I think Darielle's main point was that from a design perspective Blizzard are incentivising something that people find boring/not fun to do.
In a similar way to being feel compelled to do a lot of daily's, etc.
I don't think anyone is arguing that you can choose not to do that content. But that as a general design principal it's pretty poor.
I feel it's very easy to say "If you don't enjoy it don't do it" but a lot of people "do it" anyway. And it's whether this playstyle is healthy/good for the game that is the real issue.
That'd sum it up.
Yes, but it seems that for LFR and Flex to not "incentivize" HC raiders, it seems that they want to so nuke LFR and Flex that NO one would want to do it, especially considering the forum posters that want to remove loot from LFR completely.
I find it incredibly unconvincing that if UVLS wasn't a 50k dps upgrade on the LFR version, or if there was a loot lock that would allow for LFR loot to be of higher item level, or if the removal of an incentive leads to no need for silly gating, etc., that no one would want to do LFR. Can you show me how you reach that conclusion?
Also, I don't think I have ever seen a
single person on both this forum and WoW forums combined talk about removing loot from LFR completely. The closest someone has ever come was on the WoW forums to suggest that LFR gear should be accompanied by gear from new 5-mans or share a set with 5-man/scenario content so that lvl 90 content doesn't funnel entirely into LFR and doing things like 5-mans stay attractive over the expansion.
But from the way you're arguing you feel people who greatly benefit from trinkets or tier bonuses are "forced" to do content below their level since the power incentive is so great.
The power incentive from trinket in particular IS ridiculously great. Those trinkets can add 100k sustained dps across a fight - they prop up entire specs or classes. But as mentioned above, what I do feel is that keeping that kind of power incentive behind content that people don't want to do is bad design.
The "choice" of "Do this or do a ton less damage" isn't a very good one. It's technically a choice in the sense that you can choose not to care about it, but at the end of the it's just a calculated RoI, and the Return on these in particular is disproportionately high. More to the point - if you're bringing up suggestions like people should revise who they raid with on the basis of how valuable or not they feel doing additional busywork is? That's REALLY not healthy for the game.
Indeed, these aren't changing from current. You keep the incentive for people to run LFR on top of normal with this loot lockout system. It just became a lot more complex.
Not really though. In that absolute worst case you proposed, you've had 50% effect, while the other half's additonal complexity comes purely down to "Hit this toggle". That's not actually complex, let alone a lot more complex.
On live, since everyone's running LFR, while you may not have explicit planning done for it, you're going to be doing ad-hoc adjustments as a guild. Your Lock got UVLS-LFR this week? He's going to tell the other Lock to pick up the Normal one that dropped. Your Paladin tank finished his 4-pc? You're going to want the Ret completing his instead of giving the Paladin a 13ilvl upgrade. The guild's "decision making" isn't really made MORE complex as a result.
Perhaps not at the very start of a tier, but there are plenty of pugs going on in say a month and a half after the new raid opening. Say Bob has been doing a bit of LFRs and Flex, and together with some valor upgrades, he's sitting at 543 ilvl. He has the gear to run SoO normal if he gets into a decent group, so he has a big choice to make now. Run Flex again, and hopefully upgrade his ilvl to 544 or perhaps 545, or wait for sunday and monday, knowing that there will be some guilds on monday that might need a random, or perhaps there's a proper alt run he can jump into. Perhaps he joins a group from boss seven, and downs a couple of bosses, but because it's monday evening now, he doesn't have time to LFR the rest anymore. Or perhaps the alt group wasn't as proper as it looked, and they only killed a single boss, but again, there's no time left to farm LFR.
It also forces Bob to just idle and wait, not running any LFRs until the very last moment, and then run them all on monday in a row.
That's not actually a decision to make though. Bob knows that he/she is not going to get into a decent run without any particular guarantee beforehand - e.g. using Openraid, or raiding with friends, etc., so there's no question about doing LFR/Flex. If he/she does get into a decent run after the fact, he/she can hedge his chance at loot with Coins anyway.
Certainly if he/she can do LFR/Flex earlier in the week, there's no stopping him/her from pugging earlier in the week either, and given that Flex is cross-server and can be Open-Raided, that IS the playstyle he/she is going to be going for.
Remember that the flitting between some pugs for Normal, some guild runs at Normal, etc. is what's causing Tuning issues in the raid instances. It's part of why Horridon's been nerfed 3x. Flex mode IS designed such that a player like Bob can do Flex. The hypothetical SoO normal mode would be, as a result, even less likely because unlike in ToT, Horridon might even be in his original, or post-week1 version, not in the version he is now. I mean, once upon a time, players running 2 difficulties every week was too much. Bob being able to run 3 different difficulties but only loot one of them? That's not actually a bad situation - and Blizzard WANTS this kind of Bob to socialise and have a regular expectation of a Flex run, because he's who Flex is designed for, not Normal mode.
Even for Bob, this is an improvement with a loot lockout. It's an environment where he can guarantee completion of Flex every week, and NOT worry about a hit and miss chance at Normal. And he can do things that aren't 3 different versions of the same raid over the course of the week. So the idea that it would cause more problems doesn't really hold up, and the idea that it won't 100% prevent incentives (note that in any solution, I sat out for Durumu means you would run that on Flex/LFR) diminishes it doesn't really hold up either.
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