The alternative to not having LFD is much worse, Classic Lead devs

Raid finder can take a while, good thing the discussion isn’t about raid finder. 25 people isn’t 5 people.

Waiting 2 hours manually forming a group with no guarantee of filling or waiting 2 hours but being more or less guaranteed a full group.

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Many of us value having to interact to form groups, even if it’s as simple as the LFG spam messages and whispering the Class and spec.

I actually 100% agree with you on this. But population distribution problems affect many areas of the game, not just forming groups. Therefore, rather than applying bandaid solutions to each of symptoms, why not call for the source of the problem to be fixed?

Blizzard has propped up “mega servers” by continuing with layering (it was originally only meant to be used for major content releases, NOT the norm of Classic), HvH battlegrounds and by not implementing any limits whatsoever on faction imbalance or rerolling on already massive realms. Fix population distribution and many of these issues will gradually self-correct!

The same way we do now. There are a lot of gripes over gatekeeping here, but I haven’t seen people saying that getting into heroics is the problem. After all, it seems like most people are even in raiding gear. TBC Classic has managed just fine so far without Dungeon Finder, and I see no reason why that should be any different in Wrath Classic.

If people struggle too much to find a group to join, they can form their own and be the change they want to see by bringing low-geared and off-meta players. I have literally never paid attention to my 5-man comp outside of trying not to overstack armor types and it’s worked very well for me, both on mega server and otherwise.

Look no further than Retail for proof that Dungeon Finder doesn’t solve the problem of Tank (and to a lesser degree, healer) scarcity. They loaded a tank-only goodie bag with ultra-rare pets, mounts, toys, epic gear, gold and expensive materials for doing a random daily dungeon and it didn’t change the fact that DPS queues remained at the classic 35-55 minutes it had always been.

We already have it in TBC Classic, and people already say “Meet at A’dal for gear check” when building groups for raids or heroics. There is already nothing you can do, except to avoid people whose bar is set too high or to form your own groups. TBC Classic is getting along just fine as things are. There are some obvious problems, but a lack of Dungeon Finder isn’t one of them!

2 Likes

Dungeon Finder didn’t exist in TBC and shouldn’t be in TBC Classic, but…you have got to be kidding with this. The lfg channel is complete garbage on Mankrik. 24/7 buying and selling of dungeon runs. That’s all it is. It killed any interest I had in the expansion, and the few people I know who tried it as well.

The average, casual gamer has no shot in TBC Classic. None. Unless you want to pay to join dungeon groups you might as well not play. Ok, join a guild. But when it comes to Wrath, then LFD will have zero impact on you. If you want to run dungeons with guildies, go ahead. If you have 4 guildies and need 1 more. You can advertise to finish the group, then queue with dungeon finder. You can simply just queue with dungeon finder. Options are good.

All dungeon finder does is eliminate the need of massive gatekeeping of people demanding gold, inspecting players and approving of their gear and spec, and whatever other nonsense the min/max tryhards obsess over. Which, by the way, is utterly irrelevant in Wrath dungeons. Without lfd they’ll do it because they can. With lfd everyone can actually play what they want, when they want and experience the content they want. That’s somehow a bad thing?

There’s no angle from which the removal of lfd is good for the game.

5 Likes

everything is fine though apparently

How can you be anti something you know nothing about?

This is the unfortunate side-effect of playing on a massive realm. Having 10,000 active players in your faction is going to lead to massive amounts of spam. There is a very real problem with population distribution, faction imbalance and dungeon carries, and Blizzard has done nothing short of a shameful job maintaining a good experience through it all.

Blizzard has propped up and incentivized playing on “mega servers”, and it’s led to a point where the population bloats to an absolutely insane degree and breaks down the traditional fabric of what made the WoW community feel so good in the past. This is what the OP was referring to. You can’t pack tens of thousands of people onto a single realm, split them up into layers and expect chats or even the community aspect of the game to function properly.

As a side note, breaking dungeon carries IS a perfectly simple thing to do. I’m absolutely bewildered as to why Blizzard has let it go on for all of TBC Classic rather than acting the instant they saw their changes actually work in SoM. But boosting spam can be fixed by breaking boosts. It’s not hard to do and it would immediately stop all of the boosting spam. Regular LFG spam is going to require a healthier population balance. OR throttling chat, which seems like an absolutely miserable bandaid solution.

