Should LFD have ever been implemented?

[Azalis]

Just look at other big MMOs. Star Wars, Rift and Final Fantasy XIV all launched without a dungeon finder. They have all added it since then. The majority of players want it, even if the vocal minority doesn't

[Zerrahki]

I really enjoyed the addition of LFD - even if it did lower the amount of social interaction you ended up having with your group mates. In the end, I usually just want to get in, get my loot, and get out personally.

[MoanaLisa]

Everyone knock it off with the 'should of' - 'should have' stuff. It's off-topic and ignores the possibility that not everyone is 100% proficient in English. We require posts to be in English. We don't require them to be grammatically correct. Neither should you unless you can't understand the point being made.

[Wilian]

I really enjoyed the addition of LFD - even if it did lower the amount of social interaction you ended up having with your group mates. In the end, I usually just want to get in, get my loot, and get out personally.

Personally I'd value some gameplay that is not designed for monkeys as well.

All in all, LFD would've been fine had it been restricted to realm, not made it superior choice over manual grouping due to overwhelming rewards and it's usage as meter for balance should have never existed.

[Raintola]

The queuing mechanism is alright. Finding a group was pretty troublesome. On low-pop servers it was pretty much impossible to find a group while leveling at least.

I'd love to see them
1) Remove the ability to teleport to the entrance. Once a group has been formed, you all enter the same CRZ (which should help with summoning). After that, it's up to you to find the entrance.
2) Stop making everything retardproof. We're not idiots, we can handle a challenge.
3) Change the loot system to either personal loot, or have stricter roll and armor type requirements. Players no longer have the decency to pass/greed on loot with the correct stats but the wrong armor type when there IS a person of that armor type in the group (e.g. a Mistweaver monk needing on cloth int gear when there's a mage in the group).
4) Increase the VP/JP rewards. This compensates for the increased difficulty added by point 2.

The last two are a wash for me, but:

1. Yeah no, not interested in waiting on lazy people who can't be bothered to fly to the stone.

2. Also no, not interested in wiping on a 5-man boss that has inconsequential loot because someone, especially a tank or healer, can't get out of the killyou on the ground.

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Say what you want, but LFD/R completely screwed heroics for me, the accessibility of them and easiness just makes them pure unenjoyable and pointless.

So other people having easier access to them makes it unenjoyable for you? Kinda sad.

[Hitei]

The interaction was in the dungeon and amongst the group members whilst still looking. If it's incredibly easy to replace a person, and if you know that you will probably never meet those people again, the reason to actually converse with them fades off. If however you feel that it's very likely for the two/three/four/five of you to meet again, then it's far more likely that you will strike up a conversation and get to know your fellow group members.

Same thing if there is actually some kind of difficulty in the dungeon, which requires the group to work together, current difficulty isn't even designed around that anymore.

I never spoke again with the vast majority of people I ran dungeons with in Vanilla.
We were just random people from around my level who ran a single dungeon and then went our separate ways.
There also really wasn't a great deal more conversation in old dungeon groups than there is in LFD groups.

And last, please, please stop pretending in your head that Vanilla and BC dungeons were difficult. Having to stop before every pull to crowd control things is not difficult, it was tedious and a pain.

"Sheep moon, trap triangle, kill skull first" is hardly invigorating conversation that builds great communities.

[Exaelitus]

It could have been implemented way better. Keeping it server wide and still requiring you to actually move your ass to the dungeon isn't too much to ask for, in my opinion. The teleportation made people lazy, and the anonymity allowed people to be complete assholes and get away with it. Terrible implementation...

You really have it backwards. The implementation of LFD is quit good. That's why, social interaction can't compete with it. If it was a terrible implementation, nobody would use LFD. It's your idea to force social interaction that is flawed. People like to call that giving people a reason to socialize, but it's really just eliminating competition, so people are forced to interact. That's a recipe for creating inferior products. If you come up with a way to for people to interact that they will choose despite real competition, then you'll have a decent idea.

Also, yes, your implementation of LFD is too much to ask. You basically want to make LFD suck, so nobody uses it. That's a terrible implementation. It's enough to make the tool useless. Queue times would be too long. Waiting for other people to get to the dungeon isn't fun and it completely changes what you can do in a given amount of playtime. A good portion of people would be reduced to only doing dailies and sit around in trade chat. This is a subscription based game. I don't want to have to go back to playing another game while I wait for things to do in WoW. That's a waste of money, especially since the novelty of travelling to dungeons wore off years ago.

[Iceman2500]

LFD was a great addition to the game because spending more time looking for players for a dungeon than it actually took to run said dungeon was dumb, especially back in the days where certain specs were less........desired than others.

People saying LFD should be restricted to realm only seem to not realize that not everyone plays on a high population realm, let alone the dominant faction. No point in adding a feature to the game that is effectively useless because you're on X faction on Y realm.

[enchanted]

Yes it should've BUT... For levels below 90 or the max level as its absolutely needed since below these levels it's hard to actually form a group and it would take huge amount of time to find one as I remember back in Wrath I waited 1hr in westfall just looking for someone kind to boost me through dm until then a guy said: "Maybe when I'm done". But for the max levels I mean cmon there would be plenty of max levels on the server so it would be easy to form a grp for a HC dungeon or a normal dungeon so once you hit the level cap you cannot then access LFD ever again until the next expansion when it gets released and then it will be locked at max level and so on.

As for the social interaction part I don't believe spamming there just for an hour waiting for a guy or several people to help you finish a dungeon is much of an interaction and even though it wouldn't matter as they can never speak with you while in a dungeon or be friendly. That is completely up to the person whether to interact with the other in a dungeon or not.

