I normally try to be relatively charitable in my dealings with others on this forum, even when I disagree with them. I struggled, in this regard, with your posts, and some of my responses will come across as harsh. I apologise in advance.
This is simply wrong. I loved the original tuning of the Cata dungeons, just as I love how challenging TBC Classic heroics have been. But this is because they were tuned to be hard. The dungeons themselves are hard, or at least harder than dungeons in other expansions. My experience in Cata and TBC Classic is that they didn’t suddenly and miraculously become trivial just because you played them with friends or guildies – its just that friends and guilds give you a ready source of players with which to run dungeons, often bypassing the necessity to bother with the LFG channel. It made dungeon runs convenient, not easy.
Yes, they were. They absolutely were.
Are you remembering how the dungeons were on release of Cata, when many people didn’t have the best of gear? Or are you remembering the nerfed versions of them Blizz brought in, and the even more nerfed versions that exist in modern Retail?
I recently went back into Retail, in order to see what it was liked. I started levelling a balance druid in Outlands using dungeons, and I was completely shocked. Really shocked. By the time I’d picked up the quests at the start of the dungeon, my group had already killed half a dozen mobs. I’m not kidding. Once I joined in, trash mobs lasted about 2-5 seconds each. Bosses lasted about 10-15 seconds. It was ridiculous.
And no one talked. Not because it was an LFD group, but because the tactical chat that’s necessary in TBC dungeons simply wasn’t needed here, because the dungeons were so ridiculously easy. It’s not the groups. It’s not LFD. IT’S THE DUNGEONS THEMSELVES.
Now, I’m actually in favour of harder content. I would be in favour of Wrath Classic dungeons and the first tier of Wrath Classic raids being tuned to be harder than they were in OG Wrath. Because that’s what makes dungeons fun – a bit of a challenge, with decent rewards on offer. I enjoy that. But at no time have dungeons been a source of socialisation with WoW, and TBC Classic has absolutely proven this for me. Socialisation comes from other sources – guilds, discord channels, and raids – and it is the health of these scenes that matters. And to my mind, they’re plenty healthy on my servers in TBC Classic. Socialisation is fine. The dungeon runs, when you get them, are fine (or mostly fine, you get the odd dysfunctional run). The only issue is GETTING dungeon runs when you’re levelling. Getting into a levelling dungeon has become truly agonising, and many of us feel that LFD might be used to solve many of the real problems starting to emerge in TBC Classic (and will undoubtedly be present in Wrath Classic).
I’m going to call BS on this. My success in running dungeons throughout multiple expansions has not varied depending on whether the group was filled with randoms or filled with people I know. It genuinely hasn’t.
I think what happened is this: Socialisation started to dwindle in the game. Players looked for a reason, and lumped on LFD, because it came in at roughly the same time. But I think what TBC Classic has clearly demonstrated to me, is that the decreased socialisation was probably going to happen with or without LFD. The social experience happens because the players are determined to make it happen, not because of any mechanical features in the game.
So am I, as I’m in a wonderful and HIGHLY social guild. I just don’t understand how this is a rebuttal to my argument – which is that socialisation in TBC Classic does not centre around dungeons, and therefore introducing LFD will not harm socialisation in TBC Classic.
LFD isn’t being proposed because people are miserable in TBC Classic. At least, that’s not the motive in my case. It’s being proposed because there are real gameplay issues starting to arise in TBC Classic, such as the increasing prevalence of boosting, tanks charging for their services, and certain levelling dungeons NEVER being run. I feel that LFD, implemented judiciously for levelling dungeons, might help to fix these… and I’m sceptical that doing so would actually harm the game in the way some people fear.
Here is where I become a little uncharitable… it effing isn’t the reason at all, and experience in Retail and Classic should absolutely show this. The reason people talk in TBC Classic dungeons is because they HAVE to, because of the relative difficulty of them. They coordinate tactics in order to ensure the success of the dungeon.
This is nothing to do with how the group was brought together. It has nothing to do with randos being bad. It is absolutely a factor of how challenging the dungeon is. The reason people DON’T talk in Retail dungeons isn’t because of LFD, it’s because they don’t need to. The mobs fall over if you breathe on them too hard. Talking gets in the way of a quick clearance of the dungeon. Whereas in TBC Classic, NOT talking gets in the way of a quick clearance of the dungeon. That’s the heart of the difference experience between Classic and Retail.
That’s assuming that LFD WOULD exacerbate the issues. After having played TBC Classic, and having done a quick-ish check of the state of affairs in Retail, I’m more convinced than ever that our initial assumptions about LFD simply weren’t true. I now no longer believe that LFD was any kind of root problem in Retail. I firmly believe that decreased socialisation was simply because the playerbase was naturally changing over time, as existing players got older and new players grew up on different types of games. I now believe that the changes were happening with or without LFD.
People have a social experience in TBC Classic, because of the mindset of players going into the game. The playerbase is fundamentally different from the playerbase in Retail. They are determined to have a certain experience in TBC Classic, and they make it happen. That’s all. TBC Classic dungeons are fun to run because they are fundamentally challenging, due to their tuning. LFD has nothing to do with it. That’s all. There’s no mystery. LFD is not a hypnotist. It cannot suddenly transform people into mindless zombies that don’t talk, don’t socialise, and are terrible at running dungeons.