147568-whats-wrong-with-lfr

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I've never played WoW or ff14 so I've never played an mom with this feature. But I don't see the big deal with having it. What is the reason everyone is so against a looking for raid channel or whatever?
 
Does it make people feel less elite or something? I mean, who cares if pugs have a tool to form raids? Is there something I'm missing about LFR that is really bad K something? Help me out here.
 
 
Thx	
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			Mmo	
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I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with an LFR system. The only thought I have on the matter is that most progression groups would rather have people they can vouch for or vet into their ecosystem for the purposes of progression. The interpersonal dynamic and intimate training are really big things that LFR tools completely bypass. In raids that have any challenging aspect to them, LFR becomes the dice roll when people really want predictability and scaling metrics for improvement.
 
When content becomes easy enough you could snooze through it and succeed via overgearing of the population or reduced difficulty of encounters, LFR becomes a lot more attractive.	
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			For the answer to that, you have to look at the goals for a raid encounter, versus the goals for an encounter people queue for.1) A raid encounter by design takes a certain amount of preparation, teamwork, and practice so the group can get used to each other. The content is designed around this.2) people who just want to queue up for something want to have it start soon, have some people know what they're doing, and have it be done so they can get their loot and go.LFRaid is "bad" because the raid content has to be redesigned to fit those different goals. This game (and most games) don't have the time or the staff to make essentially double the encounters, with less good loot (so it is fair to the people who put in the extra time, and fair to the people who seek convenience).An LFR system is often seen as something that pulls people away from regular raiding, which is already tricky to get and keep enough people organized for. The encounters are easier (they have to be when the group is 20 strangers, you can't have fights where one person messing up cause a wipe).If I were ever to start raiding again, it would not be with an LFR tool raid. I did some of that in WoW and it is generally very boring. Almost no communication, no sense of camraderie, run from thing to thing, do your own thing without worrying about others, and "win" then go home.	
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			I say just let them go in and fail on their own. They will learn pretty quickly that you can't just run around in there and kill stuff and get the phat lewtz. I don't see anything wrong with letting them discover that the hard way.	
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			If they put in a LFR for world bosses, instanced them, and had 20 people do it instead of the zerg fests they are, be good.  The current raids, not so much.  I could see 2 different difficulties (though I think GA is easy enough now), but LFR is super easy and not really raiding at all.  It's more of a single player game with people there, what the current world bosses are.  And not alot like those zergfests.	
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I say just let them go in and fail on their own. They will learn pretty quickly that you can't just run around in there and kill stuff and get the phat lewtz. I don't see anything wrong with letting them discover that the hard way.
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			Yeah I see Carbine already caved and nerfed Mortichai fight because if complaints from the f2p players. Think the same would happen with GA?	
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1.  It removes player interaction with each other in the face of the hardest content in the game.  As the Salad said, "This won't end well."
2. Removing player interaction with each other destroys the core content of any MMO - interaction with other people.  This may seem like a /facepalm statement, but it's easy to forget.
 
I was going to list more things, but that's actually devastating enough that I can stop there. LFR is evil. It is bad. It should not exist.  LFG is bad enough (I'd prefer a GW2 style system instead of a random matchmaker).  Do not pass go.  Do not collect 200 omnibits.  Return to sender.  Address unknown. No such number.  No such zone.	
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If they put in a LFR for world bosses, instanced them, and had 20 people do it instead of the zerg fests they are, be good.  The current raids, not so much.  I could see 2 different difficulties (though I think GA is easy enough now), but LFR is super easy and not really raiding at all.  It's more of a single player game with people there, what the current world bosses are.  And not alot like those zergfests.
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I've never played WoW or ff14 so I've never played an mom with this feature. But I don't see the big deal with having it. What is the reason everyone is so against a looking for raid channel or whatever?
 
Does it make people feel less elite or something? I mean, who cares if pugs have a tool to form raids? Is there something I'm missing about LFR that is really bad K something? Help me out here.
 
