Guild Wars 2

Lord Kuru.3685:

Nokaru.7831:

Are you willing to give up content you care about for this?

They’re asking for easy mode because they aren’t getting any content. There’s nothing to give up.

He’s talking about future content. Would people still be okay if raid story mode will delay new fractals by at least another 2 months?

Nokaru.7831:

Just a question: For all of you who keep asking “Just make an easy mode,” who exactly do you expect to build this? I would not want the raid team to dedicate even one second of time to this task since I’d prefer they keep building their raid bosses. Are you willing to give up content you care about for this?

Because content for 80% of players is >>>>> content for 10%. Simple.

Rednik.3809:

Nokaru.7831:

Just a question: For all of you who keep asking “Just make an easy mode,” who exactly do you expect to build this? I would not want the raid team to dedicate even one second of time to this task since I’d prefer they keep building their raid bosses. Are you willing to give up content you care about for this?

Because content for 80% of players is >>>>> content for 10%. Simple.

No it’s not. Otherwise we wouldn’t get things like certain harder jumping puzzles, dungeon paths, higher level fractals, SAB (I doubt 80% of the population liked it, especially TM), WvW, PVP and so on and so on.

Releasing content only for some kind of majority leads to a boring, stale and uninteresting game.

maddoctor.2738:

Releasing content only for some kind of majority leads to a boring, stale and uninteresting game.

Not releasing content for majority leads to a dead game.

SlyDevil.3952:

Did you know the existence of a story mode in dungeons reduced the total number of people who would choose to play the explorable mode after?

No, i didn’t. Source plz?

maddoctor.2738:

Releasing content only for some kind of majority leads to a boring, stale and uninteresting game.

Concentrating on content for small minorities leads to a game where majority of players have nothing to do.

Astralporing.1957:

maddoctor.2738:

Releasing content only for some kind of majority leads to a boring, stale and uninteresting game.

Concentrating on content for small minorities leads to a game where majority of players have nothing to do.

Who said anything about releasing only content for the minority? And besides if you split these “minorities” and release content for each one of them, you will end up releasing content for a great percentage of your playerbase. The mistake is to focus only on one thing, just because they are called “the majority” and neglect every other aspect of the game because “reasons”.

Anet made the decision to do raids. I don´t necessarily understand why, but they are a reality.

I can understand that people who like these kind of stuff are happy now. But I also hope that the same people understand that the stuff we other people got was not that exciting or even numerous after HoT.

Chinese new year is not a viable content, it is a glorified mini game. And it is a 1:1 copy of last year, hardly exciting or new.
Shatterer update is something for the casual, I gladly admit that.

Had a crazy idea.

Say every two hours we open Spirit Vale up for the zerglings to roll through. With no rewards so they can experience the story.

Good: Everyone gets a kill
Bad: Well its zerglings
Funny: I would love to see all the zerglings crowded together on Sabbath’s Platform when the flamethrower goes off.

It already is for most “skill levels”. You just need to put in effort to learn the mechanics of the bosses.

Malediktus.9250:

It already is for most “skill levels”. You just need to put in effort to learn the mechanics of the bosses.

This………….

There’s 0 need for “Difficulty Settings”. It’s designed to be hard content, if you don’t like that there something like 40 zones worth of easier content +dungeons and Fractals for easy mode.

Stop trying to break what doesn’t need fixing.

Please do not add extra difficulties, the Raids are fine as they are. Do not bend to a few complainers who refuse to put any effort into the Raid.

Coulter.2315:

Please do not add extra difficulties, the Raids are fine as they are. Do not bend to a few complainers who refuse to put any effort into the Raid.

You mean like how Anet bent to the players who QQ’d for raids in the first place, or how they bent to the players who QQ’d about having to do map completion in WvW for a Legendary,

Anet probably wont make difficulty settings as it would be pretty hard to do id imagine, but having that attitude is what makes people push harder and complain more about the raids to begin with, like I said in another topic, the raid community cannot support this game alone, Anet needs to find balance, else they can sit back and watch all there hard work crumble as they go out of business.

Go read this

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/49p01e/why_arent_people_interested_in_raids/

They aren’t complaining about raids, but it gives good insight as to why people don’t want them.

Ok I Did It.2854:

the raid community cannot support this game alone

If they can support just that fraction of the dev team that work on the Raids then I don’t see a problem.

There’s been some recent discussion about making raids more convenient and approachable to players that currently feel alienated by the existing raids, either due to difficulty level above their skill, or inconvenience in forming and coordinating a group for them. Many people enjoy the raids in their current form, so I don’t believe the existing raids should be changed in any way, but I do think having alternative options would be a positive change.

An easy mode version of the raid would allow lower skilled/geared/un-meta players to experience the content without needing to be carried, and would allow those that don’t have the time or interest to spend forming a “meta” party and struggling through the content to just pop in, move through the raid in about the same time as a normal dungeon, and then get on to other activities.

For those that enjoy the hard mode raids, they would remain exactly as they are, and would remain by far the best way to earn the raid-centric rewards, so there would be no temptation for those who can do the hard mode raid to “just do the easy mode instead.” It would be like a trained surgeon deciding to just flip burgers instead. Of course, potentially raiders could run both, and since there is a weekly cutoff to how much raiding you can do, running both versions would give you slightly more max gains than just running hard mode currently does.

So here’s how I see it working:
1. Selecting the version. This shouldn’t take much developer work to implement. They already have plenty of methods of “choose what you want to do,” and I’m not sure which would be easiest to slot into the existing raids, but one of them must be a fairly trivial addition. They could use the vanilla dungeon “talk to an NPC to select path,” or the Fractals “on entering choose the path you want from a UI,” or the story mission “challenge mote” element, whatever is most convenient. This would activate the easy mode version (hard mode should probably remain default).

2. Designing the easy mode content. The actual mechanics and enemies would be identical to hard mode. No need for new animations, mechanics, anything. Everything you’d need to do in hard mode, you’d need to do in easy mode too. The only difference would be in the consequences of failure.

Effects that deal enough damage to OHKO almost any player, such as failing a lightning drop in Vale Guardian or wading into the poison on Slothazor, would instead just be normal damage, threatening, but not auto-wiping. You wouldn’t want to “stand in the fire,” but it wouldn’t be the end of the world either. This would encourage players to do the mechanics right, but would rarely lead to a party wipe if they screw it up from time to time. This would basically just be a numbers tweak, changing these effects from being “enough damage to wipe most players,” to “about half that or less.”

