This could’ve worked. Giving you the normal and heroic dungeons in LFD. But requiring in server grouping for the badges might’ve been a good compromise. Or maybe it would have failed? IDK.
Also WoW was the casual baby MMO.
Instances
No Deleveling
Max Level in less than 2 weeks played
Quests
You didn’t drop items on death
Auction Houses
Mounts
Low cost, on demand transportation.
Battlegrounds
And so on…
If you were a “hard core” MMO player you should hate WoW. It was the beginning of the end for actual hard MMOs.
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The audience didn’t increase at all it LK. It flatlined and then started failling.
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So people on a pvp realm can never fly then?
Personally, flight is always a bad idea. That being said, choices have consequences.
Wrath ended higher than it started. The loss started after the Cata launch.
You forgot food and water, the greatest “easy mode” item EQ and DAOC never gave you.
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Not really. It plateaued as it started with ~11.5 mil and ended with ~12 mil. And the tiny bump it did get was right at the end of LK, which doesn’t point to anything save hype…after which, the decline started and has only accelerated.
None of which counteracts my statement. Wrath plateaued, but it didn’t lose subscribers. None of the quarterly numbers dropped below previous numbers, and it ended with more subscribers than it started.
“Loss” refers to the numbers being lower, which never happened.
Don’t forget things like plentiful in game quests, flight paths, in game maps and so forth.
Well, Quests were in the list.
WoW grew slightly over Wrath and had another bump early in Cata, it wasn’t until a little into Cata that subs really dropped. MoP started to stabilize the numbers again but then WoD flushed it all down the toilet and dropped more than half the sub base.
I wasn’t arguing that Wrath lost subs, I was arguing that didn’t gain any, and it didn’t. The teeny tiny sub growth it did have was at the very end, which means it had nothing to do with Wrath and more to do with the next xpac.
And with every xpac starting with Wrath, Blizz dumbed the game down a little more…
Wrath did not have a major sub drop, Cata Did, and WoD completely tanked. Actually The big sub jump was right after Cata’s launch but then quickly tanked. But not nearly as much as WoD…
Wrath saw a slight rise overall, and had serious enthusiasm for Cata. Cata killed that enthusiasm but didn’t kill it. MoP started to bring it back. Then WoD flushed it down the toilet.
Which, for the third time, is what I said…
Though I will argue that Wrath had a slight rise. The microscopic rise it saw had nothing to do with Wrath.
To the answer the OP:
I’d say, when it released in Wrath, no, not really, at least for established players. It made it easier to snag a pug if a guildie couldn’t get on, or no one was available to help you gear up your alt. For those players, however, their community was already established before its release.
It was more than LFD. I’d say it was a diminishing reward system (Effort - > reward, it got easier to get gear), LFD / LFR eroding over time the established communities, and the continued slashing of class uniqueness. Homogenization most call it. To me that last bit really hits hard.
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The random dungeon finder put simply, shrunk the world of warcraft down to the random dungeons of warcraft. It opened up a pandoras box of unprecedented trollage. As well as general unsavory behavior that was previously kept in check via threat of community blacklisting.
Making a group back in the day took time. Meaningful choices in terms of who you brought to some dungeons. In other times you ran with whoever you could find. And with the time commitment, players tended to see the dungeon through to the end.
Often times players made friends and recruited new guildees this way. This was virtually eliminated with the random dungeon finder.
I think that players that are/were in giant progression raiding guilds, or even accomplished medium sized guilds, are grossly downplaying the impact the random finder has had on the game overall.
edit: I learned to tank dungeons because of the old system of forming a group. Amazing thing was it was on a shaman. ![:grinning:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/grinning.png?v=6" ":grinning:")
I likely would have just stayed as a dps if I had started the game in 3.3 or later.
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No I don’t think LFD doomed wow, I think there were many factors that contributed. A lack of horizontal content, timely released and formulaic game design impacted wow, along side shifting player habits and general attrition of the playerbase. Once you have saturated and dominated the market there is no room to grow.
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The world immediately felt smaller
This is more because the world outside of dungeons became irrelevant. Rather than being able to instantly form and travel to dungeons. -
You felt detached from the world.
See answer 1 -
The need to socialize went down.
Agree to some extent but I feel its more the relative challenge of the dungeons dropped which means communication was not needed. Early cata some very punishing dungeons that resulted in groups communicating more on what needed to happen. -
Guilds were less important.
I still think this is a symptom of having “nothing else” rather than LFD being bad. LFD is a tool to form groups and bring people together, maybe if dungeons had longer term goals that needed to be worked towards in tighter socialised groups LFD would be the starting point leading to higher/content? -
Dungeons were made easier because they had to be completed by “everyone” because the selection was now automated.
Is the expectation that every dungeon SHOULD be completed? Should there be conditions of failure or partial failure? Timed runs, deathless runs etc could be implemented to give greater reward, meaning LFD still has its place but Better groups would be more desirable (similar to how m+ was implemented). -
You geared faster because the dungeons were now easier, and could be run many times per day.
So, make them harder? Artifically time gating content is something I hate above all else. -
Easy content and faster gearing leads to boredom much quicker.
Does it? Or is it just repetition without variance in game play and objectives? Achieving goals and milestones is an important motivator. -
WoW didn’t feel the same anymore, it was becoming more of an action RPG rather than an old school RPG
Again broader content could have appeals to both preferences. -
Sitting in a major city and queueing for dungeons became the norm…no real need to go out into the world.
Again, the reason to go out into the world should not be to travel to a dungeon. The world should exist and have content that you want to engage in.
I’m not saying anything you said is wrong, but LFD/LFR contributed to almost everything you listed.
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What are you talking about? LFD isn’t used much after a few hours of being max level except for tanks/healers to farm augment runes. I can see saying it had a major effect prior to mythic dungeons, but now it’s a small stepping stone.
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