 
Thx
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LFR doesn't cater to the nearly non-existant and non-profitable "hardcore raider" demographic. People just can't admit that this isn't 2008 anymore and would rather see the plug pulled on this game than have it cater to the profitable casual demographic like it should have from the beginning.
 
You can have your own opinions that LFR sucks, dumbs down the content, and is a shallow experience, but you can't drag gamers back to 2008 and forcefully create a demographic that barely exists anymore. The raiding that many of you are promoting is a relic, it's had its day and its time to move forward.	
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I didn't realize that teamwork and skill were relics in an MMO.
 
There's zero reason to even make group content if the players doing it aren't talking to each other and practicing together to win and progress.	
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LFR doesn't cater to the nearly non-existant and non-profitable "hardcore raider" demographic. People just can't admit that this isn't 2008 anymore and would rather see the plug pulled on this game than have it cater to the profitable casual demographic like it should have from the beginning.
 
You can have your own opinions that LFR sucks, dumbs down the content, and is a shallow experience, but you can't drag gamers back to 2008 and forcefully create a demographic that barely exists anymore. The raiding that many of you are promoting is a relic, it's had its day and its time to move forward.
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The posters before me have pretty much said it all already.
 
LFR, or "tourist mode" as I like calling the system, comes with a whole number of issues when treated as anything other than a means for very casual players who are not really interested in raiding to experience the story told in the raids.
 
It's not even the problem of the system being intrinsically bad, it's usually a community problem caused by the way the system works.
 
One of the biggest flaws is the fact that it just throws people together. There's no social interaction between group members, no agreement on what purpose each player pursues and in a lot of cases no team spirit.
You have players who know the mechanics, you have players with no idea at all, you have players looking to just experience the story told in the raid, you have people looking to quickly farm gear as a stepping stone into "real" raids, you have people who want to have a look at the dumbed down raid mechanics in preparation for actual raiding, you have players who respond to mechanics by trying to outgear them instead of dealing with them and you have the people who've mastered mediocrity looking to "win" the game by decking themselves out in LFR gear.
And, of course, a number of those are relying on the LFR system precisely because it gets them into a group without subjecting them to the trouble of actually talking to other players.
Toss all of them into a mixer, stir, select 20 at random and you have your typical LFR group.
 
LFR mechanics are tuned based on this, boss abilities are dumbed down or missing completely. A group of 20 lone wolves can generally win the encounters even when 5 of them decide to stand in the red and keel over. Provided the group does manage to wipe expect half of them to immediately leave. Don't expect anyone to explain why the group wiped, it usually takes a couple of additional wipes to the same mistake before anyone speaks up.
 
This is a problem because raids are generally created as the most challenging PvE content available. Having to do so with a dumbed down version in mind not only means the devs have to design essentially one and a half raids it also limits them in the crazy stuff they can do with encounters.
It also makes LFR really, really boring the nth time you do the encounters provided you belong to the group of people having at least a basic understanding of the game's mechanics. For everyone else it makes them a confusing mess because nobody is going to explain to you what to do and looking the information up yourself is too much trouble.
 
Ever heard of part of WoW's community being really toxic? Automated matchmaking played a huge part in that and that includes the Dungeon Finder. Back in the days of manually forming groups and having to be mindful of one's reputation people tried not to act like a jerk to everyone because otherwise it meant they'd eventually be out of people willing to group with them. Now they can just roll the dice again and inflict themselves on another group.	
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PUt it in perspective, is there anything in this game that is easy?  I'm not talking about overgearing, but with lower gear trying to do the next tier of content?  LFR would make it so this isn't true, and ruin alot of what Wildstar is.  
 
@Sigma, your right it's not 2008.  So there's MMO's out there trying to develop content and raiding content in games are crap because cater to the I want ezmode and afk thru raids while not trying to be at my best.  It's called being lazy, what alot of people unfortunately are today.  Rather see no raid content than the bs they are implementing in the MMO world to cater to what I call lazy gamers.
			