Enemy HP would also be toned down slightly, so that you wouldn’t need constant prime DPS in order to kill the boss within the timer, again, just taking an existing number and making it a slightly smaller number.

Breakbars would also likely need to be tuned down a bit, to require less coordination. Certain unique mechanics might also need to be more forgiving, like how with Slothazor’s white mushrooms, if you miss one then you don’t get another for a while, instead make it so that two spawn at a time, with the second being in a less advantageous position. Messing one up would be a set-back, but not likely to lead to a wipe.

The intended balance is that the hard mode raid should be comparable in difficulty and chance of failure to an average vanilla dungeon, or at worst a low-level Fractal.

3. Rewards. The easy mode raids would have a weekly lockout just like the hard mode, ideally not a shared one so that people could do both. Anything that drops from the hard mode could drop from easy mode, but at a much lower rate, perhaps 10-20% of the existing rates, meaning that on average an easy mode raider would need to complete the raid around 5-10 more times to get any drop reward than on hard mode (and keeping in mind that hard mode raiders could be doing both, giving them a bonus roll for the rare loot each week).

Current Spirit Vale bosses award 10, 14, and 18 shards respectively, 8 shards for the combat content in the maps, and up to 6 shards per failed attempt. My recommendation is that the easy mode versions would offer at least 3, 5, and 7 shards respectively, none for the non-boss portions, and none for a failed attempt. Ideally it would be a few more than that, up to 50% of the existing reward, but this would be enough. And again, players willing and able to do the hard mode could get these on top of their existing rewards.

4. If they want, as a further incentive for players to at least attempt the hard mode, they could make it so that you have to at least attempt the Vale Guardian on hard mode, say, ten times, in order to unlock the easy mode. Pretty much any group of players would be capable of that, and players would be able to get an idea of how it’s meant to work before deciding that easy mode is the only option for them.

Ultimately, I think this system would be more than fair to those who enjoy the existing raids, while opening the content up to a much larger portion of the playerbase as something they could reasonably do on a regular basis. I also believe that my proposal would require very minimal time for the developers, as most of the elements required are already existing in other parts of the game, ready to import, or simple number tweaks in a database, or at most a few timing changes on timed procs like mushroom spawns. Even the balance testing would not have to be terribly rigorous, since the hard part was in making sure that the hard mode was tuned against top-tier players. Just making it “easier” has much more room for error, and if they mess it up there is much less harm in just tweaking it again later.

So, does that work? Any issues that I haven’t considered or should we implement this sucker?

No thank you. The Raid is designed specifically to have a place for harder content, no one forces you to play it but if you have the right attitude you’ll be fine.

Dragging things down to the lowest common denominator with no reason to aspire to be better at the game is not good for the community or standards of play.

Putting dev time on nerfing current raid content is an annoying thing for you to suggest.

Asking for a way to grind rewards in easy mode is awful (in WoW, due to lockouts having separate rewards, people tried to do them all for loot and it caused burnout and will cause you and your easymode raiders to have to deal with people who just want the loot).

If you don’t like raids thats fine, stop trying to kitten with them, please.

I haven’t done any raids myself, but seeing other raids, there is no need for infantile mode for raids.

They are rather easy, and it’s only players who put restrictions on other players, mainly because they want to play elitist in an already casual game.

No thank you. The Raid is designed specifically to have a place for harder content, no one forces you to play it but if you have the right attitude you’ll be fine.

Then the easy mode raid is not for you, and nobody will require you to play it. This is for other players for whom your words do not ring true. It is not for you to judge these players.

Putting dev time on nerfing current raid content is an annoying thing for you to suggest.

As I made clear, I do not believe that this would take considerable dev time at all, maybe a few manhours in total, and if any dev would like to explain where I’m wrong in that then my ears are open, but vague “the devs could better spend their time elsewhere” could much more easily be applied to the entire raiding content if it remains in its current state.

Asking for a way to grind rewards in easy mode is awful (in WoW, due to lockouts having separate rewards, people tried to do them all for loot and it caused burnout and will cause you and your easymode raiders to have to deal with people who just want the loot).

I’m pretty sure everyone involved will just be in it for the loot, that’s sort of the point.

If you don’t like raids thats fine, stop trying to kitten with them, please.

I don’t like raids in their current form, but there are elements about them that I’d like to be able to enjoy, so I’m suggesting a way that I, and many other players, could do so. If that mode is not for you, then you don’t have to use it, but having it available as an option would in no way hurt you.

They are rather easy, and it’s only players who put restrictions on other players, mainly because they want to play elitist in an already casual game.

If you’d tried them, you would know that they are not nearly as easy as you make them out to be. They’re far from impossible, but they are by no means easy. An easier version of them would provide a useful function. Don’t think of it as “infantile mode,” think of it instead as if the default raid is the “Tribulation Mode” of SAB, which it pretty much is, and what is being requested is a “Normal Mode.” “Infantile mode” would be several steps below what I propose here.

isnt that how we got to the state we are in now? people refusing to learn because there was no need to…
i am thoroughly against an easy mode, it would take away motivation to actually get better

Goatjugsoup.8637:

isnt that how we got to the state we are in now? people refusing to learn because there was no need to…
i am thoroughly against an easy mode, it would take away motivation to actually get better

Doesn’t fractals have an “easy mode”? I thought they started at level one and progressed to level 50? Does having easy fractals stop people from going on to level 50 or do they all stay at level 1?

isnt that how we got to the state we are in now? people refusing to learn because there was no need to…
i am thoroughly against an easy mode, it would take away motivation to actually get better

If someone doesn’t have the motivation to get better, then they don’t need it. Some people are just content with where they are.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Goatjugsoup.8637:

isnt that how we got to the state we are in now? people refusing to learn because there was no need to…
i am thoroughly against an easy mode, it would take away motivation to actually get better

Doesn’t fractals have an “easy mode”? I thought they started at level one and progressed to level 50? Does having easy fractals stop people from going on to level 50 or do they all stay at level 1?

Do people get burned out of fractals and consider them content to be avoided except for Swamp and dailies? Lets not do this to raids please..

Ohoni.6057:

isnt that how we got to the state we are in now? people refusing to learn because there was no need to…
i am thoroughly against an easy mode, it would take away motivation to actually get better

If someone doesn’t have the motivation to get better, then they don’t need it. Some people are just content with where they are.

That’s fine but they should stay where they are without dragging Raids over to them, thanks.

