I 100% believe that participation data on retail and in Remix will bear this out: the vast majority of players who raid, only queue LFR. There is huge friction in forming a raid group and queueing for Normal+. I also believe that a lot of those who do Normal+ are just people buying boosts and those providing that service. I bet a lot of them only do it once for AOTC.
But doing 8+ bosses is also way more of a time commitment than most players want. This is also made worse by there being no real reason to do raids. If you want to gear up, do M+.
My theory is that only reason we keep getting 10 boss raids in retail is purely for the Race for World First. Well, that and a few people are probably nostalgiac about raid progression from years past.
WoW used to have 1-3 boss raids. Vanilla/Classic has Onyxia, for example. Players like this.
It doesn’t even make sense. Race to world first types would prefer 4 6 boss tiers rather than 3 9 boss, as most bosses in raids are fake bosses anyways and more raids means more races means more money.
You will never convince me how having one dungeon with 8 bosses … is somehow a better design than two dungeons with 4 bosses.
Smaller pieces of the same puzzle that allow us to better manage our time is the way to go. It seems silly to even try and argue against this.
In a SINGLE player game, I get it.
But when I get 7 bosses in and a SINGLE PERSON out of 20+ has some emergency that they have to drop, you potentially ruin my entire time investment (along with the other 18+ people). This is UNACCEPTABLE.
The vast majority of players don’t raid at all. Wowhead and MMOC collect data that consistently shows that of those that do raid, most do LFR.
But here’s the big problems with LFR as it stands now:
Someone at Blizzard keeps wanting to make raids “hard”, which really just means “annoying”. LFR Raszageth, for example, is ridiculous.
There’s no real reward from raiding other than cosmetics. In S4, LFR is Veteran gear. You can get that from doing Awakened weeklies.
Wowhead, MMOC and WarcraftLogs data aren’t a “feeling”.
Also, the last season that had the separate faction guild achievements for claring Mythic went basically to the end of the season before 100 Alliance guilds cleared Mythic. What does that say about participation?
In the current WoW content scheme, that means an extra major patch since we only get a new raid tier with a new major patch. There are limits to how many major patches Blizzard want and can produce and how many the players will put up with. Put it this way: what gearing up would you do if a major patch only lasted a month?
But this is based on the assumption you’re keeping the current design. You don’t have to.
Imagine content patches are released in pairs. The first content is “the easy raid/ content” where you gear up, etc. And the second patch is where you USE that content. Maybe slight upgrades? Maybe just cosmetics?
There is certainly a way to iterate however you want on a potentially “evergreen” design. It’s a dynamic game… anything is possible. Don’t ever fall into the trap of saying “we can’t do that!” when what you really means is: we can’t do that with how it’s currently designed.
True. But Blizzard have been trying for more than a decade to turn WoW into a seasonal game. Every major patch has total gear obsolescence (something I’m critical of).
My hot take is that every bad design decision in WoW in the last decade comes from a desire to make WoW a competitve game ie Race to World First, MDI, AWC.
Early WoW worked like this because one raid tier fed into the next. But like I said, Blizzard wants to make major patches self-contained, making all previous gear obsolete.
I’ve toyed with the idea that all raids should be 40 man and you get better gear with fewer people eg LFR at 40, Normal at 30, Heroic at 20, Mythic at 10. Same exact content.
I agree but Blizzard has conflicting goals.
For example, WoW will never be a serious PvP game until all arena/BG participants are normalized with the same ability choices and gear. Think of CoD, Fortnite, etc. Every player is basically the “same”. Well, CoD is a little different because you can earn guns and blueprints from grinding them out but generally the principle holds.
But Blizzard has it where to be the best in PvP, you need to grind out PvE content. Why? Because Blizzard wants that participation. But this turns PvP into a game where some players have inbuilt advantages from doing something unrelated to PvP. That’s not a fair PvP game. Or a serious one.
Same with the bots and farmers. Blizzard wants the subs and the participation. In Classic (including SoD) the bots are so laughably obvious but Blizzard does nothing except the odd perfuncttory ban wave when all it would take to solve is an announcement and some humans that hang around BRD just banning rogues with random names.
The entire concept of raiding needs to go away entirely.
I don’t wanna sink 3+ hours of my time with only a 5 or 10 minute break between. I don’t wanna sit for 10 minutes between ready checks because nobody is every on time for anything, I don’t wanna sink 3+ hours of my time into something and possibly not even get 1 piece of loot.
Exactly. Requiring a 2-3 hour time commitment automatically excludes the vast majority of players. Even for those that can, many don’t want to.
I see what you’re saying but IMHO the problem isn’t raids per se, it’s trying to make raids hard that’s the problem.
People liked the 40 man Classic raids, for example. Do you need 40 people to clear MC? Absolutely not. But it makes for a much chiller and thus more enjoyable atmosphere. Classic raids have their own issues, specifically all the meta-chasing where organizers would rather spend an hour getting the 20th cleave warrior than just going with a suboptimal roster. For MC. In phase 5.
But Blizzard has decided that raids need to be hard and that the only way to make them hard is to add mechanics that mean if one player stands in the wrong spot, it wipes the raid. That’s not fun for anybody.
The length of a raid isn’t as much of an issue when you’re talking about not the progression race at the start of a tier, but guilds. When you have a consistent group to raid with, you don’t have to clear out the entire raid in one sitting, but you’re also more likely to do so (at least eventually).
I dont know where you got the idea that people loved 40 man raids, it was not as enjoyable as you think.
We had to rely on the thought that all 40 people would even attend the damn things and that wasn’t always the case. It was also very hard to tell who in the 40 man group was dumb enough to fail a mechanic that wiped the whole group.
As it stands its really hard right now to even get 25 people to join.
