Not thrilled with the so called dungeon finder

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
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I remember doing lower level dungeons in Classic vanilla. RFD… we were going rather slow. Just sitting there for a while between each pull, drinking and chatting. Before each pull, there would often be discussion of how to approach it. What CC to use. Okay, so we’re gonna sap X, sheep moon…

I unsubbed right before TBC came out… had to focus on work, more than any other reason. Came back three months ago to Wrath. It was a totally different vibe.

First thing I noticed was that, 0.1 seconds after a battle ended, the tanks moved forward, and didn’t stop moving forward, until the next pull. There were even occasions where the tank engaged without any other team mate around, and died. Chat mostly consisted of one and two word sentences. Robotic. CC? Never a consideration. Team strategy? Who needs it. Just AOE.

I don’t know why it changed. Maybe because that’s what streamers started doing and people want to be like them? But it feels robotic compared to the often humorous banter seen 3 years back.

Probably the most chat my fiance and I saw was when a guy pointed out my she was doing suboptimal DPS and suggested some websites to look at for specs. Really sad.

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The very nature of its design is mired in the company’s cronyism.

You aren’t allowed to type in the text box unless you download/activate that SMS authentication crap.

So this tool that is supposed to be for our benefit, that is supposed to be user friendly and work better than RDF, is making you do something against your will.

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Why would everyone change their role to tank?

Why would the party leader change everyones role to tank?

The system is changing peoples roles. Either through graphical bugs or changing peoples roles.

The system is bad.

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Yeah, that’s a stupid extra hoop that they baked into the tool to unlock more functionality, but that isn’t an example of the tool introducing a new problem into the game. I’m asking you, how does the LFG tool make the game worse than not having it at all?

As a side note, I think you’re quite wrong to think of the authenticator thing to be an indication of cronyism (unless that was just thrown in there randomly)… They obviously (and explicitly) require an authenticator to stop people from using the tool to spam advertisements as we’ve seen happening in Retail for years.

I don’t know whether that’s still an issue in Retail, and clearly, the much better solution would simply be to moderate those listings, but it isn’t hard to understand why this is the route they went.

See:

Fixed it for you.

Let’s talk about these tools as they function in principle rather than getting caught up on details that can be fixed. Dungeon finder would likely be buggy in implementation too. But that’s a limitation of the pathetic amount of resources Activision Blizzard allocates to the WoW team, not of the concept itself.

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So because someone might use it to advertise, you’re going to ruin it for others that need to use it legitimately?

Thats one my strongpoints in my GDKP thread.

Not randomly, based on my opinion and observations on what is going on around me.

It doesn’t. But if it’s not going to work optimally for everyone, it just as well as not having at all, for some.

Glad to see you at least recognize this to be a problem, the bear in tubbly’s similar thread just wants to put the blame on anyone who chooses not to activate the SMS.

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Like I said, it’s a stupid hoop to jump through, and it’s not a good solution to the problem. I would much rather have them actually moderate the listings rather than just trying to mitigate the chances of people abusing the system.

But the reality of the situation (that I don’t think will ever change under Activision) is that they would prefer to save costs by automating as much of the problem out of the game as possible rather than devoting man hours to moderation. It blows, but that’s where we’re at.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but you’re arguing for dungeon finder, right? We could say precisely the same thing of dungeon finder… So that doesn’t really support dungeon finder or oppose the LFG tool, conceptually.

If you’re only in here to criticize the appalling lack of bug fixes in Classic at the moment, then you may find we actually agree quite a bit.

Oh, definitely. The authentication is such an unreasonable inconvenience, I have no idea why the WoW team put the comment feature into the LFG tool to begin with. They had to know that most people would just never use it. I feel like I’d rather it not be in the game at all than for them to dangle a useful feature in front of my face only to tell me I have to jump through inconvenient hoops to use it.

And the terrible thing is that I don’t even know if it’s still like this by design, or if the devs would change it if they weren’t miserably understaffed. They (somewhat understandably) almost never communicate with us or acknowledge problems so it’s hard to tell what’s working as intended or not.

