Elitism of Normal Raiding and Misguided LFR Hate

[Arbs]

If you whisper bads who are failing they typically snap at you no matter how polite you are and start up a fight in raid chat.

Yepp, But Tanks are always willing to listen I have learned. I have had Tanks whisper me telling them its there first time & I tell them its all good I will carry the heavy load & allow them to watch & get a hang of it and learn from that. An most of the time it is possible results. I have never witnessed a bad tank in LFR, maybe thats cause I prevent it from happening.

But Dps or Heals will snap at you if you try to help them in anyway or fashion.

[Ronduwil]

The point he was trying to make flew right over your head. There is no incentive in LFR when you can just wipe several times to get a buff. Why try when the artificial gold sink will improve your play?

Because it's fun!!! That's why you play a game. Why are you raging because some idiot in your group is looking at youtube instead of playing the game? The fact that you can persevere and come out with loot in spite of him is good. Why do you want to punish the 20 people who are trying because 5 people are just there to game the system? Sure I can (sometimes) AFK my way to loot. Is that fun? No! That's the incentive: the fun of doing your best in the game and overcoming obstacles, even if the obstacles are other players who are trying to troll the group. You guys are acting like raiding is a professional sport or something. No one is paying you to do well in raids; you're actually paying for access to them. You're just doing them for fun. If some people have fun AFKing to loot let them. The majority don't find that to be fun.

[Arbs]

People did quit from the difficulty of Cata heroics. Hence the massive nerfing.

Do you really think that many players left because they didn't like Vashjir and Uldum.

QQ Grim Batol QQ Deadmines QQ Vortex Pinnacle QQ Zul'Gurub

The massive decline began after the nerfs & alot of people said it was faith lost in Blizzard.

Now a days it seems Casuals are the one quitting more than Hardcores, as they still play but do not raid as much.

[Ronduwil]

Trust me guys, it is in our common interests that Blizzard invent some way to punish leechers/AFKers. It is not even hard, the tech is already there - look at BG "report AFK" option.

I'm with you there. Every time I see the "Players cannot be kicked shortly before or after combat," message I want to punch my screen. The one thing Preach did right in his infamous video was to point out how the system excessively protects under-performers by allowing tanks to ensure that kicking is unavailable by staying in combat for as often as possible.

[pimpeddakota]

It's not that LFR is bad.... It is literally the player.. I'm sorry when I see a player with no gems/enchants/reforge you just don't belong in a raid environment. It just isn't made for you because you clearly could care less and you want to be rewarded for just being there. Just today I had to trolling the living mess out of a tank to get him to bail because the boss was nearly 3 shotting him to death and he was a dk. To make it worst this player was 11th on the healing chart on a single boss fight while he was MT'ing. If I could sit down with this player yes I could teach him the many things he is doing wrong BUT LFR isn't that type of forum. That is what 5 mans are made for BUT because the masses wanted 5 mans to be a joke now players don't learn their class there. They learn them in LFR and people don't want to be patient with you at that level.

I'm waiting for blizzard to modify the vote kick rules so people have a rapid way to fix the 30K dps'ers/HP'sers, and those tanks that clearly shouldn't be wasting 23-24 other peoples time

[Arbs]

It's not that LFR is bad.... It is literally the player.. I'm sorry when I see a player with no gems/enchants/reforge you just don't belong in a raid environment. It just isn't made for you because you clearly could care less and you want to be rewarded for just being there. Just today I had to trolling the living mess out of a tank to get him to bail because the boss was nearly 3 shotting him to death and he was a dk. To make it worst this player was 11th on the healing chart on a single boss fight while he was MT'ing. If I could sit down with this player yes I could teach him the many things he is doing wrong BUT LFR isn't that type of forum. That is what 5 mans are made for BUT because the masses wanted 5 mans to be a joke now players don't learn their class there. They learn them in LFR and people don't want to be patient with you at that level.

I'm waiting for blizzard to modify the vote kick rules so people have a rapid way to fix the 30K dps'ers/HP'sers, and those tanks that clearly shouldn't be wasting 23-24 other peoples time

LFR could be a great feature, if Blizzard regulated it properly & didn't keep nerfing it.

