Thank you. This guy said it the best.
I’m a big proponent of the RDF / dungeon finder. I’ll get by without it but taking it out of Wrath classic is not a good move imo.
2 Likes
My argument for wanting RDF is simple, i dont want sit LFG the whole time or spam chat all day. I have limited times to play so the times i am able to play i would like it spend it actually playing the game.
There not really any downsides to adding it.
8 Likes
I’m not going to unsub over the issue, but I do believe the lack of a proper dungeon finder tool for Wrath Classic is a mistake. Low level dungeons, in particular, could REALLY do with one. On many servers, it is increasingly hard to find groups for low level dungeons, and this trend will probably only increase in Wrath Classic. It certainly did in OG Wrath.
When the LFD came in in OG Wrath, I’d been trying to get a group together for SM for weeks (and no, I’m not exaggerating). I’d never seen the inside of the dungeon, and really wanted to run it. The LFD tool was a massive boon for low level dungeons.
Now I get that people are worried that cross-server dungeons will decrease player engagement and socialisation. I really do get it. But I think the degree to which the LFD tool was the actual culprit is hugely overstated. Having played through TBC Classic, I strongly believe that player engagement and socialisation, and a strong server community, do not arise from running dungeons. My experience is that they arise from guilds and discord servers and raiding. Indeed, it could even be argued that the LFG channel is a NEGATIVE social experience, with all its politics and trolling and hating – using the LFG channel is such a bad experience that it could be considered worse than no socialisation at all.
My proposition, right from when this issue first started being discussed, was to use the LFD tool in Wrath Classic to solve real problems. Sooo, introduce the LFD tool for Classic (1-60) dungeons at launch (or even at pre-patch), and for Outlands (58-70) dungeons at the first major content patch.
As for Northrend dungeons, you could either put them onto the LFD tool in the last major content patch, or not at all if there seemed no need at the time. If you get to the last major content patch, and players aren’t experiencing any particular difficulty getting Northrend dungeon groups together without LFD, then make a decision at that time.
I think this whole issue has been dogged by dogmatic thinking regarding #nochanges, and about Retail vs Classic. Ultimately, changes should be made (or not made) because of the reality on the ground, not because of preconceived beliefs. The objective being to release a game that people find enjoyable and rewarding to play.
6 Likes
Someone is making an addon to replace it. Since blizzard cant do it, the addon gods will save us.
4 Likes
What this guy says. It’s all about money with these changes.
2 Likes
I think removing the dungeon finder is way too heavy handed.
In my 10+ years of playing WoW Wrath was by far my favorite expansion and the dungeon finder was not something I ever viewed as a negative.
I loved being able to log on after work, queue up while doing dailies and run dungeons without the inconvenience of having to waste time finding a group. It made dungeons way more accessible to people who have less time to play like myself. The dungeon finder being removed or not will probably decide if i play WoTLK Classic… or not.
12 Likes
Yep, for me it turns out not having the proper dungeon finder and battleground queues be easy with one click to queue, then teleport in, teleport out has ruined the fun for me and made me want to quit WOTLK already. I need the monotonous questing to be broken up by PVP/Dungeon queues popping. In OCE servers leveling with battlegrounds or dungeons is dead, no one uses the new system because it’s garbage and I can’t be bothered getting to max level through questing alone. Original dungeon finder was awesome and it’s what makes leveling most fun, this new dross system has ruined my return to wow.
5 Likes
So I’m asking you this:
- How do you feel about Dungeon Finder not being added to WotLK Classic?
This makes me very happy. I actually threw both arms in the air when I first read this.
- What do you think are the positives of having Dungeon Finder?
You can run through a dungeon you’re interested in more quickly, and time spent just traveling from place to place is reduced.
- What do you think are the negatives of having Dungeon Finder?
There are multiple answers to this. When I looked back over years of playing WoW and decided to leave, I realized that the one thing that had done the most to degrade the experience for me, was the addition of dungeon-finder. Everything about group play experiences changed for the worse when that was implemented. Later, raid-finder was added, and the degradation spread.
