I’ve seen many complaints on several threads regarding Blizzards decision to not add Random Dungeon Finder (RDF) to the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King (WOTLK) Classic Expansion. Many of the responses read as just complaints about a lack of convenience that they get in the retail version of the game and fail to get in Classic. Others are just simply demanding they just take the current RDF and implement it and if that doesn’t happen they proceed to making claims of hoping that devs lose their jobs.
Lets tackle the latter first. Calling for someone’s job in the forums is just ridiculous full stop. Secondly a lot of these complaints seem to forget a simple key piece of information when it comes to tools like RDF:
We have done this experiment before.
We have seen what happens to this game when RDF is implemented because we have already gone through it. We saw both the good and the bad. I will openly admit that there were some benefits to the RDF however, there were far more negatives and it took us longer to realize them but we eventually did over time. While its true the RDF tool did in fact launch during the original WOTLK expansion back in 2009 it wasn’t until later on that we realized what was wrong with it. After the WOTLK expansion came to an end and we started Cataclysm thats when the negatives started to pop up. Throughout my time in Cata the hot button issue within the community was how “The Open World is Dead”. Thread after thread and video after video. It was filled with this notion of how (depending on which faction you played) everyone simply sat inside Stormwind or Orgrimmar and just teleported from dungeon to dungeon and that the world felt empty. This was pretty common throughout Cata and got even worse with the Looking For Raid (LFR) tool when that came out as well. This notion carried on into Mists of Pandaria (MOP) where the complaints about the world being dead only grew louder and the same issues were more in our faces. The world was dead and instead of sitting inside Stormwind or Orgimmar players simply stayed at their respective City in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms and teleported from dungeon to dungeon leaving another continent lifeless of player interaction.
When Warlords of Draenor (WOD) hit it was more of the same however after two expansions of a dying world the next negative impact was front and center and I heard and felt those same complaints as many others did. “The Open World was Dead” AND “The sense of community was gone”. In WOD the notion of having a group of people you knew faded and what was left was random people who barely said a word to one another getting grouped up, teleported to a dungeon, ran it, and never spoke to them again all while queuing from inside your instanced Garrison. It felt hollow and it also took away many of the organic ways people found guilds and groups of players to continue to play with.
The world used to be THE Main character of the game and when the world started to go the interactions and social experiences that created the communities were next in line to fall apart. Searching for players to group up with is how guilds were formed and friendships were made and the dungeons served as the catalyst for that player collaboration more than most. The RDF stripped away these experiences in favor of convenience.
It was also around this time that players started talking about wanting to go back to the original version of the game.
The now infamous “You think you do but you dont” was asked during the WOD panel at Blizzcon. The reaction from the community was pretty unanimous…The game had changed for the worse not the better and we needed support from Blizzard to turn it around. It didn’t happen and players started looking for alternatives most notably the Nostalrius private server. Nostalrius showed what the current versions of the game were lacking with a lively open world and an active community working together across multiple guilds and groups. A far cry from what we were seeing in current versions of the game at the time. This only furthered the player base for an official server response from Blizzard.
It was pretty common going forward for people to hope for some sort of vanilla wow option to be announced at any of the next Blizzcon events from this point forward. There were threads about how special that version of the game was and Nostalrius was often referenced for what it had achieved. Some of the most popular streamers even openly campaigned for classic server options.
After Legion and Battle for Azeroth gave us more of the same we finally got what many had been asking for from Blizzard. A chance to go back to the original version of the game that fostered the core elements that made it so memorable and renowned. World of Warcraft Classic came out in 2019 and its success lead to the Burning Crusade and once BC was announced we all collectively knew that Wrath was coming in the near future. But we also knew that it meant we were faced with RDF again when it came to Wrath and many of us were nervous of repeating the same mistake again.
Those of us who had been paying attention and played through the expansions knew that while RDF did bring convenience to the player base it also ushered in the fundamental issues that began to erode what made the game what it was. The experience of a world full of others that you would come to know as friends or enemies on the opposing faction. The unexpected on our journeys and realizing that the journey was part of the overall adventure. Making friends with people who you may never meet outside of Azeroth. Getting lost along the way but figuring it out together. Coming across a player in need. Being a higher level and lending a hand to someone who needs it. A lot of this went away when the player base had the convenience of just sitting inside a capital city clicking take me to the dungeon instantly and that then turned into take me to the raid instantly and this slowly killed the community spirit and the living world.
Fortunately Blizzard listened to the player base. You could say they had literally years of feedback to look into with the current decision to not just implement the same RDF from the past. For all the reasons mentioned above and the evidence of the fact that the player base did complain about the world being dead for years and the player base did complain about losing the sense of a community for years. And now when Blizzard came back to the original launching point of RDF and a decision needed to be made they chose not to repeat the same mistake. Yet many are complaining and seem to forget why we got to go back to classic versions in the first place.
Again think about the fact that we have done this experiment before. We know what happened when these conveniences were slated as a higher priority than that of a healthy community and world. If you want the convenience of RDF there is an option for you to get it in the retail version of the game. Understand that Classic WoW <> Retail WoW. The community that got us Classic knew what it wanted even when we were told that we just thought we did many years ago. We don’t want the same RDF as before in the game because we learned from the past. We acknowledge the net positives did not out weigh the negatives.
Could there be an alternative RDF? Yes I think there could be and so does blizzard. Will they nail the implementation right away? Probably not but that doesn’t mean just throw in the old RDF when we have years of past experiences to look at that show us what it did to the game.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” -George Santayana
