Arguments could be made that the decline started with the PVP BattleMasters being placed in the cities. Starting with a decline in world PvP.
No BattleMasters
No LFD / LFR
If you really mean LFD and not “LFD and LFR,” that would max out at five-player content. Were there really realms where people had to kowtow to elitists for those? Occasionally pre-BC someone would be unwilling to join a group with my feral druid, but that just meant I didn’t go with that specific person.
I like the convenience of the LFD tool but I would rather have the game without it. Just like I like flying mounts, but I’d rather have the game without them. When certain conveniences are introduced, they may very well be more efficient, but they can sometimes make the game less fun and adventurous.
The Lord of the Rings would have been a more efficient adventure if the eagles would have just flown the ring right to Mordor and dropped it in the mountain but would it have been a better adventure?
It’s the road to LFD that created the mindset that doomed WoW in my opinion.
It was on the contrary.
People just got bored and left because this is what happens to games in general.
They introduced ways to make people stay subscribed.
Easier ways of getting into groups, moving around, etc.
This was in fact pretty good for the majority of the players because it allowed them to play content that was only played by people who belonged to guilds and had no other life.
The only bad thing I see is that today this game is no longer a RPG but a dungeon crawler. It became just lame version of Diablo. At least the dungeons in Diablo are smarter.
I really don’t care about LFR in and of itself. If people need a way to pretend the’re “raiding” and “beating” the game, whatever. The problem with LFR is the gear it awards for essentially facerolling a scenario you can’t fail.
I’m not sure that’s true. LFx was introduced when WoW was still riding high.
And, it LFR was bad for EVERYONE, even the people that like and mostly do LFR.
That is because you don’t know that what LFR is about. It was for people to see the end of the story. This is a RPG game with a lore where people are expected to follow the story, and a lot of players do.
LFR was never about “beating” anything, but allowing for people who don’t want or care about the raid mechanics to see the end.
I’m pretty sure you can “see” the story without being gifted high level gear…
Theoretically, sure. I’ve posted a time or two that Blizzard could have–and should have–kept raids as largely a side thing the way they were in Original-Classic, but implemented a “tourist” mode for raids, where you could, e.g., watch a group of NPCs down the Lich King, seeing all of Icecrown Citadel and seeing the end of Arthas’ story without needing to worry about raiding yourself.
But the fact is–they didn’t choose to. They went in the “most of our playerbase is not choosing to raid…that’s a problem to be fixed!” direction instead.
I remember playing in TBC and wrath before the random dungeon finder. People actually talked to each other and trade chat was not constant trolling.
After the finder the game changed in a bad way forever it seems. In my opinion the random dungeon finder is the single greatest community killer in the game.
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It wasn’t LFD alone. It was that they made the game simply too accessible… When the game stopped being about the journey, and instead became how FAST you could get to the end, that’s when sub numbers started to drop.
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Yep true, one of the reasons why people liked return to kharazhan was it wasn’t like the other dungeons.
And why kharazhan raid was popular it was like the brd version of a raid, big large npcs, vendors, and more to it.
It was alive, dungeons should be more alive.
Wow is the worst version of diablo by far.
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What are you talking about? They didn’t “fix” the problem of people not raiding, they just szkewed the game so much that you don’t even need to raid. Heck, you don’t even need to do the pretend fake raiding called LFR to get that gear. And what did that assuaging of widdle feewings cost us? Every thing else. WoW is a one raid game with very little content. That’s why we have all this repetitive band-aid “content” fillers shoved down our throat. There isn’t anything else to do.
It didn’t help but it was more a death of 1000 cuts than a single mortal strike
They Could have done q few things to not make LFD such an abomination
- not made dungeons aoe fests would have required a continuation of good behavior, communication and coordination.
- kept LFD strictly realm only so you could be held accountable for your actions
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the day it went live, as guildmaster I told my members that this is the end of the community being the face of the game and so it came to pass.
I also predicted LFR was soon to follow. Blizz has a pattern to the things they do, which makes it easy to interpret what their future plans are.
Now if LFD had been a server only addition, it would have had the opposite effect. It would have opened up running with other server players you wouldn’t typical have crossed paths with and expanded the familiarity among the server community. It would have provided a great bonding mechanism, but Blizz was more concerned about game expediency than community building at the time.
Yep and it cost them. The thing was LFD wasn’t that bad, it was the cross realm that made it the monster.
My guild for instance was a thriving guild in Wrath and at first we really liked LFD because we could just group up and do it. Eventually though we found the down side. We stopped running together and doing it on our own, and worse our major source of recruiting new players was people we would invite to fill random spots. That was gone and with Cata 10 mans being ramped up we had to really work to find players.
Eventually my wife and I turned the guild over to others. We had already rebuilt it in Vanilla, and TBC and just were out of steam. It didn’t last long after that as far as any real activity.
All of that might not be just on the shoulders of LFD, but it made things so less natural, especially for more social guilds.
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Remember when it first come out and it put you in a queue for a Dungeon, but you still had to run there… that was fine imo, it was the teleporting that ruined the game.
it was one of the major nails in the coffin, along with CRZ.
No it didnt. Because mythic+ exists you still have to run to stones. Second, the game saw its largest jump when LFD was introduced.