Did LFD doom WoW?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Did LFD doom WoW?

Its like most things good intentions end up hurting things that you can’t foresee or plan for. There’s a reason they have the saying “the path to hell is paved with good intentions” :+1:

WoW hasn’t ever been “doomed” IMO, its just changed so much and for a different crowd of players, I don’t blame Blizz, this is America and money rules all…it is what it is. I kinda knew when Activision and Blizz got married that this would happen, the COD crowd of “instant gratification” would take over and become their target audience because that’s where the money is and old school players aren’t as common and harder to please.

You all have to remember, the suits don’t play games…they don’t care about quality or content, they care about their GOD, money…I’m sure at the time Blizz was thinking, hey we can make the game more accessible and we can make more money for the suits, its a win win. Problem was the long term effects on the community was an afterthought.

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It wasn’t just LFD; most MMOs have a group finder now and none of the ones I’ve tried have been nearly as terrible an experience as it is in WoW.

Heirlooms were a major culprit. They were grossly overpowered and made it so that people, especially tanks, could solo on-level dungeons with relative ease. In other words, having Heirlooms basically made the rest of the dungeon group expendable.

This was combined with the change in design philosophy to quick, AoE everything down dungeons. So now we have people who can basically solo these dungeons running them as fast as they possibly can.

The extra layer of anonymity that comes from LFD doesn’t help, of course.

But one major difference between WoW and other games that doesn’t get discussed nearly often enough is that Blizzard did nothing to curb poor behavior in WoW early on; in fact, they more-or-less encouraged it through their own behavior at events like BlizzCon. While games like FFXIV have their bad eggs, they do try really hard to keep their player-bases civil. Blizzard didn’t try to do this until it was far too late, and poor behavior had become the expectation, if not the norm.

So what you end up with in WoW a bunch of players who have never been disciplined and don’t actually need the other players in the group playing under multiple layers of anonymity and lack of accountability.

No, LFD didn’t doom WoW, but its addition was like pouring gasoline on a fire.

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They definitely took away some of the magic, but it was players that chose to be jerks, can’t blame Blizzard for that one.

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TL;DR - For me, it’s the lack of imagination and innovation that is hurting this game right now. It’s the difference between King Kong (1933) and Star Wars: Episode IX. The 1933 version of King Kong was innovative and imaginative, in its day. But imagination and innovation progressed to the point that the Star Wars movies are pretty much the standard for sci-fi. Imagination and innovation in World of Warcraft, however, has not progressed much since mid-Wrath. Things have been tried, but only half-heartedly and poorly implemented.

Reading through most (not all, I’m old, I don’t have that kind of attention span any more :rofl: ), I see good points in literally every post. And while I agree with many, many of those points, for me there is one over-riding reason why my interest has waned mightily over the years.

Lack of imagination and innovation.

The biggest example is personal flight. When it was introduced in TBC, a new type of content came with it – the netherwing drake quest line, Tempest Keep dungeons and raid, Throne of Kil’jaedan, Socrethar’s Seat, etc. It even enhanced wPvP by allowing us to more rapidly get to the scene of the fight in Hellfire Peninsula (and later, in Southshore, Crossroads, etc.) by landing at the nearest flightmaster and leaping into the air to go straight to the battle. In Wrath, half of Storm Peaks and all of Icecrown wasn’t accessible until we reached the point where we could train-up Cold Weather Flying.

But it was implemented poorly, and I attribute that to a lack of imagination and innovation. We were able to get to the fights (whether PvP or PvE encounters) quickly, but most of the engagements were on the ground. In-flight combat was not available except against certain NPCs that we were thrown up against. That (help me out here, my memory isn’t perfect) was one of the features of Eye of Eternity in Wrath. It could have been carried over into PvP so easily by adding the ability to player-controlled characters. Think “medieval combat” where mounted combatants went at each other, knocking your opponent off the mount but combat still continued until you, too, were dismounted; only THEN did it transition to ground combat. NPCs were given the ability to dismount us, but not OUR characters. Oh, sure; we had Occulus and Wyrmrest Temple dragon-to-dragon combat, but that wasn’t “us” in combat, it was the dragons fighting it out with us just along for the ride and selecting what ability our dragon was to use.

Imagination and innovation would have given us the ability to fight each other while mounted, instead of reducing every PvP encounter to ground combat only.

Questing … from captivating, compelling, challenging quests structured so that we WANTED to do them, became MUST DO them as the main driving force. They became mundane, lackluster, a grind, unimaginative, with absolutely no innovation whatsoever behind them. A treadmill instead of a cross-country marathon.

