Players show up to dungeons wanting to get their gear, knowing what the goal of the group is, knowing what role they’re going to fill, and knowing exactly how they’re going to do it. Players furthermore don’t need to coordinate on buffs or CC since the former are decided for them and the latter are largely ignored as players get better at the game and as the game progresses. Nor do most dungeons have bosses that are difficult enough or mechanics complex enough that players would need to strategize before engaging. That latter point only compounds over time as people learn the fights, thus needing to talk and strategize even less.
Therefore, what reason do players have to talk or socialize in dungeon groups in the first place? RDF just made you get to the dungeon faster and gave you a larger pool of players to group with. It didn’t change the way people were already playing the game.
You RDF lot are seriously starting to sound like Trump supporters and flat earthers. Just simply grasping at any straws to try and bend reality to serve you.
LFD came out with the ICC patch. The ICC patch was originally scheduled near the end of WOTLK. The actual end of WOTLK was pushed back because Cata wasn’t ready yet. By the ICC patch, subscriptions had already started to decline and just continued to do so thereafter.
You severely contradict yourself the moment you acknowledge that we’re playing on an anachronistic patch:
The thing is, as it already stands: there is no ‘proper wrath’ left to work with, inherently, seeing as you yourself have just inadvertently admitted as much by virtue of acknowledging that things are not as they were. You cannot simultaneously appeal to ‘the way things were in wrath’ (i.e. dungeon finder as a necessary relic) whilst simultaneously granting that things have already changed, whilst then positing that which has already changed as somehow being concomitant with the crystallized preservation of certain features. It’s incoherent.
Face it, classic was never fully classic, it was about preserving the spirit of classic, not literally recreating it. This has been true since the dawn of Blizzard’s vanilla 2.0 thanks to layering.
https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-details/world-warcraftr-subscriber-base-reaches-12-million-worldwide
That was written on October 7th, 2010.
Yes… LFD… was released with the ICC patch. I already stated that. So… thank you for confirming what I already said…
" Patch 3.3.0 is a content patch that included Icecrown Citadel as a new raid instance as well as three 5-player dungeon wings in the Frozen Halls. Patch 3.3 was to be the last major patch before the release of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm" Release (US)
December 8, 2009
And as noted, this patch was supposed to be the last major content patch before Cata. Cata’s release was delayed, a lot, so they also added the Ruby Sanctum content patch. So LFD (dungeon finder) was intended to be near the end of WOTLK.
I wanna tackle this from a different angle. I think your opinion is valid, but I think you’re basing it on your own personal viewpoint and playstyle, and completely disregarding anyone not like you.
Your first point feels like you’re missing context. You say you were promised something, but you’re basing that promise off of a post they made on the vanilla version of Classic. They have never said that Wrath Classic was intended to be a “truly authentic experience” because Wrath was not 2006, which is what the thing you linked is referring to.
If it were to be introduced, RDF absolutely should not come with launch. Launch content is not balanced around people having such easy access to heroics. RDF entered Wrath at a point in the game where everything but the last 3 heroics added was a complete faceroll. Any plate dps could queue as tank and completely steamroll them basically solo. The entire purpose was to make daily heroics less of a chore. Adding RDF at the start would have wildly different impacts.
Here’s what I really hate about people making the subscriber argument. Do y’all really not realise that maybe the fact that RDF existed during a phase of completely faceroll heroics was the reason that people thought Cata heroics were actually hard, then quit because of it? The forums at the time were literally drowning in posts about how “hard” Cata heroics were. They weren’t, at all. They required a tiny bit of thought, which RDF heroics didn’t.
Finally: Just because YOU don’t get socialization from LFG does not mean that other people don’t. I love the interactions that come from LFG chat based grouping. I don’t have to invite the first person that whispers ‘inv’ with no other info. I can pass on them and wait for someone that actually talks. I made lots of friends early in TBC because of the LFG tool, and I still talk to many of them now.
Heck, even today I wanted to do an MgT daily for mount chance, and I happened to find someone that shared a similar interest in achievement hunting, and after talking a while they joined my guild
Your want for convenience should not outweigh the real social impacts of not having RDF. Whether you agree with it being a social experience or not is entirely up to you. You choose not to make it social, therefore it isn’t. But for those who do like it, RDF being added would completely remove it as an option.
