WOTLK Classic - Dungeon Finder Removed

The point of classic is to be a museum piece. It should be as authentic to the era as reasonably possible. Classic and BC didn’t have LFD so the modern revisiting shouldn’t either. WotLK did have LFD so the modern revisiting should have it. If the point of classic were correcting perceived issues with each era there’s a whole list of issues they should have addressed with Classic and BC.

For example, Dual Spec would have been a demonstrably positive feature to have in Classic and BC with absolutely no downside. People on the classic forums like to make up downsides including the lead developer himself but, as I said, those are made-up. They’re not real issues. However I was in favour of not having dual spec in Classic and BC specifically because they weren’t there in the original.

My comment was specifically about that perceived issue of LFD.

First of all, we don’t know much about how much of the community supports either LFD or opposes it. It’s not like any sound opinion poll has ever been conducted. However, much like the flying debacle in 2015, the response to the stated intention to not add LFD in WotLK classic has been particularly enormous and negative. [This reply to the announcement](Return to the Icy Realm of Northrend in World of Warcraft®: Wrath of the Lich King Classic™ - #5 by Tahil-atiesh], as an example, has over 7 times as many likes as the announcement itself. My own top-rated post of all time is about LFD. In contrast people defending the decision see much worse ratios of likes-to-replies. I would say it’s evident that Blizzard badly misjudged the split of support LFD v.s. opposed LFD. They clearly misjudged it so badly and assumed that the “oppose” faction was so much larger that they didn’t even think to ask about this most contentious of issues in their email surveys. Like I said, this reminds me of flying in WoD: Blizzard was misinformed and walked into a spectacularly unpopular decision right when the game could afford it the least because they misjudged the split of support flying v.s. oppose flying. As it turns out on the forums you mainly hear from the disgruntled people and not the content people i.e. usually it’s a vocal minority. This is why it’s important to gauge community opinion via surveys.

Secondly, LFD is just not a bad feature. In fact it’s a pretty good feature. Mainly for the convenience aspects. I understand that Classic fanboy boomer dads think convenience is generally a bad thing, but it actually matters quite a lot in terms of maintaining longevity. We can see the results of not having LFD in Classic and BC: forming dungeon groups becomes an extremely difficult and negative experience across the board. That happened back in the day as well, which is why they added LFD in the first place. It’s especially more important nowadays because WoW is not a fresh new game any more so participating in the endgame is much more important to the average player. Other MMOs like SWTOR made a big show of not having a cross-realm dungeon finder and that turned out badly because the priorities of the average MMO player have evolved. FFXIV wisely launched with a cross-realm dungeon finder and did very well.

People make a stink about the “social aspect” but that’s just largely uninformed. There is actually an intact social aspects throughout WoW’s history. People are still heavily incentivised to be in a cooperative guild and now there are cross-realm communities. Being able to meet and interact with people who would otherwise be forever locked away behind server barriers is actually in itself an avenue for social aspect. Yes, individual server communities largely diminished (not entirely, though: usually people in each server’s end game scene know each other), but that doesn’t mean that the social aspect of the game is gone as per the boomer dad take.

So to summarise those points: the very premise of WoW no longer being a social game is bad, as is the take that the community widely blames LFD for it.

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