I had a thought of suggesting each faction have a logistical officer be added to every zone and major city where you would have to sign up for random dungeons and choose your role.
When your queue popped you’d still be transported to the dungeon but then back to the officer when you’re done. Making people sit through a short flight might be acceptable. There’s an in-game lore reason for it.
People are literally facerolling heroic on most private servers at the start of them where they buff all bosses and dungeons.
No one cares about in game lore. Yall didn’t care about in game lore when we celebrated the death of the same 2 dragons thousands of times in classic.
I think the LFG tool could be “improved” with a thought process like this.
I’m imagining a “quest board” or “sign up board” located in all major city and rest area in each zone, where essentially the LFG tool is only accessible from those boards. The tool works basically identical to how it does in retail, but I feel like this would be the extra “immersion kick” that would make grouping a lot more interactive and realistic-feeling-ish.
If something like that happened to automatically group people together…it’s possible I’d have less issues. As we’ve discussed though, I’ve quite a few additional issues other than the automation of grouping to reconcile with.
The other major thought was to bring it in in phases. At wrath pre-patch add all dungeons level 70 and under. It’s old content who cares? Make people group up organically for the new dungeons in Wrath.
Once ulduar is released, add the Wrath dungeons - but not heroics. Daily badge quests in Dalaran still.
With ToC add Heroics but keep the Black Knight dungeons out. If you want to spam the normal version just go to the zone and hang out in front of the portal - it’s not hard.
At ICC add Trial of the Champion(?) both versions but keep the new dungeons out.
Add it all in with Ruby Sanctum. With shorter phases I think helping accelerate the catch up mechanic can be useful and I’m worried that we will see a lot more bots, GDKPs and Gear Score 2.0
I could swear I posted this in a different thread, but I can’t remember which one it might have been.
This was posted in a different thread and is kind of is close to your suggestion. I agree that either your own, or this post are close to the “ideal” way of implementing LFD
One of the things I like about my idea (other than that I came up with it of course) is that it helps speed people leveling up to get to 70 during pre-patch.
We’re already going to clogged with Death Knights it would be nice to have a few healers running around so that we’re not positively overflowing with the danged things.
Oh don’t worry, Blooms got atleast 17 bad takes in the chamber at any given moment.
One thing I’ve been pondering a little bit is how necessary my sentiments would be specifically for leveling anymore in WOTLK.
Classic leveling is infamous for being that “long” grind (for most average players). So retaining the integrity of it, even if the important content is still at level cap feels important. To a degree, I feel the same about leveling in TBC when the leveling is still relevant.
However, in WOTLK, the leveling is super buffed and people started having a ton of alts because it took a hot couple of days to make a new lvl 80. The leveling experience became basically irrelevant and could be solo blitzed without even needing a dungeon run on the way up.
What this means is I could maybe see RDF being utilized specifically, and only, for players below the level cap in non-80 dungeons, since the design of the leveling is already shot, there’s just nothing to preserve.
However this does lead to people literally just spamming the queue to level up, which to me could either be “fine” or passable but it doesn’t necessarily feel “right” for an expansion that is still very adjacent to TBC and Vanilla. So maybe like a limit to how many times any given dungeon can be randomly queued, and make it kind of reasonable (like 5 and then if you want a group for that dungeon again you’re doing it the normal way) and or heavily nerf dungeon XP and make it purely about finishing the quests and possible loot.
Basically any lvl 80 dungeon would not be viable for queue though, and I presume many believe this to be an integral part of the feature and it’s inclusion, but I’m just demonstrating how I do have soft points on the matter.
Why are you focused on “preservation” or immersion. This isn’t FF14 where everything is centrally balanced around the overarching main story in the game, to which they just straight up match you with players automatically and teleport you to the dungeon and give incentives to do so rather than recruit people. Guess what, they have a more social game and in general a kinder (not better though) community.
WoW on the other hand is primarily focused on PvE. There are a large portion of the community that does not care on single bit about the lore, the world setting, or immersion. For those that do, there are a large number of things that are not immersive that those who seek that would be made about being in the game.
The payoff for immersion in a large amount of cases that impede gameplay. It would be immersive if when you died you have are unable to play your character for 2 hours because they are recovering. It would be immersive if after killing a raid boss you had to recover for an hour and could not progress to the next boss because you were literally fighting for your life to topple a mythical and powerful foe and need to recover from this epic fight before continuing your crusade. Is that immersive? Heck yeah it is. Is it terrible gameplay? Absolutely.
If I wanted to feel immersed in a 13ish year old game that has nearly every element solved and one that a large amount of players know from personal experience or content creators regaling their experiences, I’d play on an RP server. Don’t confound game systems and designs with “immersion”. Move on with the times.
100%, immersion and “RP” style systems and game design is very often at the sacrifice of convenience and “intuitive” game design.
Where we disagree is I believe that to be kind of the point. That’s the intention. For it to be cumbersome and difficult. It’s a unique aspect of “Classic” MMO gameplay that those who are fond of that old style recognize but willfully indulge in because the investment - reward algorithms that take place as a result of overcoming those tediums is…well, rewarding.
No risk, no reward.
There is some in built protection to dungeon spam due to healer/tank demand in a limited pool of players.
Tanks will no doubt have instant queues, Healers will range from instant to 7 or so minutrs, while dps could likely see up to 30-45 mins. Since so few classes can actually can tank, many players WILL be questing for significant periods between dungeons. As such, i dont think exp needs neffing per-se, personally i would rather it was increased to incentivise people to actively play the game as opposed to AFK boosting.
One of the features of RDF is IF you get a group you like (this is where socially interacting as dps IS important). You may convince your current healer and tank to re-queue with your established party. If RDF has no cap, it rewards being a good party member… Especially for dps mains who make up the majority of people AFKing in cities waiting for groups.
Are you referring to the community that spams LFG and eventually gets in a group. You do an entire dungeon without anyone ever saying anything in /p. Man, I can’t wait to see what the game is like without RDF…
WoW never had this, from day one of vanilla WoW was based around being a casual friendly MMO with QoL.
Except as we seen, when faced with those “Unique” aspects, we modernized our approach to contend with outdated but “unique” systems. We looked at faction competition for resources and setup cross faction channels in Discords in order to coordinate with the other factions regarding buffs and bug farming to name a few, an act that would had banned players in the past. We now have nullified factions on most servers by the existence of mega servers.
We saw the vast world you had to travel and made multiple summoning alts and clickers clipped through walls so you can move around the world with ease.
We saw leveling and the vast investment that it had in Classic. We then after leveling our initial characters to opt for boosting.
We saw the open world where you can gather and fight the land to make a livelihood and choose to do efficient farms in dungeons. Then when the bots became prevalent we opted to let them do their thing and simply either buy gold or go to place where said bought gold is laundered to a degree because it was better to simply get gold using those matters, have the bots farm the stuff and have a surplus on the AH.
In TBC where running dungeons regularly had utility, what did we do? We implemented an Addon to streamline the process and utilized logs to determine group membership instead of the old “meet me at the bank for inspect”.
Countless examples of individuals wanting to circumvent these “old school design”. All of this is not done with a smile on their face. This is done though gritted teeth and thoughts of how it sucks. I say trash it.
If this doesn’t reach 2500 why are any of us still here?
As someone leveling their first BCC toon, waiting almost an hour to get a group for anything pre-TBC (or even normal TBC sometimes), then having to walk to the dungeon, all while hoping no one leaves before or during the dungeon, is pretty discouraging.
I think a compromise would be to limit the dungeon finder to your own realm that way you still have a stake in it
Hey we got shoulders, time to push Glad 
You don’t need RFD you have GBB