Disclaimer: This post is based on personal experience and observation.

While there's always been a certain level of frustration surrounding PUGs, there is something to be said for picking a group of people that you may or may not know and entering them into a team environment to go through content.

With the birth of LFR, a lot of PUGging died down (not completely, but it did impact it) and the queue system started for "raiding." What happens with the queue system, however, is you enter into a prechosen group of strangers whose only accomplishment was meeting (or cheating) an ilvl requirement, with little to no team work or leadership involved. It does what it's intended to do by showing players the content, but all in all becomes little more than a headache to get a couple pieces of low level purples each week and see what the bosses look like.

Many of the experiences of LFR cause people to become weary of PUGs and what was an already potentially frustrating thing (PUGging) becomes something that fewer and fewer people want to attempt since the idea of leadership and teamwork seems to be lost outside of a guild environment.

Thus, the majority of people either queued to suffer through LFR or stayed within their guilds for Normal/HM, with fewer and fewer PUG groups forming for current content.

Much of the raiding experience is lost in LFR (i.e. team work, leadership, feelings of accomplishment) which makes it that much less appealing.

Flex, however, seems to offer an easier raid environment while still requiring that certain level of choosing your group and working together without punishing too harshly on its encounters.

With that said, what I'm hoping more than anything for Flex is not to get gear from it or run it all the time, but I'm hoping that it helps to repair much of what was lost within the community stemming from the LFR experience. Hopefully, once players get more involved in forming PUGs again (and with the onset of Connected Realms) that the community will become more involved socially, friendships will form again and PUGs for Normal modes will increase as these friendships are made across guilds and players and people once again know who to "go to" for that good healer alt, or that good DPS or great tank alt.

I remember PUGging weekly throughout Wrath, it it's very exciting to form groups each week, some people you know, some people you don't. You're not all in the same guild, but there's something to be said for reuniting with friends and acquaintances each week and forming new friendships outside your normal raid schedule.

At any rate, that's my hope for Flex. Not that it be an end in itself, but that it promote decent PUGging again throughout the servers and that some of that social awareness can return to the game that's been lost in the anonymity of LFR. It won't of course fix everything 100%, but hopefully it will encourage a move in the right direction especially as realms connect and we can start looking within our own "realms" instead of always OpenRaid.

Thoughts?