LFR should TEACH players to become better raiders.

[lappee]

Based on what?

For one based on people wanting to complete the quest(s), unless you advocate that every single player will just not do them if LFR doesn't exist. One could just take and check percentage of characters / accounts that completed normal mode raids before and after LFR introduction (while the raid was current content), but that would require some effort to show statistical facts for things that are logically true as well - all just for people like you to not believe anyway.

No they won't, the simply will not go to normal if there's no lfr.

Pre lfr 85-95% if the player base never set foot into raiding. It was an asset costly area with little to show for it. That's why Dragon Soul was pretty much copy and paste the raid. Funding of assets were cut and lfr being popular meant raid funding returned for mop onwards.

Hell WoD had more raid bosses, mini bosses and trash than cataclysm.

Not just that but we also know that majority of players don't rise to the challenge. They just leave. Cataclysm was a disaster for numbers in the first year because of heroic dungeon difficulty where after ghostcrawler told players to get good or get out many just decided to get out.

The Cata sub bleed was terrible, the bleed only stopped when lfr was introduced along side iteration 1 of transmog.

Playerbase dropped for a lot of different reasons, and LFR wasn't one to save them (otherwise WoD would've had higher numbers all out the expansion, rather than peaking at start and then dropping to a point where they stopped releasing numbers all together.).

And again, taking LFR away doesn't make the raid more difficult (because LFR and Normal are more or less the same, and I already said the diffiiculty curve can be adjusted to take that in mind). What would change is that people would queue to an organized raid group and not AFK the whole time in the raid.

- - - Updated - - -

This isn’t necessarily true, and also goes against what, I believe was Greg Street, stating that the opposite is true. Stating that when presented with the option of learning something to get better and get into organized content vs just not doing it, people would choose to just not do it.

Greg said that people would rather not do difficult content, than learn and do the content. Now we're talking about actually doing the content (by queueing into organized groups) and playing the game - rather than AFKing in LFR.

The difficulty of the raid is more or less the same, so there is really nothing to "learn" beside the basic mechanics of the fight (mainly N'zoth, which you have to learn in LFR too, unless you're the AFKer).

I'm sure most people would not join Normal mode raids, no matter how easy they are if it means that they have to communicate with another player (at which point I really wonder why they play an MMO anyway). But even if tiny fraction of those people (which is highly likely) would start Normal mode (and perhaps further) raiding more than just that one time they wanted to see content or finish a quest then that would increase the number of players in the raiding community - and thats all better for the raiding community.

[mysticx]

So the solution for people who don't want to raid is to offer them a not "very... enriching experience"? And removing any chance for those people to ever try nhc?

Sounds solid. That seems like a great point for me. Again it worked before lfr as well. People who really wanted to see the content - saw it. I did like 300 dps with my mage and yet I stand before Illidan like 2 weeks after I hit max level. If you wanna see nzoth right now go and join a stupid nhc raid and be carried to nzoth and have a shit ton of fun. That easy and simple.

They can try normal and up if they want, the majority of them *just don't want to*, it's not as if the existence of LfR suddenly condemns the players to run it and never do anything above that ever again, but it's enough for many people.

Good for you that you saw Illidan in two weeks, have a cookie! Most people however, were not as lucky (Or willing to pay for a carry), and those people need something to tide them over, WoW doesn't have the playerbase anymore to risk losing a bunch of players to inaccessibility of content.

[lappee]

You know that "raiding community" (Normal included) is much smaller than the "non-raiding community". So if you put the majority in a situation where their options are joining a raiding community or quitting the game, you are asking them to rise to the challenge of doing harder content. And as you pointed out, it's been established that they'd rather quit in that case.

So what you count as a "win" for raiding community, comes with a considerable loss for the entire game. And thus even for the raiding community.

The raiding community isn't revived by removing LFR. It's a wrong solution to a non-problem.

Except its neither harder content nor am I putting them in a situation where they can only either join the community or quit the game - That is just absurd to begin with. I'm asking them to do more (Find a group and press queue button, instead of finding LFR button and pressing queue there), if that extra step is enough for people not to take part, or atleast try, raiding at the entry level then I suppose their quests and story weren't that important to begin with.