Coulter.2315:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Goatjugsoup.8637:

isnt that how we got to the state we are in now? people refusing to learn because there was no need to…
i am thoroughly against an easy mode, it would take away motivation to actually get better

Doesn’t fractals have an “easy mode”? I thought they started at level one and progressed to level 50? Does having easy fractals stop people from going on to level 50 or do they all stay at level 1?

Do people get burned out of fractals and consider them content to be avoided except for Swamp and dailies? Lets not do this to raids please..

That has nothing to do with my question. His quote was saying that people won’t advance beyond ez mode if that was available.

With fractals, people at level 50 might be doing level 50 swamp, but they didn’t stay at level one and do level one swamp. If they’re doing the same fractal, that’s a reward and no new content issue. Not an “if there’s an ez mode, no one will go past ez mode” issue.

Ohoni.6057:

There’s been some recent discussion about making raids more convenient and approachable to players that currently feel alienated by the existing raids, either due to difficulty level above their skill, or inconvenience in forming and coordinating a group for them. Many people enjoy the raids in their current form, so I don’t believe the existing raids should be changed in any way, but I do think having alternative options would be a positive change.

An easy mode version of the raid would allow lower skilled/geared/un-meta players to experience the content without needing to be carried, and would allow those that don’t have the time or interest to spend forming a “meta” party and struggling through the content to just pop in, move through the raid in about the same time as a normal dungeon, and then get on to other activities.

For those that enjoy the hard mode raids, they would remain exactly as they are, and would remain by far the best way to earn the raid-centric rewards, so there would be no temptation for those who can do the hard mode raid to “just do the easy mode instead.” It would be like a trained surgeon deciding to just flip burgers instead. Of course, potentially raiders could run both, and since there is a weekly cutoff to how much raiding you can do, running both versions would give you slightly more max gains than just running hard mode currently does.

So here’s how I see it working:
1. Selecting the version. This shouldn’t take much developer work to implement. They already have plenty of methods of “choose what you want to do,” and I’m not sure which would be easiest to slot into the existing raids, but one of them must be a fairly trivial addition. They could use the vanilla dungeon “talk to an NPC to select path,” or the Fractals “on entering choose the path you want from a UI,” or the story mission “challenge mote” element, whatever is most convenient. This would activate the easy mode version (hard mode should probably remain default).

2. Designing the easy mode content. The actual mechanics and enemies would be identical to hard mode. No need for new animations, mechanics, anything. Everything you’d need to do in hard mode, you’d need to do in easy mode too. The only difference would be in the consequences of failure.

Effects that deal enough damage to OHKO almost any player, such as failing a lightning drop in Vale Guardian or wading into the poison on Slothazor, would instead just be normal damage, threatening, but not auto-wiping. You wouldn’t want to “stand in the fire,” but it wouldn’t be the end of the world either. This would encourage players to do the mechanics right, but would rarely lead to a party wipe if they screw it up from time to time. This would basically just be a numbers tweak, changing these effects from being “enough damage to wipe most players,” to “about half that or less.”

Enemy HP would also be toned down slightly, so that you wouldn’t need constant prime DPS in order to kill the boss within the timer, again, just taking an existing number and making it a slightly smaller number.

Breakbars would also likely need to be tuned down a bit, to require less coordination. Certain unique mechanics might also need to be more forgiving, like how with Slothazor’s white mushrooms, if you miss one then you don’t get another for a while, instead make it so that two spawn at a time, with the second being in a less advantageous position. Messing one up would be a set-back, but not likely to lead to a wipe.

The intended balance is that the hard mode raid should be comparable in difficulty and chance of failure to an average vanilla dungeon, or at worst a low-level Fractal.

3. Rewards. The easy mode raids would have a weekly lockout just like the hard mode, ideally not a shared one so that people could do both. Anything that drops from the hard mode could drop from easy mode, but at a much lower rate, perhaps 10-20% of the existing rates, meaning that on average an easy mode raider would need to complete the raid around 5-10 more times to get any drop reward than on hard mode (and keeping in mind that hard mode raiders could be doing both, giving them a bonus roll for the rare loot each week).

Current Spirit Vale bosses award 10, 14, and 18 shards respectively, 8 shards for the combat content in the maps, and up to 6 shards per failed attempt. My recommendation is that the easy mode versions would offer at least 3, 5, and 7 shards respectively, none for the non-boss portions, and none for a failed attempt. Ideally it would be a few more than that, up to 50% of the existing reward, but this would be enough. And again, players willing and able to do the hard mode could get these on top of their existing rewards.

4. If they want, as a further incentive for players to at least attempt the hard mode, they could make it so that you have to at least attempt the Vale Guardian on hard mode, say, ten times, in order to unlock the easy mode. Pretty much any group of players would be capable of that, and players would be able to get an idea of how it’s meant to work before deciding that easy mode is the only option for them.

Ultimately, I think this system would be more than fair to those who enjoy the existing raids, while opening the content up to a much larger portion of the playerbase as something they could reasonably do on a regular basis. I also believe that my proposal would require very minimal time for the developers, as most of the elements required are already existing in other parts of the game, ready to import, or simple number tweaks in a database, or at most a few timing changes on timed procs like mushroom spawns. Even the balance testing would not have to be terribly rigorous, since the hard part was in making sure that the hard mode was tuned against top-tier players. Just making it “easier” has much more room for error, and if they mess it up there is much less harm in just tweaking it again later.

So, does that work? Any issues that I haven’t considered or should we implement this sucker?

It sounds good in theory. In practice, however, there are unintended consequences.

They did this over in WoW and it turned out to be a terrible idea, in my opinion. The problem is that each tier of difficulty essentially becomes “training” for the next tier in much the same way that players expect random pickups to prove they’ve completed the content and know what they’re doing in the current scenario. The result: burnout.

As a former raid leader and guild master from WoW, I can tell you that burnout is the death of all raiding guilds. Everyone puts in the time (so much time!). Then, for whatever reason, you lose a core raider to burnout, to other guilds, to internal conflict, to life, or what have you.

You find a replacement, but usually end up having to carry them as they learn to work within a system that has been fine-tuned with hours upon hours of practice. That’s obviously bad for morale, particularly if the change results in the raid having to take a step backward in progress. The danger of losing players to burnout increases.

When WoW made the decision to essentially force us through several iterations of the same content with varying levels of difficulty, it exacerbated the problem. Now you have to vault the psychological wall of running easy mode versions of the same content and only then reaching what we call the “progression” stage, where the danger of burnout is highest.

