I imagine the people who now have access to raids in LFR enjoy it.
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RDF was in Wrath.
No. The entireity of Wrath from the start of the expansion was about providing casual players with an enjoyable experience where painful mechanics and grindy slow levelling were seen as a bad thing. RDF was supposed to be in from the start but they couldn’t get it finished due to technical issues. The game was meant to be far more accessible than Vanilla, because they realized that if they wanted to grow the playerbase, they needed to make the introductory experience for players easier, as they’d basically tapped out the hardcore market.
And the “developers who saw it as a mistake” were also the ones who were most obsesed with hardcore vanilla, and most of them had moved on or did so soon after.
Wrath was never meant to be Vanilla in Northrend from it’s start.
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This will happen. You’ll have Blizzard Paid Boosts to 70, once Wrath comes out. You’ll still have to level up in the “current content” but that’s a decent environment.
Lets also be clear here. I did some digging, and every metric I can find, puts WoW Retail at around the 5 million MAU mark. And Classic (which is far rougher) around the 500k MAU mark.
You can claim all you want that Vanilla was the perfect game, but there’s still a larger market over where LFR is normal. Just different people who enjoy it.
It’s not bad at all, in fact I think LFD was one of the best ideas ever… It just wasn’t in TBC, and not having it in TBC is part of the game.
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Then again, I also thought the Zombie plague thing leading up to WOTLK was the greatest thing in the history of WOW, who doesn’t want to inflict a Zombie apocalypse on TB, or SW… Zombie raids were the greatest time I ever had playing WOW… I bust out laughing just thinking about how much fun that was.
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That’s not how it is. 
No RDF was also in Wrath. For a longer period of time and vastly more content.
And Wrath made good on that design philosophy from beginning to end. Dungeon finder was a convenient feature, but it is far from the sole reason, or even from being a primary reason why it did so.
It literally only saved the time it took to form the groups (if you never did it on your own anyway) and travel to the dungeon. Aside from that, the only other way it was easier was by making it so you could run dungeons without even knowing their location in the world, which was quite common shortly after it released.
I don’t deny that it helped people find more groups when they were playing on dead realms, but by definition, the number of people playing on dead servers has always been tiny and so their experience isn’t the ‘WoW experience’ in principle.
- I’d like a source on that
- Even if it was, I don’t particularly care when what we’re talking about is Classic, which is meant to have parity with the original experience.
You keep chanting this mantra but it makes absolutely no sense. Nothing about removing dungeon finder is “Vanilla”. It’s more true to the Wrath experience by any and all objective measures. I’d love to hear any that you can come up with that disagree.
What’s MAU an acronym for? And I’m probably going to want to see some links from this digging you’re talking about.
Never said that, so I’m not sure why you bothered typing it.
I will be impacted a lot by LFD being taken away. It was an important part of my original experience. I know of no good reason against it. People who don’t like it can not use it.
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The vast majority of people making these posts are retail tourists and tourist in general. They aren’t people who’ve been playing since day one Classic Era. This is Classic WOTLK not retail WOTLK
You can keep that strawman argument in Cata where it belongs.
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Oh, so did you mean to say “Accessibility before Cata leads to fun”? Because LFR is absolutely an accessibility feature. If you’re trying to talk about accessibility, but you think that mentioning one of the biggest accessibility features ever introduced into WoW is a ‘strawman’, I have to think you either don’t understand what a strawman is, or perhaps you’re intentionally being dishonest.
I created my character on the launch day of Classic and I want RDF. I started Classic excited to replay Wrath as I remember it…not this watered down version.
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The point is when people have no argument against lfd, they talk about unrelated things…like lfr.
Example: man, garrisons in WoD really segmented the community and turned it into feeling like a single player game. So obviously Wrath shouldn’t have dungeon finder.
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I just don’t like the cross realm and teleporting to the dungeon.
I’d honestly be happy with it forming the group for me. But I want the sense of community on my realm to know the players and the guilds.
I also want to see players in the world so that we can have that interaction. While leveling my druid in TBC I was getting ganked and it was the coolest thing to see a paladin drop from the sky bubble me and help.
I played in OG WotLK as well and while initially I loved the dungeon finder I learned the hard way the unintended consequences.
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Even if people that don’t like don’t use it it still has an impact on their game experience.
That’s like trying to argue that theft should be ok and if you don’t like it just don’t steal from people.
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You were talking, broadly, about accessibility, and I pointed to LFR as an example of where you were wrong about it being a good thing. How exactly is that unrelated?
I can’t tell you what to do, but I’d suggest you stop trying to apply broad concepts to specific situations like this if your argument and/or mindset are too fragile to be challenged broadly, and also to stop calling things “strawmen” if you don’t know what that means.
Asking you to acknowledge LFR when you made the statement that “accessibility leads to fun” is not a strawman. That’s not what a strawman is.
Traitorous critic fallacy. Nice.
The cross-realm argument has some validity, but the teleporting to the dungeon doesn’t. One guy flying to a dungeon, another following afk, and three people waiting to be summoned adds absolutely nothing to the game.
