Well blizzaard kinda killed them off. It’s what went wrong.
They absolutely did. And they’re doing it again in Wrath by removing dungeon finder. Say goodbye to the casual players.
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Yup, I can see it, you can see it so many can but Blizzard is blind by their “power gamer” elitist thoughts. Like seriously I don’t need advantage in PVP to win, I instead need GAMES to pop that are not a billiion rating lower. (exaggeration), but you get the idea.
I don’t NEED Mythic raids, what I want are PLAYERS to play wtih to raid with to have fun with. The more they cater to the the parse lords (yeah I am guilty of this) the worse it is for the casuals who don’t care about that stuff but get excluded because of it.
The more they focus on making things “Dark souls” the less gamers they have… basically…
And as for PVP, MoP proved too me when they removed rating and turned the Elite sets that I love into basically same item level T-mog versions of the same armor… It was rad and Arena populations exploded in the same season; tons of people played and it was really great.
Blizzard later (later expansion) added rating back to gear, and guess what happened… All the boosters came back, and the population died; there are almost as few people doing Arena in Retail as in TBC… Its super crappy man.
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I mean the point of Wrath dungeons is to steamroll them with AOE, Wrath dungeons are a joke, outside of Halls of Reflection
I’ve said this a few times, but in an overall design philosophy perspective the worst thing that happened to WoW was turning it into an e-sport. First with pvp and then with pve.
It destroyed…everything. Class design is boring and bland because of balancing around being an e-sport. Mass homogenization everywhere. Just look how the playerbase has become. Obsessive min/max tryhards who care NOTHING about the actual simple, fun joy of playing the game. Which is no surprised because that’s how WoW has been designed for many years. Blizzard created these monsters.
Of course those types of players always existed, but originally it was a very, very, very small percentage of the playerbase. Yet that is who Blizz catered to for years. So casuals had two choices: adapt and change to that mentality…or quit. Obviously millions and millions quit and most of those who remain in 2022 are the e-sport crowd, and whales.
But forget Retail…it’s a lost cause. This is Wrath Classic and Blizz is removing a system that would drastically help alleviate the horrible bots, boosters and gdkp plague ruining TBCC right now. Also, lfd obviously lets far more players (the casuals especially) experience the content without having to pay gold or conform their class and spec to the ‘meta’ because tanks and healers pick and choose the ultra group composition. God forbid players get to play what they want, which the dungeon finder would enable.
I don’t know what they’re thinking, Harland. This is just awful for Wrath Classic.
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Yup they’re killing the game little by little, it seems to be what they do. I do agree with you overall that “rated PVP” was a mistake, it absolutely was because it’s somewhat exclusionary; especially now.
Games like this should have always aimed to be as inclusive as possible while also providing a degree of challenge. Similar to table top RPG’s the further you deviate from the adventure the worse the game gets.
I love Arena, and RBG’s because they’re really fun, but in truth they should never have been added.
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Yes, you can definitely ‘take small towns and move them into a large city scape’. I should know that, I was both blessed and cursed by being born in and spending 25 years of my life living in NYC or frequently visiting in my years living in other states…5 completely different styled boroughs combine to form the city and guess what? The sub-communities that have historically occupied major areas remain un-phased while also allowing room for new people to constantly move in/out functioning just fine. There has been thousands of newcomers that still ultimately fail to compromise the culture that dominates the different areas. Ever heard of ‘ChinaTown’ or ‘Spanish Harlem’? Yeah, there’s hundreds of spots like this in the city that have never been tarnished even as the population shifts. If people have a community or culture that is actually worth anything then I promise you merged servers isn’t going to compromise that. All it does is sacrifice the character names, which has a subjective amount of importance. It would however fix a lot of the issues people have had on their low-pop/med realms since Vanilla
Also, your point about RDF not contributing at all to the behavioral patterns and social aspects in the Classic community is a bit dishonest and lacks context. Here’s why
- RDF was not included in either of the first 2 original expansions and the community wasn’t perfect, yet it was STILL objectively better than the modern Classic community. This doesn’t support the Pro-RDF side considering a bulk of the people who came to Classic in the first place are from retail, the version of the game that has been dominated by the QOL features for 10+ years. “Go to retail” didn’t come out of nowhere
- RDF has been featured in every single expansion since Wrath. It is also an objective observation that RDF was the foundation of future QOL features. For example, LFR is literally the same exact UI overlay and process, its just reskinned for raids instead of dungeons. How can we say with a straight face that QOL features birthed by RDF have a lot of negative side effects but the feature that influenced it itself doesn’t? Huge contradiction I’ve seen by plenty of people
- We have statistical AND anecdotal evidence to show that since those two features were added in the game the subscription numbers of retail have declined and a lot of those unsubbed players chose to either quit the game entirely OR play on private servers OR come to Classic. Why are people not playing private servers on the later versions of the game that have all the QOL/Animations/Content lanes/etc. ? Perhaps because people actually do prefer to form/be a part of a live community instead of just going for whichever version of the game is more convenient/streamlined. Ask yourself this: Do you REALLY believe that these private servers would’ve died if they always maintained the same exact populations but RDF was modified/flat out removed? If RDF and all its children have been available for like 5 expansions AFTER Wrath and yet people have been on Wrath pservers for years then its safe to assume RDF isn’t the dealbreaker for them.
