Number one - every five minutes, the system gives you a popup to determine if you are, in fact, at your keyboard and cogently in the game.
Number two - just make the role of somebody visible in-line when they request an invite. I don’t care that I can hover over them and see class, I just need to know what they can and can’t do at a glance.
Number three - accurately display people’s levels. No, seriously, it doesn’t even do this correctly and people will routinely ask to group with you and be reported as not max level for heroics.
Number four - don’t let people sign up for heroics or raids they are locked out to. If the game recognizes your lockout, the group system should too.
Number five - just automatically run a role check so you can see if you actually have the roles you need. People literally don’t set this correctly and then get mad when you ask them to do the role they signed up for unintentionally.
Number six - make it obvious you’re in the queue, more so than just a little eye blinking every once and a while. This goes right back to number one, the AFK check.
I like actually playing classic, so when it comes down to the nitty gritty of how I find groups for it, I’d love for the experience to not be, I don’t know, garbage by default.
I don’t think you need to have a guild for anything, certainly not heroics, and basically not even 10 man content. All of this stuff is trivial. I want badges and I want a group, and I want a tool to get that group built into the game that doesn’t suck.
If you want a real hot take, why don’t you grill me on thinking that they should bring the WoW token into Classic. I mean why not, you can probably ask a random selection from 1/3rd of your B.net friends list about how gold is bought and sold and every single one of them who admits to doing it will simply say their time is more valuable in actual monetary currency compared to in-game time farming gold, and if the transaction was facilitated by Blizzard they would be more than willing to pay even more than what the gold sites are already offering. It would literally destroy the grey market in a single move. Don’t you hate bots and farmers? Don’t you hate market manipulation and auction house tomfoolery? It would go away if people could literally convert their cash into coins like they can in retail to pay for a subscription with a premium.
and so it was in one day an intrepid crew journeyed into a dungeon. the name was wailing cavern. not one proper tank among them. and they adapted, they overcame. this is the way!
if these brave souls can do it. so too can a brave heroic UK crew!
inb4 not the same thing comments from someone. No crap. It be like me saying retail frost dk is perfectly fine for tanking a M15 because I did it once in heroic Sanguine depths when tank bailed/dropped. but that is the story we got from a dev.
Sure why not, would be nice if devs refined the tool, So far it has worked for me and these are just minor tweaks to improve the interface, eg tracking lockouts would be nice.
Step One: Automatically fill the group based on other players in queue, pulling from other servers if needed.
Step Two: Teleport players directly into the dungeon entrance.
Step Three: Add a “Random” function for players who want to fill for any dungeons their level; whether they’re just after XP, badges, or to kill 20 minutes, would be huge.
Step Four: Add some achievements, like I dunno, a silly pet or a title even, for doing a certain number of dungeons using the tool.
Okay but memes aside I don’t even care if you use the social lubricant anymore.
Do you actually know people in the classic community outside of your guild? Do you get along well with PuGs? From my experience, not only are they by and large bad players, but they have terrible manners and etiquette, stuff like pulling instead of the tank behavior, just foul plays all around. I find that if I don’t know somebody personally through a guild or socially they are bad and rude about it when you point out their faults. I don’t like it when people I don’t know personally tell me I’m doing things wrong either, so turnabout is fair play.
I don’t know about you, but when Wrath ended and rolled into Cata back in the day I didn’t hate the idea of the group finder, and it’s not the death knell of WoW. It was never a problem to be quickly put into content to actually run the dungeons, it’s absolutely absurd to attempt to argue that spending less time trying to actually play the game by removing arbitrary barriers like time to getting inside of an instance running counter to the game’s longevity. Keep it server-specific and you don’t have a problem. You wanted the “social aspect” back and with megaservers you’re just as anonymous as on retail because nobody actually really wanted small communities, and those that do are on dead servers. Why not just literally let me run Wrath content efficiently at this point. Who cares, the changes have already been made and you’re literally arguing semantics. I don’t see how that somehow ruins the game by letting me play the content I want to actually mechanically do more quickly than dealing with this manual garbage that doesn’t even tell me the basic statistics of somebody asking to be in my party. We’re beyond that, and making the UI deliberately bad in 2022 is just insane given the development we’ve put into the game as a community with addons.
Cataclysm was bad because it removed choices, not because it streamlined the social aspects of the game. Flex raids and Mythic+ are great mechanics from a design perspective of lowering barriers to entry to allow more people to have better stats and capabilities with smaller groups in specialized hard content. That’s a great concept, and Heroic+ is probably going to go over like gangbusters for people like me who love Mythics as a concept but love Wrath mechanics and tuning.
