LFR "difficulty" - are you serious!??

This subject has been discussed extensively on other threads, setting the perfect difficulty level for LFR is a very tricky thing to accomplish.

When you enter a LFR raid you never know what will be the average skill level of those 25 players, good communication is usually very hard to accomplish, there’s always players not listening, there might be more than 1 person trying to lead, different tactics might become conflicting, etc…

There are just too many things we have to take into account; you just can’t expect LFR to have a linear decrease in difficulty from Normal mode.

For example, if you get 25 experienced (in normal mode) skilled players that don’t know each other joined together by LFR, they won’t have the same raiding experience as if they were raiding with their own guild groups, even though they are able to complete raids in normal mode with their own guilds, they might end up taking a very long time to adjust to each other and face several wipes if LFR had the same difficulty as normal mode.

What I’m saying is, if we raise the difficulty too much, due to the nature of the random grouping system, most raids will end up with excessive wipes, players frequently leaving, constant queuing to find replacements, and just an overall bad and tedious experience. Sure, every once in a blue moon, the right group of players would be put together and would have a great raid, but if that happens only 1 out of 10 times that’s not something we aim for with LFR, it wasn’t designed to appeal to those players, for that you have normal and heroic mode.

The raid encounters need to take into account not only the skill level of the average raid but also the fact that these raids are usually made up of players that don’t know each other and the inevitable lack of communication and coordination that it implies.
Certain Boss abilities on normal mode are built around the assumption that there’s enough coordination in those raid groups to overcome certain obstacles. This same assumption can’t be applied to LFR, that’s why sometimes we have to simply remove certain Boss abilities instead of just tuning them down, some abilities can only be either on or off, without anything that you can actually scale up or down.

I realize that these first LFR encounters might feel a bit too easy to some of you, but I think that the explanation for that also lies within that very same sentence; they’re the “first bosses” of the “first part” of LFR.
Let’s wait and see how the difficulty of LFR encounters progresses in the near future, if the overall feeling of the community is that the difficulty needs to be raised, we’ll make sure to pass that info along to the developers and if they happen to feel the same way about it, I’m sure they’ll be happy to adjust it.

11/10/2012 13:05Posted by Retarjoe

Could you maybe answer the question on why LFR doesn't share a lockout with the Normal raids?

This is actually something we might consider for the future.
There are quite a few logistical issues that we would need to sort out before we could apply such a change though. At the moment developers simply have to put their efforts into higher priority tasks and we don’t currently have a plan for this, but it might happen someday, it’s definitely not out of the realm of possibilities.

We would also like to see how LFR is used, perceived and viewed by the players during these next few weeks because the only basis for comparison that we have for LFR is DS, which is a completely different beast, not only the circumstances surrounding Cataclysm are extremely different from the ones in MoP, but LFR itself has also changed quite a bit.