why are lfr and flex raid such a big deal

[Vayshan]

Complaining about a videogame is still better than judging others for it.

It's still the same thing. Venting frustrations and trying to get your points across as loud and hard as possible just to be heard by someone

[Deleted]

It may be even worse, since (assuming they have enough of each role and no odd glitches in difficulty) kicking the lowest performing player will improve the odds of downing a boss.

Well, we do not know the exact tuning yet, but assuming what blizzard said earlier, the difficulty of the bosses in flex should not be that high, which means that a player do not really need to be that good to "pull his weight". So for you to be heavy enough for the raid that they would want to replace you to kill a boss, you would have to be very very bad (if flex is tuned as blizzard said it would be). Especially considering that you have a group with you, if you have one player that is on the level for a normal raider, that would weigh up for another player playing extremely bad.

And in the case you are that bad that you weigh down the group in an "easy mode"-difficulty, that should probably be a wake-up clock for you that you are playing with other human beings and you should probably show a bit of respect for them by grabbing your thumbs out of your ass and put atleast a minimum amount of effort into your play. If I was playing soccer with someone that was constantly running around picking the ball up with his hand, I would probably be pissed at him for not even bothering to learn you should use your feet, not your hands, especially after the referee constantly calling foul.

As long as flex is not hard there should be no reason that players should need to be replaced to down a boss. What you mentioned is the exact reason why flex system would never work in normal/heroic raids, but flex is supposed to be tuned easy.

Normal mode is completely inaccessible to players who normally only play LFR. Not "hard" but "completely inaccessible." Tune that down a notch and call it "flex" and it will still be too hard. The only people who have progressed in normal modes during this expansion have been, basically, heroic mode raiders who have had organizational or time problems that prevent them from doing heroic.

Qué?

So it is not too hard but if they dont tune it down it is too hard.

Basically, if flex requires voice chat for pugging, it's too hard, and will be an even more marginal activity than heroic raiding

Okay, so voice communication is not required for raiding. That said, it is a huge help and huge tool. But is this suprising? You are a part of something that requires a coordinated effort of a big team, being able to... coordinate... helps a lot.

Is that a bad thing? Last year I set up a 3v3 team playing basketball in a street league. If my team would have been quiet and never said a word to eachother, we would probably have lost every single game. Luckily, we have good communication so we finished second out of 20 teams.
Now, you could say, communication in other sports is free, you dont need to buy a headset. Well, while that is true, other sports also have expenses. If you are going to play as in the previous example, basket, you need a good pair of shoes. If my teammates would have shown up in a pair of heels or heavy boots, I would probably have kicked their asses. Same goes for things like hockey, well you need hockey gear. Show up using a branch from a tree you found outside the stadium as a stick. Guess what, for gaming, headset (or anything else that provides you with voip capabilities) is considered as expected 'gear'.

As long as my multiplayer gaming career stretches (back to CS 1.5 in the summer of 2002), having a headset was expected of everyone, it was considered required and vital. We are now 11 years into the future, getting headsets are easier and cheaper than ever, why on earth would be evolution of gaming go backwards? In my opinion, not having voice com in current state is just unacceptable.

[Osmeric]

Well, we do not know the exact tuning yet, but assuming what blizzard said earlier, the difficulty of the bosses in flex should not be that high, which means that a player do not really need to be that good to "pull his weight".

I disagree with that assessment. Blizzard said they want the target audience to be downing 1 or 2 bosses a week. That means a lot of wiping will be occurring. That also seems incompatible with Flex being pugged, except w. carrying by raiders from higher difficulty modes.

[Tharkkun]

I was talking about Flex raiding - I'm fairly sure Flex will not be a prerequisite to getting into LFR if the difficulty is higher. I'm assuming anyone who doesn't want to go any further than LFR will never be bothered by flex at all. Maybe Normal guilds will be affected by it though if theres such a big jump from ToT to SoO, but that might mean Normal guilds can skip LFR after-all.

Don't worry. We'll have double the threads here soon complaining about how Flex and LFR is ruining their lives because they must run it every week on all their alts. Rather than improve as a player they will continue to hide it behind gear!

