Alright. Before you click away and say, “oh, it’s just another generic ‘LFR sucks’ without providing an actual interesting basis behind why one would think it sucks,” I’d love to give my two cents on it as a guild leader.
I think what people fail to realize is that LFR isn’t “destroying the game,” as some people might put it, due to gear handouts that are near to being on par with normal difficulty gear. The difficulty also isn’t a problem, as it’s still probably harder than anything we’re seeing in Classic.
Having been a guild leader for a number of years now, the only major gripe I’ve had with this system is that it can be potentially community-destroying. It certainly hasn’t been known for tearing individual guilds apart, but I think what people found to be appealing is that you’d need to find a guild to team up with to start tackling a raid, and the sense of accomplishment is automatically higher when you do it with a group of people you know.
This is why if a guild of relatively inept (compared to doing Heroic/Mythic difficulty raids) would still probably feel accomplished if they queued up for LFR as an entire guild.
Raiding was a part of what the game should be facilitating, which is social interaction. LFR’s difficulty and gearing aren’t an issue, because I’m sure that if they removed the ability to queue for this difficulty, you most likely wouldn’t be seeing as many complaints abut it.
Finally, I’d love to hear what you think. Not the “just play Classic” criticism, as I’d rather that Blizzard improves upon a progressing game that is constantly adding new content. Classic and its systems can be fun, but this is something that the world experienced. I want to see them do a good job at something new again, and making the game a social facilitator is one of the steps that they need to take in order to accomplish that, in my opinion.
I recently left Classic. I didn’t really see the “community” there. Basically had groups telling everyone who wasn’t a tank, priest or mage to “gtfo no invite”. Had folks ninja gathering nodes and chests left and right, and folks ignoring others cries for help with group content.
So at the moment I’m appreciating things like LFR and shared open world spawns because the community has always proven itself to be terrible and I appreciate systems in the game that allow it to affect my gameplay less. I would buy into the whole community premise if that wasn’t the case.
This is one of my major issues with Classic. Everybody knows what to do. The resources were provided, and that allowed people to go straight ahead, which kind of ruined the social factor.
People didn’t even know what a raid was. While there isn’t that much that’s unknown about WoW, even for the first month of BFA, the community aspect was very strong because people were going around the world, teaming up for dungeons, and doing things of the sort.
This. It shouldn’t even be faction-based tbh
I never said games made communities. I said that WoW had systems back in the day that made it easier to create different bonds and friendships which lasted because of the content.
I have mentioned this in a few threads, which is that I “quit” raiding back in WoD. I was tired of everything associated with raiding, and so I walked away. LFR gives me the ability/option to see content. IMO that is what it is there for.
I have also mentioned that social interaction is a choice. I truly believe that equating the current state of “community” or lack there of to the introduction of LRF/LFG is foolish. LFR/LFG does not take away the choice to speak to whomever is in the group with you, you aren’t muted, there is still a chat function. People choose not to speak, to make friends, to network.
There is no “deeper problem” with LFR. There is a “deeper problem” with the playerbase trying to blame a tool rather then look inwards.
Not to get all high and mighty over here, but there is truth to the idea that the hardest examination is the one which requires you to look at yourself.
The only thing that needs to happen with LFR is the removal of that difficulty as a whole. Just move the queue part to Normal and keep the option to do manual groups. Normal is barely different in terms of difficulty but this would help reduce the item level bloat while still keeping that queue option for people without guilds.
So never once while questing in vanilla did you group with others out of necessity to fight mobs that had a high respawn time, were elites, or kill a named mob that would be hard to solo/had a slow respawn time?
Cause if you didn’t you either did not play beyond the beta or you are lying. There are plenty of situations in the starting zones of vanilla that position people to require the aid of others. And it is through those situations where people can play off one another and further refine their skillset. And if they do that enough (hey this mage isn’t bad), they’ll eventually party up to then go into that zone’s low level dungeon.
Before anything, I’ll start with this: When the person who actually made LFR says it’s a mistake, you know it’s bad.
There are plenty of things that probably have had even more of an impact than LFR did on the community. My intention is to bring up the fact that this is merely an aspect of a much bigger problem of Blizzard’s inability to facilitate social interaction in retail WoW.
The chat option is a choice, sure, but LFR conveniently (and I’m not saying purposefully, as I don’t think it was made w/ the intention of hindering social interaction at all) just makes the whole process seem completely robotic. There was, and is, something about grouping up with friends to take on a challenge that is so much more appealing.
I understand that players don’t have time anymore, but if Blizzard wants to start doing everything for everybody, they’re ruining the game. It’s funny how back then, WoW actually required you to be more active, and that’s when its subscriber numbers were at their highest. When you needed to collaborate with other people.
I don’t think players voicing any sort of criticisms is a problem. I think people have opinions, and we need to learn to respect them, just like I do yours!
That may be your experience but I ran into a crap load of people questing and through dungeons and had people i logged on with everyday from doing nothing but playing the game as recent as Cata.
A lot of it came from no sharding tbh. I would see the same people day after day until we talked, grouped up for some of our leveling and boom. Now everyone is just temporary. Imagine how hard keep friends IRL would be if every single day you moved to a state.
Content was also harder which made people ask questions which could lead into dialogue which could lead into party invites which could lead into friends lists. Hell, playing classic this random player literally helped me redo over an hour worth of questing to catch up to him because I grouped with him to clear a bandit quest. I hadn’t experienced something like that in retail in years back in early cata where some random player I was questing with took me through literally all the flight points in multiple zones because I didn’t have em and he wanted to keep questing with me. Took over an hour to do and he had just met me. That’s the last time, I have seen something that happen until classic.
The problem is that you can see the content without joining a guild or raid group. There’s no need to have a community, because you can just do it by yourself. So the community gradually falls apart as people decide that getting carried by two tanks and a couple healers is just as good as running normal or higher.
In vanilla/Classic, if you want to do the content you either have to organize into a group or be a part of someone else’s.
Of course, that content is entirely optional, isn’t it?
Literally this. Three times this past weekend I did questing in wetlands, for each of the major areas. The first time was naturally with a group that was doing the Dun Modr quests (elite DI dwarves). The second time was with a random mage I grouped up with while we were fighting the murlocs and undead in the west. I later ended up doing all the Dun Modr quests again with them because they stuck around after we had done the Eye of Paleth quests. And then even after that while I was scrounging around to finish all the quests in the zone (the gnolls in the southeast), I found a priest and I ended up doing all the murloc, undead, greenwarden, and crocolisk quests to bring them up to speed.
Content truly can bring people together if the need to group arises.
There is nothing wrong with LFR. The people running it wouldn’t suddenly decide they want to become raiders if it was removed. The gear is subpar to what you get from emissary quests and low key mythic+ instances.
You can’t make people social by removing content. Classic wasn;t social because it lacked an LFR, it was social because you could only group with those on your server. So you had to make connections and get a name for yourself. To bring that back we would need to thru LFR/LFD, sharding and cross realms all in the trash and that isn’t something I expect Blizzard to do any time soon.
This is tangential to that in a way. OP is saying that the existence of LFR erodes the social framework of working with others. Through which others have stated that this has created a throwaway culture in the game. No permanence in talking with other people to do content cause you will always find someone else via an automated system.