Not going to touch RDF vs Group finder discussion.
Group finder doesn’t seem bad at all, it needs some tweaking still but it’s on the good way. My biggest concern tho is the missing cross-realm feature. I understand that cross-realm might interfere with the social aspect but still, you must understand that such a bulletin board is more effective with increasing number of participants. By ommiting cross-realm completely you indirectly PROMOTE creation of megaservers. And just look on Firemaw, what does this mean. You had to take radical actions because it started to go even out of your control.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d say that Blizzard knows that small and medium realms will get refueled on Wotlk release, but not sufficiently to stay stable throughout whole expansion. During later phases, transfer money from desperate players on dead realms will be floooowing once again. Cross-realm group finder would be the bane of this.
If I were a super conspiracy theorist, I’d say that thy create Fresh for the very same purpose knowing it won’t last throughout whole expansion.
There was no automated RDF at the start of Wrath. I am all for trying new improvement to the manual tool and you are free to demand the automated one once 3.3.3. or corresponding phase of WotLKC arrives.
Besides, they can integrate auto group form option into this very tool if they need to.
With all due respect to traditional UI menu I despise fall down menues like “Dungeons” and “8 activities selected” buttons on second screenshot. They slow down navigation and filtering of information and that is major disadvantage of any manual LFG tool.
Since you have fixed number of following main categories
Dungeons
Heroic Dungeons
Raids
Quests & Zones
PvP
Custom
Wouldn’t it be better to add a row of 6 icons-buttons representing these categories in empty space on top?
The sub categories could take space to the righ.
Example: clicking “Dungeons” icon would open up sidebar with all available dungeons to your level. You could then click dungeons icons for instantly filtering your interests.
Let’s discuss these as quick as possible and expand when needed:
1:0
True. RDF has no gatekeeping and any undergeared meme spec can get in, despite RDF stealthy trying to find 2 ranged and 1 melee dps anyway (noticed this in retail way too many times).
2:1
False. Most of players willing to buy dungeon boosts for gold aren’t doing it from desperation of seeing empty LFG chat and LFG tool. They do it because they can be AFK while booster does the leveling for them. They won’t use RDF but rather look for specific dungeon like SP in TBC.
2:2
LFG reduces the spam as it carries most repentant uses of the chat into more readable UI. RDF kills the chat, making the game looking completely dead with only boosters spamming their advertisments.
3:3
False. This is completely up to Blizzard to deside what categories of LFG can be crossrealm and what not. It has nothing to do with basic functionality of RDF.
4:4
This is side product of crossrealm aspect of RDF. Same as above. It can be done with manual LFG if Blizzard deside it is appropriate.
5:5
If there is no players of required role, like a tank for a dungeon, you can’t speed it up in neither of tools. RDF kinda better in this term as it distributes players equally so average wait time can be shorter. Manual LFG tool can put players and groups that waited longer on top of the list and make players of the crucial roles or classes finding groups even faster.
6:6
It is a key difference, that manual LFG tool makes people reach to each other, while RDF developers a culture of silent solo centric session based gameplay who just click the RFD button and forget that they play MMO.
As final score of 6:6 shows it is not. RDF is simply a populistic version of LFD that forces developers to release trivial content, because automated tool can’t form a competitive group from lazy players who ain’t learning the encounters or their class.
This is the reason why next devolution of RDF that is LFR had to rely on overnerfing raid content, why Cataclysm heroics groups started failing in RDF and on the contrary why Mythic+ is using only manual LFG tool.
It would if they implement RDF instead this frankstein LFG system.
As you said above, Cross Realm has to be enabled too ensure more playerbase on all levels of content.
But also, If ppl play slower leveling specs such as Ret Pally or Warriors they are getting less frequently invited in these leveling groups. Instead the mages/warlocks/druids/… (AOE Classes) get priority.
This “META” gets excluded in the RDF system since the systems picks automatically.
As I said above this wouldn’t add more tanks to the system. And you know why there are less tanks besides:
This role making leveling outside dungeons ineffective.
It requiring more knowledge of the dungeon and watching out for other party members mistakes to be ready to intercept threats.
It implying that tank is party leader by default and is responsible for the whole group progress and speed.
Raids usually requiring no more than 2-3 tanks per 25ppl. Most leveling tanks, especially paladins, end up their career by becoming boosting alts.
In original Wrath the paladins and warriors you mentioned did collected tanking gear and could register as both tank and dps thanks to dual specialisation. Now they mostly rely on boosts, excluding potential tanks from any search, making issue worse.
And RDF isn’t making percent of registering tanks bigger. Your realm might had more tanks per dps, but they would surely be taken by groups of other realms and thus RDF is not helping at all.
Dumb question, but how do you plan to handle the guild recruitment usecase if you lock down the LFG channel?
Cause no one manually joins the “looking for guild” channel
So everyone uses the LFG channel for that purpose. If you’d auto join everyone into the “looking for guild” that would solve it I guess.
But recruitment for guilds would otherwise shift to the trade or general channels, which would be horrible.
Because of all of the endless spam out there. If anithing deserved Bulletin board interface it would be guild reqruitment. Retail has somewhat good interface for that, but it still need work to improve it.
Yes, but due to the way the patch is at launch (Patch 3.3.5) it will be the ICC patch but without ICC being open.
Whiny for no reason? It was in the patch we have for launch but they are putting in altered and watered down version because they listened to the whiners.
in all honesty, the playbase is too entitled. Too whiny. They are REALLY are divided on what they want. If i were a developer, i’d just come out and call you all flippin’ idiots and shut up.
Christ.
WoW community is actually genuinely and utterly a joke at the moment.