It has always been the player & always will be.

[wych]

Than people should put in some effort instead being handed everything. There is nothing accomplishing about being handed everything, it makes you feel worse. Its utter sad that people litterally try to defend being handed everything without any effort., If you don't put in the time & effort you don't deserve it.

You are COMPLETELY missing the point.

It's not about wanting to be handed things for the vast majority of people, it's about wanting to experience end game content when they don't have the ability to dedicate 2-3 nights every week to it.

People who haven't got multiple nights every week to spend playing WoW want end game content, therefore Blizzard have listened and given them end game content.

Luckily if YOU want to achieve something then you can completely ignore LFR and Flex and play normals and heroics, the same way you could go and buy Halo and just play the game on the hardest difficulty if you want "accomplishment".

[satimy]

Oh I disagree. Many of the players are late Cata and Mist players, or remaining wrath babies.

Look at what happened in Cataclysm when they tried to make dungeons HARD. Not remove, just have them not be a faceroll. Many many wrath players left. Same thing would happen again and would cause another expansion to go from great to horrid in just a couple patches. All these players used to faceroll heroics, easy VP gear and tier thrown at them would cry, blizzard would scramble to save them and we would have a repeat of 4.3

What blizzard needs to do is make LFR bottom of the barrel. Sure, run the raids get some gear, but literally all gear is better and at least some is easier to aquire.

wrath heroics were harder than cata heroics. Loken was so annoying, so was all of Halls of Stone, Utgarde Pinnacle, Gundrak and lets not forget everyones favorite the occulus. The ICC 5 mans were also no cakewalk.

Heroics would be ranked in difficulty Tbc>Wrath>Cata>MoP

[Airwaves]

After all that. The point of the thread is?

[Arbs]

You are COMPLETELY missing the point.

It's not about wanting to be handed things for the vast majority of people, it's about wanting to experience end game content when they don't have the ability to dedicate 2-3 nights every week to it.

People who haven't got multiple nights every week to spend playing WoW want end game content, therefore Blizzard have listened and given them end game content.

Luckily if YOU want to achieve something then you can completely ignore LFR and Flex and play normals and heroics, the same way you could go and buy Halo and just play the game on the hardest difficulty if you want "accomplishment".

If you don't have the time to experience content than why don't you find time to do it & you can't find the time than don't do it at all. If you want do something put in the time & effort to get there.

An for Blizzard listening to them it is one of many reasons why WoW has almost 50% of its subs since Wrath, even if majority of them are prbly from Asia.

I like Flex, I think it is perfect allowing players to regulate it. But you always have the scumbags who want to be carried or put in ridiculous requirements.

[Ronduwil]

Reason I hate LFR in easy step by step format:

1. LFR is full of players who are honestly bad at this game. Maybe it's because they're bots, maybe they're just kids who are up past their bedtime, but there's way too many DPS pulling auto-attack level DPS.

Who the hell cares? If that's how they have fun let them. What do you care how good they are? Do you start raging at kids on the playground because they're jumping on the hopscotch lines?

2. The content is set up in a way that encourages this behavior. Day 1 nerfs is taking things way too far. IMO there should be no tier of content where sitting afk on auto attack the whole time is viable. If half your raid is auto-attacking, or not pushing the panic button on Ultraxion, they should wipe.

I keep repeating this, but I would rather they protect the 20 players who are doing their best from the poor behavior of the other five than to punish everyone for the mistakes of the few. You don't seem to understand the point of LFR, which is to allow someone with < 1 hr per day of play time to make meaningful progress in the game. That doesn't happen when they have to wait 40 minutes to kick and replace all the trolls in group.

3. The system is set up in a way to protect bad players. First of all, it's near impossible to kick guys from LFR right now.

Agree this is a problem.

Most people either vote no on the kick and call you elitist for not wanting an auto-attacker, or are afk and therefor auto-vote no when the timer expires. So you're left with the good players dropping group early and getting hit with the deserter debuff.

