Tomato tomato.
Really? Could you point out a complaint for me?
And this is the issue, people like to scape goat LFD as the problem because it was highly visible. But donât want to look at deeper issues why the problems they blame on LFD actually happened and how retail ended up where it is. Some of which weâre seeing in classic despite 3 years of no LFD.
Itâs a case of correlation does not equal causation, LFD happened to come out before Cata which had a lot of other less visible but actually far more damaging changes in it. So people like to glom onto LFD as the problem.
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Cross-Realm anonymity in LFD definitely causes a breakdown in the social contract leading to server communities beginning to fracture. LFR accelerated it.
I guess that entirely depended on what server you were on, if you were on the perfect sized server where finding a dungeon was reasonable(there were enough people in general and enough tanks/healers to support dps) but was still small enough to have a community that was great.
Your point about cross realm anonymous grouping is valid, but I believe the day they opened paid realm transfers, name and factions changes was the body blow for accountability. Every server had itâs bad apples and you knew to avoid certain people. Once they allowed them to change their identity and run away, it made the problem so much worse.
We had a known scammer and ninja thief on our server. He was a pariah and one day he just disappeared. Rumor had it he jumped to a new realm. Point is, they added an escape hatch for bad behavior. Players can be as toxic as they want and can just buy a new beginning. I think thatâs 10x worse than anything LDF did.
I could build a fire to cook a meal for my family or burn my neighbors house down. Its all in how the tool is being used and abused. Same goes for LFD.
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Contrary to what I initially thought, it seems like people flocked to Classic because Retail was too grindy. Here, they can âbeatâ the game within minimal effort.
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I actually agree a little bit with the sentiment. The idea of never being able to be âcompleteâ can be demotivating. The idea that you can feasibly get all your BIS and then, at least for a little while, sit on top of the world and feel proud of the achievement, could be considered a very valid positive of older WoW versions.
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It almost certainly is, which is why Ive been publicly lamenting the decision to not offer at least one TBC Era or Forever server.
I have more than a couple 60s in Classic Era. Having a definitive end at the end of a long journey feels great.
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LFD creates more reasons to play WoW, the fact that you couldâve logged in and just do a dungeon in little to no time is an appealing thing to have in a game.
Not to say that there arenât problems assoiciated with LFD too, it can make people more toxic since itâs cross-server and the added anonymity could make LFD a toxic enviroment. Personally I donât think people will suddenly become toxic just because something is cross-realm, if theyâre willing to do those things then they were already toxic to begin with.
Youâd encounter more toxic people because youâre simply just interacting with more people then you would if you did dungeons normally and I think the people that arenât toxic vastly outnumber the people that are.
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Im sure all 6 of you will manage just fine with LFD being the game.
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Retail just didnât feel like WoW to me anymore. It looks totally different, it plays totally different, leveling is different, running dungeons is different, the amount of busy work is different. It felt like everything was tuned for maximal convenience, yet somehow also bloated to an absurd degree. It just didnât feel satisfying anymore, even when I was accomplishing tasks and goals. The experience just felt kinda sterile and watered down by pure quantity. I dislike how fast everything is. I dislike how gear is earned. I dislike how the specs were unlocked and your gear automatically changed to suit it. I disliked that everything is account-wide, and any semblance of my individual charactersâ accomplishments and uniqueness were dilluted because they were distributed across all of my characters. I disliked that transmog and account-wide gear appearances removed any sense of what a character was wearing or what they had to accomplish to wear it. I disliked that the sheer number of mounts, pets, achievements, toys, etc made it feel so much less rewarding when I got a new one to throw onto the pile. I dislike the thereâs a Blizzard-endorsed way to buy gold with real money and then spend that gold on literally anything in the game including gear, achievements, PvP rank, etc. I disliked the direction they took the lore. Man, thereâs a lot of stuff.
That being said, itâs not âthe devilâ. Itâs just not for me anymore. Itâs pretty obvious that I donât like it, but what makes you say I throw that term around like itâs âthe devilâ? xD
I still think youâre misunderstanding my question. Maybe I can break it down even further, I might not have explained myself well enough:
- [X audience] likes âOld WoWâ (roughly speaking, Vanilla to Wrath. Maybe some Cataclysm)
- Many people in [X audience] dislike Retail (roughly speaking, WoW after Wrath/Cataclysm)
- There are many changes that happened in WoW which led to âOld WoWâsâ evolution into what most would call Retail.
If we took every single one of those changes that [X audience] thinks were pivotal in âOld WoWâ turning into Retail and ranked them from most significant to least, do you believe that Dungeon Finder would be in the top 5? Top 10? Or do you think itâs hardly at the forefront of their minds when it comes it?
Iâm asking you what your perspective is on the people who tend to want less changes and often talk more about âauthentic experienceâ. Iâm curious to know how much you may understand the other side of things. Iâm not asking and I never asked whether you personally liked Dungeon Finder or thought it was a good change for WoW. I want to know what your perspective is on the people who tend to be called âpuristsâ here.
