That’s the point, with LFD the people using chat to form groups would be people who value doing so like you. The people who don’t care would be in LFD, which should be a win win for everyone.
Except that there’s nothing strongly tying LFD to ICC, it was available for all dungeons when it launched not just the ICC dungeons. It was a tool to form groups that was deemed better than the current situation not a piece of content.
The other possible explanation is you’re an extreme extrovert that enjoys small talk so much the you make social interaction in as many groups as you can. Consider the possibility that you’re the outlier that makes it happen in your groups. If we look at forum posts very few have experiences like you while you can find dozens of people that have group experiences similar to mine. Even most streamers claim to never or rarely talk while in group. You might want to consider accepting other people’s differences instead of trying to force everyone to be like you. These three streamers describe the groups they’re in the same ways as mine. most relevant portion starts at 54 minutes.
and
When something is extremely convenient, people flock to it and away from the non-convenient thing. Doing things the inconvenient way is just handicapping yourself. I’m not sure if it was already clear or not, but if Dungeon Finder is implemented, I will be using it. I do dislike the entire concept of Dungeon Finder and I wouldn’t stop making groups manually, but it simply makes no sense to put myself at a disadvantage.
I don’t want to be put in a situation where I have to choose between taking the path of least resistance or being disadvantages because I want to keep playing the game the way it was originally designed to be played.
Maybe not to ICC specifically, but Dungeon Finder was released as an absolute paradigm shift. It may not have been anywhere near as pivotal, but guild banks were added late in TBC and that was mirrored in Classic as a phase-gated feature.
There’s also an argument to be made that 3.3.0’s release was the single moment when Activision’s influence started to manifest itself in WoW’s gameplay in a way that had never been seen before. And that’s the biggest reason why it will be a good thing for the health of the experience for it to be left out. As I’ve pointed out above, the entire point of Classic is to offer an experience removed from Retail. The first major implementation of a system that marked WoW’s sudden change of direction down the path of Retail was Dungeon Finder.
I am certainly not extremely extroverted unless we’re speaking in a very relative way. 
If anything, I’d just say there are a few distinct categories of people who communicate more or less and I’d fall into one that’s closer to more than less. But I tend to be one of the less talkative people in my groups unless discussion is happening.
I’ve seen this pop up countless times recently – The forums aren’t a good representation of the average experience of the average player. Of course we have plenty of people here saying that they don’t experience social interaction, because this forum is currently flooded with people who don’t want it or don’t value it. If the WoW team decides to go back on their decision and launch Wrath Classic with Dungeon Finder, I guarantee you in just a few days’ time, the majority of the posts here would be from people who were upset over “Blizzard killing the social experience”.
I don’t really see any point in putting more stock in what streamers say than just random people on the forums. They’re just normal people like anyone else or their experience is something that none of us could possibly relate to anyway.
What makes you think I’m trying to force anyone’s perspective? I do accept peoples’ differences and have actually said several times in this thread that there isn’t much sense in digging too deep in a discussion about our anecdotal experiences because they are absolutely going to be entirely different.
Of course, I wouldn’t try to dismiss the experiences or the wants of the other people who may disagree with me. I’m just saying that anecdotal experiences shouldn’t be a part of a debate on this topic because it will just create a circular argument “But MY groups are X” and “MY groups are Y”.
I’ll remind you that I was never originally the one who wanted to talk about player interaction in party chat. xD
I completely agree. I’m 100% pro LFD and I think it should be phased in period correct. It was added in 3.3.0 to serve a purpose when most players had little reason to engage with dungeon content. It served that purpose perfectly.
Yes, it is. The devs have said they are not going to include it - at all - in any patch. They are removing a feature that was in the game. A feature that a significant portion of the player base at the time engaged with, if not regularly. Not including it at all means they’re cutting it. The argument of how long it was in vs not is completely pointless and achieves/proves nothing. It was in wrath for just as long as ICC was. You could argue, by your reasoning, that because the player base went longer without ICC than with it, that the devs could choose not to phase ICC in at 3.3.0 and they wouldn’t be “cutting” it.