Each of the points y’all have brought up in this thread are (with rare exceptions) valid and contributed to the state the game is in now. But to me, the underlying reason for those points is that the development team ran out of ideas, lost the ability to logically progress a feature to the next level, and has simply gone to pushing “something” out the door to keep the sales and subscription fees coming in. And one of the most SIGNIFICANT reasons that has become the norm, is that we have lowered our standards and now accept mediocrity where excellence used to be the measuring stick.

I have more examples, but this post is long enough already.

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and the 2008 stock market crash, removed alot of blizzard’s competition. a big part of innovation comes from peers competing with each other’s ideas. without competition, without brilliant minds competing with each other, you lose the drive/need/creative source.

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As they say in the Catholic parlors on Tuesday nights – BINGO!!! :+1:

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The main people that complain about LFD & LFR are elitists that are upset other players could participate in endgame content and that they couldn’t be gatekeepers anymore.

A negative for them, a positive for the community at large. CRZ ruined communities. LFD/LFR did not, all it did was ensure that elitists couldn’t gatekeep anymore. One of the best decisions ever made.

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Yes lfd doomed wow, along with lfr. End game content in general were for those who deserved to get there by going the extra distance. Any one who says other wise is a communist and the problem with what wow is today.

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Nope. LFD shrinks the game down from a world to a menu. With it, you can level from around level 15 to max without leaving a major city.

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LFD, multiple difficulties, exponential stat growth, and not keeping the entire game world relevant is what doomed WoW. Because it is no longer the world of warcraft. It’s action looter instances and raids of warcraft.

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If all you were doing is LFD, then that’s on you for not experiencing the rest of the game.

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While the game certainly isnt doomed at this point as there are still tons of players, the things that made me leave the main game a few times despite the friends that still played have always been story related.

My conclusion is that blizzard while having talented scene writers has never had anyone who was good at actually planning or building a long term story on their team. They have made some really good story arcs in this game, but the overall story has never been well done. They have always let their new story ideas take precedent over the story as it was already up to that point and for me that makes for a story I just cant stay engaged with in the long run.

As far as game communities I think of it as a function of time. It takes time spent with people to build up relationships and the more a game is built for the kind of player that plays only a few hours a week the less of a community that game will have. For me I no longer have the hours I used to when it comes to playing games and I would not find communities like I used to because I cant put into them what I once could, so I would not expect to get out what I once did.

The overall game design has moved to make game take less time to feel like you have some progression so in that sense most of the time saving features people are talking about (like lfd, flying, etc) are part of what has resulted in a less strong community. On the flip side though it makes the game more accessible to people with less time to play. I know when I will play classic now I will consider myself lucky if I ever finish a dungeon set, nevermind a full suit of raid gear just because I no longer have the time that I did back then. For me classic represents a time when the story was still mostly coherent and I will enjoy that even if I never step foot in a raid.

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Well, I explained why they don’t go together and what the real issues in WoW are so…

This is simply false.

  1. Because of how the game is now, casuals can pug normal/heroic raids xserver even if they can’t find or don’t want to find a group. You can even do with with mythic after they open mythic to xserver groups, which is done later on into the raids life cycle.

  2. The gear you get from LFR isn’t really “high level.” It’s substantially lower in ilvl compared to the higher difficulty raids (outside of titanforging, which I discussed is the main thing that destroyed progression in WoW and is a separate issue).

People lost interest in higher level content because of forging primarily. The ones that lost interest before that lost it because they were burnt out on raiding or were older and no longer interested in scheduling WoW time like it was a job or hated Dragon Soul etc. It wasn’t LFR.

edit:

This is optional. You can still level up in the world if you want to. Most people who weren’t had already seen everything there was to see out in the world numerous times. Leveling was a chore because it had become a means to an end for vets, not because Blizzard had somehow ruined the game.

You can talk about the importance of encountering others and what not when leveling, but the thing is, there were far more vets than new players. So you just weren’t going to get what you wanted because the number of new players leveling was so low. Cross realm servers are really the only saving grace that allows new people to encounter anyone while leveling because per-server the number of new people leveling through the world was so small.

Ironically, a huge complaint in retail is that leveling is too slow now because they substantially nerfed the leveling pace when they released allied races. Dungeon leveling use to be very fast for a long while with heirlooms. I’m not sure questing is really any slower now. It may even be faster.

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I agree. The attunement idea isn’t terrible but I would make sure it didn’t take more than , idk… a half hour? To complete?[quote=“Ziryus-doomhammer, post:161, topic:137190”]
The biggest issue is that LFD was also trying to fix dead realms. In retrospect blizzard should have just bitten the bullet then and gone with servers mergers, or as they called them linked realms
[/quote]

I agree with this.

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Absolutely.

I remembered WoW community as I loved it back then evaporated after it was introduced. My friends disappeared.

Everyone just clicked the LFD button and forever ran dungeons with new random people. The dugeons by then were AOE-fests anyway in Wrath. So, LFD worked because you didn’t have to invest time with good people to clear a dungeon good CC and strategy and coordination.

