This whole situation is Deja-Vu. I remember a lot of issues in the past where forum sentiment would be overwhelmingly against something. I remember it well with CRZ, Cata dungeons, things like that. It never goes anywhere and Bliz devs stay completely silent knowing it’ll eventually die down.
Sadly, It’s SOP with this company.
I know how you feel, I feel the same way.
But I’ll still try regardless, call it insanity if you will.
Oh, OK. Well, congrats on that then! Yeah, that pretty much clears up my concerns. Thanks 
No, I’m glad you’re taking an interest now that you’ve been appointed to the Community Council; had I known that you were new to it as of today, I would have been more supportive. My bad.
Personally, I feel that RDF is the single biggest difference between what I consider to be Classic and Retail, as forming dungeon groups and PuG raids through /LookingForGroup are some of the best memories I had during the original releases, and have enjoyed them during WoW Classic and TBC Classic as well.
However, I am somewhat curious (and surprised) that they specifically announced that there would be no RDF for Wrath, rather than just not announcing anything, releasing Wrath Classic without RDF, and then deciding later if they would like to release it around the same timeline it was during the original iteration.
So, personally I’m not pro-RDF, but I’m also not particularly anti-RDF. The major thing I would have liked to have experienced in Wrath Classic is patch progression on a DK, as I missed out on playing one the first time around, until maybe the last patch, which is apparently what we’ll be getting.
I don’t have a strong stance either way as I won’t be running any dungeons unless asked to or once for quests.
Positives would be being able to get into dungeons faster without needing to moniter it, talk to people or be a meta class.
Most negatives are in the past as it shifted game design from the world to a dungeon spamming arpg where all meaningful gameplay is in a dungeon. (Still peeved over the Primal nether/Frozen orb system)
Hybrid solution already exists in game. The LFG tool is basically the same thing if people used it, except rather than being automated it requires someone with a little drive to actual make the group.
indifferent
alt leveling
some people want it and i dont want them to have things they want
just add it on phase 2 , when ulduar comes out , so we have a “normal” leveling experience
Edit : NO X-REALM for dungeon finder, thanks.
Glad for no rdf.
Rdf is most helpful to small realms to do dungeons, however it doesnt fix the other issues of small realms, dead AH, dead world, difficulty getting into raids, exc. Its a bandaid that only fixes a small part of the issues caused by low server population.
It negatively effects a few aspects of the community. It causes grouping with the tool to be anti social, removing part of the social aspect of doing dungeons. It also reduces the effectiveness of realm reputation, blacklists, exc because of the cross realm feature. It also makes people less likely to work with friends/guilds to schedual dungeon runs, alt dungeon runs, exc because why wait for your friends if you can get it done with 0 effort on grouping, compounded with how easy wotlk heroics are, grouping for wmthe heroic is the hsrdest part of doing them in wotlk, automating the grouping just makes it an arcade game at that point.
I would be ok with blizzard making a better looking for group system, but i dont think there should be automation in the grouping, nor cross realm. No teleport, and no bonus loot for using the tool.
Edit: one thing i would like about an improved lfg tool is being able to filter out gear competition to some degree.
For example a “non competition” search that will help you not pair a grouo that will have everyone wanting the same peice of gear.
Example, lets say you have a warrior tank, a mage and warlock dps, and a paladin healer. You use the non competition search so it will try to find you a leather/mail physical dps. To minimize people competing for gear. Do i expect it to be perfect? No, but it would encourage people to not stack to many caster or physical dps.
Got to arbitrarily make the game less convenient to make it feel like you “earned” something.
The dungeons should be social, not the group forming.
Sorry but whispering 20+ dungeon groups that I’m a hunter LFG then either being ignored or invited isn’t this huge social aspect you think it is…All while using an addon to do it instead of the thing blizzard made to fix these issues…
Not sure why y’all keep saying this.
If you’re the leader of the group and I whisper you you’re either going to ignore me, invite me or say sorry full on hunters. There isn’t going to be anything social about it.
People’s alts aren’t going to be leveling like that now if this isn’t implemented we’re just going to be using mages. Just grab that auto follow weak aura for the real community experience
The decision to not have RDF in WOTLK is hands down the worst decision the development team have made to date. Its sickening to think the people involved in that decision are going to continue making bad decisions.
The pro’s for RDF vastly outweigh any con’s that could be made up. Makes the old world dungeons relevant, compared to now where they’re completely ignored outside of mage/pally boosting. Promotes alt leveling which keeps the game alive and players engaged. Gives mains something to do outside of raid logging and wintergrasp. More content is necessary for the longevity of WOTLK Classic. I could go on and on with the pros of RDF but i think this paragraph is enough
The only legitimate downside to RDF that I’ve seen is World PvP on the 1 or 2 balanced PVP servers. I get that some peoples whole reason for playing WoW is to gank people at summoning stones or flight paths. There are no other downsides that hold any kind of merit.
A hybrid solution would be to disable the instant teleport on PvP realms. There should not be any other restrictions on any other type of servers. We should get the full RDF from level 15 to 80 as it originally was (and should be).
I trust the developers to know their game better than the players, frankly. We may have insights, but big decisions are best left to the professionals.
I like the philosophy of the Classic Mantra. I like how the developers have progressively made more changes to the Classic game as time has gone on.
