Ghostcrawler: "LFD with harder dungeons and NO LFR"

[Deleted]

You're funny.

Almost as funny as the subs chart and your mom after finishing me. So?

Infracted

[Seefer]

Almost as funny as the subs chart and your mom after finishing me. So?

Resorting to petty insults? There's a shocker.

[Osmeric]

What exactly was too difficult?

Normal mode in the previous tier (particularly BRF) was still too hard for F&F guilds. Heroic and especially Mythic are too difficulty for most players.

LFR lacks in incentive and reward, as does most of the rest of PvE content.

Note that by "reward" I don't just mean "ilvl of loot". Simply mailing people purples doesn't feel rewarding, as the experience with Garrison demonstrates clearly. My position is that people play a game like WoW to feel better about themselves. The LFR ghetto doesn't really provide that, but that's because it's smothered at the bottom of a stack of difficulty levels. The game is sending LFR players the clear message that they are terrible. Even if that's true, it sucks the perception of reward out of it.

[grandgato]

What exactly was too difficult?

Normal raiding feels overtuned for the rewards it gives. I guess Blizzard felt SoO was just way too easy and accessible?

[Foj]

You're mistaken there, Wrath's heroic dungeons were incredibly rewarding, so rewarding in fact that they were worth doing even if you were already doing normal raiding. Even if you were just grinding badges for raid-quality epic items it was always worth it for the chance at an epic as every last boss dropped one, and you didn't even need epics to begin raiding Naxx so it was a huge boost to get one. Heck, my brother got a full set of ICC 10N quality gear without ever setting foot in a raid, it just took time but you could get the same gear as normal raiders by just gathering badges from heroic dungeons. I hated Wrath's dungeons, but I still them every day becayse if you didn't you'd fall behind, that's the reality of it, there hasn't been an expansion where heroic dungeons were forced on you as much as they were in Wrath. There's a reason they nerfed the rewards from heroics in Cataclysm and upped the necessary points to get epic gear, it got way out of hand.

Here's the typical complete lack of understanding about the meaning of words like "forced."

You as a player who has chosen an extreme, fringe playstyle, are "forced" to do the same dungeons over and over and over again.

Everyone else, on the other hand, has something to do.

Normal raiding feels overtuned for the rewards it gives. I guess Blizzard felt SoO was just way too easy and accessible?

I am at a complete loss to explain the tuning of normal in WoD, unless Blizzard really did want to (1) force everyone into organized raiding thereby (2) killing off the game because most players are totally uninterested in and/or unsuitable for organized raiding.

Socialize............yeah sure, I'd like to be in your 5 mans, in mine nobody talks unless it's to yell at someone.

Socializing died in Cataclysm, when random 5-mans became 3-hour bitchfests.

5-mans were great in Wrath. Not just at level 80. Leveling 5-mans were great too.

Hehe nope in RPG game. Nodady will pay 15 dollars per month to play just for sake of playing and get nothing out of it then fast food fun. They will rather leave and play games like LoL or Dota. If your MMORPG game is fast pasted, with fast food content people will simply leave becouse thats exactly what we dont want from mmo game. MMO games are supostu take you very very long time to progress trought it. Not just log in do 1-2 dungeons and log out. Thats most boring and unrewarding experience what you can give to rpg players.

You don't understand why Wrath was so popular, either.

GC in this quote is just wrong about difficulty. He's not wrong that he and many other hardcore players enjoy the game when it's more difficult. But he's wrong that WoW's popularity resulted from difficulty, and that a lack of difficulty hurt the game. It's a completely indefensible position, and so completely ridiculous that I feel like he must have just been having a bad Twitter day.

[HuxNeva]

I'd say making older content redundant for its intended purpose immediately after the release of new content affects a lot of people and is probably what gets WoW in its "no content" phases in the first place.

The current system even strives to make new content 'been there done that' after the week it releases.

[Jaylock]

Normal mode in the previous tier (particularly BRF) was still too hard for F&F guilds. Heroic and especially Mythic are too difficulty for most players.

LFR lacks in incentive and reward, as does most of the rest of PvE content.

