The bigger point to be made is the community as a whole now is much older and has responsibilities. I started playing wow when it released when I was 14. I had practically no responsibilities and could devote 10+ hours a day to the game. Spamming for groups back then wasn’t as big of a problem as it is now. The average age in our community now I’d say is about 25+. People don’t have the same time and commitment to the game that they did back then. Back in vanilla and TBC WoW was basically everything for me, as most kids who played WoW it’s a large portion of what we thought about on a daily basis, maybe that’s just me but I don’t think it’s too far from the truth.
I don’t think WoW should have took it all the way to what they did for retail but these QoL changes like LFD were very much needed to conform to the age group of the community as the game progressed.
No, but we’ve seen the lasting effects of RDF/LFD and what it has done to the game over the years.
I casually brought up the fact that they were not adding this to a couple of guild members that have been playing TBC and they are actually happy about it. Completely unprompted they started complaining about how RDF has caused people to jump in and out of groups “without consequence” (their words), and how they are glad it’s not going to be in because at least they won’t be able to do that sort of thing like they can do in Retail now.
Claiming “Classic Wrath” is a different game is utter nonsense. It’s a rehash of an older version of Retail, and a version where they made both good and bad decisions.
RDF was one of those bad decisions. It should (and is going to be) reversed, for the longevity and health of the game.
Depends on how far into the expac you are, I suppose! But sure; I’d be happy with them removing the LFR difficulty level, and having LFR available for Normal/Heroic raids (maybe even Mythic, but I’m not currently a Mythic raider in Retail, so I don’t want to overstep my experience with my opinion).
I mean, if they added an LFR for Wrath, where it was the same difficulty but gave you the opportunity to do one wing at a time, and not be locked to a raid lockout with the exact group, that would be quite convenient. People with social anxiety issues who may not wish to join guilds, or people who are busy, have changing schedules and for whatever reason cannot join regular raiding guild groups would also be able to benefit from such a system.
Again, these two things are NOT what led to retail being what it is. It was the stance of the dev team which lead retail to what it is. Legalizing RMT via wow tokens, not cracking down on other RMT things like arena boosts/title boosts/gear boosts/ etc. trivializing content like heroic dungeons and even trivializing raids now in retail where the best gear you can obtain is from spamming mythic+. THESE things lead to the downfall of retail not a QoL change like LFD or LFR. even LFR I wouldn’t say was terrible because the gear you got from it was terrible when it released. There was still incentive to do the REAL raid and not LFR. That doesn’t exist anymore in retail which has nothing to do with LFD and LFR themselves but the direction shift as a whole by the dev team.
I think the next point of complaint after adding RDF would be that the queues for DPS are way too long and tanks refusing to pull unless they are guaranteed loot at the start.
But yes I think the slippery slope does begin as soon as you put RDF into the game ahead of its natural release point.
The dps ques will be longer than healer or tank for sure, but its a much welcome change imo to be able to que up and go open world farm or quest and wait for a que pop.
I’d agree, I don’t want LFD on release I think it should come out with ICC phase as it did originally. I do think they would have launched it at release if they had it, but I also know the burnout that would take place at the start of the expansion when everyone has their pre-bis for phase 1 two weeks into the expansion. I know that burnout very well as my resto druid was full phase 1 bis two weeks into tbc classic. the game got extremely stale and turned into me raid logging right off the start of the expansion.
In a subjective way, sure. FWIW, it’s Dungeon Finder, not Random Dungeon Finder* This is an important distinction, because (quite obviously) “Random” Dungeon Finder does not include specific queues.
Anyway, they perform literally, the same functions:
Queue for specified instance content
Automatically matched with an instance content group
Automatically teleported to the instance with the instance content group
You may be hung up on differences between Instance Dungeons and Raids, but that doesn’t change the functionality of Dungeon Finder nor LFR.
That’s LFG, which is what we are getting. Both Dungeon Finder and LFR are instance content grouping and transport automation.
This is a fair point. There is an LFR Raid difficulty, and in Retail the difficulty of Heroics has been lowered to make room for Mythic and Mythic+ — but this isn’t really a point in favor of what you’re stating.
The LFR raid difficulty is more of a symptom or side effect of adding the tool, much like is reflected by the current difficulty level of Heroics in Retail.
I’m sorry but I just do not understand this. Not once have I ever been hindered by typing “LFG x dungeon dps” while questing or farming out in the world. There has never been a single time where seeing “LFM 1 Dps x dungeon” was too hard to respond to while killing a boar or picking flowers ever.
I just don’t get how a possible 2 hour long queue is more favorable over just typing and reading a chat. There are thousands of pve mechanics that are more demanding than simply interacting with a chat box.
I have had people decline to join my group before because I couldn’t summon them. So instead of enjoying my time while I form a group I sit at the stone and prepare to summon.
There are always some people who will say “I don’t want to be in your group if you can’t summon” and with pug’s you can’t always be picky.
When you have an active guild who actually utilizes chat it poses a problem, When you are on a server of 20K+ players it poses a problem with text scrolling so fast that if you look away from the chat box for a second to focus on the mob you are killing or look for that node to gather you missed your group chance. IT DOES matter and is more favorable that you just get a pop up when it’s ready so you can fully focus on what you are doing and enjoy yourself rather than treat it like a job where you have to multitask multiple things.
It saw a fair amount of traffic in SL from many crowds. Season 2(?) wing 1 had a rng mount drop that had even mythic try for.
season 3 when the tier sets came out for a while the heroic runners hit this up too if no rng love in normal-heroic. while not the best stats versus heroic some class/spec bonuses it didn’t matter. the tier was more for the set effect than ilevel. it worked well enough till heroic dropped as I understand it.
See from my standing megaservers are a problem and they need to be broken up. If the chat is zipping by like a vegas slot machine it means its broken and the server is broken. A lot of you wanted a server with a massive player pool to group with but you monkey pawed yourself and now are living with a curse instead of a blessing.
90% of your problems would be fixed by simply playing on a less populated server believe it or not. The toxicity, elitism, and overpopulation are non existent on a normal server.
You are assuming that RDF is going to magically solve your problems. When it really just presents you with new ones.
RDF isn’t adding more tanks to the pool so if it was added a week later you would shift from complaining for it to complaining about how long it takes to use it.
Thats why they give us a report and ignore feature. I’ve yet to cap out on ignore and never have an issue with removing a toxic spammer from the chat.