LFD was introduced in mid to late wrath and the population only increased by around 500k…
I never kissed any boots and raided all the time
1 Like
Dungeons were far easier in wrath then any time before it.
I agree, obtaining allies was part of the original game. If you didn’t have the requisite group you couldn’t do the run. Many people enjoyed the challenge of building contacts.
Almost every change in WoW’s history happened due to a majority of players asking for said change.
People didn’t want to wait around for BGs. Xrealm BGs.
People didnt want to wait around for dungeon groups. LFD.
People didnt want 40 man raids. 10-25 man raids. Then 20 man mythics.
People complained about ninjas. Personal loot.
A majority of things that “doomed” WoW were infact self-inflicted. People asked for them. Blizzard gave them. Blizzard tried to appeal to everyone and found it out its hard to appeal to everyone.
So no LFD didn’t doom WoW. People asked for it.
1 Like
That redesign began in wrath. Not cataclysm
Lol. Why did anyone need to gatekeep wrath dungeons? They were beyond easy.
We don’t read them because they are far too long and far too incorrect. It’s stunning that you “think” that a system like LFD/LFR wouldn’t hurt the community when it is specifically designed to allow content for sidestep the community AND forced it to be idiot proof while provided game neutering gear.
And it’s cute that you are actually arguing that nothing has really changed… If that were actually true, we wouldn’t need LFR/LFD… You know, logic and all that.
Without having read this whole big thread.
My answer would be no, it did not. It was just another brick in the wall. WoW’s downward spiral was made by a thousand small cuts, figuratively speaking. It was the sum of numerous changes throughout the history of WoW.
You have to be a retail troll with your constant defense of LFD/automated grouping. To say they didn’t harm the game is just delusional.
1 Like
Well, I was there and many people looked for quite some time trying to fill groups up for content. Remember that some instances would take a very long time to complete and if people were looking for one that was a bit more complex/less desirable it would take a while to get a group going. Not to mention people leaving the group while it was forming up.
So no, not making stuff up.
1 Like
Citation? Seriously though, I doubt a majority of players even knew what many of these were until they went live.
Vocal feedback probably had an influence for sure, but the philosophy of the dev teams drove much of the game’s direction too.
Kevin Jordan, who was WoW’s original class designer has stated many times on various streams and podcasts that much of the reason class design even in Vanilla was the way that it was due to vocal player feedback. He said they always listened to vocal complaints because the people who complained were the loudest.
He stated that people were playing Holy Paladins vastly more than Ret paladins, therefore, ret were low on the totem pole for improvements due to lower amounts of complaints.
WoWs playbase has become more and more casual as the game has gone on. This is most likely due to an aging playbase with less time to commit to the game than before. Notice how the rank 14 honor system was scrapped due to the time commitment and voice feedback. Notice how 5s arena was scrapped due to low player turnout.
Look at the raiding rosters. They were 40 at the start. People complained that was too hard to get together. So they lowered them.
They have access to player metrics. Many players don’t even raid mythic. Just a few days ago they increased the rewards for outside raid activities to be on par with heroic difficulty.
Blizzard listens to player feedback. They really do for the most part. Watch Blizzcon announcements where they go over the system’s panels. Look at the transmog sections. They always get the loudest cheers. They have been increasing transmog options over the years due to massive player feedback. I know people on the Classic Forums don’t like it, but many players love it.
The average WoW player likes LFD. They like LFR. They like convenience. They liked mounts and pets.
I’m not saying that the dev team isn’t the driving force. I’m just saying the dev team listens. It’s not a bad thing. I didn’t say that comment to be bad. It’s just the average WoW player has changed since 2004
1 Like
And then they come to the forums to complain about a dead game with nobody to play with and nothing to do, literally what happens.
2 Likes
Blizzard goes back to the drawing board to try and change the formula.
My favorite one was this in Legion “Artifact power is horrible. Remove it!”.
Then in BFA “Wow… bring back Artifact power. It was so much better.”
That’s the problem. Players complain. Devs listen. Players complain some more lol.
1 Like
Oh, totally. I give Ghost Crawler a lot of crap, I know he is probably a great guy and meant well. However during his tenure he made the grave mistake of giving players the impression that Blizzard was listening to them lol.
Jeff Kaplan (Tigole) would have told us all to shut the hell up, get geared and learn how to play. In my opinion anyway, that was better for the health of the game.
The biggest problem with LFD is that people started using that to level instead of questing.
It made questing areas feel empty, as no one was in them.
2 Likes
Blizzard built out a particular casual style, but not every casual player fit their mold, and many left.
it wasn’t simply LFD but in combination with a treadmill reward system that had such bad synergy.
I am a casual player and cannot stand grouping with random anonymous players who are often unfriendly, incompetent, and/or uninterested in the content. Over and over. Just depressing.
Op brings up a lot of valid points.
That said, OP only presented one side of the argument. He failed to mention any of the benefits of LFD:
- Prior to LFD very often you couldn’t run dungeons at all. If your guildies or friends weren’t online you were often out of luck. You’d spend the whole night doing nothing of consquence, because you couldn’t run dungeons and couldn’t find or make a pug group.
- At least on Silver Hand server in Vanilla, there was a private server-wide chat channel called “Leftovers”. You could try to recruit or find pug groups there. Doing so felt a lot like LFD, but much less effective and without the slick interface.
- If you found yourself grouped with particularly good players from LFD, you might add them to your friends list and run with them again. Just like in Vanilla when you ran a group with some pugs and it went well.
- LFD didn’t get rid of guilds. Most players in guilds in Retail prefer to run dungeons with their guilds rather than LFD pugs. LFD is a helpful tool to find a player for an empty slot in a guild group or for when no other guildies are online or want to run dungeons.
1 Like
If you took away lfd no one would level alts ever again. I would never consider leveling another character if I had to wait around for hours trying to pull enough lvl 70 somethings together to run utgarde pinnacle or something and I could only quest for 109 levels. It’d kill the game