Other than convenience, what argument is there for RDF?

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
101

what are you talking about? you must be living in another world, bg’s are x-realm since month2 of classic2019, it’s been always a region wide on classic! Unless you’re talking about about another game because you definitely never played original vanilla pre 1.11 where bg’s was server based “since you looks ignorant about the past” also random bg’s is a random matches where a total randoms face each other and does random things, if you want a pvp quality in bg’s that’s rated Bg’s! a cata feature but u can ask for it now not a big deal, alsothe queue from anywhere has nothing to do with BOTS being in every single bg’s in past 3years, and i hope that you’re not accusing pre-queue for bringing bots into bg’s LOL

anti-QOL people are desperate and blaming anything without even having a clue.

102

Why do you all assume your timezone is the be all and end all, there is a whole world out there.

103

The argument is, Removal of RDF protects social experience, as that is blizzard’s reasons for removing the tool in the first place; forming groups aren’t a social experience, and LFG tool is just as easy to form groups with as RDF is, you can literally queue for all or any dungeon with LFG just as you would with RDF

Give some examples of how they protected your social experience

people already do this without RDF, they have for all of classic so far.

dungeons aren’t the only place to interact with people, nor are they exclusively designed for this.

it takes the same amount of time as it does with LFG to form groups, the time it takes to complete the dungeon is up the group, not the tool.

yes, because people want to play the game and run dungeons, is that a bad thing? you dont want certain players to do group activities such as dungeons? that doesn’t seem very socially accepting of you.

where is your source or data to back this idea up?

what is the cost? what social experience has the removal of RDF protected you from losing?

except for people who don’t want to level alts questing or battlegrounds 1-80, or people on dead faction servers, or people who can’t play on their mega server because of queue so they want to play something or an alt on a less populated server with less players to play with…?

such entitlement.

104

“I just think”.|
Exactly you think and so it should be right?

105

Im not saying anything about my timezone. Im in EST. The person I quoted was making the argument that they can log on right now at 1am PST and find a group in 10 mins. Im stating thats irrelevant because everyone right now is grinding heroics for their prebis so obviously youre not gonna have trouble finding a group.

106

96% of the subscriber growth of WoW came before RDF. NINETY-SIX-PERCENT. Quarterly subs had never once decreased during this period. Subscriber growth between the RDF release and the great collapse are a blip. And we’ve just seen a large growth in classic players despite there very specifically not being RDF, because of people coming back in the lead up to an expansion release. Pointing at the 0.5m three quarters after RDF but in the period just before Cata is almost comical.

107

Then I apologies, I see it a lot and it annoys me lol

108

So a feature that was only out for 1 year had less growth than when the game was live 5 years prior to it? Do you guys even think before throwing out the garbage logic.

In reference to this, it took classic vanilla less than a year to see a very huge drop off.

1 Like
109

wotlk retained vanilla and tbc’s subscriber base of 11 million; retained them.
wotlk gained an additional 500,000 subscribers, 500k
500,000 additional subscribers were gained after RDF up to cataclysm launch.

that means the period after RDF and before cataclysm made up for 50% of wotlk subscriber growth.

quarterly subs never decreased during wotlk.

1 Like
110

cross realm pve and rdf pls i agree good post

111

To add to this when doing research regarding subs I found -

"In a new analyst note, Mike Hickey from Janco Partners has been examining Blizzard’s World Of Warcraft success in light of the Activision/Blizzard merger, suggesting average monthly WoW revenue in “the low teens” per user, and a churn rate as low as 4-5% per month.

So now let’s go back and look at that graph with an understanding that 5% of the population leaves every month. For ease, let’s just look at WoW West, which includes the US and European subs. It remains steady at around 5.125 million from 2009-2010. Assuming a 5% churn rate, that means 256,250 new subs had to be gained every month (on average) just to keep steady.

Now, let’s look at… well, any other year. 2005-2006, when the WoW phenomenon took off? WoW went from 500k to 2.5 million subs in the West, meaning that it had to maintain the 500k it already had and gain a total of 2 million more. 500k * 0.05 + 2m / 12 = 191,667 subs per month. In other words, vanilla gained new subs at a 25% slower rate that year than Wrath.

