LFR -> Flex -> Normal -> Heroic: Why?

[PowerOfTwo]

Blizzard needs to motivate people to PUG. I believe Flex is a step to a right direction. Blizzard should to it long ago instead this joke LFR. Honestly I dislike idea of everyone who wants may see the content. If you want to "watch" it - check youtube, why you should have access to all bosses if you want nothing to do. But this is Blizzard policy and I dont want to argue.
Thing I started with - Blizzard needs to motivate people to PUG. Too many low skilled guys with epics today, and more skilled people just dont want to wipe. Proving grounds, Flex, Connected Realms is all the steps in right direction, and I like it.
Today it is quite hard to step from LFR to Normal. In LFR you can just do nothing, but in normal not only you should do decent dps or hps, you should watch mechanics and you may wipe the raid if you fail. People just afraid of LFR guys who like to stay in fires.
Very often you may see like "Going ToT 6 HM (2-3 hm with wipes really), need a healer with 9\13 achievement" and "Looking for ToT 9 HMs, I have 5 HM achievements (3 of them I got boosted with)". This resulting in hundreds if people looking for a raid getting nothing, or the raid looking for last spot for hours and dont even start.
There shouldnt be so. In ideal world when you log in to the game you should see dozen of raids for every difficulty for every progress. Waiting time to gain spot in a raid should be minimal.

This in a nutshell. Stick a fork in me for saying this but i think LFD is where it went downhill... now granted i was lucky enough to be on kazzak wich at one point had like 7/10 top world guilds on it , so we could actualy pug things like MH and BT back in the day but: when lfd first came out, i was tihnking finaly we can be rid of gearscore and "if you can't poly you can't join". But comunity is what kept subs playing.

This is the price we pay for conveniance. When you can not play for months then activate a month of gameplay and experieance everything a tier has to offer with random ppl you will never meet again whats the point of sticking around? i can notice this on my chars. My original main, a lock has a full friends list my "contacts" as it were. My shammy wich i pugged back in BC and wotlk, again has a pretty big friends list, all my other chars tho? compleetly empty because you know, why bother? You got you're guild if even that and besides that you literarly have no need to interact with the other tens of thousands of ppl on your server because everything is automatic. I know everybody whines that "omg only 2% of ppl ever raided and bla bla bla" but i just can't for the life of me see how then the sub count was highest when the least amount of ppl raided..... certainly auxiliary activities like rbgs and arenas wern't as evolved back then. The whole game is now basicaly wam bam thank you mam, cya next patch honey.

If flex can help instill some of the old "unofficial guild" thing that was going around , a group of ppl you could pug with every reset , more power to it.

[Raelbo]

It is difficult to balance the need for LFR catering to the casuals and letting them see content so they allow the game to remain healthy and profitable with the need to increase the number of players who are, for lack of better term - good, so that raiding guilds have a player base to recruit from and so that pugs are healthy and encouraged.

You are assuming that faced with a choice between working harder at the game in order to get any fun out of it, or quitting, that most players would choose the former. In my experience most people I know have chosen the latter.

To use ToT as an example, what if LFR was only the first three wings? People still get to see most of the content, but it comes with the caveat "if you want to see how the story ends, that's what normal modes (and now flex modes) are for and you should consider those modes."

Personally I would take that as getting the middle finger.

Blizzard: "L2P or you don't get to see more content".
Average Player: "Cheers Blizzard, good luck with your game".

There needs to be some incentive for people to want to increase their skill instead of floating along.

There is only one incentive that makes any sense: Fun. It's that simple.

WoW is a game. People play it to have fun. Most people who play video games derive enjoyment from the challenge of beating the game. However, and let's be totally honest here, beating this particular game at it's most challenging is actually a lot of hard work.

While some people may feel that the work aspect makes it more rewarding when you complete the game (and I would tend to agree with that philosophy personally) a lot of people simply won't ever be prepared to put in that work.

This is ok. Remember, everyone is not the same (a concept that I think a lot of people on this forum struggle with).

So if you accept that different people will have different thresholds of work/effort that they will be prepared to put in before they decide it's simply not worth it, and no longer fun (and quit), it stands to reason that "forcing" people to work harder simply won't work.

By all means, keep some rewards for those who achieve the pinnacle of success in the game (exclusive mounts, titles, heroic gear and the occasional "bonus" boss), but don't withhold fun. It won't work. It will simply drive those people away from the game.