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I’m just saying for the way it works, it just feels like we may not have even bothered with it all and saved the code and programming.

But is it better than nothing at all? Yes, I agree.

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It makes perfect sense. They’re using the modern client and mixing it with the old code. We know they’ve had issues making all kinds of systems work (that are in Retail). By the way, Retail RDF is not Wrath RDF.

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Just add dungeon finder that is cross server for 1-70 and call it a day so people can level

even on benediction there are no leveling dungeon groups, has nothing to do with “the people” has everything to do with “the system” that is implemented

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The andys would rather hold their ground on something trivial that doesn’t effect their gameplay whatsoever. People leveling alts promotes participation, bigger pool of people to do dungeons / raid with.

Its okay, when servers are dead and they are crying they only have themselves to blame.

The only socialization that goes on in dungeon groups is “summon please” “we’re phased, you’re going to have to fly here” “gg thnx for the run”

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What interaction pre running the dungeon are you talking about. The only interaction I currently get are whispers asking my gearscore. Then in the dungeon its ’ Hello ’ and thats its for pug groups.

The current dungeon finder encourages this gameplay now. Sit in a city refreshing dungeon finder waiting for that one whisper asking your gearscore.

Make your own group via your servers lfg. No choice has been remove here.

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Lower population servers are dead and networking just cant happen when the population is just not there. Do these lower pop server players have to hand over cash just to transfer and play the game.

All your points may have made sense at the start of wrath. But now the hype is over and population has plummeted, Random Dungeon Finder is needed.

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So, it’s been a while since I’ve engaged on this, mostly because I got a bit tired of repeating it. However, your argument gets used a lot, and maybe it’s time I gave it another go. Not that I think you guys will buy it, but given human nature, it will percolate and maybe even subtly shift your perspective in some small way. Or not… given this is gonna be a rather lengthy post that lands on at the 70+ of yet another RDF post :stuck_out_tongue: Ah well, onwards!

The reason your argument doesn’t work is because RDF is simply the path of least resistance and humans are kind of lazy. I mean, play the scenario out in your head for a bit. Let’s assume a 50/50 split in the population between folks who like RDF and folks who don’t. Let’s not belabour this ratio, it’s just for the sake of argument :wink:

RDF comes out and 50% of the population uses it, and the other 50% of the population doesn’t and continues to use LFG to form their own groups. This will probably be fine for a time… but a short time. Because eventually, laziness wins. Eventually, a small portion of that 50% who doesn’t want to use RDF will find a reason to use it. Maybe they’ll tell themselves they just want to check out that day, or maybe they just don’t want to bother peopling. Whatever reason they justify it with, a portion of the population shifts over to using RDF. Maybe it’s only an additional 10% and hey, a 60/40 split is still pretty good, right?

Except it continues to cascade until eventually, those people who still truly want to avoid the RDF experience have no choice for PuGs because nobody is using the LFG tool. Not because it’s better, but because it’s easier. At this point, manually formed groups for content that is offered by RDF completely die off and the change over is complete.

Now you might be inclined to say here, “But Tubbly, that’s a classic Slippery Slope Fallacy!” You know what? If this were 2010 you’d be right! However, this is 2023 and what I’ve put forth here is exactly what we saw play out in retail. Eventually, RDF became the dominant form of group formation for all dungeon content in the game and this did not change until Blizzard added dungeon content that could not be joined via RDF (ie, Mythic dungeons in WoD).

It’s worth noting that we’ve also seem similar trends play out on a much faster timeline in WoW Classic. In a very short amount of time (Phase 2 in Vanilla Classic), we saw servers self-organized into mono-faction servers because on any given server, one faction dominated the other. Some folks had enough and transferred off or rerolled to the other faction, which then cascaded to the point where servers effectively became 100% single faction. To those folks on an Alliance dominated server, is it just a simple matter to say, “Well just play Horde if you want”? No… because there simply wasn’t anybody to play with.