Note that by "reward" I don't just mean "ilvl of loot". Simply mailing people purples doesn't feel rewarding, as the experience with Garrison demonstrates clearly. My position is that people play a game like WoW to feel better about themselves. The LFR ghetto doesn't really provide that, but that's because it's smothered at the bottom of a stack of difficulty levels. The game is sending LFR players the clear message that they are terrible. Even if that's true, it sucks the perception of reward out of it.

I'm going to stop you right here.

Normal mode was tuned specifically to be doable by lesser skills / friends family guilds. It is not tuned too difficult for them. Normal can be done with arms tied behind the back and with a blindfold.

I think its amazing that these "friends and family" guilds you talk about, and maybe the circles you raid with (not sure, but assuming since you are usually a crusader leading the charge to make the game easier) are always asking for the game to get easier, and for the rewards to get better for easier, lackluster gameplay.

No.

No you should not be getting high end raiding gear without some sort of effort involved. There needs to be wipes. Maybe not to the tune of what it is in Mythic, but Normal should pose a threat. It should present challenge to these Friends and Family guilds. If Normal is supposed to be the top end game for these guilds, why should blizzard make all the bosses push overs? Shouldnt they make it challenging enough to be a challenge for them? Yeah, it would be a breeze for heroic / mythic guilds, but it should be a challenge for the group it is targeted for.

Stop lobbying to make the game easier and to make the rewards better. It irritates me and many many many other people.

[Osmeric]

I'm going to stop you right here.

Normal mode was tuned specifically to be doable by lesser skills / friends family guilds. It is not tuned too difficult for them. Normal can be done with arms tied behind the back and with a blindfold.

Well, you are entitled to your opinion, but I firmly believe you are incorrect.

I think its amazing that these "friends and family" guilds you talk about, and maybe the circles you raid with (not sure, but assuming since you are usually a crusader leading the charge to make the game easier) are always asking for the game to get easier, and for the rewards to get better for easier, lackluster gameplay.

That's because Blizzard has almost uniformly erred on the side of making the game too difficult. Their bias explains why I say what I do.

No you should not be getting high end raiding gear without some sort of effort involved. There needs to be wipes. Maybe not to the tune of what it is in Mythic, but Normal should pose a threat.

Beyond a certain difficulty level, the F&F guilds fall apart and quit, and plenty of them did that in this expansion. Much of the quitting was from guilds that could not clear normal mode in T17. F&F guilds are not in it for challenge. Treating them as "hardcore junior" is an error.

[Glorious Leader]

Stop lobbying to make the game easier and to make the rewards better. It irritates me and many many many other people.

I would wager that the "many many many other people" amounts to maybe a handful. Certainly far less than 5 million lost. I never once heard a single solitary sole bitch about wrath tuning and rewards. Then I came on the forums and welfare epics and wrath babies became a thing.

- - - Updated - - -

They lost 5 million people focusing on casual players raid content. If you don't see that, there really is no hope for you at all.

But there is no evidence anyone can have for anything in these arguments. Every single post in this thread is pure speculation on what people think would happen based upon past events. Just because something happened a specific way in the past or in another game or in anything doesn't matter to this argument as it is completely different in all regards. So saying "give proof" is probably the dumbest thing to add to a thread like this because there isn't on either side. You can attempt to persuade people, but that's about it.

They lost 5 million subs by focusing on raid content period.

And if you can't offer anything substantial to back up your opinion then it's not beyond questioning wether or not the game would die without raiding. It's just self serving bs. If asking for proof is the dumbest thing one can add I wonder on what level of stupid the statement " theirs no question the game would die without raiding" is?

