Blizzard’s decision to launch WotLKC without the dungeon finder shows that they have a vision for the game. The intended experience is that, if you want to be successful, you have to engage with the players around you – by talking to people to form groups – and engage with the world – by actually traveling out in it to get to instance portals.
Unsurprisingly, requiring players to engage with each other and the world on an MMO brings a lot of benefits:
This approach facilitates emergent gameplay experiences – memorable, unplanned, unscripted moments that make the world feel fun and alive/
It promotes friendly, nontoxic behavior among players, because players have control over who they group with.
It promotes an immersive gameplay experience. Running into and grouping with the same players and actually having to travel from place to place will make Northrend feel like an actual continent to be explored.
That’s not to say that dungeon finder is necessarily all bad. Blizzard could change its implementation in a few minor ways to retain the convenience of smoother group formation without sacrificing an immersive game world:
Enable the cross-realm dungeon finder for low level (1-70) characters only.
Restrict the dungeon finder to filling groups from your local realm only.
Remove the functionality that teleports group members directly into the instance.
Overall, though, I think Blizzard is making the right choice. I want to thank them for expressing a vision for what the intended WotLKC experience should be, and making a controversial feature choice in order to realize that vision. I hope they understand that the screeching on the forums represents a small but disproportionately loud segment of the player base, and I hope that they have the courage to stick with this decision.
Ive been advocating against the random dungeon in the forums ever since it was first announced, and especially after It went live and changed how dungeons were ran. The random dungeon finder gets abused and causes abuse to players.
Guild cliques love it because it makes their clique activities even more cliquey. Guess what happens if you are not apart of the clique in your guild…
“Go Go Go kick the noob” types love it because that’s what the rdf literally became in the first hours of it going live in 3.3.
Then came the “get to level 15 and stand in org/SW queuing for dungeons on a hunter all the way to 55 so I can roll a death knight” crowd. oof
There was/is of course players that had/have odd schedules and could/can not play during prime times for their regions. In this rare occasion the random dungeon finder was/is useful. But still not worth the overall damage to the game imo.
And given that players have congregated on a few large and medium servers in classic, its very likely that any player will be able to get dungeon runs taken care of in a timely manner.
Tank selling heroic/daily/level boosting tanking service, no LFD? no problem! 100g a run for normal dungeons, 200g a run for heroic! I can do healing too! same rates apply! Money upfront, no refund if party falls apart.
They will implement some sort of grouping feature however I am quite certain they won’t budge on original LFD for reasons I outlined in other threads regarding micro transactions. However, once this becomes glaringly obvious blizzard will take a strike to the knee once players figure out they got duped
Original wow (vanilla up to patch 3.2 wrath) was perfectly fine for 5years without the random dungeon finder. During which time millions of players formed dungeon groups.
Thus far wow classic has been just fine without the 3.3 random dungeon finder. And thankfully, will be just fine in wrath classic.
This is a big thing for me. A lot of people want to know exactly what the benefit of being out in the world is, and it’s hard to describe, because a lot of the funnest and most memorable stuff is completely unplanned.
So they kept LFD for 7 expansion for no reason? If it was so bad and ruined retail, why did they keep it? Why did they keep building onto LFD and improving it? Or maybe they kept it because it worked and still works. Either way, how does it affect you whether it is in the game or not? Did someone force you to use it back in the original WotLK, and you didn’t like it? Didn’t like seeing more people do dungeons and leveling instead of buying dungeon boosts?
You think other people should be required to be out in the world and experience moments that you think are fun and memorable. So play the way you want, and not for what we came for.
Right? These people were ok denying any change up until now for the sake of keeping it true to the original. Not this time though, people might use LFD and break free of the classist gatekeeping to have fun or something. Maybe they just forgot how harsh early 3.1 and 3.2 were when it came to Gear Score checking, achievement verifying elitists.
The original classic community didn’t really change, what has happened is that WoW classic exploded and a lot of retail people who never had the same complaints joined along for the ride and had a good time, which is the ideal.
What you are mostly hearing now are cries from those who have joined in on the fun trying to make this into the game the classic community quit playing long ago. You’ll likely find a lot of correlation between people who support LFD and the items you listed, as well as equal correlation to the opposition of each.
That was in 2004-2009. Are we in 2004-2009? No, no we are not.
I just think it’s quite silly to deny players what the majority want. Despite what anyone may claim, people who do not want LFD are the minority. Every poll shows this, and polls skew hardcore, and hardcore skews anti-LFD.
Even without LFD barely any social interaction happens when forming a group.
LFM X, Mage LFG - X and typing “inv” is what we have right now in TBC and what we’ll get in WotLK. That’s not being social, people rarely talk in dungeons and getting to them to “expirience the world” is just something that generally won’t happen.
You can bet that you’re gonna be alt tabbed while flying to your dungeons, that one of the only things you’ll say are “inv” because the only real time you have to talk are if you’ve wiped or after you’ve killed a boss saying “can I need on that?” which would’ve happened with LFD anyway.
Do you mean PvP? Getting corpse camped is so fun!
I think the toxic behaviour was blown way out of proportion in regards to LFD. Does it make it easier? Yes, but I doubt that people will be toxic solely because of LFD. You’re bound to run into more toxic people when you interact with more people.
Until you get summoned by the stone… Also some servers have so many people on it that with or without LFD they might as well be running with people they’ll never see again.
LFD being removed is small, but the reasoning behind it is dumb. Claiming it removes a social aspect of the game meanwhile we’re all AFK spamming chat for groups. All this change does is slow down the game, like instead of running 20 dungeons for an item you only do 10 because now you need to wait around spamming LFG/M and oh, would you look at the time I’ve spent 30 minutes looking for a group, guess I’ll stop.
Dungeons will 100% be run less with LFD being removed.
Respect your opinion but strongly disagree mainly because the alternative with what I have experienced and many others have on TBC Classic is not this immersive social gameplay that you are falsely claiming it is.
It’s not 2007 any more, it’s spam and pray you are the first to be invited to a bulletin board addon and pray you are a class they deem necessary to invite otherwise pay for a tank in order to play the game. Iv’e had just as much toxic behavior from LFG / Bulletin Board than i ever experienced using the Dungeon finder tool in many many years.
Dungeon finder hurts boosting, alleviates server population issues, prevents forced transfers ($$$$ blizzard know)
And players who chose to engage in that immersive experience and find like minded players to travel with can still do so and they did in the past and opt out of engaging in using the Dungeon finder system. Both ways of playing co-existed in 3.3.5 in a healthy way and can again.
Thank you blizzard for listening to the feedback and starting discussions on possible changes to your decision.
