When the news arose that WOTLK Classic would no longer incorporate the Dungeon Finder queue system, I remained neutral on the topic. I intended to roll with the punches and allow Blizzard and their more experienced, more knowledgeable devs to decide what’s right for the game. And on almost all subjects they would trump my opinions. But allow me to express mine for this particular subject.
There are some benefits to having it, and there are some downsides to having it. Both of these things are true. But after deep thought and putting together groups myself in TBC for dungeons (even the Heroic Dailies, which are the highest in demand) I’ve come to the conclusion that having Dungeon Finder outweighs cutting it.
Let’s go through a scenario in which the Finder doesn’t exist:
You’re eager to knock out both Normal or Heroic dungeons.
You spam the LFG channel.
You get all the DPS you desire.
3.a. You’re left wanting for a Tank or Healer, sometimes forever because one never shows.
You now get the pleasant responsibility to endlessly be vigilant and hawk-eye the LFG channel for potential teammates.
You aren’t afforded the time or focus you would need to go out and do anything else, and are instead left to stare at your chatlog while hanging out with your friend the Summoning Stone.
The group finally forms, everyone is summoned, Maybe a sentence or two is said, and then the dungeon gets completed.
The rose-colored glasses which have been donned for so very long encourage your mind to believe that this is ‘More Social’ and makes the game feel like there are other players with you, instead of NPC’s. I play a heavy amount of both Retail and Classic, and I will confess that Classic dungeons will have slightly more people typing in Party chat. So what? Let’s think of the benefits of the almighty queue-system.
After just a few clicks, you are prepared and queued for whatever content you wish, from almost anywhere you want.
Traveling no longer necessary. Northrend is huge. Fast flying (for non-credit card swipers) might only be realistic to have on a single character for a long time into the expansion.
Classic groups will and do fall apart like butter in the microwave much easier than Retail queue groups.
When the previous happenstance occurs, the queue system fixes that with a single click of a button. Replacement is easy. Classic replacement is a pain in the ***, if we’re all being honest. “Okay guys, I need another to walk backwards through the whole dungeon back outside to the summon stone. Guys! …guys? Hello?” you may sometimes find yourself saying to a void as no volunteers arise.
Putting together an entire group is sometimes half of the entire dungeon experience. It’s lame. We all know that most people do not put together groups. It’s annoying. I’d wager 90-95% of players do not form their own group. Most just wait for someone to say “LF DPS _________”, and they whisper away.
Certainly it’s far more efficient to queue, but it’s also a quality of life thing. I would absolutely love to continue to peruse the Auction House while queue’d instead of playing mama-duck getting the ducklings all together.
Some argue that with the queue system, all other players are ghosts who fade in and out, never to be seen again, and that Classic’s system allows you to recognize familiar players and names. I think that’s about where that information ends. “Hey, it’s the tank from yesterday’s group. Cool.” The end.Amazing.
I’m sure many players reading this could throw out more reasons in defense of the Dungeon Finder, but I think these are probably the strongest reasons why it should stay. Putting together a dungeon isn’t hard. It’s annoying. Putting together a raid requires much more thought and actually includes far more strategy than any dungeon group could. If Blizzard enjoys the thought of semi-social groups clearing content, then it can still remain for raiding.
Very well-explained post. As an addendum, most people who seem to be “against” the Dungeon Finder are those from mega servers like Grobbulus or Benediction. Those servers very likely do not suffer as much from the issues mentioned here. However, I wish they were capable of seeing that every other server is not like them and would benefit greatly from the RDF. If nothing else, it should be available for 15-70 content with cross-realm grouping, to aid in leveling.
I understand the desire to make dungeons easier to get to and people more replaceable, but this can just as easily be described as a negative rather than a benefit to someone that is trying to be neutral or fair. I don’t think that this thread is fair at all given you only list the perceived negatives.
Classic isn’t about what’s the easiest and most convenient option. Part of the game is about having a world in world of Warcraft and having people being in it instead of teleporting from A to B.
You might find making a group tiresome and dislike how replacing someone isn’t as easy as pressing a button. But that may be a positive for many as it makes you work with sub-optimal conditions without simply removing people you dislike.
Ultimately I understand that you’ve not had a good experience with classic given your 7th point. You haven’t made friends or gotten to know people in your dungeons and fundamentally don’t see cross server as being any different. But that’s a you problem. Getting to know people and making friends is great in classic because you’ll see one another again and there’s actually a reason to get to know good or nice people. If you ruined this experience for yourself on a megaserver than that’s not my problem, it’s yours. We’ve seen the social decay from 12 years of LFD in retail and even retail is moving away from it.
I get you want a QOL tool but just say as much. No reason to pretend it’s for the health of the game.