[PowerOfTwo]

There is only one incentive that makes any sense: Fun. It's that simple.

WoW is a game. People play it to have fun. Most people who play video games derive enjoyment from the challenge of beating the game. However, and let's be totally honest here, beating this particular game at it's most challenging is actually a lot of hard work.

While some people may feel that the work aspect makes it more rewarding when you complete the game (and I would tend to agree with that philosophy personally) a lot of people simply won't ever be prepared to put in that work.

This is ok. Remember, everyone is not the same (a concept that I think a lot of people on this forum struggle with).

So if you accept that different people will have different thresholds of work/effort that they will be prepared to put in before they decide it's simply not worth it, and no longer fun (and quit), it stands to reason that "forcing" people to work harder simply won't work.

By all means, keep some rewards for those who achieve the pinnacle of success in the game (exclusive mounts, titles, heroic gear and the occasional "bonus" boss), but don't withhold fun. It won't work. It will simply drive those people away from the game.

Except that about the only effort needed to beat normals is google your spec on icy veins, do MAYBE an hours worth of reading if you go in depth and set up some keybindings. Am i the only one that gets francly terified that ppl cba to do even this? WoW is an old game with simple mechanics, yes it takes alot of practice and muscle memory to squeeze those last couple of %s out of your class. But as far as playing at a lvl that trivializes normal? Its an 6-8 bullet point priority list for most classes, you can't bind 8 buttons and run out of fire? than wth are you doing playing in the first place, do ppl who cba to do this very basic amount of work expect to hit "join que" and 5 minutes later a random epic shows up in the postbox as a reward for finding the lfr button?

[Aboubacar]

You are assuming that faced with a choice between working harder at the game in order to get any fun out of it, or quitting, that most players would choose the former. In my experience most people I know have chosen the latter.



Personally I would take that as getting the middle finger.

Blizzard: "L2P or you don't get to see more content".
Average Player: "Cheers Blizzard, good luck with your game".



There is only one incentive that makes any sense: Fun. It's that simple.

WoW is a game. People play it to have fun. Most people who play video games derive enjoyment from the challenge of beating the game. However, and let's be totally honest here, beating this particular game at it's most challenging is actually a lot of hard work.

While some people may feel that the work aspect makes it more rewarding when you complete the game (and I would tend to agree with that philosophy personally) a lot of people simply won't ever be prepared to put in that work.

This is ok. Remember, everyone is not the same (a concept that I think a lot of people on this forum struggle with).

So if you accept that different people will have different thresholds of work/effort that they will be prepared to put in before they decide it's simply not worth it, and no longer fun (and quit), it stands to reason that "forcing" people to work harder simply won't work.

By all means, keep some rewards for those who achieve the pinnacle of success in the game (exclusive mounts, titles, heroic gear and the occasional "bonus" boss), but don't withhold fun. It won't work. It will simply drive those people away from the game.

I forgot how fun it was to continue to do level one super mario bros over and over again. LFR simply doesn't offer any challenge to any player and without any difficulty or progression there's no fun, or feeling of accomplishment. Flex should fix time commitment issues.

scrap it after next xpac accept lfd + raiding doesn't mix, just like drinking and driving.

[drbutcher]

Oh that casual vs hardcore discussion again. I took a break from WoW for 2 years but some things never change.

Untill i stop playing i was in a what you call "hardcore" guild. A guild which always were in top 100 guilds in the world (from 50-100 actually). Some things i want to say:

- NOONE In my guild or any of the top guilds have any problem with other players getting loot. I wouldn't have any problem with LFR giving heroic loot. A good player will be good no matter the gear.

- WoW is a G A M E.. You play it to have fun. I had fun doing heroic modes back then. I don't anymore. I only wanted the gear that will allow me to kill those bosses. You should not care what others have.

- I can't understand why you can have the best pvp gear available in the game without being good in PVP and not in PVE. Did you see any real difference when they allowed players to have the best pvp gear available? No. Nothing changed. Those who were good in PVP were still on top. The same is for PVE. Give everyone heroic gear.
How many do you believe will be able to kill bosses in heroic mode? And those who will do they will do it much later than the top guilds. I really can't see the problem.

- People who cries about "casuals" getting gear, are actually more casual than them. They are people in guilds ranking around 1000-2000 in wowprogress, who raid 5-6 times per day and still have problems clearing content. Do you know that there are guilds who clears everything in heroic with only 2 raids per week?

