I had joined a 25 man ICC Heroic this past weekend and was on my friend’s Mumble server. One guy in the group deplored the whole LFR mechanism, calling it for “noobs” and “scrubs.” That guy rubbed me the wrong way (outside of having a terrible hick accent) in possessing this oversized ego but it made me think about myself and why as a casual I do not care for raiding, especially progression raiding.
The primary reason why I don’t do raiding is that I had a fairly bad experience in ICC back during Wrath of the Lich King. I finally managed to get into a raiding group with a friend. On one of our first raiding nights, I told my other friend, who was pretty hard core, that we were starting up. He rushed home but we ended up leaving him and in fact, not even doing anything that night. It pissed him off and my raid leader remained unapologetic. In addition, my gaming computer back then sucked balls and my equipment like my mouse hurt my arthritic hand. So doing numerous attempts on Sindragosa with some kid getting mad (and underpaying me for a trinket I won fair and square), I quickly realized that raiding wasn’t for me. In fact, that experience had burnt me out so badly that I ended up quitting World of Warcraft for a while.
Fortunately, in Cataclysm, the LFR thing was born. At first, I was cynical after seeing how poorly managed the new Heroics were, I decided to give LFR a try once one of my other friends told me how easy it was with the 25 man format. Low and behold, I could do end game content without as much drama and the hours of pointless wipes.
So that’s the primary reason for me staying away from raiding. It’s not that I cannot handle the play style, it’s that I do not particularly care for it. Of course, it really depends on your guild, etc. Right now, my options are pretty limited on my server. That said, the real pet peeve for me is just the waste of time.
I watch a lot of livestreams and the thing that strikes me the most about raiding is how unhappy everyone is. This is particularly true when it comes to heroic raids. I think the people in those guilds are by far the most miserable players in the game. In fact, watching their streams is a form of catharsis and vicarious living since I don’t have to put any mental effort to go through that experience.
For myself, I prefer using the time wiping for other activities. There’s already and overwhelming amount of things to do in the game. Managing 10+ alts is an enormous task so dedicating myself to endless wipes really isn’t my idea of fun.
The other thing is that raiding (especially progression raiding) to me is just a massive dick measurement competitions. Dick measurement competitions are the most pointless exercises in the world and imo are what truly holds humanity back from greatness. Yes, you push each other trying to achieve this abstract goal but in the process become a fucking asshole because you want to show that your 1 mm weiner is now 0.00000001 mm bigger.
For instance, last night in an LFR we had some idiots showing off their new Thunderforged Gear. I couldn’t care less. All I cared about was getting through the instances. All that I cared about was whether or not the gear made us go faster. But having to deal with these boneheads bragging about it made me realize that I could potentially shrink my weiner by becoming a full time raider and developing an oversized, unhealthy ego.
Again, the whole thing to me is just about time efficiency in the game. The point is that at a certain stage, the gear you obtain in doing these things end up being thrown away. There is a functionality to it which makes it worth obtaining. But outside of gear, bragging rights and camaraderie I can’t see any other reason to raid. And the basic reasons just aren’t appealing enough to me.
LFRs to me are the “smart” way to go. I like seeing the content and having people to play with to get these things done. I can feel like I’m playing through the expansion while things are relevant and yet not feeling as though I’m spending pointless hours of my time doing an inane activity for little to no good reason. I’ve heard that many guilds have ended up just focusing on getting into LFRs for “progression”. To me that’s just plain smart. Why make it more difficult for yourself than necessary?
People talk about the challenge in the game but I don’t see farming a boss for gear really a challenge. But that’s what the game of raiding is. It wouldn’t be so bad if you get the gear beforehand to do a boss that you only had to down once. However, the game is so ass backwards that it’s a perversion of the state of capitalism (and if you don’t know about trickle down economics, go read some 101 on the subject).
Lastly, the issue isn’t necessarily about being lazy. It’s about being smart with the little time I do have. I try to do things efficiently when I can. I see hard core raiding as being an inefficient use of my time with respect to the way it’s handled outside of LFR at this point. I suppose if I wanted to become a professional gamer, I could change my attitude but why dedicate myself to something that probably would earn me 1/10th of what I earn as a tech worker?