Straw Poll: Which early changes led "Old WoW" to become Retail as we know it today?

[Aurumai-grobbulus]

@Lowstrung-old-blanchy

First, not everyone uses the BB addon.

You don’t need the addon to form your own groups or join them. It does help though. If someone have a grievance about difficulties in certain aspects of the game, I would definitely suggest that they see if it’s something that can be solved or mitigated by an addon before they go asking for a feature that will drastically change the game!

@Lowstrung-old-blanchy

If you want the best chance to find a group you have to have your ears open to the capital only channels in case the ONE group that is forming ends up using that form of communication.

It seems pretty rare to me that anyone looking for more will exclusively use trade chat rather than just using LookingForGroup, or a combination of the two.

@Lowstrung-old-blanchy

I don’t think you quite understand the nature of life of a small server. Because of the rampant raid logging that people do since the dungeon scene is so dead, there aren’t any tanks/healers around to group with. That includes guild tanks/healers.

Nearly all the people I’ve seen saying that “it’s no big deal to get a group” have been from a mega-server. I think you’ve lost perspective that 90% of the servers are not like yours and the players on them are not experiencing the same thing in game.

I actually just talked about this with you in another thread. I’ll quote it rather than typing again because it applies all the same:

@Aurumai-grobbulus

I do currently play on Grobbulus which is among the biggest servers, so you’re not wrong about this being much less of an issue for me than most. However, up until very recently I was on Whitemane. I played there for all of TBC so far up until the point where there were only about 600 active Alliance players left. It was around then that it actually started feeling impossible to play, but a very big reason for it was the fact that the Horde outnumbered us so absurdly. Even then, I didn’t have too terrible of a time finding people who wanted to run content (at level 70 AND while leveling alts), it’s just that they’d often give up because we’d have to corpse-hop our way to instance portals. Forget never being able to use summoning stones, we often couldn’t even use the auction houses because the Horde occupied our capital cities. Literally anywhere in the world you ever needed to be, you’d be camped by the Horde. And it was intentional – It became a pretty common occurence for them to use addons to say “leave”, “transfer away” or “go horde” while they camped us. I’ve also spent a while on Myzrael since TBC launched and my experience there has been fine.

A “mega server” is not needed for finding groups. If you’re on a realm with 1,000+ active players in your faction, you’re not being utterly dominated by the enemy faction, and you’re not trying to play in the middle of the night, I have a very hard time believing that anyone’s trouble with finding groups isn’t in large part due to their determination to play group content. Everyone is different and has a different level of effort they’re willing to put into playing the game, but in my experience on multiple realms (including Grobbulus in Vanilla), you can even find people to play with on servers that are widely considered dead without having to spend the “hours” searching that so many people here seem to think it takes.

@Lowstrung-old-blanchy

I would be personally happy if they just linked all the small servers together with lfg and left the megas to their own devices. Too bad that wouldn’t work since the vast majority of the people on the mega servers would transfer off just to have access to lfg.

I don’t think I’d personally be upset if that were to happen, though it really should be all or nothing. Either Dungeon Finder belongs in the game or it doesn’t. They shouldn’t be making exceptions for anyone even if they are suffering. Implementing Dungeon Finder changes the experience dramatically, and if it’s good enough on its own merits, it should be implemented to all realms rather than just those who would benefit the most, I think. They made the descision to leave it out because they think it’s bad for the game, you know?