[Normie]

As long as my multiplayer gaming career stretches (back to CS 1.5 in the summer of 2002), having a headset was expected of everyone, it was considered required and vital. We are now 11 years into the future, getting headsets are easier and cheaper than ever, why on earth would be evolution of gaming go backwards? In my opinion, not having voice com in current state is just unacceptable.

Voice chat is anti-immersive, just totally destroys immersion, and I've always been opposed to it in WoW from that perspective. It just ruins the game for me to be listening to a bunch of nasal nerds with the same clipped pronunciations using the same memes in their speech. That is so not what I play a "fantasy" game for.

[Terielx1]

But how can it possibly destroy the community? If the majority of the community chooses to partake in it, rather than old school raiding, then it stands to reason that it was what they would have rather had in the first place. I can understand raiders getting frustrated at having difficulty filling their rosters, but the fault lies with the fact that people are turned off by a lot of the baggage that goes with traditional raiding. Raiders should be trying to fix those negative stigmas, instead of blaming features that give the players what they want.

but this feature doesn't give all players what they want... LFR was meant to be a tool for someone who couldn't see content on a regular level, instead its just another boring grind for VP, tier pieces, and legendary quest items. this feature should be something people WANT to do not something people are all but FORCED to do. Just because the majority of the community chooses to partake in it doesn't mean they wanted to.. its like saying "ok guys, you have 2 options, you can get a big bonus in a couple months or a few smaller bonuses every week", who the fuck is gonna wait for the big bonus?

[Normie]

but this feature doesn't give all players what they want... LFR was meant to be a tool for someone who couldn't see content on a regular level, instead its just another boring grind for VP, tier pieces, and legendary quest items. this feature should be something people WANT to do not something people are all but FORCED to do. Just because the majority of the community chooses to partake in it doesn't mean they wanted to.. its like saying "ok guys, you have 2 options, you can get a big bonus in a couple months or a few smaller bonuses every week", who the fuck is gonna wait for the big bonus?

"Forced" does not mean what you seem to think it means.

I know, you've heard that before, but it's still true.

You are not forced to play WoW at all let alone do any particular thing in it. If you are playing in a way that you don't enjoy because of social pressure, well, that's your fault for not being able to balance your perceived obligations to others with your responsibility to seek your own happiness. WoW isn't doing that to you.

[Deleted]

I disagree with that assessment. Blizzard said they want the target audience to be downing 1 or 2 bosses a week. That means a lot of wiping will be occurring. That also seems incompatible with Flex being pugged, except w. carrying by raiders from higher difficulty modes.

Either way, anything is just guessing until it comes released. As long as it is easier than normal I cant really see it being difficult enough to require you to be "carried by raiders" to succeed.

[klaps_05]

well you said it yourself - you cant give the same toys to someone that only does LFR compared to someone clearing x/x heroic, just makes no sense

[Terielx1]

"Forced" does not mean what you seem to think it means.

I know, you've heard that before, but it's still true.

You are not forced to play WoW at all let alone do any particular thing in it. If you are playing in a way that you don't enjoy because of social pressure, well, that's your fault for not being able to balance your perceived obligations to others with your responsibility to seek your own happiness. WoW isn't doing that to you.

Forced, being that to be remotely competitive in raiding one has to go through LFR to get the shiny legendary crap to boost raid performance. Forced, being that to be remotely competitive in raiding one has to go through LFR to get the tier pieces for set bonuses early on. Forced, being that to be remotely competitive in raiding one needs to valor cap each week to keep ahead of the game. has nothing to do with "social pressure". Speaking on the valor capping point alone, would you rather do 50 heroics or 10 LFR's (just an example i know its not the actual numbers). And no, i wasn't forced to play wow, but i enjoy raiding and was one of the best in my guild and trying to progress while sitting in blues is brutal, agonizing, and frustrating, so to combat this people are FORCED to do LFR/heroics to get VP, gear, and legendaries, or stop raiding. Forced means exactly what it means, the act of doing something because there is no alternative. if i wanted to quit wow over it i would quit, but i enjoy raiding and i enjoy doing it with my friends

[Deleted]

Voice chat is anti-immersive, just totally destroys immersion, and I've always been opposed to it in WoW from that perspective. It just ruins the game for me to be listening to a bunch of nasal nerds with the same clipped pronunciations using the same memes in their speech. That is so not what I play a "fantasy" game for.

