Should LFD have ever been implemented?

[barackohmama]

I voted no. People are so lazy nowdays in wow. Fact is LFD has ruined much of the joy in wow. Whole zones are now dead, meetingstones are pointless. travel is useless so you dont really need that fast fancy mount. Most people don't know what other players play on their own realm etc etc. Everything just to make the game more convenient and arcadeish.

[RicardoZ]

I'll kind of meet the OP halfway and say that Heroic modes should never have been added to LFD, but for regular modes, I think it's a pretty good feature.

[Mormolyce]

Except it won't be. Because the mentality of plowing through the dungeon as fast as humanly possible has been engrained from so many pugs. No matter who you group with(outside of personal friends) they are conditioned to be impatient. Riding to the stone isn't a negative thing, it's just logic. How does it make sense that you can instantly port anywhere? Not to mention how fast it is to get there now with flying mounts.
It is in MOST respects(not all), INferior. It's the same as the rest of the game, sacrificing quality for convenience.

^ This is all make-believe.

If there a lot of people like you who feel the way you do, you'll have no trouble finding them in Trade.

And I don't understand at all how you want to premake a group that doesn't plough through things fast? That's exactly the advantage of a premade group, you set the pace between you. Usually: fast.

This just confirms my impression that a lot of this anti-LFD prejudice is based on vague wishes and fuzzy nostalgia for a time that never actually existed.

[frumper]

It's usually these socially inept people that had long waiting times for groups I would wager. I never had such issue, not even as a despised Ret Paladin of the time, thanks to my capabilities of socializing to a point I was asked to join in groups by a lot of people.

On my high pop server you'd be lucky to get an AB let alone an AV queue after midnight. And that was a queued instance! Insinuating people have bad social skills as the reason why they couldn't find a group is just rude.

[TS26]

The social interaction (at least in leveling) into getting a group was one of my favorite times in WoW, but was removed for convenience when LFD came in. So, if you could travel back in time, and stop LFD from ever being implemented, would you?

Cleaned up the thread title to stop any more grammar nonsense [ML]

But it wasn't, you can still try to find a group manually for an instance and then queue for it. You just chose not to.

[Dormie]

^ This is all make-believe.

If there a lot of people like you who feel the way you do, you'll have no trouble finding them in Trade.

And I don't understand at all how you want to premake a group that doesn't plough through things fast? That's exactly the advantage of a premade group, you set the pace between you. Usually: fast.

This just confirms my impression that a lot of this anti-LFD prejudice is based on vague wishes and fuzzy nostalgia for a time that never actually existed.

You just disproved absolutely nothing of what I said.

[frumper]

I voted no. People are so lazy nowdays in wow. Fact is LFD has ruined much of the joy in wow. Whole zones are now dead, meetingstones are pointless. travel is useless so you dont really need that fast fancy mount. Most people don't know what other players play on their own realm etc etc. Everything just to make the game more convenient and arcadeish.

Those zones were dead before 3.3 came out.

[Eats Compost]

I feel that it allows and perhaps even encourages Blizzard's bad habit of putting forward raids as the primary form of non-PvP endgame content. They aren't sustainable and that's a serious problem for the game; they require a lot of time resources to make and yet they don't have any long-term value outside of the gear rewards associated with doing them. How many people would actually do LFD, particularly LFR, minus the rewards? Not many, I think. At least with battlegrounds, you have some people there for the sake of being there, which is something very lacking in the LFD environment. LFR is a double whammy of entirely reward-driven experiences and content that is outdated by the end of a patch and obsolete by the end of an expansion. Just isn't good.

With all that said, the existence of LFD and LFR aren't the problem. They're just the wrong direction to go in when you want to fix the "no content for the masses" issue. Modern-day heroics and LFR are more accessible, yes, but at the unavoidable cost of being less compelling and having reduced content lifecycles. Stuff like Battlefield: Barrens and the Timeless Isle are good forms of alternative content, but they need to step it up and perhaps even consider scaling them to prevent redundancy.

[Derpleton]

One of the interesting things I noticed between LFD and spamming trade is that I was a much worse playing without LFD mainly because I believe people would put up with the noobishness to avoid 2 hours of trade chat. In LFD people will just kick you and make you want to figure out what you did wrong (assuming they weren't telling you how to play as they kick you for being a noob)

[Mormolyce]

It's both. Wotlk was easier than normal, but now any LF function has to be stupid easy. LFR for example.
You can keep denying it but you'd just be wrong :/

Also, yea Wrath dungeons were easy, but nothing like the current 5 mans have been the whole expansion. You hardly need to even heal anymore, it's an absolute joke. It's borderline broken gameplay.

It's true that you wouldn't want LFR that was as hard as NM. It'd be unplayable.