Should faction transfers come to WotLK (as would be consistent with the original timeline), we will see a trend of player migration to Horde (as is also consistent with the original timeline). This is for similar reasons. The mentality is that Horde is stronger, so some shift to Horde looking for advantage. Then, slowly, everybody shifts over just looking for people to play with. We saw exactly this happen.

Mega servers are also another example of a Classic trend that played out very quickly. There’s some good WillE videos covering this, demonstrating that some server populations deteriorated from healthy to dead over a period of a month, with the population decline being able to be clearly linked to a population increase in another server.

So no, it’s not a matter of “just don’t use it”… should RDF come to WotLK, it will become the dominant form of group formation. For those of you who like RDF, obviously this is not a problem. However, to those who value the more manual process of group formation, it’s effectively a death sentence to that type of player interaction. One that won’t return until late in the hypothetical (but probably inevitable) WoD Classic.

These two systems, unfortunately, can’t coexist. Honestly, I wish they could so this whole thing could be put to rest, but sadly that’s just not the case. As it is, a decision needs to be made… what kind of emphasis on player interaction and community should WoW Classic prioritize?

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Outside of the daily heroic, the LFG tool is pretty dead on Faerlina. Path of least resistance doesn’t matter when there isn’t any resistance in the first place.

If you’re leveling an alt or a returning player trying to catch up it’s an absolute nightmare right now.

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This goes into a whole other realm but I’ll try to keep it brief (ish) since I already wrote a novel above.

Firstly, point of clarification. Isn’t Fearlina a rather large server? On my own server (Pagle), the LFG tool is quite populated for all dungeons. I was playing this weekend and there was 10+ groups in all level 80 categories. Maybe folks on Fearlina aren’t as engaged with lower tier content? No idea… but on Pagle, LFG for H/H+ was pretty populated.

Secondly, the LFG tool as-is is not sufficient. There is an aspect of legacy RDF that really should be explored here, especially for lower level dungeons. That aspect is cross-realm. We could have cross-realm enabled in the current group-finder and that would go a long way towards alleviating the issues players on low-pop realms have, while not compounding the queue issues high-pop realms have.

Anyway, you’re not wrong… players being able to find groups can absolutely be a problem and it should be addressed. There are just many of us that don’t feel RDF is the appropriate solution, primarily because of the cost associated with it.

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you want the biggest difference between the two? LFG not only allows extreme gatekeeping, it encourages it and there is nothing social about it unless you classify toxic statements as to why you dont get to group as a social experience worth having.

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The retail LFG Tool is significantly better than what we have for a number of reasons. Obviously it’s cross realm which solves some of the major problems right now particularly for dungeons besides the heroic daily. The interface is also significantly more usable and it doesn’t have the annoying bugs that are present in the classic version.

But the basic problem remains that RDF is simply better for the vast majority of dungeon content since only in H+ might you really want to put any thought into group comp(just like M+ in retail). So for most dungeons in classic a LFG Tool just ends up being more steps with the same end result, even if it’s cross realm and the player pool size gets solved.

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I agree with the first part of your post, but not here. It’s important to understand that this is purely preference based. I enjoy the game as it is without RDF, and I have experienced both aspects of this.

However, I think it’s important to focus on what we do agree on, which is that the LFG needs improvements and that cross-realm would be a value-add for the community as a whole.

Once we have that, we can continue to argue about the rest as we have been :slight_smile:

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I want an authentic Wrath, and that means RDF. The fact it came in 3.3 is irrelevant as every other system for 3 years came early. Also, as of now, it’s not coming to Wrath at all.

It’s just a fantastic coincidence that the solution to the problems plaguing Wrath happens to be authentic. The devs should have cheered for joy. Instead they removed it from the game.

When I want the Vanilla experience, I go play Classic Era, which is great. But Wrath should be Wrath.

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Your argument always fails because it assumes that the path of least resistance is bad and people only choose it because they are lazy. In almost every case the path of least resistance is the better path. People choose it because they are intelligent. Almost all the advances we see in the world today are because engineers etc are constantly finding better ways of doing things more efficiently. The average person today has wealth the exceeds the imagination of people centuries ago. And its all because people have worked to make more and better paths of least resistance.

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