As you know, all of us here at Blizzard take customer feedback very seriously. We all spend a lot of time every day reading the Battle.Net forums for World of Warcraft, we communicate with our fans through Twitter and Facebook, and we have a variety of statistical tools that monitor and report on what actually happens in-game.
The new Looking For Raid feature has generated a lot of feedback. Indeed, it has generated so much feedback that we had to bring another 38 quintillion petaFLOPS of server capacity online to handle the new topic requests sent to our North American forum servers alone.
A lot of the feedback we've received has been very positive, and we're extremely happy about that. People with irregular schedules, or in guilds that don't raid, or who have a variety of reasons that make it difficult for them to tackle the normal modes have informed us that they've had a lot of fun with LFR. We really could not be more pleased about this.
Unfortunately, there have also been some complaints. Most of that server capacity we added has gone towards serving the topic-posting needs of people who rolled on a thing that dropped in LFR and yet, somehow, did not receive it. After reading a representative sample of threads with titles such as "LFR Loot System has hit rock bottom" and "A Simple Look at, Looking For Raid Loot" and "LFR loot issues thread#29992", we have come to a conclusion that we feel best serves the needs of all our valued customers.
We are currently deploying a hotfix to all realms that will remove all loot drops from Dragon Soul bosses in the Looking For Raid difficulty. Instead, bosses will drop Legendary Satchels, with each player able to loot their own individual Satchel. Satchels will have orange text and contain a small but non-trivial amount of gold and have a small but non-zero chance to drop certain easily obtainable companion pets, as well as a basically-zero chance to drop the Ashes of Al'ar.
All of us here on the World of Warcraft development team are extremely excited to read your feedback about this latest change, but we have anticipated that the volume might very well be beyond even our ability to capture a representative sample. We have so far been reading and collating results from between three and four-hundred threads on the LFR loot system posted to Battle.Net every second, and this has allowed us a reasonable grasp on the contents of the other seventy to eighty million threads posted that second. Conservative estimates from our research team have indicated a likely post volume far in excess of the total information contained in the observable Universe, and as such we are simply incapable of adding sufficient server capacity to address your needs.
We would need to secure the services of an omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent Being merely to handle the posts made by customers upset that they received a cockroach pet of the wrong color. Incidentally, should such a Being be reading this post, I would like to personally encourage you to visit our Careers Page and apply today! We offer competitive benefits and will assist with your relocation to Irvine, California.
Until such time as we are able to hire a Supreme Being or Beings, however, the most cost-effective measure to throttle feedback and allow us to continue delivering the reliable gaming and forum-reading experience you've come to expect from Blizzard has turned out to be hiring third-party professionals skilled in stealth and infiltration to administer a powerful paralytic neurotoxin to all active subscribers to the World of Warcraft. You should be feeling the toxin's effects shortly: do not be alarmed! Our hired professionals will also be connecting you to intravenous nutriment delivery for the approximate two-week duration of the paralysis. We do not believe any convincing evidence of long-term harm has been shown to occur from this toxin, but do be aware that you agreed to be paralyzed against your will when you clicked "Accept" without reading the updated EULA and TOS.
Thank you again for being such amazing fans of World of Warcraft! It has been a dream come true to work here. We're looking forward to your feedback in a couple weeks, when you've had time to relax about it a little bit.
Good luck obtaining the Ashes of Al'ar!
Greg "Phantomcrustacean" Road
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