But you can't blame LFD for easier heroics. LFD came in late in Wrath after dungeons were already incredibly easy (because they were massively overgeared by that point - a lot of people forget that, HoR for example made mincemeat out of a lot of LFD pugs because it had a higher ilvl req). And then Cata comes along and the heroics were probably the hardest they've ever been (again, people went from doing everything in full ICC NM gear to being unable to overgear content, that was a large part of the difficulty jump). And the complaining shook the forums to their foundations. ZA and ZG were similarly punishing. It was only in HoT that Blizzard decided to deliberately reduce the difficulty of heroics for pugs, which they continued in MoP. And made CMs to replace the experience of difficult dungeons. And they experimented with heroic scenarios for non-queued, more difficult content.

So in short, the difficulty of dungeons varied a lot for a host of reasons and it's not as simple as LFD made them easy. At all. The current philosophy of easy heroics for pugs came about through enormous community demand for exactly that.

[Wilian]

On my high pop server you'd be lucky to get an AB let alone an AV queue after midnight. And that was a queued instance! Insinuating people have bad social skills as the reason why they couldn't find a group is just rude.

It definately did not increase their chances. The way you present yourself could make a world of difference. Say if someone typed stuff like "LFG SL MS warrior" it will probably if not disappear in the flood of text but also be overlooked if someone else put more effort to personalize their text along the lines of "A jolly warrior and his band of big weapons looking to smack some acolytes down in the Shadow Labyrinth!".

[Anzaman]

So, if you could travel back in time, and stop LFD from ever being implemented, would you?

Nope.

It was quite awful to watch trade chat being flooded with "LFM TANK/HEALER FOR...". In it's current condition it's a lot faster to get into a group.

[Mormolyce]

You just disproved absolutely nothing of what I said.

How can I disprove something that wasn't proven in the first place? You made vague accusations that the playerbase has somehow changed its psychology since an undetermined mythical point in the past and that's somehow (reasoning unclear) preventing you from making a pug yourself. You can't prove or disprove that, it's just fluff.

[frumper]

I feel that it allows and perhaps even encourages Blizzard's bad habit of putting forward raids as the primary form of non-PvP endgame content. They aren't sustainable and that's a serious problem for the game; they require a lot of time resources to make and yet they don't have any long-term value outside of the gear rewards associated with doing them. How many people would actually do LFD, particularly LFR, minus the rewards? Not many, I think. At least with battlegrounds, you have some people there for the sake of being there, which is something very lacking in the LFD environment. LFR is a double whammy of entirely reward-driven experiences and content that is outdated by the end of a patch and obsolete by the end of an expansion. Just isn't good.

Who ran 3-5 hour BRD runs if not for the sake of gear? Sadly, you were probably there looking for +fire resist gear for a raid.
Dungeons take a lot of time to create too. They've shifted a lot towards scenarios because they're reusing a lot of art to make them.
Old raids on the other hand are far from obsolete with players looking for either the content, flavor items, or transmog gear.

[Mormolyce]

I feel that it allows and perhaps even encourages Blizzard's bad habit of putting forward raids as the primary form of non-PvP endgame content. They aren't sustainable and that's a serious problem for the game; they require a lot of time resources to make and yet they don't have any long-term value outside of the gear rewards associated with doing them. How many people would actually do LFD, particularly LFR, minus the rewards? Not many, I think. At least with battlegrounds, you have some people there for the sake of being there, which is something very lacking in the LFD environment. LFR is a double whammy of entirely reward-driven experiences and content that is outdated by the end of a patch and obsolete by the end of an expansion. Just isn't good.

With all that said, the existence of LFD and LFR aren't the problem. They're just the wrong direction to go in when you want to fix the "no content for the masses" issue. Modern-day heroics and LFR are more accessible, yes, but at the unavoidable cost of being less compelling and having reduced content lifecycles. Stuff like Battlefield: Barrens and the Timeless Isle are good forms of alternative content, but they need to step it up and perhaps even consider scaling them to prevent redundancy.

Even in those cases, people quickly desert content once they run out of gear to get from it. IoT has been empty for months on my server.

I think this is a much broader concern than LFD, which is why do people play MMOs at all? Clearly, a lot (like 90% I'd say) do it all for the lewtz. I mean, look at CMs for example. No loot, hardly anyone does 'em.

[frumper]

It definately did not increase their chances. The way you present yourself could make a world of difference. Say if someone typed stuff like "LFG SL MS warrior" it will probably if not disappear in the flood of text but also be overlooked if someone else put more effort to personalize their text along the lines of "A jolly warrior and his band of big weapons looking to smack some acolytes down in the Shadow Labyrinth!".

Yea, I'm sure that wouldnt get you trolled. But to address whether it would help you find a group or not, the answer is no. If people werent in trade chat looking for a group, then it didn't matter how you asked for a group. And starting your own group was a 1-2 hours endeavor usually. That is of course when you'd invite people and they see you didnt have a tank or healer and would just quit. If you had one they might wait it out. All of this aside, when someone quit mid run because mommy said it was dinner time, bed time, or the baby is crying then you were screwed and had to take another 20 minutes minimum(traveling) plus the time it would take you to find a replacement. If you just needed a dps then it was probably quick. If you needed a tank, the group usually fell apart.