Personally, I would feel the opposite. Playing with multiple players and being able to communicate with them adds to immersion. You get a better connection to your fellow players if you can hear their voice. Your fellow players become "human" when you can hear their voice, they dont feel like a bunch of NPCs helping you do down a boss then.

So do the content, that does not require you to interact with other players. You do not need to aim for the only content that revolves around coordination between multiple players if you do not like interaction with other players.
If I do not like tomatos, I do not go a restaurant, order their tomato soup and proceed to complain that their food is bad.

Also, you do not need to run with a bunch of nasal nerds. You can find people that are on the same mindset as yourself.

[Hexorcist]

You are still confusing the word "forced" with something else.
The key point in every sentence you tried to make sound important there is "to be even remotely competitive".
That is a WANT not a NEED. You want to be competitive so you feel forced but the truth is, if you were skilled enough at your class and you played optimally and did the mechanics right all the time, and you had exceptional attendance and at least seemed to put in a genuine effort every week, with a good attitude, you would be of value to your raid whether you did the things you think you're "forced" to do or not.

My problem with this thread is the generalization that nobody in LFR has any idea what they're doing.
That may be true... Sometimes. However, I've been in a PUG group of 10 people who for the most part are "LFR Heroes" who have never done normal mode, and in two 2.5 hour sessions we were already 2/12 in Normal and veeery close to 3/12.That's pretty good for people who have mostly only ever played LFR, which is apparently so dumbed down you could sleep through it. Keep in mind many normal 10-man guild groups were stuck on Horridon forever; we only wiped maybe 10 times, tops.
So while it's easy for you "raiders" to say that normal mode is completely inaccessible to LFR players, or that flex will still be too difficult... Keep in mind SOME players in LFR actually know exactly what they are doing and are not the "bads" you think they are.

[Normie]

Forced means exactly what it means, the act of doing something because there is no alternative. if i wanted to quit wow over it i would quit, but i enjoy raiding and i enjoy doing it with my friends

What you're doing when you do everything possible to accumulate gear is you're covering your ass.

What you're missing when you and your team is slow to progress is skill. Not gear. But when someone starts looking around for the weak link in the chain, if you've been out there grinding every last bit of gear you can proudly claim "It's not me, I'm a hard worker, check out all these Runes I've got. It must be Sephiroth over there, he's not even working on his legendary and he uses 275 stat food."

But it's not the gear. It's so obviously not the gear, when you see top teams blow through normal mode in a few hours in blue gear.

[fangless]

Forced, being that to be remotely competitive in raiding one has to go through LFR to get the shiny legendary crap to boost raid performance.
Forced, being that to be remotely competitive in raiding one has to go through LFR to get the tier pieces for set bonuses early on.
Forced, being that to be remotely competitive in raiding one needs to valor cap each week to keep ahead of the game.

Eh. You can get your "legendary crap" in normal raiding, you aren't forced to do LFR. You aren't forced to do LFR to get tier pieces for heroic raiding, considering you couldn't even get all the pieces in LFR for a few weeks after 5.4 dropped. You'd be surprised how much dps you actually lose from dropping down to 502 loot instead of 535.

Forced to get VP? Maybe.

[Otimus]

Players raiding =/= community.

How many friends have you made in LFR? How many persons have you actually talked to in LFR after your LFR run was completed?
How often do people actually talk to eachother inside LFR? (except for blaming other people for wipes / sucking or asking for vote kicks).

The problem is that everyone is completely anomynous and how you play has no future effects on you, since even if you play bad you complete the task and you will be able to complete it the next, and the next, and the next week while being completely afk. Basically, it encourages 0 player interaction. Fairly obvious this is not healthy for the community.