I think we’ve just about exhausted this conversation. It WILL have an impact, and in a load of different ways. Whether you choose to think that’s a lie or not is totally on you, but refusing to acknowledge how we (people who don’t want it) feel about it is just going to create more circular discussions that lead nowhere constructive.

It would serve you to put some stock in our reasons for disliking Dungeon Finder because many of these reasons are a consensus among us and they happen to be key points that the WoW team stated when announcing the change. If you can’t accept the reality of differing viewpoints, then you have absolutely nothing to talk about other than to try and drown out the dissent through sheer attrition.

You talk as if that’s how the game works, in principle. Both on large servers and small, I’ve certainly SEEN this happening, but it’s very far from being the only experience available. I see no need for gatekeeping, and if I don’t immediately see a group looking for my role for content I want to run, I’ll start the group myself. Maybe it’s just because I don’t discriminate against less gear or off-meta classes, but if you literally just invite the first people who message you, you’ll have your groups pretty quickly, and they may struggle a bit from time to time, but at least everyone gets to play.

We need to be the change we want to see. Stop hard-reserving drops, stop gear checks, stop stacking specific classes, stop kicking people the moment they make a mistake. And if the gatekeeping issue is anywhere as bad as you say it is, there should be an abundance of neglected players who would be glad to join your groups if you open them to everyone.

This works even on very small realms.

I didn’t say everything is fine. There are plenty of things that are NOT fine at all. But the point is that we see what the game is like when there’s no Dungeon Finder and it functions more or less as intended without it.

If we could just get the WoW team to summon up the will to address boosting, botting and population distribution, a big portion of the problems people talk about in the Dungeon Finder conversation will gradually self-correct.

3 Likes

I’ve played from vanilla to current day retail back to classic to current day TBC. I am very aware the pros and cons of the RDF system.

Tanks/healers leveraging the quick RDF Q times are no different then what a lot of tanks and healers do now with charging for runs.

Has anyone thought that Blizzard is making Classic, TBC and Wrath bad for the community, because they want the community to go back and play trash retail. They know they will loose a lot of retail players even with the new expansion coming out. You don’t need to buy the new expansion to play in wrath classic, just need a subscription. I don’t plan on playing the new expansion at all. Not interested in the crap fest. I have suffered through Classic and TBC to get to Wrath and its going to be a crap show as it is now. I agree the new system they come out with will only be a band aid and pretty sure its going to be just as bad as the one we have now in classic and TBC that no one uses.

Easy solution.

They use the change they made in SOM that stopped all boosting.

RDF has nothing to do with it.

I don’t think that is the case.

I believe their wall is the time required to develop the LFD, as they don’t have it implemented right now.

All they have is the cross-realm RDF which is cross realm and also scale level of the players.

I agree with this… ive read alot of threads on retail about dps and the LFG TOOL LOL

The cross-realm LFD is the same system, just without the scaling. Blizzard has the system - they have to disable it.

It isn’t. It doesn’t show you the dungeon you’re joining and the progress it is. You have to be able to know if you’re entering into an ongoing dungeon, because you’re going to be locked.

On retail even if you were locked, through RDF you would be able to run the same dungeon, given you select random, while on Dungeon Finder, you cannot run the same dungeon again if you were locked.

So, it is not the same system, and as you already pointed, they have to change it.

It’d take very little effort. We didn’t believe Blizzard when they said they had no data from Classic, and I don’t believe Blizzard if they say they don’t have the LFD system that they had before ready to go.

Well, we don’t know that for a fact. Given the negative PR to the removal, should it be so simple they would’ve said it would be in the game.

Blizzard said they were, “surprised” by the reaction. It’s also Blizzard - they refuse to move quickly, and they very rarely change their mind based on feedback without a lot of dragging of feet.

Just like a game producer landed out of nowhere in the Fresh topic to “calm down” the lowest minority we have for the fresh realms in regards of their transfers??

Doesn’t seem to help much your argument.
Holding the transfers costs 0 developing hours, hence, my point.

Blizzard scrambling to try and calm down people who want the actual feature being planned, and the entire point behind it to avoid people moving in with gold cap.

It doesn’t matter if it takes dev time to re-engineer a system. That doesn’t have anything to do with their current decision to not add it.

  1. One has a LARGE (to not say HUGE) portion of the player base complaining about.
  2. The other is just a couple of randoms complaining about it.

  1. Has development needed to get done
  2. Has no development required

My point stands: the reason to not add Dungeon Finder is that they don’t want to deal with the required engineering.