There’s almost no content now that doesn’t have a faceless option to it. Even M+ can be done with a group finder and you’ll never see them again. How awful is it to feel so alone when you’re surrounded by people.
Precisely why I don’t feel invested in Retail any more.
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It certainly didn’t help
I’m truly looking forward to interacting with people for more than 5 minutes again.
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Stick to retail, you belong there
Me too, I just hope that players are not forever corrupted and/or jaded having had to put up with 6 expansions worth of go!go!go hurry up noobs!! randoms.
TL;DR - Yes.
Those that are corrupted will be happy playing retail. Those that are jaded will be happy it’s gone. For the latter, I know I’m happy…
Yes. Having McDonlds like content with WOTLK and LFD is why I stopped playing WOW. If I wanted to play a face paced game there are a ton of them out there and I can play for 3 weeks then quit playing all together never to come back to. Pre-WOTLK was the best time in WOW. It a was Real MMORPG at that time.
In a few unintended ways I think.
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The Player Aspect - it shifted the game to a more solo-mentality game and a more lobby based game. People because disposable, players became more impatient, and as WoD proving grounds show’d us there were a LOT of people that the game had to dumb itself down for… which goes to point 2
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Game Difficulty Balancing - led to designing base content around the lowest common denominator. We have this weird gap between the lowest and the highest now, though the other half of the issue is Blizzard’s esport fascination… I don’t think either direction is healthy for what the game was trying to be… an MMORPG. Too far in either direction and you lose the core elements of the genre like immersion, community, customization and artist freedom to try and create something special.
Most issues in WoW I don’t think are as simple as this = that. Many issues are a result of a culmination of attempting to fix, streamline or pander without a clear direction other than ‘we want all the players playing’.
The actions were intentional, some of the results weren’t.
They did this specifically to allow the “I pay $15 too!” crowd to do content without having to find actual groups. That was on purpose.
And if they didn’t mean for it to be for the lowest common denominator, they should’ve known that’s where it would end up. However, that they didn’t know is a hard sell as LFx content started at faceroll.
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The reasons for LFD were to address dead/faction imbalanced realms. The dungeon design for wrath was already there from launch long before LFD was added.
Not it wasn’t. And even so, that could have been remedied without LFx.
We aren’t simply talking dungeons, but regardless, LFD certainly made no effort to make them harder. I believe you talk about Cata 5 mans a fair amount. Remember when some actual ability was required in 5 mans after less than an xpac of LFD? Endless mewling…
The only significant difference was that Cata(and BC) dungeons were designed around large amounts of CC. Wrath dungeons were not, and that was by design because of how some classes were being excluded from dungeons in BC.
Shockingly when they tried to put random groups into dungeons not designed for them it fell apart hardcore in Cata.
Uh…yeah, because LK dungeons were the birth of the AoE derpfest. When they tried to end it, people wouldn’t stop complaining.
What “designed”? CC was needed in vanilla and TBC and fewer classes had it then. But thanks for explaining exactly why Blizz HAD to be make LFx content failure proof.
I’m not sure why this is hard to understand, LFD in Cata was creating groups that could only AOE in dungeons where you couldn’t do that.
There were classes that could only AoE?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
ROFL…
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That’s fine if you want to pretend that the issue is that players got worse between BC and Cata and not that LFD would have failed just as badly in BC go for it.
Of course it would have failed! BC content wasn’t something you could put peanut butter on your keyboard, put it in the floor and let your dog out and still defeat.
/shrug I pugged extensively in BC/Wrath/Cata and what changed was not the quality of the players. What changed was the dungeons and how you formed groups for them.
BC - Favored CC heavy groups, and you formed your own groups, the problem was this excluded people with no/undesirable CC.
Wrath - Group comp was much less important, some people consider this easy mode I guess
Cata - Back to BC where CC heavy groups were heavily favored but LFD didn’t take that into acount, LFD crashed and burned in Cata because of that.