“Q: Who is Raid Finder for? A:Raid Finder is primarily intended for players who don’t already raid consistently. These are players who may not have had the opportunity to take part in raid content due to scheduling conflicts, playtime constraints, limited access to other raid-capable players, or a lack of experience with higher-end content. These players may want to experience World of Warcraft’s raid content and storyline without being able to commit to the additional time investment of a raiding guild. The Raid Finder is also a great way to quickly and easily gear up alternate characters without having to worry about raid lockouts.”
— Blizzard Raid Finder FAQ, November 30, 2011
there’s still many of us that fall under that. good you have more in statics but the rest of us are still left out. bring back lfr please.
Thankfully gdkp is much more widespread this time and will create opportunities for people who don’t want to commit full time to a guild to still see the content and enjoy it.
The 2011 FAQ describes a time when WoW was drifting away from socially-driven MMOs toward theme park design, and LFR was Blizzard’s Band-Aid for a problem they created—not one that Classic was ever built to solve.
Yes, players with time constraints exist. Always have. That’s why Classic offers socially-driven tools like GDKPs, casual raid pugs, open world recruitment, and scalable content. Cataclysm Classic in particular includes Normal raid tuning and broader accessibility without the need to inject automated raid content that bypasses community entirely.
And let’s be honest—players who “don’t consistently raid” don’t need a separate queue where they get lower-difficulty loot for less effort while avoiding responsibility. That’s not accessibility. That’s detachment.
So no, LFR wasn’t some holy gift for the underserved—it was a response to WoW bleeding guild culture and needing a way to stretch raid metrics. Classic doesn’t have that problem unless we repeat Retail’s mistakes.
If you want to raid without committing to a full-time guild, grab a GDKP, join a weekend pug, or form a Discord raid network. Don’t flatten the experience for everyone else in the name of convenience.
Calling GDKP supporters “clueless” while completely ignoring how they’ve functioned as the backbone of casual raiding in Classic is exactly the kind of surface-level dismissal that gets nothing done. GDKPs aren’t some fringe system—they are the replacement for players who don’t commit to static guilds but still want access to full raid content.
You don’t have to like GDKPs. But pretending they don’t work while thousands of players use them weekly to gear, fund professions, and stay raid-relevant is just willful ignorance. And throwing the Token into the mix doesn’t make it clever—it just shows you can’t argue against the system itself, so you try tying it to Blizzard’s worst monetization decisions instead.
You want to talk clueless? Try ignoring the one system that’s actually community-organized, transparent, and rewards performance—then insisting a fully automated loot roulette is somehow more “worthy” of support. That’s not insight. That’s cope.
They do not care. In fact, they offer more accessibility functions in retail, such as the One Button Rotation that’s recently dropped but take away from here is something hilariously and backwards from Blizzard, but expected.
Yes. Let’s stop catering to the ones who make up most this games population. You a new hire to Blizzard?
How are you flattening the experience if it is optional content? Tell me without the ChatGPT, in your own words. The only reason Blizzard might think LFR is because big manbabies who still play this game are upset that someone got their loot, or, they’re mad people will not play with them anymore. There is no good reason to not have LFR other than others people wildly selfish over pixels.
Yes they do. There are far more people stopping just below raid than there are raiders. Removing this is not going to make non-raiders raid, they just will continue to not do it.
Blizzard would most likely be adding LFR if that were the case. The fact is that it’s not needed for the vast majority of players to raid in Classic. They have the numbers and they must be pretty clear.
Provide evidence for this assertion.
I’m glad Blizzard is not catering to people who don’t have time to play the game.
False equivalency. RDF simply expedites forming dungeon groups (the dungeons themselves are unchanged), LFR is its own pseudo-raiding format. You could certainly argue though that the cross-realm anonymous nature of RDF is just as encouraging of toxicity as it is in LFR. Do you want that removed as well?
You’re still going in doing thing as you do in dungeons and they both do the same exact thing for the same exact reason. You’re just getting more people doing a bigger dungeon but this dungeon is difficulty is scaled down for the casual crowd. It’s RDF but for more people to get. LOL.
The players here are already toxic, just report and let the mods take care of them. Removing accessibility features because grown men can’t stop crying on this game is a poor excuse on why we can’t have things.
LFR is a zero-fail mode that provides a terrible pseudo-raiding experience that discourages casual players from attempting to progress further and frustrates more serious players who feel it is mandatory to slog through LFR carrying afk bots for the still-powerful set bonuses and trinkets.
Colorblind mode is an accessibility feature. LFR is not.
Wow was ALWAYS a theme park designed MMO, as opposed to sandbox design which it never was, it just got easier over the years partly to players getting better more knowledgeable and partly to design, but it was always themepark.
The designation themepark and literally zero to do with LFR either for or against, with the exception that it allowed players to finish the story for that particular theme park… err expac.
Opening the raiding scene to casuals had nothing to do with “drifting to a more theme park design” as it was already there from day one vanilla.
People should be happy they’re doing the same thing that they did with lfr in cata. These dungeons are insanely faster at gearing you up compared to lfr. Imagine doing lfr once per week and getting a few items if you’re lucky. I was literally fully geared in lfr gear in 3 days doing twilight dungeons. And if you’re worried casuals won’t be able to experience raiding due to no lfr have no fear, normal is easy enough. Normal has always been easy and always will be easy.
And I’d argue that LFR had a huge hand in this by openeing people up to the posibility that they could actually raid, and enjoy it, speaking only of my personal opinion of course.
