Full disclaimer, I’m not a level 70, I didn’t play a whole lot in TBC Classic but I did play some Classic Era. I haven’t been active on retail in years. I started Wrath originally when it already had the dungeon finder.
When Wrath was initially announced as not having RDF, I was excited. “Wow, this will be a whole new experience of Wrath for me! I’ll get to experience Wrath with the immersion of manual grouping and seeing dungeon entrances.”
The idea on paper is cool – imagine adventuring around, making friends, seeing dungeons in their full glory and putting groups together for the dungeons as an extension of the adventuring we’re doing around it anyway.
The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. People generally aren’t around the dungeons. You put a group together through an un-immersive LFG tool and through competing with spam in LFG chat. Then if you’re lucky someone else will get to the entrance in less than 30 minutes to summon everyone else. And if you’re lucky you can all communicate together. And if you’re lucky it’s a good group that can clear the content.
Instead you spend all that time putting the group together only to find out after having invested all that time that the group wasn’t good enough (people queueing for roles they don’t know how to play, not communicating, AFKing, people “disconnecting”, everything that people fear from RDF happens already). So if you can’t struggle it through and the party breaks up, you have to start it all over again and hope that the second round goes better.
Then you run into the dungeon, spend the time clearing the content, and maybe get 1 level. In that time, if you were questing instead, you could have gotten 2 levels, so you feel discouraged to try other dungeons unless you’re playing a tank or healer, and you just go back to questing, or you consider that level 70 boost, or the community ends up doing mage boosting and not even bothering with the real WoW experience at all. How immersive.
The lack of RDF has honestly killed my desire to play because dungeons should be a part of the overall leveling experience and just relying on questing sucks. I don’t want to go through the hell of putting the groups together again when they go like that. If I had a bad group with the dungeon finder that couldn’t clear, it would be hardly any time wasted in comparison to find a replacement member or get into a better group.
There’s a disconnect between the anti-RDF crowd and the actual people playing the game, and I suspect that maybe the former are those that already leveled to 70 (or boosted their character) and maybe either feel like “I had to do it the hard way, why shouldn’t everyone else?” Or they think more people at endgame is more competition for them.
With this current system, people just won’t stick to Wrath except for those that were already invested into Classic before. It’s not an experience that holds up without RDF in people’s modern lives. We’re not unemployed teenagers with tons of time on our hands anymore, we can’t invest 16 hour days into WoW and have the most immersive experience. The community has changed, people will boost instead of bother, and this is not good game design when Blizzard isn’t actively trying to make the leveling experience better to push people away from boosts.
I was wrong, and I changed my mind. I hope Blizzard does too.
Still don’t care about rdf