Can we just have the Wrath of the Lich King Raiding Scheme?

[Fendred]

It's simple really. By dumbing down fights so much in LFR that even a 3 year old could do it, players were preconditioned to think that its ok to stand in fire, its ok to not interrupt "1 shot moves", its ok to do terrible dps or afk and still win the fight. If this were in the case in isolation it would be fine for the most part, but many players after clearing LFR went on to do normal and heroic raids, and carried these thoughts with them. Then when they failed, they went to the blizzard forums and QQed about raids being too hard when it was the same all along and the problem actually lay with them.

Yeah, it definitely was an issue. However, the issue that I'm trying to address with my suggestion is a bit different. Before we had a lot of LFG tools, doing dungeons meant communicating a lot with other players. This eventually grew the hardcore community that all of these other games keep trying to grab. To succeed at growing hardcore players locally, the game must reward players for putting together groups and slowly increase the challenge over time. The game would thus benefit tremendously by having an entry level raid that requires that kind of socialization. The transition from looking for group tools to a true raiding challenge is too hard a wall for new players, and so the game's local raiding community is very slow to grow in comparison to the elder gamers who come from elsewhere (who make up the bulk of the raiders).

Just as an example, back in vanilla WoW, if you stood in Orgrimmar or Iron Forge, you would see people asking for a raid group or teams advertising for raiders on a daily basis. The difference between FFXIV and WoW Vanilla end game community was that this phenomena continued far into its three year life and only got rekindled by Burning Crusade. In FFXIV, its gone almost silent, and you'd be lucky to see such advertisement once a week. In WoW, the process of getting to end game caused players to grow strong social circles and gain confidence through successive victories of increasing difficulty with the same group of people. In FFXIV, what we saw were the arrival of veteran raiders who hit max level, but few that are home grown.