Awesome post OP.
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I think the biggest thing for me is; How much is having it in the game impacting you?
Without it, personally, it has destroyed the very thing I was excited about; Levelling alts without paying for boosts/replaying content I’ve done so many times over.
My biggest take away from the debate is the ratio is way off when it comes to the enjoyment of players having it in or out of the game. I think both parties make great points, yes, but ultimately adding it to the game will piss less people off. If they announced RDF was being added from pre-patch I highly doubt the response from the Anti-RFD would be similar to the Pro-RDF we’re seeing now.
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Can we just look at features with pros and cons. Why does it have to be exactly like in the past? OK, the LFD only existed for 40% of the time. This is 2022, we can do better. The developers should think through which feature they want to change and why.
The removal of LFD is said to preserve players’ interaction. The disenchant button isn’t added for the same reason. However, the 2022 player base no longer interacts like in 2009. Trying to enforce something that no longer exists is a very weird take.
It’s like an old man wishing shopping malls to be vivid like back in their days. Now we have online shopping and self-checkout kiosks; that day may come back only if you banned the internet. Everyone would socialise more, the mall would be crowded, but everyone would be just miserable.
Comparing LFD to the internet is extreme, but I hope you get the main idea.
This Brian guy is like Lenin. He thinks that by making model utopian policies he can actually regulate people’s behaviour. Lets remove convenience so that people socialise… What a stupid take. The player base is the same with or without LFD.
This change is backward, full of nostalgia and wishful thinking. The community and interaction are not there to preserve anyway. The WOW developers are overall very disconnected from reality. I really want him to answer this simple question. How is his experience leveling and grouping before 70?
I’m also tired of the classic player base. Something is very sick inside their mind. Instead of making a better game, they like to live in the past, to play a version of the game like in their youth. Your argument about the original timeline is a symptom of this IMO
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I hope they don’t add LFD to Wrath and stand their ground with their decision.
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Finally a constructive post without all the feet stomping and childish yelling.
Watching the player base change - even just via the forums, from pre-beta Vanilla Classic reworkx2 to now, is comedy gold. I never really played Retail (panda xpac for a little maybe? or the housing one) so I don’t know what the typical player base attitude was like, but people didn’t say good things. But geezus, ya’ll are so much older and wiser compared to the noobs you were 20 years ago right? Listen to yourselves.
I’d imagine what a Retail forum would look like and draw parallels to what I’m reading from the Wrath crowd and the resemblance is uncanny. Except some of you folks are like 30+ years old.
I never played Wrath, but as TBC started the path toward Retail, it’s clear that the players behind Wrath put the pedal to the metal.
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LfD doesn’t prevent players from communicating. There’s still a /party chat channel. I don’t see people talking in /party in the pugs I join. How about we just require each party member to type a certain amount of words in /party before they can attack a boss. That would solve the problem that you see.
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Probably quite a bit more than I’m even capable of effectively communicating to you. A little while after dungeon finder was first implemented (probably around the Cataclysm pre-patch or sometime during Cataclysm’s official launch), I noticed a sharp decline in a certain quality of the game that made it so special. People talked so much less and started leaving the groups the instant the last boss was looted without saying a word. Running dungeons started feeling less like a cooperative effort and more like I was playing with bots. Increasingly over the next few years that I played WoW, it became more and more difficult to create groups manually whenever it was necessary and when I did, there was an overwhelming amount of people I played with who had no idea how to get to the dungeons and just sat there waiting for a summon. Questing zones started feeling totally empty and I often had to abandon every group quest I had picked up while I leveled.
The server(s) I played on had relatively healthy populations and faction balance in most cases (I routinely checked those metrics on WoW-progress), but fewer and fewer people wanted to do anything but AFK in a resting zone while waiting for a queue pop when they leveled alts. So leveling alts because way less fun for me. I don’t always need to be in a group with people while I level, but I certainly enjoyed it when /who would bring up a long list of people and I ran into them all the time. It was great being able to call for help when I needed it, or to be that help for another person. Also little interactions like buffing and emoting at people for no reason. Playing WoW used to feel a lot more like I was chilling with other people and it gradually felt more like I was just playing Skyrim.