Literally just backport all the good content, raids and instances, mechanics like Transmog and Reforging back into the game, because those are all the things we care about. Balance gear around set bonuses because ICC is already zenith level gearing with hitting caps on stats, so you can make it interesting by having set bonuses that are different enough to cause a significant change on gameplay. If you don’t like the gear you can reforge the stats to a profile you enjoy, because the Classic community is just the kind of instrumental players to want that kind of mechanic back and appreciate it more than retail did.
It’s really not rocket science to keep Wrath as the core of the Classic era game and tune around it long-term with backporting all the content through some Bronze Dragonflight BS or whatever you want to do lore-wise.
Yeah it was fun to be ignorant. That was 20 years ago though. It’s not fun when everything is known and the fun is literally the third party website damage and healing statistics we designed as a community benchmark independent of Blizzard to gauge our objective worth.
Tell me what’s more fun, pink parses or not knowing how to play, and I’ll show you two different kinds of players that are still here, but I can for sure tell you the ones who like the color pink are more active and around than people like you who think ignorance is bliss. I don’t even say that by trying to frame it as a deficit in any kind of play style. Free play is still a very legitimate way to play WoW and not knowing how to play because it’s your first time in the game is a wonderful experience.
The guys on the top did it before though. They did it like me 15 years ago. They did it in their late 20s, early 30s, or in their teens like me and are now reliving the experience with jobs, families and real lives and approaching the game differently. I don’t have time to waste on some new kid who is figuring out the difference between defensive and battle stance. I get that these people play but there are more people like me who have basically 20 years of knowledge and understanding of this dumb game because we fell in love in our youths and it’s also just one of the best designed versions of the game.
Those elitist guys are the ones in charge of your server. They run your community forums. They are the policy makers of the Discord, and all the social enforcement - they were the guys who set the brackets in Classic. I don’t know if you played enough PVP to have the displeasure of needing to deal with the honor cartels. They are the guys telling you that you need to do XYZ to fit in to the social dynamic of the place. They’re the ones running the raids and the groups and they’re the ones who are going to tell you your greys and greens are not good enough for their literal Naxx 10, and tell you your achievement is not good enough for trivial nonsense that was cleared literally a decade and a half ago as recycled content because 1% of the vanilla community even saw KT in 40 man. Classic had a 100% clearance rate of every raid. If you didn’t clear a raid it was abnormal. Not knowing how to play now, similarly, is abnormal.
Struggling in Warcraft is a thing of the past with the amount of knowledge we have about it. WoWHead on its own merits is enough to guide you through the game with like ten seconds of effort every five minutes if you get confused. People literally pay hard currency to have guides that literally just point them with an arrow on the screen to tell them where to go. Nobody likes to think anymore, and you’re just trying to adhere to a standard where nobody should be required to think, and I don’t enjoy it when people are bad when it’s not hard to be decent anymore with literally a decade and a half of knowledge and theory.
It’s not bad for like about ten minutes worth of effort but boy does it suck when I invite an entire party’s worth of DPS as a tank and a healer and I need the invites to time out before I can fill my group. In what world does that logically function as a group finding tool? Just don’t let people be AFK, or sign up for the wrong things.
I also saw tonight somebody who literally queued up just to talk in the LFG channel. If that’s also locked behind group finder, that’s really silly because shooting the breeze and trolling channels used to be the lifeblood of the game 20 years ago. You shouldn’t lock being able to converse on the IRC to a feature where you have to be focused on actually doing content.
I would love it more than anything if the system was smart enough to block the check box on any heroic i have already ran. Obviously I can open up the raid tab and check my lockouts manually but eventually it becomes a pointless memory exercise which doesnt do anything meaningful. If i could skip that step of nothingness and just know “oh i have done 4 so far, I can run the others still”. I’d like that.
Overall aside from 1 day where i listed myself at an awkward time I have typically gotten into a group in well under 30 mins. I have had some times where I’d list and be whispered within seconds. Either theres lots of people looking for players, or I am building up a positive rep with frequent dungeon runners and they are keen to have me along
was in a heroic drak tharon today and some fairly geared hunter was spam needing on everything just to be a low tier loot ninja - after he just sat there before the first boss for 10 minutes not playing. We showed him the door and proceeded to complete the run as a 4 man, all of us having a good time. We went and did the hol heroic daily after that (picked up a new dps, finished, had fun