What a nonsense.
People know the game for 80% that are playing classic, been there and done that. Asking for help or other things were reduced a lot in wotlk because ppl knew more things. In other words, ppl became less social.
RDF wasnt the issue. Its there because the content was old and ppl want to rush through it. The current generation want to be efficient.
If you think the game is still social as back then, ure highly mistaken.
95% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Sure =) =)
These are all very good arguments against raid finder, you are correct that most people stay in WoW to raid or PvP with their friends. RDF and itâs supposed lack of socialisation will have very little impact on this, except for that couple of very rare persons who found their guild via very succesful dungeon run with some guild members. But that thing seems to be so exceedingly rare that to force the majority of players to suffer through current LFG system with spam and sold boosts and GDKP runs seems extremely cynical to me. Huge harm for tiny chance at social experience.
I swore I wonât play Wrath without RDF but I also loathe abandoning my guild and will most likely go back on my word just to keep raiding with them. The pull of a good guild is very strong indeed. Again, cutting or adding RDF in Wrath wonât change much at all about that aspect of the game. Vast majority of players look for a new guild based on existing friends, or on discord based on an add, looking if the raid times fit their schedule and if the guild is looking for that class. Yes it can happen once in a lifetime that you find your guild in a dungeon run. It even happened to me at the very start of Classic when all my buddies from retail wrath/cata quit within a month of starting. But it is not how the game is even now, 3 years later.
And this is why most of these discussion come down to preference and believe, not facts.
Some people like to do activities with their family and friends only. Some prefer to party and do activities to just do the thing or meet new people. Some only go to an event because its to be with their friends and community, although they dont like the event itself, while others prefer activities, like doing group sports with anyone, because the group activity itself is what they want to do.
Its the same with wow.
Some players look for a game that provides a good basis to build a stable (guild) community as the main priority focus. Others simply like to play group content in a good game and dont want forced social activities. Many players even prefer to meet new payers every run, instead of running with the same faces every time.
But, as said, its a matter of preference. Vanilla tended a bit more towards a social aspect, while wotlk tended a bit more to accessibility and casual (non binding/social requirements) fun activities.
If we take facts we have:
My interpretation of these things, which is biased, because I personally think that wotlk is a really good game as it is and my favorite expansion:
Making content less accessible to support social bounds always supports the gdpk/boosting mentality to a similar degree. More players will join guilds, more players will do/buy boosts and will partake in gdkps and more players, that want neither to spend money for the boosts, nor spend their time socializing in guilds, will quit the game.
The casual (pve) player base, that wotlk focused on, will shrink and result in an even harder time to find dungeon groups for these players. Once they fall behind gear wise, they will have trouble to find raids. The other casual players, that they once played with, are now doing guild runs or boost/getting boosted or quit the game.
On the other side, with RDF, these casual pve players will be able to gear up without changing their game style. They can join ânormalâ pugs later on, because there are more players like them and they all were able to get enough gear for the content.
Personally I think RDF is a good thing overall. Players can jump into action any time. Even if it takes time for dps, they can farm/doing dailies while they wait, instead of looking at a LFGchat or a tool all the time. Leveling players and players on less populated servers have a chance to find groups they otherwise wouldnt, if the RDF is crossrealm. I also think that having less gdkps/boosting, more normal pugs and less players quitting at the cost of less guild activity, of players, that dont want to be active in a guild to begin with, is a reasonable thing.
Now my totally biased interpretation:
Vanilla fans, like the current Blizzard team, dont like wotlk for what it is. They think the most played, most desired expansion is not good enough for them as it was, so they want to change it for the smaller vanilla fanbase.
On the other hand Blizzard thinks gdkps are a good and healthy thing. Players can buy as many level boosts as they like from Blizzard themselves, as long as they pay for additional subs. Its not against TOS to buy a token, sell it and trade the gold with classic, effectively legit RMT gold buying in classic. Bots could get banned, but the subs and the boosts make them good money.
If more players feel gated and forced to buy gold for boosts/gdkp, Blizzard makes money from that.
Blizzard creates so many additional problems, that were not part of the original expansions back in the day. After seeing that, being able to argue that one qol change (RDF) for a big part of the community, thats working against dying servers and diminishes the need to buy boosts, is the reason why âthe game became antisocial retail and will be unenjoyable for everyoneâ, is something that amazes me every day.
Youâre still missing what the RDF changes.
It changes the target group of WoW.
You wonât find that guild outside of a dungeon either, because you are suddenly no longer playing with people that even care about guilds anymore. Because as it stands you get people from being at least okay with social interaction within the game to the actual social gamers (People that play specifically for the social aspect).
With the RDF in the game, the target audience changes and you will no longer meet the social gamers. Instead the spectrum moves and you will have people that despise any interaction with other players to the people who like it, but do not seek it.
If you rank people on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is the anti-social gamer (does not want to interact with others, not necessarily rude or selfish) and 5 is the social gamer, then you do now have everything from 2-5 in the game, with very little 2s.
With RDF you will have 1-4s in the Game and probably very little 4s. But itâs the 4s and 5s. that are building and forming the guilds that have that strong pull. This is how RDF destroys the social aspect. Not by removing LFG spams, but by making the game accessible to the 1s and less interesting to the 4s and 5s.
Really? In my guild in Wrath (and Cata) we made groups and used the RDF as a commodity, going there and back again - and now and again finding the missing one when we played at off hours. And we were very social and talkative - in writing, not in Ventrilo or such - during Dungeons aand befor and after as well 
I think youâre exaggerating just a wee bit
Why do you keep thinking that the current lfg is more social than rdf? You barely talk.
