This is nuts

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Many people want the Dungeon Finder included in Wrath of the Lich King Classic, either immediately upon release, or in a later phase. Many other people don’t want it included at all - citing their own reasons why:

  1. It destroys the community aspect of World of Warcraft

  2. It will effectively cause the open world to be bare and unexplored because players will just spam dungeons in a major city

  3. You’ll be paired with players you’ll likely never see again

Online games of any genre do rely on a community-based approach to success - this isn’t a secret - even the most primary type of online game has a community. So it’s understandable when people want to try and preserve the community in World of Warcraft.

The main concern that comes up with the community aspect is that during the Lich King/Dragonflight reveal, Holly Longdale stated that they listened to the community, and were using their feedback to drive Lich King Classic, and used that as a reason that Dungeon Finder was to be removed from the game. However, in a tweet by Brian Birmingham on April 25, 2022, he states:

“I object a little to the idea that we assumed no one would care. The reason we brought it up the day of the announcement was that we knew it would be a departure from expectations.
I’ll admit the scale of the pushback has surprised me, but we wanted to get feedback.”

The problem that I see is if they already spoke to the community enough to have Holly definitively say Dungeon Finder wasn’t going to be included, what feedback is Brian referring to? Wouldn’t they have already gotten the feedback? Furthermore, if it was true that they wanted feedback, why wouldn’t Holly be the one to say this in the actual reveal?

I’m all for preserving a community feel in the game, absolutely. However, it really boils down to how the Dungeon Finder really affects it…

The Dungeon Finder removes the opportunity for players to create their own groups and play with others from their server

This isn’t true. While some may say that it’s counterproductive to still search for groups the same way as today, while there’s an automated tool for it, it is still more than possible to not only group up with random people from your server and knock out a few random dungeons, but it’s also possible to group up with guild members before queueing. Remember, you can still use the tool with a full party - you just won’t be searching for additional members.

So, how DOES the Dungeon Finder ruin the social aspect?

One point people bring up is that there is little to no communication in these dungeon runs - I would tend to agree with this; there really is pretty much no communication. However, there’s little to no communication in TBC Classic dungeon runs, either. It’s because tank marks are fairly universal, we all know the content by now, and you have players with multiple monitors, splitting their attention between WoW, YouTube, and other things, and they seem unable to respond to messages in-game.

Even before a run starts, though, you have to find the group. THIS part of the social aspect COULD be hindered by the Dungeon Finder - except, oh, wait, you’re saying we have to look at 100 lines of spam per second just to see a group forming and be the first to say that we’re DPS, competing with fifty others? Typically, communication might go like this:

/4 Tank LFG for Ramparts
/w dps, inv
/w heals
/invite, /invite, /invite, /invite
/p Can I get a summon?

At this point, we understand that a party leader will not interview prospective party members - so there’s no need for further communication in this case. The TIMING aspect varies… WILDLY. Even as a tank, I sometimes have to wait 45 minutes to an hour for a group to form, and sometimes even longer.

Many people are saying that you’ll never see the players in Dungeon Finder again. What exactly are we basing this off of? Our past experience in Wrath of the Lich King? Normally, that would be a great support for an argument, first-hand experience in the actual expansion in question. However, if we actually look at it, during the original Lich King, our battlegroups (Which limited our Dungeon Finder capability back in 2009-2010) saw as many as 20 realms being connected to each other. This would 100% mean that you would be unlikely to see the same person more than once unless you were lucky (I managed to pull off this feat a few times) Today, the NA/Oceania realms, for example, only have a total of about 21 realms that have any active characters on them - and yes, that includes realms with 1-50, as well.

The other thing that comes up is that if Blizzard really DID care about the community, why in the world would they sell a Level 70 boost that effectively skips over 88% of the levelling aspect, and thus, the social aspect? It seems to me that they don’t care, they’re just using this as an excuse to sell the boosts because, as we all know, boosts would be useless and pointless if Dungeon Finder were present.

/end rant for now.

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Care to throw in a tl;dr so I can know if I’m giving you a thumbs up or a thumbs down?

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I know it’s his job but I felt kinda bad if he really was surprised by the flames he’s faced.

Their messaging has been sort of disjointed and doesn’t make sense at times to me. As you (the OP) pointed out on the reveal they claim to have based their decision on feedback but the reveal was made early to get feedback? Like you didn’t really have confidence in the data you had gathered (if any)? I mean that’s what it sounded like to me and that’s just head shakingly awful.

One of the things that Brian hung his hat on was the illustration of community based on a dungeon run in Wailing Caverns. Which wasn’t really much of an interaction at all. Maybe he should have elaborated.

I have a dungeon run using the dungeon finder story that has stayed with me for many years. It shows the good and the bad but also how setting an example is powerful.

I queued up as tank into a group that was already almost to one of the first mini-bosses in Razorfen Kraul. When I arrived, one of them whispered me that he was playing with his son and the last tank left because his son (a hunter) made a mistake. So I told the group we would be marking and asked they allow me to pull. One of the dps left. The healer told me that they had the time to put into a longer run but the hunter was bad. I asked the dad that whispered me if I could at least tell the healer that the hunter was new. He agreed. Once the healer realized that they were helpful and called out directions to the hunter. Another dps that declined to speak joined us and he too was advised of how the group was going to roll. We encouraged the hunter and finished the dungeon successfully. Everyone thanked the group and heals plus the other dps left. The dad asked me to wait and he explained to me that his son was thrilled about the run and wanted me to join their family guild (on a different server). Dad did most of the talking and he revealed that his son was on the autism spectrum and had a lot of difficulty socializing with people. But his son would have been upset if he revealed that to the group - apparently they tried to be honest about that before and the ridicule was something neither of them wanted to deal with again.