And yes, I'm sure people would stop raiding. Just like I'm sure there are people who stopped doing LFR because its too hard (or any other content). Does that mean everything should just be easier so we can get more participants (which does have a diminishing return, a point where harder content will actually net more people).

Raiding community isn't revived by removing LFR, I never argued it being as such. I only said it would increase the amount of people within the community, even if it is by only a little bit, and that still stands as a fact - no matter how much you hate that fact.

Whether removing LFR would be good/bad for the game overall is an utterly different topic - you need to learn to differentiate two different topics (like with your researches that didn't apply here).

- - - Updated - - -

It would require effort, yes. Luckily Blizzard has done that work for us, so it doesn't have to be a thing to believe in or not to believe in. The business case of adding a new raid mode has been driven by research of participation numbers - and that's why we have LFR today. If what you're saying was true, it wouldn't exist.

The whole idea of "people willing to rise to the occasion if presented with challenge" has been proven false. They've publicly said so.

I know this doesn't fit into your inner narrative of "how things should be", but maybe you should consider for a moment that you are, actually, wrong about this?

And once again you're mixing up two topics

Topic 1) Participant numbers in Normal mode raids before and after the introduction of LFR --- This doesn not include people who do LFR, LFR is NOT Normal mode.
Topic 2) Participant numbers who saw the raid in whatever difficulty --- This includes everything, from LFR to Mythic.

Now Blizzard has done the work for topic 2, but we've never seen numbers from them about topic 1. One could check all characters in armory and see the dates on relevant achievements, but that is just extra work to prove a fact that is already logically demonstrated multiple times.

But yeah, clearly this isn't going anywhere, its too tiresome to constantly explain things in words of one syllable. Gl and hf in your LFR endeavors.

[SirBeef]

We know that LFR is a divisive topic on MMOC but hear me out on this, I believe this would be good for the game.

Intro

LFD was and still is a great tool used to open up heroics, Mythic+, and raids to all players. Depending on the time of day, you can set up a group for almost anything and find players who want to do that content. Mythic+ has become a huge success for players who want small group content in which they control how challenging it becomes.

LFR is a mixed bag and not much of a success story. On 9/19/2011, Ghostcrawler stated :


Gamepedia.com describes LFR as:



LFR is supposed to bridge the gap between the super causal players and normal raiders, with the flexibility go right the wing of the bosses they need without committing hours clearing the earlier bosses/trash. It is a great concept that should be taken further.




Problems

Off the top of my head I can name 4 bosses that destroyed LFR groups due to poor tuning. N'Zoth, the Corruptor, Kil'jaeden, Lei Shen, and Durumu the Forgotten all had group tactics that needed to be learned but heavily punished the raid if a player screws up. This is fine in an organized group where you know the players, have voice communication system in place, and can replace players who repeatably fail the mechanics. In some raids the trash "teaches" some of the boss mechanics, so the whole group understands how to approach the boss. Combine this with vent/discord/youtube/dungeon guides and you usually have a decent idea of how to boss fight works. LFR players get none of this. The trash is so heavily nerfed that they dont learn the mechanics, players drop in and out of the raid so the people you spent the last 30 minutes with can be replaced with with players who never done the boss before and refused to use the above resources to learn how to complete the encounter.

Imagine explaining N'Zoth to 24 other players, setting up groups, wiping and learning the fight and getting the boss HP lower with every attempt only to have half the group leave and replaced with players who NEVER did the boss. It is not fun to effectively start from scratch with every pull.

If the Above wasnt bad enough, add toxic players to the mix. Players who causes chaos by kicking the guy/gal who is explaining the fight, queuing as a role they have no gear for, pulling extra trash or bosses without a full group or both tanks and/or missing healers, failing boss mechanics on purpose, dying 0.0045 seconds after the pull, or just AFK/auto attacking the boss.

With both of these facts, no sane raider would want to join LFR and players who regularly use LFR would avoid the problem bosses. This defeats the whole point of LFR.



Solutions

1. Proving Ground V.2
2. LFR Score
3. Raider Bait
4. LFR Tuning

Proving Ground V.2


Remember proving grounds?



Proving Grounds should be updated every expansion and become a REQUIREMENT to complete before you can queue for LFR. Like the original system, a Gold/silver/bronze tier system should be put in place with and endless version for players who want to test themselves. It should be designed around the player having NORMAL 5 MAN dungeon gear and increased throughout the expansion life-cycle to match the gear requirements need to queue for that tiers raids.



