It’s not overly common, but it does happen. I was in a stone core heroic in cata and cleared until the last boss (very much carrying the group) and it was 4 guildies and me. Spent 1.5 hours carrying the group because my dps was twice that of the other 2 dps combined, the tank couldn’t tank and the healer couldn’t heal. I was abusing turtle pets having separate CDs, fast dismiss with the tonk toy, hunter CC, kiting, exc. To get that group through that dungeon. They kicked me at the last boss to get their friend in to get their daily reward. Which I didn’t get because I got kicked.
The queue time average for a dps was about 1 hour at the time. So I lost about 1 hour first queue, 1.5 hours in the dungeon, and 1 hour for the next queue. Just to get my daily heroic done. This has happened to me once, but it was still very irritating to the point I made a lvl 1 on their realm to ask for an explanation as to why I was kicked. The good news of it was they were unable to kill the last boss, so they got what they deserved for that behavior.
I’d say that group is one in a million. I’ve never had any issues like that. I would say that the good of not having to constantly keep looking for available players outweighs one bad experience from 10 years ago.
Obviously LFD scarred you to the point where not only do you not want to use it, you don’t want it in the game at all. I don’t like M+ but I’m not butting heads with the million people that do like it.
RDF is a benefit to the community. people be like, rdf bad, then proceed to shell out gold for a boost and afk, because they can’t find a group in the mass of text in lfg.
I’m not removing the community from in game. Discord is just a method of communication. The community is still in the game.
Your trying to act like you can only have one without the other. You can do both at the same time. People use discord voice while raiding, they don’t have to log out to chat, log back in, then play, then log out to chat. Both can be used at the same time. They are not exclusive to eachother.
I saw the slow death of the community from rdf and lfr. It’s hard to get anyone to even talk to you in retail if they are not in your guild. And even guildies don’t talk as much.
Outside of guild runs I rarely said anything other than “add” or “OOM” before vanilla and BC.
I don’t see it as a threat. I see it as a tool of convenience that will save me from looking for a group every single night on two characters to get my daily badges.
The point I’m trying to get at is that by removing most of the community and grouping to being organized on discord removes that option from people playing the game without discord. It actively reduces group recruitment in game and pushes it elsewhere that may not be as accessible to others, or they may just not use Discord with the reasonable expectation that it is not needed to find consistent PUG groups.
