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Classically Classic
I kind of glossed over it amongst all the other WoW news, but let’s talk about Dungeon Finder, aka LFD.
Wrath of the Lich King Classic is coming. What is being intentionally left out is the Dungeon Finder, a feature that debuted at the tail-end of the expansion. According to Brian Birmingham, this was done for reasons:
“We know that the Classic audience is more interested in long-term social engagement, that feeling that comes from reaching out to people, talking to them about how you’re going to group, trying to coordinate, who’s going to do what role walking to the dungeon together, trying to figure out how you’re going to get to the dungeon, who’s going to summon, maybe run into a PVP fight on the way,” Birmingham says. “And then you finally get in there and you have friends that stick together with you.”
Did anyone read that paragraph and actually go “Yeah, that’s exactly what was missing in my life”?
I do not necessarily want to get into the semantic fight of what is Classic and what is not – Blizzard has tinkered with the formula of what is “classic” from the very beginning, and it’s a fool’s errand besides. But I do feel like this decision and the reasoning behind it is firmly in the “tail wagging the dog” territory. Which is funny, considering the lengths the retail WoW devs go to to specifically ignore player feedback on their many disastrous designs. Perhaps the Classic devs are more acutely aware of the temporary nature of their work if that playerbase evaporates.
That said, Dungeon Finder is indeed a conundrum. As Wilhelm succinctly puts it:
I have been down the “where does classic end?” path before, but I think you could make a very strong argument that Dungeon Finder is the dividing line between “classic” and “modern” World of Warcraft. Yes, Cataclysm changed the world, making Azeroth a different place, but Dungeon Finder changed how we played.
I will agree that Dungeon Finder is the bright red line between when classical WoW turned into retail.
Or to put it a different way: Dungeon Finder represented the democratization of WoW.
I did not start playing in vanilla, but I experienced the full depths of despair that was pugging in TBC and early Wrath. What is missing from the Brian Birmingham quote above is the 40+ minutes you spent in Trade Chat forming a group, the next 15 getting everyone through the door (“I was waiting for a summon” “Oops, I left my reagents back in the bank”), and finally having the entire run ended abruptly when someone left or got fed up. Back in 2008 burning two hours to maybe finish one heroic dungeon was okay. It certainly wasn’t going to continue being fine for long either way though.
Maybe that wasn’t your experience. Maybe you were privileged enough to have joined the game with IRL friends, or got a guild invite at the right time and place to meet people willing to routinely run dungeons with you. In which case… the Dungeon Finder should not have negatively impacted you at all. The only people it would have “hit” would have been GearScore tryhards lording over Trade Chat, or perhaps extroverts looking to hook up with randos. Thing is, both of those types would be just at home in a guild anyway. So again, no loss.
Dungeon Finder opened up the game to solo players. WoW has always had a reputation as being solo-friendly compared to its peers, but within the game itself there was a rather abrupt progression stopping point at the level cap. You could grind reputation dailies for blue gear and… that’s it. It’s fine to say that MMOs are better with friends, and to encourage the fostering of friendships within the game, but this was all stick. It also made for some questionable design considerations when 80% of the design effort went into content that only 20% of the playerbase ever saw.
Did Dungeon Finder affect WoW culture? Sure… in a roundabout way. You cannot exactly type “GOGOGO” in a hand-picked TBC pug nor can operate in radio silence the entire time. And it is certainly true success rates of Dungeon Finder groups is dependent on the difficulty of the content in question, thereby putting downward pressure on (default) dungeon difficulty. See: the Cataclysm LFD Disaster. But as the esteemed Rob Pardo said back when Dungeon Finder was released:
The other piece is that the WoW playerbase is becoming more casual over time. People who were hardcore into MMOs, they joined us first, but the people we’re acquiring over the years are casual. They heard about the game from a friend of a friend, and maybe it’s their first MMO – maybe it’s their first game. The game has to evolve to match the current player.
This was from the lead designer of vanilla and TBC, not some random intern or junior B Team dev. And this was from when Dungeon Finder was first released, so it wasn’t that it caused the playerbase to become more casual over time. Rob Pardo actually went on to say: “To be completely honest, [the Looking For Group tool] is a feature I wanted in the game when we launched the game.” Dungeon Finder was not an accident, it was not a concession to some casual boogieman. It was intentional! Which makes its removal from Wrath Classic such a contortion. What is trying to be preserved technically never existed. This is a do-over attempt with a self-selected group of purists. Which is cute – I hope Blizzard eventually releases dungeon completion rates.
