Remove the group finder tool

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

this "community" you think you are going to get back if they removed LFG and flying isnt coming back, keep dreaming

Which is exactly why i said the dmg is irreversible. L2read?

[Deleted]

Which is exactly why i said the dmg is irreversible. L2read?

So hostile, I think you may have been changed by LFG. Seems like LFG is pure evil!

[Sylvaeres]

Good one

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Those who look for the challenge in the game and have what it takes will be able to skip or quite quickly move past LFR. Yes, it's there to make the start for new players easier. Some will find LFR is enough for them and that's ok - they would not stick to raiding for too long if LFR wasn't around anyway. And those who want something more already have the minimum base to move forward and the moment they find the guild they will do less and less LFR and eventually skip it completely.

Yes, in WoW loot is motivation. And higher difficulty raids give better loot. Even one more argument of why LFR isn't stopping anyone who wants to raid to progress further. It's all the case if someone is really motivated for raiding or not. LFR helps people figure that out. If someone doesn't feel like raiding anything harder past LFR it's all for the better because that person who not like raiding anyway.

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Well, if for your spamming chat for hours to form a group is THE social activity then it's rather sad. I prefer more meaningful social activities and with LFG tools I'm glad I can skip the meaningless part and enjoy the fun part of actually PLAYING the game with other people rather than spending hours on looking for people to play with.

All excellent points

[Solarnova]

If we never had the group finder in the first place, then it would be fine, as we wouldn't know anything better, but we've had group finder for so many years, so we're beyond the point of no return. It's nice to come home after a long day of work, hit a button, and bam--you're in a group, instead of talking to folks for 30 minutes to get a group set up.

[Deleted]

But it does impact me, since my relative performance to the rest of my group just dipped down into nothingness, if I didn't choose to use that button at Legion launch and everyone else does use it.

You're free to group and play with other people that want to ignore the loot vendor. It's your choice. It's exactly the same argument as with LFR/easymodes.

[Thrif]

If you want to remove LFG, you need to remove X-realms all together. There will never be a community in the game again as long as that exists. In a village with 50 people you're sure to get to know everyone whether you like it or not, in a city with 1.000.000 you'll likely not get to know anyone unless you get out of your way (except co-workers and such, which is equivalent of guild mates).

Just removing LFG won't do anything but frustrate people.

[Deleted]

You're free to group and play with other people that want to ignore the loot vendor. It's your choice. It's exactly the same argument as with LFR/easymodes.

One undermines progression entirely, the other gives me a tourist mode to see a raid, with no real rewards. Yeah, completely the same thing!

[Deleted]

One undermines progression entirely, the other gives me a tourist mode to see a raid, with no real rewards.

It doesn't undermine anything, you can choose not to use it. Just like people say you don't need to use LFR if it ruins your sense of progression.

[Deleted]

If you want to remove LFG, you need to remove X-realms all together. There will never be a community in the game again as long as that exists. In a village with 50 people you're sure to get to know everyone whether you like it or not, in a city with 1.000.000 you'll likely not get to know anyone unless you get out of your way (except co-workers and such, which is equivalent of guild mates).

Just removing LFG won't do anything but frustrate people.

I agree with your final point (Removing it doesn't solve anything). I would argue that communities do exist in the game though, they are called guilds. I honestly have no idea why people keep saying that the community etc is dead, when you can just join a guild, get friends there, and do stuff with them. That's no different today than it was in Vanilla. I've always tried to run dungeons and raids with guildies, and for the life of me I can't understand why people somehow think that this is gone.

When I run a dungeon with 4 other players from my guild, I know that they are good players. I can avoid getting random retards entirely, just by socializing a bit. To be honest, this entire thread makes no sense to me. So many people who want to remove something that provides convenience for a lot of players, to get something that they can already easily get if they want it. Makes no sense.

[Jewsco]

That 2+ hours looking for a tank happened back in the day when tanking was actually hard and demanding not today when everyone and his grandma has 4 tank alts.
G

Really? What proof do you have for this? Last I checked even with lfd a dps can wait sometimes up to an hour. And that is with lfd and using cross realms so I think a lack of tanks in game is indeed and has almost always has been a problem. It is a thankless job that one gets bitched at a lot while doing isn't a real shocker.
If lfd is gone and one only can group with people from thier own realm how on earth won't it be longer?