Or are you seriously saying that the community improved from LFR?

I don't think the community improved or got worse because of LFR, I think the same people, more or less, who really wanted to raid, are still raiding. Which isn't a whole lot of people. What is new, is that a whooooooooooole lot more people are seeing those instances. You could say there's a problem of not having much new blood for raiding, but that's really how it's always been, really. Historically, not many people have raided. I think that's what the guy is saying.

If you take LFR, it'd more or less still be the same. Those LFR people just wouldn't be doing anything, or if there were more heroic dungeons, they'd be doing those.

The idea of community is blown way out of proportion. That "community" that existed has never had a whole lot of people really participating in it anyways, and the tools that did come, got rid of a lot of the fluff for a small minority of people who seemed to like it, while opening up content to millions more.

[uiemad]

It's a whole mixture of things that no one is every going to agree on. Some background on me. In vanilla I went into Zul Gurub 2 times. Other than that the only "raiding" i did was Upper Blackrock Spire pugs. I did PvP a lot though. Burning Crusade was much of the same. Lots of PvP. Casually raided Kara and Gruuls. Wrath, hardcore raided. Then Cata and Panda I've been super casual and been sticking to the occasional LFR.

So the issues I have with LFR...

It's not "fun" for anyone halfway decent. I hate LFR. I don't do it because it's "fun" or I "enjoy" it. I do it because it is the easiest most convenient route for me. If it WASN'T there I would be doing normal pugs and frankly, would probably be much happier. But why DO normal pugs? I can knock out some LFRs in a fraction of the time and go on my merry way to playing animal crossing or some shit. Hell I can play Animal Crossing WHILE doing LFR. People are mush more likely to go the route of convenience than with what is more enjoyable.

Which brings me to part 2, it's braindead easy. Before the Atonement Disc nerf. I could pretty much surf the net, play my ds, while spamming Smite/HolyFire and top healing meters (now I'm somewhere in the middle) and keep the raid alive. This kind of difficulty in no way fosters player growth. Many of the people who go into LFR are bad or even almost average. but these people have 0 reason to get better and nobody has any reason to help them. Why get better? You just Q and you are put in a group and everyone has to put up with you. It's so easy you WILL kill the bosses anyway. Nobody in there will likely see you again so they have no reason to try and help you understand how to play better. It's a black hole.

Now that sort of segues into part 3, Community. This has been being said forever. Before LFR people had to rely on their servermates for groups. Yes it did take some time and luck to find a group or get one together. But here's the kicker, over time, spending hours with these puggers, you learn who you liked. You learned who was good and who was bad. Who you wanted to invite again and who you didn't. You learned who made good groups and who made bad ones. This is how I and many people wound up with full friends lists. This is how I and many other people were introduced to our future guilds. The amount of people I have added to my friends list SINCE LFR compared to BEFORE is a mere fraction. Lastly, this "community" as it were, held a certain level of accountability. If you were an asshole/ninja/whatever, you frequently weren't ever brought along to things because no one wanted to deal with your shit.

For my final point, the special snowflake argument. An MMO is not just a game. It should be a world. It should draw you in and have a certain level of immersion. To facilitate this, aspects of it need to have a decent level of verisimilitude (realness). In this case we're talking about inconvenience or unfairness. While I love being able to fly around, things like flying mounts of hurt this. Making the world feel smaller and more trivial. While I enjoy instant ports to dungeons and to just about any other major point of the globe, this takes you out of the world and hurts that "realness". Foot travel and flight paths were terribly inconvenient, but they kept you grounded in the world. Do you see where I'm going? Unfairness provides something similar. I didn't raid until Wrath. I never saw inside of most raids. I never once had an issue with this. When i ran around and saw people with gear from Molten Core or Blackwing Lair, I was jealous sure, but it was so cool to see those people. To imagine the places they got it from and to wonder about how much work it took to go there. It all added to the big mystery of things and gave me something to strive for. It was COOL if someone had something I didn't have. LFR pretty much shits on this and while I appreciate the ability to see and get the things that the "hardcore" get to see and get, I have to question if I'm actually happier now and if it's actually better design. LFR even gives a legendary nowadays, something that was reserved for the Hardcore, and every time I hear someone deride a "hardcore" for not wanting "casuals" to have it and then call them a "special snowflake" I have to ask them, why is it YOU want it or need it if not to feel special?