You no longer message your group mates to form a group. The ice isn’t broken and (literally) the entire dungeon can go by with no communication. When there is communication it’s usually just people who have done that dungeon 100 times getting annoyed with people who haven’t. The expectation is that everyone spams it, because the players who spend the most time online have, and they are always there filling the groups. You only discuss your role (tank, healer, dps) with a GUI, not with the people you will be playing with. The dungeon experience doesn’t involve talking about the dungeon or the game, or having any investment in the other players you are with. Because you invest less in preparing and traveling and organizing, you feel less responsibility to act as part of a team, and less reward when you succeed. You killed the boss. It was quick. You were entitled to that. Flat, dead, neutral experience. Three people who never spoke and one who only ever said “clear left side first?” hearth silently out.
If you do not meaningfully interact with other players anymore, why even pay for an MMO? For people with active guilds, who raid a lot (and not through raid-finder) this may not matter so much. They are still getting meaningful interaction from other parts of the game. They may want dungeoning to be a mindless grind as long as it’s fast. I don’t know. As to which players you should cater to? That’s up to you all. You have a better view of which customers are most important to keeping the thing going.
- Do you think an hybrid solution could be implemented, whether it be a partial Dungeon Finder or a different solution altogether, and what could that solution be, if you can think of any?
I think solutions that help reduce the travel time to dungeons could be fine. One thing I loved about WotLK was the scale of the zones and continent, and it could be that taking away the time saving aspects makes it too onerous to level. I believe the thing that ruined my experiences, was having all the person to person interaction taken out of forming a group.
For my 2 cents: I only play WoW anymore because Classic came out, and it has no dungeon or raid finder. If WotLK gets dungeon-finder, I will only want to play a version of Classic that has no dungeon-finder. Hopefully the earlier versions of Classic will still be an option. They won’t keep my interest as long as being able to play WotLK again, but they would be the only thing making WoW attractive to me over other options.
1 Like
without rdf, its not classic, but hey let them do that so i can complain late about the 100 more changes they have in the works to destroy what wrath was.
6 Likes
Mispeled,
I am responding to this post because frankly I am not sure where else I can go to have my concerns around the RDF considered by Blizzard. They seem to at least communicate with the Community Council about things so I hope you can take this to someone.
I will admit I have always been in favor of the inclusion of RDF in Wrath Classic, and vocally so. However, prior to the pre-patch I resolved to give the LFG tool a fair shake. Having been playing on the fresh pve server the last few days here is my honest feedback:
Before considering more specific points it is necessary to discuss the broader issue of why the LFG is desired over RDF by Blizzard. Based on what I have read the majority of concern seems to be preserving the social aspect of the game. A lot of the people who are against RDF seem to think of it as a turning point in Wow’s development philosophy that ultimately hurt the game. I do not deny this. But consider that RDF may not itself have been harmful to the game - rather that the motivations for implementing it would become harmful when taken further.
In theory the LFG tool would fix this issue, however its current implementation seems to be counter-productive in that regard. Whether Blizzard realizes this or not, the people who play the game have evolved since original Wrath, every server I surveyed in TBC classic used existing global channels as a server-wide chat. On larger servers this becomes an issue when channels like LookingforGroup become spammed with so many communications that one cannot hope to read it all, but on smaller servers these channels were essential to building a sense of community and server identity where there may not actually be a lot of people in a given zone. There is something to be said for keeping LookingforGroup as a channel just for that, but if that is to be enforced, as I have seen some evidence to suggest it is, then the addition of another global channel specifically for chat would necessarily be required to support Blizzard’s stated intention of promoting the social aspect of the game - as isolating people from each other would be antithetical to that goal.
