You’re the first council post I have seen on this subject, so thanks for asking. I do apologise for the incoming novel.
In order asked,
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Upset, bewildered, and most of all disappointed.
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Players who don’t have the luxury of as much free time as they once did, myself included, can experience dungeons and farm gear and just enjoy the game. I played when I was just a teenager and had hours to pour into the game. I used dungeon finder and met my share of unhelpful and rude players, but also met many more helpful and excited players enjoying the dungeons and showing little spots where chests would spawn, rare mobs and give details on tidbits of lore of areas that I did not know. In Wrath content it made leveling and farming tokens and greens for enchanting a much easier task and I met my old guild on a very lucky encounter. This led to me spending nights running dungeons to gear people’s alts and preparing for raids without being slowed or all together prevented from doing so if someone else had a family event, work or any other real life event.
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While I myself did not deal with it as much during Wrath, I did run into my share of absolute dungeon ruining jerks who would ninja loot, pull trash or que as a tank while being a dps spec, resulting in several wipes. In these occurrences the player would either be kicked or would drop and would likely never be seen or heard from again. I have heard issues mentioned of the world feeling empty due to the telepoeting feature, but never felt it to be an issue as the alternative would have been flying to the dungeon while alt tabbed.
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I feel that no changes to the dungeon finder would be the best solution. The reason for this I feel simple. If they removed the ability to teleport to the dungeon, it simply adds time to the process and makes the point of time availability moot. If they remove the cross realm feature, it prevents the low population servers, the ones arguably the most in need of LFD, from being able to form groups in a reliable manner. If they isolate it to old content and release it in waves, say be able to only do Classic and BC dungeons during first patch and allow WoTLK dungeons in second patch, etc. It simply gates off content that players want to play, a pointless effort. I feel the product that they released was the best middleground for all players. No time wasted simply flying from Dalaran to Argent tournament or to Colderra, no being left out to dry because your server population dwindled, no preventing access to content because drip feeding the content keeps players longer. I could see making changes to loot rules, I.E. a hunter not taking a shield. The only other alternative I can see, is creating a non LFD realm, allow transfers of characters, guilds, etc and essentially fencing it off (or vice versa for servers with LFD). This is a dubious idea and has an entire host of issues with it, but is the best alternative I can see so that the players who do not want LFD are also not left out in the cold and forced to deal with changes they do not want. If anyone can come up with better alternatives that don’t stomp on a section of the player base I would happily support it however.
In summary, LFD was a wonderful addition to the game and removing it serves little purpose. It had flaws, but with the sheer diversity of players I feel the old version was and still is the best option. People will still in all likelihood still deal with people griefing, trash pulling and being absolute jerks. Still, those without as much free time win, those on small realms win, those who want to jump back into the old game win. I fear those who lose are the ones who dislike the effect that LFD had on the game and its community, which is itself a valid argument, but it does not mean we simply remove a feature. While I may be incorrect, it appears that the various polls show a majority of players want the old LFD, while a minority want it fully removed. These were sadly polls on the forums as Blizzard did not put out an official poll (to my knowledge) and seemed more focused on a select minority. Again, I apologize for the novel and hope that Blizzard will change their decision and release LFD so that I, one of the players without as much free time who wants to jump right into the game, can enjoy the old game that I lost hours of sleep on.
