Blizzard, help us build up new potential raiders

So I think we can agree there are a large number of players that never venture beyond LFR and get into raiding, and there are obviously a lot of different reasons for this. Some people don’t have the time or the ability to commit themselves to a schedule or just don’t have interest in doing so.

I think however there is a good sized chunk of that player base that simply lacks experience and/or has performance anxiety because of a lack of hands on experience and I think the entire game would be better off if we could find a way to get those players over that hump and into normal raiding and hopefully beyond. So stick with me here…

when you play a team sport like baseball, nobody really wants you on their team if you’re bad… so they have mechanisms for screening out those players (try outs). The raiding community has it’s own ways of screening out those players but it is more oriented towards higher end play (heroic/mythic), when those methods get applied to normal it makes it more difficult than it needs to be to start normal raiding. so how do you get good at baseball without playing on a team you aren’t on and thus can’t play the game to get better?

you train, you practice throwing, hitting and train yourself to play and you get better and eventually you have the confidence to try out for the team and if you put the effort in, you get on the team. Many guilds have try out processes of various types and that’s great but not many people want to take the time and build you up as a raider from a complete noob and it’s not something you can do by yourself very easily at the moment… sure you can read guides and watch videos, but it’s never going to be the same as building real experience by doing… This is where I think Blizzard could help.

Blizzard… we need a training sim. Somewhere a player can enter and practice individual boss mechanics. Where I could for example enter and select shriekwing, I select my role and have a raid group of bots (like the ones in exiles reach, I know it can be done) doing the other roles so I can practice dps and hiding behind pillars to avoid earsplitting shriek, or a tank could que up Sludgefist and practice steering him into pillars and tank swapping. Allow the player to do this for any boss so they can get hands on experience with the individual fight mechanics.

no loot, no rewards, just practice and if I’ve completed the mechanics to kill the boss, I’m given an achievement for that boss in the training mode that I can show when I apply to a guild or a pug to show that I have the basic comprehension of the fight mechanics required to do the fight on normal. This room should only be allowed to be completed by a single player so that others cannot carry them to the certificate, but it would be nice if it would allow observers as it could be a really useful in game training tool when paired up with a mentor watching and coaching via discord.

now you might be telling yourself “that’s what LFR is for” and that is partially what it was intended to be, but here has been my experience with LFR from the perspective of someone that has been teaching and observing a completely new player I have been trying to get into the game…

You que into LFR and either your team has enough people who know the fights to carry the rest of the raid or you don’t and you wipe until enough inexperienced (or flat out malingering) players leave and get replace by enough experienced players and/or enough determination stacks to finally down the boss. There isn’t any time to read the individual fight explanations right before you engage the boss and there isn’t enough punishment for failing the mechanics to reinforce learning. The only boss mechanics my new friend picked up on our LFR training sessions were the ones that I took the time to explain and point out during the fight. Most of these new players do not have direct mentors like this.

Think of this like the proving grounds, but specifically for learning raid fights.

I think getting as many people into normal raiding as possible is best for the health of the game, but only if they are prepared to play and aren’t going to negatively impact the playing experience of those already familiar with raiding. Smoothing out this entry process and giving as much opportunity to succeed to new players as possible is the best way to encourage a healthy influx of players and reduce conflict and toxicity between old and new players in the raiding community as a whole.

This idea is a napkin doodle and obviously needs a lot more thought and polish but I think it’s an idea that really has some great potential for the game.

please share your thoughts.

5 Likes

We could always build up the proving grounds, that’s basically what it’s there for is practice.

3 Likes

Or the players can themselves not be toxix d bags why put on blizzard

12 Likes

I disagree. It needs to be like a daily quest that someone can repeat as often as they want.

Anyway, I have brought up various types of tutorials and scenarios to help players who want to learn to play better without inconveniencing other people to achieve those goals. The majority of good players don’t think those players deserve help. They think they have chosen to be unskilled just to annoy good players. They have zero conception of how learning works in the real world, and think that a new player should be able to step into the position of someone with decades of elite experience in gaming on day 2.

3 Likes

yea that’s basically what this would be is the proving grounds with boss fights and a completion achievement. Something that hopefully wouldn’t be a ton a development work and would help out the new folks.

1 Like

Yes. Like we need elitism to rear its ugly head any more than it already does. This would be abused by raiding guilds to let people join for raids but they don’t get loot because they don’t have said training mode achievements.

“You don’t have all the training mode achieves so hand over all the loot that dropped for you bro”.

Hard pass.

1 Like

if the world was the way I wanted it to be and not the way it is then people wouldn’t be so toxic. but it’s not and this wouldn’t solve those problems by any means, but maybe help to smooth the transition process for new folks into the raiding community.

The proving grounds was perfect as a vanity achievement. There is no learning component, although a lot of people seem to think that “You failed, tough luck. Come back later after you’ve taught yourself on your own how to git gud and pass, or try again now, but haha, you can’t respond because we stunned you!” is a tutorial mode.