LFR Score

LFR should teach players the fights via pop ups / Raid warnings that say "Move to this location", "Taunt", "Raid wide damage inc, prepare to raid heal", The boss is weakened, do max damage", etc.

I would love a score based system that tracks damage/healing/tank cd used/etc and used that to determine if you can get gear/rewards. An example:

All living players would passively gain points with bonuses for avoiding/soaking some of the bosses abilities (fire on the ground, void zones, anything that can be avoided). DPS would gain points for damage done per time alive and killing adds, healers for healing and keeping the tanks above 50% HP and bonuses for bring an low HP player back to 80-ish% HP, and tanks for taunting on time, using CDs to reduce incoming damage, and reducing raid wide damage.

Your score is private and can never decease so another player cannot grief you by pulling you into fire/voidzones/etc, however if you cause players to lose HP or Die by not soaking a boss mechanic or not moving away from players when you have a bomb/negative effect, your score will pause for few seconds depending how how much damage the player(s) took.

Each boss will have their own score levels. At X score, you become eligible for gear drops (50%) with higher scores getting a higher chance for gear to drop up by another 15%. This system will carry the increased drop rate to the next LFR boss (in the same raid) so a player who is doing their part will have piece of gear drop every 3rd-4th boss. The bonuses will reset when the player is awarded a piece of gear (not counting bonus rolls).

Example 1, player with a very high score: Boss 1 - 65% chance at a loot drop, Boss 2 - 80%, Boss 3 - 95%
Example 2, player with a very high score: Boss 1 - 65% chance at a loot drop, Boss 2 - Loot, Boss 3 - 65%

Example 3, player with a score that awards a chance at gear: Boss 1 - 50% chance at a loot drop, Boss 2 - 50%, Boss 3 - 50%

Example 4, player with a low score: Boss 1 - 0% chance at a loot drop, Boss 2 - 0%, Boss 3 - 0%

Example 5, player with a score that awards a chance at gear who died on phase 2: Your score and the score levels will be calculated based on how long you were alive. If this player was auto attacking and purposely killed him/herself then he will not get gear, However if this was a single misstep made by a player who was doing his/her part then they will have a 50% chance to get loot.

This will teach the player base about the bosses mechanic and reward them for doing it correctly. Toxic players will only punish themselves.



Raider Bait

This one is simple, give top tier raiders a reason to do LFR. It can be a weekly quest that can only be seen by players who killed X number of bosses on normal or higher (this will be account wide). The reward could be extra bonus roll coins, currency for Y (Example: corruptions), Conquest/valor/etc. Players on this quest will be more likely chosen to be the raid leader. Adding higher geared players to LFR will reduce queue times, increase the success rates and give players a chance to see what a geared raider can do.


LFR Tuning

Another very simple change. Remove mechanics that can cause a player to get one shot or wipe the raid and tune the bosses abilities so LFR players have time to react to an error without killing them or someone else. Death and a wipe should not be the punishment in LFR, the lack of gear caused by your low score should be sufficient.




Conclusion

My goal is not to punish LFR player but to empower them to do better. With the above systems in place a player who queues into LFR would have some knowledge of basic boss mechanics (proving grounds), have a leader who has killed the boss on much higher difficulties (raider bait) and would push themselves to do well so they will have a high chance at loot (LFR score).

I got into raiding when I saw endgames raiders chilling in Org in BIS gear riding mounts that came from endgame achievements or bosses. It was inspiring, I am hoping that seeing such titans in your LFR group would motivate others to challenge themselves to do more difficult content and one day become that beacon of awesome for other player.

Thank you for reading though my ideas and I want to know yours and any problems you foresee with the ones I listed.