- Casual doesn't mean you are a bad player. Like hardcore doesn't mean you are a good one. I have met many casual players who could have easilly been in top guilds. They just don't have time for it. I have also met many hardcore players who are... just bad.

- Ilevel increase from patch to patch is stupid imo. In BC for example we started with (if i remember correctly) something like 600-700 dps? In sunwell only locks and rogues were hmm it was either 2400dps or 2600 dps. So we have a X4 dps increase. Now we start with what? 30k dps? and we are at ? 200-250 single target. And we still have one more patch. It is stupid imo.

- Ilevel is stupid imo. I remember when people started using "gearscore" most of us were laughing at them. Now the ilevel increase is so high that you just use the item with the highest ilevel (only exception are trinkets). You are a destro lock and you get a heroic item with crit which isn't your best stat. You have a normal item in that slot. You will still use it because of the ilevel.

[Raelbo]

Except that about the only effort needed to beat normals is google your spec on icy veins, do MAYBE an hours worth of reading if you go in depth and set up some keybindings.

...and be properly geared, and have played your toon enough in recent times to be familiar with how the spec plays so that the simple things most raiders take for granted (like not standing in the fire without losing 90% of your dps) can in fact be taken for granted.

Getting "raid ready" requires a certain minimum time investment. Reaching the minimum skill level requires a certain minimum time investment spent raiding.

I believe a lot of experienced raiders are out of touch with what it takes for someone without that time investment/experience to get to a semblance of what we would regard as decent.


All I have to do to empathise with the "average" player is try to remember my own history. I remember stepping into my first real raid after having played the game for over a year and thinking I was pretty decent. 20 seconds in I was dead in the fire - so focussed on trying my best to dps that I literally didn't see the fire.

Fast forward 6 months, during which time I learned all about my class, practised my rotation, learned how to be aware of what was going on around me while maintaining output, and I was a completely different raider. Now many years later, I too, find many of the mechanics trivial (although there are some that will still take me several attempts to get right). Importantly though, I can still remember how there was a time when I would have found them hard.

[Aboubacar]

That's what people like drbutcher don't understand... this isn't casual vs hardcore. This is intended to discuss the point of LFR and it's place with the implementation of flex. Flex is for "casuals" and the only difference is you can't ignore mechanics and you have to interact with other players heaven forbid...

It's not about the game being too easy or free epics etc. It's about flex taking LFR's spot over time, which it very well can.

[Raelbo]

I forgot how fun it was to continue to do level one super mario bros over and over again. LFR simply doesn't offer any challenge to any player and without any difficulty or progression there's no fun, or feeling of accomplishment.

I quote the post you were referring to: "Remember, everyone is not the same".

Flex should fix time commitment issues.

Not really. Will it make pugging more feasible? Yes I believe so.
Will it make pugging as easy as queueing for LFR? Not a chance.

Flex raids will still require a person to organise them. You'll still need to find the right mix of tanks and healers, and this could take time. You won't be able to just join a flex raid at any time of the day or night. There will still be noobs who don't have a clue and raids that disband after 2 wipes etc etc.


Flex will, I expect, fill a big void that many players have been feeling. But I don't think it's a catch-all replacement for LFR. At best it will be a better fit for a decent sized portion of the community currently relying on LFR.

[Deleted]

people still confuse options/oporunities with chores?

[Vermicious]

Why? Because.

[PowerOfTwo]

...and be properly geared, and have played your toon enough in recent times to be familiar with how the spec plays so that the simple things most raiders take for granted (like not standing in the fire without losing 90% of your dps) can in fact be taken for granted.

Getting "raid ready" requires a certain minimum time investment. Reaching the minimum skill level requires a certain minimum time investment spent raiding.

I believe a lot of experienced raiders are out of touch with what it takes for someone without that time investment/experience to get to a semblance of what we would regard as decent.


All I have to do to empathise with the "average" player is try to remember my own history. I remember stepping into my first real raid after having played the game for over a year and thinking I was pretty decent. 20 seconds in I was dead in the fire - so focussed on trying my best to dps that I literally didn't see the fire.

Fast forward 6 months, during which time I learned all about my class, practised my rotation, learned how to be aware of what was going on around me while maintaining output, and I was a completely different raider. Now many years later, I too, find many of the mechanics trivial (although there are some that will still take me several attempts to get right). Importantly though, I can still remember how there was a time when I would have found them hard.