Compromise with the barbarians at the gates has ruined some systems. Thinking we know better is hubris.
“I know only one thing: that I know nothing.” - Socrates
Access to dungeon content for low population servers is a big one. Access to low level dungeon content.
Well for one, it would be a distinct change from Wrath of the Lich King. Dungeon Finder was added in patch 3.3, about halfway through Wrath, and only existed in Wrath’s final major tier of content, well after dungeons were relevant. Putting dungeon finder into relevant content would be a very large change.
Everything else is entirely subjective: ‘anti-Classic’, ‘anti-social’, ‘beginning of the end’ types of opinionated doomsaying. Even subscription declines starting at the end of Wrath are hard to show or argue causation, despite typical scapegoats (‘flying mounts’, ‘lfd’, e.g.). It is a convenience for conversation trade-off, one that changes how players engage both with that content and other players significantly, and encourages problematic behavior. Full stop.
“In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win.” - Ayn Rand
Could be, yes. You could offer LFD for normals-only, for example. Or only add it to 1-60 or 1-70 dungeons to deal specifically with the low-level dungeon issue. Or simply release it later.
I think normals-only is a poor idea. If players can spend their time in LFD normals vs grouping with manually in a heroic, that makes the playerbase of available heroic players smaller, making that experience worse for anyone wanting to run heroics.
A cross-realm low-level dungeon finder would be very welcome, I think. There is still a trade-off there but where it becomes a binary ‘do the dungeon with strangers’ vs ‘dont do the dungeon at all’, the pros do seem to outweigh the cons. Low impact for low cost, though, so if this is a significant amount of work, Blizzard shouldn’t bother.
Overall, I think the simplest solution is to do exactly what Blizzard is doing: kick the can down the road. Release WLKC without LFD, see how the playerbase engages with the improved LFG, and reevaluate releasing LFD at a later point.
It’s been like this long before WoW launched. I can’t recall a single moment where I made a friend in game when getting rejected for a group. I ask to join, you say yes, no, or nothing. Social interaction complete.
I would just love if Blizzard stepped in on this. This singular topic is ripping up the community and taking focus away from other things we should be talking about. Even the anti-crowd, most of them anyways, will say the current chat based group finding option is bad.
I just want to group without scrolling/spamming chat to do it.
Rofl you can’t be serious?
Legion??
BFA?
Shadowlands??
Took them 3 xpacs to learn borrowed power is trash, chores are trash.
If blizzard makes a decision it’s almost guaranteed it’s the opposite of what the community wants.
While I don’t necessarily disagree or agree with everything you said after this, I think you’re putting too much faith in the ‘professionals’. Nothing that the current dev team has done has me thinking that they are any type of professional, quite the opposite. I don’t believe any of them should be in any position to make drastic decisions that effect the game. One dev (who recently started posting on twitter) just oozes narcissism and a clear lack of understanding the classic playerbase.
Critiquing with the benefit of hindsight is pretty easy. Evaluating a decision apriori is much harder.
But just to be clear, we are in the Burning Crusade Classic Discussion forum
Thanks for the time you took writing the post, I’ll just chime in on this specific part of your post (I’ve read the rest, and every other post in the thread, I’m taking notes).
As someone working for a game studio as a software engineer myself, I can say with confidence that game developers knows about as much regarding what players needs or wants as the players themselves. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that, generally speaking, it’s not really possible to tell what players need or want. Mostly because everyone wants something different.
Game developers are expert in their fields yes, and majority of them are gamers too. But players are experts at playing, that places them in a good spot for their vision of a game to be worth taking note of. Some of the greatest changes in video games have been the result of players feedback and proposals.
They had hindsight.
Legion comes out. It’s well known the AP grind chores were trash, we were all vocal.
BFA launched once again way more backlash, this is the 2nd time surely they learned right?..
Shadowlands launches…
How much hindsight did they need?
Imagine touching a hot stove and getting burned but too dumb so you burn yourself 3 times instead of 1…that’s blizzard.
Glad you got faith in them but I know you’re in the minority there.
Nothing? Really? That’s pretty harsh.
I can point to the decision to make Enhancing Totems work as the tooltip intended as a positive change to TBC. Or to make Gnomish Battle Chicken proc mechanics less deterministic. Or a handful of other small changes.
Alright, fine. I’ll give you a ‘handful of small changes’, and even a big one, which is giving alliance seal of blood. There are buckets full of changes that should’ve been made (and haven’t/weren’t) or changes that were made, in bad taste. None of these changes are even close to being on the same level as RDF’s removal. That one should’ve been left to the community in the form of an official vote, or just left in and re-evaluated later.
Give people the option for rdf and dont force everyone to play the game the way only some enjoy imo.
If theres a way to make both sides happy that would be great. Maybe some servers with rdf some not idk something someway to give people options.
Perhaps. But what the players want or need is not always what is best for the game.
Keeping in context we are here discussing this, and obviously have some faith in the usefulness of the conversation 
I know I played wrath much differently than I did BC so I might be fuzzy on this but… I know if you wanted to progress in wrath you had to get your emblems from the dungeon daily. Maybe someone can correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t recall BC heroics being a big deal.
If what I remember is correct, jumping into a heroic isn’t a big deal in TBC today, but come wrath it’s going to be a make or break currency for most players.