The Eye of Eternity with a vanilla female orc boss is “epic”?

1. The 25 person model is more forgiving, as there are more players to pull the weight of less skilled players. If my memories serves, they mentioned this in an interview.

2. I personally believe this has helped appease the dps masses, as the queue times are shorter for them. 25 person raids require a higher ratio of dps to tank, and therefor more can be fit in per queue.

It’s simply the first raid in a long time where there’s been an appropriate ramp up of difficulty from start to finish, and I think that’s weirded a few people out.

Personally, I think they’ll really hit the sweet spot in MoP, with Challenge modes. This way, at max level I can:

-Enjoy simpler, faster Heroics on my alts, not worrying about an unbalanced PuG since I’ll be able to help make up for it, AND
-Have tough, gear-normalized challenge runs with my guildies when I want something tougher.

LFR I was actually skeptical about, I admit. But it seems-well, after the first couple weeks, anyway-to actually be successful so far. I think it’s great for those people who just want to see the content, and for myself, again, for alts.

I do understand the worry about casual raiding guilds, however. Time will tell there, but I think casual raid guilds and possibly some more 25 mans will take this hit.

Speaking of 25s, my own personal QQ lately is simply that 25 man guilds are really going the way of the dinosaur. Some old 25s went to 10 for simple logistical reasons. Some old 25s went into several 10s simply because they had the people but preferred 10s but wanted the same difficulty. I’m actually really cool with these. However, the ones that make me sad are the 25s that went 10s because it’s easier to get 10 skilled people together for the same loot and achievements now-which makes me wonder how many people actually raided 25s because they liked them. We’re the last full-on 25 man left on our server to my knowledge, and since Hordeside population is dwindling, and the ones there are happy in their 10s, recruitment is all but dried up for it.

What really hit the nail home for me was seeing the top guild race this tier-the majority of the top 100 kills have been 10-HC…and I really don’t think 75-80 of the top 100 guilds got members suspended for LFR exploits(unless it was that excessive?) telling me that even some of the top of the crop are going to 10s. I’ve absolutely nothing against 10 mans by the way, and I even like certain things more about them-but I just like big raids in general.

I’d say people who are against any kind of inducement for grouping/ forming communities are also just as elitist in their way. That’s the problem with big multiplayer games, lots of interest groups among players, few of whom are willing to compromise.

I want to see content, I want to raid but I don’t want to have to deal with all the ridiculousness that’s associated with raiding. I don’t want to have to tolerate a bunch of asshats or schedule my week around raid night to be able to do stuff. The vast majority of the playerbase has always been capable of raiding. It’s not really that hard. The issue has always been jumping through the hoops to get there. LFR has removed the final hoop and SWOTOR better do the same thing by at least the second patch.

I’ve also come to the realisation that a lot of the people who complain about the loss of ‘community’ are advocating a similar form of elitism to the people complaining about the lost exclusivity of raiding. But their advantage comes in the term of being a long term player or being in a large guild rather than time spent raiding.