I made an alt and joined their guild. I checked in with them periodically and ran some dungeons. We usually needed a healer so we’d queue up in the dungeon finder. A few instructions and we were off. Sometimes people would quit. Sometimes the group would stay together run a second dungeon. It (the RDF) worked great and the anonymity was not the crusher of cooperation or communication that many lay on it.

Blizzard, if you are still listening I want to commend you for at least stating you want to see a better community in your games. Some of the decisions you have made as a company seem to me to be counter to that but I understand that the business has financial obligations to meet. I would like it if you would consider that tools in the game are just that. The tool doesn’t create or destroy. How we use the tool matters. I wish you luck if you believe that the exclusion of the tool will somehow change the actions and attitudes of some players. That can only come from within. But if the metric for deciding who is good for community and who is not is talking with others when forming a group or in a dungeon, then you would have driven people like the young man I met away from a game where he could be one of the adventurers too. And that would be a damn shame.

oh sorry the tl;dr is that everyone has good and bad times in dungeons - using lfd or not
plus blizzard needs to work on messaging
the dungeon finder isn’t to blame for bad people choosing to be bad

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That was a very sweet story.

Never feel bad when liars meet their comeuppance.

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we are Judge Judy and Executioner!! rawr!!

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It was a feel good moment but quite probably not unique. Brian had his sweet story too. But it wasn’t the dungeon finder that made it. It was people. We can do this now without the tool but the tool doesn’t keep it from happening.

Blizzard has a choice: become the Ministry of Love to enforce the proper Classic groupthink or admit that players will form the bonds they value in the way that seems best to them. Some of those ways may be detrimental or even violate the ToS. That’s when the company steps in and enforces clearly defined penalties.

Striping the tool because it’s easier than enforcement is apparently what happens when choice is too burdensome and not cost effective.

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My guess is that the LFD tool doesn’t work on the Legion engine so they decided to save $50 by not posting the programming job on Upwork.

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lmao
that much?

Wonder how the Frankenstein project of adapting the LFG tool from retail is working out?
we heard you hate retail so we are bringing a retail tool in to help out
No really guys - you had a tool that was put into the game during the Wrath expansion. Could we just have that feature when ICC drops? Like it was originally?

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But nobody will, because everyone will just be using LFD.

The “just don’t use it” argument doesn’t work in reality.

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Nah, we still formed groups for specifics and achievement runs all the time. If you don’t want to do random dungeons or use dungeon finder, you really don’t have to.

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But that really just goes to prove that the majority WANT the Dungeon Finder then, doesn’t it? If the majority DIDN’T want it implemented, and it was, then hardly anyone would actually use it.

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Rift has a LFD queue but players made their groups in trade chat mostly.

I never understood why.

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OP: “I like Dungeon Finder.”

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Oh.

Thumbs up, OP.

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For the record, blizzard ‘listening’ to what the community wants is how we got Season of Mastery, which is objectively speaking is a complete failure. As many predicted it is almost entirely dead before the release of AQ and I bet you anything blizzard is very disappointed with how it turned out.

The reality is blizzard doesn’t know who to listen to when it comes to designing classic games and keeps missing the mark. Classic 2019 was success in spite of everything blizzard did with it because of the pandemic and players desires to achieve things with the game they never got a chance to.

The reality is the game has been bleeding subs since it’s release. It has had a very high turn over rate, and the only reason it remained as strong as it has is because of the pandemic.

Blizzard needs to stop doing their survey’s and instead get fresh eyes on the project. They’re missing big time opportunity with the game. They barely market it. They don’t commit to actually improving the game.

DO NOT trust your survey data blizzard. The average player has a high degree of cognitive dissonance. They will tell you what they want from the game, then play the game in the exact opposite fashion. LOOk at how players actually play the game and make design decisions based off that.

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SoM is a “failure” because it was too soon.

Give me the same SoM in 2 years and i’m gonna play it.

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I would rather them just make it like it was with no changes, their design is why I don’t play retail, I’d just rather have the old game like it was good or bad parts (even it’s bad parts were better than what I think the current Dev’s can come up with anyway).

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The ENTIRE idea behind the Classic versions of the game was to remain as faithful as humanly possible to the source content. As Blizzard themselves has stated, Lich King is a MUCH easier project to bring to life than Classic Vanilla was. There is no need to bring in fresh eyes, it’s a simple copy + paste job for Lich King. One of the biggest problems here is that there’s a split community, and bringing in more people will just add to that.

We can’t really say that for sure, because we have zero data without it.

I’m not sure if you’re referring to the surveys ACTUALLY sent out, or the supposed surveys taken from the community on this one but I think you need to accept the fact that ZERO communication was exchanged between Blizzard and ANY community. In TBC Classic, for example, there was nothing standing in the way of Blizzard making money from 58 boosts - Dungeon Finder, however, would completely negate the 70 boost.

But players aren’t playing the game as they want to - they are being forced into playing it a certain way to even be able to play it at the most minimal level.

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Fully agree with this. I have a few friends who still play retail, as well as others who play classic. I’ve bounced in and out of both. We all received surveys, but none of them asked anything about dungeon finder. No one I know, or anything I’ve googled, has shown any sort of outreach to the community about this topic until they announced it.