[Deleted]

It doesn't undermine anything, you can choose not to use it. Just like people say you don't need to use LFR if it ruins your sense of progression.

Doesn't matter if I choose to use it or not. Progression is undermined either way. "Sense" of progression and actual progression are two very different things. Just like reality and perceived reality.

Fact: You don't have to use LFR if you don't want to. There are several BETTER options.

Fact: If there was a button to click that gave you everything in the game, progression is essentially pointless. If you can completely invalidate everything you or others have done in the game with the click of a button, you ruin the game. There is no option that provides you with better rewards, unlike the LFR deal.

The two have nothing to do with eachother. For some reason that I can't understand, you seem to think that LFR is required, and that completing LFR somehow means "winning" the game. Newsflash: You can watch a video on youtube to see the lore etc., but that certainly doesn't mean that YOU beat the game. Learn the difference.

[Jewsco]

If we never had the group finder in the first place, then it would be fine, as we wouldn't know anything better, but we've had group finder for so many years, so we're beyond the point of no return. It's nice to come home after a long day of work, hit a button, and bam--you're in a group, instead of talking to folks for 30 minutes to get a group set up.

Also nice to get other things done in game while waiting for lfd. Where in the old way we had to sit in a city spaming trade chat doing nothing else as the group formed

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Which is exactly why i said the dmg is irreversible. L2read?

Or one can still form a group without lfd and even if using lfd can talk and be nice to other players right?
Or be means and nasty and tell them L2read. That surely makes matters better and fosters a community right?

[guardian_titan]

I've stated this twice now on the official US forums but bears stating here as well:

WoW mirrors the real world.

Remember the last time you went to the store. What did you do? Did you talk to every person you walked by and make a few friends or did you just get what you came for, hit the register, and leave without a word outside of maybe a simple sentence to the cashier at check out? Did you even bother with an actual cashier or did you do the self service checkout?

Remember the last time you went to the gas station? What did you do? Did you talk to the other people filling their gas tanks or did you just fill up yours, pay, and leave? Did you even bother to pay inside to talk to a person or did you just use your card and pay electronically?

Remember the last time you went to the movies? What did you do? Did you talk to everyone in the ticket line, then the concession stand, and then in the theater itself before the movie started or did you buy your ticket, get your popcorn, and go sit down without a word to anyone else? Did you even bother buying the ticket at the theater or did you buy it online? Did you even bother to interact with the concessions to buy popcorn or did you skip it entirely?

What about the last time you went to the bank? Did you just use an ATM or did you go talk to a teller inside? Do you get actual checks from work you have to deposit each week or do you just get them deposited electronically?

Think about what you do in the real world before you judge WoW. People are more interested in their phones and existing friends than they are in talking to random strangers and making new friends. If we can't change what we do in the real world, there's not a damn thing Blizzard can do to change that behavior. WoW is nothing more than a symptom of a larger problem. Blizzard can slap a band-aid on it all you want, but it won't change real world behavior. The real world will always circumvent anything Blizzard attempts to "right the ship".

Each time you skip past human interaction, you're just adding to the problem. People evading human interaction by preferring machines is no different than players in WoW avoiding each other in favor of soloing things.

TLDR: Blizzard's not at fault for supposedly destroying the community. The real world beat them to it. It's the players who destroyed it.

If people aren't social in the real world, removing things like LFD, LFR, or even LFG won't change anything.

[Deleted]

Fact: You don't have to use LFR if you don't want to.

You also don't need to use the free loot vendor if you don't want to.

Fact: If there was a button to click that gave you everything in the game, progression is essentially pointless. If you can completely invalidate everything you or others have done in the game with the click of a button, you ruin the game.

Exactly what the multiple difficulty modes does to me. There's this LFR button to click that will teleport you to the raid with guaranteed clear and loot. It makes progression in that raid essentially pointless.

For some reason that I can't understand, you seem to think that LFR is required, and that completing LFR somehow means "winning" the game.

And you seem to think the free loot vendor is required, and that getting the gear and achievements somehow means "winning" the game.

[Deleted]

If people aren't social in the real world, removing things like LFD, LFR, or even LFG won't change anything.