You simply don’t have to deal with any of this in casual 5-man content. If a player drops group, you and 9-39 other players didn’t invest hours of effort with that player, so it’s really not as big a deal. You also don’t have to worry about your progress resetting every time that happens or the resulting cascade of players leaving (I’ve seen plenty of solid raiding guilds go out this way! Even “best on server” guilds!).

I know. It’s ridiculous. But that’s what raiding is. If you’re the raid leader, it feels much more like an obligation than a game. You have so many people relying on you, investing their time to accomplish a shared goal. You can’t let them down!

I’m not an elitist. That whole aspect of raiding is something I never tolerated well. I’m simply attempting to illustrate the difference between casual and hardcore content. I realize they don’t play well together, and I wish there were a way around it. But I’m not convinced that attempting to blend the two in this way is wise.

I think your complaint is valid. If I knew of a way to make it work, I think everyone should be able to enjoy raiding. The encounters really can be a lot of fun, and there’s nothing quite like the sense of accomplishment you get when you put in the time with your guild and after days or even weeks of failure you finally succeed!

I just can’t agree with this particular solution. I think it has a real chance of ruining raid content for the very people it was intended for.

Coulter.2315:

Ohoni.6057:

isnt that how we got to the state we are in now? people refusing to learn because there was no need to…
i am thoroughly against an easy mode, it would take away motivation to actually get better

If someone doesn’t have the motivation to get better, then they don’t need it. Some people are just content with where they are.

That’s fine but they should stay where they are without dragging Raids over to them, thanks.

Nope, it’s only fair, since raiders refused to stay in their raiding games, and instead decided to drag GW2 over to them.

Do people get burned out of fractals and consider them content to be avoided except for Swamp and dailies? Lets not do this to raids please..

People get burned out on any content. What makes you think that easy mode raids would cause people to burn out more than the existing ones? If anything this would lead to considerably more people raiding over time, since it would have a lower barrier to entry.

That’s fine but they should stay where they are without dragging Raids over to them, thanks.

Why? Nobody’s talking about touching the raids you enjoy, so leave that out of it, what’s the harm in providing additional content that would be more appealing to those players?

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Coulter.2315:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Goatjugsoup.8637:

isnt that how we got to the state we are in now? people refusing to learn because there was no need to…
i am thoroughly against an easy mode, it would take away motivation to actually get better

Doesn’t fractals have an “easy mode”? I thought they started at level one and progressed to level 50? Does having easy fractals stop people from going on to level 50 or do they all stay at level 1?

Do people get burned out of fractals and consider them content to be avoided except for Swamp and dailies? Lets not do this to raids please..

That has nothing to do with my question. His quote was saying that people won’t advance beyond ez mode if that was available.

With fractals, people at level 50 might be doing level 50 swamp, but they didn’t stay at level one and do level one swamp. If they’re doing the same fractal, that’s a reward and no new content issue. Not an “if there’s an ez mode, no one will go past ez mode” issue.

Which is the point I made above which can cause burnout (seen in fractals) and I have seen before (WoW and raid difficulties) and do not want that system damaging Raids that are doing so well – I highly recommend wing 2 btw if you haven’t tried yet.

We have something precious, Raids, and unlike WoW did I don’t want us going completely off the rails making easy modes that turned exciting and fun content into easy chore for the week.

It damages the community, burns people out, splits players up, drops player improvement and skill and causes so many people to play raids that Anet’s data gets all kittened up (Eg. Blizz think “oh people are all doing raids, that must mean they like them, lets design an expansion that only the raids are worth doing” .. WoD pops out .. “oooh.. all those poeple who were doing easy raids each week as a chore don’t actually like them” … you know the rest).

Keep Raids for the Raiders, you should give them a try I 100% support anyone wanting to try them but do not rip them down to easymode – the outcomes are pretty crap for everyone involved.

I am sorry LS3 is slow releasing but please don’t hurt us in your frustration.

I am not going to read that wall of text, because it likely boils down to the same arguments that have been made for an easy mode. None of which matter, because the raids aren’t as hard as people are making them out to be.

The only strict fight “DPS wise” is Gorseval, for your average group. This is not to say they aren’t challenging encounters, but the challenge lies in learning the fight. Once you do that the DPS comes naturally.

Additionally, easy modes don’t teach you properly. You wont know what’s fatal unless it’s actually fatal and so far only 2 attacks are actually fatal, Sabatha’s Flame Wall and Gorseval’s World Eater.

Let’s not even begin to talk rewards. Just no. Raids are supposed to be hard content, you want rewards work for it.

Gene Archer.8560:

Coulter.2315:

Ohoni.6057:

isnt that how we got to the state we are in now? people refusing to learn because there was no need to…
i am thoroughly against an easy mode, it would take away motivation to actually get better

If someone doesn’t have the motivation to get better, then they don’t need it. Some people are just content with where they are.

That’s fine but they should stay where they are without dragging Raids over to them, thanks.

Nope, it’s only fair, since raiders refused to stay in their raiding games, and instead decided to drag GW2 over to them.

Actually I was here the whole time, but glad to see “an eye for an eye” philosophy is still popular.. For a perceived wrong as well, just out of spite. Classy.

Which is the point I made above which can cause burnout (seen in fractals) and I have seen before (WoW and raid difficulties) and do not want that system damaging Raids that are doing so well – I highly recommend wing 2 btw if you haven’t tried yet.

Again, people WILL burn out on raids, and new people will come in to replace them, but nothing being suggested here has anything to do with that.

It damages the community, burns people out, splits players up, drops player improvement and skill and causes so many people to play raids that Anet’s data gets all kittened up

You exactly described the existing raids. Are you suggesting those should be removed?

Keep Raids for the Raiders, you should give them a try I 100% support anyone wanting to try them but do not rip them down to easymode – the outcomes are pretty crap for everyone involved.

Again, nobody is talking about reducing the existing raids in ANY way. they will be left 100% intact. This is a separate thing, an optional thing that you never need to touch if you don’t want to do them. A way for those people who can’t do the raids in their current form to be able to enjoy what elements of it they can manage. It has nothing to do with you.

The only strict fight “DPS wise” is Gorseval, for your average group. This is not to say they aren’t challenging encounters, but the challenge lies in learning the fight. Once you do that the DPS comes naturally.

People who succeed at things tend to get an overblown idea of how easy it is for everyone else. Note the people crowing about getting to Diamond undefeated. Rest assured that while it is not impossible, it IS as hard as most make it out to be, and if people do not feel that the existing raids are within their wheelhouse, they are right about that and you need to accept that.