[Normie]

It's not "fun" for anyone halfway decent.

You're overreaching there.

I honestly don't really know why some players dislike LFR. What people say is "it's too dumbed down" or "too many derps" or "you can afk your way to a legendary." But part of that is exaggeration/bullshit and part is arguably incorrect opinion and the only true part is that it's dumbed down because that's just how it has to be.

I don't think what people say about why they dislike LFR really reflects the actual reason they dislike LFR.

Now, in general, I like LFR. What I don't like are rude players, but those are much scarcer in LFR these days. I think I feel like I "have to" spend too much time in it, but, eh, I know that's just me talking myself into something that I don't actually have to do. (And wouldn't miss if I didn't.)

[fangless]

You're overreaching there.

I honestly don't really know why some players dislike LFR. What people say is "it's too dumbed down" or "too many derps" or "you can afk your way to a legendary."

These are all valid.

The mode inherently has no sense of accomplishment. You'll never kill a boss and be excited, you're just upset when you wipe. You're upset if you don't get loot, or excited if you do. But the boss kill is removed. That's 90% of what makes progression raiding remotely entertaining, and why people put up with dying for hours. You won't have any neat stories of LFR (aside from weird trolls) down the road. You won't think back to Dragon Soul about your LFR experiences, you won't think back to Throne LFR fights a year from now. I can recall my C'Thun kill from Vanilla AQ40. That was 7-8 years ago.

Basically all the positive intangible things that people find fun in raiding are missing. It's hard to understand this concept if you've never actually done any of those things, but I guess it's more of a case of not knowing what you're actually missing. LFR "raiding" is not the same content that you think the other players are doing. It's not just because of difficulty, but it's because of all the other missing pieces.

Why don't I care for it in the game? I don't care about people getting items, I care that it's basically giving kids sugar for dinner, and thinking it's working because they enjoy it.

[uiemad]

You're overreaching there.

I honestly don't really know why some players dislike LFR. What people say is "it's too dumbed down" or "too many derps" or "you can afk your way to a legendary." But part of that is exaggeration/bullshit and part is arguably incorrect opinion and the only true part is that it's dumbed down because that's just how it has to be.

I don't think what people say about why they dislike LFR really reflects the actual reason they dislike LFR.

Now, in general, I like LFR. What I don't like are rude players, but those are much scarcer in LFR these days. I think I feel like I "have to" spend too much time in it, but, eh, I know that's just me talking myself into something that I don't actually have to do. (And wouldn't miss if I didn't.)

It is a bit of a exaggeration yes. But to imply it doesn't reflect what I actually dislike about LFR, when I proceed to go into a pretty decent explanation of what it is I don't like about it, is a tad bit silly. I do however agree with it's too dumbed down as well as the statement that you can afk to a legendary, as that is what I've been doing this whole xpac.

[Hexorcist]

I enjoy LFr as well. People can talk all day about how it promotes shitty gameplay and encourages players not to improve... But I can honestly say the raid-type encounter experience from LFR HAS made me a better player because I am infinitely more aware of the game environment and the foe's actions than I ever, EVER was or would have been in dungeons before LFR.
I reckon there are other players who have also improved at least in awareness as a result.
I can go into normal modes now and execute most mechanics well, even if I've only seen the "dumb version" of a mechanic in LFR. I couldn't have done that even a year ago because I didn't have any incentive to pay close enough attention.

I like LFR, there's nothing wrong with it. If you want community and you want people that are all 100% there and trying, getting 10 people for a normal 10-man is not that hard if people were willing to teach someone once in a while, rather than "lfm tot 515+ ilvl and [Ahead of the Curve] checking all armories" bullshit.