- - - Updated - - -

You're mistaken there, Wrath's heroic dungeons were incredibly rewarding, so rewarding in fact that they were worth doing even if you were already doing normal raiding. Even if you were just grinding badges for raid-quality epic items it was always worth it for the chance at an epic as every last boss dropped one, and you didn't even need epics to begin raiding Naxx so it was a huge boost to get one. Heck, my brother got a full set of ICC 10N quality gear without ever setting foot in a raid, it just took time but you could get the same gear as normal raiders by just gathering badges from heroic dungeons. I hated Wrath's dungeons, but I still them every day becayse if you didn't you'd fall behind, that's the reality of it, there hasn't been an expansion where heroic dungeons were forced on you as much as they were in Wrath. There's a reason they nerfed the rewards from heroics in Cataclysm and upped the necessary points to get epic gear, it got way out of hand.

)

And I would still dearly love to know what the issue with this was. You could have said no and not do the dungeon.

- - - Updated - - -

5 mans were only done because they gave valor. There was nothing else meaningful about them. You had all the gear drops you needed in a few weeks tops. Since there is no currency like valor anymore, that reason to run them is gone. That leaves only for gear which, as covered, would be done in a few weeks.

So the problem with valor was? Now the genius fucking developers sit around scratching their heads trying tk figure out how to incentivize dungeons but they already had the right system in place
..

[Paulosio]

Blizz gave us harder dungeons in cata and the community didn't like it. I think both LFR and LFD should be scraped, but it won't happen

There would be the exact the same outcry as with flying not being available for so long in WOD if they removed those. How is making it inconvenient to get to a dungeon and making it take 30 minutes to an hour (and almost impossible at night and morning) to find a group for a simple dungeon going to make the game better for a single person ?

People couldn't be bothered to take an extra 2minutes to get to places via flight paths and ground mounts but you think they are going to enjoy it taking an hour to form a group (sometimes longer) and then another 10-15 minutes for everyone to get to the dungeon every time ?And have you forgotten what happened any time someone left a dungeon group before LFD? Someone would have to go all the way back to a city and start spamming trade and if it was a tank or healer you were missing the group often just fell apart because it took too long to find a replacement. Then you finally get back to the dungeon with your full group and you find that someone has gone afk in the ridiculously long wait to get going again... Oh back to the city again to find a replacement for them too and so it goes on for the next 2 hours.

What was acceptable 10 years ago isn't going to be acceptable now and it would just drive more people away from the game. I didn't mind at the time and i'm sure others were the same but I guarantee there would be an outcry if it was like that today. If it was such a great system how come more people haven't migrated to wild star, an MMO developed by former wow developers that tried to take a game back to that style and failed miserably ?

[Ronduwil]

This is frankly a specious argument. World of Warcraft is a goddamn game, not a TV show. The first imperative of a developer--any developer--is making it so that people want to and can play it at some level instead of just watching it. I see this nonsense all the time and have kept quiet about it. But fuck that. It's fucking nonsense.

I think that you and I actually agree in concept, but we may be getting hung up on semantics. My pet peeve is the claim that LFR exists for players who want to "see content," but I believe that Blizzard intended much more than that. I stand by my statement that anyone can "see content" through a youtube video. LFR was not intended to enable players "only to see the content," as so many claim. As the Raid Finder Q&A stated, "players may want to experience World of Warcraft’s raid content and storyline without being able to commit to the additional time investment of a raiding guild." This, as you pointed out, is not the same as "seeing content." The "experience" alluded to in the Raid Finder Q&A includes gear progression, compelling boss mechanics, and social interaction. From what I've read about WoD, the current LFR provides none of that. The gear is subpar, tier sets are excluded, bosses fall over, and players typically wind up with 25 random jerks who want to burn through instances as quickly as possible so they can gather their share of the loot piñata and move on.

I have no problem with the idea of making content accessible to everyone, nor do I mind the existence of LFR. My quibble is with the fact that LFR has replaced the forms of content that I found most compelling. Speaking from personal experience, the last time I saw a compelling progression path was WotLK. At release I could acquire Naxx-level gear at a slower rate from the last boss of every heroic dungeon. As the relase went on, raid gear from previous tiers was made available through newer, more difficult heroic dungeons. When my character had gotten almost all they could out of dungeons, I was able to pug previous tier raids or "trash farm" current raids in order to continue progressing. Eventually I was well-geared enough to fill vacant slots on my guild's raiding roster as needed. I may not have been at the forefront of raiding progression, but I did get to raid a little, I always had something to do, and there was always something to look forward to.