Perhaps the devs did come to regret the Dungeon Finder inclusion and/or unintentional consequences over time. Certainly they felt that way about flying as the years went on. But warts and all, the Dungeon Finder saved WoW for me and presumably millions of others. What was “lost” was never really desired by me in the first place, e.g. ingratiating oneself to strangers to complete a 20-minute dungeon for badge loot. If you want a static group and a sense of accomplishment, join a guild and raid something. Opposition to Dungeon Finder is even less rational these days as the devs have included scaling Mythic difficulty to dungeons for several expansions. Hard group content never went away.
The only thing that did disappear is the dependency on social networking skills… for low-tier group content. If your guild/friend group fell apart because everyone could now get their dungeon needs met with anonymous strangers, chances are that the “bonds” were not quite as strong as you perceived. Sorry, champ: if they really wanted to play with you, they would be playing with you.
Ultimately, I suppose we will just have to see how this all plays out. Maybe the Classic community will love spamming LFG and/or Trade chat to fill the Pit of Saron group for the 50th time. My guess is that Blizzard will end up putting in Dungeon Finder by the time ICC is released, or else they are really going to need to tinker with the badge and loot economy.
Waycrest Manor
I completed my first dungeon in Battle for Azeroth, which was Waycrest Manor.
The first boss was the Queue. The average time to get in was 8 minutes as DPS, and I waited 45 minutes. While I waited, I fished out in the Horde area, as a level 112 Demon Hunter. The only reason I was doing a dungeon at all is because Anchor Weed Rank 2 required running said dungeon. With Anchor Weed currently selling for 550g apiece, it felt worth doing. The fish being 50g-100g apiece was bonus.
Forty-five minutes is a long time though.
Once inside, I was immediately reminded of that one dungeon in GW2, which was also inside a mansion. I was going to look it up just now, but does anyone care what it’s actually called, even if they play GW2? The bottom line is that Waycrest Manor reminded me of that other one because they are both terribly designed. You can’t have an MMO with a floating camera and then do a bunch of interior houses. It’s dumb, players can’t see shit, and you fight the camera more than the mobs.
The dungeon run was successful, but that was either because our healer was god-like or the tuning was low, even by LFD standards. More than once, I accidentally pulled extra groups of mobs trying to utilize Fel Rush, especially since my Azerite Powers boosted it. This included accidentally pulling one of the bosses (Raal). Somehow we muddled through it all – probably because the healer was a Monk – and I got my Anchor Weed book and we defeated the final boss.
My druid is another herbalist, and I’m debating whether or not to try and knock out the quest sooner or later. Respeccing as a tank would certainly help with queue times, but I’m a bit leery of the dungeon in general. And, you know, getting back on the saddle in terms of tanking.
Or I could just farm leather/herb for another 45 minutes while sitting in the queue and not worry about respeccing at all, trying to change Azerite Powers, etc etc. Hmm. Tough choice.
Tank One for the Team
I have been following Overwatch’s “one-trick pony” debacle off-and-on for a few months now. The official word is that no one gets banned for picking just 1-2 heroes and ignoring the team composition. The unofficial word is that you should be banned for not picking a character that best helps the team. Several Top 500 players seemingly get banned for one-tricking, and Gevlon sees a conspiracy to sell lootboxes.
Thing is, the overall system is such a shitshow that I almost agree with Gevlon that there has to be a conspiracy. The alternative is that the designers A) have never participated in a school project in their life, B) never played WoW, and/or C) never played their own damn game for 5 minutes.
See, the problem is this:
We built Overwatch around the concept of teamwork, and we believe the game is much more fun for everyone in a match when we’re picking heroes that contribute to the overall success of the team. At times, this means we’ll be playing our mains; other times, we should be trying to help the team by choosing heroes that round out the team’s composition. We won’t be actioning you if you only play your main, but we also don’t believe this is the ideal way to play Overwatch—especially in competitive settings.
Imagine the following: you are playing WoW and you hit the queue button for Looking For Dungeon. After a minute or so, you zone into the dungeon with five other people. As you stand there looking at one another, you have 40 or so seconds to figure out who is going to be the tank, who the healer, and who the DPS. Oh, and the dungeon itself has a time limit, and the bosses will change based on the classes and specs you choose. Good luck!
