Let me stop you there before you go into your pre prepared talking points. This has nothing to do with “other people” enjoying LFR. This is an issue of motivation and design. If this was a single player game, like say Zelda, and there was a teleport in the beginning area that took you directly to Gannon, the final boss, but I could also get to the final boss doing all the dungeons/collecting all the gear/etc then the psychology of why I am doing this this ceases to make sense. The game itself and its own integrity ceases to exist. It doesn’t matter if no one else has ever played or will play Zelda, its a design problem.
So please stop with the failed talking point that is essentially “Dont care about what other people are doing” because it has nothing to do with that. You LFR guys miss the point so blatantly its hard to take any of you seriously tbh. You sound like parrots with prepared talking points over and over again without ever even attempting to see the problem, or even kind of being realistic on why or how defeating an endboss has a huge psychological effect. Sure, you can replay the game over and over again, but for most, much like any game, its a little thin for many people.
Plenty of times. I can log in right now, queue for a warfront, afk and get my epics. Maybe after that I’ll afk in LFR and get more epics. Depending on the world quest rewards right now I could log in and get some normal raid ilvl gear from a few world quests.
Don’t act like gear isn’t handed out for almost nothing.
Absolutely. Me and my guild actually quit when LFR hit in Cataclysm as we did content to see it generally. Thats why new expansions are fun, new games are fun, not because its a rehash of something else you have done before.
In Cata there was Normal and Heroic modes, we never did Heroic, because there was nothing there that meant anything, however, when we found out there was a secret boss in Bastion of Twilight then we started doing Heroic. That was something worth reaching for. The gear from Heroic suddenly had purpose, we needed it and to go through this Heroic difficulty (which was really hard for us) to see a secret Boss.
That was fun, things like that keep people playing and wanting. Once there is no boss, nothing interesting at the end beyond just rehashed difficulties its ultimately pointless beyond fun, for some, maybe a lot of people.
So yes, your statement is correct. LFR caused me and my guild to quit. I don’t even play Retail anymore, and yes its because things that used to keep us motivated are now thrown at you so easily its simply not worth trying.
Anyone saying “No one!” is effected or has effected your Raiding pool because of LFR is already wrong. I can promise you my existence proves that, and I imagine theres many more.
None of this cuts out the accomplishment of doing Mythic, I understand for some that is a motivation. It is impressive, truly, its a difficult thing to do. Its not always enough however beyond what I feel is the top of truly addicted people at this point, or the truly addicted worst of the worst. The mid tier casuals like my old guild I don’t feel get a lot of value out of the current design.
They do have an affect on you, for two reasons:
First, what you said is actually (in a sense) the problem. When people stop at LFR, they don’t move on to Normal, thereby reducing the pool of actual raiders.
Second, gear inflation is a thing. Let’s use some numbers for gear rewards:
This is a reasonable distribution; higher gear rewards come from content that requires more effort.
It also shows the problem with LFR: it devalues the gear received in WQ’s. The more people with ilvl 400 gear, the less valuable that gear score becomes. This process is what economists call inflation.
And before you ask, Benthic gear only makes this problem worse.
Several patches of this, and the number get WAY out of hand. Remember that, as gear increases in linear fashion, stats increase in a linear fashion… but (due to the nature of how damage/healing is calculated and class mechanics work) as stats increase in linear fashion, damage increases exponentially.
Imagine a Fire Mage with 0% crit… now imagine that same Mage with 100% crit. Their damage didn’t increase by 100%; it increased way more than that.
It has everything to do with “other people” enjoying LFR. That’s what video games are for, to have fun. Different people enjoy different things in the game, some like collecting items/pets, some like Mythic raiding. Neither is wrong or right. I don’t like Pet Battle but I don’t whine and cry to have it removed, other people like it.
Do you think there should only be one path of difficultly level to the final boss?
Should we delete normal too? Should we delete Mythic because only a small portion of Blizzard customer complete this?
Even if you are (which you probably aren’t), that doesn’t change the fact of devaluation through inflation. If anything, it simply makes it worse by devaluing Normal raid gear.
So you log on… DO STUFF and get rewards? So once again. do epics just appear in your bag just logging on? So why are you lying you get gear just by logging on?
Also how is that different than logging doing molten bore… Doing the one mechanic bosses and getting gear? Classic isnt super difficult.
Inflation is due to the flood of gear from a number of different sources, this is true. But LFR is definitely one of those sources, and contains the additional problems listed above.
LFR was initially implemented as a “band-aid” fix in Cata; instead of fixing the issue, they instead tried to make that “band-aid” a feature.
Absolute nonsense. Blizzard…ION…stated VERY clearly that LFR was created to JUSTIFY creation of raid content at all.
How many times do you folks need reminded of facts in here?
“LFR justifies the creation of more raid content when millions of players are able to see content. Only a few thousand people actually saw Kel’thuzad, but millions saw Deathwing. The reason Mists of Pandaria is starting with 18 bosses and adding larger raid tiers than we have had previously is because many players are going to see the raids through LFR.”
…Ion Hazzikostas, Lead Encounter Designer (Convert to Raid)