Forgetting the bad parts ? A retail story of RDF

WoW Classic Wrath of the Lich King Classic Discussion
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Hello ,

Just wanted to share a story of a few days ago , when I decided to check retail so I can see the end of the Shadowlands Story .
I started leveling a new character by doing the quests . If you care about the gear I was decked in the questing gear I got along the way .
I reached lvl 55 and about that time I decided to do Plaguefall . For those that haven’t tried , its a lvl 54 ish dungeon .
I queued for dungeon finder and after some 15 minutes I got in a group .
The group strangely enough enough consisted of me (lvl 55) 3 lvl 60`s and one lvl 59 .
I though to myself : " Oh well I guess I wont see much of the dungeon now , but whatever"

This was understatement …

The dungeon began with the pack of 60s and the 59 rushing along on their mounts skipping all trash . Naturally they reached the boss , killed in 10 seconds and continued to rush skipping all trash .
All fine right ?
No . I`m lvl 55 and truthfully got lost . You can guess what happened next . When i asked for someone to help me out I got a vote kick which passed .

Now I’m not saying they shouldnt rush it . They are max lvl epic 70k hp characters , they want a fast run and that's fine . But did I get a choice to join this group ? No I was sent in it and wasted my time for just trying to enjoy the instance . You see these kind of rush rush t6 gear runs in BCC (and not a small amount of them) , but I can still choose not to join them . Ive learned to simply say “blue geared 70 mage , looking for a calm run” and even it takes a some time I can find a normal group that doesn’t mind doing the dungeon the slow way , or simply make such a group myself .
RDF doesn`t let you do this . When everyone start queuing the RDF you can bet no one but friends and close guildies will gather manual groups .
And as I said the rush rush behavior is not something uncommon .

Honestly I don`t want to keep queuing the RDF only to end up in these kind of groups over and over , when I simply want to run a slow dungeon so I can explore it and not stress over every single second “wasted” on that 1 trash mob which we could skip.

Let alone that RDF forces the devs to tune the dungeons for completely uncoordinated short tempered people (aka very low difficulty ) .

From a player who`s played since Vanilla in 2006 , I remember how happy I was when RDF was first implemented , only to get smacked by the reality of how crap the groups became because of it . In the end all “heroics” got dumbed down to aoe rush fest .

To the veterans out there , do you remember the release of Cataclysm .
The tears of how “hard” the dungeons were and the OMG nerf Grim Batol threads . The dungeons werent hard . They need you to cc here and there to pull carefully , but the RDF mentality had already warped the players . If you couldnt rush aoe everything it was “too hard” so the heroics got dumbed down . Then people stopped doing them . Then they started complaining that there was nothing to do . Then blizzard invented the “timed” dungeon in pandaria so it could at least give some sense of challenge to those dungeons which people stomped .
And ever since dungeons have become crap .

I hate the rushing in the timed mythic+ dungeons , which dont even drop loot on bosses . I hate the rushing when leveling in retail . And I really hate the "quicker PVP" , which is basically just whos going to one shot each other.

I Like a slower paced , calm game and it`s why I started playing classic .RDF is the trigger to all rush rush contents . We already have retail for those kind of players .

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I am absolutely on this with you … I hated revisiting some dungeons on retail and everyone expects you to know every single skip on every dungeon that people came up with during 15 years of playing …

Freehold is perfect example, you can instantly see who is new player, because they will walk into first pack of trash to kill it, while rest of the group is half way to final boss …

The issue is, none of this is going to change if you remove RDF … we have 2 classic eras that are without RDF and its exactly the same in there … everything is skip run, its only prot pala + 3 aoe dmgers and you can get only to easy quick dungeons, no BF/SHH/SL/Arca etc because they take too much time …

And it will continue on wotlk too, at start you wont get even into normal dungeons without SWP gear, and after people sleepwalk through early raids you will need full PvE gear to get into heroics …

+Dungeons on low levels are absolutely dead, low level dungeons offer absolutely 0 value for the effort you need, just the traveling time can be just more easily spent on leveling through quests

One simple thing would be adding reward only for full dungeon run, I find it absolutely stupid that you can just zerg the last boss and get full run reward … or rather clearing whole dungeon offers smaller reward compared to just skipping everything …

Also offtopic about difficulty … if you run anything below like M15 you are basically running “babys first dungeon” … people complain that something is too easy, until it gets harder then they complain again …

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So you’ve made one bad experience in retail and the RDF is bad? I’ve made a lot of bad eexperiences in TBC Classic, what or who do I blame this on if there wasn’t an RDF?

