It’s very true that there’s a rampant problem of people who either want to optimize any time spent/effort out of the game or they’re in fact very insecure and think they have no chance of clearing content without min/maxing. But the solution that WORKS is building your own groups and taking less geared and off-meta classes yourself. We have to be the change we want to see.
For those of us who know what we’re doing, we should be building groups as often as we can and leaving the doors open to everyone – No more hard-reserving, no more gear check at A’dal, no more “LF caster DPS only”, no more “checking logs”, no more kicking people out of the dungeon for a mistake, no more abandoning the group the moment you realize it’s going to take 10 minutes longer than a world record run.
I never do any of these things and I pay no attention to my group comp outside of getting the appropriate number of roles and trying not to stack too many people who need each armor type, and it’s been very successful. And I’ve done this on very small and dying realms. The fact that “elitism” is so rampant necessarily guarantees that there are a bunch of people who want to join your groups.
I would generally say that’s mostly true, but you must also remember that people with those insane expectations still play using Dungeon Finder, and they absolutely bring that mentality in with them. In my experience, these issues have been less common in later Retail, but I think that’s most likely because dungeons that you can queue for are quite easy.
I remember people constantly being kicked from groups in more difficult or complicated dungeons. I wouldn’t be surprised it it happened in at least 7/10 groups in dungeons where you can’t just tank and spank everything. I would say this creates an even worse situation for the casual players in some situations because doing a random dungeon might place them in these dungeons where they’re very likely to be kicked out and then they’ve just wasted 40 minutes of queue time for nothing. That’s a very nasty experience.
Now, just because I see this huge negative for the casual player, I’m not saying that Dungeon Finder is overall worse for them. I’m saying that the positives come with enormous caveats. And beyond that, I think that the reasoning on adding Dungeon Finder to the game should hinge on more than just how easy it is for casual players to find groups. Casual players DO join dungeon groups right now in TBC Classic. Not all of them, but they absolutely do play through the content and reach out to join groups.
TL;DR:
Dungeon Finder’s benefits don’t outweight the costs – It may be an overall improvement for the casual player, but I think it’s generally a negative thing for the whole population. We should try to solve the issue of casual players being locked out of groups by forming groups they can join.
Whether it lost the most subs ever is something we can’t reasonably conjecture on – The subscriber count never declined during Wrath. Cataclysm was the first era in WoW’s history where the subscriber count started to decline, and THOSE sub losses are ones that we can actually see because there’s proof of it.
Do you actually look at the real sub numbers, or are you guessing this from memory? Sub numbers stayed perfectly steady for more than a year in Wrath and if anything, that was Wrath “riding the success of tbc”. Once ICC came out, the sub count steadily climbed to WoW all-time record and leveled out at Cataclysm’s pre-patch.
You don’t call it “riding on something’s success” when an expansion not only maintains the subscriber count steadily for more than a year, but when it also INCREASES the sub numbers more than a year after the previous expansion. Wrath didn’t inherit the highest sub count in history, it created it. The sub count didn’t climb during 3.3.0 because TBC was good. It climbed during 3.3.0 because 3.3.0 was good.
The expansion that actually fits your description is Cataclysm. It started at the highest sub count the game had ever seen because the subs didn’t decline during Wrath (Riding Wrath’s success) and almost instantly went into freefall because people needed very little time to realize they weren’t interested anymore.
The sub count is literally the only objective measure we have to go on. Going off of anecdotal experience just makes no sense. You’ve seen lots of complaints for Wrath and I’ve seen almost nothing but praise. So who’s right?