot of arguing about just how relevant it was. I honestly don't think that helped.

Oh, also: I'm not disagreeing with what you said, just trying to clarify my comment a bit.

Yea removing that stepping stone that 10 man normal was was a terrible idea. It removed the content for family and friends and it cut the recruiting line.

On my realm 25 mans went from 24 in t11 to 12 in t12 to 4 in t13 to 2 in t14 to 1 remaining in t15.
And no we didn't get a lot more 10 man guilds to cover those losses the raiding guild population went down as well.

btw. so fun to see that now after so long time blizzard finds out that oh maybe the icc model was pretty good, woops and i know this will be annoying but "I said so all along".

Combining 10/25 lockouts so people didn't feel obligated to do both.. Now we'll have three lock outs? What changed your mind?
It's a lesser of two evils thing. We changed the ICC model, but in retrospect maybe that wasn't the right call. (Source)
In game design, there are rarely no brainers. Usually you are trading off pros vs cons. This is no exception.