Why RDF is needed, why you all want it and why any other take is wrong

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
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Please read this post fully, before you comment, it will be painfully obvious if you didnt.
Lets start with some facts

  1. LFG spam is not social or a conversation, if “LFM nexus need tank” - “im tank” is a conversation to you, seek help.
  2. LFG spam goes by really fast, which means you can’t quest or farm or do achievements, anyhting really as well as youd like, it also means you need to stay in the city or by the dungeon entrance unless youre the type of person who only gets summons.
  3. People rarely talk in dungeons, there is almost never a need to, even now in TBC HCs, before the nerfs the most you get is “any food” “thx for group” all dialogue we will still see even with group finder.
    Source: vanilla, TBC, WOTLK, wow classic, TBC classic.
  4. RDF does not impact how social a group can be, if you’re a social person, being in RDF doesnt impact that at all, youre free to speak, you can ask people how their day is or what they do for work or whatever.
  5. You will still be using LFG alot, you’ll use it for raids, Pvp, arenas, group quests, crafting, trading and yes even still for Dungeons you might be in a que and need a tank so ask chat.
  6. RDF didnt even remotely impact the social experience, you have guildies to be as social as you like and LFG is still used everyday for other things.

I could go on, but my point is proven.

Now i will pre-emptively counter the common arguemnets you may have.

  1. “But i like to form groups to see who im inviting, make sure they arent noobs”
    Fine, do that, youl have friends and guildies to group with, most people dont care as pugs rarely fail and even with the buffs to HCs, people know this game backwards.

  2. “Teleporting to the dungeon makes the world fell small and ruins world PvP”
    You’ve been accepting summons since they were a thing, its a non issue, as for world PvP if the only downside is that honourless gankers cant gank…then, i could care less, give only PvE servers RDF, i dont care about pvp servers.

  3. " Cross realm made reputation matter less"
    Correct, i hope cross realm isnt in wotlk classic, cross realm was RDF only flaw.

  4. “The kick system was toxic”
    Also correct, hopefully blizz have the wisdom to make it better

These are all the ones i can think of at the moment.
Please read the entire post, its gonna be so cringe seeing replies from people who didnt, i hate having to repeat myself.
If you can make valid counter arguments (that i havent already addressed) i will be happy to refute them.
RDF isnt the same as wanting retail, i havent care about wow since wotlk ended.
Also blizz, keep the glory of the raider naxx mounts, no point removing them, naxx is getting buffed and people hate to rush.

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“why any other take is wrong”

I stopped there. How do you expect to have a discussion when you immediately tell the other side they’re completely wrong? Or maybe you just want to impose your view and who cares about everyone else.

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Woah, what a surprise a new RDF thread.

LFG tool will greatly help on that.

And sometime they do.

It does. If i have fun with someone during a dungeon we won’t be able to play together because he is from an other server.

Yeah. Being a “disposable random for an other server” didn’t affect players behavior. Especially when you can be replaced in no time just by pushing a button.

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Cross realm is a non issue too. Even on the smallest server people only really know about 1-3% of the playerbase. That’s not enough for a connected community to exist. There also is no meaningful backlash for bad behaviour in dungeons even without RDF. You can post about toxic players in the server discord or write in LFG chat, but the majority of players won’t care. So the toxic player might have a few players, that ignore him. But it’s just a fraction of the server population.
And even if he would ruin his reputation to a point, where he can’t play anymore, he can just make a new alt and play as if nothing happened.

In my opinion the kick system is better, than what we have now. Now the group leader has all the power. He could kick you before the endboss, because a friend that needs the boss just came online, if he likes.
The vote kick systems has a few fail saves. It’s only enabled after 15 minutes, so you can’t kick a person for superficial reasons, before even seeing him perform. And once it’s enabled you need the majority of the party to agree to the kick. Also I’ve heard everytime you vote kick, the time until you can vote kick again gets longer. I am not sure if that is true or not, but it’s harder to abuse the vote kick system, than to abuse kicking as group leader in a regular group.

Else I agree with your points. I would just add another point.

