At current iteration LFR is nothing but an improvement for the game IMO. Everyone who wants to play on a high level, have no reason to visit LFR. LFR is very easy to implement, as it's the same raid with nerfed numbers, so it takes very little resources for development. And apparently there are enough people who want to experience game in a story mode, so they get that content.
There was time when LFR was boring, yet necessary for hardcore players, but that's just bad game tuning, not failure of LFR mode itself.
I don't see the issue with LFR. If you want to join a guild and run raids you still can. However, some of us don't feel like joining a guild and would rather just queue up every now and then.
To be clear - I support LFR but here's why I think some people don't like it:
There was a "golden age" of WoW where things were new, and hard. It was a perfect balance of difficulty and grind made bearable by the newness and marvel of it all. I liken it to finding a new programming project which you are stoked on. The effort/reward loop is finely tuned.
LFR was part of a bunch of changes, spanning years, that evolved WoW but moved further and further away from that initial magic.
The gripe many have/had is that LFG/LFR removes the community building element of having to find a group, or find a guild. You had to really work to get a group, and work even harder to get (and stay in) a guild. I remember when I first stepped into SSC. I had spent months working for that. To then work with that guild to clear SSC and move on to Hyjal was thoroughly amazing.
Yes, you can still "do" that (get a guild, hardcore raid) but there was something about knowing that other people hadn't even seen what you were seeing, that was thrilling.
I think some people also don't like that the same gear (or nearly the same) models are available to LFR groups. Back in the day, if you saw someone walking around with a full T3 set it was something magical. Nowadays, everyone kinda looks the same.
I remember that I first started feeling that way when LFR was introduced.
My experience as a Final Fantasy XIV player is that Duty Finder (the equivalent of LFR) is such a massive necessity for quality-of-life that I'd never ever be able to go back to an MMO without it. I used to play EverQuest back in 1999-2000, and I ultimately left after a year or so because everything about that game was an exercise in frustration despite the cool concept. I didn't get back into MMOs until I discovered an MMO that actually respected the player's time and didn't require everyone to jump through hoops and sit around and wait for people to bite just so they can play the game.
And, mind you, Duty Finder in XIV isn't just a raid thing: every single piece of instanced content uses it, even levelling dungeons, and that applies whether you're queueing solo, queueing with a partial party, or entering content with a fully premade party (even right-clicking on a dungeon entrance just opens up Duty Finder). XIV doesn't just respect the player's time: the entire design of the game is built around respecting the player's time at a fundamental level.
Yea I fully appreciate this. In fact, when I do pop back to WoW I am always grateful that LFG and LFR exist. That system is a godsend for casual gamers (like myself).
I just used to be a hard core gamer so I share the sentiment that some may feel which is that the glory days of WoW are long passed. What we have now is objectively “better” in every way, and yet, you can’t help but miss the past.
That's the curse of all long-running MMOs, though.
You have to have power inflation, for any of the common content models to work.
And you have to also provide a fast lane for new players, otherwise no one is going to join, only to be a decade behind where everyone else is now.
It's unfortunate because it screws existing players. But ultimately, that's only because they believe the myth that MMO stats / levels / gear actually have value.
Totally. I don’t fault Blizzard really at all for the evolution of WoW over the years. It had to evolve, and so it did. It just meant that for me, a lot of the magic was gone. But I had also grown up a lot, and had dramatically less free time, so I don’t even think I could ever support that “golden age” of WoW gaming even if it had never changed.
All in all, they grew up with their player base and I don’t fault them for it in the slightest. Sure, minor gripes here and there but generally speaking, they have made the right calls.
I actually think their current model works pretty well. You have a fast track to the current content but the current content has levels of difficulty that you can work on.
So this scratches a big topic of what's wrong with WoW.
In short, WoW has transitioned to being run by people who don't play the game, don't understand people who do play the game and are targeting the game at people who don't play the game at the expense of those that do.