If you feel comfortable excluding these people from raids for no other reason than that you want to exclude them, then fair enough, but don’t try to make it seem like this is in any sense for their benefit.

Additionally, easy modes don’t teach you properly. You wont know what’s fatal unless it’s actually fatal and so far only 2 attacks are actually fatal, Sabatha’s Flame Wall and Gorseval’s World Eater.

That’s not true at all. Any simple guide will tell you which attacks are ment to be fatal. If you’re playing easy mode, and get hit by Sabetha’s flame wall, taking maybe 50% damage + burning, you’ll realize that if this had been hard mode you’d be dead. If you manage to never let that happen, you’ll know you’d stand a chance in hard mode. Yes, players can choose to play sloppy if they want and just face-tank what they can, and that’s fine, that’s their choice. But they also have the opportunity to test themselves against the content, and do their best. The nice thing is, if they manage their best, they will know it, and even if other members of their team play sloppy and do less than perfectly, it won’t result in a wipe that would negate all the first player’s efforts.

Think of it like Golem MKII. You can just hang back and range him, or you can melee him down. You don’t have to melee him, and if you do, you can die a few times and it doesn’t actually cost you anything, but it’s still more fun to rush in and melee him, and actively avoid all the potential damage. I like that, but I would hate if they made it mandatory, and/or caused the event to fail if too many people got caught.

Coulter.2315:

Actually I was here the whole time,

And you dragged GW2 over to your raiding mentality instead of leaving it alone and letting it remain a non-raiding game.

Coulter.2315:

but glad to see “an eye for an eye” philosophy is still popular.. For a perceived wrong as well, just out of spite. Classy.

You want to talk about perceived wrongs? You percieve LFR as having been responsible for damage to the WoW raiding community that was never its fault. Everything that has happened to the raiding community in that game is the fault of the raiding community, and nobody else.

Gene Archer.8560:

Coulter.2315:

Actually I was here the whole time,

And you dragged GW2 over to your raiding mentality instead of leaving it alone and letting it remain a non-raiding game.

Coulter.2315:

but glad to see “an eye for an eye” philosophy is still popular.. For a perceived wrong as well, just out of spite. Classy.

You want to talk about perceived wrongs? You percieve LFR as having been responsible for damage to the WoW raiding community that was never its fault. Everything that has happened to the raiding community in that game is the fault of the raiding community, and nobody else.

You’re absolutely right because WoW was losing a crap ton of players before LFR was finally implemented in late 2011 and most of the raiders and pug groups were using any means possible to measure and judge people before allowing people into pugs during Wrath and early Cata. Most people that say LFR was a failure are tryhard midcore casuals who want someone else beneath them to keep their foot on and belittle them. I raided for 9 years in WoW and even have many Heroic/Mythic kills under my belt and raid leaded (raid lead and tanking right after getting hom from work is something I’ll never do again, I almost quit the game then, raids are easy, just leading them is the hard part btw) as a paladin/warrior tank for 3 years

Also, there have never been any numbers released about LFR damaging WoW or FFXIV so again, its mostly people with an axe to grind that make stuff up to support their weak arguments (if they even had that to begin with). FFXIV’s raids are all random queue accessible outside of savage mode and even some of their fights that anyone can access are harder than some GW2 raid bosses which is pretty funny. Its Anet just trying to keep hardcore cred for petty reasons like they did with dungeons not having a random option too (which IMO is what killed them really). GW2’s raids are way easier than FFXIV and WoW’s harder raids too btw.

So yeah, people keep citing WoW and FFXIV as dying because of their LFR options but those two MMOs have more players and are more successful than GW2. Odd that, I wonder how long Anet will keep the raid game up for the “hardcore” before they finally crack and cite them as a failure or add in an LFR option. I’ll come back if they do the latter as any new MMO that shys away from convenience for the sake of being cool and edgy isn’t for me anymore. 15+ years playing MMOs and 9 years of hardcore raiding was enough for me, easy mode or GTFO, boys.

Gene Archer.8560:

And you dragged GW2 over to your raiding mentality instead of leaving it alone and letting it remain a non-raiding game.

He did nothing of the sort. The developers did as they felt and rightly so that adding content for controlled slightly larger than average encounters would foster community growth. It has.

Unfortunately a very vocal minority, oddly enough the same minority who complained about dungeons are now complaining about raids.

This group is never satisfied because following this flow chart is too hard for them. Replace Speed Run with “Non-Casual”.

Or make the raids more easily accessible, you know… Make an actual Raid finder. The difficulty is fine but it’s a pain in the kitten to form a group, the LFG is a mess.

How about an easy-mode raid with no loot for those who just want to experience the story? I would appreciate that. I’m in a guild group and we’ve tried the first raid multiple times. It’s a lot of fun, but we haven’t got past the Vail Guardian yet. You see, I’m a huge fan of the lore of Guild Wars, so right now the only way for me to get the story is to spoil myself online. I know we’ll beat the raid with my guild eventually, but that could be months later. I would like to keep up with the story as it’s told and not be left behind.

TexZero.7910:

Gene Archer.8560:

And you dragged GW2 over to your raiding mentality instead of leaving it alone and letting it remain a non-raiding game.

He did nothing of the sort. The developers did as they felt and rightly so that adding content for controlled slightly larger than average encounters would foster community growth. It has.

Unfortunately a very vocal minority, oddly enough the same minority who complained about dungeons are now complaining about raids.

This group is never satisfied because following this flow chart is too hard for them. Replace Speed Run with “Non-Casual”.

“vocal minority”?
80% of the players play solo
90% dont raid at all
WHO is the vocal minority?

don’t worry too much with the story: it is all additional story, no main plot story, the story will pick up where we left it at the end of our personal story and Anet doesn’t expect all players to know what has happened in raids to be able to understand what is going to happen next

How about an easy-mode raid with no loot for those who just want to experience the story?

That would be better than nothing, but only barely, and that I don’t think would be worth their efforts, since it would take the same time and effort to produce, but no player is likely to ever do it more than once, it’d be less replayable even than story chapters, which you can grind out for some decent rewards.

No, it only makes sense for them to include reward enough to make them worth running. Less reward than the full raid so as to not make the full raid pointless, but rewards worthwhile enough that players would be interested in hitting the easy raid at least once a week if they weren’t capable of the hard mode. That would be worth their effort since it would be creating solid repeatable content for those players who cannot pass the current raid within their existing skill/time constraints.

don’t worry too much with the story: it is all additional story, no main plot story, the story will pick up where we left it at the end of our personal story and Anet doesn’t expect all players to know what has happened in raids to be able to understand what is going to happen next

It may be a separate story to the LW storyline, but it’s no less consequential. If you don’t want to care about it, then that’s your choice, but don’t try to tell others that they shouldn’t care.