Maybe you're right and old timer do take stuff for granted. Indeed i can look at most mechanics nowdays and my brains jumps to "ive seen this before". But that wasn't my point. Yes maybe you and me can roll a new class, look up a guide play it decently within a day, while others i would take weeks or months. But my point was that ppl who won't even put in the time to learn some basic level stuff through google shouldn't complain stuff is "overtuned"....

I mean look at the wotlk holy pally. you we're basicaly playing wack-a-mole. Get grid, get a mouseover macro, and spam the lowest hp target. I think you can aggree anyone could do that. I enjoyed the more "advanced" (and i use the term ligthly) stuff, BoF on rotface, BoS + bubble to provide external cooldowns, BoP to clear aggro / dots. Indeed maybe we can't expect everyone to know the auxiliary stuff of their class. But a dmb warning and a bullet point priority list is about all you need to perform in normals , can u aggre?

[Raelbo]

Indeed maybe we can't expect everyone to know the auxiliary stuff of their class. But a dmb warning and a bullet point priority list is about all you need to perform in normals , can u aggre?

For me personally, I agree. However it has been my overwhelming experience that the standards which I apply to myself cannot be uniformly applied to the WoW populace at large. Just because you or I find something to be simple does not make it objectively so.

And to be fair, I spend a significant amount of time playing this game. Admittedly a lot of that time is on activities that have very little bearing on my raiding ability, but even so, I probably spend a good few hours each week outside of raiding doing stuff to make my ability to raid better. On top of that I have many hundreds of hours of actual raid experience behind me already. Because of this I am always pretty much up to date, and the incremental effort it takes to keep up the pace is quite manageable.

But for someone who has fallen behind the pace, it is a lot more effort to catch up. I see this with my friends and brothers who play a lot less than me. It's not that they are bad players, but the lack of time they have invested in the game over the last year has taken a heavy toll on their ability to raid, both in terms of their lacking gear and their ability to play their classes well. Not only am I sitting about 25 ilevels above the nearest dps in my guild, but I am also performing a lot closer to the theoretical dps I should be getting with my gear than the others.

I have no doubt that if they put in, say 3 hours a day for the next month, they would all be quite capable of clearing ToT. But that kind of time/effort committment is unrealistic. I will be lucky if they put in 3 hours a week, and the results of that won't be enough to do more than Flex.

[Raelbo]

Please elaborate what being bad is, then. No, really. I'm curious.

Bad = not as good as a significant majority. It's a subjective term relative to other people in a similar situation. What other definition were you expecting? I suppose that is a silly question to ask because it seems that a large number of MMO-C readers have come to the bizarre conclusion that anything below the 99th percentile is bad...

On another note, why do you have such low expectations of other human beings?

How about you define "low expectations".

Honestly, I expect my friends to have fun playing WoW. It would be nice if that translated into them being able to play as much as me and participate at my level. And again, just because there are a few delusional people out there who believe that spending 3 hours a day playing a game (which if you include weekends and holidays equates to a time investment equal to half a career) is trivial, does not make it objectively so.

- - - Updated - - -

Please elaborate what being bad is, then. No, really. I'm curious.

And just to add to my above definition. There is a difference playing badly, and being a bad player. For example, Novak Djokovic can play a bad game of tennis. But he is still a brilliant tennis player.

In relation to WoW - a decent player who is out of practice, who hasn't taken the time to optimise (or even obtain) their gear, rotation etc, can perform pretty badly. However with a bit of effort they can rectify those issues. A bad player is generally beyond help and will never perform well, or will require significantly more effort to do so.

[Deleted]

Do I really need to explain again with mathemagic why this is not a good definition at all? In the majority of cases, the majority of people at any given activity is "bad". Of course, there are some exceptions, like counting 1+1=2, where I can safely say that the majority is good and not just average. When it comes to string theories, I can safely say the majority of people are bad, regardless of how knowledgeable they are about physics. If a class takes a test at school and the average for the class ends up being 3/20, having a 5/20 doesn't suddenly make you good. You still obtained a shit grade regardless of your positioning compared to your classmates.

In such a case, the students haven't failed though.

Their teachers have. I do think that has applications for good old wow, tbh. Wow is terrible at teaching people how to play.

That said, wow isn't a test meant to find out who is the best, it's a game, meant to entertain.

