Full disclosure here - I am coming back to the game after having left post Cata. I raided through heroic WOTLK 25m content, my guild got a top 100 Arthas kill, we got all achievements for ICC, and again repeated the process through Cata before we grew old, lost interest, and eventually went our own ways.
In addition to my hunter main, I also had a prot pally and resto druid that I would run through the non-heroic 10 mans with pugs. And actually finish them! Crazy, right? If RDF had not been a thing I can guarantee neither of my alts would have ever raided ICC. I would not have put the time nor effort in to run them through normals and then heroics in a “LFG” environment. This was at a time when RDF did 5 mans only. It was phenomenal, it was easy to take a break from the questing grind to pop into a dungeon, then return directly back to where your questing started.
I’ve heard various complaints about RDF, but what they boil down to is the following:
- “Dungeons shouldn’t be cross realm”
- “Instant teleportation takes away from gameplay immersion”
- “I never liked RDF, I preferred spending an hour making a party, then 20 minutes making my way to a dungeon across the realm so I could summon my lazy party members and invest 2 hours into running a single instance, not including the time it spent for me to get back to whatever I was originally doing”.
I’d like to address these issues.
1 - “Dungeons shouldn’t be cross-realm”
I believe you are entitled to your opinion, I, personally, do not share it. Cross-realm dungeons were introduced as a solution to stagnated server populations to allow people to participate in content even if their servers had low populations. Why doesn’t Blizzard offer “RP” servers where the population of players can xfer their characters and play with RDF not as an option. I remember the days of non-cross realm PVP in Vanilla, Sometimes I’d be queued for 5+ hours just to get into an Alterac Valley before they were cross-server. To fix this, PVP instance queuing was changed to cross battlegroup, this instantly solved the issue, people got to join the instances, everyone was happy. And yet, Blizzard doesn’t seem to have any intentions of removing cross-realm PvP when they are removing cross-realm RDF - why is that? If your goal is “to make the experience more immersive for players” - why not make them all queue up in Alterac Valley and walk through an instance once the PvP group is made? Why is this unnecessary qualification only reserved for PvE content?
2 - “Instant teleportation takes away from gameplay immersion”
Then don’t do it! Nothing is stopping you from using RDF - you are absolutely free to sign up for the local LFG, truck your butt to the dungeon, and summon your team members. “But there is no one LFG because everyone is using RDF” - Well, there is a reason for that. Again, I would suggest some RP servers without RDF where all of the “I like to run to the instances” masochists can continue with their traditions. How many times would you expect someone to run to southern Tanaris to enter OHF before you feel they’re “fully immersed”? I actually got to see more content with RDF than without - dungeons I would normally skip over in early content, I actually got to see because it was so easy to find a group for them before I out leveled their content.
3 - “I never liked RDF, I preferred spending an hour making a party, then 20 minutes making my way to a dungeon across the realm so I could summon my lazy party members and invest 2 hours into running a single instance, not including the time it spent for me to get back to whatever I was originally doing”.
Again - You do you. Again with the RP servers - you can form a collective of all of the people who want to show their true dedication to lore and immersion by forming a server of like-minded individuals who enjoy excessive flight paths and travel.
I am in my 40s now - I just re-subbed to the game about 3 weeks ago hoping to play through Wrath content again. My hunter is already 70, my druid is now 30, pally is next. I was going to hold off on leveling the druid and the pally until wotlk so I could use RDF and make the experience more enjoyable, alas, apparently that will never happen. I am now seriously debating just unsubbing as I am coming to realize this will not be the same WOTLK I grew to know and love.
Please keep RDF in the game - make some non-RDF servers, make them not-cross realm. You can make everyone happy, you’re just choosing not to based on the voices of the minority, and I can guarantee you it is going to cost you subscriptions as a result. Not all of us enjoy spamming “LFG” in chat, for hours hoping others are also feeling motivated. Or even worse, just being completely ignored because they didn’t feel your gear was good enough to “waste time on”. Your “New player flag” is a joke, i hope you made the flag red because that is all it is going to be used for.