				
	Edited November 27, 2015 by Orrestes	
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If they put in a LFR for world bosses, instanced them, and had 20 people do it instead of the zerg fests they are, be good. The current raids, not so much. I could see 2 different difficulties (though I think GA is easy enough now), but LFR is super easy and not really raiding at all. It's more of a single player game with people there, what the current world bosses are. And not alot like those zergfests.
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Nothing, people are dumb and think adding an LFR into the game would mean the difficulty of the actual non LFR raid would be touched. If Carbine knows what they're doing, they would do an LFR difficulty and normal difficulty (one that you can't queue in, much like what we have now and difficulty the same as we have now). 
 
That is not the problem with the game though. Problem is the game lacks people to raid with. Every guild out there are looking for people all the *cupcake*ing time, people quit all the *cupcake*ing time. I still don't know why Entity-2 hasnt been merged back into Entity 1. I dont know why Warhound hasnt been merged into Entity 1. If only Carbine actually gave a shit about the game. 
			
				
	Edited November 28, 2015 by Hazz Rang	
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			No one I know of thinks that adding a LFR version would mean nerfing the real version. They do fear burnout and wasted resources, though.	
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No one I know of thinks that adding a LFR version would mean nerfing the real version. They do fear burnout and wasted resources, though.
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Nothing, people are dumb and think adding an LFR into the game would mean the difficulty of the actual non LFR raid would be touched. If Carbine knows what they're doing, they would do an LFR difficulty and normal difficulty (one that you can't queue in, much like what we have now and difficulty the same as we have now). 
 
That is not the problem with the game though. Problem is the game lacks people to raid with. Every guild out there are looking for people all the *cupcake*ing time, people quit all the *cupcake*ing time. I still don't know why Entity-2 hasnt been merged back into Entity 1. I dont know why Warhound hasnt been merged into Entity 1. If only Carbine actually gave a shit about the game. 
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And the argument still stands of people wanting easy raid just so they can raid.
 
this is what brings in money and population, so what is it to you? Who cares do you consider it raiding, or not raiding, if it would stimulate the economy and keep the servers full?
 
Bad in the fact they don't get better and bad because it brings a type of player that doesn't even try and the content keeps getting nerfed to appease them.  
 
I highlighted the important part. It brings in players instead of driving them away.
 
They won't rune their gear out and if they do, they  will do it incorrectly like put 60% MH on a warrior and 15% crit because they have all waterslots in their gear and don't feel like rerolling their slots. 
 
And you think it doesn't happen right now? How much of the population has time to hard grind money to reroll their runesets, when it costs raiders hundreds of plat?
 
 
 Have content that bridges people to obtain gear to tackle Vet dungeons once reaching 50, by making Adventures good (try to make the small 3, 10-20 minutes and Malgrave a vet type that drops dungeon loot and no more than 30 minutes and not so RNG). and shiphands.  Don't have a quest right away to here's 50, do vet dungeons.  Bridge Vet dungeons to forming a raid to tackle challenging content, just not GA challenge (world bosses).  I could go on and on about how people need to get better, and learn to form groups instead of playing by themselves.
 
And you're missing the point entirely. Currently the population is dipping because all you can do in PVE leads you to raiding. If you're not raiding, why are you here? Well, not everyone can or wants to raid. Not everyone will ever have the skill to tackle vet dungeons. Well where's content for these people? Because if you don't offer them content, they'll go somewhere else. And a game can't life off raiders alone.
 