Cataclysm completely changed the way progression worked. As a non-raider I had nothing to aspire to. I could get a few trinkets with valor points, but that required valor capping every week, and, frankly, valor capping through dungeons at release was more time consuming than raiding. Every casual guild I joined died when the majority of its members realized the futility of the new raid-only progression scheme, so I was eventually left with no other social outlet in-game than being in a raiding guild. In late Cataclysm Blizzard finally realized how silly it was to take progression from the masses, so they created LFR as a means of progression for them. However, the fact is that LFR was far more useful for raiders than for non-raiders. When one of our tanks quit due to a RL injury, one of our DPS switched to tank spec, geared through LFR, and was tanking our raids within the month. When we needed to gear new recruits we burned through LFR instances with them for a few days, and they were ready to raid. However, I noticed that none of my casual friends were particularly interested in what LFR had to offer, and the could not be compelled to remain longer than a few weeks (long enough to exhaust the dungeons). The raiding lifestyle, however, was brutal for me. I was getting no sleep, spending less time with my kids than I wanted, and dumping miscellaneous household chores on my wife that I should have taken on myself. By the time I finally beat heroic Deathwing I was pretty much fed up with raiding.

MoP came along, and I was so burned out from the year before that I took time off. When I finally resubbed the dungeons were a joke. Worse, the gear they were dropping was laughable. I did the Klaxxi rep grind because I'm a completionist, but the gear that they awarded was laughable in comparison to LFR drops. There were no harder dungeons, and Blizzard was up front about stating that there were no plans to add any. There was nothing good to craft and no incentives for gathering mats. If I wanted to craft a nice bag in WotLK I would chain instnaces and disenchant the drops I won for the necessary mats. If I wanted to craft a nice bag in MoP I logged in once a day, pushed a button to burn my cool down, and log back out. One of those methods was fun, and the other was not. Even cooking was ridiculous. Instead of being gated by mats that I could supplement through dailies I was exclusively gated by dailies. I tried to raid again, but after a month of the same scheduling SNAFUs, the same server progression issues, the same loot drama, and the same retention problems that had plagued my guild in Cataclysm I realized that raiding is just not for me.

That's my problem. It's not the existence of LFR; it's the fact that everything that used to be fun about the game was shoved aside in favor of raiding. LFR is a symptom of that, not the disease. LFR was intended to be a facsimile of the raiding experience, but it fails in that regard. It was apparently intended to replace all the other good things that I used to enjoy as a casual player, but it doesn't do that either.

[Glorious Leader]

Should note that alot of the issues with lfr gear being sub par is due to the ridiculous ilvl inflation. Again cause of raiding...

[emilylorange]

Should note that alot of the issues with lfr gear being sub par is due to the ridiculous ilvl inflation. Again cause of raiding...

That's a dishonest oversimplification. Blizzard has noted people expect upgrades, and those upgrades, in order to seem worth the effort to the player, tend to improve exponentially in quality.

This would be true whether or not raiding existed. If there were no raids and all we did was wallow in a mudhole and click on frogs, the reward system would still cause inflation over time.

So cut it out.

[Kickbuttmario]

Gaming never was there. There are in WoW somewhat under 1 million players that do guild type raiding. Everquest peaked at what 500k players and was exactly what the people in this thread think would make WoW the most popular thing on earth. WoW was the utlimate anti-EQ when it launched in that you could gasp actually level without a tank healer full group combo.

Because of that difference, WoW was able to succeed in a way that generated a lot more players in the game than there are people in the world who are attracted to hardcore, organized raiding or for that matter any kind of large group content. WoWs "problem" is one a great many people would envy and that is they dragged in a lot of players to play a game that the developers have from all appearances zero understanding of and manage to dribble out enough non-raid content here and there to keep a substantially larger number of subscribers than there are players who want to raid. How for 10 years this has eluded them speaks to some major delusion on their part or just plain stubborn in the face of the evidence belief that of something to the effect that if only everyone raided in a guild with people they like then everything would be great and so they design the game to shove people toward what they as players and devs like.