The next year (2006-2007) was 2.5m * 0.05 + 1m / 12 = 208,334. Again, almost 20% less.

It is not until the 2007-2008 release of TBC that we see Wrath being overtaken: 3.5m * 0.05 + 1m / 12 = 258,334. The difference there is… 2,084, or 0.8%. Basically a rounding error. The last year of TBC is a bit sketchy depending on how you want to interpret that final tick on the graph. If it’s 4.9 million, then TBC gained the same 2,084 number more. If it’s any less, Wrath wins.

If you want to follow the global population line instead, the figures come out as follows:

  • 2005-2006 = +537,500
  • 2006-2007 = +477,084
  • 2007-2008 = +562,500
  • 2008-2009 = +625,000
  • 2009-2010 = +575,000 (<—Wrath)"

So even with a churn rate of 5% the time that RDF was in the game gained more subs than Vanilla did.

3 Likes
112

12 million players, literally a world record at that time, did you really think they could continue that growth? it had to plateau, and it did.

But the decline, that was in cata years after LFD you can’t blame the tool for that, just like you can’t blame LFD for people today, people have changed, they are no longer the social mmo players of old.

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113

you’re only proving that you never played original wotlk, again as i said! game being on same content for +1year will always drop in subs, RDF have nothing to do with that, and most people/guilds i know back then who quited, did quit for tons of reasons the RDF was never one of them.

for example, some servers stayed offline for 13days in row, due the macro issue, i don’t think if this happen now anyone would keep on playing, people does quit because they can’t play for 7hours queue, so if 13days? it will be a disaster

and most people was fed up with farming icc for 1year, so they did quit, impossible for any game to retain the same numbers if they never released a single new thing for 1year.

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114

thank you for your research, appreciate it

115

LFR wasent the reason for the massive drop off in cata lets be real here, it was impleneted in dragon soul which is widely regarded as a pretty bad raid tier on top of it being the end of cata which was pretty meh expansion.

RDF/LFR was and is not the reason the social aspect died and I am kinda tired of seeing this as a excuse.

What killed the social aspect wasent a singluar thing, but multiple things, with the advent of things such as vent where people could just talk to their friends outside of the game, the game becoming harder and general interest in wow fading after wrath is what killed it.

Just look at retail, you have the LFG system where people have to form talk and form up…and people still dont socialize in that.

As it stands in classic barely anyone actually talks in pug groups I have joined, most dont talk and I normally just talk to friends in discord, only runs that are talkative are with guildies.

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116

anti-rdf in wow showing hate toward a feature with fake info and wrong assumption yet they talk about social aspect…those people have zero clue about the meaning of the term Social.

hey anti-rdf if you’re not trolling, or abusing something neither doing RMT? please go seek medical care, you need it if you think that rdf will destroy your social life.

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117

Yes, I was responding directly to your post which specifically mentioned 2010. And also talking about how they have made the same queue changes recently, with the same negative results.

Yes, pre-xrealm is what I am talking about in comparison to now, and to RDF. Why am I having to reiterate what I literally just said?

Yes, in Cata Blizz realized they had totally ruined BGs, and created rated to try and reverse the damage.

118

i think at this point the burden of proof should be on the anti-rdf crowd, prove how blizzards removal of RDF improved or protects your social experience or how such wouldnt be possible with RDF.

the way they have it framed is having us prove why RDF is needed or how it isn’t ruining their social experience, which is not hard to prove at all tbh but it is so backwards to do this circle as they cling to blizzard’s reasoning when all their excuses fall apart, even when blizzard’s own reasons don’t hold weight for their actions.

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119

They cant because we have 3 years of experience in the classic version of the game where we’ve witnessed time and time again how social the pugging scene is without RDF and it basically is no different.

2 Likes
120

Well you would categorically be wrong, since as it stands RDF is very intentionally not in the game.