Rise of Azshara Developer Insights with Ion Hazzikostas

That doesn't answer why it ruins it for you. LFR gear is terrible and gives no reputable achievements. By choosing to play solo, LFR players are getting the worst rewards. How does someone doing LFR ruin things for you? Do you simply not want them to be able to see that content in any way or form?

The last part is where I answer that, the gear / achievements are basically irrelevant. It's more about how you can experience content while playing the game like a single player RPG which discourages stuff like communities forming.

This is demonstrably wrong because serious raiders will always go for the higher difficulty levels. Someone who actually intends to raid will never be satisfied with LFR (if they are, then they were never serious in the first place). There are arguably more raiding guilds than ever before, and competition among them is fierce. How does LFR even remotely affect any of that?

At the higher level such as yourself (raiding mythic or even just raiding with your guild) this may be true but I'm talking about casual players. From their point of view (and again this is anecdotal from my experience with friends / people I know so take it with a grain of salt) why play a higher difficulty that makes you go through the trouble of assembling a group and working together with people when you can already experience the whole thing by just entering a queue and basically running through it like a single player RPG? Whereas before even if you didn't make it far (I'm also one of those people who rarely raided in the past / definitely never made it to the final boss of any raid) if you wanted to experience the content you would have to pug (or join a casual guild).

When you lower the bar for minimum entry it makes that, and what's required for it, become the norm for how content is experienced by the masses (aka casual players) and what people are expected to do for it. So you end up with a situation where the normal thing to do is just ignore people and enter queues to experience content because that's the easiest / fastest way to do it, which is the reason for my point about how people need to be encouraged to actually communicate / work together to experience content otherwise they won't actually do it and you end up with a MMO where the casual player just plays it like a single player game.

Just to clarify, the issue (in my eyes) with LFR has nothing to do with gear or achievements, it's solely about how it contributes to making a less social game which admittedly is of varying importance to some people (some people don't really care how social the average player is with one another whereas for a casual like myself it's what I care about most in an MMO)

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