I don’t think LFD was the problem itself, but it was just one of many things that started to change how the players played the game.
I think raising the level cap was a mistake, it just invalidated too much. I think cross realm was the bigger culprit than LFD itself but they did keep doubling down on it through other content so I think they would have been better off with a robust LFG system.
I still think one of the other big mistakes was allowing some of the addons that they did. Once players started being able to track metrics it just spiraled more and more into a competition and a constant screaming for balance. In a world where numbers are all that matters, things like utility and support are hard to quantify for lesser numbers.
Yeah its true sadly, Maybe they will see people want a real MMO and not a Diablo version that cost 15$ a month plus the game price. cross server / Sharding / LFG / LFR and making all classes the same was where they went wrong and much more. It all takes away from the social part of an MMO. Maybe they will see that in classic.
They forgot why people pay 15$ month…MMO (To socialize). As of right now people can buy this in a one time price with most games today. Also it doesn’t feel very achieving when they just give you gear which is a cheap gimmick that only will please consumer/player for a short period of time. which eventually stops filling awarding in no time which makes even any game boring and unsatisfying.
LFD increased people’s ability to form Heroic capable groups and enter dungeons. And didn’t require you to get everyone to go to the entrance and wait etc. But it also reduced your ability to control the people you played with. The bigger part of this was probably the cross realm aspect. If it had tagged you with people in your own server only, and made it so that you could declare people you didn’t want to be matched with, then it probably would have maintained the “You can’t be rude to everyone” that pre LFD had. But without it, you needed a guild of active and engaged people to even do one dungeon a night.
Not reading post, read title, pressed the like. And agreed. Yes, yes it did.
Edit:
Goes back reads post.
Yeah I can even expand on that. Like how it removed the want or need to befriend healers and tanks that were good etc. Example.
It did take away from the world too. You just get placed in dungeon. Sure its fast but took away from the core idea of the game. I do agree with you on the cross server stuff was bad due to bad players who didn’t have to worry about bad server rep which was a thing before LFD. Also it was for faster game play which can burn you out. Back in the day when it took longer to get gear it felt more of an achievement. Now it just like oh ok new gear now to the next one within no time.
Yep. And it killed WPVP a good bit too.
And it killed the “out in the world” a bit too.
And it helped kill leveling guilds.
And it helped kill the traveling aspect where so many players actually had to learn where the dungeons exist.
It also helped kill little cool things like Scholo gate entrance having a lock etc.
And it killed that good old feeling of meeting at the stone.
It also killed the chat activity of all of the “LFG” and “LFM” in various zones and trade.
Yeah I am gonna stop. lol.
A server limited, no-teleport, matching system that put you into the group but didn’t do anything else, might have been a better option, but live and learn. The original didn’t deal with roles which is what killed it at the stones.
Its like League of Legends with all its lore but no world to explore since you can just afk in city and que up and never move to do end game stuff. I mean it’s there but no one really uses it. It’s not that people don’t like the world but its efficient to do the faster way and so it must be done to keep up with others. Its bad and will only kill the MMO part in time which is why retail wow is dead.
edit ( The world is part of the core game that makes wow) without it you paying 15$ a month for League of Legends and playing pvp or player vs AI.
Yeah it’s the Path of Least Resistance Gaming Fallacy issue.
Players will, if given the ability to, chose the path that offers the quickest and easiest route to their chosen goal. Even if that route cheapens the game and makes the overall experience lackluster. This is because we’re hardwired to do that. We always look for the quickest and easiest ways to get results.
Even if it kills the experience gamers will do it. example you don’t see many Teemo mains in L.O.L rank, though he might be fun he isn’t the best way to lvl in rank. Most will pick the faster route no matter if it takes all the fun out of it for them. In time they may never know why the lost interest and just quit.
While LFD didn’t single-handedly destroy the community of WoW, it went a long way toward minimizing the need for players to form relationships. It used to be that people made friends in dungeon runs and invited the same people back the next time they went because it was a smooth run. Now, dungeons are easier–not only easier, but much, much smaller and more straightforward. The odds of “wiping” in a non Mythic+ dungeon in modern WoW are the same as the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field (3,720 to 1) so there’s really no way to “stand out” as a high-functioning group member in regular dungeons anymore.
Because of that, a lot of people don’t even participate in Mythic+ or Normal+ Raid content, because they’re not accustomed to forming groups on their own, or developing social circles. Far too many people in BfA nowadays play WoW like it’s a single player game. It’s hard to blame them, either. The story went single-player a long time ago, too, when elite quests were nerfed into the ground and the player character was elevated to being an important figure in the story.
It more or less declined because the Storyline with Arthas was concluded in WOTLK which is honestly why a majority of people I know played it for, to see the conclusion of a character they played WC3 with and hundreds of hours of custom games featuring his model/voice.
I think the introduction of LFD was more or less the starting point for a lot of the things that have made the game more of a dungeon crawl/lobby game. When I logged into wow over the free weekend it didn’t really feel like an mmo. Kinda felt more like playing diablo… it was weird. When I leveled this dk I just quested but at max level I just qued into everything and didn’t talk to one person.
Pretty much this. As far as the story goes, I had a blast through Lich King and couldn’t imagine what WoW had in store next. And they announced Cataclysm - and a lot of folks stopped being as interested as they were. It would be like the Lord of the Rings movies didn’t end, and just kept going.
Some sentiment was that “They’re just making expansions to kill lore characters.”
I certainly had a hard time staying with WoW during Cataclysm because I wasn’t connecting to the Deathwing storyline, and the Thrall-centric story just sort of, muddled it’s way through.
But that’s how it tends to go. A great champion is rarely followed by a great champion - there’s often someone in the interim to give a space. And they can be good, but they get overshadowed by the previous champ. Everyone knows Ali and Tyson, few talk about Larry Homes or Trevor Berbick.
LFD allowed me to spend more time doing what I wanted to do - running dungeons if I wanted, or if I wanted to do something other than dungeons. I do not have an issue with groups - if I want to do a dungeon with my friends, I do so. If I can group with people and work to figure out fights, like I did in Vanilla, we can do that too.
For everyone who says that cross-server and lfd killed the social aspect of the game, it says more about them - they say “you get to know the people you play with” - and what happens if you don’t like them? Are you only acquainted with them because they are good at playing a game?
I prefer learning and getting to know more and more people. Welcoming them, helping them succeed. There’s thousands of people out there on each server - millions of players worldwide, and in a social game, you won’t remember them all, but you can help them all the same.
By itself, no. But when you make it cross server and then dumb down content, you get braindead players you’ve never met and will never meet again screaming gogogogogo at you.
IMO the world didnt feel smaller until the expac cata. We all literally sat in capital cities and never left. Post cata the worlds never really felt small to me. Especially MOP where we were out all the time. Course compared to Azeroth every expac area is small…
I completely agree. LFD seemed like a great idea but the overall consequences of the new feature destroyed the server community. Community is everything to the people that played vanilla. I hope Blizzard does not include any cross server grouping.
Its just one of life’s little ironies. Something that appears it would make the world closer, seems to drive it apart.
On that note I have a complaint about Facebook in that I miss when you would run into the people you “used to know” on occasion by chance and catch up with them.
Now I get an instant update on everyone’s life that I have ever known for any length of time even if I have not spoken in person with them in a decade. I know what food they ate last night, where they vacation, even what funny thing their pet just did.
Now I love Facebook because it lets me keep up with family halfway across the country, but its time they update it and let me build categories for my friends list and set update frequency settings for them.
Facebook is like the LFG built for the real world that sometimes I wonder if we were better off before it existed lol