Wrath had LFD in 3.3.0. LFD should be added again in Classic 3.3.0.
This entire argument is a strawman.
It does not matter in the slightest how long it was in the game in Wrath; if it was in the game during Wrath, and no longer is… then it’s being cut.
No one’s claiming ICC wasn’t a part of Wrath because there was more Wrath without than with it. That would be an immediately ridiculous argument. If you were to remove ICC from Wrath as is being proposed with dungeon finder, and tried to justify it as you have here, it would be immediately ridiculous.
There’s precedence for holding back features until the appropriate patch or not including them on launch, and if they decide to hold dungeon finder for the ICC phase, then it wouldn’t be cut at all. Not implementing it at all is cutting a Wrath feature.
But at this point you are dictating to others that they should play as you want them to play. And acknowledging that that social interactions just isn’t that major of a factor for most people.
And this is totally fair, I’d be more than happy if blizzard would take some other measure to address the issues LFD addresses. But if they won’t do that then LFD is the solution they came up with at the time.
I would also disagree that LFD was activision’s idea. CRBG’s were pre activision and were the first step into cross realm random groups as a means to solve server/faction population issues.
the Devs have (since the release) said that it is currently not planned to be released but it is not a definite choice nor was it at the announcement, because it became clear as they were approaching announcement that the community is split on the matter.
Unfortunately it was done so on a podcast and so the statement isn’t getting shared around much. Given that they were already juggling whether to include it or not before the announcement, you could pretty much guarantee it will at least come out with ICC. Especially with the forum outcry.
Careful, hopeful optimism is a heinous crime in these parts.
I understand your idea of the target audience of wow classic is players who value the classic spirit, doing things the old RPG way. I want to elaborate on why this is a wrong view of game development. When I said this is a product, not a charity, I mean that all games/software and arts are made for mass consumption. The maker always wants to reach the maximum number of customers. I want this game to succeed too, to reach 5 million players mark, for example. Your post is correct if this game is specifically made for the classic taste and advertised like so.
The premise that there are different defined audiences of the game is wrong. WOLK in 2009 was made to please any gamer. The game could cater to almost everyone from casual to hardcore, which is why it was successful many years ago. I don’t get why you want to turn it into an “old way only” game? Why limits it to a “target” audience. Can you envision the WOLK version you want? DO you want millions to enjoy or just some thousands of classic purists? Removing LFD simply removes accessibility, limiting their reach; this is a bad business decision.
Your assumption that retail is bad and classic is good is also very wrong. Retail is bad because of many reasons, but not QOL improvements. All the features that were added over the year solved the problem of their time. There were genuine demands for dual spec, cross-realm play, matchmaking, and various other features. There is a genuine need for cross-faction play right now in retail, and it’s being implemented in 9.2.5. The developers didn’t invent dual spec and LFD to punish players.
The idea behind no-LFD in classic is that the devs want to mold the players’ behaviour, to improve social interactions. They never mean to limit their target audience. The major drawback of LFD is that it lessens the feelings of grouping up and taking on an adventure in a dungeon. That is a valid reason to consider no-LFD. The loss of LFD means there will be fewer dungeon runs overall, less accessible gameplay, and a dead leveling scene. This is simply a design trade-off, which is considered wrong by many people. They are nerfing the players’ accessibility, a textbook mistake. Search “wimping players” and you will understand.
IMO, the developers of the classic now have god-complex symptoms. They want to make their marks with the game, to rub their egos, to prove that their version is better. This is not an uncommon problem in an institutional setting. Instead of following the players’ enjoyment, the devs seem to follow their own ideology, to be specific, the lead developer’s ideas of how things should be, ignoring the players feeling. The game design is considered their primary focus instead of the players’ fun. The design should follow the players, not the other way. They should base their design on the reality of how people play the game in 2022.