TexZero.7910:

Thaddeus.4891:

TexZero.7910:

You must not be reading the same thread i am then, where in people are indeed asking for them to gut the raids by adding an easy mode.

ADDING an easy mode. You still have the normal mode, which is as hard as the current raid. The raid would still be 100% the same. There is just another mode that is easier with less reward.

Ever heard of subtraction by addition ?

That’s exactly what adding an Easy mode does.
Since you like to use games and game principals as examples i’ll use one you should be familiar with.

Have you ever wondered why as you climb in ranks for PvP your time to play becomes longer and longer ? It’s because as you climb the selection pool gets thinner and thinner. The same can be said in this case when add a mode to Raids which already has (if you believe the fantasy numbers) only 5% of the player base doing it.

Now does adding an easy mode actually add to people doing the current content ? No. Pretty straightforward.

It would add people to the current content as some of the less skilled could learn mechanics in easy mode and then move to normal difficulty. If people from normal mode would move to easy one, that’s a problem caused by rewards, not the difficulty itself.

Coulter.2315:

RyanCid.9270:

Yeah but with the easy mode you can learn how to play raid properly since the boss and the mechanics are the same

So you think people dodge boss attacks that don’t kill them? The reason people learn the mechanics is because they suffer when they don’t.

If none of the bosses’ attacks hurt you (being easy mode) you won’t learn.

We don’t need to split the Raid Team up… The Raid does not need an easy mode.

I found it way more time effective to spend some time on boss encounter using “easy mode”, ie tankish gear, that simply allowed me to learn the mechanics without wiping on that boss to a single attack. This is especially true when learning to solo some of the content as a single fail means a complete reset. Once I learned the animations and timings, going full dmg gear was easy.

Not saying everyone needs this but a lot people do. Not everyone’s skill is amazing and when there are other constraints added to investment to learn new stuff, a lot of these not so amazing players end up not learning at all and they stay from the harder content completely.

There is no need for any of this, especially if this “easy mode” takes resources and time from the Raid developers. I’d rather the Raid developers keep releasing content for those they are supposed to and not use their valuable time to make different versions of existing content. Would you be fine if the LS team takes on the Raid “easy mode” so LS3 takes even longer to be released?

Instead of adding Easy mode for the Raids they will do the more obvious things. Fix LFG tool so it’s actually working and is not a mess (coming in April if I recall?), let their teams focus on what they are doing best and release something for the more casual players.

Making Raids wasn’t a mistake, but not releasing anything aside for Raids was, if we had LS3 by now there wouldn’t be any issues. I do hope we get something like SAB in April.

Address the actual problem, the lack of meaningful content for a large part of the playerbase. Not the Raids.

Ohoni.6057:

How about an easy-mode raid with no loot for those who just want to experience the story?

That would be better than nothing, but only barely, and that I don’t think would be worth their efforts, since it would take the same time and effort to produce, but no player is likely to ever do it more than once, it’d be less replayable even than story chapters, which you can grind out for some decent rewards.

No, it only makes sense for them to include reward enough to make them worth running. Less reward than the full raid so as to not make the full raid pointless, but rewards worthwhile enough that players would be interested in hitting the easy raid at least once a week if they weren’t capable of the hard mode. That would be worth their effort since it would be creating solid repeatable content for those players who cannot pass the current raid within their existing skill/time constraints.

You’re basically saying that playing through any story content multiple times isn’t worth it if there’s no or little rewards attached.

Even if there would be an easymode, is it nescessary for it to be a farm for rewards? I don’t think so.

Plus what mad is saying above is right. The raid team should focus on raids, and living story should focus on making story available. If they have the resources to do so, then yes, i really would love to see the story more available to a bigger audience. But a tacked on scaled down version of raids really would be barebones storywise. This could be done easily, but it wouldn’t be a high quality version of easy mode raids. I rather have them work on something with quality rather than simple half baked attempts of altering already great gameplay otherwise.

There is no need for any of this, especially if this “easy mode” takes resources and time from the Raid developers.

Again, there’s no reason why this should take more than a few hours of “time and resources” away from any developers, all the stuff they’d need to pull it off is essentially “off the shelf” tech. UI elements stolen from other dungeon coding, and a handful of numbers changed in a database to be 25-50% lower than the numbers currently in there, problems solved. They’ve done more complex feats in late-patch-day hotfixes.

And as for “there’s no need for this,” not your call. There’s not a need for it for you, that much is your call, but if I say there’s a need for it for me, then you’re done. No argument functions beyond that.

Would you be fine if the LS team takes on the Raid “easy mode” so LS3 takes even longer to be released?

Sure. I can pop some popcorn while I wait for them to finish it up and then they get back to LWs3.

Fix LFG tool so it’s actually working and is not a mess (coming in April if I recall?), let their teams focus on what they are doing best and release something for the more casual players.

All of that is good, and should be done, but none of it would correct this particular issue.

Making Raids wasn’t a mistake, but not releasing anything aside for Raids was, if we had LS3 by now there wouldn’t be any issues. I do hope we get something like SAB in April.

SAB would be nice too, but again, nothing to do with this. Why do you keep throwing out chaff? It’s not like I’m doing this out of boredom, I’m plenty busy in the game right now with PvP league. I’m not a PvP fan, as may be apparent, but I need my three matches per day and a few more Revenant wins for Achievement 3, so even if both easy raids and LS3 were out I’d have to squeeze them in right now, but they are both features that I hope they can implement ASAP regardless.

If LWS3 were out now, that’d be great, I definitely want that, but it wouldn’t change my stance on easy mode raids. That’s still something I want to see and that would greatly benefit the game, AND raiders. Think about it. You seem to want “raids” to be a success, and for the time being they are, but they might not always be the case. Easy mode raids are a way to help ensure their long term success, because :

1. They will help to train new raiders in a more accessible manner than “face-smashing until you beat the raid.” By practicing the mechanics at low stakes, they’ll learn how they work, and at least some of those people will graduate to being capable at the hard mode in a way that they never would if “fail until you don’t” was the only option. These players will be the ones populating those older hard modes once the vanguard moves on to the next raid or burn out completely. There are enough raiders right now, when it’s new and fresh and there are only two wings, and the second wing isn’t even fully nailed down yet, but what about a year or two down the road, when there are 6-8 additional wings, do you really think the current population will be able to keep a healthy pool available for people who want to do Spirit Vale? Just look at the current dungeon population, and imagine that it were twice as hard to find a group (since you’d need twice the players), and then ten times that, since there’s a much higher barrier to entry. Don’t you want there to be people on the other end when you LFG?