[Glorious Leader]

What I said was true. The gear is not a requirement like meeting the basic system requirements to play the game. Hell LFR has more of a need, it has a literal and hard requirement of ILVL to get in there. In general though it is not a NEED in any real sense. It is certainly very helpful but as method and paragon proved you can do it without the gear. You DESIRE the gear and that's fine but you should really acknowledge that it's simple a desire to grow stronger and be more powerful, a desire that is shared by pretty much everybody playing this game (it is an rpg afterall) and regardless of what activity you do in the game it ought to reward you in that respect. And I don't mean up to a point, I mean PERIOD. If the developers are serious about alternatives then we ought to be able to skip raiding entirely and progress just as well and as far with the other methods in game, EXACTLY what people were doing in cataclysm. Then their'd be no need for 4 difficulties and raiding could be as niche as fuck and nobody would care. It would actually have to be niche though. Award little player progress that couldn't be gained outside a raid (after all we want it to remain niche and not food to drooled over by the masses), only contain a few bosses with EXTREME challenge and reused assets (after all if it's niche it'll have very little mass appeal and such can't consume all their resources), could not be used as a tool to tell the story (after all once again it's niche and well story is also mass appeal) and ultimately have as little popularity as possible. I really honestly think most of you would hate that but it's what niche raiding would mean.

Once you recognize the simple principle that OTHER PEOPLE play this game to then you realize that making raiding a niche thing would be well terrible for raiding. It would mean OTHER PEOPLE who don't necessarily fit that niche would still need to be entertained and since their are apparently LOTS of people who don't aspire to raid the developers would have to shift their focus. Raiding and the raids would have to reflect their true weight in terms of players playing and well it would be tiny. In fact you people should be so happy for lfr. It's in your best interest as raiders to have lfr around. It kept raiding in the game and more than that it gave you the "high quality" raids you seem to claim we've seen in mists. Frankly I think ToT is trash but ToT is ToT because of LFR. The man who eats meat is brother to the butcher.

[Deja Thoris]

Raiding and the raids would have to reflect their true weight in terms of players playing and well it would be tiny.

Just no.

Raids are part of the allure of the game, even to people that don't take part. It's like a nice car that goes 250kph, most people don't drive that fast but the product would feel diminished if that feature was taken away.

The rest of your post was the usual fodder though. Entertaining yet disturbingly clueless.

[Glorious Leader]

Just no.

Raids are part of the allure of the game, even to people that don't take part. It's like a nice car that goes 250kph, most people don't drive that fast but the product would feel diminished if that feature was taken away.

The rest of your post was the usual fodder though. Entertaining yet disturbingly clueless.

No they weren't that's a myth and even if it were true well "allure" doesn't entertain people. At max lvl they had little or NOTHING to do because well they don't aspire or care to commit to raiding. Niche raiding would be exactly that. NICHE and because it's niche well it would have to take a back seat in the greater scheme of things. Their true weight in terms of entertaining folks (and ultimately keeping players playing) was SLIM before lfr and is only marginally better now because everybody is shoved into it.

At least you took the time to read it even if it ultimately fell on deaf ears.

[Deleted]

Oh yes, for certain. it just leads to the weird gaming situation where if you need gear to down content, you can't have it and if you dont need gear, you get it. Put like that it does seem a little perverse. I can't see wow going to a handicap system now because of all the QQ but I bet if blizzard had their time over that's what they would go for.


Yes, but if it's the first raid after reset and you don't go and clear flexi straight away those who you leave out are going to think you are an asshole, and there is nothing stopping them from going with another guild to do flexi instead of sitting in org. So, the midline raiders who are generally benched (i.e. those you need to make a 10 man viable) will just leave. Why wouldn't they? They can help someone elses progression by sitting in two moons and maybe get a normal mode raid sometime in the next few weeks or they can go raiding themselves in a flexi. They don't even get saved to flexi, so the GM/RL can't even tell them to save the lockout.

Not even a contest, is it?


Why take one for the team when the team won't take one for you?

10 man normals either go flexi every reset or bleed players like a stuck pig until they collapse.

I have to admit, that I have no experience when it comes to Normal mode guilds and what they would do etc. I would like to think, that doing Normal with a rotation is more desirable for the challenge and the better rewards but I really don't know.