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@mirta000,
1. Rather not bring those type of players to the game honestly.  It would start the cycle of degradation of content to appease the players that can't play the game properly.  OMG WHATS AN INTERUPT!.  It did to WoW.  And they are trying to add in content to bring back the players that want good content, not the I'm a special cupcake.
2. see 1.
3. It costs those raiders hundreds of plat because they are putting the best runes in their gear, and not waiting on drops to get their runes.  You can rune out pre-raid gear for cheap.  I think blue superior runes were going for divine rune(blue)-50g, pure-30g and can make a superior for 29g.  35 slots @ 29g is 10p to fully rune your dungeon gear.  10p is not alot at all.  Rerolling slots is another 10p tops for superiour level gear. You get 50g-1p per dungeon run.  Doing the t3 contract nets you 5+ plat.  That's for superior gear, and that is not buying any glory rune bags or doing pvp for the stuff.
4. I'm not missing the point entirely.  So you don't want to raid, that's fine.  Wildstar has been adding that content since day 1.  That's all they have added to the game.  To appease the players that don't want to raid.  But were talking about LFR and LFR would not be that content.  LFR IS A RAID!  Talking about dungeons, well, dungeons aren't hard, it just people expect to queue up, even if they have the gear for them, and be able to 10 minute STL the very first time and not understand the fights or what you have to do.  Get real.  Proves my point of lazy players.	
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@mirta000,
1. Rather not bring those type of players to the game honestly.  It would start the cycle of degradation of content to appease the players that can't play the game properly.  OMG WHATS AN INTERUPT!.  It did to WoW.  And they are trying to add in content to bring back the players that want good content, not the I'm a special cupcake.
2. see 1.
 
it's still players. Right now the game REALLY needs to live. Because as a sub title it didn't. And the population is dropping again. I get what you're pointing at, but WoW is actually very successful. And in this industry you got to be successful, or you'll be shut down.
 
3. It costs those raiders hundreds of plat because they are putting the best runes in their gear, and not waiting on drops to get their runes.  You can rune out pre-raid gear for cheap.  I think blue superior runes were going for divine rune(blue)-50g, pure-30g and can make a superior for 29g.  35 slots @ 29g is 10p to fully rune your dungeon gear.  10p is not alot at all.  Rerolling slots is another 10p tops for superiour level gear. You get 50g-1p per dungeon run.  Doing the t3 contract nets you 5+ plat.  That's for superior gear, and that is not buying any glory rune bags or doing pvp for the stuff.
 
I don't think that at the moment my character has 10p on them. In order to be getting 50G a dungeon run, you have to max out your elder points. If you're farming with a static, it's not that horrible, however majority of players don't have a static and then it's significantly slower. Weeks when I couldn't get a group for dungeons I wouldn't max at all.
 
4. I'm not missing the point entirely.  So you don't want to raid, that's fine.  Wildstar has been adding that content since day 1.  That's all they have added to the game.  To appease the players that don't want to raid.  But were talking about LFR and LFR would not be that content.  LFR IS A RAID!  Talking about dungeons, well, dungeons aren't hard, it just people expect to queue up, even if they have the gear for them, and be able to 10 minute STL the very first time and not understand the fights or what you have to do.  Get real.  Proves my point of lazy players.
 
Just saying, but the first time we cleared STL Vet at ALL, with a static, it took us 3 weeks. And it wasn't a gear issue. I don't think that players expect to clear in one run at all. I just think that people don't have the patience to try for close to a month before they get disappointed and give up. To keep people coming for content, you have to give them something. If they wipe repeatedly, they not only not get any rewards, they have to pay the repair costs. And even if you do get a new gear piece, have fun spending a lot of money to rune it.
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			LFR is a great idea, issue is the attitude players bring once a MMO adapts to this idea.	
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That's because they know what LFR is and they actually did LFR in WoW and FF14. Everybody that played WoW knows that LFR is a DIFFERENT (as in, completely separate) dumbed down version of the actual hard raid (which means, the regular version is untouched and you can't queue in for. Two different difficulties, TWO. 
 
