There’s been an incredible amount of heated debate on the World of Warcraft forums where two factions have essentially created two stances around terms of LFR and the notion of “welfare epics.” The issue here is that one group (also known as “casuals”) are the ones that, of course, want these items while the other group (also labeled as “hardcores”) want the end of LFR and the supposed hand-me-downs of gear to the casual groups. The bottom line is that LFR and the gear drops from LFR (nor those you can purchase from venders) are not going anywhere from Blizzard’s viewpoint. This blog will attempt to discuss why neither will be removed.
Quite possibly, one of the chief bread and butter products of World of Warcraft (and many other MMORPGs) are raids. Raids consist of large groups of people who form to take down bosses. They often times represent so-called “end game content” where people who have managed to successfully level up their toons have an option to participate in this form of content. A lot of time and effort go into developing the mechanics, graphics and environment of raids, where companies like Blizzard see as ways to continue to get players to participate in the game once they hit their maximum level for a given patch/expansion, since leveling stops. Instead of progression through leveling, the game becomes progression through raiding and is measured typically through the content that a player can down in these raiding bosses for a given period date.
Naturally, high end raiding is very competitive, where top guilds from around the world try to hit world first or server first for various categories. Other guilds might use raiding as a form of self-progression in demonstrating their abilities as well as seeing raiding as a form of a social event. At any rate, raid bosses in general are designed to offer a degree of challenge as the mechanics require a lot of coordination, patience and time allotment to successfully beat.
Part of raiding and progression involves receiving gear through downing a boss. The gear that drops is random and forces players to return to better their characters and remaining competitive. Thus, the idea of farming bosses plays a key role in how the game creates an artificial barrier in content consumption, which, of course, provides companies like Blizzard to stretch out content while developing new content and/or fixing existing content. Not to mention just sitting around and collecting hefty dues from people who do this form of a grind month-to-month.
Prior to LFR, you pretty much had to belong to a raiding guild in order to obtain gear and progress further into the game. Depending on your server, this process could be easy or incredibly difficult. Take low population servers as an example where people might have an impossible time finding the people with the ability and schedule to handle regular raiding. While you can probably find good skilled players on any server, finding equally competent players on a low population server at a certain time might be frustrating, causing certain realms to perhaps have no progression whatsoever.
On top of that, because of the time and skill requirements for raiding, a lot of these guilds would create barriers to entry such as enforcing a certain level of skill, ability and history in order to participate. And even for those successful enough to join such a guild, there is no guarantee that they can participate in raids. Yet even more distressing can be guild drama where people might argue over loot, raid participation, people who have problems handling raid encounters, etc. In these cases, without the ability to progress oneself in some meaningful way, people would end up quitting, feeling that there is no real purpose in being able to experience new content or improving their characters somehow.
Enter LFR and “welfare epics.”
Since patch 4.3 LFR was introduced as a means to allow anyone to participate, using only a toon’s ilvl and the occasional progression status as requirements. It is the ultimate pugging tool, pooling from as many realms as possible to fill in a group algorithmically. At the same time, in order to allow for completion LFR was designed as an “easy” version for raiding as certain mechanics might be missing from a fight, hit points and damage lowered and making many encounters doable in 1-2 tries. The idea here is simple: given that random people are grouped together, attempt to minimize the frustration and allow a successful rate of moving forward given a certain level of effort.
Part of the idea here was to allow for people who normally could not raid or those who had various issues with raiding to move through content. Since a huge portion of the game is designed around raiding, it would only make sense for Blizzard to ensure that it could appeal to a broad enough audience that they are spending tremendous resources on.
Yet to sweeten the pot, Blizzard added reasonable gear drops that were slightly less powerful than their more difficult level counterparts. By doing this, Blizzard has worked a way in which to create an incentive for continuous raiding at the LFR level for this new audience. In short, getting people to play the game the company is spending resources on. People who wanted to fully gear their toons would still farm these LFR instances to get valor and pieces and that situation could easily take months as the rates for drops were set fairly low and mostly random.
To make matters more interesting and complex, with newer LFR instances coming out such as Heart of Fear, Terrace of Endless Spring and Throne of Thunder, we have minimal ilvl/gear requirements to enter on top of making previous raids (or sections) a prerequisite. Again, Blizzard sets up numerous barriers so that content isn’t consumed too quickly and creates a subliminal (or perhaps even not-so-subliminal) desire for people to continue pushing and paying for the game.
Hardcores though will complain about letting these so-called casuals receive similar rewards, something the hardcores believe should be earned. Admittedly, I will say that there is some level of truth to the ideas behind what the intentions of the hardcore gamers might say. The problem though is that the design of World of Warcraft is, in truth, not a very good one in that you have a system that depends on the notion of farming. Progress in this game is like molasses and not very gratifying overall. It’s main requirements are time and patience for dealing with the grinding and that aspect is extremely controversial on an individual basis. I believe a lot of people do not want to devote their lives to a single game but still want to enjoy it on occasion. And even in this instance, the time and patience requirements are pretty stringent at best.
At any rate, I doubt that Blizzard will change this model of World of Warcraft as it’s one of the things that probably keeps the game alive, despite the engine starting to age badly. Yet in order for them to even maintain the non-hardcore audience, they pretty much would have to continue to cater towards a certain level of effort and time requirement so that people feel rewarded enough to continue playing. And that’s why neither LFR nor “welfare epics” won’t be going away in the near future.
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