My thinking about Alex normal/savage. Issue IMHO inside

[Velhart]

Raiders in WoW will tell you that raiding is as good as it's ever been. It's the rest of the game that's suffering.

snip

Sorry if I did not explain myself correctly. The quality of the Normal/Heroic raids in WoD are still miles above what other MMO developers make. I speak of the structure, not the raids themselves. This is an argument on adding an easier mode to raids. Its not the end of the world that LFR exists, it just decreased some values raiding has. I say that and it is subjective, but that is just how I look at it from my perspective, rather if it is successful or not. I apologize, maybe saying destroyed was over excessive.

Except that it's completely factual. The majority of the people who run Raid Finder difficulty in WoW (especially now that they've removed almost all the non-story incentives from it) are people who aren't interested in organized raiding. They never have been, they never will be, and it doesn't matter what you do or what incentives you add to organized raiding, they're never going to make that transition.

Go back and look at any of the graphs of participation levels in organized raiding content that MMO-Champion.com has put out over the years. Raid Finder's increased the total exposure of the population to raids, but has done little to nothing to increase or decrease the organized raiding participation.

That does not mean you should not be trying to. Just because a person is not interested does not mean you should not be promoting all the content the game has to offer to them. Sure some cannot be convinced, but if a developer is not trying to create that incentive or not encouraging you to try the content, then it becomes more their fault than the user.

I am not saying that an easy mode does not work in theory. Its hard for me to explain without going paragraphs about it, but in short, there are certain elements to raids that are earned through the challenge of it, making what you earn have more of a reward factor like the story for instance. Each player has their own preference, but when you add things like a story and its easily obtained just by doing effortless content and not taking the time to earn it like BCoB before, then the value of it drops and why I say that it decreases the value of the raids. How much the value decreases depends on the player, but to me, it drops a lot.

That's a noble goal in theory, but it simply doesn't work in practice. Go look over any of Ghostcrawler/Greg Street's comments on it over the years on twitter. Blizzard found (especially in early Cataclysm, with the heroic dungeon difficulty at the time) that if you raise the bar and try to force people to come up to meet it, most people will just quit and go find something else where the bar is at a comfortable level for them.

That's even more true when you have a situation like the current one, where there's simply nothing that even comes close to bridging the gap between the hardest content outside of raiding (Ravana Extreme) and the start of raiding (Faust).

I wouldn't argue it, but again, does not mean you should not be upholding yourself to these standards. If the charts show that people are not getting any incentive to build themselves into harder content, then they need to go to the drawing board and find a way to. Of course you do not want to force people to do this content, but at the same time you want to give them reasons to. More like encouraging if anything.

If we had Easy > Normal > Hard in FFXIV, while I don't agree with the structure, it would at least give that bridge. However FFXIV is simply Easy > Hard and this is the main problem that developers need to look at.