Right now, new players to BFA are unable to get a raid group via the LFR finder for older BFA raids such as Uldir, Battle of Dazar’alor & Crucible of Storms. I see a vicious cycle here where you have fewer people queuing for older raids due to the absurdly long waiting time and this, in turn, leads to even fewer people utilising the raid finder tool for older raids. At the same time, no people (not even guilds) are running such older BFA raids as they no longer offer the latest gear.
For current casual players who usually raid through the LFR, the obsoletion of the LFR finder for older raids would affect their gaming experience and may encourage them to quit WoW.
For new players who just subscribed to BFA, even with the free lv 110 boost, once these players reach lv 120, they would only be able to access the newest raid - The Eternal Palace via the raid finder and even then, the waiting time is around 20 - 40 mins for the queue to pop and another 30 mins to clear the wing.
Assuming that LFR users are mainly casual players, I don’t think these people have so much time to wait around for 40 mins to get an LFR group and then another 30 mins (on average) to clear that LFR wing.
The above are indicators that show that the new influx of casual gamers is slowing down and the existing casual player pool is also shrinking at the same time (probably due to the vicious cycle I mentioned above). We need to do something about this urgently.
With the interest of Blizzard in mind, I would like to propose a solution - for LFR raid roles to be filled by AI-enabled toons whenever the queue is more than 15 mins long. The Blizzard’s KPI for raid finder should be such that anyone, queueing for any roles, should be able to get into the particular LFR wing that he or she is queueing for within 15 mins.
Blizzards big on undermining their own content. One of the major arguments for LFR has always been this thing along the lines of “well we want people to see the raids otherwise there really is no point in making more raids.” So what they do is make a raid and more or less only make it relevant for a few months. In fact, the first “catch up mechanic” was put in place while Uldir was still active and undercut multiple difficulty levels at the same time. That isn’t a “I don’t like LFR” comment either, I think it’s healthy to have, but they sure do make it hard to try and figure out what direction they want this game to take.
I honestly have no clue why they don’t leave the LFR queues up for all previous raids. The gear is pointless in terms of stats so really, people would just be running it for other things such as transmog or if a mount and pet drop. If they think they will be way too easy with current gear, they could put in a item level sync into the raid to bring everyone down to when it was relevant.
No… that’s just your assumption. There’s zero reason for me to run LFR when I can do world quests, Naz, world bosses, M+ and Warfronts to get a respectable ilevel.
I haven’t touched a single raid on my 120s and I’m at 420ish and 415ish on them.
Odeargodno. AI in this game sucks.
They do. You can solo queue for all old LFR raids or group with friends and queue for them. Just talk to an NPC. It would clutter up the LFR window to have that large of a dropdown.
It’s a definite stark contrast to Legion LFR. On my main I run with a group that does Norm/Heroic raiding, but I wander through LFR on my alts. All through Legion it wasn’t hard to get any raid tier to pop a queue other than the last week before BFA.
The incentives from Legion are gone. They should just make it so once a raid tier is obsolete, you can select a Scenario option & go through the raid to complete any story related quests.
Stop with the fake outrage-- Raids reset on every Tuesday, this is when most players are trying to get through LFR for the week and it’s the reason that Queque’s are often at their lowest.
Either try it and see, or simply sit there in 2 hour long queues-- Blizzard can’t force players to Queue on your time.
The problem is not that you cannot queue for an older BFA raid in the raid finder. The problem is that you can queue for a long long time and the queue is not popping even after 1 hour.
Or how about, instead, Blizz provided an actual incentive to run non-current content like, say, some form of extra currency that could be used to buy or upgrade gear on-par with current content, or a variety of crafting materials?
It’s been like this since Mists. If you run on Tuesdays, you’ll find queues are a bit shorter.
Just like you won’t find many groups running older Normal raids, you won’t find many running older LFRs. New stuff comes out, people move forward to that new stuff. It’s just part of the cycle of content in this MMO.
The raid finder is meant for casual players and you cannot confine these casual players (who are usually working adults) to a narrow time frame each week for them to clear the LFR and then blame them for it if they happen to miss the narrow window due to their various work/life commitments. LFR is meant as a tool to facilitate a raiding experience for all players, but especially casuals, at any time of the week. This is the design intention behind raid finder.
This is why I said earlier that there is now a vicious cycle at work here to encourage existing casuals to quit WoW if we are not doing something about it. New casuals to WoW would be compelled to quit too if they are unable to get into the older BFA raids through the raid finder.
If you don’t want to wait in queue as a DPS, that’s your decision. DPS queues are always long, regardless of the day or content. You have other options to gear up. Many other options.
No. There really isn’t.