I been waiting for someone to make a thread about this, however no one has so i’ll bring it up even though i’m not the best at starting such things. (Trigger warning)
Asmongold recently said today that the issue with the slime cat (yes, i’m beating this “dead horse”) isn’t the difficulty but the reasoning as to why people don’t want to raid. As people in FF14 (yes the game you guys hate because it competes with your soul mate that is WoW) and lost ark don’t have people complaining (crying, debating, what ever you want to call it) this hard about rewards in raids. And I felt this rang true and should be discussed more for people who don’t know or don’t watch him.
I feel like I know exactly that reason, it is gate keeping and community standards. It is hard if not hostile to enter the raiding community as a casual or someone who prefers to be alone. If you don’t have the right race, class, and spec combo as well as a good Raider IO score, well simply put you are open to people whispering you in a hostile manner. You will be insulted, criticized, and shunned for even wanting to be in “their group”. No one wants to be openly insulted yet it is a common occurrence within this game.
The biggest answer to such toxic hostility? “Form your own group lol” this doesn’t stop people from looking at your raider io score before joining your group, this doesn’t stop people from whispering you for trying, and this doesn’t stop trolls or other hostile players from joining your group and wrecking it because they have nothing better to do. And on top of that you’re probably get a exclusive group of people who either have never raided or don’t have any group experience of this scale.
It is better to put these new or inexperienced players with veterans to learn from and make the game a bigger and better place. However when such solutions are presented the very same hostile crowd responds with “its not my job to baby sit or teach people, my time is way more important to bother with people like that”. Again FF14 and other mmo communities don’t have a huge audience that thinks like that or at the very least are allowed to practice such hostilities openly.
And if you think somehow the community isn’t as toxic or hostile as I claim it to be, and you browse these forums even somewhat frequently, then why did the social contract that most people knew wasn’t going to be reinforced with actual GM’s upset people? Why did people get so upset the thought of being nice, or helping people out in the world cause such major issues? Threads were spammed for months about a policy that wasn’t and to this day isn’t enforced about being nice to others. So if anyone has anything to add or any feedback I would like to hear it.
TLDR: One of the biggest reasons why slimecat not being in LFR upsets people is because the raiding community is hostile and blizzard should find a way to fix that.
The only reason the cat is a big deal is because people thought they’d be able to get it in LFR, and now they are finding out they can’t. So they feel like they’ve been robbed even though they never had it.
If it had been said normal and higher from the start, no one would care just like all the other mounts from raids.
I do understand that there are alot of toxic raiding guilds and communities out there. But there are also lots of casual and laid back raiding ones out there also. I am in 5 raiding communities myself, each very casual and some very laid back. It just takes a bit of effort looking for these communities.
I do agree with you that is the primary reason and I also agree it was a bad move on Blizzards part, but there is another reason I was hoping that would be debated but after waiting for awhile and it not bringing up i thought it would be good to bring up.
All the things you have listed I have never encountered in 15 years of raiding once. Does it happen? Probably but not to any real extent and if it does you have this handy block/ignore feature ingame
Id say his community is way more hostile and toxic than the wow raiding community. Sure the few elitists at the top are set in their ways but a large majority of the rest of the raiders in this game just want to kill bosses and loot. They expect certain standards so kills/reclears are as painless as possible.
The only reason is that the achievements have been in the live game for weeks stating that it is attainable at any level. Why the change? Why the slimecat on a stick?
Imagine you get hyped to play ff14 only to find out that whatever reward you wanted is now gated to a higher level of content than you first seen. Thats why people are upset - if it had been known since it was added into the live game that it would require normal or higher not a single person would be here complaining.
Getting into raiding can be intimidating, but its easy to overcome for anyone who really wants to.
Most of the people angry about the cat don’t want to get into raiding. They aren’t trying but getting blocked by elitists. They just thought they’d be able to do it without “real raiding”, and now they can’t. It isn’t that they want to raid but the community is too toxic.
I do agree with you that is the primary reasoning, i also agree that asmongolds community or at the very least the people who are in his chat box are worse than the elitist raiders in wow. However it is also true that there are a lot of people who are outright negative to anyone who wants to enter something new as an inexperienced player. Hence why “must have ahead of the curve achievement for heroic to be allowed to que for this normal premade raid group” and why that became such a meme. Or how you need 1800-2400 rating to enter a YOLO Rated bg premade.
Asmongold himself, is, or was, a massive elitist. He wanted LFR to be completely removed from the game. Maybe he changed on this issue? But, I still don’t like him for other reasons.
Regardless of opinions on the man he does indeed want LFR and Mythic to be removed, but he also wants raiding to be generally easier for everyone and more open for people to get into. He only wants Normal and Heroic to be the only difficulties in raiding.
There are plenty of guilds/communities willing to give someone a chance thats never raided before - its how you grow said community. The issue is retaining those players. Since Legion i have had more guildies join and raid simply as a stepping stone into higher level content. They know they cant join a CE guild unless they have CE prog exp, gear and logs. They know to get into those guilds they need heroic aotc every tier. To get into heroic aotc every tier you need some logs of normal raiding etc.
Do you expect someone who is completely new to the game to step into 2k+ arena teams or 20+ m+ keys? Or someone who only played once type of endgame to walk into the highest levels of other endgame?
You mentioned lost ark - its gearing system only allows for those players that have completed that content and attained that ilvl before they can even look at stepping up. Id love a change like this for wow - account wide progress. Im willing to play with new/less experienced players at a level they need to learn at before they step into anything higher.
There are stepping stones specifically put in place to respect those other players time.
I’ve been playing since 2004 and remember a time when all we had were dungeons and raids. No difficulties, no queues. Just meeting stones and portals. I knew then, when they changed it, this would be the eventual outcome. When they first introduced dungeons queues, but not for raids, I knew where this was headed.
They should’ve left it alone, or made both queueable, and never introduced difficulties.
I will admit that I have no experience with Lost ark and was quoting asmongold when he used FF14 and Lost ark as examples in his opinion. I also like others with family and friends have experiences where it is difficult in finding guilds who want to raid at a casual level and will take / teach you. I’ve only have experiences within area 52 and Blackwater raiders, and i had not been able to find a casual raiding guild that was willing to teach new players. The guild i joined had that goal in mind before it fell apart where the guild leader had to take a 1-2 weeks away from the game for health related reasons even though people were willing. But this is also from a perspective of someone who works and lives the night shift life like 11p-5a eastern time zone. and is free on mon-wed (not weekend D:).
Its a matter of access - if the only raids that were doable were super tuned hard the casual playerbase would move on. If it was only super easy, the higfh end players would move on.
Its a system designed to try and keep player retention. When you exclude parts of it by design those players stop playing and i think wow is so succesful because time and time again it hits that balance.
Raiding community is simple. Why invite someone that doesn’t know what they’re doing when you can invite someone that does.
I don’t like to raid because I feel like most of the time I’m invited and spend 30 minutes getting into a discord or whatever and waiting for the group to assemble. Then you wipe on a boss repeatedly and get no loot for it or you get loot that isn’t very good.
Take a look just in these forums the activity of guild recruitment. Then think about other forms of social media and how its used to find people.
WoW is a single player mmo with optional group content, that what has changed over the years. Many players are ok with just hitting a button to do the content. There is no 1 click button for guild recruitment or the process of finding a guild to raid with.