TLDR: WoW has a lot more subs than any game designed to be all about raiding will ever have again and got those players as a lark because they made levelling solo something that was possible, not because people signed up by the millions to join guild raiding with the attendent schedules, drama and headaches that go along with it. If they continue on the course they're on (raiding, more raiding and even more raiding until your eyes bleed) then they will eventually be left with only true raiders as customers. They very much like the money that the non-raiders send to Blizzard every month but they don't seem to want to do all that much to keep it coming in so it will be interesting to see what wins out in the end.

Fantastic post bud. +1 if I could. It really goes to show that a lot of people here keep thinking that raiding is the true problem when it never was. Blizzard is the true problem and they have to stop focusing on making people go for raiding as the only option.

That was the issue with WoD LFR in that there wasn't a lot of other things players could do, as in Cata and MoP, there were still loads of things to do, albeit haven't been great in a long time.

[Glorious Leader]

That's a dishonest oversimplification. Blizzard has noted people expect upgrades, and those upgrades, in order to seem worth the effort to the player, tend to improve exponentially in quality.

This would be true whether or not raiding existed. If there were no raids and all we did was wallow in a mudhole and click on frogs, the reward system would still cause inflation over time.

So cut it out.

I did say "ridiculous ilvl inflation " as opposed to what you get if you didn't just have to have 4 different difficulty levels with their own seperate ilvls and now even worse in the raids themselves between raid bosses further ilvl jumps.

[emilylorange]

I did say "ridiculous ilvl inflation " as opposed to what you get if you didn't just have to have 4 different difficulty levels with their own seperate ilvls and now even worse in the raids themselves between raid bosses further ilvl jumps.

What you're describing is several problems:

-LFR gear sucks now because they're trying to incentivize people to move to higher difficulties - even though Ghostcrawler told us long ago people will not 'get better', they will, as a rule, choose to quit instead.
-LFR gear also sucks now because the super duper leets were running it for set bonuses, and in the wisdom of ALL OR NOTHING blizzard removed the sets and good trinkets instead of deactivating them if you tried to throw LFR pieces into a heroic pile, or saying 'w/e if you want to be optimal that's the cost of optimization'
-it's still cheaper to set 4 levels of difficulty for ONE raid than put effort into crafting content and rewards specifically for each group those difficulties targets, and you know, Blizzard is two guys that operate on a shoestring.
-People will move to the path of least resistance - because if you have the same reward but one path to it is easier, ur dumb for choosing the hard route.

I'm not going to call their solution 'great' - I'm unsubbed after all - but it's more complex than you're making it out to be.

[Glorious Leader]

What you're describing is several problems:

-LFR gear sucks now because they're trying to incentivize people to move to higher difficulties - even though Ghostcrawler told us long ago people will not 'get better', they will, as a rule, choose to quit instead.
-LFR gear also sucks now because the super duper leets were running it for set bonuses, and in the wisdom of ALL OR NOTHING blizzard removed the sets and good trinkets instead of deactivating them if you tried to throw LFR pieces into a heroic pile, or saying 'w/e if you want to be optimal that's the cost of optimization'
-it's still cheaper to set 4 levels of difficulty for ONE raid than put effort into crafting content and rewards specifically for each group those difficulties targets, and you know, Blizzard is two guys that operate on a shoestring.
-People will move to the path of least resistance - because if you have the same reward but one path to it is easier, ur dumb for choosing the hard route.

I'm not going to call their solution 'great' - I'm unsubbed after all - but it's more complex than you're making it out to be.

Its an awful solution and yes lfr gear sucks for many reasons. Nowhere did I say that it was only cause of ilvl.inflation. ilvl inflation plays a big part in why it sucks but it's not the only. Ultimately all the reasons you list go back to the demands of raids and raiders being at fault. Raiding is why we can't have nice things.

