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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, I can definitely see and understand that there are people who view the interaction as a forced means to an end that doesn’t need to happen.
Oh, there’s definitely no doubt that dungeon finder would be an even bigger quality of life improvement for people on realms whose populations are dwindling or dead. The WoW team’s handling of population health has been nothing short of shameful. That being said, I really wish that people would think bigger than dungeon finder for solving that problem.
I think population health and faction balance should be solved without slapping another layer of problems onto the situation. Band-aid solutions for population discomfort will only delay actual work on population health. I would much rather we demand that Blizzard do something about the horrendous state of server population than to have them implement dungeon finder and call it a job well done for playability on dead realms and never look at the issue again.
I wouldn’t want to look at this as an “either or” situation, but I definitely think it’s way less likely that Blizzard will address non-existent populations and faction imbalance if the people on those realms suddenly have access to group content.
One other thing on this issue too – I think anyone who looks at the population problems as a reason that dungeon finder should be implemented would be hard-pressed to remember that by definition, the people playing on dead realms represent a vanishingly small minority of the playerbase. Minority demographics do still matter, but let’s remember that the whole point of Classic is to be authentic to the original game. To be authentic to the experience, dungeon finder cannot be present for more than about 25% of the content, but even that much is obviously debatable. To implement dungeon finder at launch with the intention of improving playability for the small number of people on dead realms would be to alter the game from its natural state for everyone for the comfort of very few individuals.
Which raises the question, why does someone who does value that interaction want to play with someone who considers it at best irrelevant or at worst a nuisance?
It has never been about wanting to exert my will or preferences onto the other people who play this game. I’m not trying to put any words into your mouth, so do please correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds to me like what you’re saying is very much in line with a common argument used on these forums. Something along the lines of “Why do you want to control how other people enjoy the game?” or something like “Why do you get to choose which play style is valid?”
I’ve already posted on this in the past, so please click for a detailed explanation on why I think Classic should generally remain as true to the original experience is it possibly can:
Summary
Classic wasn’t created to satisfy the majority of Activision Blizzard’s audience. The whole reason why Classic exists at all is because, despite all of the financial success Activision achieved by forcing WoW down the path of Retail, an enormous number of players were sick of the changes made in the name of accessibility. So much that they decided to host private realms when they were continually denied the “Legacy servers” they spent more than a decade pleading for.
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 it would be to appeal to that part of the playerbase. This is why they sent cease and desist letters to the people heading the biggest private realm projects. It was only ever to protect their financial interests, because the millions of people playing on those private realms represented a loss of potential profits.
Make no mistake, Classic is absolutely NOT meant for the majority of Activision Blizzard’s audience. They understand their majority customer demographic very well, and that’s why Retail is what it is. The majority of people playing WoW are “casual”, which is why they have been the primary beneficiary of nearly every single significant change to WoW since Activision merged with Blizzard’s parent company in 2008. Whether it was turning WoW into Retail or creating Classic for the part of their audience that they drove away over the years, Activision Blizzard was only ever following the money.
Retail is what you get when WoW appeals to the majority of players. Implementing the very things that led to Retail today would undermine the reason why Classic exists in the first place.
In this situation, even though I see and recognize that many people want what I would call a departure from the original experience, I think the thing that matters most is keeping the game more the way it was.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t make sense from a business perspective, or from the perspective of the intended audience of Classic to optimize the game for convenience or “accessibility”. It would be best for the WoW team to maintain as little overlap between Classic and Retail as “authenticity” demands, in my opinion. I stopped playing Retail back in Legion because the experience just wasn’t even recognizable to me anymore. Classic has largely been the return an experience that I and many other people felt was completely lost.
Yeah, I agree – People often like to say “It’s not 2008 anymore, the audience is different now”, but they’re completely missing the point. The game is meant to bring back the experience that was lost.
That wasn’t quite what I was asking. I was asking why do want to be grouped with people who don’t value that interaction as much as you do and in fact might even be annoyed they had it?
As for authenticity, that’s doubly out the window in regards to LFD in wrath. Blizzard has been pretty willing to both make changes in the face of authenticity and in regards to wrath LFD is actually authentic. And mostly i care about the actual content and class balance etc being authentic at this point.
if only that were actually true; problem is this engine we play on is not the same as the real 3.3.5; its not even close. Instead they will spend the maybe 1 year worth of “Classic Wrath of the Litch King” trying to tread water regarding a the bugs, just like Vanilla Classic and TBC Classic.
The first sentence is already wrong. A game is created for players to have fun. IT’s a profit-generating product from a profit-seeking company, not a charitable act. You have a very weird view of reality…
Aurumai is putting a lot of effort to explain quite thoroughly what they meant saying this, please be respectful and actually make an effort to read the post. Classic was obviously created for fun. it’s a video game. But it was meant to be fun for the classic audience and not necessarily the majority retail audience. It was meant to be an authentic experience for people to relive their nostalgia. Things on this have changed somewhat and we now accept some changes however they have said themselves the design principles of classic remain much the same as we are playing an old game.
The profit end of things came from the idea of getting classic players to return to WoW. We don’t want to play retail and we would leave if we had no choice. It wasn’t charity, it was business logic. There’s enough demand for a product, so let’s make money from it that private servers were getting.
I guess I just don’t understand what you mean. I’d prefer to be grouped with people who do value player interaction, not those who don’t. o.o
I would actually argue that the WoW team has always intended for Classic to be quite authentic to the original article. Do note that all of the monetization stuff most certainly came from high up on the corporate side of Blizzard, not from the people actually developing it. The devs themselves have no reason to want cash shop stuff in their game because almost all of it subverts the core design philosophy of the game.
Well. * gestures broadly at the thread * I posted this thread to put that very idea into contention. After all is said and done, I think it would be inauthentic for Dungeon Finder to be implemented a moment sooner than the beginning of the ICC phase. And I think that Wrath Classic doesn’t ever need Dungeon Finder to be authentic.
Very true! And being that the concept of ‘fun’ is subjective, a game must be optimized for maximal fun by appealing to a common perception of what makes a game fun. That’s why the term “target audience” exists.
Unless you think that target audience is irrelevant, in which case anyone who enjoys Hello Kitty Island Adventure should also have plenty of fun playing Elden Ring…
Precisely. And please tell me how you think it would make business sense to increase the overlap between Classic and Retail. Doing so would:
Drive the audience that demanded Classic away and back onto private realms where Activision Blizzard can make no money from them
Attract more Retail players to Classic where there’s less monetization and no charge to play expansions
Dwindle Retail’s player population and therefore reduce the incentive to foot the cost of developing content for it
Classic is playable with a regular WoW sub and includes the expansions for no extra cost because private realms are a viable option for people who want to play old WoW content. Activision Blizzard wants as many people playing Retail as they can possibly get because that’s where the average player is going to be spending way more money. It makes the most business sense to keep a little overlap between Classic and Retail as possible because that’s what maintains the returning players’ interest in Classic and the keeps the Retail playerbase where they will be more profitable.
It’s horrible business sense to have your products vying for each other’s audience rather than appealing to different audiences and being successful in all of them.
It certainly can be, though I’m a little surprised to see you admitting that you would, as if it’s something to be proud of. I should think that anyone who even pretends to want fruitful discussion on a forum would never want to “reduce” dissenting opinion so as to make it easier to dismiss.
After all is said and done, I think it would be inauthentic for Dungeon Finder to be implemented a moment sooner than the beginning of the ICC phase. And I think that Wrath Classic doesn’t ever need Dungeon Finder to be authentic.