[Eats Compost]

Who ran 3-5 hour BRD runs if not for the sake of gear? Sadly, you were probably there looking for +fire resist gear for a raid.

I did not say that dungeons were ever good in this regard. I just said that LFD and LFR encourage them as frontline content for the majority of the playerbase, which is bad because of their lack of longevity and reward-driven nature. They just aren't sustainable, and are very easy to tire of. Vanilla also had a different enough playerbase and environment that things like BRD are hardly relevant to a discussion about the game in its modern form.

Dungeons take a lot of time to create too. They've shifted a lot towards scenarios because they're reusing a lot of art to make them.

Yes, dungeons share that problem. They're also not sustainable. They just aren't particularly relevant to a statement about patch content right now because Blizzard hasn't been adding any in patches. Scenarios are at least more efficient when it comes to resources, but they are equally unsustainable for the most part.

Old raids on the other hand are far from obsolete with players looking for either the content, flavor items, or transmog gear.

Vanity items don't make the content that they come from good, which is half of the issue with raids. When people are going and completing content solely for the rewards that they give, that's a problem that will raise its head sooner or later. It doesn't have to be the case that gameplay isn't rewarding, but the gameplay certainly does have to be engaging and fun, preferably enough so that people will go to do that content even without the promise of a reward. PvE content seriously struggles to achieve this, and it's doubly troubling because of the level-dependency of almost all of it.

Remember, this is an MMO, not a single-player game that warrants what would equate to a single playthrough. It needs to keep players playing and coming back to do things, and relying on item rewards to do so isn't a great solution. The carrot on the stick can only get us so far, and it paints us into the corner of having something or nothing to do based entirely on the items we have.

[Wilian]

Yea, I'm sure that wouldnt get you trolled.

Sometimes it did, curiously enough the pattern of it was from those people who kept spamming same odorless LFG message all night long without any luck with group while I would go and finish few runs.

But to address whether it would help you find a group or not, the answer is no.

That is not my experience. I always found a group in quite the timely fashion.

If people werent in trade chat looking for a group, then it didn't matter how you asked for a group.

While true, LFD tool was a poor-man's solution for such issue (Population). Connected Realms is the route they should've gone to begin with.

And starting your own group was a 1-2 hours endeavor usually. That is of course when you'd invite people and they see you didnt have a tank or healer and would just quit. If you had one they might wait it out.

This sort of behaviour would imply towards those "LFM for X!" messages which would simply not inform anyone with the group's current status if they ever actually caught eye. Also if you had to wait 1-2 hours to make a group chances are you went to it in a manner that simply wouldn't attract people.

All of this aside, when someone quit mid run because mommy said it was dinner time, bed time, or the baby is crying then you were screwed and had to take another 20 minutes minimum(traveling) plus the time it would take you to find a replacement. If you just needed a dps then it was probably quick. If you needed a tank, the group usually fell apart.

While true to an extent, this was very much an rare exception, not common occurance in my groups. I don't plan things around based on that there is a CHANCE of something maybe happening if stars won't align.

Overall your experience is so far from mine I'll just have to believe your methods didn't work out.

[Eats Compost]

Even in those cases, people quickly desert content once they run out of gear to get from it. IoT has been empty for months on my server.

I think this is a much broader concern than LFD, which is why do people play MMOs at all? Clearly, a lot (like 90% I'd say) do it all for the lewtz. I mean, look at CMs for example. No loot, hardly anyone does 'em.

And that's the core of the issue. It's reward-driven. That needs to change and a focus on entertainment value from content, rather than their reward payoffs, needs to come in. Reward-driven content that is also accessible enough to be completed quickly won't keep people playing an MMO forever. Even trivial things like pet battles have a better focus on longevity and fun value than a lot of the game's major content, which should raise a red flag for Blizzard.

The journey should be more important than the destination, and that just doesn't show up in the game's design.

[frumper]

And that's the core of the issue. It's reward-driven. That needs to change and a focus on entertainment value from content, rather than their reward payoffs, needs to come in. Reward-driven content that is also accessible enough to be completed quickly won't keep people playing an MMO forever. Even trivial things like pet battles have a better focus on longevity and fun value than a lot of the game's major content, which should raise a red flag for Blizzard.

The journey should be more important than the destination, and that just doesn't show up in the game's design.

I think one mistake you make is that the "end" of the journey isn't really the end in wow. The game gets added content. There is nothing wrong with the design you're proposing, it just isn't WoW. In a table top RPG the content never has to end because you have an active GM creating encounters as you go. A video game has finite resources and finite options. I've always felt PvP should be designed exactly how you describe, but I've come to accept that is not how WoW is designed, or how they want to design it. Counter Strike, Starcraft, Baseball, Monopoly can be repeated because the player creates the dynamic content. In WoW we're largely playing against a computer and we hit those finite options.