It’s an absurdity in a MMO-like setting, but the designers actually think it works in Overwatch. And it does for a bit, because there are X number of people who are willing to take one for the team and choose a character they don’t like to play in order to give the team composition a chance at success.
A team composition that was not chosen as a team, mind you, but rather by the whims of whoever insta-locked the DPS first. So in order to have a chance at winning, you have to reward the selfish behavior of others. And let me tell you, there is nothing more toxic than the feeling you experience when you take one for the team and the team loses.
Possible solutions are relatively straight-forward:
- Allow players to queue for roles (Tank, Healer, DPS, Flex)
- Create in-game Guild or Clan functionality, so players can organize themselves
- Only allow premades in Competitive modes
- Do nothing, while tacitly admitting your failure as a designer
Thus far, the Overwatch team is decidedly choosing the last option.
Final Final Fantasy (For Now)
I gave FF14 six months. But I just can’t take it anymore.
Obviously I did not play it as my primary game, else I would not have ended at level 42. That had less to do with my motivation and more to do with the fact that it simply isn’t fun. There is zero satisfying about FF14’s combat – none of the attacks have any weight, and it’s all just flashing lights and high-pitched screeches. I might have been able to get over that, if questing had any meaning. But it doesn’t. Maybe WoW has “corrupted” me into believing one should be able to traverse a narrative without mandatory grinding breaks, but that’s what on offer here.
The final straw was more recent. The day before, I was once again stuck a third of the way into level 41 and the Main Story Request required level 42 to continue. I joined a group of three friends and we ran a dungeon and guildhest in order to get enough XP to get over the hump. The next day, I played through 3-4 MSQs and once again got stuck halfway to the required level 43. So, I queued up in the LFG equivalent and started playing around on my phone.
Then, 23 minutes later, the queue popped. It was a one-boss, no-trash encounter. No loot, shit XP. Fantastic. I queued again, and 17 minutes got into a more traditional dungeon. Except by the time I got to the end of it, I still had not leveled up. I was halfway to 43 with full rested XP at the start, and still needed 25% of a bar to go.
People complain about questing in WoW where you out-level the quests in a zone before reaching the end, but the alternative is apparently completing a zone and then farming public quests/dungeons for days. No thank you.
There is always a chance that I come back a year or whatever down the road. Perhaps after Square Enix fixes their dumbass game design. But for now, I am done. Yearly attempt over.
Beginning of Endgame
I have been at the level 110 cap in Legion for about a week now. A lot of hit, and a little miss.
World Quests (WQ) are an interesting variation of the traditional WoW endgame daily quest grind. You get an “Emissary quest” every day (accumulating to three total), which gives you some general direction: complete four WQs of that specific faction, get bonus rep and a chest full of goodies.
What’s odd about the system are two things. First, the interface for this is all weird. Maybe an addon will solve this (Edit: there are several), but I find it awkward having to zoom into each individual zone and hover over the WQ icons to see the rewards. Don’t really care all that much about Artifact Power or gold at the moment, and a whole lot more for the free gear.
And that’s actually my second concern with WQs: it does weird things to incentives. Basically, some of your WQs are going to reward gear straight-up, and the relative quality of this gear increases as your average ilevel increases. I’m not sure of the limitations of this system, e.g. if every armor slot is open season, but you better believe I’m willing to click on some objects and/or kill X mobs for the equivalent of heroic dungeon gear. Then you sometimes get Mythic gear WQs for defeating dungeons at any difficulty. Which, yeah, provides a pretty big incentive to run dungeons.
Incidentally, my DPS dungeon queues the last few days have actually been 3 minutes. One time it was actually instant, which caused a moment of panic as I thought I accidentally queued as a tank. I think WQs are the same across regions, and that might be the reason why a given dungeon would have no queues. Or possibly more people are willing to be tanks, given how easy questing is as one.
Gold-wise, I broke 100,000g last night. All as a Gatherer mind you, as the AH continues to be throttled. I suppose the expansion is still new – and raids have just came out – but the prices of some of these goods is rather surprising. Either Blizzard has gotten the farming bot situation finally resolved, or everyone is still flush with gold from Garrisoncraft, because 70g 100g+ Foxflower is crazy. That herb in particular is not only easy to farm, it can proc a literal fox that runs around and drops 20-30 herbs. If I cared more about wanting more gold, I’d be doing that every night. Fjarnskaggl is also crazy, and Starlight Rose? 280g apiece.
