LFD

[apocrypha]

If all servers and factions were decently populated then LFD wouldn't have been so necessary. I'm on what used to be a *tiny* Horde pop server and before LFD pretty much never ran dungeons. It just wasn't possible to get a group.

The social-group-forming experience you're all talking about happened again in LK with pug raids. With 10 and 25 mans available and gearing getting to the point that pugging raids was a reality I was pugging VoA and ICC 10/25 pretty much every week for a while, and got to know a *lot* of people during that time.

Making 10s & 25s share the same lockout and the whole guild-run-xp thing has destroyed that entire part of the game and now the only hope of getting into raids is either to be in a large enough guild to be doing them or to be a healer and hope to get into one of someone else's cos loads of guilds seem to be lacking healers atm.

[Typhon]

LFD does not play nicely with group content that is not facerollable.  That's why it worked well in WotLK and doesn't work so well now.  If forced to choose between LFD and 5-man content that requires you to be slightly awake at some point, some people prefer the latter. I'm not one of them, but I understand where they're coming from. 

Simply because of the way they implemented dungeon difficulty.  If you could dial in your desired level of difficulty, and that auto-selected for other people that wanted a more difficult experience, and players could only attempt more difficult encounters based upon completing less difficult encounters then the 'we like it tough' folks could group with like-minded players and  ditto for the 'just want to smash stuff to relax" folks.

The only folks that wouldn't be happy would be the, "I want to complete this dungeon, and I don't want n00bs to be able to" folks.  But who cares about those jackoffs?

In the broader context of, "all WoW dungeons become easier over time", isn't difficulty really a matter of taste anyway?  Except that those that like it easy need to wait, and those that like it hard have less options overtime (arguably you could remove your gear, or put on crappy gear, but that seems pretty lame).

[Rendakor]

I thought that was why we had Heroic and Regular dungeons?

[Paelos]

I thought that was why we had Heroic and Regular dungeons?

85 Regular dungeons as well not exist after the first 2 months. Nobody wants to bother with the pitiful rewards out of those when you're usually using better quest gear.

[Sjofn]

Plus there's only what, three of them? Snoozeville, man.

[Ratman_tf]

What exactly is wrong with it?

I understand that the "teleport everybody inside the instance", "place quest mobs inside the instance" and "much faster queue times" are quite popular and have made instances casual playable again. What are the most serious problems and how do you suggest they be addressed?

For people who want to do random dungeons , they're perfect. For someone who likes to run with friends and fuck all the asstards out there in internet land, it takes away their friends who already ran Dungeon X with LFD, got their shinies or badges or whatever, and moved on.
The fix is to rip out the LFD feature, but that genie's already out of the bottle for WoW.

[caladein]

I'm not sure I understand you.  Is the problem that your friends don't want to do dungeons (with you?) after they've exhausted the rewards?  Or is it that they don't want to run another one after having done their daily dungeon earlier in the day?  The other option would be that your friends are saved to the particular one you want to do from having done their dungeons earlier.

I can't really speak to the first interpretation. To the second possibility: daily dungeons, in the form of quests, pre-date the Dungeon Finder by two years.  My friends and I will run into the third at times, but heroics have always been on a daily timer.

[Koyasha]

I'm not sure I understand you.  Is the problem that your friends don't want to do dungeons (with you?) after they've exhausted the rewards?  Or is it that they don't want to run another one after having done their daily dungeon earlier in the day?  The other option would be that your friends are saved to the particular one you want to do from having done their dungeons earlier.

I can't really speak to the first interpretation. To the second possibility: daily dungeons, in the form of quests, pre-date the Dungeon Finder by two years.  My friends and I will run into the third at times, but heroics have always been on a daily timer.