In short, if we view the game as fan service for the purists, then you have a point in saying LFD is not cut, it may not be needed in the first place.
Awful lot of typing in this thread but very little is being said.
Blizzard doesn’t have the code for WOTLK style RDF. Rather than putting forth the effort to build it from the ground up, they’ve gaslighted the community and a few poor, uneducated souls are white knighting for them.
It has nothing to do with community. Its pure laziness.
If that were true people would choose to pay a mage to boost them through low level dungeons and not use the lfd. It’s cheap for the low level dungeons and definitely more convenient than using the lfd. But most people would choose the lfd because people want to play the game. It’s not what is more convenient. It’s that lfd works all the time to get you a group to actually do a dungeon and the other systems, mage boosting or the lfg channel, often doesn’t work at all.
I don’t see how this could be an issue. Retail has LFD. The UI might be different, but it works the same way. Can’t they just modify that for WotLk?
I doubt its that simple tbh.
If Blizzard were to announce they would release it at the same time that they did back in Wrath I could be content with that. After them flat out stating it would not be done, whilst mentioning boosts and not charging real money for hair cuts, my expectations are not high. I do appreciate your point of view though.
No, I don’t care how others play. I’ve said this several times. I just want to play a game where the world itself is a relevant feature used by many rather than just an empty, cosmetic nuisance. The quicker you can get around in the world, the more irrelevant that world becomes. I’d prefer for WoW to feel like a populated world rather than to have to choose between feeling like I’m playing a lobby game or as though I’m playing a single-player game where the world is only populated with NPCs like Skyrim.
I just wish people would see that the WoW team is far less likely to deal with population issues if Dungeon Finder is thought to have fixed, or even just sufficiently mitigated the problem. And it really won’t. You and I both know that dead realms will stay dead, and the only upside there will be that dungeons will be possible for the tiny number of people on those servers.
Now I’m not going to pretend that population issues are highly likely to be addressed in the first place. I’m sure we could agree that the way Blizzard has not only allowed, but propped up horrendous server health is shameful. But I don’t want them solving one terrible problem by implementing what I think is yet another terrible problem.
At the very least, even if you disagree with me that Dungeon Finder is a bad solution to any problem the community faces in Classic, it would still be a major shift in the experience for the overwhelming majority of players to suit an extremely small number of people on dead realms. You seem like a very reasonable person and I’m sure you can see the fallacy in wanting such a controversial solution to be applied to everyone to solve a problem that only seems to negatively affect a tiny number of people.
What I mean to say is, a solution that affects everyone shouldn’t be used to solve a problem that negatively affects a small number of players. At least, when that solution seems objectively bad for so many people.
Yeahh… That doesn’t make any sense to me. The same could be said of most of Classic – If you didn’t ever watch it, you should check out the panels they had at BlizzCon talking about building a new way of interpreting the old code they had, as well as building quite a bit of the game from scratch. Classic runs on the Legion client and I don’t think there’s really any reason to think they can’t retrofit it for Dungeon Finder, especially since they have compatible systems code this time around.
Also, I don’t know how exactly you think is “white knighting” here. If you’re referring to me, you clearly just throw that term around and probably don’t know what it means. xD
We’re talking about official system features, not certain player behaviors which have emerged to circumvent game mechanics. The same thing goes for GDKPs or botting. Anyway, I wouldn’t say there’s full overlap between people who want Dungeon Finder and the people who will just buy a high level character or let someone else play the game for them. There’s no doubt in my mind that people who want Dungeon Finder actually do want to use it to play the game, which can’t be said about people who would rather NOT play the game. 
Also, one of the most common disagreements people have with me on these forums is “What community? Everyone is just mage boosting anyway”. Do you think people haven’t flocked to the dungeon carry economy as a way of circumventing the game?
Sounds like Classic Era is the game for you.
So far, all of Classic has been a great experience for me.
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