In my opinion the biggest plus of the RDF is, that it guarantees runs. In TBCC multiple times I’ve been trying to build a group for hours and still had to disband it in the end, because it never got full.
In RDF this can’t happen. Maybe you have to wait 1 hour as a DPS class, but then you are guaranteed to get into the dungeon. It’s much better than trying to build a group for 4 hours and not even run a dungeon in the end.

Also the RDF is more fair than regular group building. The community is meta obsessed. I’ve seen people search 30 minutes longer for a class, that allows to clear the dungeon 10 minutes faster.
The RDF doesn’t care about the class or specc. It treats everyone with the same roll equally.

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Yes by removing that spam too, like the RDF does. That’s not an argument against the RDF.

And they will with the RDF too. If players went to chat they chat if they don’t want to, they won’t. It’s irrelevant, how the group was formed here.

You can, if you or that player switches server. You could even just make an alt on that server to play with that person.

What you describe here is as social as not to talk to the locals when you are on vacation, because if you return home, you won’t be able to go out drinking with them.
You don’t always have to make friends to be social and not every player in the RDF is from another server.

What you describe is true for regular groups not for the RDF. In the RDF it’s not as easy to kick a person, as you make out out to be. In a regular group it is.

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As a staunch proponent of RDF I have to say this is a very weak thread. There are much better ways to argue for RDF and your section on counter-arguments is laughable, even I as a fan of RDF can dismiss 3/4 out of hand.

3/10 for writing it up and having your heart in the right place. Better luck next time. I suggest actually reading the arguments of the “against” side and how to dismantle them. It’s not by “you are wrong” and “don’t use it” and “it didn’t affect social environment in 2009”. You can start by reading some of the 700 post thread on the front page of this forum.

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Just disabled the cross-serv and problem solved.
And i don’t know how you could get some fun on a fast food dungeon with 0 tactics, 0 assigments and with a rush of 15min dg blue stuff.
Did you played on Wotlk during these last years ? I don’t think so. Because so only one time i get some fun with others peoples it was with a custom mythic dg on this expansion. There is no one reason to get “fun” like you are talking in dg, weird, but true.

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When it comes to crossfaction, they could just make a checkbox to enable and disable crossrealm, so players, who prefer playing with players of the same realm, will be able to do so, even if they use RDF and those players on low pop servers can play dungeons, they wouldnt be able to, if it was realm only. Should be quite simple to implement and highly effective, since it solves nearly every issue thats related to the negative impacts of the RDF but keeps the upsides of crossrealm.

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I only needed to read your first point. You do not even understand the arguments that you are arguing against.

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Because im so certain i am correct, only those who are not thinking logically dont want RDF.

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That’s not the social aspect of it. The time it takes to build a group gets you all talking. Everyone is from your realm, and you start to notice the same names again and again, and out in the real world. That builds up a feeling of community.

This hasn’t been my experience at all. I can’t think of a single dungeon I’ve done in the past week that didn’t have some kind of banter happening.

Having other areas to be social doesn’t mean that removing the social aspect of another isn’t reducing the games ability to form a social environment. Silent RDF spam was the single biggest killer of social interaction.

One argument you missed is the world cohesiveness. Generally speaking, there are three main reasons to play an mmorpg

-Gameplay
-Story & world
-Social aspect

It’s already established that RDF damages the social aspect, but I’m more concerned with the story & world part. As it stands, dungeons make sense in the world. They are locations of great danger, and a band of nameless, expendable adventurers are suited to go and tackle that situation. Powerful runestones can be used to summon all the members to the location. It all makes sense in an in-world reality setting.

Adding RDF breaks that world-cohesiveness. You sit in the capital city, suddenly you’re in a dungeon, suddenly you’re back in the capital city, suddenly you’re back in the same dungeon, suddenly you’re back in the capital city, suddenly you’re in a different dungeon because hey levels.

This is something given less appreciation than it deserves: the world needs to be cohesive, and make sense. World building is what made Vanilla and TBC so successful, you were never the focus of the game, the world was the focus of the game and you were just lucky enough to be there.