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Because Wrath didn’t have RDF? Wut? This is literally the expansion where it was added for an entire year. Don’t start the insane ramblings about “last content patch”, because it still was in the game for 12 out of the 25 months of the expansion. Essentially half of Wrath, and the half that most people considered “wrath babies” started in. As the ICC patch came out, and long term players started to drop away after clearing the content, a whole wave of new players started around that point, and their entire experience of it was with RDF.
Monthly Active Users. The standard by which Blizzard measures it’s userbase.
To use a 5-second search example:
https://activeplayer.io/world-of-warcraft/
All the sites I looked at have roughly similar numbers.
Because you seem to want Wrath to be watered down to Vanilla standards… since that’s what you keep advocating for.
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I can’t believe I have someone here arguing that greater accessibility to things players enjoy is a bad thing. That’s actually where the discussion is now. Unbelievable.
The process of getting to the fun stuff should not be a tedious, pointless waste of time. That’s Retail design: barriers and hurdles to finally unlock the fun stuff. Wrath’s biggest foundation was accessibility. And Blizz has cut that out of Wrath Classic. That’s the point. When I, and many players, think of Wrath they think of first and foremost accessibility. Way back in Wrath Blizz removed so many of these hurdles…and 2022 Blizz is putting them back in place. People like DOING dungeons. The act of getting there is the least important part. Sorry, but lifetime friendships aren’t formed from ‘LFG DUNGEON, X GEARSCORE, SPEC Y’. The act of getting to the content should be as simple and convenient as possible, because it’s the actual group that matters. Getting players into the group is the hard part, and dungeon finder makes that much, much easier. Then you just let nature take its course.
By the way, completely unrelated, but I have a basketball hoop set up in my driveway. Sometimes I get home and shoot around a bit. But the really great nights are when I spend the first half hour looking for the ball in the woods. Strike that, the BEST nights are when I can’t find it at all. Not sure where it went. Maybe a bear ran off with it. So I head on down to Walmart to buy a new one, and get to deal with those lovely people. I get home just in time for the sun to set. Yeah, I didn’t shoot a single shot but man I put forth some effort! That’s time well spent! Why do an activity you enjoy when you can spend hours not doing it. You know what’s better than doing a fun hobby? Almost doing a fun hobby.
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Too much accessability can be a bad thing in some cases, in most it’s good though.
Because Wrath didn’t have it for more than half the lifespan and more than three times the content. These details are important. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be in the game because it was never in Wrath, or because there was any period of time where it wasn’t in Wrath. Rather because the majority experience by any measure I can think of, happened without dungeon finder, on top of the fact that I think it’s awful for the game.
I’m not saying last content patch, because that wouldn’t be true. I don’t know why you’re saying this. I said nothing like this. I’d prefer it if you’d stick to what I am saying rather than trying to argue with things that I’m not saying.
What I am stating is a fact. <50% lifetime, <25% content. And subjectively on top of that, I think it’s bad for the game.
Do you have any evidence of this? A link or a quote?
Oh, I see. Yeah, I don’t really see why you bring it up. Classic and Retail are different games, and let’s remember that Classic is a rerelease. The fact that Classic has a smaller playerbase could very well be influenced by people who simply aren’t interested in playing an ‘old game’ or who don’t care to relive it. That’s a common reason why my old guild mates from back in the day aren’t interested in coming back for Wrath Classic.
Nope, I’m advocating for nothing like that. I love Vanilla, but so far for all of Classic, I’ve had my eyes set on Wrath. I’m just on the side of retaining the median experience from actual Wrath. And with that in mind, I’ll reiterate once again that I wouldn’t have a problem with dungeon finder being implemented in the ICC patch as it was originally.
Why is that so hard to believe when LFR exists?
I agree with that. But where we disagree is that you think that actual gameplay is a waste of time in the context of a game. I actually like the game the way it was designed (You know, kind of the point of Classic), so to me, forming groups makes beautiful sense for an MMO that’s meant to be social, and actually traveling through the world also is very consistent with universe scale and the RPG elements the game was built around.
This design is fantastic chef's kiss I only wish the people who hated it would stop trying to change that and just go play something they actually like.
Nothing’s stopping you, friend. 
It was a primary focus of Wrath’s design, yes. Though dungeon finder was only one aspect of that. And also, dungeon finder, I would say is more a feature of convenience than accessibility.
The only people who were granted more ‘access’ to the game through dungeon finder were the statistically small group of players who played on dead realms, or people who suffer too much anxiety to send a whisper. The game shouldn’t be retrofitted for the entire playerbase just to apply a bandaid fix to the problems of fringe outliers.
Wait a second… I thought you just said that “Wrath’s biggest foundation was accessibility”. What else have they removed from Wrath Classic? Surely you’re not implying that an expansion whose primary foundation was accessibility is no longer accessible because they’re not implementing one convenience feature?
Which ones? Other than dungeon finder, obviously.
Overall, you seem more like the kind of person who wants that ball to just teleport to the hoop rather than having to actually interact with it to make it happen.
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