Sources :
https://www.mmo-champion.com/content...(Ghostcrawler)
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Raid_Finder
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Proving_Grounds



------------------------------------------------------
Thank you all for your input. I like some of the ideas being throw around. Here are some of the more common responses :

1. No, LFR is fine
2. LFR players dont want to improve and do more difficult content
3. Raiders in LFR would be toxic
4. iF YoU dOnT LiKe iT, ThEn DoNt dO iT
5. More "chores" isnt a good idea
6. LFR is WOW's most popular content and messing with it would cause backlashes in other areas
7. your ideas suck
8. sToP tAlKiNg aBoUt lFr, tHiS iS tOpIc #4581111

Wholeheartedly disagree. If a player wants to become a better raider they will do so. LFR is not nor was never intended to be a teaching tool. I am certain some may checkout LFR and want to improve and move onto real raiding, which is fine. But not everyone possess the skill nor the the time to hone said skills. Most people just want to see the story content while participating but either do not possess the skill nor time to do so at a level higher than LFR. It matters not if people here believe normal is just as easy, they would rather pop in a queue that doesn't have silly rio requirements or even bother looking for a group.

Fact is over 50% of players step into LFR, and less than 15% do traditional raids. There is a desire from non skilled players, as well as other tired of guilds and schedules(which LFG has helped those more skilled player) to see where the majority of development resources go who, for whatever reason, choose not to. Your problem is you are trying to get a subset of players to do something they have no interest in doing. Nothing can be done that will make or empower the core LFR player to want to get better and move on to other difficulties. Frankly, you sjould just mind your business and let whoever wants to run LFR and nothing else do so and worry about your self.

[ClassicPeon]

Wholeheartedly disagree. If a player wants to become a better raider they will do so. LFR is not nor was never intended to be a teaching tool. I am certain some may checkout LFR and want to improve and move onto real raiding, which is fine. But not everyone possess the skill nor the the time to hone said skills. Most people just want to see the story content while participating but either do not possess the skill nor time to do so at a level higher than LFR. It matters not if people here believe normal is just as easy, they would rather pop in a queue that doesn't have silly rio requirements or even bother looking for a group.

Fact is over 50% of players step into LFR, and less than 15% do traditional raids. There is a desire from non skilled players, as well as other tired of guilds and schedules(which LFG has helped those more skilled player) to see where the majority of development resources go who, for whatever reason, choose not to. Your problem is you are trying to get a subset of players to do something they have no interest in doing. Nothing can be done that will make or empower the core LFR player to want to get better and move on to other difficulties. Frankly, you sjould just mind your business and let whoever wants to run LFR and nothing else do so and worry about your self.

I think people should be incentivized to become raiders. Being a bad raider already incentivizes you to become better. But raiding should be the defacto endgame of wow. Even though you dont want to raid. You can still play them game, you just cant beat it.

At the same time heroic and normal raids should have more incentive to be done in organized guild groups instead of pugs.

[mysticx]

I think people should be incentivized to become raiders. Being a bad raider already incentivizes you to become better. But raiding should be the defacto endgame of wow. Even though you dont want to raid. You can still play them game, you just cant beat it.

At the same time heroic and normal raids should have more incentive to be done in organized guild groups instead of pugs.

The only thing that the return of “Raid or die” would push people to do is leave, and WoW can’t afford to lose that many players.

[krl]

LFR is fine as a tourist mode for players looking to complete the storylines. Any modification should be done with this objective, not to make players improve, they do not play with this mindset.

Same, enticing raiders to do LFR is a mistake. It would mix two different populations and would create huge toxicity.

A possible improvement for LFR would be Blizzard implementing a basic bossmod for it, tailored for specs. With clear instructions like <use spell Y now> and not <Ability X is coming>, which implies knowing the abilities. And also, auto floating marker and dps targets.

Blizzard should be implementing a virtual Raid Leader, in fact.

[SirBeef]

I think people should be incentivized to become raiders. Being a bad raider already incentivizes you to become better. But raiding should be the defacto endgame of wow. Even though you dont want to raid. You can still play them game, you just cant beat it.

At the same time heroic and normal raids should have more incentive to be done in organized guild groups instead of pugs.

Nah guilds should do that. Because the only group that seems to worry about low skilled players are faux elitists. If they want better skilled players to recruit from, then they should be willing to put in that encourage players to get better.

[baskev]

i agree with your list nr's: 2,3,4,5 i like the most.

But for real. What is lfr? Lfr for me means now that i do not raid anymore. A change to keep some decent gear/get to see the whole story.
And to teach raiding? that is what normal raids are for.