2 Likes

A big problem with your goal here is that raiders themselves are kind of exclusionary. Its hard to get into a guild that actually runs content because, like an IRL job, they want the experience already there. I mean, I get it. The raids are quite difficult - do you want to bring and basically train someone who has essentially never done it?

LFR is so limp and useless that it cannot be considered training for even a normal raid.

I honestly cannot think of anything that’d solve this other than random guild leaders taking it upon themselves to cultivate it.

1 Like

you know a long time ago I was resistant to putting achievements into the game entirely for that very reason, but at this point it feels like the cat is out of the bag.

Blizzard seems to really not understand some people just don’t like raiding for barrier of entry/social and in general, just NOT like the content/raiding in general?

I don’t get this obsession blizzard has. I’m not raiding, ever, i don’t care. Most people feel this way.

Blizzard isn’t ‘creating’ new raiders, it’s just making people hate raids more than they already do.

You can’t force someone into liking something, this is one of the basic principles of human psychology, and eventually it’s going to blow in their faces.

9 Likes

I don’t think you should force people who don’t want to raid into raiding.
This isn’t a feature for them. Just like Heroic and Mythic content isn’t for them. The most important thing is you are enjoying your time in Azeroth, no matter what you’re doing.

2 Likes

Here is a better idea, and I know this might be a bit crazy, but just hear me out on this.

If you want more raiders, then maybe you should, as a community that talks about how great it is, work to grow the community yourselves, and not ask Blizz to do things to try and strong-arm others into that content. If the raid community is this amazing thing, then take non-raiders along to raids, be patient with them as they learn and help them grow as raiders to become part of that community.

5 Likes

I am teaching new players, hence my section about my experiences with LFR and new players. This also isn’t a mandatory feature which is why I emphasize it needs to have no rewards at all other than the link-able achievement as proof of completion. This is just a tool that the community can decide to use or ignore and I think it would be really useful for learning fights and I know I would use the heck out of it.

The fact is that people who do LFR have chosen to do LFR over raiding. We see loads of non reality based claims made by people who want to think everybody in LFR actually wants to do progression raiding. But they’re too stupid to know LFR isn’t progression raiding. People who cling to this narrative believe that there is no excuse for not wanting to be a progression raider, and everybody in the game owes it to them to make that commitment, to change their jobs or even careers so they can be in one of the overwhelming majority of guilds that all raid at the same time, to abandon their family responsibilities and let someone else do them, to stop claiming that a disability means you can’t be good enough, because having vision or mobility disabilities is no excuse for not being a progression raider. To go back to raiding even though they used to raid but decided they don’t want to any more, for whatever reason. That’s no excuse!

Every attempt at social engineering in this game has failed, but devs can’t give up on their baseless belief that every player in the game can be turned into a progression raider if they are forced to join guilds that don’t want them and raid.

This is their last chance to prove that they are right and everyone else in the genre has been designing their games wrong by trying to encourage players to play the game and have fun.

8 Likes

There’s nothing Blizzard could do to make people suddenly able to raid on a schedule. Are they gonna hire babysitters, maids, chefs, etc for people so they have less responsibilities and more time to raid?

This game’s community is no longer filled with mostly young people with 0 responsibilities. People have aged up and no longer have time to raid. It’s time to offer more alternatives, M+ was a start.

7 Likes

The only way to get more people into raiding is to make it easier and make it queable like LFR in wings. Also add a currency like FF14 so you have 100% control over 1 upgrade a week.

3 Likes

Dude, unironically they can do the following:
-Put ALL difficulties on LFR or in general erase the barrier of entry somehow magically(cant deny people from pugs)
-Increase raid lootdrop by 100%
-Lower the difficulty significantly

and im STILL not gonna raid. I DONT WANT TOO

ITS BORING. People don’t just dislike raids for the barrier of entry, they also dislike them because… Its just not fun & engaging?

Some people, JUST dont want to spend hours in an instance smashing keys on a boss for 10+ min straight. It’s that f’ing simple.

I hope that after all of this, which i believe may be a blessing in disguise, blizz finally get the memo. Most people dont want to Raid and you can’t make them, some people

roll the drum

FIND IT BORING. The mystery of the uniserve solved!

Times change, newer generations enter. Young people these days prefer fast spaced content.

2 Likes

this is me too. i can raid, i have the time and the ability, but i just dont like it. in TBCC i raided to try out BC differently this time, as all i did was pvp back then. we went 14/14 prenerf, and first time we downed KT my guild was whooping n hollering in discord and i just stared at my monitor and shrugged. i didnt feel full of accomplishment or anything, it was just a thing. there were a dozen times i was gonna “give my two weeks” to em, but then id get like 2 drops and was like well i cant now…

even if i was playing still, the slime cat wouldnt convince me to raid. nothing would. of the times ive tried to raid and joined raiding guilds, id say maybe 2 out of the dozen or so were good guilds, and pugging is just terrible. no thanks.

1 Like

I used to raid in BFA cuz it was fun… But SL no thanks

1 Like