[Deleted]

The problem for me lies in the difficulty of dungeons as well as their rewards.

I'd like to see harder 5 mans with greater rewards.

Back on topic...

LFD did a lot for me.

I remember the pain it was to form a group pre-LFD. If you were on a low-pop server (As was I, I played with friends during raids) or were trying to get a group together at an awkward time then it could take forever. I also remember a point where I trekked to Dire Maul ready to summon when nobody else could be bothered to leave Stormwind. Bringing it up created arguments as to who else should go.

I don't miss the social aspect as it was rarely there for me. I was always speaking to someone via /w or over vent so I wasn't paying attention to any idle party chat. I can understand why some would miss it for that aspect though and I do see that nowadays the majority of people I run dungeons with want to get in and get out, not chat; I've seen people outright tell me to shut up and focus on my role on the odd occasion where I have attempted to socialise.

[nekobaka]

The "social interaction" you are referring was basically wasting 2 hours of your life sitting in a main city spamming "LF TANK, HEAL AND DPS FOR X", ...

No thanks, i'd rather wait 15 minutes, get a group, zone in, kill and zone out.

Sucks to have been on your realm. I spent about 15 minutes getting a group. Even in Cata I was getting into or filling my own PuG raid in less time than it takes a DPS to get into LFR. Talk about sad.

Random queues should have been an option to preformed groups and not a given right to a quick smooth run. When LFD was first introduced the developers said that if you wanted a smooth run and control over the members of your group then form your own group. The trade off of the convenience of the system was having to deal with random groups. If I want to solo queue for something "challenging" then I am mature enough to accept the risk. I did not like having my option to random queue for engaging content taken away from me because of a segment of immature players who are against social interaction.

[MoanaLisa]

The point should be made that with the Connected Realms thing eventually becoming a reality, if it's done reasonably well, putting together groups from chat channels may be viable again. Not that I want to see either LFD/LFR gone but for those who really hate it, it will be possible to do that another way.

If people simply did that now--assuming there are enough of you to easily form groups--threads like this wouldn't need to exist as people could simply do whatever pleased them at the moment. Removing it at this late date would cause more problems than it would solve so it's a waste of time to wish for it.

[Marxman]

2) Stop making everything retardproof. We're not idiots, we can handle a challenge.

You did the Cata heroics at the start, right? Those were only mildly challenging, and the community practically flipped their shit over them. Did you see them in an LFD pug? It was brutal.

I can handle challenging things. I cannot, under any circumstances, lead a bunch of sheep through something challenging. I have no patience for idiots, of which there is an abundance within the WoW community. Challenging content should remain as it is for H Scenarios (which aren't challenging at all) and challenge modes. Bring your own group. GC says it a lot and it's 100% true: challenging content and PuGs do not mix.

[Deus_77]

Social Interaction already dying before LFD come.

You probably don't remember this

2.Trade> LFM Heroic Daily UP, 5100 gearscore

[Exaelitus]

Which is probably the reason why you had to spend 'hours' to find dungeon groups sitting in capital cities while I could just snap my fingers and get a group together in less than a few minutes.

LFD was only added because of inaptitudes:
1. Either the inaptitude of the players to be more social and organized, to have an easier time to form groups for dungeon and raidcontent; or

That sounds like a damn good reason to add a feature to a video game.

[adman17]

Back before LFD, my experience was that you need a cohesive team to get through dungeons. They weren’t especially difficult, but you had to know what you are doing, and there were certain roles to play. You may have been in a guild, and had some friends that you had dungeoned with before. You may have asked in trade for people to join a dungeon group. This dungeon group could have led to you joining a guild, or new additions to your guild. The importance around teamwork built friendships. And as someone said earlier on, the way the game is dictated the social interacition.
Now some say you ‘could’ do this still. But honestly, its not the same, and you don’t need to form friendships to get things done . So why would you? When once you had most of the server knowing that working together and being mature got things done, now its just “who cares ill go do a quick LFD ”.
The friendships are forged through the experience. Back then, there was more time. And from the dungons i’ve done, I wouldn’t call “tank is fail” or “qq moar gg” as forging friendships.
So I don’t dungeon or raid anymore, because the social interaction (the way that I enjoyed it) is not there. I just do 2v2 Arenas with my one friend that actually still plays wow, because at least there we can rely on each other and enjoy working together.
I understand though people on low pop realms who would spend HOURS looking for people in trade. That sure did suck, and was a big time-sink. But have a think about a world where LFD was not implemented, but instead they introduced the freshly-annoucuned feature – “Connected Realms”...

[SamR]

LFD was one of the best features ever put into WoW and is pretty much expected of any AAA MMO launching today. Any MMO that launches these days without a LFD type system tends to add one pretty quickly. Hopefully before they bleed too many subs.

[Lord Blackmore]

The people who love LFD and hate the idea of actually looking for people for a group are lazy. It was not hard to find groups (even as a DPS) when you had to "spam" for groups.

Your experience is... your experience. I can assure you that the experience on my server was completely different. If my friends weren't on, it would take a long time to get a full group. And the longer it took, the more people would drop group because they were tired of waiting.

And don't call people lazy, either. It has nothing to do with being lazy.

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Well, it does sum up the entire philosophy behind casual game design:

Can we please just have one thread where people don't start in with "casuals" shit?

[inboundpaper]

Yes it should, I played a tank and still despised spamming /2.

[Lord Blackmore]

Sucks to have been on your realm. I spent about 15 minutes getting a group. .

I give you credit for recognizing that people's experiences on different servers was.. different.