I distinctly remember everyone and their mother claiming LFD is what "killed’ the unique social aspect of the game back in Cata and that it was the addition that caused the massive decline in players from the 12 million WOTLK enjoyed. People used to post graphs and what not that showed the massive player decline started when 3.3.0 dropped.
This was like a universally agreed on thing and one of the major things players pointed to when begging Blizzard for vanilla servers even back then and begging them not to add LFR during the Dragon Soul tier.
It’s kind of funny taking a peek in these Forums to see what’s going on and seeing this total 180 in real time. Blizzard 100% remembers this stuff even if many of you don’t or are too young/new to have been there. If they implemented RDF we’d have another wave of players leaving because the social aspect changed and then people would beg Blizzard to implement new servers to leave the feature out. It’s already happened before. It seems like a good idea now but you’d regret it later.
This was like a universally agreed on thing and one of the major things players pointed to when begging Blizzard for vanilla servers
For Vanilla WoW, yes.
Vanilla and Wrath are both great, but for different reasons. They aren’t the same as eachother, and they don’t need to be.
It’s already happened before. It seems like a good idea now but you’d regret it later.
You are right, this did happen before, and recently. The largest name in PServers had a “Increased Difficulty, 1x XP, no Cash Shop, no RDF server” released, and people rejoiced. After many months of Sweaty Players + No RDF, we learned some things:
People will minmax anything they can. If the minmax is standing outside of Gundrak and only running Heroic Gundrak every day, they will. (This literally happened)
People will not run any dungeons outside of the fastest. It’s usually just Gundrak, but if it’s your alt or expansion launch, there will be an exact order of Heroics you do daily, always leaving off Oculus and CoT. After your initial badge grind, you’ll only do Gundrak.
Among other issues, like getting your alt into dungeon groups, hell, on that PServer nobody invited Locks/Hunters to dungeons past P1 because they can’t keep up with the insta-nuke aoe meta.
As you can see, the server eventually reverted the “No RDF” feature. Players largely rejoiced, at least anyone that was playing daily and got sick of the Gundrak meta.
Lastly, what “killed’ the unique social” wasn’t RDF. It was the difficulty mixed with being repetitive. In Wrath, even with no RDF, you don’t talk to your group. You get an invite, you go to Gundrak, and you quietly nuke it. It isn’t some dungeon you do every now and then, you do it daily. Possibly on multiple characters. And it’s a joke.
The only talking happens if you need a “Heroic train” where they knock out the faster heroics, like 4-5 of them, and they’ll just paste a macro saying the order.
Wrath was designed with an issue that was addressed with RDF: The need for many boring repetitive tasks you’ve done many times for the entire expansion. It isn’t immersive doing Gundrak your 100th time. RDF increases variety and lets you play out in the world while you do it.
Eh, I can only speak from experience since I didn’t play Classic, but I always found the LFD to be one of the most boring features in WoW, I started in Legion and I remember asking my friend who was showing me the game when we would do content with other people and he just queued us up and that was that, we got teleported, melted everything because of that awful pre level squish balancing and everyone left at the end without saying a single word.
I am still leveling in Classic, ressubed recently and decided to give TBC a try, and if Jon’s comment is anything to go by that would be roughly the same experience one would get with LFD in Wrath which sucks if you ask me.
It’s because Classic is infested with retail tourists playing the game because of the content drought in retail and how terrible Shadowlands is. That’s why the forum is flooded with people screeching that we NEED LFD and the game is going to DIE WITHOUT LFD and other such nonsense. It’s all retail andys malding over the fact that they have to actually talk to people and have to actually travel to the dungeon.
I was actually playing retail WOTLK when LFD first released and everyone hated it back then. It utterly killed socialization in the game, and incentivized anti-social behavior like ninja looting because the other 4 people in the group were random strangers that you would never see again after the run ended. Plus it made the world feel small because it just insta-teleports you everywhere. It’s an anti-MMO feature. It sacrifices game feel in favor of convenience.
Plenty of us played back then and we also play now. Can you say the same ? Or are you here to talk about a game you don’t play, aren’t playing, and wont be playing lmao. Let it go.
30k megaservers say what? Social aspect is already dead outside guilds and rdf solves some very real issues that TBC classic players are already facing mister hiding behind retail avatar.
Are you even saying anything? I don’t think you are.
You rest your entire position on what you perceived as popular opinion from over a decade ago. You didn’t provide anything concrete to talk about. I’m not sure why we should even engage in a discussion based around your simple minded frame work. And I even know what popular opinion you’re talking about. You’re for the most part bringing up the streamer Kungen who was very vocal about why he disliked the direction wow was taking, and his community essentially started to meme the response, even though they didn’t really have their own thoughts on the matter and likely kept playing the game anyways.
Here are the facts about WoW’s decline surrounding the end of WOTLK and CATA. What I’m about to tell you isn’t opinion, it’s what happened.
Gaming market became more competitive with the rise of free to play games like league of legends and cheap indie games on steam. People simply had more choices to choose from.
Many people viewed WOTLK as the end of wow series because that’s where the Arthas story line ended.
CATA dungeons and raids were much harder than WOTLK. This turned a lot of people off from playing the game.
Despite wow starting to decline during this period of time it still held over 7 million players going into MOP and through the life of that expansion. WOW has been incredibly successful for the past decade, and much of that success rests on the shoulders of features like RDF. I’d even go so far to argue that without those quality of life features the game would have fared far worst over time than it has.
Another guy just wanting to argue with no proof to backup a bold claim.
Everyone agrees that RAID FINDER killed WoW… nobody ever talked about RDF… the misguided slight that taking forever to find a dungeon is a healthy thing for a video game is ludicrous… Dungeons don’t mean anything… Raids are the PVE end-game for World of Warcraft…