For people who ar estill clueless and still dont wan't LFR for wharever reason, WoW has 4 difficulties: 
 
LFR (raid finder queue in mode, large raids which you end up 2 manning most of the time)
Normal (still joke version of the fight but theyre not treating you like a 3 year old baby anymore)
Heroic (you actually have you look at your monitor once or twice)
Mythic 20 (now you actually start wiping) 
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And WoW has lost close to 40% of their playerbase because with all those difficulties there were only 3 raids with 2 tiers in the latest expansion. All those versions take extra time to make and balance.
 
Most people want quality content, not quantity, but when they make more things to do, no one wants them to waste time. Three raid difficulties you can mostly sleep through because you did daily zones and got overgeared? Waste of developer time, waste of player time.
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			What games do LFR?  You have WoW.  You have FFXIV sort of but it's different, i'm not sure about this honestly.  Other than that, what other games are there?	
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			I dunno LFR actually needs more raids to function unless they split up certain wings to do then raid is done.	
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I dunno LFR actually needs more raids to function unless they split up certain wings to do then raid is done.
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			You want dumbed down, brainless, lfr like raiding experience? Then do world bosses, it won't get any better than that. Oh and let's also introduce autoshot and turn this into a tab targeting mmo while we're at it.The regression of overall game difficulty is really frightening me and if ignorant people who aren't willing to learn but instead want everything handed to them are the future of MMOs, I don't know if I want to stick to this genre anymore. But we'll see, only time will tell.EDIT: Oh and I like Orrestes idea. Why not just re-sell world bosses by letting ppl queue for them and set them into some instance. I'm pretty damn sure they'll fall for that and love their 'lfr'.
			
				
	Edited November 28, 2015 by Anyakei	
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			I'm not convinced that LFR would actually bring players in, or make players say much longer. Seems like LFR would add maybe a month tops for players who are bored and looking for more casual content to do.	
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What games do LFR?  You have WoW.  You have FFXIV sort of but it's different, i'm not sure about this honestly.  Other than that, what other games are there?
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And WoW has lost close to 40% of their playerbase because with all those difficulties there were only 3 raids with 2 tiers in the latest expansion. All those versions take extra time to make and balance.
 
Most people want quality content, not quantity, but when they make more things to do, no one wants them to waste time. Three raid difficulties you can mostly sleep through because you did daily zones and got overgeared? Waste of developer time, waste of player time.
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I have no problem adding a group Finder for GA, but not a fan of an easier version. This has been hashed to death on other threads, but I believe ez mode GA would be run a handful of times, and then those who wanted it would be bored and not have much to do. The current raids work because they keep people engaged for long periods of time. And the big problem with adding these raids is leading to burnout, where people who want to raid the "real" versions farm the ez ones first and get tired of it before they even get to see GA in all its glory.
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What else do you want to do in an MMO? ERP? 
The objective in an MMO is character progression, which means you level up, clear content, get gear. 
 
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LFR is a great idea, issue is the attitude players bring once a MMO adapts to this idea.
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			I don't see flex raids working without a ton of encounter mechanics getting screwed up.	
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Nothing is wrong with LFR. The probem in this game is that there isn't any content suitable for an LFR tool that might allow PUGs to raid.
 
When Carbine produce an "easymode" raid, even if it's just a 10-man Sim-Core version of GA, then they could allow people to run it through an LFR tool. Until then, the closest you'll find to LFR will be someone in your server's general channel offering spots in a raid for suitably geared players (typically ilvl 80+ gear, fully runed) with prior experience of the raid.
 
If you run into GA at the moment with a group that hasn't done it a lot, you'll spend the evening looking at the floor.	
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This is completely my stance on LFR. 
 
LFR was not a bad thing in itself, but the attitude and sort of behaviour of some players was absolutely deplorable. One thing I did like that wow brought in was Flex raids (now wow's current normal mode), that should have been LFR from the beginning in my opinion.
 
