I am supportive of having a RDF. However there is one disadvantage of having RDF that I have never seen any supporter of RDF cover. And I believe this is the main underlying issue why Blizzard refuses to implement RDF. Even as a supporter of RDF, I cannot convince myself of anyway to argue against this particular disadvantage of having a RDF. I hope one of you can come up with a logical argument why this disadvantage is not significant.
- The gear from Dungeons is much better than world quest done at similar levels. It is not just better, it is around 6-8 levels better. It makes quest completion feel worthless. What will happen is, everyone will just grind dungeons and in level gaps between dungeons, they will just grind mobs. This makes it extremely hard for every single gamer doing worldquests to find groups for normal and elite quests (Hinterlands Elite quests remember?). It also becomes impossible for certain “feel good” scenarios to occur, eg Player A is fighting a mob and about to die to the mob, then suddenly he gets a heal from B just before dying and the two of them proceed to teamup and finish mob.
In addition, certain quests where there is a need to travel a tunnel full of mobs, it will be extremely boring to do these quests, because with RDF, you will rarely find other players running around doing worldquests, and the result is that you are the only person running this quest and have to kill all these mobs yourself without help before reaching end of the tunnel/mine where quest objective lies (i.e. Felwood Tunnel quest remember?)
The normal world and its quests become irrelevant if RDF is implemented. The present effort required to form groups and to travel to dungeons are essential in a sense that they force players to balance costs-and-benefits when thinking whether to dungeon or worldquest. If you want better loot, you have to spend time and effort to form a group and to travel to said dungeon. If you are unable to commit the time and effort (the cost part of the equation), then you have to give up on getting the significantly better loot from dungeons (the benefits part), World questing is your next best option. And every MMORPG requires a significant chunk of people to choose the latter, otherwise the world in the game will be not crowded enough and slowly will become totally empty as people leave the game because they are unable to find other random players while questing.
If dungeon were NOT to be the direct and CLEAR better substitute to world quest, then having RDF is fine. If people were running dungeons purely because they prefer that experience to worldquesting, then thats fine. In this case, dungeon loot levels should be reduced to within 1-2 levels of worldquest loot and the existence of RDF would not result in 99% of player base grinding dungeons and ignoring worldquest.
It likely takes too much effort by Blizzard to reduce item levels from Dungeons given that WoW does not make as much profit compared to other games that they have (remember the new phone game they have which have seen people spending thousands on it?). This is why Blizzard is unable to explicitly rationalize this issue like I have in this post because they do not want to explain to the WoW Gamers why they are not willing to spend effort to change the loot structure.
In summary, options become irrelevant if one single option stands out significantly from other options. This only results in lack of choice for consumer (as it means they have to just pick one option over the others due to its clear superiority) and lack of choice for consumers in a game, will eventually kill the game because they would lose interest in the game since there is but one clear path (spam dungeons and ignore worldquesting).
Before flaming me, remember I am supporter of RDF. Its just that I think many other supporters of RDF may have forgotten how bad an influence RDF had on worldquesting and most posters are just focusing on the benefits of RDF (which I agree there are many, especially convenience) and not touching on the detrimental impact of RDF on worldquesting.