Is RDF really ruining social aspects of the game?

TL;DR is an argument that took a of space in online gaming discourse. It boiled down to whether or not the developer of Darksouls has a type of moral obligation to provide an easier difficulty mode in their notoriously difficult game. A) Those in favor argued it’s only good for accessibility for a wider audience, making it more inclusive. B) The other side argued that a developer has no obligation to do so, and that there being an easy mode detracts from it being a hard game fundamentally (if you beat Darksouls it’s a personal achievement).

Regarding LFD I’m in the “B” boat. You and all the others that disagree with me in the “A” boat. Phrased in a different context I think it will be easier to see the arguments we’re having in a clearer way.

This is why I claim it’s a “Darksouls easy mode argument”. The entitlement of those in the camp “A” isn’t making much of an impact on me. OK, so getting into dungeons will be easier, but to what end? It is not a goal in itself for me to exclude players, but as I previously pointed out, if Blizz goes with “A” (pro LFD) or “B” (no LFD, my side) some will feel excluded. Thus, the argument from “inclusiveness” isn’t great on its own if it doesn’t match the design philosophy of the game (which it doesn’t).

Nothing personal, I still don’t want LFD even if it means some players feeling it’s a deal breaker.

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I give up.

I’m nether for, nor against LFD (and if it should be in, then decidedly NOT at launch). Make me “C” group.
I am against you telling me WoW is supposed to be like this. Wow is supposed to be like I want to play it, not like YOU want Me to play it - with or without RDF.

This was my last answer to you in this matter.

You should be interested in Blizz’s arguments. It’s what will decide the future direction of Wrath Classic. You have to argue in spite of this, not ignore it.

To exemplify, I want transmog to be in Wrath Classic. Here are my arguments: a) collections will already be introduced, b) it adds lots of endgame content, c) it makes people feel more invested in their characters and the world without it relating to making the character power level higher, d) people have a reason to enter old dungeons and raids, e) it’s a social experience where you can “goof around” with friends or whatnot that still will feel rewarding even though the content is trivial.

And so on. I have reasons and justifications. Blizz probably don’t agree with this currently and that’s OK. I still argue in spite of what Blizz thinks, and I don’t pretend otherwise.

LFD is more akin to content than balance or such. Should be pretty obvious since it extends the relevance of dungeons. We don’t need to extend the relevance of dungeons at the start, because they will already be!

So you want the terrible state of TBCC in later Classic Wrath patches, but with an automatic dungeon finder? Genuinely curious.

OK. I’m open for discussions, but platitudes don’t really add all that much.

I honestly don’t know what you want to say with this - I will refer to the “Darksouls easy mode”-argument again to point to why this “let players play the way they want!!!”-argument doesn’t have as much punch as people think it does.

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I just wanted Wrath to be as it was, no more and no less. I played it for years on pservers and it was fine as it was. If people don’t like it they should’ve sticked to playing whatever version of WoW they liked best, be it Vanilla, TBC or w/e.

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It didn’t have LFD at the start. It was a huge part of the launch that it wasn’t there, in that Northrend felt alive with active players around. That you could talk with, cooperate with, run dungeons with, and so on. These people were not anonymous as players in the world are today in retail with sharding and all that. You see someone once and then never again during your whole time playing retail.

It’s not irrelevant to me because I happened to really like early Cataclysm. Everything Blizzard said in that blog about “dungeons are hard” resonated with me back then, and it resonates with me still. Admittedly, Retail doesn’t have the same problem that Cataclysm did. If you like 5-man content then there’s Mythic Dungeons for you.

Similarly, I’ve had a lot of fun in dungeons in TBC. I’ve mained a rogue, and depending on the group composition there are often situations where I get to use every single tool I have at my disposal. That’s when the game is fun.

The reward structure will be reworked. Blizzard said so, didn’t they? But again, it could fall completely flat on its face. We’ll have to wait and see how they intend to change the reward structure before we can discuss about that.

I don’t really think it will be excluding towards people not in BiS gear. I’d also like to dispel the notion that the Mythic Dungeon is excluding. The Mythic Dungeon has a tiered challenge. If you want to push it then you will have to have good gear and play well, that is true, and therein lies the problem of elitism and toxicity. But can it be any other way? Maybe you, as a player, ought to aim lower if you don’t want to elbow with that crowd (general statement and not targeted at any particular individual). That is what I did, personally. I don’t know what my record is in Mythic Dungeons but it is probably not amazing. Should that matter if I, in the end, had a fun experience?

