#wowscreenshotaday September
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| WTF: Mess |
I can't keep up with the tsunami of WoW Insider articles. When I said my plans included more focus on job and Matty-shack, I meant it. I have no idea what's available on the Timeless Isle, no clue about stats, gear, or new recipes, and am completely in the dark about, well, everything. But one thing I do know are LFRs. The article that caught my eye yesterday is "Are We Getting Less Tolerant of Wipes?"
To me, this begs the question: were we ever tolerant in the first place? I guess, then, it's a matter of degrees. I will never forget when I went in an LFR with my loyal, larger guild (Iocane: this was before your time) and the group accused me of pulling some blob and before you could say "wut?" I was kicked. A guildmate then whispered to me, asking, "Did you pull it?" Way to stand behind your guildmate, and the answer is "No."
Between new, green-horn players getting fresh epic gear at the drop of a trash pull, while perhaps more experienced players grind away for thirty-boss boss kills for one fist weapon (*clears throat*) players don't know if they're coming or going anymore.
Let me offer radical suggestions:
No more kicks.
No more deserter debuffs.
Add BIG determination.
If you die, you are removed from group immediately after the boss fight or wipe: BUT - no debuff, and you get a script as to what happened and why.
Sound harsh? Yes. So crazy though, it just might work!
Yesterday I tried for the umpteenth time to get Momokawa some goodies. I always seem to zone in after Immerseus: does this fight bore people to death? Is that why they wipe? Anyway, get through to Norushen, and that is always when the wheels fall off the bus. Now, I've done Flex about three times now, and I love it. Why is Flex easier, when the fights are dumbed-down in LFR? One key factor is communication and motivation. While fighting Norushen yesterday, three players repeatedly died. They were either AFK, didn't understand what the word "beam" meant, or maybe undergeared. I don't know. I don't care. I'm not mad, bro, it was just another typical experience at the beginning of a patch in LFR.
This same experience holds true when one is leveling a character: the expectations of other players is at once understandable (if this is one's 37th alt, perhaps one should know what to do, a little bit maybe?); however, it is also ridiculous. It feels like players expect a level 31 paladin to perform like Theck. Um, no.
The last caveat I would ask is it would be nice to have the option to report to Blizzard as to why you dropped a group: person using racist slurs, trolling, afk, etc. This is not just player reporting or snitching, but a way to gather data. Why should they want this data? Well, they're the ones asking the question.
In any case, I'll do what I always do: go do old content while everything calms down, and then end up again behind the curve.
I enlarged that screen shot and stared at it for a while mesmerized by the pretty ui and then realized it's probably the same thing I'd do in a raid so probably good I don't go there, lol.
ReplyDeleteI should mention that is UI pre-clean up; this was the LFR I "practiced" in and then threw up my arms in disgust at myself: I spend more time tweaking UI frames than I do flossing teeth. Ewwwww....
ReplyDeleteI was reading this post again and am pretty sure I was channeling my inner warlock when I wrote it.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteGoing to try to post this again. Either my iPad ate the last one or the blogging software did.
ReplyDeleteThe reason that Flex is "easier" than LFR is the company you kept in doing it. With LFR, you are given a random lot of random people. A few are likely competent, one or two might be awesome, 5 or 6 die on purpose so they can go AFK and look at dancing cats on YouTube, and the rest are well intentioned but not skilled players.
When you did flex, you did it with my new guild, at least two of the times you've been. That group of 15-20 consisted of 10 people from my normal raid group; a competent core within any group will be ultimately successful. I'd wager if you took that same core of 10 into a 25 man LFR you'd not have a single wipe. I know when I queue for LFR on my shaman I always choose healer; I can overcome a lot more bad play "healing stupid" than I can DPSing.
As to tolerance for failure, that's clearly something that has changed. but it's also different for LFR than it is for normal. I expect to wipe some during normal progression. We wiped probably 5 or 6 times Thursday night while learning the fifth boss on normal difficulty, and we felt good about how much better we were getting at the fight; next week we'll likely get 6-7 bosses done instead of 4.
Back in vanilla WoW we would wipe for 4-5 hours on a single boss, go to bed, and come back and do it again, for weeks. It took us probably 5 months before we could clear Molten Core in a single night. The game is different now; gear is the only mechanism for meaningful progression. That wasn't the case 8 years ago.
- Krash/Turk
I totally agree: you can't take out the relationships and camaraderie of a tight knit group. But I do know that even with a guild run, things can get goofy-footed. But LFR is still okay for just grabbing a piece of gear (sometimes) and seeing the fight--maybe LFRs need to be ten-man, and not twenty five - perhaps that is the only fix it needs.
DeleteThe stated reason for it being 25 man is that there is more room for error. In a 10 man, if you have 2 DPS die, the fight is over. You may not wipe, but you won't beat the enrage timer. In 25 man, you can lose a healer and 3 DPS and still finish the fight.
DeleteHonestly, I think the solution is simpler. Make flex and LFR share a lockout. Pick one or the other, and do it. This week I did 4 bosses on normal, 6 on flex, and 8 on LFR on Turkic. That's a lot of time and effort, but in order to progress on normal I need the upgrades. As you know, I'll stop doing LFR as quickly as possible. Once I clear SoO on Turkic on flex, I likely will never do flex on him again.