LFD was the deathnail of the WoW community.

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[quote=“Savax-feathermoon, post:1, topic:137190, full:true”]
5. Dungeons were made easier because they had to be completed by “everyone” because the selection was now automated.[/quote]

I would say this was one of the bigger contributors to the issue but I would argue that LFD exists to make dungeons easier and not the other way around.

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It isn’t false. In Legion, how often did you, even on an alt, run EN once Argus came out? And lets say you did for a quest or a artifact skin, how overgeared were you, even an an alt?

And yes, welfare gear is lower than normal + raid gear, but it’s substantially higher than all the previous raid gear, not to mention the 5 man stuff. Also, to allow you to pug content, Blizz has had to idiot proof so much of it. Which makes it a sad joke. How often has someone said that heroic is the new normal?

Also, I’m not sure why everyone always think that I’m talking about high level raiding when I explain how stupid LFR and welfare gear are. I’m not. They barely scratch higher raids. What they do is put everyone who doesn’t do higher end raiding into the same box where we get to eat the epics that Blizz is constantly throwing at us for doing nothing more than managing to log in and hit the correct queue button.

Lastly, when you always have the worst gear (LFR) you aren’t actually progressing. You, relative to everyone else, never changes. You are, in effect, forever in dungeon blues.

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I specifically talked about how forging ruins progression, which started to be a problem in Legion. It has nothing to do with LFR though. You can have LFR/WQs etc without titanforging, they just have chosen to make the game a giant casino where you can get mythic raid quality gear anywhere potentially, which drastically reduced any interest in actually going after the hardest difficulties.

Also, mythic+ is attractive to people who don’t want to organize larger groups of people but are still interested in a challenge. I don’t think having higher difficulty 5 man content is really a bad thing. I just don’t like the overall package because of titanforging. Forging is the primary reason I lost interest in bothering with any type of progression in retail.

I already wrote about why catch up gear is actually a good thing. We’ve had catch up gear for a long time, even in the most popular expansions. You do not want someone coming in mid expansion to have to spend weeks or months progressing through old raids to get to the current ones.

Heroic is supposed to be the new normal. We use to have one raid difficulty. Then we had two. Now we have 4.

There isn’t an issue with having casual people who don’t want to progress any further in the game along with people who want to push the game to its limits. Some people don’t want a challenge but still enjoy playing. Good for them.

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I think LFD was the start. I didn’t mind it initially and still think it could have been done properly. The major negatives were instant teleporting, making all the dungeons mindlessly easy (no feeling of achievement before burnout), loot bags and bonus stats essentially FORCING the use of the concept.

LFD should have been an easier grouping option you chose on the basis of convenience over lower chance of success. We didn’t need convenience AND to ruin the integrity of dungeons and as long as LFR didn’t exist you still had raiding to bring in that feeling of community, integrity, and epicness to the game. Once they cheapened dungeons and raids there was simply nothing of interest left.

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This is kind of ironic.

See, I totally believe the heyday of the game was when Blizzard estimated 2% of the playerbase had ever downed a boss in their toughest raids (Naxxramas and Sunwell Plateau). But I was never part of that 2%. Not even close. I raided Molten Core very casually in original-Classic, after Naxxramas was out; I was part of a raiding alliance that went to Karazhan and struggled hard with Zul’Aman in Burning Crusade (I was one of the few members who was actively interested in also going after Gruul and Magtheridon).

When 98% of the playerbase was never going to be in the latest raid, Blizzard had to make actual endgame content that wasn’t raiding raiding raiding. I–like most people–played for things like dungeons, Argent Dawn/Timbermaw Hold reputation as an end rather than a means, and the dungeon set upgrade chain with very little concern for the stats on the specific set pieces.

Then in WotLK, they put Ion in charge–a member of a top raiding guild, which explicitly had the name “Elitist Jerks,” and their website spelled out that they weren’t kidding about it. Under Ion, raids were made the entirety of endgame, and methods to get everyone into raids were added, culminating* in LFR. And those people, like me, who weren’t interested in rushing to maximum level and raiding for the entirety of their playtime stopped playing.

So…who is the elitist, again?**

*I don’t know if they added something further to get people in raids, after LFR; as I’ve mentioned many other places on this forum, I stopped during mid-Cataclysm. The most recent raid added when I quit was Firelands; the daily quest area that came with it, in stark contrast to the Isle of Quel’Danas, wasn’t fun and was manifestly not designed to be, instead being there to be hard work that people who incomprehensibly weren’t spending all their playtime getting migraines from all the dull red in Firelands, could plow through for some sense of accomplishment.

**The intended answer to this rhetorical question is “Ion”; again it said so in his guild name. Clarifying because I realized it could look like it was “Fallanaa” if I didn’t.