This isn’t just isolated to WoW either, its a large part of the reason that Elden Ring has been so successful, and why Dark Souls has such a dedicated community that trawls through item descriptions to learn about the world, its why FFXIV has such a committed playerbase, and it’s why people remember dungeons like Deadmines, Hellfire Citadel, The Nexus, but don’t remember dungeons from later expansions.

Once the world building starts to decline, you’re only left with gameplay and social reasons to play, but the social aspect will start to take a hit with this change too. So if gameplay is the only reason left to play, then why play WoW when there are so many other games with much more engaging gameplay.

And this is reflected in the subscriber count: after wotlk blizz made moves to make the game more convenient, and reduce the role of the world in the game. That’s when we see numbers decline, which isn’t due to lack of time or interest in the i.p. of warcraft itself, as people surge back in millions to play later expansions, and that’s the story that brings them back.

But hey, that’s worth sacrificing so you can sit in dalaran riding in circles waiting for a queue to pop and don’t have to bother whispering people right?

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Actually thinking on this: I was running dungeons with my cousin in the US last night, but I can’t remember the names of the current dungeons off the top of my head…

I can visually remember them and the pulls and tank tactics, but I can’t actually remember the names of them…

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So far we have people who clearly didnt read the whole post, making bad arguments ive already gone over and others claiming they can counter my arguments, but they clearly cant.
If i was wrong, i wouldnt speak, still waiting on a single valid argument as to why im not correct on every point.

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This is my answer.

If you played Wotlk recently, you are free to prove me i’m wrong, if you just played Wotlk 10 years ago, then you are stuck in your old memories.

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RDF has costs and benefits, the whole argument comes down which outweights which. You can’t argue for it by just saying “it’s logical”, there are people here for whom potential loss of “finding new friends and guildmates and having people be accounable for toxic behaviour” will outweight any amount of convenience and benefit and even existance of dungeon runs at all that we can possibly name.
In either case, what’s the point? You can construct a brilliand for or agains argument, and maybe swey a few fence sitters who read it to favour your side. Blizzard wont even read it and I think they aren’t adding it simply because they can’t get it to work.

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Your arguments are subjective, you can’t just declare every counter-argument isn’t acceptable.

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That’s not how it is for 99% of the groups. You obviously didn’t PUG a lot.
I’ve been playing on a server with about 1500 players, so it was really small. But even on this server I rarely saw names twice.
And the only thing people were talking about while forming a group was, how it always takes ages to form groups or often just: “Sorry, I have to go. This is taking to long.”

If you really think this is some valuable social interaction, you either have Stockholm syndrom or you don’t know what you are talking about, because you didn’t PUG at all.

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I’ve leveled exclusively by doing dungeons on my warrior and paladin, since I simply don’t like questing. So on Firemaw, one of the highest population realms, it’s definitely like this.

Sounds like you’re the one that hasn’t done much pugging

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Ok obviously I didn’t PUG because I rarely encountered players a second time in dungeon. What kind of logic is that?

Maybe in leveling dungeons it’s different, because the pool of players to pick from is much smaller. But from level 60-70 and especially on max level, there is absolutely no chance you’ve kept running into the same players over and over when there are 14k players on the server.
Even if we assume that only 10% of the players are running PUG dungeons, the probability to run into the same player twice in a pool of 1400 players is 0.28%
The probability to run into the same player 3 times becomes 0.000784%.

So either you’ve made an really unprobable experience or you are straight up lying here. My point stays. For 99% of players it’s not like you initially described it to be.

I guess you’ve been just running with guild and friends mostly and that’s why you kept running into the same people in dungeons over and over and also why you had banter during the group building process.
But this has nothing to do with PUGing and obviously you’ve only played with a minuscule part of the server then and don’t have any idea what PUGing and the community is like.
So you are not qualified to talk on this topic.

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No.

Aaaanyyyywaaaaayyyyy: I don’t want RDF, because I want classic to be the legacy game in its spirit, I return to, when I don’t feel like playing retail. I don’t care, if it’s a 1 to 1 recreation. I only care about how it feels like to play

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