You can still form group with RDF, so that argument doesn’t hold water. YES, your ability to do so is impacted. But likewise your ability to queue into groups doesn’t exist without it.
With RDF restricted to normal you would have to travel to the dungeon, you would have to queue with people from your server.
Once it has reached the ICC patch, Heroics are not farmed like in Tier 7 and Tier 8 for upgrades and instead only there as a source of badges. The fall off in active heroic participation will slump significantly, as the 2 badges offered by the daily is the only reason for any raiding character to do a heroic. Hence adding the dungeon finder now just allows alts and new players late in the game a quicker way to form badges in content that can essentially be solved by people in ToGC and ICC gear.
The only difference is for those people leveling, they will have more people to queue dungeons with while questing making the leveling experience at least a bit more engaging.
The fact that there are 100s of threads around this topic would suggest otherwise. Forcing an absolute on the rest of the playerbase to play “your way” hurts you just as much as it hurts them. You need people on your server for a multitude of reasons (groups, raids, economy, materials, random fun… e.t.c). Bleeding half of them away because they are denied the feature they were looking forward to doesn’t help anyone.
Failing to find a middle ground and just screaming from your own little hill doesn’t move us towards a healthier classic for everyone.
Like I said, I will play regardless. But I would rather have MORE people to play with.
By forcing players to take the longest route between two points they could present the illusion of zones that were larger than they were. Combined with phasing quests it kind of worked, but not really.
I think the community has changed enough that RDF is a welcome addition at least for the low levels being a 70 prot paladin I have a bit of privledge for acquiring groups but at the lower levels it has to be so painful to try and get a dungeon together.
You don’t need to play all day to do a dungeon. That’s just dramatic. xD
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I see you choose to ignore the second part of my post.
Cross realm group finders also already exist. LFD is not some radical new concept, it’s just a new use of a tool to find a pug groups for content that is already pugged. LFD doesn’t fundamentally change anything about dungeons, it’s just another way to find a group for them.
I’m sure you can tell by now that I enjoy typing long messages and addressing individual sentences in posts with full responses rather than just answering paraphraphs with single statements. I’d be happy to address the second part of your post the moment you make it clear that you’re not just intentionally derailing conversation and/or trolling.
You argued that class balance isn’t different from a new system feature and then ignored or avoided every attempt I made at asking you specifically why you think that is.
There are expansion (pre-patch) engine/system changes and feature implementations like the achievement system and the barber shop.
there are mid-expansion feature implementations like guild banks and Dungeon Finder.
Class balance isn’t a “feature”, but rather the state of class mechanics, which has been in a constant state of incremental change since WoW originally launched.
Dungeon Finder (automated cross-realm group forming for dungeons) is a feature/tool that never existed in WoW in any capacity before it was implemented in patch 3.3.0.
How is tuning existing balance numbers and mechanics similar to creating and implementing entirely new features into the game that never existed previously?
it’s a video game it is really suppose to be inconvenient and there are some servers where it’s so messed up one faction could not field a 10 main raid at any one time due to the people online at max level are so low *even worse at the lower levels (which is why they also need to work out a battle group RDF, unless you want to pay for everyone’s server transfers (sure blizzard won’t bother to fix it). live without it yes, be able to fully play the game no.
Except I did answer your question very specifically. The reason why blizzard has been going with the last patch of the expansion in terms of balance/features(neither of which are content) is because that’s the point where they’d addressed as many problems as they could.
And while yes a lot of the balancing and features do get added up front in the expansion there’s also a significant amount of changes and additions are made over the course of an expansion to address problems as they come up, or as time allows. In that regard balance and features are very similar. And in the case of LFD it addressed very real issues, it wasn’t just added for funsies like some people seem to think.
And just like how LFD was added in 3.3 there were also significant class balance changes there are well. Why? Because they were addressing existing in game issues.
Now don’t get me wrong I’m not super invested in LFD itself, rather that the issues it addresses get addressed. And so far blizzard hasn’t announced any plans to do so, as such LFD is the answer.
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.