2. Even those players who never move past the easy mode, they’re still spending hours playing through the game, presumably having fun doing so, within the raid content the developers made. Which system do you think would be more supported, something that only 10% of the players ever touch, or something that 25-50% of the players engage with regularly? The easy mode will be easier, but it’s part of the same development process as the hard mode, as they add new hard raids, they add new easy raids, and player support for the easy raids feeds into the development budget of the hard raids.

Address the actual problem, the lack of meaningful content for a large part of the playerbase. Not the Raids.

Why not both?

Ohoni.6057:

Again, there’s no reason why this should take more than a few hours of “time and resources” away from any developers, all the stuff they’d need to pull it off is essentially “off the shelf” tech.

You really don’t get it huh? This “Easy mode” of the Raid will be like all other types of content, it would HAVE to be balanced. It would HAVE to be tested against certain specs/builds and party compositions. And the rewards for it will HAVE to be balanced on a Risk vs Reward basis. It will also need to be supported like any other type of content, making sure it still works when skills are updated, when new skills are added, when new stat combinations are added. You don’t release content and leave it there forever, you constantly monitor and update as necessary.

So your “it won’t take more than a few hours” comment is objectively false. Just because they will use all the same assets doesn’t make it “easy work”.

Address the actual problem, the lack of meaningful content for a large part of the playerbase. Not the Raids.

Why not both?

It’s a choice.

1) Add new content for that part of the playerbase that doesn’t have anything new to do.
2) Convert existing content so it applies to more of the playerbase.

Personally I’d take 1) and leave Raids alone. Let the Raid team continue do their job as they already have.

You’re basically saying that playing through any story content multiple times isn’t worth it if there’s no or little rewards attached.

This is true. There’s very little story content I’ve played through multiple times, at least without a specific reason. Most of my characters haven’t even gotten past Claw Island on their personal stories yes. I still greatly value playing through the personal story once, but it’s not something I particularly enjoy replaying.

Even if there would be an easymode, is it nescessary for it to be a farm for rewards? I don’t think so.

Is it necessary? No, and I said as much. But would it be beneficial to everyone involved on all sides of this? Yes. It would be beneficial to the players who could only participate in it because it would add an activity that they could do.

It would be beneficial to existing raiders because it would provide a small bonus reward each week if they completed it, and if they can beat the main raid then this should be fairly easy for them. It would also benefit them by training up new players to help them, who might not immediately be as good as veteran raiders, but they would at least be a lot better than newbie raiders because they will know the mechanics backwards and forwards.

And obviously it would be beneficial to ANet because for the same effort it would take to keep the existing raiders occupied for a couple hours a week, it would now keep probably 3-10 times as many players occupied each week, and happy players are spending players. If you can keep them happy with minimal content team effort then why not do that?

The raid team should focus on raids, and living story should focus on making story available.

They should, and if I thought for a second that this would be a serious lift that would distract them from anything important then I would pull back, but the protestations I’ve heard seem to be coming from people who don’t want this on ideological grounds, because I can’t imagine the time or effort involved being at all considerable. They did the entire Shatterer overhaul after adding Legendary Weapons (so like two months? Less?), just because they decided that one of the achievements was too clunky. They made SAB entirely on their own time, no development budget or staff beyond volunteers.

The work involved in this, so far as I can see, would be negligable, nobody’s asking them to actually change the mechanics of the fight or invent new gameplay. Everything would work exactly as it does now, just the boss would require slightly less DPS to wear down, and the “hammer drops” would be a bit less punishing. I can get more specific about each encounter, but I think any raider knows what situations cause wipes, and how they could be toned down to turn them from wipes to “a couple people got downed but we could rez them easily enough” with no more than some numbers changes.

It wouldn’t alter the story at all, anything that would mess with the story would take a lot more work than anything I’ve suggested.

You really don’t get it huh? This “Easy mode” of the Raid will be like all other types of content, it would HAVE to be balanced. It would HAVE to be tested against certain specs/builds and party compositions. And the rewards for it will HAVE to be balanced on a Risk vs Reward basis.

But they’ve done all that, with the hard mode. The hard mode is already presumably balanced, and balanced to much tighter tolerances than any other content in the game. All easy mode would do is loosen a few of those screws. There are teams now that can six-man certain hard mode bosses. Those teams would have an easier time of the easy mode. And since easy mode is lower reward, and lower prestige, it’s less important if a few teams learn how to roflstomp it. They left game-breaking dungeon exploits in for months, and I can’t imagine anything that spectacular happening here. If they do notice some unintended behaviors, then they can patch those up, but I don’t expect there to be any significant ones.

It will also need to be supported like any other type of content, making sure it still works when skills are updated, when new skills are added, when new stat combinations are added. You don’t release content and leave it there forever, you constantly monitor and update as necessary.

But again, it’s just a shadow of the hard mode. Any changes that are made that would impact easy mode should impact hard mode too, and would require a balance tweak regardless.

It’s a choice.

1) Add new content for that part of the playerbase that doesn’t have anything new to do.
2) Convert existing content so it applies to more of the playerbase.

And I’m saying it’s not a choice, because adding new content takes a ton of developer attention that this won’t. Adding new content requires modelers, animators, designers, map artists, voice acting, all sorts of things. None of that is necessary here. All they would need is ONE person who programs UI elements to drop in one of their many existing flavors of “dungeon path”/“challenge mote” style difficulty selector elements, and ONE person who handles the stats and balancing sort of elements to copy-paste the old raids over and then tweak a few numbers in the databases. Then they test that once or twice internally just to make sure everything more or less works, maybe pass it to some outside testing once or twice, but far less testing would be needed than on any other content, since the real “tricky bits” of the encounter have already been tested to death.

It’s not either/or. The time and effort needed for this element would not hold back any new content by even one patch cycle.

Ohoni.6057:

All easy mode would do is loosen a few of those screws.

And this part is exactly where your argument fails. It’s not as “easy” as you think it is.

But again, it’s just a shadow of the hard mode. Any changes that are made that would impact easy mode should impact hard mode too, and would require a balance tweak regardless.

