The comparison isn’t between the two systems having any commonality; but what Blizzard is willing to throw away, and when they’d be willing to throw it away. PoT was a much larger scale, which required much more resource and time, and it got scrapped instead of salvaged. In short; “because something takes time and effort”, combined with “they wouldn’t waste said time and effort”, isn’t a valid argument when talking about Blizzard specifically.
3 hours isn’t exaggerated. I’m talking about obscure dungeons, while leveling, not max level daily heroics. I’ve personally seen on medium and even high pop realms, groups be listed in LFG for hours on end, and with the recent changes de-incentivizing boosting making level gaps that much more important to be mindful of, now I’d imagine they could last longer as well. (That is my personal lens). I disagree however, that in principle, the game was designed with the idea of leveling as a holy priest or prot warrior.
It’s merely anecdotal, that while it doesn’t directly affect your class, it does increase your player power. Having access to ‘more’ of it, is better, in most cases.
The flaw in the logic here is boosting. Neither of us could quantify how much that has retained players, or drove them away. Boosting completely negates the process of forming your own groups, right up until max level. Now that it’s been changed, and with Wrath around the corner, we shall see (I’d assume phase 2) how retainable no RDF Wrath will be.
Not sure this is true. TBC is when they reduced the number of raiders from 40 to 25, specifically because of population issues. Wrath further enforces the opposite by making each raid have a 10 man mode. Retail has had flex raiding for an expansion or two now, further enforcing the opposite. If the goal is to get more people into the content, you’d extrapolate that data…
I’d say it alleviates lower population servers wait times, something that manually forming groups doesn’t achieve. Also, your choices are to spend money to xfer, furthering server population issues; or to reroll, which furthers server population issues and takes an extreme amount of effort.
Um? I don’t want to take this argument at face value, and assume there’s something you’re trying to get at, because this seems like dishonesty. The “goodie bags” were meant to incentivize tanks and healers to use the DF system, and also to get people to play those specs to ‘take advantage’ of the system. It’s much more complicated than this, which is why simplifying it as you have makes the argument seem dishonest.
I’d agree, but then I’d also point out that if Wrath achieved all of this by other means, they still felt the need (mostly from player complaints) to implement DF. What does that tell you? Also also; Wrath complicated specs; not simplified. TBC; Rogues are still spamming Sinister Strike, Shamans still spam Stormstrike/Lightning Bolt, Warlocks, Shadowbolt.
Overly literal. I can press W on a mount and head to a dungeon, that doesn’t get me 4 other people willing to do said dungeon.
It seems you already have…
No, it was wording it in such a way, sure, but it also makes it abundantly clear that manually forming groups isn’t always “social interaction” nor does it guarantee that you’ll run a dungeon when you want to, RDF does by finding like minded individuals, within level range.
Yet, it’s the only metric we have to measure by. I’ll elaborate;
As long as the quality of dungeon remains subjective, it would be impossible to finitely measure it; but the standard of quality doesn’t have to be better with DF, (it could remain relatively the same, or be slightly less, and still maintain good stature) it only has to be comparable. Does the dungeon itself change whether you used LFG, Guild or DF to form your group? Then the quality of the dungeon isn’t impacted, correct? The quality of the experience in forming the group? Sure. The quality of the dungeon run itself? Possibly, but seems slightly irrelevant.
So it increases an objective aspect, but decreases the subjective aspect. I’m not arguing this, just pointing out that you feel your experience is lessened with the addition of DF, while others would have their experience bettered by it’s addition. It’s a weird stance, really.
I feel like this is personal lens. You probably play on high pop servers, with LFG spammed all day and night with active users, doing things. With an active Auction House, and competition for gathering nodes/farms. What you’re either ignoring, or forgetting, is that lower pop servers exist; they are suffering because they don’t have these things to bring in new players, or get xfers from older players. Even (as stated above) higher populated servers have hard times finding level appropriate leveling dungeons; yes, the big ones (ZF, SM, Strat) are easy to fill, but find a group for Sunken Temple, BFD, Uldaman, Razorfen, BRD, They are much harder to find than the common ones. Lower pop servers suffer much worse, and I feel as though nobody gives credit to the argument that they almost require DF to thrive.
I’m willing to see what the realm consolidation brings; but if it doesn’t somehow stimulate the entirety or the populace across all realms, I feel as though DF is inevitable. Regardless of how anybody feels about it.