[emilylorange]

Its an awful solution and yes lfr gear sucks for many reasons. Nowhere did I say that it was only cause of ilvl.inflation. ilvl inflation plays a big part in why it sucks but it's not the only. Ultimately all the reasons you list go back to the demands of raids and raiders being at fault. Raiding is why we can't have nice things.

tbh most raiders don't give two hoots about LFR. I actually like LFR as an idea, I just think it needs some fixing to help it become a pleasant social experience rather than enduring 24 people with competing desires for 45 minutes to 2 hours (by 'fixing' I just mean rewarding good group behavior through game systems rather than trying to have other players single out and punish people that are miserable to be around). It's a thing that you maybe do a few times to fill a missing piece in your armor and then never have to look at again unless you have alts or you miss some weeks on your legendary - but even then, for most people you can ignore it entirely.

Whether or not you like raiding, you are playing an MMO, where the tying factor to play is the people you play with. If you're not going to reward people for coordinating in large groups, be it raids or dungeons or PVP or whatever..... why design an MMO? Why not be a single-player game?

You can hate on raidin' all you want but you may just be in the wrong genre.

[Coconut]

I'm going to stop you right here.

Normal mode was tuned specifically to be doable by lesser skills / friends family guilds. It is not tuned too difficult for them. Normal can be done with arms tied behind the back and with a blindfold.

I think its amazing that these "friends and family" guilds you talk about, and maybe the circles you raid with (not sure, but assuming since you are usually a crusader leading the charge to make the game easier) are always asking for the game to get easier, and for the rewards to get better for easier, lackluster gameplay.

No.

No you should not be getting high end raiding gear without some sort of effort involved. There needs to be wipes. Maybe not to the tune of what it is in Mythic, but Normal should pose a threat. It should present challenge to these Friends and Family guilds. If Normal is supposed to be the top end game for these guilds, why should blizzard make all the bosses push overs? Shouldnt they make it challenging enough to be a challenge for them? Yeah, it would be a breeze for heroic / mythic guilds, but it should be a challenge for the group it is targeted for.

Stop lobbying to make the game easier and to make the rewards better. It irritates me and many many many other people.

I am hesitant to post here again, since it's a long going topic and I don't think a consensus can be reached as long as people like yourself insist on treating WoW like a vocation, and not like an entertainment product.

But nobody seems to consider that the highest gap in personal skill, as well as relative difficulty, comes from the fact that the average player doesn't use the essential tools necessary for raiding:

- damage meters
- boss mods
- proc trackers
- class and encounter guides

You can praise the game and blame the players all you want, but WoW has done too little to integrate these into its default interface, and it does very little as well to guide players towards them, or explain to them how crucial they are.

While we do have some visual cues for ability procs, and some rudimentary encounter warning system, it's way below what is needed to make a player truly aware of his character and his surroundings.

The basic spec guides in game are sometimes teaching you the wrong thing (arcane says cast missiles when they proc instead of saving them for 4 stacks). The lack of built-in damage meters prevents people from experimenting (although ironically the game provides plenty of target dummies on the premise that you are using an addon), being competitive, or even realizing the gap between themselves and someone who carries them (so they won't worry kicking the mythic taxi from LFR).

Many raid encounters are designed assuming you have prior knowledge of when they will trigger to optimize a response, while the default interface warns you, at best, after the fact (Iskar's lasers for example). And a lot of your damage comes from correctly making use of your trigger procs, even though they are a tiny icon buried in a far away corner in the middle of fluctuating buffs, as per the default UI.

Not to mention that even a few of the existing features are not used by a majority of players, such as macros, and even keybinds.

The game does a great deal to keep up with addons in providing a challenge, but not in making sure players are up to the task without them. If they had, I'm convinced the average "skill" level would skyrocket.

The game is significantly harder without addons, and a player should have no obligation to keep up with external software that smooths out the flaws in WoW's UI, just like someone who buys a car shouldn't be under an obligation to tune it himself. It's only proper that Blizzard at least provides content that is challenging for those who play the game as it was designed.

[Sharein]

What a dumb statement.

Does he honestly believe players are interested in having eight dungeons as only endgame for an entire expansion?

If they want this to work we need atleast thirty different, challenging dungeons. And probably even more.