That's because half the time people are calling for kicks they don't know what the hell they're talking about. Take a look at this guy. He is the #6 hunter for Immersius DPS on WoL right now: Highscore's Immersius Parse on World of Logs
What is his #1 DPS skill? Auto-shot. Knowing nothing about hunters, if you saw just the ratio of damage without considering quantity wouldn't you think he was AFKing? I've seen many people in LFR calling for hunter kicks without knowing WTF they were looking at. Maybe if you gave specific reasons for kicks and not just "kick the bad DPS" you would get more people on board with your VTK efforts.

Solution: Raise the requirement. Perhaps change from an iLevel requirement to a proving grounds requirement. At least that way there's more control over how good you are (especially for tanks/healers, and would likely purge the auto-attacking DPS).

This isn't a solution. Half the AFKers are "good" players who are just out to troll. this isn't going to fix anything. You need to focus less on how "good" everyone else is and play for your own sake.

[JakeSteel]

I wanted to make a comment about LFD and about how it could also affect a player's skill end game. This is all observational bias, however, since I haven't played much since WotLK.

LFD and LFR seem to share a common issue; since there's less coordination in a group of random strangers, the content has to be trivialized (to a degree) in order to compensate for the lack of teamwork. While this might be a boon to a lot of people with LFR, I think it's a contributing factor to the lack of skill gained while leveling, along with what you mentioned in your post. The last time I was playing, my two friends and I intentionally avoided using LFR, traveling to the dungeons and completing them as just the three of us. It worked since we each covered one of the three roles. We only got to about our 30s, which I know isn't far at all, but even then as the healer I pretty much never had to cast a healing spell. It was a little ridiculous how easy it was. If the difficulty of dungeons doesn't change much throughout the levels, then it makes sense that a lot of endgame players wouldn't understand their roles as well as they should, or how to play their class effectively.

If that is part of the problem, there's nothing that can really be done (unfortunately). Blizzard will keep stretching the goal of reaching endgame each expansion, which means they'll increase the speed of leveling so more people can enjoy it. I really wish they would believe in the philosophy "the journey is the game" but at this point I don't think it's possible.

[Arbs]

I wanted to make a comment about LFD and about how it could also affect a player's skill end game. This is all observational bias, however, since I haven't played much since WotLK.

LFD and LFR seem to share a common issue; since there's less coordination in a group of random strangers, the content has to be trivialized (to a degree) in order to compensate for the lack of teamwork. While this might be a boon to a lot of people with LFR, I think it's a contributing factor to the lack of skill gained while leveling, along with what you mentioned in your post. The last time I was playing, my two friends and I intentionally avoided using LFR, traveling to the dungeons and completing them as just the three of us. It worked since we each covered one of the three roles. We only got to about our 30s, which I know isn't far at all, but even then as the healer I pretty much never had to cast a healing spell. It was a little ridiculous how easy it was. If the difficulty of dungeons doesn't change much throughout the levels, then it makes sense that a lot of endgame players wouldn't understand their roles as well as they should, or how to play their class effectively.

If that is part of the problem, there's nothing that can really be done (unfortunately). Blizzard will keep stretching the goal of reaching endgame each expansion, which means they'll increase the speed of leveling so more people can enjoy it. I really wish they would believe in the philosophy "the journey is the game" but at this point I don't think it's possible.

LFD has its pros & cons, but in the end it was needed, but it had a bad side effect that did for harm than good. If Blizzard would take away people LF access that could be a solution to removing toxic behavior in Queues.

[Ronduwil]

http://www.noxxic.com/wow/dps-rankings/realistic

The dps inflation of ilvl gear is a huge problem at the moment, pisses me off so much when someone comes in to LFR 50+ilvl on me acting like a tough guy.

In my opinion this is a huge problem and generates most of the animosity toward casual players in this game. When a 553 frost mage is pulling just shy of 300K while a 496 frost mage is still at 120K that's a problem. I'm pretty sure that level 60 raiders didn't pull three times as much DPS as their non-raiding colleagues in Vanilla or TBC. I know I certainly didn't see that in WotLK. They really need to tone down the over-dependence on gear and make DPS rely more competent play.

