Since the discussion regarding LFD is mainly about “yes” or “no”, I would like to point out how LFD could be implemented, in case we get it as a defining key feature for the upcoming classic wotlk.
Desired implementation of the LFD tool
LFD group building should favor players of one realm
Only if a group couldn’t be formed within ~10-15 minutes due to the lack of players queuing on a realm, the search will be expanded to other servers as well
this will help keeping server communities together (social aspect) and still make the tool useful for players on less populated servers.
Keep itemlevel restriction as it was (187) for heroics, so players need to go to non heroics first to gear up
Those who want to go there regardless of gear can still travel there and walk in with a premade group.
Remove the dungeon daily quests, since the reward will be included in the first random dungeon (heroic) as it is later
The additional badges for queuing random heroics could be removed, since these additional badges were not available until patch 3.3.
Keep lockout for all heroics, so players can only do them only once a day as it was intended
Premade players using LFD can only queue and be assigned to dungeons all members don’t have an id for yet. Once no open id is shared between the premade users, or one player has all heroics on id for a day, queuing heroics will become impossible.
Healer and tanks should get a small additional reward bag like for LFD/LFR in Shadowlands or the quest-bag for alliance players for winning battlegrounds in tbc.
since healers and tanks are usually outnumbered by dps, the additional reward potentially motivates some players into these roles
Conclusion
With these conditions server communities of of higher populated servers would still stick together and those of less populated servers would be able to find groups at all times. Players who misbehave will still be known on their server and repetitively toxic players can be punished on site by the group vote kick and furthermore anything else, that is possible today. Tanks and healer would get additional motivation to queue up, making queue times for dps players faster. The overall rewards would be the same as it was back in 3.0-3.2, just the group making would shift from LFG-channel to the LFD-tool, resulting in fastest possible group creation for non premade players and the LFG-channel gets clearer and easier to use.
I appreciate this thread as a way to reach some form of middle ground to satisfy as many players as possible. You did not mention dungeon teleport - how would You see it being handled?
Also: I did not see anyone mentioning it, but have You given any thought to the possibility of cross-realm connections being an option to turn on/off in the game options menu? If it were possible (software-wise I mean) would You like it to be implemented? Do You think it would be beneficial, detrimental, or indifferent?
Since 3 of 5 players get ported / summoned anyway, I would just port all players to the dungeon, as it was implemented in wotlk. The reason is, that besides heroic dungeons, everyone leveling will have a hard time to travel to their designated dungeon. A leveling alliance player will have trouble going to the scarlet monastery and horde player to deadmines. Not porting these players will result in players disbanding the group and queuing again. On the other hand, on max level, there will be 2 players flying to the port stone and summon the 3 remaining players. If all get ported instead, I dont think it will be much of a loss of experience.
How could FLD ruin world exploration, if it’s already possible to completely bypass it, as I said? Besides, have You been levelling any alts recently? Because I’ve been. I have 3 level 70 characters already, all levelled up from scratch in TBC. the world is already barren, with Blizzard’s level boost & mage/pala boosting in place. I’d say at this point it’s hard to destroy world exploration any further.
You managed to provide actually useful input, nice. Having the ilvl restriction for heroics and only adding the random dungeon reward past the daily later on make sense. I’m not so sure about the lockouts. The benefit of doing more dungeons that lockouts is virtually zero after the first week of wotlk, but it enables people to join virtually any other group without issues.
Favoring players of your own realm sounds nice on paper, but on megaservers it doesn’t matter, and for smaller servers it makes queue times longer. Lowpop realms don’t need the additional disadvantage.
Dungeons aren’t what make people go into the world. Farming does that, just that you now compete mostly against bots. Questing does that, but only until you reach maxlevel. Curiosity does it whenever you like to.
To get to a dungeon, you align your character and hit autorun until you get there. That is not exploration. Exploration is when you, for yourself, want to go somewhere and explore. It has nothing to do with 5 man dungeons, at all.
The requirement to discover the entrance was not to make the open world more populated. It was to ensure that people could find the entrance when they died.
A lot of the time you spend questing in classic to level, after LFD, it was not the case. As LFD is a huge convenience over questing to level.
Levelling via questing is something lots of us do when they hit max-level, via alts, sure not everyone does, but it plays a big part still.
This is classic, my personal opinion (and feel free to disagree) if you want convenience go play retail. It’s convenient to the point were nothing feels rewarding.
First of all…If you are a dps the optimal way to level is actually to do quests while you wait in que. And that’s what most people will do because most people are dps. That’s why having LFD makes for a more varied leveling experience instead of just questing because you can’t find a group for a low lvl dungeon.
Second…Even if it’s optimal to lvl only through LFD like if you are a tank/healer…they can just increase the questing exp rate to compensate and leave you with a choice instead of being forced into questing as a dps spec.
Third… ‘‘if you want convenience go play retail’’ makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER when talking about a feature that actually came in Wotlk. Sure let’s just remove dual spec , battleground NPCs in major cities , warlock summoning inside instances and any other convenient thing ever added in classic because you always have retail if you don’t like it ! Because the only difference between retail and classic is a few convenience features right??
I was completely astounded when an actual game dev spouted such nonsense during the announcement.
But if you really want to go down that ‘‘logic’’…here is a way that makes at least a bit more sense. How about the people that don’t like LFD just go play vanilla classic or whatever else instead of a classic version of an expansion that actually had the feature??
Thats another feature that should not be removed. Blizzard added it because they realized swapping 6 glyphs every time you want to switch between tank/dps or pvp/pve spec, is just too much. If there were no glyphs like in tbc, having no dual spec wouldnt be so bad. But playing 2 roles or pve and pvp will cost 10 times the amount of gold it does now.
And regarding the topic, its not the wotlk fans that should play retail, if they want wotlk-features, its the ones hating these features, that should keep playing vanilla or tbc instead of trying to turn wotlk into tbc 2.0. FAITHFUL RECREATION of an expansion is what we wanted, not vanilla with wotlk content.
Which TBC? For the majority of wrath LFD didn’t exist, and LFD is not content, it is a system of how you group up to do actual content. To indirectly claim people who do not want it in the game are not “wotlk” fans is just grossly dishonest, but yeah, go to retail.
When all other arguments have failed they always pull the good ol’ “gO tO rEtAiL”, which funnily enough makes even less sense than all their other arguments.
You know they lost at that point.
Anti lfd enthusiasts dont seem to have better arguments, so we need to accept that they claim there is not any noticeable difference between faithful recreated wotlk and retail. The best argument up to this point is cross realm social accountability, which is a legit concern. However, considering the dead realms, these players have two options without lfd: either dont play dungeons at all or transfer to another server.
As I stated, it would be possible to make lfd cross server only or at least prioritize cross server before expanding the search.
Most lfd-advocates would be alright with adding rfd later like it was back in the day, but not adding it at all is neither faithful recreation, nor does it address the current queuing problems with overly spammed lfg-chat/bulletin or dead servers.
Thats not even an argument. You think “classic” is like vanilla forever. We wanted to play old expansions, because we liked them as they were. Every expansion had new features, many because they were needed when the game changed (like dual spec was needed when glyphs made respeccing regularly too expensive). They stacked up each time until we reached the currently newest expansion. If you dont want new features, old expansions besides classic vanilla arent ment for you. Flying mounts, arenas, catchup mechanics, dual spec, rdf, they all are part of a process. If you dont like the process, you should stop at whichever expansion you think its enough - not trying to create vanilla with new worlds.
Personally I found every expansion after wotlk heavily lacking class design/pvp wise and quit within few months of each expansion (didnt play wod and bfa though).