While daily dungeon quests predate LFD, two things in Burning Crusade especially made those a good thing rather than a bad thing like LFD.  First off, the dungeons were considerably more difficult back then.  Way harder than WotLK dungeons, and still considerably harder than Cataclysm dungeons.  This meant it was a lot better to run them with someone you worked well together with already rather than a wholly random group.  Second, it took longer to form the group, so again, you were more likely to wait until your friend was going to be online.

Besides which, dungeons aren't something most people want to do all day in my experience.  When they were difficult, they required concentration and effort, and most people don't want to put that level of concentration in all day, so they want to do one or two dungeons and then maybe farm, quest, or just log off.  Now that they're easy, they're just boring, so you want to do a couple to get your rewards, then go do something else.  If I've done a few dungeons today, I'm going to groan and not really want to go if a friend comes on wanting to do some more.

I do agree with Numtini that an LFD system would fit a game like CoX very well.  Of course, the actual gameplay of CoX was always boring to me exactly because of that; there was no real challenge, it was just running through the instance stomping a bunch of guys flat, which is exactly why I get bored of that game and quit, even though it's amusing for brief periods.

[Typhon]

CoX added the ability to choose one of five different levels of difficulty approximately a year after release.  Rewards were better, but not purples versus greens better.  High end difficulty probably needed to be made a bit more difficult to appeal to the, "I enjoy slamming my dick in the door"-level required by the 2% that want that.  And fireworks and phasing in of statues so they can feel good about themselves.

The fact that your friends weren't waiting for you to come online says to me that they couldn't really be sure on any given night whether you were going to be online that night or not.  So, without LFD, on the nights that you don't show up - they are shit out of luck.  Sounds like that is only better for the folks that don't mind putting together groups via chat.  I find it tedious.  With LFD I could queue and let the system do the work of putting together a group.

Here's another thing to think about - if your friends don't want to run a dungeon again when you get online, maybe the answer is for the developer to make the dungeon fun to run multiple times per evening rather then pine for a past that many people really didn't enjoy.

[Rendakor]

The issue at the time was that you could (can) only do a heroic once a day, and then you were locked out of it until tomorrow. It wasn't an issue of "not fun to run again" but rather, not able.

[Typhon]

Oh.  ... well that's very different then, isn't it.  ...  nevermind!

[Sheepherder]

While daily dungeon quests predate LFD, two things in Burning Crusade especially made those a good thing rather than a bad thing like LFD.  First off, the dungeons were considerably more difficult back then.  Way harder than WotLK dungeons, and still considerably harder than Cataclysm dungeons.  This meant it was a lot better to run them with someone you worked well together with already rather than a wholly random group.  Second, it took longer to form the group, so again, you were more likely to wait until your friend was going to be online.

Thirdly, you have to exclude all your friends not bringing a tank, heals, or CC.

Am I doing it right?

[kildorn]

Waiting for my friends to be online = playing someone else's game for me.

Mostly because the people I WANT to run instances with are a three hour time difference from me. Or in one case, just has a sleep schedule like he's three hours time difference from me :P

[Lantyssa]

So I'm not good enough to group with you, huh?

[Ratman_tf]

I'm not sure I understand you. 

The problem is that I don't want to play with some random jackasses the LFD throws at me.

The cherry on the shit sundae is that the chances of me getting a guild run for a dungeon have gone down when members who are willing to LFD get their runs that way, and are less available for guild runs.

[Nebu]

The problem is that I don't want to play with some random jackasses the LFD throws at me.

The cherry on the shit sundae is that the chances of me getting a guild run for a dungeon have gone down when members who are willing to LFD get their runs that way, and are less available for guild runs.

I agree 100%.  

The other question I have is "who gives a shit if I got my uber gear solo or in a group"?  It's PvE.  The only reason to get good gear is to kill harder PvE mobs.  If social interaction has fuck all to do with retention rates, then why not just make the entire game either soloable (to scale with grouping optional) or with a group of NPC's?  It's not like my PvE gear affects anyone else's fun and it gives me more content options for my dollar.

