In one of the recent interviews it was stated that “important events happen in dungeons and major villains are killed and that solo players often miss this”. This is one of the benefits of follower dungeons is that now the story can progress into and through the dungeon. This also is great for non-solo players who want to quickly go through the story without waiting in long queue times.
But this idea has me thinking isn’t the “important events happen and villains are killed” also true of raids? I know from talking with more casual friends this expansion that they often get confused by story in the game because they do not raid and will say things like “what happened to Raz” and “where did the other incarates come from”.
One solution in game is LFR, but this isn’t great. LFR is at best a long wait to roll a die on how much time you waste to people being toxic. Overall its a very poor experience and is exactly the type of interaction that solo players try to avoid in the first place.
I think a solution to this problem would be implementing Follower dungeon AI in an LFR mode:
- Leave existing LFR in place, but add an option to queue with AI, either using the same interface as dungeons in the dropdown or add a check box or something.
- To reduce the AI demand, reduce the group size to 10 “players” from 25.
- Allow people to queue with friends and autofill the rest with Followers.
- Fixes queue times, especially dps who often have to wait 30 min to an hour in queue.
- Since people will bring up rewards, just tie it to the same lockout as regular LFR, the number of drops can scale based on the number of people.
I can already see comments about making an MMO a solo player game, but changes like follower AI dungeons and potentially applying it to LFR doesn’t take away from it being an MMO. It allows more people to be engaged with more parts of the game and story. More people engaged means more people playing, or continuing to play, and this is good for the health of the game.