Given the profitability of Herbalism, I went ahead and dropped Mining on my druid. I started up Alchemy, under the assumption that if herbs were so profitable, adding some labor in there might increase that profit margin. As it turns out, I understand now: Alchemy got hosed. Basically everything is gated through a half-dozen or more dungeon quests. Not just high-tier recipes either – you don’t get the Alchemy trinket or transmutes until the end of a long, multi-dungeon quest-line. Flasks are after heroic boss kills. Rank 2 recipes also drop from dungeon bosses.
And then you have recipes themselves, which require ridiculous shit even for cosmetic items. Skystep Potion requires four (4) Starlight Roses. To move at 150% speed for 8 seconds. At current prices, that’s over 1000g a potion. Yeah, herbs will probably be cheaper a year from now. But Starlight Rose in particular is an herb that can actually proc failures.
In any case, I am overall comfortably coasting right along at the endgame. I spent another WoW token to resub, and the general gameplay of collecting the easy WQ gear and herbing my way to 10,000g by the end of the session is satisfying. At some point I am going to check out Demon Hunters, and then take a look at my rogue and/or other alts. My other alts will be a problem though, I suspect: most are trapped pre-Draenor, and I never unlocked flying there.
We will just have to see how engaged I stay with the druid.
Social Dungeoneering
With Legion, I feel that Blizzard solved a major source of social friction and then almost immediately made it even worse than before.
As you may or may not know, by default LFD queues in Legion are Personal Loot, which neatly solves the long-standing issue of loot whore/ninjaing. But this also made it feel like nobody was getting any actual loot, so Blizzard added a big prompt notifying when other people won stuff. Of course, this highlighted those situations when someone won useless (to them) loot, and people started pining for the days when they could pass on/trade loot to each other. So Blizzard made the items tradable as long as you already had something with a higher ilevel in that slot.
This culminated in my recent Neltharion’s Lair run, wherein I won some lower ilevel gloves and missed the whispers from the healer after the penultimate boss. Hey, the chat box gets pretty full sometimes with the near non-stop narration, okay? Taking my silence as some sort of snub – or perhaps simply engaging in some vindictive blackmail – the healer simply stopped healing me. After eating dirt for a second time in front of the trash leading to the final boss, and getting emotes instead of a rez, I asked “Did I do something wrong? :(” assuming that I was not following some trash mechanic. “At last he speaks.” Ah, I see. I trade the gloves and received healing for the last fight.
This sort of convoluted situation has since occurred three more times in different contexts. Boss dropped a 825 helm and the Demon Hunter traded it to me, but seemed to almost regret his decision. “Are you really going to use that?” I suppose he was asking since I had the 2-piece set bonus from the Order Hall armor. Another time some gloves dropped and the winner asked who needed it, and two party members must have gotten in a furious whisper war, because the run stopped for a solid 2 minutes before something was hashed out.
Finally, I won some lower-ilevel wrists in my latest dungeon run, and basically spent the rest of the run trying to inspect our Bear tank to see if they were an upgrade to him. They were, I surreptitiously traded them to him instead of the Demon Hunter, and went on with my day.
Hey, remember when all of this was solved by hitting Need or Greed? I do.
Seriously though, if Blizzard is going to add all of this tradable Personal Loot nonsense, they should probably invest in an UI element that asks if you want to Pass on the loot. If you hit Yes, it should pop up a Need or Greed prompt for everyone. If you hit No, the item could still be tradable in case you want to give the item to a particular person without advertising or whatever. Done and done.
OverDungeon
I was reading a recent article from Murphy regarding MMOs needing to be more social, and he gave a few different approaches. This part in particular stuck out to me:
Final Fantasy XIV’s commendations are a great start, but I think those could be turned up to 11. Promote adding strangers to your friends list or repeat grouping with others. Create a more prominent reputation system so players are more aware of how the server views them.
When trying to visualize how MMOs could do the above, my mind wandered to Overwatch’s end-of-game cards. Those cards are not a perfect system by any means, but it is always nice on those rare occasions to be recognized for your contribution.
He really was annoying as hell the whole game.
Of course, that screenshot also demonstrates the other side of being “social.” Read the chat box.
Then it finally struck me why Overwatch makes me so damn salty: this is a group-based game. Of course, right? But think about it. Imagine every failed dungeon run you’ve had, where the Rogue kept drawing aggro trying to Sap, where the Mage refused to Sheep, where the Hunter had on Aspect of the Pack the entire goddamn time, and so on.