- Wrath is by far the most popular pserver culture out there and has been available for over 10 years. Wrath OG was the peak of the player count. Why was Wrath so popular off the bat? RDF wasn’t added until 3.3.0, Therefore its another observation that RDF wasn’t the reason people played the majority of retail Wrath. The same people who claimed they played Wrath entirely back in the day conveniently skip this part, probably because they know it contradicts their whole stance. They were most likely too busy running around nuking stuff with Heirlooms to even think of RDF not existing until ICC
- RDF makes content streamlined. This has several pros and cons which is the heart of this entire debate. Some people are fine with repeating history and walking down the same exact path that we already traveled because its convenient and known, some want to take the same hike but travel the other path they didn’t get to explore the first time. If we can verify that one feature influenced other features that led the decline of the game and a CLEAR change in the community WHY should we copy that same exact formula for a second time?
Weird it’s almost like retail has also had a ton of other changes happen to it besides just LFD/LFR. But sure let’s blame all problems on LFD.
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Weird, its almost like Vanilla Classic and TBCC had a ton of other changes/inconveniences happen to it besides just RDF. But sure, lets blame all the problems with the first 2 xpacs not having RDF
Sure woulda helped though.
Noone has done so, they’ve blamed very specific issues on lack of LFD.
You know the issues LFD actually fixes.
Let’s be honest. Almost everyone’s a casual in Classic. Even the people who “raid” don’t want progression.
You can play semantics all you want, I still haven’t seen anything from you in support of RDF since our first interaction outside of “I’m right because my opinion popular, you wrong”. What a weird echo chamber to die in man
- RDF was not included in either of the first 2 original expansions and the community wasn’t perfect, yet it was STILL objectively better than the modern Classic community. This doesn’t support the Pro-RDF side considering a bulk of the people who came to Classic in the first place are from retail, the version of the game that has been dominated by the QOL features for 10+ years. “Go to retail” didn’t come out of nowhere
- RDF has been featured in every single expansion since Wrath. It is also an objective observation that RDF was the foundation of future QOL features. For example, LFR is literally the same exact UI overlay and process, its just reskinned for raids instead of dungeons. How can we say with a straight face that QOL features birthed by RDF have a lot of negative side effects but the feature that influenced it itself doesn’t? Huge contradiction I’ve seen by plenty of people
- We have statistical AND anecdotal evidence to show that since those two features were added in the game the subscription numbers of retail have declined and a lot of those unsubbed players chose to either quit the game entirely OR play on private servers OR come to Classic. Why are people not playing private servers on the later versions of the game that have all the QOL/Animations/Content lanes/etc. ? Perhaps because people actually do prefer to form/be a part of a live community instead of just going for whichever version of the game is more convenient/streamlined. Ask yourself this: Do you REALLY believe that these private servers would’ve died if they always maintained the same exact populations but RDF was modified/flat out removed? If RDF and all its children have been available for like 5 expansions AFTER Wrath and yet people have been on Wrath pservers for years then its safe to assume RDF isn’t the dealbreaker for them.
- Wrath is by far the most popular pserver culture out there and has been available for over 10 years. Wrath OG was also the peak of the player-count. Why was Wrath so popular off the bat? RDF wasn’t added until 3.3.0, Therefore its another observation that RDF wasn’t the reason people played the majority of retail Wrath. The same people who claimed they played Wrath entirely back in the day conveniently skip this part, probably because they know it contradicts their whole stance. They were most likely too busy running around nuking stuff with Heirlooms to even think of RDF not existing until ICC
- RDF makes content streamlined. This has several pros and cons which is the heart of this entire debate. Some people are fine with repeating history and walking down the same exact path that we already traveled because its convenient and known, some want to take the same hike but travel the other path they didn’t get to explore the first time. If we can verify that one feature influenced other features that led the decline of the game and a CLEAR change in the community WHY should we copy that same exact formula for a second time?
