They went with a solution to a problem that was not good for the long run…
I actually think a LFD tool is good, but making it autoteleporting you to the dungeon was bad. In fact, we had a LFD tool in vanilla with meeting stones.
This was all in response to solve Dead servers. Which is something they needed to resolve. How do you rectify that when the vast majority of a servers population is lvl 60… and the rest of the world is dead. New levelers wouldn’t be able to find groups for the content… which is actually a very important part of the game.
They decided to go the CRZ solution… but they lacked the foresight on what impact it would have on server community and relationships.
What should of happened… is that they should have done server merges instead… TONS of them. Low pop should never have existed… as soon as a server is deemed low pop, they needed to be scheduled for a merge. It is so essential to the experience of world of warcraft, YOU NEED to be extremely aggressive with server merges. Don’t let a server straggle along in a borderline dead/live zone. Even use these server merges to correct faction imbalances as well… merge ally heavy ones with horde heavy ones when applicable.
Having a better LFD interface is/was not a bad thing… but all it should have done was connect you with people, not auto-teleport streamline the experience. Similiar to mythic dungeons in retail wow, where you have to actually manually find a group for.
As far as the level imbalance, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal having a lot of 60s on the server… there is a lot to do at 60… what you need is to have a healthy leveling population. That population is what keeps a server healthy.
It’s a tough call. Getting groups together for 5 person content was usually a drag. I remember logging early a lot in BC because we couldn’t get a group together to run a heroic.
They are in this weird place where they’re not important enough that you schedule them and it can be an imposition on friends and guilds to get them to run it with you.
I agree with what appears to be the current philosophy behind what is and isn’t LF content. It’s the complexity and difficulty of the encounter.
If you put it in LF, it needs to be easy enough for random strangers to do it. If it’s difficult and requires a lot of group teamwork and prep, it should a be pre-made guild type of thing.
As long as the rewards scale with the difficulty I think the LF system was a plus.
When you have to walk/mount to the instances was the best.
Summoning stones still required 2 people to run there while the other 3 were getting Food/Water and pots in the main cities. THOSE WERE THE BEST times and really FORCED you to be part of the community. Spamming /2 LF2M DM:N - Tank / Healer was the best.
LFD/LFR and Battle Masters Killed the community along with Cross-Realm.
All that stuff needs to stay the hell out of Classic.
Meeting stones didn’t do anything except put people in a list of other people who were looking to run the dungeon. Using them as Summoning stones wasn’t a thing until TBC. Unless you had a lock with you, your party was running/riding to the instance.
I don’t think LFD doomed WoW, necessarily, but It WAS an integral factor that led to a major shift in the mindset of the player base.
The person who is concerned only about their own convenience and who sees all those other people in an MMO as nothing but obstacles in their way may see LFD as one of WoW’s greatest additions and one of the best inventions in the MMO genre.
The person who prefers community and player interaction may think that LFD is a game cancer.
I don’t think it was LFG.
A lot of the stuff that really hurt WoW was the world was expanding but it felt like it was getting smaller. There was no reason to go back to old areas because everything you did was in a small portion of the new areas. Flying was a nice mechanic to add but they way they went about making you fly each time felt way too artificial. (If they really wanted to do it right, make it so there’s something that will actually attack you if you fly).
There was a lot of the same monotonous grind over and over, not only with each expac, but with each patch. Everytime a new patch/expac came out, your progress was null and void.
Lowering the raid size in TBC and on was a great decision, even 10 mans in WotLK was too, but WotLK introduced too many variants into the game for raiding. 10 mans versus 25 mans alone was a problem, then you add in the ilvl issues that arose and the hard modes for each on top of that turned a lot of people off raiding.
If they implemented it better, it would certainly have been a good tool and helped players find groups. But, alas, the Blizzard we know reared their head and ruined all socialization in the game.
No. Dungeon finder is just a scapegoat for people’s habits. WoW’s downfall was just simply time, but it’s far from dead. We’re pushing 15 years of playing this game. Even during wrath, that was ending at the 6 year mark, of playing the same game. It’s actually impressive how big of a live community this game still has after this long. It’s still considered the most successful MMORPG, after 15 years. The game is still doing very well.
Now as for dungeon finder ruining socialization in the game: When did Blizzard make a rule that you have to group with 4 other random people? When I really actively played this game, most of my groups using dungeon finder were pre-formed with all 5 people. Why did you stop? Why did you turn solo queuing into dungeon finder as the end-all to grouping in this game? Even today, with server transfers, cross-realm grouping, and now the communities, what’s still stopping all of you that still play the game from creating your own community in the game and playing together? Why aren’t you socializing with each other? Why aren’t you grouping with each other? Why aren’t creating dedicated guilds?
If you’re honestly expecting classic to undo all of this and you’re going to log on and it’s going to be 24/7 socializing, I have some bad news for you. Because the reason you stopped talking to other players 10 years ago still exists today.
YOU need to control that experience. YOU need to reach out and be social. You can do it in classic, but you can also do it in BfA, just like everyone else playing has managed to do.
Tldr: i think so, retail wow made things to easy. People progress to quickly then get bored fast. Nothing was done quickly in classic, you had to put more effort into your character.
There no need to pretend that conditioning isn’t a powerful tool and that most of people won’t take the path of least resistance when one is available. When you turn your game into a joke with a myriad of ways to cut curners, you can’t expect players to impose a set of ridiculous limitations upon themselves if they want to experience a more meaningful gameplay.
Dont really think so the world would feel small still i mean we still manually go to dungeons with mythic+. When Classic comes out people will get a rude awakening.
Meeting Stones existed in Vanilla. I’m curious to see if players will actually make use of the LFD queues in Classic this time around or if the Stones will be ignored again.
To blame it on LFD is to ignore what came first. X-realm BG’s.
Before cross realm Bg’s you knew the people you were fighting. There would be frequent good natured trash talk on the forums (it was good natured on my server any ways) and competition was pretty strong when you recognized the people you were facing.
But then that went away. I feel like that was a major binding factor of factions for every server. With no global chat channel and no real interaction with your faction if you weren’t pugging dungeons on a regular basis BC felt a lot more isolated than classic ever was.
For me, LFD and CRZ was the beginning of the end. I no longer had as much fun doing group content. Was all rush through to the end. Need on all gear regardless.
Rather than going “Man all the cross realm stuffed really helped blizzard maked up for the excessive amount of empty servers they were running for years” I’d rather have not lost so much.
It did, but I think we can all look back today and say that they game may have been healthier had they just bit the bullet and merged things. So many of the systems people take issue with are a direct result of Blizzard not wanting to close servers because it might look bad.