Honest question, how do you attribute this to RDF alone? What reason outside of running dungeons was there to go out in the world in Cata? They added old world flying, so if no RDF people would have just flown to the dungeon anyways and still a vacant world. There is more to the story than teleporting to a dungeon.
2 Likes
TLDR: RDF incentivized players to stay in the cities, and killed the world as the main character and turned players self-centered.
2 Likes
I’d quit too…
I left after like 75% of a level.
EXTREMELY well stated, OP!
6 Likes
I know its a little off topic from the thread but man i hate that zone.
Picture it, rogue main who spent every second of the day playing wow, hyped for cata.
Then this teen goes into vashjir, completes the loremaster and 20,000 leagues achievements, and logs off at level 83, not logging back into the game till 5.2.
What a bad zone.
2 Likes
I didn’t read that, I will just assume you support us in our quest for RDF!
3 Likes
Does anyone who critiques RDF ever have any imput on the implications it would have for todays player base and the current state of most servers?
Or is the argument just always going to be about how it was in 2009?
6 Likes
I mean if RDF is so anti social why then are 99% of quests not group quests? Other than dungeon quests and a select few elite quests they are all single person objectives. That’s not the least bit promoting people to interact.
6 Likes
I stopped reading here. The debate about RDF/LFD starts and stops with the WOTLK expansion. Anything and everything that happened after WOTLK is inconsequential to the discussion. Your frantic hand wringing and lament for what retail turned into is no supporting argument for why we shouldn’t have a feature that CAME WITH THE ORIGINAL EXPANSION.
16 Likes
Vash’jir is one of the zones where you either love it or hate it. I personally loved it. The visual scope of it was amazing and it was just something completely different.
I get bored seeing multiple snow or jungle zones. Vash’jir definitely was unique.
1 Like
This.
This guys whole OP is completely unrelated to WOTLK.
6 Likes
That’s a silly critique. The impact on certain tools on how the community interacts was not immediately known. Reflecting back, we can see what things have eroded a community to what it currently is on retail.
RFD is not solely to blame but it is certainly a negative.
Yeesh… the lack of logic already in this thread is going to make this an awful discussion (not surprisingly).
5 Likes
I respect your view, maybe I missed it but how exactly does RDF kill the world? I mean the teleporting to zones yeah that’s got to go, but the matchmaking system worked pretty good for people who did not want to spend their time reading and wishing for a group before they had to go to work in an hour but still wanted to progress their toons. So really lets spell out what was bad about RDF and remove that or tweak it, killing a system the worked but was flawed does not fix the problem, The current system is trash. The fix is to recode RDF’s matchmaking system, get rid of the auto ports, que up server only at first, if over 20 min wait, then open to outside servers, if you want people to not use it, reward the groups that are formed and not using it with an extra piece of loot or emblem… Done fixed. moving on to balance…
2 Likes
Sure.
Because mentioning how a system introduced in Wrath is the main reason for every other bad decision made in the following expansions isn’t anything more than subjective conjecture.
2 Likes
Mostly itll be misinformation from 2009, sorry to disappoint
Calling for someone’s job in the forums is just ridiculous full stop.
Hoping the company gets a lead developer more in line with your preference is not ridiculous, same as hoping for a new coach for your favorite team or better service from your local hamburger joint.
We have done this experiment before.
With a wildly different player base, and a plethora of unrelated changes that led to the slope you are about to describe.
there were far more negatives and it took us longer to realize them but we eventually did over time.
Except that its not true. Cata did an 180° on accesibility design then another one with LFR. WoW has not held a steady course because they’re always too late to react and terrible at reading playerbase trends.
Throughout my time in Cata the hot button issue within the community was how “The Open World is Dead”.
The brand new, recently redesigned open world. Because what kept the ‘classic’ world ‘alive’ was not how engaging it was, but how full of pointless time sinks and slow travelling it was. Quest hub optimized design from Cata onwards means people move on from every zone quickly when they get there and spend very little time walking or killing around. Add phasing and sharding and its just inevitable.
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
The main concern here is that this is NOT a negative thing. I’m sorry, but seeing random characters cross your screen as you both pass each other in an open world zone adds nothing to either of you. If you think 2022 playerbase contains people who’ll stop to chat because your characters happened to show up on each other’s screens you are delusional. At best you’re a random note, no different from a bush or a rock, at worse you’re an annoyance poaching their quest objectives.
People have always been nostalgic about the clueless, naive, social media deprived playerbase of original launch. That playerbase will never, ever return. That interaction of just walking around staring at grand vistas or trying fun things for novelty or grouping up and making small talk is gone. RDF or not, it will remain gone. Blizzard has been unable to force it back in Retail even when moving to harder, manual group content with Mythic+.