The other main consideration in this discussion is one that I would consider an ethical issue regarding player engagement with an MMORPG. One of the main selling points of an MMORPG, at least for a majority of the people I have spoken with on this issue, is that there is a lot of content for people, and each player can engage with that content on their own terms. I do not have to play PvP if I don’t want to, people do not have to kill the raid boss, or run dungeons, or get Loremaster if they do not want to. The issue, then, becomes parity of reward for engaging in content by tailoing the reward for that engagement to the type of player who would engage with it in the first place. One excellent example of this in the game is PvP rewards - They are great rewards for people who want to PvP, but if I choose not to I don’t necessarily feel like I’m missing out since the vast majority of the rewards would not be useful for the way I want to play. In its original implementation I would agree that RDF was harmful to this reward balance, as the incentives for using it were too good for anyone wanting to run PvE to not use it - regardless of whether they wanted to run dungeons or not. I get why this was done initially - it was a new system and they wanted people to have an incentive to try it out, but it became harmful to leave the rewards in in my opinion.
The ethical issue, to me at least, is whether or not to remove someone’s way of engaging with the game. There are two communities here - those who want the RDF and those that do not. If the RDF is included, but without incentive to use it, then theoretically those who do not wish to use it will still be able to engage with the game their way. If it is left out, however, those who wish to use RDF as their preferred way to play will not be able to engage their way. It boils down to - include RDF and nobody is denied their playstyle, remove it and a plurality (at least) of the players are denied their playstyle. If including it in the right way would, theoretically, not harm anyone then why keep it out of the game?
Another thing that may not have been considered is how RDF affected the leveling process for new players or players leveling alts. With the current state of many of the servers, which I do not expect them to find a solution for, the fact is there have been many times when people have wanted to run low-level dungeons and have been unable to find a group. This can be for a variety of reasons but the most common I have seen are: 1) The dungeon is not an “efficient” one for your factions and therefore not optimal for people wanting to level - very few alliance players will run Wailing Caverns, and very few Horde will run Deadmines simply because they are out of the way. or 2) Much more likely on smaller servers, in my experience, is that there may not even be enough players on that server with a character at that level to run a dungeon regardless of which one it is. Even on moderately sized servers finding the right pool of people at the right level with the right specs and desire to run, say, Zul’Farrak is nearly impossible. I cannot tell you how many times I have gotten 4/5 players and spent 2-3 hours looking for the last one, and if we do get one by that time the evening is wasted and 2 of the other players have to back out because it took too long to get the group together.
Before the nerfs to boosting a friendly guild member could be nice and run you through for quests to complete. My friend and I used to run a sevice wherein the two of use could use broken combos to 3 or 4 man dungeons at our level to help out the poor dps looking for a group - but the boosting nerfs ended our ability to do that as well. The sad fact is, without RDF many of the really fun older dungeons will not see a lot of play, existing players will be less likely to create alts, and new players will be more likely to encounter discouraging experiences where there are dungeons or quests they are simply unable to complete.
Since this response is already getting super long here is my suggestion for compromising on this issue:
- Keep the LFG tool and require its use to join LFG chat. (After fixing all of its current bugs). It is still useful for forming groups for non-dungeon content, or even organizing community events.
- Add another global channel purely for community chat, or extend the trade chat to be outside the cities.
- Add RDF back into the game, but with some changes which could include the following:
- Only implement it for levels 1-70 OR
- Remove all non-experience bonus rewards from using RDF
- Buff gold and/or item drop rates in dungeons organized without RDF
- Only allow RDF to pull from the local battlegroup used for PvP
I believe implementing these changes would allow both people who want to use RDF for the convenience/leveling and people who want to form dungeons normally to feel adequately rewarded for doing content their way, without feeling expected to do one or the other.
3 Likes
no dungeon finder helps the elitists, helps them weed out so called baddies
makes it harder for causal players to just pop in for a quick dungeon or bg
like seriously long waits to find a group, constantly getting passed by is gonna seriously drop peoples moral…
9 Likes
To put it more bluntly, the exclusion of RDF is going to cause attrition rates to be much higher than they would otherwise be. As soon as the initial content rush of alts and dungeon spamming is over, any pretense that the LFG tool is “good enough” will fall away and the disengagement will begin. Players that would have made alts will not. Players that would have run more dungeons will run fewer. Players that would have otherwise been online will instead be offline. Players who would have stayed longer will fade sooner. Players who would have gone the distance will quit before the journey ends. Communities will be harmed or outright fractured, and the social sphere of the game will degrade.
