Then why were you playing?
Chatting with people trying to find groups is what a MMORPG is all about. Clicking a button and having everyone teleport to a dungeon through an interface is not. It sucks the life and charm out of the game.
No. An MMORPG is playing in a world with many other players. There is nothing in that definition that says we must chat with all the other players in that world.
Was not a good thing. LFD should have remained realm only and not done the teleport, but it’s still better than spamming hours for a group wasting time.
There was the “group finder” interface in Vanilla. Maybe more people will use it this time.
Perhaps.
They really should make it realm-wide however. Much like the LFG interface in Vanilla. So people can look for groups for dungeons, but still quest as they need to. Make it so you still need to communicate to form the group and still make your way to the dungeons, but allow for more options for group forming.
I’m trying to think of a nice way to say you, and anyone who agrees with you, are just plain flat out dead wrong.
LFD was introduced in patch 3.3.0… yes, 10 years ago. Long before the time between WoD and current retail hemorrhaged 90% of the playerbase. Just ask all the other MMORPGs with LFG systems that are doing just fine and still managing to be MMORPGs how they managed to pull it off. You’ll probably get an answer along the lines of not using Diablo as inspiration for game design. That’s what doomed this game.
I understand your game has become crap, but you can’t just cherry pick something you don’t like about it then decide to blame it all on that just to make yourself feel better. Life isn’t that convenient.
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LFD was one of many factors that when combined contributed to the decline of WoW. LFD/LFR, CRZ and welfare gear are what did it. Collectively, they damaged community and removed progression.
LFD/LFR made most of the game an AoE faceroll. Now, it “could” have been done differently, but we’ve seen what happens when the difficulty is ramped up in LFD/LFR. Endless complaining and eventual nerfs.
And when you couple that fecerolling mess with EZ epics you gut most of the game. Add CRZ on top of it, and you have a community free solo game with little incentive to play for much of the playerbase aside from logging in daily to hit their azurite and their LFR feeder bars.
Do you think someone who was struggling to make friends and put together a group, who just wanted to enjoy the game cared about that sort of thing?
I think if the community was more willing to jump in and helped its own when they saw its members struggling back in the day, we might have not needed tools like LFD.
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What doomed wow was the creation of gear scores and achievements.
People started to measure themselves by their gear scores and achievements and those are wrong indicators of skills or abilities.
A lot of players really have reached high levels through dedication and good playing, but there is an equal or higher number of morons that have the ratings by paying with gold or benefiting from group carries.
So that became the standard that drove players to stop enjoying the RPG aspect of the game and instead dedicate themselves to the pointless pursue of gear that would turn obsolete in a couple of months.
Gains from group activities are not measurement of individual success, but people just blindly accepted that as a norm. Now the end-game became the boring rush through dumb dungeons that are static and don’t present any challenge once you do them more than once.
In regards to the RPG aspect of the game, LFR was a good idea because it allowed people to follow the story until the end. Also introducing LFD helped people complete their knowledge of the game lore, since dungeons are normaly the finalization of questlines.
The problem is that the dungeon-crawlers don’t like that the incentive to complete the story and questlines is also gear. They get upset that others also are rewarded with gear from following the story instead of spending countless hours wiping and trying again until they memorize dungeon mechanics.
This is an MMORPG game and the RPG aspects were lost.
I don’t believe it was LFD, I believe it was Raid Finder.
The downturn in players in Wrath I attribute to people wanting to leave on high note, or being burnt out. A good trilogy, a journey ended with Wrath of the Lich King. People saw the last good character that they enjoyed get taken down, the greatest story from Warcraft 3.
It was never going to be better than that, and I think a lot of people were ready to move on.
I was disappointed by the announcement of Cataclysm - it featured a character that I don’t think resonated with as much of the fans as Arthas did.
WoW’s biggest decline was when the focus was to get everyone into the latest content, and the journey stopped being meaningful, it was all about the destination. Cataclysm made questing dreadfully linear and boring.
I symapthized with people in Vanilla who couldn’t actually see what was going on in AQ 40 and Naxxramas, and I was happy to hear that people could see a version of that when they added in Raid Finder - I was told that it was a tourists’ version of the actual raid.
Raid Finder as a concept is fine, but they made a mistake by making it so that Raid Finder awarded players better gear than the previous tier. In my opinion, it should only reward dungeon level blues or cosmetic items. It made it so that everyone saw the content, but didn’t put out any real goals that they had to work for - did they need to work extra hard for better gear? No.
Ironically, I found that actual roleplay really took off after LFD, as people were free to invest more time into their characters and stories. More time to run plots, and create events. The Narrativist was freed up to spend doing something other than number crunching.
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This right here I agree with. Raid finder was a good way to see content but it should have given you a max of dungeon level loot. Maybe mostly blue with end bosses giving epics.
Gear inflation is a huge issue that’s been in WoW since WotLK. With 10s vs 25s it was horrible. Adding in raid finder, normal, and heroic raids, and ultimately mythic made it so gear levels spread way too far. Having mythic gear makes the next tier of raiding either easier or harder (depending on how it’s tuned).
If you had LFR giving dungeon level loot, it’s slow the ilvl increase making for a smaller gear curve which would make balancing later raids less of an upswing which would also make them easier for people to catch up. If it’s easier to catch up, you don’t need all these catch up mechanics that a lot of people don’t really like.
It’s other people’s fault that you were too scared to speak up in /LFG?
Interesting take…
What? Never said that. I spammed LFG and Trade all the damn time in Vanilla/BC. No one responded.
Wow, you’re actually half right.
It’s biggest problem was indeed awarding gear the content didn’t warrant. However, it had two other effects. First, it forced the dumbing down and streamlining of content. I.E., everything is now a 30 min hallway you can AoE your way through. And second, it greatly damaged the community.
- No it didn’t.
- No it didn’t.
- No it didn’t.
- Are you high? No it didn’t.
- They weren’t easy, Heroic was not easy till you had the gear.
- Was it “faster”? yes, but again heroics had a lock out for a day, so at the end of the day, it didn’t matter.
- Not true.
- Are you high?
- same as 8.
- Are you high? People were still looking for people before they resorted to queuing up for more spots.
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I maintain that a real community would have never made something like LFD necessary.
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Sorry, I have to think you’re making that up. I rarely had problems getting groups and I was on a smaller server, in a small guild (10 ish people) with few people I knew.
Not to mention the other several million people that weren’t having any problems. Even so, it wasn’t worth wrecking 98% of the game to do it.
Well, you would be wrong.
Nah world got too big and old content became irrelevant.
Tier 3 in classic completely made dungeons irrelevant. So those who couldn’t raid quit. It truly became Raif or die once gear inflated for raiders.
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It’s funny that you say that as it’s much worse now…
Basically, there are really only two tiers of gear. Those in raid gear and those in LFR/WQ gear. And tier 3 only made dungeons irrelevant for people who had tier 3 gear. Everyone who just hit 60 still needed to do them if they wanted to progress. Compare that to now, when you get to 120, and then work to get into LFR ASAP and then, well, that’s pretty much it because all there is in WoW now is one raid and some WQs…