As for it's place in wildstar, I'm not sure LFR should be a thing. Do I think that flex raids or the ability to put yourself on a "group finder/group listings" (like the one wow actually implemented with mop) should exist? Yes, especially cross server. It would allow raids to be able to pick up pugs to fill their raid. They should also think about adapting the same lockout system as the flex raids (only able to loot once a week, but able to kill the bosses multiple times) so pugs aren't linked to a lockout.
 
Also, flex COULD work but I really don't think that the wildstar raids should be touched in terms of difficulty. All my raiding friends have always said how fantastic the experience is there and that making it easier would be a travesty.
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What parallel universe do you live in? Anybody interested in raiding will do the normal GA, you're just complaining because you have a PC with internet right now in front of you. An LFR version of GA means just another way to farm plat, glory, EG, etc, you *cupcake*ing name it, and for those who don't clear GA or DS, can farm for gear to either use or for those who actually raid, salvage and get runes, sets, etc. Now please stop typing if you don't have a clue what LFR is. 
 
 
 
What else do you want to do in an MMO? ERP? 
The objective in an MMO is character progression, which means you level up, clear content, get gear.
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			To be fair, GA was designed to be the kind of content where you spend a lot of time looking at the floor.	
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To be fair, GA was designed to be the kind of content where you spend a lot of time looking at the floor.
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World bosses......
Play better if you want to down GA.  Don't expect to nerf content, just so people can see it instead of get better.	
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People too rushed or bored to do it are the problem, not the games.
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LFR as in a tool to list and find groups = fine and I would LOVE to see it in this game.
 
LFR as in the WoW LFR where you take 20 random people who probably have just hit 50 and throw them into a raid = No please don't.
 
More non raid content/ simpler little mini raids that aren't attached to "main raiding" would be amazing for the game, but please, no LFR versions of raiding. As someone who is still playing WoW and has since before LFR hit, it's an awful awful thing and ends up hurting the raiding population in the long run.  I can go more in-depth if people need an explanation, but it's really just an awful thing for games.  especially one like WS which seems to pride itself on difficulty. 	
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Accessibility in an mmo ALWAYS comes at the cost of immersion.
 
LFR and raid matchmaking dumbs down progression content to the point where most previous strategies would have to be negligible, and it also undercuts content, becuse progression would significantly faster. 
 
A raid that could last a progression guild a 2 months and the rest of the server community 7 months is quicky worn out by the entire community in the course of 4 weeks, which leads to the so called "content drought". No developer can launch a new raid on the schedule required to satisfy that kind of playerbase.
 
If it was made as difficult as the standard raid, no one could queue up for it because the majority of people feel little to no allegice to strangers, and will leave he group after the first wipe.
 
World bosses moved into weekly "box raids" would make the world feel empty, and even if two seperate streams of raiding were created with serperate content, just like adventures and dungeons, I'm sure there would still be complaints that the "real" content was still out of reach.
 
An ingame community doenst just happen, players have to build it over time. In my experience, It's best to let the player form thier groups and communities, not have the game do it for you.	
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World bosses moved into weekly "box raids" would make the world feel empty
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I hate getting dragged into these threads but this is just ridiculous.
 
Officially WoD had two tiers but it was essentially three.
 
WoD did fail not due to too many difficulties but due to the only thing to do was raiding.
 
Multiple difficulties use the same assets except they tune the damage and maybe remove some mechanics for the hardest difficulty. The hardest difficulties are harder to balance because they are less forgiving.
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			The only problem I've ever had with LFR, is that in WoW they added a difficulty level of raiding that was very very very simplistic, and if you just raid for story, you have zero reason to try and do raids normally and work for it. (I fell into this cycle myself, quit my raids, and just did LFR to see story  etc.) In FFXIV.. really they didn't nerf the actual hard stuff to much, and they usually keep the top tier of Primals, and hard mode raids away from their LFR. So they do it better than WoW in that regard. Though the normal version of it's current Raid content )Alexander and Void Ark.) is pretty simplistic.
			
