LFD? What LFD?
Not to belabor the topic of WoW Classic and LFD, but Rohan brings up an amazingly relevant point:
The real irony here is that Retail sees far less use of the Dungeon Finder than Classic would. Mythic and Mythic Keystone dungeons don’t use the Dungeon Finder and automatic group creation, they use the Premade Group Finder. So really, the only people using the Dungeon Finder are people levelling, people doing dungeons to finish quests, or people gearing up a little at the very start of an expansion. Otherwise everyone is doing dungeons the old-fashioned way, even having to travel to the instance entrance in the world.
I think it would be difficult for even the more ardent Classic purist to be upset over a Premade Group Finder compromise. It allows you to advertise a PUG to your local server community without needing to spam Trade chat. What would the counter-argument possibly be? Yeah, it didn’t exist during Wrath, but LFD did so… are you an originalist or no?
To be honest, I completely forgot about the Premade Group Finder because A) I’m not playing WoW and B) I had less than zero interest in Mythic dungeons when I was playing. I would still prefer an LFD system overall for less serious content though, especially for those on smaller servers. Sometimes you just want to press a button and get group content. If it’s good enough for PvP, why not PvE?
Posted on April 29, 2022, in Commentary, WoW and tagged LFD, Originalist, Premade Group Finder, Rohan, WoW Classic. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
In An Age 
Dungeon finder was my go to for end of Wrath when it came out, And Cata because we had valor for one reason. But the second was that by the time I got home had dinner and logged in, most everyone had their runs done for the day, and when you would ask in guild no one would reply. It was all we really had. Depending on your server you could spend hours looking for a group.
Since BfA, I’ve pretty much sworn off running instanced content. The go go go mentality get it done as fast as possible just makes the entire experience not worth it. I think I’ve just gotten too old. So if Dragonflight has a lot of solo outside content, that isn’t punishing to do endlessly, I will probably buy the expansion.
I don’t think dungeon finder or LFR ruined grouping, so much as the mentality of those chain running it for speed did.
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Yeah, when LFD first came out, I ran it daily on three tanking toons and one DPS. The sheer novelty of being able to get a group instantly and get the daily dungeon done in 10 minutes instead of socially wrangling people for half and hour was amazing. Then Blizzard fucked around in Cataclysm, ballooning the DPS queues to 45+ minutes in their poorly-thought through attempts to make dungeons hard again, which led to my first-ever break with the game.
Ultimately though, I do believe LFR is the sort of ultimate form of the tool and solves most all design problems. It makes raiding content relevant to everyone without encouraging burnout, and neatly solves DPS queue issues at the same time.
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Now if they can get better with initial tuning so it’s not 8 stacks
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Premade group finder is what groupfinder should’ve been. It works great for everything, and if they had implemented that at the start, I think there would be very few complaints, even though the effect is still very similar
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