Blizzard Community Manager Zarhym counters assertions about LFR

I can understand why Gary and Olivia are siding with Zarhym over this issue but i don`t think this makes them right. 
They are all correct that nothing in the game forces you to run LFR, but as long as there is a higher item level on LFR gear than there is on gear you get from running dungeons, you are always going to make raiders feel like they have to do this to give yourself a better chance of beating content. It doesn`t matter that the increases are only slight. 
Is eating buff food necessary to beat content? Of course not. Yet no guild trying to down content would dream of not having this minor buff to your stats. 
Its a double standard on Blizzards part which annoys me. 
They enforce a shared lockout on 10 mans and 25 mans which brought about a sharp decline in 25 man guilds but it stopped players from having to do the same raid twice a week. 
That is perfectly fine for them to take this measure even though i don`t agree with how it was done. 
But to throw another raid difficulty in which again gives people upgrades from dungeons and then claim that players are not forced to do this is a slap in the face of most savvy raiders out there. 
The long and short of this is that LFR pays more money into the Blizzard coffers and thats no bad thing. 
The easy fix would be to nerf the item level of the gear that you get in LFR and then the people interested in progressing through normal modes wouldn`t feel inclined to do this weekly on top of their raid. 
Here`s the catch though folks……if you removed all the competent raiders and left LFR to the lesser skilled players and the ultra-casuals, how easy do you think they would have to make the content for people to clear it and still get to experience all the raids? 

Basically, although they won`t publicly admit this……..Blizzard need the competent raiders to feel obliged to do this content otherwise they would have to make LFR a bigger joke than it is already. 

Every one that plays WoW knows that it is a heavily gear based game, and that the gear is that big carrot on the stick that keeps players subbed and playing the game.  In any stetting you will always feel that that some one is being let down (whether it is you raid group or your self) if you do not run LFR on a weekly basis.  thus by saying that the carrot does not matter so much blizzard is telling players not to continue playing there game. 

TL:DR – does not matter if blizzard makes to much or to little”content” players will look for some thing to point at and say that is why I quit WoW.

I knew there was a reason I didn’t like this guy, and this further validates my point. I’m not one of those people saying you should remove the LFR from the game entirely or anything of that magnitude. I think most people will at least agree that the can of worms was opened, and its something we all have to deal with.

Perhaps the original poster provided little to no constructive information. In additional raid tiers, its is true that LFR is not exactly “required”, however saying that the ilvl difference between heroic dungeon gear and LFR is a non-issue is like asking raiders if they would rather have a full set of BIS heroic raid gear for heroic raid progress, or a full set of BIS normal raid gear for heroic raid progress. He can call it a “playstyle choice” all he likes, but there are logistical realities to end game raiding that simply can’t be ignored. It is much like a lot of things since the start of Cataclysm, the illusion of choice. 

I can theoretically “choose” to not run my daily quests everyday as well, but that means that until I get a piece to replace that particular item slot with, I likely have a 463 blue. In many raid environments, that may be acceptable, and thats fine. Its also true, that in many raid environments that someone who puts forth that effort will raid over someone who does not. Therefore the choice is to give yourself every advantage possible, or risk loosing a more desirable raid slot.

That being said, I feel LFRs this teir are a vast improvement than the way they were placed in the game back in Dragon Soul.

The modern MMO gamer is a strange beast. They complain when there’s not enough end game content. They complain when there is too much end game content.

Now we have progession guild members, who are *supposed* to be the more hardcore and dedicated players, complaining about an entirely optional tier that might throw a half decent piece of gear in their direction once in awhile.

what happened to Netflix Gary, you two were doing so great. on another note, will we have more Rift random plugs on Legendary and TWIMMO ? 
for me (when did play) it felt normal dungeon> hc dungeon/LRF > normal raids/LFR > hc raids, yup they messed up. and geming EXPENSIVE gems in my hc dungeon gear is just expensive and kinda dumb