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I've been in LFRs where some Heroic level healer will whine endlessly about how his healing is carrying the raid. And I'm thinking "why in the living hell are you even here?"

I have never understood raiders in heroic gear who whine about carrying others in LFR. WTF did they expect? I used to LFR DS in my heroic gear all the time and never once felt inclined to criticize others. As long as bosses are dying players in LFR should just mind their own business and collect their valor.

[Durandro]

The massive decline began after the nerfs & alot of people said it was faith lost in Blizzard.

That was the illusion due to the time lag of subscription reports. People had already quit months prior to those numbers coming out.

And oh my the qq due to 5 man heroics was pretty intense during the first month of Cataclysm. Heck, even the normal 5 mans were pretty brutal at the start - Throne of the Tides is still probably the most difficult dungeon while leveling up purely because of the trash!

[Ronduwil]

3100 posts in a year and a half yet you don't have time to raid 3 hours a couple nights a week? Give me a break

There's a difference between firing off 3100 5-minute posts from time to time and committing three sold hours to a raid in one big chunk. How can you even compare the two?

[Arbs]

That was the illusion due to the time lag of subscription reports. People had already quit months prior to those numbers coming out.

And oh my the qq due to 5 man heroics was pretty intense during the first month of Cataclysm. Heck, even the normal 5 mans were pretty brutal at the start - Throne of the Tides is still probably the most difficult dungeon while leveling up purely because of the trash!

But they were still fun weren't they that challenge added in some excitement. I think I did Cata Pre-Nerf dungeons 10X more than I have for MoP dungeons.

[pimpeddakota]

You are COMPLETELY missing the point.
It's not about wanting to be handed things for the vast majority of people, it's about wanting to experience end game content when they don't have the ability to dedicate 2-3 nights every week to it.
People who haven't got multiple nights every week to spend playing WoW want end game content, therefore Blizzard have listened and given them end game content.
Luckily if YOU want to achieve something then you can completely ignore LFR and Flex and play normals and heroics, the same way you could go and buy Halo and just play the game on the hardest difficulty if you want "accomplishment".

See pretty much this is me... I want to see the end game but not put forth the effort I used to back in Vanilla. But I make sure my gear is the best it can be when I go in. That is my biggest issue with LFR. It should not allow you to que if you missing gems/enchants!

[Ronduwil]

The problem with LFR is not that the players who choose to "raid" this way are necessarily bad players, but that because the mechanics of the encounters are so forgiving, players don't care about doing well in that mode.

So what? What do you care what other players find fun? The fact that I can still succeed in that mode in spite of them is a big plus, in my book.

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Personally when I need to go into LFR I try my hardest to just get it done but when 10 idiots sit there auto attacking with their ungemmed gear I stop trying. I refuse to carry those kinds of players until they start trying or leave.

And then you're making your own fight take longer. As the cliche goes, it's like cutting off your nose to spite your face. The whole point of LFR is to allow you to progress your character in a timely manner without being held back by losers like that. When you quit trying because you "refuse to carry" those other players you are in effect becoming one of those players.

[Durandro]

In my opinion this is a huge problem and generates most of the animosity toward casual players in this game. When a 553 frost mage is pulling just shy of 300K while a 496 frost mage is still at 120K that's a problem. I'm pretty sure that level 60 raiders didn't pull three times as much DPS as their non-raiding colleagues in Vanilla or TBC. I know I certainly didn't see that in WotLK. They really need to tone down the over-dependence on gear and make DPS rely more competent play.

Gear scaling is revolting right now, I agree. Going up 40 item levels nearly doubled my dps! Its nice feeling powerful, but this is just too much.

Though I will note that the 496 Timeless gear is pretty awful on itemisation and stat budget (its practically blue quality), so its still not entirely accurate to measure between that and normal SoO gear. Not sure what they were thinking with that, its ilevel padding at its worst.