				
	Edited November 30, 2015 by War Siren	
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			The sad thing about this thread (and all others like it) is that many don't seem to actually understand the issue at hand or its larger implication for MMO gaming.  My hats off to those who do and are still willing to put in the effort.  Its not easy to have logical arguments ignored or countered with fallacies, circular logic, false causality, strawman arguments, etc.  	
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The sad thing about this thread (and all others like it) is that many don't seem to actually understand the issue at hand or its larger implication for MMO gaming.  My hats off to those who do and are still willing to put in the effort.  Its not easy to have logical arguments ignored or countered with fallacies, circular logic, false causality, strawman arguments, etc.  
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tl:dr 
 
I'm fine with lfr if its just a tool to form pugs to then go raiding.
I dont want something like WoWs raidfinder with lowwwwwwwwwwwwwwww difficulty raids in Wildstar, no need for that crap.
			
				
	Edited November 30, 2015 by furoflo	
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tl:dr 
 
I'm fine with lfr if its just a tool to form pugs to then go raiding.
I dont want something like WoWs raidfinder with lowwwwwwwwwwwwwwww difficulty raids in Wildstar, no need for that crap.
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I don't want to sound pessimistic, but I imagine if people started pugging the current raids unmodified via LFR you'd see nothing but complaints about them everywhere until they either nerf the difficulty or everyone stops using LFR.
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I don't want to sound pessimistic, but I imagine if people started pugging the current raids unmodified via LFR you'd see nothing but complaints about them everywhere until they either nerf the difficulty or everyone stops using LFR.
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And that brings us right back to the issue many of us have with LFR as automatic matchmaking.
 
If they introduced a LFR list that allowed people to manually form groups, maybe even across servers, to do the current raids I think it would be a wonderful addition and might help defeat the roster boss that keeps a lot of people locked out from raiding.
 
However if they introduced LFR as the queue up and be automatically matched with 19 other people deal we've seen used in, for instance, WoW it leads to complaints, frustration and ultimately a nerf to/the introduction of the LFR difficulty.
 
Just look at the drama already taking place in dungeons because of the wonderful people the queue sometimes throws together, then try to project that picture to raids.
 
tl;dr: Tools that make forming raid groups easier are perfectly fine, automatic matchmaking is not.
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I'd be fine with LFR as it's teh only way in WoW I've been able to see that part of the story, even though I really wanna do normals and get teh better looking gear. But I'd rather it be handeled like SWTOR's Group Finder.
 
I finally got up the nerve to try out an Operation a month back. I had gotten myself as adequately geared as I could before I ran of comms/crystals and I decided to go do Terror from Beyond (i think the minimal requirement right now is like...ilvl 208/9?). I sat in queue for a while, probably about..an hour or two before a group was made?
 
We did well enough until on of the tanks left us after he got the last piece of gear he needed for his set bonus (made up a story about leaving cause a client called him, but one of the group members had put him on her friends list and saw him off playing around on Odessen). So we had to wait a short bit for a new tank. We wiped a few times on the trash because the new area had those towers you had to kill first before you tackled the mobs, but once we two newbies (me and this Trooper) got it down, we blasted through.
 
The only real hard part of the Op was the Gree matrix/computer thingie bit (before the big boss anyway). I got a bit lost in trying to find the computer console that let the generators/server/what ever those things were be unshielded so we could DPS them down and bring in the second phase (the first part with the color coordination, second with the huge droid). One of our tanks got impatient and basically told us flat out he had no time or paticence to teach newbies and promptly left.
 
Now THAT is one of the biggest reasons I have yet to gear for and enter normal raids in WoW and other games. The complete and utter disinterest and disrespect people have to teach newbies who WANT to learn the raids. We end up getting the short end of the stick and basically hop back into LFR (as far as WoW is concerned) because no one wants to teach us in Normals and then proceeds to mock us and leave us and the group falls apart and then they list ridiculous requirements that we can't meet...just to do *cupcake*ing Normals. And yeah, it's easy to join a guild in WoW, but I admit that I am picky and I want a chill group, but unless they advertise right, most guilds are shit. So more times than not, I end up not in one. Which sucks.
 