[Rasix]

If all servers and factions were decently populated then LFD wouldn't have been so necessary. I'm on what used to be a *tiny* Horde pop server and before LFD pretty much never ran dungeons. It just wasn't possible to get a group.

That was my situation.  My server is pretty small and isn't very progression oriented.  My night playing also started at around 9 or 10pm server time. You could spend an entire night and not even get a group as a healer.  The dungeon finder might have well not even existed, it never led to a group at max level for a heroic. 

LFD pretty much saved the game for me.  I was starting to get really sick of not being able to do dungeons or spending a high amount of time in Dalaran doing nothing.

In the past, I've joined guilds to help alleviate this, but it really doesn't help much when you play pretty late a night. And then there are organizational issues with this approach that start to encroach on your playing time.   Waiting 2 minutes as a healer or 15 as a DPS was a lot better than shoehorning myself into a social structure I had no desire to be in. 

[Malakili]

The other question I have is "who gives a shit if I got my uber gear solo or in a group"?  It's PvE.  The only reason to get good gear is to kill harder PvE mobs.  If social interaction has fuck all to do with retention rates, then why not just make the entire game either soloable (to scale with grouping optional) or with a group of NPC's?  It's not like my PvE gear affects anyone else's fun and it gives me more content options for my dollar.

Then why not just get rid of the gear collection game and make it all pure vanity/pets/mounts for collectables and remove all gear gates to content?  The point of gear progression is that its progression for when you've run out of levels for progression.  This is done mostly at the group level at max.  If you don't like playing in groups to collect loot, why play a game like WoW in the first place?  

[Nebu]

Then why not just get rid of the gear collection game and make it all pure vanity/pets/mounts for collectables and remove all gear gates to content?  The point of gear progression is that its progression for when you've run out of levels for progression.  This is done mostly at the group level at max.  If you don't like playing in groups to collect loot, why play a game like WoW in the first place?

The point I'm making is that gear collection and grouping don't need to be connected.  I enjoyed the trip to cap in WoW.  If I could have run dungeons solo during the trip and after cap, Blizzard would have gotten even more of my money.  Isn't that the goal?  To get my money?  Maybe I could pay Blizzard to find me four people to run content with that I won't want to strangle. 

[Ratman_tf]

The point I'm making is that gear collection and grouping don't need to be connected.  I enjoyed the trip to cap in WoW.  If I could have run dungeons solo during the trip and after cap, Blizzard would have gotten even more of my money.  Isn't that the goal?  To get my money?  Maybe I could pay Blizzard to find me four people to run content with that I won't want to strangle.  

Many of the aspects of WoW don't play together very well. And as the game has matured, Blizz has managed to streamline it so that these problems are becoming more pronounced. World PvP versus instanced PvP, PvP versus PvE balance, solo versus group versus raid.

I, for example, would have been happy as a clam to have Zero solo content in Cataclysm. Just throw in some new raids and I'm good to go. I've quested till I'm blue in the face and it no longer has any interest for me. But I'm required to work thorugh it to get to raiding, and I pooped the fuck out at level 83. I just couldn't do one more goddamn quest.
So I quit. And unlike my previous breaks, where I knew it was WoW burnout and that I'd likely be back, this time I'm not sure that I'll be resubbing.

[Rendakor]

Making solo content is tough because you have to balance for the LCD. This isn't an issue currently since its all leveling or dailies, but if endgame gearing was soloable balance becomes a real factor.

[Vision]

WoW has become a task to conquer, not so much of an experience. The LFD tool is one factor in that, and if that is all you want from the game then that is great. There is no more exploring to find a dunegon, or running your zone's dunegon while you quest through the zone. I gained as much xp from the LFD randoms as  I did from actually questing. I'll second the idea that it is a shame you can't re-group with cross server party members, and at the end of the day I feel it is just a way to expedite players along to end game so they don't lose that feeling of progression.