You said something earlier I agree with:

I am very much the same. I find it deplorable that so many people chase easy rewards by engaging with boosting services and GDKP. By migrating from medium populated servers to the gargantuan servers. I have never engaged with that stuff.

However, systems like the Dungeon Finder changes how the game is played, not just for me but for everyone. That’s the problem. If I choose to play without it and I’m likely going to be completely stuck in my “social bubble” (i.e. only playing with guildees). The content that I like will also be changed; it will become something unfun and grindy.

Should WLK introduce the Dungeon Finder it’s probably not going to make me stop playing. I’ve been set to play WLK classic since even before it was announced, warts and all. But Blizzard is now trying to fix the very things I deemed to be problematic back in 2009-2010. I think they’ve zoned in on the correct issues and I remain cautiously optimisic that they’ll create a better dungeon experience for WLK this time around. And if they fail then nothing much was lost.

I never asked about progressive patching to begin with. 3.3.5 was fine as it was if you ask me. I can understand withholding LFD from phase 1 so people don’t use it for their first lvl 70-80 sprint, but from phase 2 onwards it should’ve been in. At the very least, it has much more of a title to being in the game, at some point, rather than a silly homebrewed LFG system that was never part of WotLK at any point in its history.

As for Retail, I couldn’t care less because I didn’t even manage to level to max before dropping it. And my dislike of it has nothing to do with LFD, and everything to do with the terrible state of classes, itemization, etc.

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Then a compromise I suggested way earlier might be in your taste, phase 1 you have lvl 15-70 open for RDF, phase 2 70-80 normals and then phase 3 heroics open up. It wouldnt be ideal for me personally but it would be a compromise that would make sense to me. The reason why I keep heroics away for a little bit longer is mainly to keep it closer to the original wrath but with how many people are clearly hurt over the no RDF im personally willing to have some sort of middle ground to meet at.

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But you’re not the one who’s “making offers” here, tbh. It’s the WoW devs, and they’re a bunch of monkeys who muse about “the spirit of classic” while wasting away in GDKP runs.

If they had at least hinted to the possibility of adding RDF again in a later patch, people wouldn’t be anywhere as pissed as they are right now for its outright, unconditional removal.

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OFC im not but its a suggestion I have put forwards that people could rally behind instead of drawing strong lines in the sand where everyone is a idiot according to someone else.

I mean, everyone has their own preferences and suggestions. I already mentioned mine - LFD from phase 2 onwards. But the devs seem to be stuck in their “vision.exe”, what with their “dungeon challenges” and whatnot (surely that’s not gonna make dungeon runs even more prohibitive for newer players!), so there seems to be no use to this until devs start listening to reason.

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Do you think that is going to be an issue in WLK? Classic has shown that the current playerbase will make mincemeat out of any old challenge. Their current target audience is not the curious new players who will try an MMORPG for the first time.

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Yeah it will be. Because, as ZA showed, if there is a challenge in the instance, people will take it for granted. Which means that if, say, they add a challenge to something like Nexus hc that’s geared for T8 players and forward, people will start demanding T8 or higher gear just for running Nexus. Much like people ask T5 if not T6 for ZA. Good luck being a new player or alt trying to gear up in late WotLK if it turns out like that.

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You guys make the same mistake. (by you guys, I mean the ones that for some reason do not want RDF). You think communities are the same back then and now. Back then THIS happened, indeed. Now it is different. You cannot bring this back with artificial ways (like removing RDF) because it can’t.

You will still have sharding BTW. And I would expect from you and the others to make a very vocal against-sharding threads. Because sharding hurt in-game social interaction much more than RDF.

I would like to see you in beta and talk again there about social interactions without RDF. And you will see how wrong is blizzard’s arguments for this decision.

To the rest of the guys in here. Why do you try to persuade these people? They are not in charge. I know this thread was about our opinions. But if you read again what is written in here and how the minority tries to support their opinion, you would understand it is a waste of time. And the most important; in the little chance someone from blizzard reads all these, she would be bored already.

My hope is they will see how bad this works in beta. How people react in beta. How people are sick of not having RDF in beta and change their minds. The LFG tool is SO bad I cannot find words. And it will get even worse when someone creates the first addon that can filter requests by GS in the notes (something like they did with RIO at retail). You will then look back at RDF with nostalgia.