Wotlk hcs are way easier than tbc hcs, less talk.
You keep searching for the social excuse but you can tackle your arguments so easily. If there would be new content, i would understand that u communicate more and be more social etc. But dont forget that wotlk is 14y old. People know what to expect. Its auto pilot to get the badges and be done.
The target group of Wrath Classic is people currently playing TBC Classic, most of whom wand RDF or are neutral about it, at least according to every single online poll or questionaire. Plus people returning for wrath alone, where likely vast majority of whom want it because itâs a core feature of Wrath.
Do you honestly believe wrath without RDF will attract some new players who arenât already playing TBC or waiting for wrath?
In your analogy, all players, from 1 to 5 are in game right now. Itâa just 1 to 4 are currently miserable, to a varying degree, every time they need something from a dungeon, and a few 5s on this forum are clapping gleefuly as Blizzard announced they want to keep us miserable for entire Wrath.
Such statements mean nothing without sources to back it up. What polls/questionnaires are you referring to?
sources please and remember that even the biggest streamers and youtubers only have a small % of the player base as their audience so the numbers wont be accurate at best they can be used as a indication but even at that they could be flawed as seen in opinion polls before elections in the real world all the time
In other words, please waste time collecting polls and linking them so I can dismiss them out of hand. Thanks for warning me not to bother tho.
Just from a quick google search because I canât help myself anyway:
https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/2617068-Do-you-want-LFD-in-Wrath-Classic/page12
https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwowtbc/comments/u8nwiw/petition_implement_dungeon_finder_in_wotlk_classic/
And an entire list of polls:
Itâs pointless to even attempt, these people apparently canât even fathom that thereâs a whole new world, PvE-wise, outside dungeons. Itâs like, to them, itâs unfathomable that a person could seek social interaction and still want RDF because dungeons are not the place where they seek social interaction to begin with (and not having RDF limits the opportunities to seek said social interaction elsewhere).
This is precisely what I remember, people in guild being much more eager to jump in to help others, because the dungeon they are helping in is literally one click away. Sometimes youâd use the system to pug a missing role, sometimes you just take full guild group and do 4 heroics in a row. Or if you log in at 3 am as I used to in Wrath retail when I worked nights or at 8 am on weekday, as I tend to do now when I bring kids to KG and then there are no pressing projects to translate, you just jump in solo and know exactly when your group will be up ± 2 min.
I literally remember jumping in after raid to help guild alts on my icc geared mage because the dungeons were so fast and easy. I rarely do it now, especially without a guild tank, because why put myself through that?
Like I said they can be used as a indication of what people want but they are not proof that the majority wants something, I have just looked through them, and what I can say about the mmo-champion is that its way to small to give any indication of what people really want, same with the reddit one, WiLLEs one is the only one that have any statistical value in reality, but even then the results are scewed towards what he him says, if news paper a have a poll about if their readers prefer what their editorials say over what the editorials from news paper b says then you will get results that heavenly favor news paper a over b. But his numbers say something atleast, allthough that thread clearly have cherry picked polls only 4 polls where I know for a fact that I have seen a lot more polls around than that.
But once again the only one worth considering is WiLLEs poll and that one will be scewed a bit towards what he have expressed that he wants because of the simple reason that its among his subscribers (and with a turn up of roughly 20-25% of his subscribers we can say that it most likely actually shows what his subs want at least)
Would you kindly provide at least one singular poll, however small, that shows more people wanting to completely remove RDF? And if not, are you willing to admit more people want it in wrath at least at some point in phase progression?
Most likely there are more people who want it at sometime during the expansion, even I would like it when it should be introduced but if my only 2 options are ether from the start or never I pick never, thats another reason why I dont like those polls they are to broad no difference between âI want it from pre patchâ and âI want it from ICCâ.
I donât think WiLLE skewed the results one way or the other in this particular scenario though, as his poll simply asked the question âLooking For Dungeon In WotLK Classic?â. In fact, I think he takes a pretty solid neutral ground when he talks about the issue in this video: https://youtu.be/VkoPGTRiPvw?t=136 (time stamp for your convenience). Quote:
Blizzard is not letting go of this whole âcommunityâ-idea even if it is at the expense of updates which a lot of people are clearly asking for, as they want to differentiate the game from retail and take it in another direction. There will always be issues from this though, such as server popoulation being widely skewed towards a handful of servers. Thereâs definitely good and bad to it.
I highlighted the things I find to be relevant to the discussion. Even when looking at the numbers from these polls itâs not like thereâs an overwhelming majority. On WiLLEâs post itâs 62% to 38% from ~29000 votes. A majority is for the Dungeon Finder, sure, but there were still ~11000 voices that were against it which is not an insignificant number. The reason why someone would vote yes are quite obvious â because the benefits of the Dungeon Finder are obvious â but why would someone vote no?
Even if we take the results from the polls at face value it does not automatically mean that implementing the Dungeon Finder is the correct action. Because that would alienate those 11000 voices in that particular sample size who might play MMORPGs for the social aspect. Also worth noting is that people actually try to make the argument that the Dungeon Finder somehow isnât responsible for damaging the social aspect of the game (some people even seem to argue that the Dungeon Finder improves the social aspect) and this is just false. Thereâs plenty of research that proves this.
Some articles:
https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/eludamos/article/view/vol7no1-2
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7427655
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1555412015610246
Where are polls showing people want RDF in ?
Shows polls
We cant be so quick to accept these results âŠ
Here you go: https://imgur.com/a/v3AKTHU
⊠and at this point I wouldnât even be surprised if I got away with it.