Also the point in Cata wasn’t, that the dungeons were to hard. The point was rather, that the game was poorly designed.
If you have dungeons that require CC, that you can pool with the RDF, you have to make sure every class has players with CC in the group Blizzard didn’t. So you often got into groups that just weren’t able to clear the dungeon from the start. This is were toxicity really started.

But also the problem with the Cata dungeons was to blame on Classic Andy’s, that were whining in WotLK all the time, that the game is easy without CC. Do blizzard gave in and gave them dungeons with CC and it was a catastrophe.

The thing is the majority of players doesn’t want challenging dungeons. They just want to complain about easy content to feel superior. If you try to build groups for dungeons, that are actually challenging, you will have a MUCH harder time than building groups for easy dungeons.
Do you still remember how people hated oculus in WotLK? This dungeon actually required coordination and the players had to learn something new. In fact Occulus is probably more challenging than any of the TBC dungeons. But players hated it.

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Because it was boring and vehicle fights stay static and slow even tho one has done huge character development. Nobody hated it because it was hard, it wasnt, it was boring having to do X amounts of flying islands before one could spam one button on a dragon with no way of increasing the speed.

The only thing worse would be something with fixed spawn timers. A mini Mt Hyjal inside Dalarna or something. Oh wait …

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I agree with this Post. RDF/LFR/Quest Helper were the things that ruined the Rpg aspect of this game the most. Those things remove the Soul out of games.

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I don’t really remember it, but when Cata came, the aspect of raids and dungeons were gonna be harder again got me back into PVE.
I didn’t really like them nerfing the dungeons back again so fast, but in the end they are just dungeons, ofcourse.

But your main point is spot on. Everyone was hoping and asking for harder PVE content, when that came, people cried, cried and cried and then cried some more. Then Blizzard nerfed it pretty fast.

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Or the Halls of Stone RP wall… Omg i hated that place.

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Yea, and after all the complaints they actually made the dragons scale with your gear, if you remember that, and guess what? People still hated it and left the group as soon as they zoned in to see it was that dungeon.
It was just to tedious and annoying.

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Correlation does not imply causation. Just because you did a run with a toxic skip everything run on Retail RDF does not mean that toxicity is caused by the RDF system. It is not. That toxicity is caused by the rush mentality that Retail has for the introduction of Mythic+, a system that forces people to complete dungeons on time in a very optimized way, with a penalty for failing.

That happens because people on Retail played those dungeons for two years as max-level Mythic+ and now they expect everyone to do those dungeons while leveling with the same optimization as a timer Mythic+. Wich is absurd and there are some asking Blizzard to ban in Retail dungeon skips on leveling dungeon.

If you had joined RDF on another expansion dungeons, probably some made before Mythic+, you won’t find that skip mentality. I found Vanilla ones (revamped most during Cataclysm) to be the more chilling and relaxing ones. People on those dungeons are not so toxic with optimizations and skips. But probably you can’t if you have no character at level 50, in that case, you are forced into BFA and those at the dungeons that suck thanks to Mythic+.

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And it looks like Blizzard is planning to implement a Mythic+ system into WotLK Classic. I think a lot of the anti-RDF people will wish Blizzard would have implemented the RDF, instead of what’s to come.

Or more likely they will find creative ways to blame the toxic community, that comes with Mythic+ on the RDF. Even though it doesn’t even exist in the game. But not being reasonable was never an issue for the anti-RDF people.

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That still has more merit than your defense of the Dungeon Finder seeing as your only experience with it comes from a private server. I have no interest in debating with you (as we’ve already tried to no avail) but I think it is important for other readers to know that you’re promoting a system of which you’ve literally had 0 experience with.