I can see that many people on these forums see no merit in interactions and they often minimize it, but this conversation will never go anywhere until they can acknowledge that many people see a lot of value in it. The same thing goes for traveling the distance to the dungeon rather than just teleporting to it. Dungeon finder effectively removes the distances between places by trivializing it. Those of us who think the convenience was an unhealthy change have been forced to choose between just teleporting in or traveling in an empty world.
That’s the thing though – You speak as if Classic is meant to appeal to the majority of players. The whole reason why Classic exists is because, despite all of the money Activision made by forcing WoW down the path of Retail, an enormous number of players were sick of it. So much that they begged Blizzard for “Legacy servers” for a decade and decided to host private realms when they were continually denied.
Activision Blizzard was never going to fund the creation of a version of WoW without all the monetizations and “accessibility” or roll back all of the changes because modern Retail was astronomically more profitable. So they kept saying “No”. That is, until the number of people who wanted “Gameplay First” again grew to such a critical mass that Activision could no longer ignore how profitable appealing to that part of the playerbase would be.
Make no mistake, Classic is absolutely NOT meant for the majority of Activision Blizzard’s audience. Activision Blizzard understands their majority customer demographic very well. And that’s why Retail is what it is. The majority of people are “casual”, which is why the casual player has been the primary beneficiary of nearly every single significant change to WoW since Activision merged with Blizzard’s parent company in 2008.
Retail is what you get when WoW appeals to the majority of players.
See my second response to Floppy above; it applies all the same.
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LFD doesn’t give any incentive to communicate let alone make it necessary like it currently is. You might not experience social situations (although I severely doubt you try and initiate a conversation) but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen to other people.
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No, it doesn’t prevent people from communicating, but it trivializes the necessity of communication. People en masse will literally always favor the more convenient option. Therefore, trivializing the necessity of a thing effectively removes it from existence by and large.
I really don’t mean it as a jab at you, but I have to point out that you might just be the common denominator if you don’t personally see much player interaction happening. The arguments you make against the importance of the necessity for player interaction in Classic tell me that you’re not one of the people who see any value in it.
I swear I mean this with full respect and friendliness – The way you discuss the issue makes me think that you’re just not understanding the value that I see in player interaction. It’s one thing to understand me and disagree, but another thing entirely for my perspective to be completely lost on you.
I’m very interested in figuring out which one it is.
This problem runs waaaay deeper than “10 char”.
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What do you want? Agonise people who want to eat cake and have fun?
I get it, Artificially creating friction will increase interaction. Let’s destroy cars so people can enjoy the scenic rides. Let’s ban smartphones so people socialise more.
Have you ever questioned why everyone would use LFD en mass? it’s simply better.
Social interaction should happen naturally if there is a need. The chitchat to form the group does not guarantee continued engagement once they are in. Removing LFD won’t force anyone to open up if the person chooses not to.
If you think there exists an audience who values “social interaction”, I’m sure you can join them, and do it the old way. LFD doesn’t stop you.
Social interaction does happen inside the dungeons with LFD. People can socialise when they are in, if they wish to.
I suggest we remove the AH too, lets’s use /2 trade chat for more interaction. I’m being extreme but you get my point. Wimping players and trying to ‘engineer’ society’s behaviour never worked.
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This is without a doubt the most disingenuous post I have ever seen. What you have done here is lied and twisted numbers and made objectively ridiculous assumptions.
Sees that they are literally cutting LFD from Wrath
*Immediately makes a post titled “Dungeon finder is not being cut from Wrath”
You are lying. Also your numbers game is hilarious.
Today I learned that if something had something for under half of its lifespan, even by 10 days, that thing never existed.
You are a grade A mental gymnast and I actually salute you.
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308 = 0. Einstein logic.