[Malakili]

WoW has become a task to conquer, not so much of an experience. The LFD tool is one factor in that, and if that is all you want from the game then that is great. There is no more exploring to find a dunegon, or running your zone's dunegon while you quest through the zone. I gained as much xp from the LFD randoms as  I did from actually questing. I'll second the idea that it is a shame you can't re-group with cross server party members, and at the end of the day I feel it is just a way to expedite players along to end game so they don't lose that feeling of progression.

I do kind of miss that first couple weeks when I was in Ashenvale and I saw in general chat, looking for a group for the dungeon there.  I was like, oh I'm a druid I can heal!  So I did that, and we had no idea where the dungeon was exactly, but one guy did, so he sort of told us generally where it was and we went and found it and that was neat.  I remember losing a roll on a blue staff because the other guy needed the shard to "level his enchanting" and...I didn't care!

I want my WoW virginity back :(

[Numtini]

I enjoyed the trip to cap in WoW.  If I could have run dungeons solo during the trip and after cap, Blizzard would have gotten even more of my money.  Isn't that the goal?  To get my money?  Maybe I could pay Blizzard to find me four people to run content with that I won't want to strangle

Remember when WoW showed us that MMOs weren't niche games, they were actually capable of mass popularity? Maybe they aren't.

A lot of the things talked about in this thread are that to make WoW more accessible and more popular, they have taken out the MMO elements and replaced them with solo and instant-match small group elements. And a lot of the suggestions are to get rid of the MMO elements entirely (and I agree fwiw).

When I think about what "niche" WoW fell into in my gaming for the last year, it wasn't in my mental "this is my MMO" category, that was Even. It was as a casual small random group game. Log in, pick up an random ez dungeon, log out. The same way I play World of Tanks or League of Legends.

[Mrbloodworth]

It kind of makes the entire game world just a lobby for dungeon runs. Instead of a world where you can find dungeons.

My response to that is: ok, so what?

There's world out there if you're questing. I don't see how the implementation of better features would stop it from existing.

If I'm playing in a world where I'm going to complete content with a bunch of random nobodies that I will never care to know, then why even require me to group in the first place? 

With the addition of LFD, grouping is just a time sink.  While it's still better than not being able to do the content at all, it seems that Blizzard is saying that social ties are less of an issue when it comes to their player retention.  Why not give me 4 NPC's to group with, decrease my random chances at loot, and let me play rather than waiting in a queue?  Seems like it would be a similar experience and I get the added benefit of not having to listen to idiots or have them randomly drop during a run.

Or pay a sub.


I like the LFD tool (Becouse i'm old and dont have a ton of time), i'm just saying what it does.

[Malakili]

When I think about what "niche" WoW fell into in my gaming for the last year, it wasn't in my mental "this is my MMO" category, that was Even. It was as a casual small random group game. Log in, pick up an random ez dungeon, log out. The same way I play World of Tanks or League of Legends.

This is pretty much exactly how I treat it now.  But I don't even have a game that REALLY satisfies my "this is my MMO" category. WW2O fills the gap from time to time.  I'm hoping Planetside 2 fills it next.

 Like I said elsewhere, I've been playing Global Agenda lately, but thats effectively just a shooter to me - I haven't done any AvA (though I think the premise is ok), or even any PvE or crafting past the bear minimum required to get to level 10 and start queueing for PvP matches.  I don't really have too much time for playing an MMO "the way I want to" anyways. 

Anyway, that being said, I've got one level 85 in WoW, been leveling a warrior through LFD in Northrend and that has been pretty entertaining, but I can already feel myself tiring of the dungeon running.  WoW does it well, but that being said I still can only run dungeons so much.  I suspect by the time summer roles around  I'll have 3 or so 85s just from running dungeons, and since by then Torchlight 2 will be out to satisfy my loot collections wants and needs, I can't see WoW keeping me past May or so.

