I will never go back to normal raiding again.

#1 - Dec. 7, 2011, 11:54 a.m.

I am not the best player of this game... but nor am I the worst. I am medium. I dabble in all areas... I master none. I've raided, I've pvp'ed, I've collected, I've achievement-!@#$%d. Many have done these things better than I, but still... I've at least done decent at all of them.

That said... today I have finally killed an expansion's final boss within the life of that expansion. Within his first week of life no less. Something I, an average player... never did in the previous expansions.

He may have been a sissied up version of himself... but I do not care! I am thrilled and more than pleased with the LFR tool. Leave the harder versions and the fancier loot to the people who care for such things. This is all I need.

As someone who played Warcraft 1, Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3... but never any MMOs before this. This is all I've ever wanted.

This game has never been about the loot or the prestige for me. I've always just wanted to SEE the content. I want to SEE the characters. The cutscenes. The story. I want to meet them, talk to them, kill them. Whatever. Just wanted to do it. Loot was always just a means to that end for me. I wanted to see how the world of warcraft unfolded... in its entirity. FIRST hand. Without watching videos second hand on youtube, or reading about things on WoWWiki...

That said... LFR takes everything I've ever hated about raiding and makes it go poof. No more guild politics and BS. No more people yelling in vent. No practicing and grinding for months and months only to wipe and wipe and never even get to see that final boss. No more obligations. No more schedules. No more cares! I AM FREE! From here on out, I can kill EVERYTHING and owe NOTHING TO ANYONE! HOORAY!

I can finish a raid on my own time. On my own terms. I am warm and fuzzy inside.

My only complaint is that it wasn't backward compatible to the old Cataclysm raids... which I still have yet to see. A slight dissapointment... but oh well. Guess I'll have to see these later... once I've outleveled the content, just as I did so many others in the past.

But I can't tell you how excited I am that every tier of raiding moving forward into Mists of Pandaria will have this feature. I'll once again be excited for each and every patch day!

You'll note from my achievements... I didn't do one damn ounce of raiding in Cataclysm this past year... like many... I was growing tired of this game. And trying to do and see new things became more of a chore than a fun time... so my interest simply faded.

But today Blizzard, as I smote Deathwing with only minor headaches and a reasonable amount of wipes... I found myself having fun again. Well done!

There are kinks to smooth out to be sure... but I am very pleased with the LFR tool... and I will never go back to normal raiding again. The hardcore raiders have their hardcore raids... and I the average person, now have mine...

Hip Hip Hooray

Zarhym

Community Manager

#205 - Dec. 8, 2011, 12:48 a.m.

A lot of posts in this thread make me happy. It warms the heart to hear that players are having a good time experiencing the final raid of Cataclysm and putting the "death" in Deathwing. Raid Finder was specifically designed to make raid content more accessible. We do, after all, put a hell of a lot of work into designing that content. To that end, if we need to take more time with each raid to develop a Raid Finder version so that a vastly larger percentage of our playerbase can take part, then it's well worth it.

Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback, Tweak, and everyone else who jumped in with constructive comments as well. :)

Zarhym

Community Manager

#268 - Dec. 8, 2011, 2:05 a.m.

Kudos to Zarhym. I just have one request.

Could you guys please make large raids again? By large i mean Karazhan/Ulduar/Icecrown sized, so people don't get all burny-burned out after the first 3 weeks or so.

I noticed that happening with Firelands and guilds just not playing after awhile.

I'm assuming you mean number of bosses and not space, since Firelands was wide open. :)

We definitely don't want to stick to any formulas when it comes how many bosses are in each raid tier or expansion. You might see raids on the scale of Kara, Ulduar, ICC, Naxx, etc. in the future. It's just a matter of what feels right for each tier. Having three separate difficulties, however, does require much more development time for each raid.

12/07/2011 04:56 PMPosted by Enhancedone
Praise for gating the LFR though. it was cool that we got to do dragon soul in 2 parts instead of having to commit all the time to one. (like a regular guild would before they got "on farm")

Glad you like it! We did feel it'd negatively impact the dynamic if we suggested a group should complete the whole dungeon together. While we can tamper with numbers and change the lockout rules a bit for this system, the raid content itself is still largely designed with organized raids in mind. To counter that, it just feels a little less daunting when Dragon Soul's split in half for groups being assembled via the Raid Finder.

Zarhym

Community Manager

#324 - Dec. 8, 2011, 2:38 a.m.

Personally, I think LFR is way too dumbed down. It turns fighting Deathwing into a complete and utter joke.

I think it is ridiculous that many people downed Deathwing in LFR before GUILDS managed to do it in normal. No, this was not the case for my guild personally, but there were many guilds on my server that had not downed Deathwing in normal during the first week.

They shouldn't have released the final content in LFR for at least a couple more weeks. It completely takes all the excitement of downing someone who's supposed to be so powerful. To have derp pugs downing Deathwing like he's cake just completely defies Deathwing being such a hardcore dragon. Grats Blizz, you made end-game content playable for retards and in the process ripped the soul out of the game.

I know all you who don't have decent guilds and don't take this game seriously will disagree, but really think about it. Just imagine in your real life you work hard to achieve something all for others to simply get it handed to them. So what if we get better gear in normal and heroic? It doesn't matter considering you clearly don't need that gear to down Deathwing anyway. The only thing us hardcore raiders have now is the sense of achievement of downing the harder content. However, the RP of the game has been ripped to shreds IMO.

This is absolutely the attitude and language that, in this community, needs to go sit in the corner for a while. If you can't stand the thought of there being multiple difficulty tiers of content -- into which we pour a lot of our development efforts -- to make raiding feasible for more than 2% of players, hit Heroic mode, turn on vent, and repeatedly remind your friends how good you are. I have no doubt they care. :)

Some people, like Vindicare, get it:

I don't feel any sense of accomplishment from killing a boss if it doesn't involve some form of challenge or progression.

That being said, I can appreciate the LFR for people like the OP. It clearly wasn't designed for people like me who enjoy raiding for what it actually is. It isn't all that fun for me, and I use it as mostly a tool to get free epics for little effort to help with actual raiding but what can you do about that?

I'm glad people are having fun with it.

Zarhym

Community Manager

#358 - Dec. 8, 2011, 2:52 a.m.

12/07/2011 06:43 PMPosted by Kolgait
Thing is, yes, LFR IS backwards compatible. Blizzard is just lazy.

Yea. We need more game designers like you who just really get it. ;)

Bashiok

Community Manager

#694 - Dec. 8, 2011, 7:49 a.m.

Hi, Jack.

12/07/2011 06:59 PMPosted by Stabbity
I'm curious. What all would need to change in, for example, Icecrown Citadel before it's LFR-capable?

Not a whole lot I suppose as far as the raid mechanics go, but it's long enough we'd want to chop it in half because we expect the time investment in the Raid Finder to be much shorter than ICC in its entirety was. Chopping it in half isn't a small task.

We absolutely would love to go back and Raid Finder more raids, it's just finding the time, and ultimately weighing that time against creating new raids and making those Raid Finder compatible.