LFD is popular and Taliban are emissaries of world peace! Activision runs wow now.

[question1]

Cross-Realm Dungeon Feature Coming Soon

With the continued popularity of the Dungeon Finder, many players have been asking for a way to group up with real-life friends who play on other realms to take on instances together. Today, we wanted to give you a heads up about a new feature currently in development that will allow players to invite Real ID friends of the same faction to a party regardless of the realm they play on, and then queue up for a 5-player regular or Heroic dungeon.

As this is a fairly complex service to develop, we don’t have a release date to share quite yet. It’s important to note that as with some of the other convenience- and connectivity-oriented features we offer, certain elements of the cross-realm Real ID party system will be premium-based, though only the player sending the invitations will need to have access to the premium service. We'll have more details to share with you as development progresses -- in the meantime, you may begin to see elements of the feature appear on the World of Warcraft PTR.

Please note how this blue post begins....

With the continued popularity of the Dungeon Finder ! What? Seriously? All I have seen is they trying desperately to make the system work. The system which killed off friends and community (with the help of another widely popular feature call, stay in one guild even if you hate 'em all cause else you'll have to grind rep again), had to be tweaked and tuned and is still far from perfect. Let's not forget that the 'random' dungeon finder is not even 'random'. At least in my day it used to be DM or GB all the time.

If anything LFD tool has been one of the most debated feature and given how many changes they had to make to it, it can be safely said that 'for the better part' LFD tool is a failure because of poor implementation and short sightedness of the devs.

I don't care for the paid bit, since I sold my wow account months ago (thank god I had the sense to do that) but calling LFD popular is like calling Taliban the emissaries of world peace. actually the paid service does make me happy lo...the people who still play, pay months of subs to get a 6 boss raid and have to pay to play with their friends. About half a million subs down and counting...
I must say thought, I see a pattern here. Look at all the games Activision bought and destroyed..it's all a pattern. Look at the knee jerk reactions, doing the bare minimum attitude prevalent among wow devs unless of course they can charge for it because obviously the Remote Auction House is one of the most widely used service and most of us are so lonely and pathetic, we really need to talk to our guildies when not in game as well.

People would argue Activision has no control over wow but no one can deny that there have been some major negative changes so far. Even if the teams for making mobile guild chat and raids are different, one would rather they fire the mobile team and hire some actual people who'll make content and not gimmicky crap that blizz use to get money out of no-lifers, loners etc.

Anyways..thank you blizz for making me feel every couple of weeks that selling my account was the best thing I did all year. Also I get a sick satisfaction out of seeing people who yelled at me a few months back...now slowly turning on blizz.

[ur_hbk]

Here's something from bnet.... quoting for truth .

People are paying money for a service and they have a right to an opinion on what that service should provide. Lately people have been unhappy with the amount of content that Blizzard has been producing: Delaying the second raid of Cata, 4.1 being a rehash of old dungeons. The class balancing has been all over the place with lots of hotfixes and one patch buffing numbers followed by the next patch nerfing those same numbers. Resulting in a live realm that feels more like a ptr because you have to re-evaluate your class after every minor content patch.

The fact is since the Activision merger we've seen many more attempts at making profit off the game:
# Paid Faction Change

# Paid Race Change

# Paid Name Change

# Paid Server Change

# Paid Appearance Change

# Arena Pass

# Mobile Auction House

# Microtransaction Pets and Mounts

# And Now Battle.net Cross Server Play


Now two of these Blizzard implemented before the merger (Server and Name change) but they had 6 month cooldowns and a price to discourage their use (abuse) after the merger these cooldowns were drastically reduced to 1 month, and then 3 days for server change.

Now many of the developers from the World of Warcraft team are working on Titan and many people feel that the current development teams are not of the same caliber as the so called "A team".

One of the recurring answers from the "Ask the Devs" posts is that they would like to implement feature X but they simply don't have the resources available. However at the same time development effort is being put into "Premium" features such as this when it could be used to implement said features for customers who are already paying for Activision-Blizzard's services. I think it's pretty reasonable for people to be upset with how things appear to be run. And maybe some of the facts here are not the whole story, but as a user of WoW that sure is what it looks like, and it's disappointing.

[Doylez]

LFD IS poplular and it works, there is no question about it.

Don't really care about this new Cross-Realm Dungeon feature though, probably useless for most of the playerbase.

[Thage]

Considering I get groups in less than one tenth of the time I did before the Dungeon Finder, I'd say it's popular, yes.

[Rivin]

Desperately trying to make it work? It's been in place nearly unchanged for over a year. It works just fine; that doesn't mean it can't be improved though.

As for popularity...yeah, you have no idea how popular it is. Where are you getting your information from, forums? Forum users are a tiny fraction of the actual player population. Blizzard can actually track what percentage of the real population uses the Dungeon Finder.

[Deleted]

I swear that LFD was largely praised since its introduction, but now that the queues have risen a little bit, the cool kids hate it...

[Tragopan]

I love LFD. It's a system that allows me to do something that I wouldn't bother doing otherwise. I don't understand the hate.. I never bonded with anyone in a pickup dungeon in vanilla or BC. Communities aren't made in a dungeon run.

That said I also find the paid services that Blizzard offers to be very, very useful.. I don't understand why you'd bother being grumpy about that. If you don't want to pay money for it, then don't? The same people who work on content are not the same people who work on the out of game features.

[Elysia]

1) There are a few threads already open on the subject of this update.
2) Your title was horrible and only aided in this thing getting closed.
3) The sky is not falling.

Closed.