Holy crap, are they adding in garrisons? Borrowed power? ARCHAEOLOGY??? Who made these decisions? They should be fired immediately!
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I’m gonna assume you only mentioned that portion because you secretly acknowledge that even if you disagree I’m still asking valid questions. RDF didn’t single handedly ruin WoW as we knew it but at this point if people don’t see how it was the gateway for a lot of crap then idk what to tell them other than just cope. There’s a lot of copium on this topic
One QOL feature doesn’t = literally all other QOL features. I wouldn’t even call them QOL features. Garrisons were generally hated and they were considered actual content. Removal of talents/class homogenization was just a bad design direction. Legendaries, borrowed power…you know the laundry list of things. These did not come from LFD, just really bad dev choices from the same devs who are once again, making bad choices for classic. You need some copium because you clearly refuse to accept the fact that LFD did not start the downfall of retail. Years and years of self destruction caused it.
I’d estimate that 95% of the people I’ve played with on Blanchy are veterans from OG, TBC, and some wrath. The idea that no one that played the original could possibly want dungeon finder is ludicrous considering how popular it was when it was first introduced. You know when the game was filled to the brim with original players. Or do you only consider players that were in og beta and quit in TBC to be the only “non retail” players.
As other have posted, I’m not sure why people can’t understand that it wasn’t dungeon finder that killed wow. It was the fact that Blizz literally dropped a dragon powered nuke from orbit on the entire game during cata. The world, gone. Original class design, gone. All the previous lore, basically swept away to make room for the hot mess they replaced it with (some story lines outright contradicted previous lore). That is why everyone left. Getting to run a dungeon after a 30 minute wait did not.
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LFD is not a retail feature. It was introduced with wrath. You know … the next classic xpac?
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This part is going to be so hilarious, when everyone takes your advice and rolls a DK to tank with, and suddenly you can’t find any groups because they all have tanks already.
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A Druid with copium all over their nose talking about somebody else using it… I love how people will twist words just to suit their satire in hopes that another person will press the heart or maybe even reply with their support 
You literally quoted me and still managed to twist what I said
Nothing I said was false. RDF was the gateway for other worse features period and combined with everything else this ruined the game. I said it didn’t single-handedly ruin the game as we knew it which obviously implies that I’m aware there’s countless other poor choices and mistakes that were made unrelated to this topic. My opinion on merging realms and starting Wrath without RDF is because I think people for the first few phases will dog the content without it again just out of excitement and nostalgia. Its easy to say no until its available on a nearby date and everybody else plus your friends are hopping back on.
Why don’t you mention how they killed arenas or how they allowed the world buff meta to last in Vanilla because #Nochanges even though shortly after it became #Actuallypleasechangeafewthings? Mention something impactful like the length of the phases being handled in TBC…You and the other Druid are gonna sit here and tell me RDF automatically fixes everything while earlier saying that retail had many other issues to bring up? So does Classic, RDF wouldn’t fix most of the problems people complain about
GDKP?? Its so obvious that this a modern zoomer thing that people inherited from OGs and certain info trickling down over-time naturally, definitely not a RDF issue. GDKP didn’t get popular because of no RDF, It got popular because no matter what’s in the game people ultimately get bored and don’t have proper gold-sinks to keep them playing normally in Classic. GDKP would 100% happen no matter what QOL we have and I would bet everything on this. We don’t have to agree or like it but that’s more than likely what would happen
Dead servers? Since the name reservations of Classic started way before its launch the Twitch/Celebrity culture heavily influenced where people rolled/re-rolled. Realms would naturally die anyway and people will get absorbed into bigger guilds or just quit if they didn’t reroll already. This wasn’t a RDF issue its a culture thing.
Perfect example: Thalnos. Thalnos was a popular US East PVP realm that quickly got dominated by Brazil claiming it as their mothership and it forced a lot of people I knew to leave the realm. Very popular Brazilian players started attracting a mixture of people that only speak Spanish and Portugese and not everybody was able to keep up. I speak Spanish so I wasn’t bothered, but I did happen to meet a lot of players that were chill but didn’t want to deal with the language barrier. At the beginning of Classic this realm was 52/48 Horde to Ally and had a very dynamic culture. This quickly changed the realm from being a couple thousand to just a few hundred until the realm was so dry that even the Brazilian guilds who came to take it over eventually transferred