If loot was removed from the game completely, would you still play?
No
Yes
Only once!
If loot was removed from the game completely, would you still play?
Because there was no alternative end game for players who didn't want hard content - not because there are no players in the game who want hard content.
Or maybe you could make the same statement about MoP - easy dungeons, easy LFR, game lost about 3 million players. But it's a dumb argument either way - 2 million players didn't quit the game just because Blizzard made hard dungeons, and 3 million players didn't quit the game just because of LFR. By extension, having hard content in the game doesn't cause a loss of subscribers; just as having LFR in the game doesn't cause a loss of subscribers.
Problem: half the players want hard content, half the players want easy content.
Solution: Multiple difficulties.
Last edited by mmoc2462c4a12d; 2014-01-19 at 10:26 PM.
I dont even do LFR now.
As others have said, I have many alts on legendary quest chain that need the gear and I will NEVER step foot in LFR to do it.
I pretty much don't run LFR as it is now, removing loot would just remove incentives to gear up alts.
People already thought the expac was alt unfriendly, removing loot from LFR makes it worse.
For me and many others LFR is end game. Would you still play if your end game would be crippled?
I don't do LFR to see the content, I do it because it's the only thing I have time for. I love the loot lottery and the total absence of the loot drama. I've seen some fights over pixels in the past that you won't believe, I'm too old for that shit.
On the real side of things, removing loot from anything would totally destroy it, because no one would do it. The queue time for it would be weeks
Player 1: Derp, derp, derp let's get rid of pvp altogether because it takes away from muh glorious raiding experience.
Player 2: But... raiding is fucking boring.
Player 1: EHRMAHGAD! You just like ganking lowbies! I just want to mindlessly play muh game I paid 4!
Player 2: You do realize that grinding for a reward isn't actaully fun and just amounts to a giant waste of your time?
Player 1: SHUT UP FANBOI!
Didn't read the thread, but voted "No".
LFR (as annoying as it is) is one of the main activities I do in the game right now, to gear my numerous alts and keep myself entertained while being semi awake after a long day at work.
If they took loot away from LFR (what an idiotic idea, to be honest, lol) I'd cancel my sub. Once and for all.
I would still run it, but I would wonder why they had been petty and spiteful enough to remove my means of progressing my character.
You can expand this question to all raiding and the answer would likely be much the same. The point is moot though, contrary to popular belief LFR doesn't exist so people can see the content. LFR exists so Blizzard can get more people on the loot treadmill and thus reduce the amount of new content they need to develop to keep people busy and subscribed.
In mentioning of would someone play if their end game was crippled what do you say to those who liked five mans seeing their end game crippled in order to make LFR popular?
Upwards of 10 hours a week is all you have time for and yet those who do PuGs are spending less time. The time argument has been killed with MoP LFR and further showing how BS that argument is when players would rather spend several fold more time doing a more convenient system. What LFR brings is a convenient system which finds groups for you, gets you quickly to and from a zone and the freedom to ditch a group without significantly hurting others ability to continue on like PuG raiding prior. In LFR current design it offers no time savings and is sitting with longer queues than Cata heroics despite its design to have countered that.
No loot drama, then what is with all the loot QQ on the forums? Loot drama hasnt been completely removed and not everyone likes the RNG gearing system with preference to the vendor system that had been in place years prior to LFR and which got killed off in order to further promote LFR.
There are a number of things which offer no stat based rewards that continue to see usage. Is it as popular of course not, but at least those who are partaking in it are there because they want to be there rather than finding themselves shoved into a type of game play they dont enjoy.
Last edited by nekobaka; 2014-01-20 at 12:59 AM.
Believe it or not raiding is fun for some people that actually do it for the right reasons. Getting loot is part of that but not all of that, it is about having a good time and overcoming challenges with your friends. So yeah when it is about just getting loot for no challenge with random people you are missing a large part of what makes it fun. Similarly PvP is fun for some people, but you can make the same arguments against PvP. There may be times when you are challenged in PvP but honestly if you are doing BGs(which probably align fairly closely with LFR) you probably aren't getting challenged 99% of the time. Regular BGs are mostly just a clusterfk with people even less intelligent than mob AI you see in raids. When you start getting into rated or arena, you are generally doing PvP for the same reasons people raid( having a good time and overcoming challenges with your friends ).
The difference is, heroic raids are tuned around gear (specific numbers) and require some skill / time investment to defeat, whereas LFR requires none. This is also very true with normal. Flex not so much but still more than with LFR. Not too hard to figure out.
All of these arguments are so silly. Generally, people who do normal eventually graduate to heroic modes (even if they only down a few bosses). Bosses in normal and heroic are tuned around gear. People who claim they do LFR for "progression" but make no effort to step into Flex, Normal or Heroic are kind of shutting down their own argument. 528 LFR SoO gear is not required to defeat Garrosh LFR. Not even close. I tanked and killed Garrosh on my DK alt with less than a ToT 502 LFR ilevel average.
Half of the LFR runs I've done, people consistently pull somewhere between 40-70k DPS. I pulled more than that on my main in 476-ish gear. I'm not making this shit up. This is the reality of how it is.
Edit: I should also state, since some people may have missed my previous posts, I'm not even for the removal of LFR gear. I feel it should be lowered significantly to better reflect the investment made. The side-effect of this is you won't have normal raiders feeling compelled to run LFR (minus for very specific items occasionally) and the item levels won't be so inflated, which will benefit other aspects of the game as well (such as PvP).
For example... heroic dungeons (463), LFR T14 (463), Flex (476), Normal (489), Heroic (496); LFR T15 (476), Flex (489), Normal (502), Heroic (509); LFR T16 (489), Flex (502), Normal (515), Heroic (522).
Last edited by xixixviixiiii; 2014-01-20 at 01:14 AM.
They are, but they don't have to be. The reason why we have better rewards for higher difficulty is simply to provide reward and incentive. If you removed all the gear from all raids, they could simply tune it so that the iLevel for all raids was the same but higher difficulties were tuned to be harder. It isn't a hard thing to do, and the reason we have it that way has very little to do with difficulty. It is a gear treadmill, Blizzard wants people doing it over and over again regardless of difficulty. It is a time sink. If you take away loot, people do it exactly once for achievements and that is it. Everyone gets loot not because they deserve it, but so Blizzard can get them to participate in the massive tink sink of treadmill raiding.
I've seen this come up so often and its a weak argument.
Gear helps progression so that after you have a boss down a couple times and get some more gear it isnt as healing/dps intensive as it was the first time, so you can get on to whatever boss you are doing progression on. Having each boss fight be super rough the first time you down it and the 40th time you down it would make progression a night mare and make it impossible for groups to run smaller schedules. Those 10 hour/week heroic guilds couldnt function.
LFR doesnt have progression. 0 reason for there to be gear in the first place other than incentive's people to do something they dont want to take part it but want the rewards from.
for christs sake, just accept that lfr is never going away and move on already.
if you dont like it, dont do it.
If you remove loot from LFR you gotta make the fights impossible to wipe to. Then casuals cant complain about not seeing the content.