That is Overwatch.
Every time you start a map and four people immediately pick DPS classes. Every time you feel obligated to pick a tank/healer character, for the Nth time that night. Every time you take on that literally thankless mantle and those same DPS derp it up the whole match, leaving you to die. When your teammates waste their Ultimate abilities killing one guy they chased into a room a thousand feet away from the payload. When no one is willing to change characters to counter the enemy’s composition, and you can’t because that means there won’t be a tank/healer anymore.
That is Overwatch.
In larger games like Battlefield 4, things sometimes hinge on the outcome of small engagements, but mostly it is an aggregate struggle across a 20 minute fight. Overwatch is much more intimate, like a 6-player dungeon. And whereas I could content myself with a high Support score in BF4 (revives score just as high as kills), Overwatch provides no such relief. The only scoreboard you have access to is your own. If you are lucky, you might get that card at the end of the match, but it’s fairly irrelevant by that time. And moreover, it’s a cold comfort when you lose.
For the record, I do believe a commendation system would be useful in MMOs, Overwatch, and basically any game. On the other hand, just like in real life, reputation is a function of the size of your social circle. If there are a million people cycling through the LFD queue, the 500 or so you’ll encounter is a rounding error. If you want to queue with the good players again, you’re going to have to do more than give them a commendation; you’re going to have to give them a friend request.
Huge Wildstar Elder Content Nerf
Welp, time to pack it in, cupcake. Wildstar had a good run, a solid 24 days of hardcoreness before it was nerfed to the ground:
Based on the feedback we’ve been getting both from you and our own internal testing, we are planning on making revisions to the way Superb-quality loot is awarded in dungeons and adventures. Simply put, we currently place too much value on completing gold runs for veteran level content. By placing Superb-quality rewards behind a gate of near-perfect PUG performance, we have fostered a “Gold runs or bust” mentality that is negatively affecting our group play experience. We’d much rather people engage with the content and complete the runs they start.
Therefore, we will soon be implementing the following changes:
- The existing gold medal rewards are being removed from gold medal completion.
- These rewards will instead drop off the final bosses or encounters for dungeons and adventures.
- The table from which this loot drops has a chance to be selected and is granted in addition to that bosses regular loot.
- Any medals earned instead will instead give the group bonus rolls on an instance-wide loot list, at the end of the instance, on top of extra coin and experience rewards.
- By way of example, completing a bronze medal would provide one bonus reward roll on top of the regular boss kill and completion reward, while a silver medal would provide two bonus rolls and a gold medal would provide three bonus rolls.
- The items on these rolls are randomly selected from all equipment rewards that could drop from any boss or encounter inside that instance.
- Each of these bonus rolls has a smaller, flat chance to select from the list of superb rewards.
We want groups to complete full runs of the dungeons and adventures, regardless of the medal earned. Instead of needing to disband immediately when a gold run fails, the Superb-quality rewards are available by working together to get through the instance.
Simply put: if your group runs Veteran Sanctuary of the Swordmaiden, all you need to do to earn a shot at Superb-quality loot is defeat Spiritmother Selene. No more medal requirements!
If you have any more feedback for us, please post it. The devs are listening!
See? TO THE GROUND.
I, of course, am kidding. A large number of people in the same forum are not:
So much for this game being harder. Give everyone easy loot and the degree of difficulty goes way down.
i considder this a HUGEE Nerf. might aswell remove medals als you deleted the purpose of them completly by doing this. i thought loot needed to be earned not handed out the easy way.
not even 1 month and you are already giving in to the lesser player? i guess you guys aren’t as hardcore as you promised.
keep this up and considder yourself 1 player less who will play this *still awesome game* for now.. lets see what you guys start nerfing next.. pitty realy.
Is this a joke? Already giving in to people whining about not getting faceroll epics? I thought this game was going to be rewarding if you did something extraordinary. You just killed the purpose of the medal system.. Why would you run for gold now? Even though people dont care to admit it, an important aspect of any mmorpg is the e-peen. If you cant show of your shiny nice epic that you working really hard for, only to see some careless nab with too much time, having the same item only with better sockets.. Come on Carbine, really? Im dissapointed.
The system was fine. Learn not to give in to spoiled players who doesnt wanna work hard to be equally well rewarded.