It was never RDF that was the issue. Players just want different things. And honestly, people don’t even want the game as it was. They want to be young and carefree again, unjaded and full of wonder. They can’t, of course; you can’t ever experience something for the first time twice. But as you well show, they’ll double down on denial and keep trying.
“The Open World was Dead” AND “The sense of community was gone”.
The open world already is dead. Once the extra xp and launch hype dries up, it’ll go back to its barren, desolate state again. The sense of community is already gone, daily people forego server identity and community to go blend into a sea of nameless faces in a mega realm. They value access to PUGs and guilds much more than they value their “healthy pop” small server. It is just a fact, and no amount of wishing it wasnt this way will change it.
In WOD the notion of having a group of people you knew faded
It wasnt the expansion, it was the passing of years. That notion has never faded, it just moved to facebook, whatsapp, discord, insta, etc.
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
Describes the classic experience to a tee, except for the ‘teleported’ part. Except its also missing the toxicity of paid tanks and HR loot.
The organic ways people found guilds and groups of players to continue to play with.
Has been replaced by discord applications and recruitment macros.
when the world started to go the interactions and social experiences that created the communities were next in line to fall apart.
They’ve already fallen apart. Log into any server right now and try to find it, its not there. RDF or not, what you’re wishing for is not coming true.
Dungeons served as the catalyst for that player collaboration more than most.
RDF does not harm this in any way. But you’re looking at an older player base doing solved content. Its not going to be the same.
Nostalrius showed
That insular comunities of like minded individuals can use the game as a platform for any sort of interaction. That does not mean its going to resist being scaled up. Go look at most WotLK p-servers and compare their size to Bene or Faerlina.
Those of us who had been paying attention and played through the expansions
Failed to prevent the decay of the social fabric of the game, by insulating themselves within a closed off bubble where it sort of resemble their dreamed up playerbase of yore, while turning a blind eye to the reality of what Classic has become.
The experience of a world full of others that you would come to know as friends or enemies on the opposing faction.
Doesn’t exist on megaservers, which are like half the playerbase, and barely does in most others.
Getting lost along the way but figuring it out together.
Has not been a thing since Thottbot came to be, over a decade ago.
Being a higher level and lending a hand to someone who needs it.
Got severely discouraged by the recent anti-boosting changes.
A lot of this went away
Because the playerbase that wanted it also went away. They either quit, or became different, older people.
The community that got us Classic
Left, which is why we now have megaservers and just got done killing 25 realms they left behind to rot as they chased convenience over your ethereal ideas.
We don’t want the same RDF as before in the game because we learned from the past.
You did not. You are still trying to fix out of game issues with in game solutions. You still cling to something that isn’t there, like someone trying to scoop out the sea by hand.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” -George Santayana
“When experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual”. The quote is about progress and how its different from change for the sake of change, You are misunderstanding it because you fail to internalize the playerbase and gaming as a whole has moved on, and instead wish it to remain anchored to a reality that ceased to exist many years ago. Instead of pulling quotes to sound smart, read the actual books they come in so you get a clear picture of what they mean.
22 Likes
did RDF make a player ninja loot some thing they don’t need ?
NO!
did RDF make a player toxic and be just plain awful to others?
NO!
did RDF make a partial guild group kick some one before the boss dies?
NO!
the only thing that ruined the community is the players themselves.
i know it’s hard to believe but most people won’t admit it b/c blaming RDF is easier.
14 Likes
From my perspective, I found the historical RDF to make players easily disposable as replacements were instantly available. You have almost no skin in the game with your starting party. No effort was used to compile the party or to get to the dungeon.
The existing vanilla/TBC model does require some effort to form your party. You’re now more invested in the success of the current group and are more willing to help each other.
This is what I have seen over the years. Perhaps others disagree based on their experiences.
4 Likes
No, slippery slope relates to saying that because one thing could happen, so too must another, and another, and another, until you end up at some undesirable outcome and thus, you shouldn’t do the first thing in the first place. This isn’t slippery slope… There is no danger of having RDF come to WotLK and it suddenly becoming retail. The argument is that RDF in and of itself had an observable outcome which was generally undesirable.
WotLK won’t fall apart if RDF is added, but because we’ve seen what happens to the world as a whole in the presence of RDF, we can learn from that history lesson and not repeat that course.
Retail (which has a lot of positives by the way), isn’t the culmination of any one thing. It’s the result of a myriad of decisions that resulted in both specific outcomes, and more complex outcomes that arise from the interaction between those decisions. Classic has the opportunity to benefit from hindsight here and that seems to be what Blizzard is attempting to do.
2 Likes
This assumes an audience that values adversity. I feel the current state of Classic to show that is not the playerbase currently. Its just as likely to discourage people from even attempting it.
5 Likes