WoW Raid Finder = Easy Mode

[Chesspiece_face]

The best part about it from my perspective will be the ability to queue up with some of my buddies again who I don't normally get to play with because of raid locks. That was one nice thing about separate 25 and 10 man locks in Wrath, although I wouldn't want to go back to that due to a number of reasons.

This...this...THIS. I miss raiding with a lot of folks on SR. Would love to be able to hang out again.

I think the thing that attracts me the most about this announcement is not just how it expands the players ability to socialize with the people they want to in the game, but also how it removes social requirements on the player.

I've always preached the fact that if you have any hope of lasting in a game like WoW you need to be able to log in and have fun independent of any social requirements. If the only way you can have fun in the game is when your friends are online and willing to do exactly what you want to do you will probably burn out pretty fast.

This is the great irony for me when it comes to Cataclysm. On paper it should have been the second golden age of WoW. The zone and quest content were the best it had ever been. Raid encounters were tougher and more elaberate than ever. 5 man dungeons were more engaging and demanding of players. And on the social side Terenas Lurkers came into Cataclysm with a stronger raid team than we had seen for nearly a year accomplishing encounter mechanics that a few months earlier in LK would probably have produced no end of frustrations.

And yet, despite how great it all looks on paper, somewhere in the details the game drained all my ability to enjoy it on my own terms. The only time I had fun any more was during those few hours that we were working on raid bosses. During off times I slowy went from working on dailies and reps, to standing around working the auction house, to just not bothering to log in.

The tougher 5 mans made it pure misery to just log in and do a daily dungeon run unless we had a majority guild group, adding a social requirement to simple day to day gameplay, and the tier system and loot distribution for the raid encounters made it so that even though we were doing a great job at crushing faces it very rarely felt like characters were progressing much. Many friends I talked to on other servers actually mentioned that they had stopped even going to the Throne of the Four Winds, as the loot drops there were completely unreliable to the point of being a waste of time.

If done correctly, this new LFR system could essentially resolve many of the issues that effectively drove me away from WoW. Best of all, for players like myself that get the most enjoyment out of the raid game, it will allow us to log in pretty much any time and get a taste of that fun without having the social requirements of a normal guild raid function as well as having no negative impact on the social responsibilities one does have for the guild.