Anywho, we got a paticent tank, I found the computer module, we got through the second to last boss with minimal difficulty and made it to the end (new things and intense situations can leave me a bit disoriented before i calm down, so i almost always screw up first time out, but i pay attention to things and i usually get them right the second time). Big bad was hard to beat, but we downed him after...three tries? Partly because the Trooper kept hitting the boss and not the tentacles, though tbf, it's REALL REALLY easy to target the boss as opposed to the tentacles because he's RIGHT THERE, EVERYWHERE. But, we downed him, finally. And I do know we had a harder time of it because me and the Trooper were of a lower ilvl than everyone else, BUT, we learned the mechanics and took him down. That tank has my eternal gratitude for not storming off after the second wipe and chewing us out for being the lowest geared and having such low DPS compared to everyone else. Which is something I am working on with that character and I hope to group again on another Ops run in the future.
 
In short, as you play through SWTOR, you can gather up plenty of green crystals to get yourself geared for end game content and to get you started for Story Mode Ops. And dailies on the various lvl 50+ planets can give you blue crystals and some purple crystals, to give you a headstart on the better gear. It's hard (you spend a lot just buying mods to mod out your basic orange gear), but you get there. And you can basically LFR to do it. But they don't dumb it down. If you WANT to do the harder modes, you HAVE to go to fleet and wait around and advertise that you want to do them. But as far as being able to see the story content without sacraficing the basic normal challenge, SWTOR did it best.
 
I haven't gotten very far in FFXIV to know what their's is like, but I've heard it's better than WoW's, which makes me believe that it may be similar to how SWTOR did it.
 
I feel Blizzard had the right idea in order to get newbies and casuals into raiding, but they gated the updated gear behind the upgrade costs (those *cupcake*ing crystals on draenor) and you don't really start getting any kind of set bonuses UNTIL you enter the raids. SWTOR gives you that headstart on purple gear that you buy with basic comms/green crystals. AND SWTOR gives you alternative ways to get better gear with better crystals that will let you get into the standard and harder Ops so you can get the chance to get the tokens to get even BETTER gear. WoW isn't quite the same and I feel they are hurting for it.
 
I'm a casual player. I don't hop into a raid each week. I usually like playing alts and leveling them and picking a main that I try and do the other stuff on. And SWTOR is one the better games for that, despite my issues with their refusal to do anymore class quest chapters and consolidate everything down into one main story. But they at least tried to make the raiding easier for casuals to get into with making them stupidly easy.
 
If Wildstar can pull that off, then I say, hats off to them and I'd totally get my characters to max level and start gearing them (especially if they implement alternate ways to get better gear to get even BETTER gear).	
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In other words, you want LFR but aren't willing to make a case for it and instead chose to use a lot of words to say nothing.
 
This isn't something decided by logic, or at least from the player perspective it isn't. Most games that go this route blow it. As much as I like the Wildstar team, I'd really prefer they get their act together on the things we have, instead of chasing the tiger on a feature that almost certainly won't be the magic bullet people in favor seem to think. There are better ways to keep the playerbase happy, and at the same time not compromise the design goals they've already spent 2 years trying to fine tune.
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Nope, got me completely wrong.  LFR is whats wrong with (and killing) the MMO genre.  The shift towards viewing gamers as a commodity that can be milked rather than a primary customer is also a huge issue but this isn't the time or place for that discussion.  
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Nope, got me completely wrong.  LFR is whats wrong with (and killing) the MMO genre.  The shift towards viewing gamers as a commodity that can be milked rather than a primary customer is also a huge issue but this isn't the time or place for that discussion.  
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now people resub when a new content patch hits and they complete everything added in a week or two
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