You took away RDF to “encourage social interactions” with the belief that on going repeated interactions with the same people is an important piece of community building. I agree that repeated social interactions are very important for building the community.
For tanks and healers the RDF system vs the current lfg system in beta is a wash. Both systems give these classes instant groups with zero effort. In fact, the LFG system will allow tanks to selectively choose the DPS they want. Which means if you are a dps and your class and spec aren’t META (aka affliction lock) or you share the same armor type as the tank, then you are pretty much SOL. Tanks will also be able to sell their “tanking service” to desperate dps creating unnecessary spam in trade chat similar to what we experienced with boosting and creating an overall toxic situation.
For DPS, RDF is a massive improvement over the current Wrath beta lfg system. As a DPS I could queue up for my fav dungeon and then do any other activity I want while I wait for my group. I can quest, I can farm and I can sell things on the auction house
But as I stated at the beginning… what RDF doesn’t do is to allow repeated social interactions with people on your own server which is blizzards stated reason for removing RDF.
So this here is my compromise suggestion. Put RDF back in the game, but limit it to server only. This way, people using RDF will run into each other repeatedly and community will remain strong. Everyone benefits from this system. in time, if servers become low pop and wait times become unacceptably bad, you can then open up cross realms or you can consolidate low pop realms more aggressively to keep their populations healthy
This compromise allows blizzard to achieve its stated goal while still providing non meta dps an opportunity to join dungeon groups.
Cross Realm is the only feature that makes RDF worth adding. It lets the smaller population servers play at the same pace as everyone else, and doesn’t encourage mega servers even more.
The only good compromise I’ve seen is having manual groups get more badges out of heroics, because players are slaves to efficiency, and if manual grouping is more efficient, then it will still be the main way people form groups.
Well they still have the LFG system so nothing changes. But for those of us in full healthy realms we get all the benefits of RDF without any of the negatives with cross realms
RDF Can’t be the solution to population issues. Blizzard needs to take care of their game and delete low pop realms and move those character to create healthier servers. I also think they need to come up with a solution to these mega servers, they are contradictory to the social proximity they’re aiming for. How are you supposed to run into the same people if there’s 20k players actively playing on your realm?
I agree 100%. Blizzard is shutting down a ton of dead servers to make a bunch of healthy high pop ones but why did it take 3 years to do this? It should be done on a monthly basis. Any server falls to “low” gets flagged for consolidation with all the other low pop servers.
It isn’t the solution to low pop servers, but historically it did help a lot of players on low pop servers feasibly find dungeon groups throughout their leveling journey - which positively impacts the health of a server in the long run.
I understand that it does help, I just think rdf is a bad solution. Blizzard just needs to control of their game and fix the population issues, not give us bandaid solutions that hurts the game in the long run.