There's a really good essay and a book called "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" by Robert D Putnam that explores the loss of social capital in our modern society - you can find the summary here: http://www.enotes.com/topics/bowling-alone. The lack of participation is a common problem in our contemporary western democracies - something that Trump and other extremists are exploiting fully right now.

It's pretty apt description, though it's been disputed a bit as it raises the typcal "omg TV-is making us antisocial"-issues.

What is more on the point here - is that the human brain is just not made to handle unlimited amounts of social relationships. This concept is called Dunbar's Number - or "monkeysphere" - basically each of us has a close circle of 150-250 people whom we refer to as "us" - the people outside that sphere are all "them" aka. assholes.
"the politicians" often fall into this category.. and related to this forum "the devs are runing everything" is sort of a abstraction we use, because those individuals are not part of our sphere of social relationships. They are faceless assholes who are sliging shit at us. Damn those devs.

Anyhow - the huge fault here is trying to collect the entire community of several million people into one coherent social circle. It does not work like that. They are all faceless assholes and remain to be so - unless I have a reason to include them into my sphere. Which I don't.

Guilds were excellent mechanisms of building small spheres that that could be processed by our primate brains. But the guild concept hasn't really been iterated on for many, many, many expacs.

The eroding community keep eroding, because we're still monkeys. Our brains can't handle that.

[Deleted]

Exactly what the multiple difficulty modes does to me. There's this LFR button to click that will teleport you to the raid with guaranteed clear and loot. It makes progression in that raid essentially pointless.

Do you know what progression means?

[Deleted]

You also don't need to use the free loot vendor if you don't want to.



Exactly what the multiple difficulty modes does to me. There's this LFR button to click that will teleport you to the raid with guaranteed clear and loot. It makes progression in that raid essentially pointless.



And you seem to think the free loot vendor is required, and that getting the gear and achievements somehow means "winning" the game.

"There are BETTER options" - You forgot this part. Sure you can do LFR, but you get shit gear for it. If you want decent gear, you have to do something else. The button that gives you best loot doesn't have any alternative that allows me to get better gear. Same thing with achievements. So, to make your free loot vendor more similar to LFR: You can get a full set of Heroic Dungeon-ish gear (Release specific here), and a single achievement. The vendor unlocks along with LFR. There, now your free loot vendor is comparable to LFR.

"It makes progression in that raid essentially pointless" - Yes, as is the point of LFR. If you want to do actual raids, go do actual raids. The guaranteed loot is crap btw. And also not guaranteed.

Getting the gear and the achievements is your reward for winning the game, and if everyone had everything you wouldn't be able to tell who actually won, and who just clicked the button. It would certainly take a lot of the satisfaction from winning away.

[Deleted]

Do you know what progression means?

For me progression means spending a few weeks working on a boss, and when it finally goes down, moving on to a brand new part of the instance and a brand new boss that I've never seen before and could not see any other way. The way raiding worked in TBC. To me grinding stuff in increasing difficulty modes is not "progress", it's just grinding.

[jcf190]

How does spending hours trying to find a coherent group to do anything make the game more social? I don't have fond memories of my vanilla group finding days. Even when you had friends and guildies to play with, they weren't always all online at the same time. Now I can group with friends at their convenience, but still get things done when they aren't available.

[Deleted]

The button that gives you best loot doesn't have any alternative that allows me to get better gear.

But nobody is forcing you to use the button. If you feel like it has a negative impact for you, then just don't use it.

Getting the gear and the achievements is your reward for winning the game, and if everyone had everything you wouldn't be able to tell who actually won, and who just clicked the button. It would certainly take a lot of the satisfaction from winning away.

That is true for you, not for me. So you don't have to use the vendor if it takes the satisfaction of winning away from you. For me gear is just means to an end, and achievements are a pointless grind.

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Getting the gear and the achievements is your reward for winning the game, and if everyone had everything you wouldn't be able to tell who actually won, and who just clicked the button. It would certainly take a lot of the satisfaction from winning away.

Now consider the fact that for me gear and achievements are worthless. What I got my satisfaction from was that feeling I got after wiping weeks on a raid boss with my guild and finally killing the boss and getting to move to a brand new part of the instance that I could not get to see in any other way. Those are the moments burned into my brain and the reason I played. LFR takes that away from me the very same way a free loot vendor would take away your sense of satisfaction that you get from gear and achievements. Hopefully now you understand why many of us are so against LFR.