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Thats the thing lot of people would be absolutely ok with something like this … look at tbc, they cut S3 season in half (or nearly a third) of what it was, if it would go this way in wotlk, we would have ICC + RDF in half a year anyway …

But blizz comes with some udder nonsense and just tries to nuke the game from orbit …

At least they didnt ruin dual talents …

Also some of the arguments, how rdf wont solve issues with dungeons … you would need to rebuild whole pve structure, introducing something like retail mythics and blizz would have to ban all stupid RMTs, bots, gdkps and other garbage that ruins the game for everyone …

But not only that would suddenly change the game from wotlk to retail classic, but it would also be too much work for blizz and we can be 100% sure they are not going to do anything like that …

So if I am to choose between absolute garbage that fixes nothing, or RDF that helps at least tiny little bit to cover up the issue … its very simple choice …

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The only people who are against RDF and are not completely morons are those who sells boosts or they play tanks and want to make their groups by excluding loot competition or reserve specific drops

Thats clearly not how it is, although you are right about me being a tank I have never excluded people that want the same loot as me. Im against it (in the begining of the expansion) because it promotes less reliance on guilds and therefore if a new person joins the game they are less likely to actually join a guild, the likelihood of them getting sweeped up in the GDKP trash is way higher if they dont have to look around for people and by extent see people from different guilds doing things. I have had people that have joined guilds I have been in after dungeon runs if nothing else just to get a easier time leveling up early on in both TBC and Vanilla classic. It might not be the majority who do that but a few people do it and that leads to more social interactions with them.

But to be as stupid as I can I will also leave a mirroring statement to what you wrote.
The only people who are for RDF are people who hate to talk with people and just care about themself and want to rush as quickly as possible to max level so they can buy gear for gold they have bought from some shady website.

See thats exactly what you sound like when you say

A genuine question for you, do you think more people will avoid GDKP by socialising in a random dungeon and joining the casual guild that will take them without gear or logs from tbc, or do you think more people will level to 80, hit a wall of not being able to get into heroic runs and be forced to either quit or buy their way into GDKPs with their leveling gear? Because to me the answer is glaringly obvious, you want to sacrifice a huge portion of playerbase to a life of GDKP and no dungeon runs so your one-per-server casual dad gamer guild can get a couple of sociable recruits from some normal dungeon runs.

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Is “challenging content bad and that’s why LFD is good” really the hill you want to die on?

This argument works both ways, “You cannot bring this back with artificial ways (like adding RDF at the start) because it can’t.”

I don’t want that either. That is true. Maybe both bad.

I did the opt-in. Still waiting for my key!

Here is my reply: “To the rest of the pro-LFD guys in here. Why do you try to persuade anti LFDers? The pro-LFDers are not in charge. I know this thread was about our opinions. But if you read again what is written in here and how the minority tries to support their opinion, you would understand it is a waste of time. And the most important; in the little chance someone from blizzard reads all these, she would be bored already.”

This argument also works both ways if you want it to.

I never pretended that a tool I never used or haven’t seen in action is perfect. It’s early beta, it will undergo changes.

“You will then look back at manual group formation with nostalgia.”

“A tiny little bit” is a weird place to settle when bigger and more drastic changes can be attempted.

No.

Not to try to answer in Cupìd’s place, but… With changes made to make dungeons relevant for the entirety there will be less-to-no incentive to sell boosts. Sad truth right now is that GDKP may be the only thing standing between dungeons being run and not being run at all in pug groups. Something needs to change, and LFD is a laughable tiny band-aid solution to something that runs deep into the game’s design. Blizzard is trying to mitigate that, and if that doesn’t work I’m convinced we’ll see your beloved retail automagic dungeon finder.

Because blizzard cant do bigger and more drastic changes …

Bigger and more drastic changes can be adding mythics into wotlk, which is garbage that noone wants
It can mean removing 5man dungeons altogether.
It can also mean adding emblems into real money store.

Bigger and more drastic changes mean that WotLK wont be WotLK anymore.

Why would you want to do bigger and more drastic changes, when keeping the game the way it was in the first place is thing that we know is going to work …

Why change 15 years old game that we know was just fine … if blizz wants to do save the game and do bigger and more drastic changes, they can remove all this trash from next expansion …

While there are small and less drastic changes, that are going to help the game billion times more than removing RDF, like adding modern auction house, yet blizz is somehow forgetting about that …

First fix the small stuff before you break the rest …