But by the same point, you would only ever see the SAME people without a cross-realm LFD. You eventually don’t meet anyone new. Most of the people I met in Retail and became friends with I originally met through the RDF.
Or, outside of megaservers, you might not ever meet anyone at all when leveling or trying to do leveling dungeons. Guilds typically don’t have tons of people leveling up at the same time, so grouping with them isn’t an option. So if you want to do a dungeon, you could be left spamming LFG for hours only to never find any interest.
As an aside, people said killing boosting would make finding dungeon groups easier. It hasn’t on my server. I think less people are leveling now actually.
You literally cannot meet people and become friends to do content with them again if it’s cross server. Retail you can because in cataclysm they allowed cross server grouping, but with 3.3 RDF if you got grouped with a player from another server you cannot group with them again. There’s no incentive at all to get to know one another. And what’s wrong with seeing familiar faces in your runs anyway? The point is that it’s a community.
And by the way I am not on a megaserver and there’s no issues finding groups for content. Guilds are especially helpful and it plays into the social aspects of the game which are part of what MMORPG’s are supposed to be about.
I don’t see the solution to the various problems we have because of boosting and boosts as streamlining and emptying the world any further. We need to move away from the easy bandaid fixes that made retail what it is and come up with better solutions than to try ones that have already failed.
leveled my holy pally all the way from 13-60 on only dungeons, i recognize almost no one because i don’t meet them enough times in a quick succession. at best i notice “oh look, ive ran with this person before” simply because my buff list addon remembers them since i have locked them into receiving a certain buff during that previous run way back whenever.
Except it kind of is. With TBC, Warlock summoning got better. Shattrath itself has 7 or 8 portals to around the world. The Isle gives you an item for a free port back to Shattrath. Ghetto hearthing was never patched. Flying came out, giving almost full control of your A to B “teleporting”.
As for the opposing side, I did list a few reasons. I don’t think the reasons are long enough for their own list, though. However, I would definitely read one if someone whipped it up!
Not sure what server you’re on then, because 90% of guilds are primarily max level toons. And they can’t help you without penalizing you (or themselves) due to the anti-boosting changes.
If ya meet someone you enjoyed playing with, you exchange discord names and talk, and sometimes people re-roll or server transfers. Its what they used to do.
Look, I’m pro-RDF (really pro cross-server instancing), but we’re not getting it in at launch. Lets focus on things we can affect early on.
Eventually wrath will settle into the place TBC was before wrath was announced and where wrath and WoW generally was back in the original timeline. They’ll have to put it in or wrath will look like the classic servers. That’s the time to push it.
As a Grobbulus player, and from others I’ve spoken to on the server about lack of RDF, they are in the FOR RDF camp.
Dungeon grps still hard to form on Grob, I was looking for a H Bot, Arc, Mech as I needed some qst done inside there to get my 25 qst ready for wotlk launch, and for over 30 mins a tank could not be found. Saw 3 druid healers spamming along with an assortment of DPS, but no tanks. After 40 mins of waiting I decided to stop wasting my time and played a different game. This is I guess Blizzard prefers having its player base quit the game over playing the game as long as they are still subbing.
This is a pretty reductionist take on what I posted. Just because some slight QOL tools were added to make getting around less cumbersome doesn’t mean that the game was fundamentally designed to embrace convenience. Classic especially vanilla was heavily focused on social tools and once again I do not see why the solution is to embrace even more things to circumvent the world. I could sit and explain all the very inconvenient things in TBCC to contradict what you said but it’s beside the point.
You can see what server i’m on. Guilds often help out alts or new players level and attune as they should, it is part of the game and it’s been like this since Vanilla.
This changes nothing - the incentive still isn’t there. You can say that it’s theoretically possible to group together again if the guy changes server however this isn’t being very realistic. I personally never saw this happen in 12 years of retail and it would take far too long to describe the battlegroups and server regions or cross server also creating not just financial but tangible reasons not to do this.
Or people that already have a social group to run dungeons with. I mean why implement a system that would help others finding dungeon groups better when i don’t have this problem? selfishness, no more, no less (imo)
To me it’s a trade off as I like the “wow it’s the tank from yesterday” feeling back in vanilla classic especially. Bonds are cool but as servers die you’re forced on these mega servers just to play the game because there’s no RDF so everyone leaves to greener pastures.
RDF helps small servers, all we are doing is forsaking every server into death and to what end.
To re-iterate: People are now penalized for helping new players level due to the anti-boosting changes. The earliest a max level player can help new players is when mobs are level 62, anything below applies a penalty. This means you HAVE to find people of your level, which often are not people in guilds.
Unfortunate that Blizzard didn’t seem to think the same about boosting or helping low levels. Apparently can’t keep that part of Vanilla.
