WOTLK doesn't need RDF

[Aurumai-grobbulus]

@Dumbcake-westfall

@Aurumai-grobbulus

I’d much rather have soulless interaction than none.

Really???

Yes.

@Lowstrung-old-blanchy

Can’t play all day to get what you want done? You don’t belong in my game.

1. You don’t need to play all day to do a dungeon. That’s just dramatic. xD
2. I don’t decide, or want to decide on who gets to play the game. Of course, I hope that as many people as possible can enjoy the game, even if the way they play the game is very different from my own. I just don’t want the experience that the game offers to suffer in order to appease the majority of people. That’s how we ended up with Retail.

@Lowstrung-old-blanchy

Yup. Calling out “rogue, lf4m some heroic” works every time in TBCC. You are also on a mega server. The majority of servers do not have this experience. How has the idea that not all or even the majority of servers have the same situation as the handful of mega servers.

I do currently play on Grobbulus which is among the biggest servers, so you’re not wrong about this being much less of an issue for me than most. However, up until very recently I was on Whitemane. I played there for all of TBC so far up until the point where there were only about 600 active Alliance players left. It was around then that it actually started feeling impossible to play, but a very big reason for it was the fact that the Horde outnumbered us so absurdly. Even then, I didn’t have too terrible of a time finding people who wanted to run content (at level 70 AND while leveling alts), it’s just that they’d often give up because we’d have to corpse-hop our way to instance portals. Forget never being able to use summoning stones, we often couldn’t even use the auction houses because the Horde occupied our capital cities. Literally anywhere in the world you ever needed to be, you’d be camped by the Horde. And it was intentional – It became a pretty common occurence for them to use addons to say “leave”, “transfer away” or “go horde” while they camped us. I’ve also spent a while on Myzrael since TBC launched and my experience there has been fine.

A “mega server” is not needed for finding groups. If you’re on a realm with 1,000+ active players in your faction, you’re not being utterly dominated by the enemy faction, and you’re not trying to play in the middle of the night, I have a very hard time believing that anyone’s trouble with finding groups isn’t in large part due to their determination to play group content. Everyone is different and has a different level of effort they’re willing to put into playing the game, but in my experience on multiple realms (including Grobbulus in Vanilla), you can even find people to play with on servers that are widely considered dead without having to spend the “hours” searching that so many people here seem to think it takes.

@Bloodythorns-whitemane

It has been a consistent argument from the anti-LFD crowd that because at a certain point the badges moved from the daily quests to the dungeon finder that they would be forced to use it instead of forming their own groups. It’s come up a lot.

Ah, I haven’t personally seen that argument, but it’s among the least of my worries to be quite honest. Dungeon Finder only became a thing in late Wrath where most people who wanted badges were either raiding or had multiple avenues of catchup so they could start raiding. And if they do indeed leave Dungeon Finder out of the entire expansion, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that the “Dungeon Finder badges” won’t suddenly disappear from the game because we’ll just go back to earning them the way we used to.

Of course, Dungeon Finder would railroad people into using it wether they like it or not because it would become the primary method of running dungeons. Not only would it be more convenient/efficient, the masses would use it almost exclusively and make it much harder to form your own groups because that pool of people would be extremely diminished. Trivializing the necessity for inconveniences like travel and communication effectively removes them as features of the game.

@Onikaroshi-mankrik

You don’t find it hypocritical to remove something that was in the expansion while adding something that never existed, and that they benefit directly off not including RDF for?

If that’s the way you look at it, why don’t you interpret it as Blizzard being consistent?

That being said, I don’t think that selling high level characters is something that the WoW team itself ever wanted. The actual development teams in big companies aren’t the ones who want to put monetizations in their own games because they’re the ones who care about the gameplay experience. Letting people swipe their credit card to skip the gameplay is essentially saying “We spent many years of our lives pouring our effort into making this game, but go ahead, skip 70% of it because that’s somehow better gameplay”. xD I’d bet anything that they felt dead inside during “BlizzConline” when they had to read the “And we’re adding a paid level boost so you can play with your friends!” script with an awkward smile. I promise you, aside from fears of downsizing, the devs on the WoW team couldn’t care less how much money Classic earns for Activision Blizzard’s corporate shareholders. The level boost didn’t come from the devs.

Their decision on Dungeon Finder, on the other hand, seems entirely motivated by gameplay design philosophy (even though you may think it’s bad). It’s a controversial decision that will piss off many players, but it doesn’t stand to make them tons of short-term profits.

In these things, you have to follow the money as they say. Paid level boosts were extremely controversial, but it didn’t matter because they knew it would be a massive revenue stream for Activision Blizzard. So go ahead and bastardize the “authentic” Classic experience, it will be profitable! As for Dungeon Finder, there’s no money trail to follow. It’s possible that this could actually slightly hurt their revenue stream, but they did it anyway because they think it’s the right choice.

@Ziryus-pagle

I’m not avoiding the question you’re just not hearing the answer. Gameplay features like LFD are not content, and similar to balance features the reason to have them in from the start of the expansion is that that then end of expansion was the optimal state the expansion was in.

You haven’t answered the question though. Balance tuning involves incrementally changing something that already exists by adjusting or reworking numbers. How is that anything like implementing a completely new system that had to be built from nothing because it literally did not exist previously?

It’s like saying that straightening a painting already hanging on the wall so it looks squared and perfect is the same thing as getting a blank canvass, spending weeks painting it and putting it on an empty wall when it’s finished.

@Anaxsus-windseeker

This is a counter-productive and misguided reason for omitting the RDF. Quite the contrary, RDF was a great way to meet players from other guilds, make friends, form new social bonds, display your play-skills to join/find a guild, or just goof your daily playtime grinding dungeons.

You’re kidding, right? Or do you not remember how rare it was to ever come across someone from your own server in Dungeon Finder groups? Dungeon Finder was an experience that existed in a vacuum – You were almost never playing with people you’d ever see again. When players leaned into Dungeon Finder as the only way they ran dungeons, they largely ceased playing a game that had any semblance of a localized community because the vast majority of their player interactions were happening with people they didn’t communicate with, and would literally never see again.

This is even worse for the people playing on smaller/dead servers (supposedly the people who stand to benefit most from this) because the likelihood of running into people from your own realm directly relates to how much of the active Dungeon Finder pool is made up of people from your own realm. From a playability standpoint, Dungeon Finder would be a bandaid solution for people stuck on an abandoned island, but from a community standpoint, Dungeon Finder would be the nail in the coffin – The single note of finality that almost guarantees Blizzard will never pay any attention to the issues of people on dead realms again. Why would they, if they “solved” the problem by making it possible to run dungeons? Of course, ignoring the issue of group quests, raids, economy, guilds and community (until connected realms and Raid Finder are on the table).

Dungeon Finder is about as good of a tool for making friends as waving to people in cars traveling in the opposite direction on the highway while you drive.