You keep obsessing over whether Blizzard used my exact sentence structure while ignoring the fact that they described the exact behavior I referenced.
Yes, the 2013 Developer Watercooler doesn’t spell out “LFR led to fewer players forming or staying in guilds” in a sentence formatted just to your liking. But it does describe a system where players grind through content without commitment, cohesion, or coordination a system that actively erodes the social dynamics that guild raiding was built on. That is a design-level reflection on community impact.
That quote you pulled about people cycling in and out of LFR isn’t just about wipes. It’s about the fact that LFR lets people raid anonymously, without persistence, accountability, or group effort. That’s not social raiding it’s automated throughput. And Blizzard knew it.
If you want a direct quote, Ghostcrawler gave it to you: > “If you put a gun to my head, I’d say LFG with harder dungeons and no LFR.” That’s a lead systems designer admitting the system failed socially even if it succeeded mechanically.
Add Ion’s later interviews where he reflects on how LFR weakened the glue holding casual guilds together, and you’ve got a crystal-clear theme across multiple developers and years.
So no, this isn’t “zero quotes.” This is documentation, developer reflection, and design philosophy unpacked over a decade.
You’re not disproving any of that. You’re just demanding I turn a three-year conversation into one perfectly worded sentence and pretending that if I don’t, it never happened.
It did. It’s cited. And you’re out of gas.