I have always enjoyed raiding. In Vanilla I was a super slow leveler, but I did complete ZG and did part of MC with a guild. In TBC I was a bit more active, and did weekly runs of Tier 4 content, (as my guild progressed through it), and some Tier 5 and 6 bosses on ocassion. There were some breaks and alts during that time. In WotLK, I did a little of everything. Don't remember finishing complete raids, but that might be memory failing. I had fun nonetheless. In Cata, same thing. I did what I could, when I could. In Cata I had no guild though. I was in my own guild by myself. So LFR was a huge boon to me. Some people hate LFR, but it was a great thing for me. No guild, All my friends had quit, but it gave me the chance to raid. Now in MoP, I can do 3 raids in LFR! I have 1 friend who plays WoW again, and we do LFR raids every week. Sure it might be a watered-down version that is "sooooo easy" but I don't care. It's fun. I get some gear, and VP, and hang out with a friend. I'd love to step up to doing normal raids, maybe get into a guild run as a pugger, but I haven't worried too much about it. And like the OP, I'm loving seeing the amount of raiders now.
Also, keep in mind, people are probably moving into raids to avoid dailies. The amount of VP you get drastically cuts down on dailies needed for the week.
In reply to the OP, there hasn't been a "sudden" boom in people wanting to raid. Vanilla was 7-8 years ago. That's a long time to allow people to start to understand how the game works raidwise. At the beginning, everyone was getting used to how the gam actually worked. It was pretty new stuff. They were content with the actual world, never mind the raids.
As time went on, we got heroic dungeon content with tbc, a 10man raid for the less, as people knew them back then, "hardcore" who couldn't commit to or handle 25man raids, which imo wasn't really justified.
Then in Wotlk, raids got split into 25man and 10man for every raid instance, giving everyone more of a chance at competing. Heroic raids were introduced to allow the casual/regular players to get right to the end and experience the whole raid without making the hardcore players feel cheated. And now, we get LFR so people can just go straight in without knowing anything and kill everything.
It all happened over 7 years, not instantly. It's been hyped up and advertised to give people this information before they even play, or even if they didn't know when they started later on, the amount of acces and advertising for these systems actually in the game gave them prety easy access and a quick lesson on what raids were and why they were fun to do.
Edit: Also as someone has pointed out above, acheievements were introduced as a sort of guide in a way to let people know, this is what you have to do to achieve this. It's a way of opening the game up to people who may be narrowsighted or just haven't been able to explore it all. Alot of these are raid achievements and were added in WotLK, around 3 or more years ago.
Back then the game was new and a lot of people felt that raiding was for the happy few. Over the years they got to know the game better and better and felt that it was something they would want to see too I guess. I started half a year before TBC. I had no idea what raiding really was until mid TBC and even then I thought it wa snot for me. Only after a good friend of mine introduced me to a guild I became involved otherwise it might have taken much longer.
For a lot of people it seemed like it was something they could never attain and during TBC and even more so during Wrath people felt it was something they'd want to enjoy too.
I never said they should lose money. I said dumbing down raiding for profit is bad and harmful.
As a raider in a 3 nights a week guild i managed to 2 shot first 3 bosses in ToES and get elite kill on the first... Game should be harder at that level.
Also: I expect Stacking ICC/DS style nerfs soon to herd people in raids... which is lame as fuck.
That part is plain wrong. There were hordes of casuals in vanilla and BC who were perfectly alright with only dabbling in raiding (if at all) and not seeing the top content while it was still valid.
Not seeing a connection to what the OP claims.Blizzard launched a sort of a test balloon in BC by doing Karazhan as a 10man raid to see if more people would get into raiding if the whole thing was more accessible. There's a reason why Karazhan is still one of the most popular raids to this day.
Yes, Karazhan being 10 man made it accessible for smaller guilds. At the same time - until it was tuned down eventually - the raid was more challenging on the individual level than any of the classic raids. Being a 10 man raid was definitely not the reason why it eventually became an option for everyone.
There was a decent amount of footage back in classic and plenty of it in TBC. The problem was that the barriers to entry were so high. If you wanted to raid in Classic at the point where BWL was current content, you needed to either find a BWL guild that would take you in for shits and giggles or join a guild working on ZG/MC.
Same thing in BC. You needed to get geared up through earlier raids to get into the later raids. This was alleviated somewhat with Magister's Terrace and the sunwell badge gear, but up through T6 it was an issue.
Wrath kind of got rid of the high barriers to entry.
Well, with me. (I started in 2.0.5 or something, can't remember..) I wanted to get into raids, to get more gear, and see how my character would scale as a whole. But, who would take Restribution, when a rogue in ilvl 70 greens could beat out your 140ish ilvl ret geared paladin, lol.
Still stuck it out. I wanted to raid as ret so badly. Then 3.0 happened. For me this game is all about the any lore pertaining to the Dwarf race. Or Paladin, Shaman and druid lore. And gear. I like feeling powerful in game. Gear puts you above the unnamed NPC. And is fun in my view.
They say they have stats to show what they're doing is right for the people playing, you say they're twisting the stats, which is pretty impressive considering you have no idea what they are....but you're sure they're not right yes?
I hate to point it out but your post isn't "to hard", it's mainly bollocks, made up by someone who doesn't have the information and decides that whatever falls out their head first is the truth.
Oh, really? You oughta know.
So what?Yes, Karazhan being 10 man made it accessible for smaller guilds. At the same time - until it was tuned down eventually - the raid was more challenging on the individual level than any of the classic raids.
Of course it was. Why on earth would you ever deny that.Being a 10 man raid was definitely not the reason why it eventually became an option for everyone.
Last edited by Pull My Finger; 2012-12-04 at 04:00 PM.
imho - The more you give, the more people want. So the more access Blizz gave to raiding, the more people wanted to raid. Over time, this turned into an interpretation of entitlement.
WoW is just slow on the uptake. EQ2 scaled raids to easy/normal/hard ratios while WotLK was still active.
It was a request by the community...3 years ago.
The reasons varied, but what folks wanted to do was see and experience raids often locked out before (especially with very gated attunements that the top raid guilds monopolied).
The interest isn't "all of the sudden" its been there for years in many MMOs. Now that players got a taste of it, they want a piece of the pie.
Evolution.
From the #1 Cata review on Amazon.com: "Blizzard's greatest misstep was blaming players instead of admitting their mistakes.
They've convinced half of the population that the other half are unskilled whiners, causing a permanent rift in the community."
It was LFR. Alot of people without access to raiding guilds had access to the raid finder and could see a sampling of the end game and some decided that this was something they enjoyed and they took the next step in joining a raid gear. When I joined my current guild they had never raided and were no where close to being ready to raid so I helped them properly spec build, reforg and gear up and I pushed them into LFR to see if it was something they would find that they actually liked to do. They enjoyed it a lot and when one of them mentioned that they were now a raiding group I corrected them that LFR is not raiding any more than buying my first ten speed doesn't make me lance armstrong. That gave them the drive to take the next step into raiding.
If it wasn't for lfr a lot of people would not know that they liked raiding.
Ohhh joy, the first post claiming Blizzard is greedy.
This boom for everyone wanting to raid is because people simply want to see the content.
..Which is what LFR is for.
Yet people seem to forget that.
Oh, wait this post is from Cybran. Nevermind I know why he's calling Blizzard "greedy" then.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"