From my experience I'd say that somewhere between 5.2 and now they deliberately or accidently removed the preferred queuing for groups that are already in progress. In DS there was a hotfix that groups that are already in the dungeon would always get preferred for filling up their free spots.
Right now when a tank or healer - depending on time and server the role that is in most demand - leaves, you will wait pretty much just as long or even longer as if you would leave and requeue. But this is not because nobody would fill this spots - last week our tank left lfr before Thok, and after 25 minutes in the queue I asked a friend to queue as tank for that lfr part. He had five minutes waiting time, and then got into a completely fresh run although we still were waiting for over 30 minutes.
Ten minutes later another one from my guild got invite for that lfr part, and he also started a fresh run although he was less than 25 minutes in the queue.
We waited another five minutes, and when we asked the new tank how long he had been in the queue he said almost 10 minutes.
One possibility I could imagine is that the "preferred" timer gets reset everytime a DPS gets replaced, and this happens pretty much every minute.
Last edited by Puri; 2014-03-31 at 02:07 PM.
20%? You're being generous. Even once inside it's just a slow wait for the boss to die, it's not like you're actually fighting it, strategizing around or being awake at all anyway.
Luckly LFR is no longer necessary for anyone. With some Timeless gear you can jump straight into Flex and leave LFR for the too anti-social to attempt any form of raiding that involves communicating with other people.
Try to get into flex with an ilvl below 535, Try it.
That means a shit ton of burdens. And many people are not that lucky, I spend three days there farming 100k coins for the stupid mount and didn't loot one burden
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If they don't scale heroics up in 6.1 or 2, I'm quitting the game, I refuse to ever do LF retards again, it is worse than any grind in Vanilla WoW
This is obviously just rubbish, I've been playing my boosted horde DK 90 for 2 weeks and have an ilvl of 525 and that's with running LFR, using a Garrosh heirloom, getting a warforged chest from Ordos and getting lucky with 3 burdens plus buying some 522 bits. Even with heroic SoO boss achivs people will NOT take me into Flex groups on my realm because my ilvl 'is too low'.
So I'd love to know how you jumped straight into Flex with just timeless gear.
If blizzard has to result to adding bots to compensate for terrible players then they've basically failed their job, give people a reason to put in some fucking effort and they will. If they don't then they simply won't get rewarded, Diablo 3 (despite it's flaws) has a great system of loot. It's all random but the more you play (and at a higher difficulty) the more you get rewarded. Do you see that in LFR? Fuck no, you hit a button -> accept queue pop -> press 1-3 buttons (most dpsers do that blindly it seems...) -> get reward. Where's the involvement? How come the person that watches TV on the side or any other activity (desktop/afk even) gets the same reward as the player that tries to improve himself/herself by doing his best? I seriously HATE LFR in it's current form, there's been youtube video series of actual dedicated gamers boosting a lvl 90 (as an experiment) then queuing for dungeons until LFR ilvl and then they complete SoO LFR within a month. The fun thing about that experiment is that the player (rogue) NEVER actually did anything, in 5mans he'd just follow group and not dps. Same in LFR, he wouldn't even be kicked very often. How LOW has the game (and community) gone that you can basically finish the game (lowest difficulty mind you) without actually doing anything? This to me as a competitive gamer is worrying, I think it's this bad spiral that in the end is going to kill wow.
Get some sort of system in LFR (all raids that automatically delivers loot) that rewards people who try and punish those who don't, being new to the game (or class) is perfectly fine. Not wanting or not having any reason to improve your effectiveness is TERRIBLE for the game, it really is.
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Determination is a good way of dealing with a spectrum of player skill levels. It's also a good way of encouraging players to improve without destroying them in the process.
Stronger groups will 1 shot most bosses. Nerfing LFR will make it less fun for them.
Weaker groups will take 3-4 attempts at some bosses, but they'll stay. So they'll get more practice. This cannot help but yield some improvement in skill.
I don't see any real benefit of nerfing LFR simply so that a mass of people can clear it in record time. Where's the fun in that?
I think you give yourself too much credit. Have you ever considered the possibility that some of those players you allegedly carried actually improved, both in ability and in gear? Just because there are some useless fools participating in LFR does not mean all are completely hopeless. I think you'd be stunned to find out just how many decent players other than you are keeping it going and that in the absence of some "hero" coming to save them from LFR bosses, most will actually rise to the challenge...eventually.
What's wrong with saying rubbish :O
Yeah it's a tank but so far been unsuccessful in getting into any groups... It's like I've cleared the place, done half of it on heroic, I know how to play but to some people that just doesn't seem to matter it's all about ilvl.
Ah well I'll just keep trying I guess.
Maybe it's just the EU servers. On the US I jumped into Flex on a tank in 533 and get in most groups easy. since at any time, there's only like 2 tanks LFG anyway. So you take what you can get.
that being said, my warlock can't get into a group with an ilvl of 545 because the warlock with 561 looks so much more shiney
LFR players who put in no effort land up with a bunch of 528 gear and insufficient skill to do anything with it. People who put in the effort to do Flex land up with 548 gear (people who put in effort also get enough VP to do upgrades). People who put in even more effort get 561 -567 gear and the people putting in the most effort get 574-580 gear.
Your assertion makes no sense.
For me the biggest reward isn't the loot. Sure, loot is a reward, but it is hardly the be-all and end-all of what I get out of the game. For me, and I hope the vast majority of raiders out there, the real reward is the experience - downing the bosses, pushing yourself, feeling you actually did something.
If someone chooses to be a leach in LFR, it is ultimately them who are losing the most.
Just because a handful of players do this, out of what, 3-4 odd million LFR participants, doesn't mean jack shit.
I am going to be blunt. This is a problem with you, not the community. There is absolutely no need to advocate punishing a bunch of people who aren't conforming to your idea of having fun when they are playing a game whose primary intention is to have fun.
I fail to see any argument here proving that (most) people don't want to improve their effectiveness. So you can't use it as a given fact. And therein lies a big problem with your entire line of reasoning.
Raiding has always required organization to get started. You're already taking a shortcut to the organization by hitting a button and queuing for a raid so I wouldn't really complain about queue times.
OP, just skip LFR, it's had this problem since it's creation and it's likely not ever going to go away. Your best bet is to farm timeless isle for 535 gear and go straight into Flex raids, and if you have trouble finding them, then lead one on your own or make friends with someone that runs them. This solution will be WAY more fun and will save you a lot of aggravation in the logn run.
Organize premade LFRs with a guild, group of people on your server, OpenRaid, oQueue, etc. It will help foster a sense of community if you play with people from your own guild/server and the LFR queue system will fill the empty slot with pugs if you don't quite fill up or if someone has to leave. There are a lot of people looking for higher quality LFR experiences and I'm sure some people would also love to avoid the 1-hr long queue times Also people tend to try harder when they are not in an anonymous group, and the tanks and healers get less harassment from premade groups.
Something to consider anyways. Our guild used to do premade LFRs during T14 but now we pretty much stick to flex/normal + hm runs for alt runs.
Good luck