It happened in Vanilla, and even worse in TBC. We will see the worst yet in Wrath because, in addition to the immutable, real impacts of RDF’s exclusion, on top of them will be the thought of how the situation was created on purpose by the developers and the toxic anti-RDF players. Every time a player runs into yet another consequence of this decision it won’t be a shrug and a sigh with the knowledge that this is how it was back in the day, and at least there’s Wrath to look forward to. Instead it will be a sense of injustice and despair knowing that you suffered the eye-peeling, tedious indignities of Vanilla and TBC only to be forced to suffer them all over again in Wrath as well, and with no hope that it will ever change.
8 Likes
As horrible as it is now, it’s going to be so much worse when Wrath actually launches and players hit max level. As time goes by it’ll get even worse. More gatekeeping. Players who can’t keep up get left behind. And new players…might as well not even play.
No RDF simply means Wrath has no future.
6 Likes
Right, because clearly dungeon finder causes this and not the playerbase. We can see this by how lively and social TBC dungeons were.
“inv - dps”
“123”
“?”
“gg”
God, it brings a tear to the eye how meaningful the community coming together is when I look at it laid bare before mine own eyes like this.
RDF had nothing to do with the degradation of the social sphere in WoW.
7 Likes
It will be another raid logging experience like vanilla and TBC classic with far less of the alt playing that happened originally.
7 Likes
It is truly astounding that the anti-RDF crowd would rather have 1 person forced into the world full-time instead of 100 people willingly participating some of the time, because they get to be in dungeons or battlegrounds the rest of it. It is the mindset of a toxic ex that thinks “If I can’t have you no one can!”
8 Likes
Also, is there no value in vastly increasing the amount of 2-4 people same-server groups? Again, that’s the power of the convenience and accessibility of RDF. Players are much, much more willing to group with random people they meet since it’s such a simple process to fill out the rest of the group.
Instead Blizz insists on full 5 man parties or nothing. And under those circumstances there’s going to be far more nothings. It’s illogical. It reduces social interactions. It reduces the chances of meeting new players and becoming friends. It’s a simple numbers game: the more people you group with, the more opportunity to make a new friend.
Right now you group with guildies. That’s pretty much it. And that’s not going to change. I had like 1 or 2 dungeons in the past few days where we added 1 non-guildie to the group to fill it out. I couldn’t tell you their name. I couldn’t tell you their name 5 minutes after the dungeon happened. If RDF was in the game, I’d be inviting all kinds of people I meet out in the world to run some dungeons. Without it there’s no point.
Blizz really has no understanding of human nature.
5 Likes
The anti-RDF crowd has begun, finally (after I’ve been saying it for years) to understand the true nature of tedium in game design. Issue is their brain short-circuited and now they think that all tedium is inherently productive from a social perspective, even though all evidence points to that it is not. Too much of the wrong kind of tedium breaks communities instead of fostering them. The tedium associated with raiding is highly productive. The tedium associated with analog LFG is not.
Sadly, Blizzard obviously has too many people with this kind of shallow understanding of the interaction giving their input on the game. The devs think they know what the community wants because they are talking to representatives, but those representatives are apparently a bunch of anti-RDF crusaders giving a skewed impression of what the community wants, or at least what it means to give the community what they want. Yes, we do want the more social game that the original trilogy represents. No, removing RDF is not the way to achieve that.
3 Likes
They’re probably coming to understand it a little more after reading your 1,500 posts whining about this over the last two months.
- I personally do not mind having DF removed completely. I am currently having no issues doing content with current LFG tool. (It just needs love)
- Easy groups, speed runs. (Doesn’t go good in a game that will come to an end. Why just speed run everything to get to the “end”?
- Destroys social aspect of much of the game, instant teleports to dungeons make it so people don’t even have to walk outside of a city to level. Zones will become dead zones again.
- Just implement the retail version of LFG.
In all honesty CRZ just need to be a thing. Blizzard needs to fix the servers and make it so servers have less impact on gameplay in general. Allow CRZ, Cross Realm Guilds, Cross realm Groups, etc. This would bring back WPvP on many of the single faction dominated servers.
1 Like