What I can say though, is that if Normal mode raiders are so eager to jump ship at the first chance they get, they were never in the guild for the social aspect in the first place. And if you just want to raid, you can either get better and ensure a core spot, you can try your luck in another Normal mode guild or you can run Flex raid.

But lets just say that a Normal mode guild has 13 people in their roster. Out of those 13 people some of them are mandatory to make the team viable i.e tanks and healers. Then you just fill with dps and every dps is viable, if paired the right way. Ofc you don't want to bring 3 melee for every fight and that's why you rotate. I mean, it kinda feels like you're taking the worst case scenario for a Normal mode raider in your example.

And I still do believe that the guild is "taking one for the team" as a whole, by rotating people rather than just going with the best players or calling off the whole raid. If some people then still prefer jumping ship to do Flex, so be it. Cause if I was the leader of a Normal mode guild and I lost raiders cause they didn't wanna rotate and said raiders then joined a Flex mode guild, I'd just laugh. I'd think that if they're that casual and selfish, I'd rather be without them anyway.

[Deleted]

I have to admit, that I have no experience when it comes to Normal mode guilds and what they would do etc. I would like to think, that doing Normal with a rotation is more desirable for the challenge and the better rewards but I really don't know.

What I can say though, is that if Normal mode raiders are so eager to jump ship at the first chance they get, they were never in the guild for the social aspect in the first place. And if you just want to raid, you can either get better and ensure a core spot, you can try your luck in another Normal mode guild or you can run Flex raid.

But lets just say that a Normal mode guild has 13 people in their roster. Out of those 13 people some of them are mandatory to make the team viable i.e tanks and healers. Then you just fill with dps and every dps is viable, if paired the right way. Ofc you don't want to bring 3 melee for every fight and that's why you rotate. I mean, it kinda feels like you're taking the worst case scenario for a Normal mode raider in your example.

And I still do believe that the guild is "taking one for the team" as a whole, by rotating people rather than just going with the best players or calling off the whole raid. If some people then still prefer jumping ship to do Flex, so be it. Cause if I was the leader of a Normal mode guild and I lost raiders cause they didn't wanna rotate and said raiders then joined a Flex mode guild, I'd just laugh. I'd think that if they're that casual and selfish, I'd rather be without them anyway.

Imagine the choice is between a normal mode guild (that raids flexi every rest first) and a normal mode guild which just wants to raid normals.

Which one would you join and/or stay with, as one of the raiders who doesn't always get a spot in normals?

I'm not saying people will be so cynical as to jump ship on the evening of 5.4. What I see happening is this. Normie guild 1 won't do flexi, they are focused on progression. Normie guild 2 does flexi first, then does normals. After reset, the benched players from normie guild 1 get asked to join the flexi groups raid (cos why not?) either through a friend or via trade chat. After a few weeks of this, the benched raiders are raiding more with the friends/pug than they are with their own guild. It's only natural at that point for them to move on.

What is also likely to happen is that the guild who wanted to stick to just normals will see their raiders eyeing the exits and change strategy themselves to keep the bench. This will then also make them a flexi first, normals second type of guild. Either way, 10 man normals be fucked if this is the situation, especially the more casual end because they simply won't have time to clear both flex and normals even if they wanted to. Normals (it looks to me) are going to be an afterthought - both for the new flexi class and for the HC crowd. It'll be a lot like the current 25 man situation - very few normal mode 25 mans exist.

[Mormolyce]

It's because of this that it's so alt friendly. The only people that wouldn't think so are those that are obsessed with completing everything with every toon they make. For example I have a friend that got Loremaster on 3 different toons. To the players that usually roll an alt now, the increased options for gear and gameplay experiences is a very good thing.

Haha, well I'm not that bad but if you like to collect achis, try out everything in game, max every profession, play every class then you're going to have very little time to eat, shit and sleep (I can attest to that). Hell, I had to stop doing PVP and still haven't tried CMs, and I still feel exhausted by how much WoW I've played.

Actually no it wasn't always the case with raiding. People were skipping raids in favor of other content because the alternative to raiding (buying gear through valor) was awesome. MoP is not as casual friendly as cata or wotlk when you could skip raids (the least casual friendly content they have). Theirs isn't "so much shit to do" what's available simple takes more time then it did before.

-_-

You have a really really one-track mind. Queueing for dungeon after dungeon to max your VP is about the most basic content WoW offers. You really need to stop being so absolutely obsessed with VP.