It’s never really bothered me that LFR raiders have to wait for their day to clear content; you play fall over mode versus progression based raiding you have consequences to go with that. But at this point I’m also not going to pretend about the likelihood of some level of ulterior motives; there may be some rationale left about creating progression, but I doubt that really fuels it these days.
And just at a basic level of common sense you should consider that an answer given back when Throne of Thunder launched, now pretty much 12 years old, is not the most relevant for various reasons; the leadership who decided that could be gone, changes of heart could be had, raid design has changed over the years, subscriber count variance over the years, etc.
Blizzard has been dogged on a bit for holding onto some core MMO principles that have not aged well and have admitted to it; such as trying to create “meaningful player choice” and we saw how well that went with Shadowlands.
I kind of laid it out already. You nor I will never really truly know their motivations behind something like this unless someone within the company goes rogue and spills the tea on executives making decisions based on financial reasoning rather than good game design ones. I also don’t think it’s that nefarious either; they’re not cackling about how they have LFR players on the hook and rake in millions over it.
My point to you is that a 12 year old statement for why they have LFR designed the way they do is not a strong argument. In fact, it’s pretty weak. I do think when they stated that as their reason it was likely rooted in near or total truth. MoP wasn’t their most popular expansion (#pandas), but they weren’t hurting either and with LFR’s recent implementation there was a lot to debate about how it would or could devalue organized raiding and community.
But I also think that over the years the game has changed drastically across the board and that while they still launch LFR the way they do it is at least unlikely to be solely for that reason. I think player retention is a lot more important to them these days than earlier ones and that by doing things like drip feed LFR to players it helps keep people in the game for a bit longer. It’s why they do things like 6 month sub packages, trading post, time-gated weekly campaigns, minimal end-game content available on expansion launch, etc.
To pad metrics, any time blizzard does anything that related to time gating with new content, its to simply pad their own metrics. What I am more curious about is whether we’ll get another crest for doing story mode gallywix like we did for ansurek.
They haven’t touched how raiding works in 15 years, it’s beyond out of date. Dropping it from 40 to 25 is the biggest thing they’ve done, that was 20 years ago.
I don’t take people seriously who try to find corporate conspiracies in implementation decisions that quite frankly are trivial and even have been presented logical reasons that are dismissed because it doesn’t fit the narrative.
The actual original reason was because Normal/Heroic/Mythic (I think this was actually before Mythic was introduced though) felt like they had to do LFR to fill in gear slots from drops they didn’t get to gear before raiding.
I would argue that this is probably no longer the case and there’s alternatives like M+ and delves that are more lucrative now (minus maybe like, some select trinkets).
Yea BS excuse. No LFR raider will stay and wipe for 100+ times just to get the determination buff high enough to one shot boss. People leave after a wipe.
Ilvl isn’t everything, that trinket from 2nd last boss on lfr beats out every other myth track trinket in the game for most casters currently. You can call it a tuning problem all you want but access to trinkets and set bonuses are always going to have relevancy at the start of a season and pushing the release pace of wings back helps make lfr just a little less forced for high end guilds so they can enjoy a little less burnout.
I think it’s important for you to understand that if you can’t get your debating skills up to at least a middle schooler’s level that you will not be taken seriously. Think of it as a growing opportunity for you.
And I take issue with people treating a 12 year old statement as gospel. Ignoring the “corporate conspiracy” aspect to this discussion it just doesn’t pass the sniff test for a viable argument for that reason alone. Moreover, I wouldn’t call this a conspiracy, just having enough real world experience to know that if it is a factor we’ll never know because they would never admit to it.
By the way…what does Blizzard report on in their quarterly statements? Is it active subscribers…or is it MAUs? And what does MAU stand for? Is…is…is it monthly active users? Gosh gee wilikers…do you think that could potentially fuel a desire for Blizzard devs to find ways to increase player retention rates? And did anyone else forget the reason why they stated they were switching from reporting subscribers to MAUs. Pepperidge farm remembers. Pepperidge farm remembers it’s because they said MAUs is a better reflection on the state of their business and Pepperidge Farm knows what that means is that just because subscriber count is down doesn’t mean they aren’t making as much or more money…because retained players can spend money elsewhere in the game. And that statement was made back in WoD when they had less things to sell us.
This is a common data tracking issue companies can fall into; that which gets measured gets managed. The data you track is the data people responsible for that data will care about. There’s a reason why my company, a civil engineering firm, has been trying to strongly encourage people not to focus on their utilization rate (ie: billable hours vs non-billable). Because if you tell your staff you’re monitoring their utilization rate they will fill out their timesheet in a way that will make their utilization look high. Why? Because otherwise people think “Oh no if I fall under my utilization rate I might be seen as not valuable and get let go”
In the end you have me pegged wrong if you think I believe this is one big conspiracy. I think it’s a multifaceted reason, of which some of the reason may belong to in-game design like a sense of progression or others, but also that there’s likely other roles at play that they would never admit to.