Did LFD doom WoW?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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It seems like something that wouldn’t affect the overall game as drastically as it did, but LFD seems like the major turning point.

  1. The world immediately felt smaller
  2. You felt detached from the world.
  3. The need to socialize went down.
  4. Guilds were less important.
  5. Dungeons were made easier because they had to be completed by “everyone” because the selection was now automated.
  6. You geared faster because the dungeons were now easier, and could be run many times per day.
  7. Easy content and faster gearing leads to boredom much quicker.
  8. WoW didn’t feel the same anymore, it was becoming more of an action RPG rather than an old school RPG
  9. Sitting in a major city and queueing for dungeons became the norm…no real need to go out into the world.
  10. Other players basically became NPCs because you never saw them again or needed to speak to them about anything.
    Etc…

Once this kind of queueing and fast content became the norm, Blizzard expanded it to other parts of the game… especially LFR.

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Some of what you say is CRZ but I do believe it is part of the problem.

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It’s like social media.

It Dooms society in general…People don’t talk to one another anymore. Everyone is on their phones.

LFD
LFR
Cross-Realm

has doomed WOW community as a whole. You don’t see @(Name of Character) post per server post anymore because the Wpvp and Pvp in general is dead as well.

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Yes. We would not walk or drive anywhere if we could just que for work/rec/shopping…oh wait , can do all that online …

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[DID LFD DOOM WOW?]

Yes. It has doomed WoW for for 12+ years and cost them zero dollars and made them hundreds of millions. It’s the slowest most profitable death I’ve ever witnessed.

:unamused:

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No. It was one of the MMO genre’s best inventions.

(It was soooo terrible that almost every MMO to date has adopted some form of it.)

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I think there are lots of big things that changed wow, but LFD was a feature that acted sort of like flipping a switch.

The world also got smaller as expansions included less unique peoples and reputations in them. TBC less than vanilla… Wrath less than TBC… Cata less than wrath. But it wasn’t like flipping a switch like LFD did. Zones became more simple and there was simply less to know about them in terms of level and materials they would drop with each expansion. Meaning while knowing the ins-and-outs of individual zones mattered in vanilla, eventually it didn’t matter much, also making the world feel smaller.

But LFD really happened all at once (ignoring the meeting stone thing that no one ever used as being LFD v1) compared to those other things.

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Not until it went cross realm did it truly bring the end of days.

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LFD(specifically the cross-realm part of it) was a sort of breaking point for a number of things.

but remember that LFD wasn’t just put into the game on a whim. It was done in response to a number of things that already happened.

It’s not what started the train moving in that direction.

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Sounds like you would enjoy current WoW.

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The 3 things that killed WoW were:

1: Level-cap increases - created the need to streamline leveling in abandoned parts of the map

2: Flying - final nail in the coffin for world pvp

3: Arena as an e-sport - directly led to class homogenization

WoW was already heading towards the cliff in WotLK when LFD was announced.

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I do, to a point.

However, it doesn’t have the pre-TBC world, quests, etc that I crave. So, I will be playing Classic more than current WoW because it is what I miss.

I believe LFD helped make it so that a small group of elitists can’t control the access to content of the masses.

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LFD was just one of many features that should have been put on a leash or only available for one patch/expansion.

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Easy mode AE everything down and get heaps of rewards only for all of it to be replaced by the gear treadmill doomed WoW.

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Oh absolutely, LFD was one of the biggest mistakes.

Yeah it took a few minutes sometimes to find a group or fill a spot. Big deal, its an MMO.

I ran LFD with two other people from my guild the day it was live. The level of bad was mind blowing. Not just bad play, irresponsible and/or troll’ish play but very rude anti-social behavior.

Cross-realm Battlegrounds created a culture where people can be nasty, quitters, trolls, AFK, bots, etc with limited or no consequences.

LFD brought that to running dungeons.

LFR brought that to raiding.

By contrast I still know the names of the AFK/Bot PvPers and ninja looters from back in the day.

Most of all though, LFD and LFR combined killed the need for the social friends and family raiding guild.

It made the content easy to access, but robbed those people of the experience of doing those things as a guild at the same time.

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As many have pointed out , it was a dreadful combination of things that all seemed good at the time of conception. I would also add Heirlooms to the mix. Combined with LFD they made nearly every quest or instance drop completely meaningless.

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I think it was only a piece of the puzzle, and I don’t think it was the first.

Before LFD was released, I was already starting to notice my friend list shrinking. LFD, combined with being cross-realm, wasn’t the cause of the problem - it was an attempted solution for a symptom. Unfortunately, it had bigger side effects than expected.

I remember pugging a lot using LFD at the time. I’d burned out and dropped from the progression guild I tanked for and my friend list had shrunk with a lot of gray names who hadn’t logged in for many months. Getting groups together was doable but when LFD came out it seemed a blessing to be able to invite a friend or two and then use LFD to fill the ranks quickly.

Except, pre-LFD when we made groups, we pugged in people on our realm and could friend the ones who did well. Post-LFD, there was no way to remember and reconnect with the good ones (only a way to ignore the bad ones).

Pre-LFD, as we added people before heading to the dungeon, we talked socially. Post-LFD, there was no travel time, no coordination, just poof into the dungeon, barely a wait to be sure the healer had mana, and the tank was pulling. I remember my friend and I saying “hi” and only one group in four had people who would respond and be friendly.

So I don’t think LFD doomed WOW. I think LFD treated a symptom, at first seeming pretty effective, but Blizzard failed to treat the underlying cause and over time LFD had side effects that caused more symptoms. (Early LFD didn’t need special bags/loot to attract healers or tanks, for example.)

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The discussion only goes to show what some people look for in a game. I don’t have these problems.

I couldn’t care about all of that, since I get the social interaction from actually sitting in a major city and talking, and the faster Ieveling/gearing lets me go back to being social.

It’s an MMORPG - the quests, the dungeons are designed around small unit groups where everyone can get through it as long as they fit certain roles. There’s a fixed story for everyone. No real variety except in the amount of quests or perhaps the class quests.

Social roleplayers have more time to spend on other players and they stop being just NPCs.

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Yes. Just yes.

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It was another brick in the wall.

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