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You are totally Correct, I do hope we see it with the ICC patch
You’re right, I posted several times that I don’t talk in pugs beyond common courtesy. But I’ve been in a lot of pugs with four other players. If it was a social occasion for the rest of the group I’d have seen /party buzzing with conversation. And I never do. Everyone I pug with just goes through the social niceties same as I do. I suppose there are some groups somewhere that are discussing problems with the wife and kids, troubles at work, and life the universe and everything. But I was never dropped into one and I doubt it when other people claim it’s happened to them.
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You seem to be claiming that pugs are commonly have deep conversations about life the universe and everything then suddenly I get dropped into the group and they stop talking. Why would they do that? I’m never in a hurry, I don’t rush people forward. I never suggest we stop talking and get going. I’d actually prefer to do the dungeons at a slower pace than most tanks set but I never say that. I don’t like the go go go game play but I just adapt to the pace the tank sets and never complain. The only time I try to slow the pace is when the tank won’t wait for me to drink. Then I hit the /oom emote or ask them to wait for me to drink because I can’t heal without mana. The idea that I’m somehow inhibiting chat in pugs is ridiculous
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The funny thing is that we’re not discussing articificially creating friction; we’re discussing artificially removing it. The status quo (as I pointed out in the OP of this thread) is a game where dungeon finder is present for about 25% of the expansion’s content or less.
We don’t need to “create” the player interaction aspect because it’s already baked into the game. Not only is it already baked into the game historically, the devs just announced that it will be baked into the game for the Classic release.
I chose the title for this thread because nothing had to be cut from Wrath for it to be free of dungeon finder.
No, it’s simply convenient. Whether it’s better is a matter of which metrics we use to measure it’s value. Is it better for saving time? Sure. Is it better for immersion and the game’s core design philosophy? No.
Perhaps I could compare this to something else so you can see my perspective on it a bit more clearly. I can ask the same question of fast food. “Have you ever questioned why everyone would eat fast food en mass? it’s simply better.”
Convenience is popular. But it’s not better in a lot of cases. Much like fast food, I think dungeon finder lacks wholesomeness and causes cancer in the experience.
There is a need. You want to see that need removed.
The comparison doesn’t follow because the auction house has been a core feature of the game since Vanilla. The game’s experience was designed with the auction house in mind. The only thing that was designed with dungeon finder in mind was the prices at 3.3.0+ badge vendors.
We’d have to remove the auction house from the core experience and it would change everything. We don’t need dungeon finder for the Wrath Classic experience to be true to its original form.
There isn’t a need though for dungeons, right now they’re just as anonymous and lacking in social interaction as LFD.
If I were to pug a dungeon today in TBC I would see people I’ve never seen before and will never see again. And unless someone just wants to be chatty nothing will need to be said to complete the run. So exactly the same as LFD.
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It was just a possible explanation. I can only conjecture as to why your experience lacks social interaction while mine doesn’t. My experience has been absolutely full of very friendly people who like to chill in party and have conversation while we run. Not every group of course, but a vividly clear majority of my groups.
I suppose there isn’t much sense in spending too much time focusing on the difference of our anecdotal experiences with dungeon groups. Player interaction has been plentiful and valuable in my WoW experience. I couldn’t possible say that it’s been the same in your experience.
I would then, at the very least, ask that you try to see that many of us value the social interaction that we have. We can all see that social interaction is brought up constantly around the topic of dungeon finder, and it’s because many of us have witnessed a sharp decline with the introduction of dungeon finder.
TL;DR: We’re not lying when we say that the interactions DO exist and we value them greatly. You may not see it or agree with it, but it’s an important point in this discussion for many people.
I’m not saying player interaction isn’t important, it’s obviously quite important in a lot of things. I’m saying that the player interaction directly involved with forming a pug dungeon group is not very important. Simply because at this point it’s so robotic anyways.
Now that’s fine apparently some people value that largely artificial interaction, I do understand that. But the flip side is understanding why a lot of people consider it no better than just clicking a join group button. But you also have to understand that for a lot of people LFD means being able to run dungeons at all which has a very real impact on them.
Now if blizzard would take other steps to fix that problem then LFD would be a lot less relevant, but at this point it sounds like they’re planning to just leave things as it.
Sadge
/10char