Oh, I don’t think I was aware you were talking about low-level. I feel you there.
Oh, I’m not saying that the traditional group building guarantees meaningful social interaction. Just that it guarantees some interaction of any sort. However in my experience, meaningful interaction is far more common with traditional group building, whereas people in dungeon finder groups (gradually) were basically just bots that would ignore anything you say.
We’re having very different experiences. There is a stark difference in my experience between traditional groups and dungeon finder groups. Not always, but extremely often. Having played in the eras that people typically consider to be modern Retail for a couple of years, I’m fairly familiar with the the way groups became after dungeon finder was implemented. I’m extremely confident that it would just go that way again if dungeon finder was implemented today. And of course, I acknowledge that I may be a bit friendlier and more helpful to people than the average random person, so for sure I could be a common denominator. But that was also true when I played Retail, and I had gotten used to simply being ignored by the “treadmill bots”.
As for GW2, I’ve never played it. I always wanted to. I remember seeing the box art when I went to stores that had games and thinking it looked sooooooo cool. But in those days, the family PC was so old and weak that it could barely play flash games. 
Or maybe it was the GW1 box I’m remembering…
I mean, if you can quote them for me, I’d be happy to relinquish that one or two idiots may have said that. 
Either way, that’s a gross misrepresentation of the general sentiment of people who don’t want dungeon finder. I have never witnessed someone saying that Retail is only bad because of dungeon finder.
I think you misunderstand; It’s a slippery slope, not a slippery slope fallacy.
It would only be fallacious to make claims of one thing leading to another if there wasn’t some sound logical reasoning for it, or strong evidence. But in this case, we have just about the strongest evidence that’s possible, without being able to time travel: we’ve seen precisely where this road leads because we’ve already experienced it before.
We know what dungeon finder feels like, we know how popular it would be, we know how human nature dictates people would tend to be less social in it. The idea that predicting the future in any capacity is fallacious is a common misconception of the slippery slope fallacy.
It doesn’t change the facts. “Don’t like it, don’t use it” is the traitorous critic fallacy, and it’s not an argument. I see where you’re coming from, but I’m going to keep calling it when I see it.
I’d highly recommend you actually look up what the slippery slope fallacy is. You seem to have a cartoonish misunderstanding of it.
Nice strawmans, but they’re meaningless. We’re not having a discussion about “no changes” or whether Retail stuff belongs in Wrath or not. This thread is about the OP’s misgivings with the LFG tool, and the conversation is largely about whether dungeon finder should be in the game instead.
It must be server-specific. On Grobbulus, it’s used for all kinds of things, not just raids.
Meh. I could see how botting might be slightly easier to do in dungeon finder, but I definitely don’t think that there would be much of a noticeable difference.
It makes absolutely no sense to quote the devs immediately after they implemented the feature… Of course they have literally nothing but good things to say about it, because
- There’s probably a lot of pressure not to publicly disagree with the dev team’s choices especially when they’re fresh
- They didn’t have the decade+ of experience and hindsight to show them where dungeon finder would lead the game.
And I’m not saying that there aren’t WoW team members who are positive about it today – I’m just saying that cherrypicking words from team members who were in the midst of rolling the system out is just about as useless as a quote can get as far as the argument goes.
It can certainly be argued that dungeon finder might have been a contributing factor, but it would be impossible to say for sure, or to try and glean how much or how little it contributed… There’s literally no data to prove that dungeon finder – specifically – actually caused any loss of subs.
Dumb example. Cross-realm PvP doesn’t function at all like PvE content, and it literally needs cross-realm grouping to function the way it currently does. That’s not the case for PvE in principle.
Dumb examples. Dungeon finder teleports are literally the only fast-travel mechanic in the game (with the partial exception of PvP teleports, but again, couldn’t exist this way without it) that is completely free of costs AND infinitely useable.
Because of that, it diminishes the value and flavor of every other method of travel by trivializing distance, which is an extremely important mechanic in WoW.