Pugs and challenging content are just not compatible. I remember a 100 page thread on WSC back when Carbine first announced the LFD tool where everyone complained that the tool would lead to easy content. Carbine assured us that they would not nerf content to appease whiners.
Now here we are less than a month into the game and Carbine has already folded. Watching this whole dungeon fiasco unfold I thought there were 2 possible options:
1. Give us a new grouping tool to make same-server groups and elimate all the horrible behavior that the anonyminity of LFD provides
2. Nerf contentThey took the easy way out, and I have zero doubt that as l2p said, this is only the beginning of turning this game into another braindead MMO that requires zero thought or skill.
One thing I will agree with the last quote above, is that PUGs and challenging content are not compatible. Or more specifically, LFD systems and challenge are not compatible. It is not about catering to casuals per se – you can desire as hard a game as possible – it is about the immutable fact that if the LFD system does not result in a successful run more than half the time at a minimum, the LFD system itself will fail. Kinda weird to think about it now, but there were some of us there at the start of the LFD revolution, and watched this truism develop in real-time.
Has it really only been three years? Indeed it has.
I will be honest in saying that I am rather surprised by Carbine’s… generosity in this regard. Until 20 minutes ago, I believed the simplest, most likely solution would have been to disable the Medal system when using the LFD tool. Because let’s face it, the real problem here were toxic morons who believed that they were entitled to skilled strangers pulled randomly from a dozen servers. That’s right, I said it. “Casuals” are entitled to the same thing every gamer is entitled to: content tailored to their skill level. Gold medal runs are not it… but Bronze runs? Yeah, those could work. And yet here we were, the “hardcore” babies throwing a tantrum, dropping groups or kicking noobs because they couldn’t get what they wanted. I don’t blame the hardcore crowd for rationally determining that a non-Gold run isn’t worth their time. I blame them for going into the LFD queue expecting anything more than a completed run.
As I said, Carbine is being generous here. And subtle. The “bonus rolls” were a nice touch insofar as it provides a glimmer of hope to those whom were looking for a specific item a given boss failed to drop. I think most of us have experienced dungeon runs in WoW where the tank or healer drops immediately after not getting the loot they hoped for. Indeed, I would advise Blizzard to implement this selfsame thing for WoW immediately. I shouldn’t have to, given that WoW already does this in LFR, but you know how it goes.
In any case, this is excellent news whether you are on the train, or looking at the tracks from afar with anticipation. Hey, don’t look at me like that. It isn’t schadenfreude, it’s science. A testing of a hypothesis. That’s the thing about reinventing the wheel though: it almost always ends up having the same rounded corners.
There And Back Again?
I came across a thread on Reddit which was a pining for the “old days” of MMOs when you either grouped up or didn’t get to actually play the game. Which, now that I think about it, is a scenario not all that different from empty FPS servers. Anyway, the top-rated comment concluded with this:
The truth of the matter is, those of us that grew up on the hardcore MMOs, we’ve already done it. Most of us just don’t want to do it again. I don’t want to play a MMO that takes over a year to hit the level cap. I don’t want to play a MMO where I have to stand around for hours before I get to play. I don’t want to play a MMO where I can permanently lose everything I’ve done in the last few hours. I’ve already done that; I don’t want to do it again. The novelty of the MMO is gone. There are better ways to enjoy my time.
There is a nuance to this argument that I don’t see all that often, and I’d be interested in what other veteran MMO players have to say about it. It’s one thing to say that once some auto-grouping functions are released, like LFD or LFR, that there is no removing them. But put those aside for a moment and ask yourself: how many times do I feel like I could start over in a “pure” MMO (whatever you define that as)?
Maybe the question is nonsensical, considering we technically “start over” each time we play a new game. On the other hand, I’m not entirely convinced another MMO could bribe me enough to get back into raiding as a full-time job again. Even if your game of choice was EVE, how willing would you be to starting over in a completely new game with similar time-investment requirements? Still willing to spend 1-2 years of real-time building up a skill set? Or do these sort of investment mechanics have diminishing returns regardless of “dumbing down” or other streamlining that might go on?
In An Age 
LFD? What LFD?
Apr 29
Posted by Azuriel
Not to belabor the topic of WoW Classic and LFD, but Rohan brings up an amazingly relevant point:
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 in Commentary, WoW
4 Comments
Tags: LFD, Originalist, Premade Group Finder, Rohan, WoW Classic