[Vision]

It was a little tedious finding a group to run the dunegon you needed without it, but it forced PVE interaction within certain zones, in the sense that individual zones felt like they had their own community instead of everyone standing outside the AH in Org. When I can out level a zone because my LFD tool gives me added XP on top of what I already get from a dunegon, so much for hanging around long enough to try and attack astraanar, or overrun southshore, which are two things I havent seen happen in a long long time.

[Soulflame]

Southshore is kind of a wreck these days.  It's been overrun enough, I'd say.

[Ingmar]

It was a little tedious finding a group to run the dunegon you needed without it, but it forced PVE interaction within certain zones, in the sense that individual zones felt like they had their own community instead of everyone standing outside the AH in Org. When I can out level a zone because my LFD tool gives me added XP on top of what I already get from a dunegon, so much for hanging around long enough to try and attack astraanar, or overrun southshore, which are two things I havent seen happen in a long long time.

Hillsbrad doesn't have a dungeon, so the only people who would have been sitting around in the zone zerging Southshore were waiting for the old 8 hour long AV monstrosities to start. LFD is not the culprit.

[Vision]

It was a little tedious finding a group to run the dunegon you needed without it, but it forced PVE interaction within certain zones, in the sense that individual zones felt like they had their own community instead of everyone standing outside the AH in Org. When I can out level a zone because my LFD tool gives me added XP on top of what I already get from a dunegon, so much for hanging around long enough to try and attack astraanar, or overrun southshore, which are two things I havent seen happen in a long long time.

Hillsbrad doesn't have a dungeon, so the only people who would have been sitting around in the zone zerging Southshore were waiting for the old 8 hour long AV monstrosities to start. LFD is not the culprit.

LFD probably isn't the culprit in the case of Hillsbrad, but considering you had to run from Hillsbrad all the way to SM as ally to get to your dunegon it saw lots of traffic at one point.

[Numtini]

On early dungeons way back in the day, let's not forget there was no system whatsoever at the time, then the idiotic stone things that everyone told them correctly were not going to work. That doesn't help with lower level dungeons now, but when they were current, it would have made a big difference.

[Sjofn]

So I was amused, today I did a PUG on my Horde rogue. Healer was pretty good, rest of the group made me want to stab someone. We finish, I drop group, and the healer sends me a tell asking if it was just her, or was the tank sort of a moron, scaring me half to death because I didn't realise she was from my server. We're totally BFFs now. So I guess it is still a TINY BIT possible to meet new people that way!

[Azazel]

They should have taken the next step with Cata and rebuilt the back-end completely, turning it from a conventional sharded game into one giant server with phased/instanced zones to keep crowding and lag from getting out of hand. At this point the concept of individual servers is nothing but an anachronism that prevents people from socializing, messes up population balance for things like Wintergrasp and Tol Barad, and generally holds back the game.

This has been my thought lately, especially after getting back into Guild Wars.  'Server' should be nothing more than a channel you have a preference for, and switching is as easy as clicking a button or two.

That would be great. I'd even get to socialise with some of you-all occasionally. I guess the reason they don't do it is because of the AH/server economies?

[Azazel]

EQ2 has an awesome, simply awesome guild recruitment tab.  It shows what the guild style is, a short descriptor about the guild, online officers, classes recruiting... the list goes on.  It's worth checking out the F2P EQ2 just to see it, imo.

Or you could screenshot it and post it here?

[Koyasha]

Server economies aren't really a good thing for the average player - the only thing increasing the number of people participating in the economy can do is make things easier for the average player by increasing competition and driving prices closer to equilibrium.  With server-limited economies it's possible to monopolize goods if no one else chooses to be in the same market as you, but if all servers shared one AH there would be no market niche that has no competition, and thus prices would stabilize at the lowest gold/hour that anyone is willing to work for.  The only people this would negatively impact are people that do significant AH business and profit significantly from the limited economies, and I doubt they are a large enough population for it to matter.