LFR undermines both the aspirational part of the game, which is extremely important, and the social aspect of building relationships, which is super-important and the real reason most people stick around.
Now we have 4 raid levels (LFR, Normal, Heroic, Mythic), which is too many. The differences are largely cosmetic and minor ilvl bumps. There are some unique items in higher tiers, to be clear.
Lastly, LFR is essentially an interactive cinematic. It's part of what I like to call "conveyor belt content". There's no choices to be made. The outcome is almost certain. You may as well be watching a cinematic. This probably goes well beyond LFR.
Final Fantasy XIV has been experiencing constant growth since Shadowbringers came out in 2019, and in the last few months has absolutely exploded and obliterated WoW's numbers even before the harassment allegations came to light, and yet XIV's instance system is thoroughly built around an LFR-esque system called Duty Finder.
The original version of XIV wasn't like this at all, and that version was a massive flop, but then it was rebooted into its current incarnation by Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida, who has extensive experience playing MMOs for decades from Ultima Online to EverQuest to old-school WoW (I would recommend watching Noclip's documentary on XIV [1] [2] [3] for more on Yoshi-P's background and the decision to completely reboot the game). It's precisely because of his experience with the warts and frustration of old-school MMOs that XIV is so streamlined and committed to not wasting the player's time, and XIV is massively, head-over-heals successful for it.
It turns out people really, really don't like forced socialization, and when an MMO comes along that does away with it, people flock to it in droves. The facts don't bear out your allegation that forced socialization is "the real reason most people stick around": XIV's runaway head-over-heels success is due to the fact that it so thoroughly eschews forced socialization that it's often described as a single-player JRPG punctuated by multi-player instances and a completely optional set of social side content.
> WoW has transitioned to being run by people who don't play the game
Current game designer Ion Hazikostas is a hardcore raider, guild leader and completed every raid in game on the highest difficulty. I don't think it's fair to qualify him as not playing the game. Of course I have no idea about their internal chains, that's only a public high-ranked figure.
I'm generally agree with your stance and I don't like many changes either. But I can accept that those changes actually were necessary for the game to survive, as current playerbase is completely different from those who played the game 10 years ago.
Yeah and the raids are generally good but everything else is, well, trash. Coincidence?
Also, Blizzard tends to over-focus on the behaviour of Mythic raiders who are like 1% of the population. And I don't mean they cater to their needs. I mean they burden everyone because of perceived "abuse" that would otherwise occur were something not in the game (eg conduit energy).
Classic was "hard" because of organizational challenges, patience requirements, and most importantly lack of information. Access to information has completely changed the game, explaining why it took people virtually zero time to beat MC this time around. The classic of reading some sketchy material on forums to understand raid mechanics and raiding with keyboard turners is gone and can never be recreated.
That's missing the point though. Its introduction was a marked change in server/player culture that only accelerated over the next decade; players didn't want to put effort into something that took time, they wanted it now.
I went back and played a little while ago. Dungeon Finder was near instant, and would stick me in a dungeon I had zero context for. Magically transported there. Nobody was from my server. No conversation/chat. The encounters/dungeons themselves were utterly without context (I never had a clue where they were) and felt like clicking through to get loot with no sense of storyline.
For me, that's a huge negative. I remember that the dungeons on the shattered plains (i think) specifically revolved around the shattered hand orcs or whatever. They synced with the area and the quests I'd been doing locally. It felt like a cohesive world I was involved in.
I cannot argue that the new system isn't efficient. It got me playing and it got me loot. But I never learned anything about anyone. I never engaged with the story. I'm just old I guess xD
I don't see it that way. I'm cool with things that take time like moving up the ranks in Mythic+.
What I didn't like was the forced socialization. I'm fine with my IRL friends, I don't want a bunch of people pinging me when I login to Wow. I just want to login, group up for a Mythic and log off.
And some people are lonely and would prefer the game design which forced them to socialize with others (or forced others to socialize with them). You can't please them all.
But hope springs eternal.
[1]: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/wow-producer-discusses-k...