First of all I think it’s funny that you invoke “causation does not imply correlation” and then you go on to explain how the timed aspect of Mythic Dungeons caused the rush mentality – as though that mentality didn’t exist long before the introduction of the Mythic Dungeon.

A tool that automatically create groups is not in and itself going to create toxic behaviour. In fact, the party leader of a dungeon in Classic pretty much acts the part of a Dungeon Finder. Unless the party leader asks for advice from the group or if you make recommendations that the party leader heeds the party leader will just invite whoever they deem fit and you have no agency over that whatsoever, right? The Dungeon Finder is just doing that for you, albeit with a lot less fact checking.

If there’s one component that is largely to blame for the toxicity we see in retail dungeons it’s the cross-server aspect. Cross-server is great at reducing queue times but it does severe damage to the social aspect of the game. People you meet through the Dungeon Finder are not relevant to you long-term. So you are less invested in them. And let’s say you actually did hit it off with someone through the Dungeon Finder, what then? Back in Wrath you could not queue for dungeons cross-server.

If you’re not looking for a social experience then the Dungeon Finder is great for you. Why should you care if the tank is a toxic scumbag so long as he gets the job done, right?

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Ok so using the RDF in an WotLK environment is 0 experience to you, whereas ONE run in Retail, that has a lot of other features that obviously also influence the community is a noteworthy experience in your eyes?

It just shows how biased you are. And seriously I am also tired of discussing anything with you, because you fail to see any reason.

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If you wanna dismiss him and his experience with it on pservers, what about all the rest of us then? All of us that have plenty and more experience with it? We promote it for various similar reasons all of us, but it comes down to the fact that we all think it’s a far better system then what tbc now has.
And speaking of tbc, there’s just as many toxic people on there now that there will be in wotlk.

Fixed that one for ya. Your welcome.

With RDF I’d put that person on ignore and never risk having to group with him/her again. That is simply not possible right now. Now in tbc, without the RDF, I risk facing the same toxic person every time I search for a group.

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Yes, and you would have understood that if you read the remainder of my post.

I’m sure he would be heartbroken over that as he continues to queue and be an a**hole to potentially thousands of other players. But hey, at least you’re alright :wink: !

…? Amazing.

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Yea, like that aint happening right now…

Here we do agree. It is just amazing how you fail to see that… Biased much?

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I would actually argue that there will be more toxic people in WotLK. Because of the gating and elitism that will come with the new LFG-Tool. And if Blizzard really implements Mythic+, there will be a clash between casuals and sweaty players, that will be much worse, than what we’ve seen in TBC Classic so far.

And as I found the TBC Classic community toxic already, that’s not something I am looking forward to.

But it’s just an assumption of me, so it could turn out wrong.

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You know what I do if I end up in a group with someone I know is a toxic scumbag? I tell the group: “Hey! That guy is a toxic scumbag! He did this and that in another dungeon I was in.” And if he’s not kicked then I’ll leave the group.

You know what you accomplish by putting one guy on ignore? Pretty much nothing. Chances are slim that you’ll run into the same guy again regardless whether you put him on ignore or not.

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No random group will kick a player because you accuse him of something. Most likely they neither know you nor the other player, so it’s testimony vs testimony.
And if you leave, you will be seen as the toxic player by the group. And might land on an ignore list yourself. Not that it would really decrease your chances of joining a group.

Something like this only works if you know the players in the group. Fur random dungeons it’s just fiction.

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Well look at us, 7 posts that contain practically 0 value. Forgive my snark but I couldn’t help myself, but I’ve done myself a disfavour as I’ve allowed you and Jazem to derail myself from the main point I wanted to make.

Cross-server is the culprit. Not the automation. The automation has issues of its own, sure, but it is not as damaging as the cross-server aspect. Period.

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Yea fair point. I had wotlk with RDF in mind writing that.

Granted we ofc might be wrong, but we do share that assumption.

Just this really:

Plus the fact that you’re gonna spend/waste a good deal more time finding a new group if you leave.

Exactly. In tbc that is. And in wotlk without RDF this will stay true. You know what fixes that? RDF. Because with that you’ll never ever see that person you’ve put on ignore in your groups again.

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