[Lolites]

point of LFR is to see content, if you want to get better at it you can and should start at normal

[SirBeef]

point of LFR is to see content, if you want to get better at it you can and should start at normal

Those that desire that do so. This obsession of how others play some have borders on unhealthy.

[Lolites]

This obsession of how others play some have borders on unhealthy.

not that i disagree, i just have no clue what this have to do with my comment you replied it to

[MrLachyG]

Those that desire that do so. This obsession of how others play some have borders on unhealthy.

some people are control freaks

[Blackmist]

LFR is an utter waste of time even for the most dogshit alt.

WQs give better loot. The only purpose is for people to see a glimpse of what the grown ups are doing, like those little steering wheels you could put in cars so baby can "drive" with you.

I quite like the intro you get to your spec if you use a 110 boost. That should probably be available on demand, rather than only for one spec and only when you use a boost. A little scenario to get you using your abilities right.

[Bethanie]

I don't really understand why raiders are even bothered with LFR, it is aimed at casual players that have no interest in running other raid difficulties, and increasing the difficulty of LFR would simply see the players stop doing LFR.

As it stands LFR allows casual players to see the bosses and lore without any fuss, and it rewards according poor loot that is worse than world quest loot. World quest loot scales to item level 445 which is Normal raid quality, LFR loot is item level 430 which is Mythic 0 Dungeon quality.

That said the idea of raids teaching players what to do isn't a complete bust, as several of our recent recruits have proved that 'lol-heroic' raids do not prepare players for Mythic raiding. The amount of fail that these guys managed to display was shocking. Perhaps the difficulty of heroic raids needs increasing.

The way I see it the different raid difficulties are for different types of player:

LFR - Casual players that don't have the time or desire to do anything else. Outside of wow they a most likely to be playing a fast paced dungeon crawler.
Normal Raids - Social players that enjoy a quick blast with friends. Outside of wow they will be out socialising, working, living regular lives.
Heroic Raids - Players that have the time to commit to raiding, but lack the skill to do anything difficult. Time outside of wow is limited to school, toilet and food breaks.
Mythic Raids - Skilled players that enjoy a challenge. They are organised people, easily juggling family life and work. They tend to be competitive and like to push themselves to improve.

[Elias01]

LFR is fine as a tourist mode for players looking to complete the storylines. Any modification should be done with this objective, not to make players improve, they do not play with this mindset.

Same, enticing raiders to do LFR is a mistake. It would mix two different populations and would create huge toxicity.

A possible improvement for LFR would be Blizzard implementing a basic bossmod for it, tailored for specs. With clear instructions like <use spell Y now> and not <Ability X is coming>, which implies knowing the abilities. And also, auto floating marker and dps targets.

Blizzard should be implementing a virtual Raid Leader, in fact.

Do you realize that there is difference between i want to improve as game and i have to improve otherwise i wont beat content? Frist case are players what play for challenge and are absolut minority. Second case is majority and since their goal is just to experience content they pick path of least resitance to achieve their goals. You might say thats fine. No it isnt fine becouse path of least resitance is LFR and LFR isnt fun or exciting content. Yes they get to experience content but most boring way there is and simply quit game soon after. Back in TBC even when most people never experience everything that desire to see raids was what kept them playing for long period of time. LFR do not retain players and do not makes more people enyoj game.

[Elias01]

The faceroll raid difficulty of Wrath was direct response to this. They started losing people because raids were unattainable to majority. They tried to fix that by making super-easy modes. It didn't help.

Yep they start lossig so many playesr thats why TBC had biggest player grow and retantion and WOTLK growed barely 500k players with massive amounth of people quiting game due to stuff like LFG and faceroll content.

[Newname1234567890]

People running LFR will not aspire to do greater. They're generally not interested or do not have time to run organised raiding, and making LFR a worse or different experience than it is currently will not make them run higher difficulties.

This, because this is me.

[Clozer]

The faceroll raid difficulty of Wrath was direct response to this. They started losing people because raids were unattainable to majority. They tried to fix that by making super-easy modes. It didn't help.

Can you back up any of your claims? I could say the opposite and be just as right as you are.

[Makabreska]

It's hard to learn, when your are getting flamed by your team mates for your every failure. LFR as it is would teach new players easily, but only if others in raid extended a friendly hand, instead of going mental on them.