Not really. They are different game modes that require different kinds of balancing acts. Something that makes easy mode broken (because it’s easier) won’t make hard mode easier as well. It’s a similar thing with how high divisions in PVP require a completely different balance pass than lower divisions, what is OP at the low end of the spectrum is weak at the high end, and ironically it’s the exact same build. It’s the same thing with a Raid “easy mode”.

And I’m saying it’s not a choice, because adding new content takes a ton of developer attention that this won’t.

Developer attention from a different team that is supposed (and paid) to deliver. And I still don’t believe you understand game design and development at all, if you think this “easy mode” will be so easy to implement.

Still, as you said before:

There are enough raiders right now, when it’s new and fresh and there are only two wings, and the second wing isn’t even fully nailed down yet, but what about a year or two down the road, when there are 6-8 additional wings, do you really think the current population will be able to keep a healthy pool available for people who want to do Spirit Vale?

If/when they release more Raids there might be a problem with participation. No, in fact there WILL be a problem with participation (There is no “might”), in other Raiding games they avoid that by increasing gear tiers and level caps, making older Raids much much easier.

Right now we don’t even have one full Raid, can we repeat this discussion when we have at least 2 full Raids? I hope even Anet has plans for when that time comes, if they don’t, then they are simply not doing their job correctly.

And this part is exactly where your argument fails. It’s not as “easy” as you think it is.

How so?

Not really. They are different game modes that require different kinds of balancing acts. Something that makes easy mode broken (because it’s easier) won’t make hard mode easier as well. It’s a similar thing with how high divisions in PVP require a completely different balance pass than lower divisions, what is OP at the low end of the spectrum is weak at the high end, and ironically it’s the exact same build. It’s the same thing with a Raid “easy mode”.

PvP balance is an entirely different kettle of fish, because the effects of powers are identical (high end enemies have no more HP or DPS than low end), and the distinction is just that tricks that can really fool inexperienced players are easily countered by skilled players. This doesn’t really apply to PvE. But do consider that there are already 100 tiers of Fractals, each wildly more different than anything I’m suggesting here, and they manage to balance those well enough for their standards. I think having two different flavors of raid, with the only differences being some clear-cut stat shifting will not overly tax them.

You act as if everything in this game is meticulously balanced, and that if they can’t absolutely perfectly balance the easy mode raids then they shouldn’t do it at all. Nothing in this game is perfect, it’s all subjective and varied, too hard or too easy for different people. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, they can easily get it “balanced enough.”

Developer attention from a different team that is supposed (and paid) to deliver. And I still don’t believe you understand game design and development at all, if you think this “easy mode” will be so easy to implement.

I haven’t worked on a game of this scale, certainly, but I have done some game coding in the past. And you saw as well as I did what they managed with the Shatterer in almost no time, changes more significant than I’m discussing. If someone from ANet tells me that this would be way too much work, I’ll believe them, but coming from someone who’s ideologically opposed to non-raiders gaining access to the Holy Ground, I’m sorry if I remain unconvinced.

Right now we don’t even have one full Raid, can we repeat this discussion when we have at least 2 full Raids?

Why wait? The people who can’t do the current raids aren’t going anywhere, might as well get them playing right away, learning the techniques, becoming ready to fill holes in the wing1 hard mode right as wing 2 players leave it. I wouldn’t mind if they only did an easy mode for wing 1, and released the wing 2 easy mode after wing 3 is out, but I don’t think there’s any benefit for stringing players along further out than that. It would give “vanguard” groups time enough to master the existing wing before “easy mode” players got to crawl all over it.

As you say, in older games, this happened naturally as a result of the gear treadmill, which won’t be a factor here, but also that gear treadmill did set the pace, as each tier only gave a marginal advantage over the previous one, so weaker players would have to wait for 2-3 more tiers to come out before the raid would be easy enough for them. Since the “slide to easy mode” would not be gear treadmill-dependent, why wait longer than we have to?

Farzo.8410:

I haven’t done any raids myself, but seeing other raids, there is no need for infantile mode for raids.

They are rather easy, and it’s only players who put restrictions on other players, mainly because they want to play elitist in an already casual game.

There is no suggestion for ‘infantile raids’ just slightly easier options.

How do you know they are easy if you haven’t played them??

This would be useful if only for training.

My guild does decently well at taking down Vale Guardian but there are lots of other things to do and all too quickly it’s Sunday night.

We haven’t got Gorseval down below 25% health remaining. It’s not because we can’t do it, it’s just we are not trained.

Then why are people who have managed to do raids so terrified of a lesser Raid option? Will it really make their kitteny look smaller?

Btw, one thing I wanted to stress, because I think some people missed it in the OP, is that even if it becomes horrifically unbalanced (and I don’t think there’s any reason it would be), it wouldn’t be that big a deal.

I mean, worst case scenario, one of the vanguard groups figures out some crazy exploity strategy that works in easy mode, allowing them to clear the entire raid in like ten minutes. Boom, boom, boom. Way less than intended.

Well so what?

It would still be subject to the weekly lock-outs, so they could only get any reward from it once per week, and that reward would be less than the hard mode version. They could earn the same rewards by half completing the hard mode bosses a few times and wiping. And since failure would not be rewarded in easy mode, the one-time victory prize is all they could get from it until next week. And of course even if they do manage this feat, they’d still want to go on to complete the hard mode version each week, since they would then get the larger reward from doing that.

I mean it’s not ideal, and I’m certain they could do better than that, but even if they screw up, the price of failure is negligible to the game as a whole. So what’s the harm?

Gene Archer.8560:

Coulter.2315:

Actually I was here the whole time,

And you dragged GW2 over to your raiding mentality instead of leaving it alone and letting it remain a non-raiding game.

Coulter.2315:

but glad to see “an eye for an eye” philosophy is still popular.. For a perceived wrong as well, just out of spite. Classy.

You want to talk about perceived wrongs? You percieve LFR as having been responsible for damage to the WoW raiding community that was never its fault. Everything that has happened to the raiding community in that game is the fault of the raiding community, and nobody else.

While technically true, it’s an irrelevant point. The impact of making any change is what it is, no matter the intent. LFR WAS responsible for damage to the WoW raiding community. It doesn’t matter that they did it to themselves. Raiding has its problems to begin with and LFR made them worse.

That’s why I said that while I agree with the overall sentiment (making content accessible to casual players), I can’t agree with this specific solution. At least, not without some serious thought going into how we can avoid devaluing this content for those who it was intended for.