This is a very nuanced conversation, and we have to be very specific about word usage here, please bear with me. Do you actually mean the singular problem? Or a problem among many? I donât think Iâve witnessed a single person on these forums who would call Dungeon Finder the problem as you put it.
Just to be clear, the very part of my post youâre replying to here is me explicitly saying that Dungeon Finder is not the problem.
What issues are you referring to? Dungeon Finder happens to be the single topic that I and many people here have been talking about the most lately, but Iâve brought up other problems many times during these discussions.
Itâs possible to reply to someoneâs post in agreement not just to argue. And yes thatâs entirely correct there is a lot more going on than just LFD. But I see a lot of people who donât want LFD laying all the problem retail has squarely at the feet of LFD. With no acknowledgement that LFD solved a lot of very real problems for a lot of people, problems which exist today in classic or that âmuh communityâ by and large doesnât exist anyways for many in classic.
Cata introduced a number of changes that were quite detrimental, keep in mind LFD was out in wrath for over a year with no problems, but those arenât as easy to pin down as ZOMG LFD Evil!!!
Guild perks, these were absolutely devastating to smaller guilds as they werenât just fluff that was easy to ignore, some of the stuff there was really really broken like mass summons, mass rez, gold flow, a number of rep/honor/exp/profession bonuses etcâŚ
Merging 10/25 mans. Having those separate had created a pretty vibrant raid pugging experience in Wrath that lead to a lot of interaction between more serious raiders and casual players. That disappeared over night. And there also werenât filler raids like ZG/AQ20/Kara/ZA to fill in that gap.
Something that gets over looked, changing to the Valor point system which had a weekly cap shared with raids. Instead of a daily dungeon. Which generally lead to people not logging in as often, canât be social if you arenât in game.
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Just nitpicking, but imo âold wowâ would encompass Vanilla and TBC only.
âWrath babyâ existed for a reason.
Couldnât agree more. I feel this change actually preserves the âspirit of classicâ and that itâs more of a good gesture than a bad one. Take away what began to make WoW modern and keep it CLASSIC.
Just kind of makes me scratch my head as to why theyâd do this yet continue to sell level boosts and suchâŚ
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There are plenty of aspects of retail that have nothing to do with RFD I find negative. The classes and gameplay are drastically different post wrath. The fact that gear started to become randomized was the beginning of the loot treadmill it is today. If I wanted to play Diablo, Iâd play Diablo. The entire world of world of warcraft changed and the lore transitioned to something that became more and more hyperbolic and unintelligible.
The last half of Wrath was the most fun I had in the wow franchise (I quit about 2 months into cata as it wasnât my bag anymore). RDF was actually a big part of that fun. It enabled me enjoy dungeons of all types in a time frame that fit with my available time. Iâm older now and have even less available time.
I donât mind having to wait for a group. I do mind having to wait 2+ hours for a group and being locked out of doing anything else while waiting. If my guild tanks or healers arenât on or are busy doing their own thing, why should that be the âend of my playtimeâ as well? How does having RFD detract from your enjoyment of the game? The community is already borked.
RFD might even make things better as all the players who are fed up with the state of the community will likely flock to RFD and be quite happy doing it. They might even be more willing to socialize since the people theyâd be grouping with would have been in the same hellish boat for the last 3 years.
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You donât realize how important reputation is in Wrath and the only way to get some of the reps is to run dungeons. No LFD is fine if you rush and get your reps done as soon as possible, but if you are a slow leveler or playing an alt after youâve got your main set it wonât be enjoyable since youâll have to do what we do now, watch and spam the LFG channel until you get a group, which can be 30 minutes, an hour or two hours. Leveling, gearing and getting reputations on your main will take a few weeks, but doing it on your second alt will take months most of which will be standing some place watching and spamming the LFG channel looking for a group.
Thatâs not a good reason not to have it. We didnât have fire for centuries either, but the world is much better with it.
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The reasons I donât like Retail, and DO like TBC Classic (and am looking forward to Wrath Classic), have nothing to do with LFD. I will definitely still play Wrath Classic, even if they donât introduce the LFD. As the OP said, the reasons Iâm looking forward to Wrath Classic are the zones, music, dungeons, Wintergrasp, raids, and the Lich King himself. I am fully pumped.
However⌠I ALSO believe that Wrath Classic will be made better by a judicious use of LFD. There are problems already occurring in TBC Classic â not with the Outlands dungeons, but with the levelling dungeons. Boosting. The difficulty of getting groups together for certain dungeons (BFD, for example). For these dungeons, at any rate, LFD would be a genuine boon. It would make the game better.
I can solve everyoneâs problems since there is such a break between no changes and blah blah blah. How about they can decide if it comes out when it is suppose to come out which is the ICC phase. I donât really understand why people would think it would of came out at the beginning of the expansion anyway when it wasnât there in the first place. If your answer is well I assumed, well maybe next time donât make assumptions.