Should LFD have ever been implemented?

[Deleted]

I think there is nothing more to add.
Except that it was around 1 to 1,5 hours on my server.

Granted it's no fun to wait for hours to find a group, even though that was pretty damn rare, I recall easily getting groups in 5-10 minutes... I still don't feel that the end result of the dungeons were worth it just for having a short queue. In the end you're still sitting around SW/Orgrimmar, only that the queue is looking for you. In exchange the difficulty is pretty much removed and all senses of social interaction is gone.

If all you want is to enter the dungeon, smash through it and then leave, wouldn't it have been better to have a solo option so you could do it at your own pace whenever the hell you felt like it?

[Paulosio]

I don't really remember there being that much social interaction since the end of Vanilla when making pug dungeon groups. In Vanilla I found my 1st molten core raiding guild after impressing a raid leader in a PUG UBRS run and I made a couple of friends here and there in places like Sunken temple....

In BC I don't really remember there being that much social interaction and for heroic dungeons the main social interaction seemed to be along the lines of "sorry we want a mage for CC".

In WOTLK (pre dungeon finder) My main social interaction in dungeon groups seemed to be me getting annoyed that nobody travelled to the dungeon because they all wanted a summon. I'd always get to the dungeon 1st even when being the 5th player to join a group and then have to wait about 15 mins for someone else to bother coming to the summonng stone.


The other annoying thing about not having dungeon finder is that you weren't able to actually play while trying to get a dungeon group together. Nowadays I quest or whatever while waiting to do a dungeon... Pre dungeon finder (especially after they removed the global LFR channel) I had to stop what I was doing and go wait in a city and either spam for more myself or wait for someone else to do it. It wasn't a lot of fun.

I could tolerate dungeon finder going away but only if they brought back a global Looking for group channel... I really don't understand why they ever got rid of it. I've heard them mention something about system resources but if it worked in Vanilla surely their tech can handle it now too. The only downsides are that there are probably more people waiting to troll such a channel now than in Vanilla and it would be a gold sellers paradise.

[Akka]

LFD was the single worst thing ever added to WoW.
The entire point of a MMO is to interact with people. The persons this function please are the ones who don't WANT to interact with others and basically come to play a solo game - WTF are they doing in a MMO then ?

It's like playing a FPS, but wanting the auto-aim because it's "a pain to aim yourself".

[Paulosio]

Granted it's no fun to wait for hours to find a group, even though that was pretty damn rare, I recall easily getting groups in 5-10 minutes...

I suppose it depends on your realm... But for those on less populated / dead realms it probably isn't ever possible to find groups in such short ammounts of time. Hopefully virtual realms would fix that.

- - - Updated - - -

Players are just different nowadays with the game being so old. There isn't a great deal of player interaction in heroic scenarios despite those being formed in the same way as dungeon groups once were. I sometimes wonder if dungeon finder had never been implemented if player interactions would even be any different to how they are now. Dungeon finder gets used as some sort of scapegoat for people who care about the game but don't enjoy it as much as 5-10 years ago... but really i'm not sure anything could ever keep a game feeling fresh after that ammount of time.

[Synstir]

I am glad they did implement it.
It saves a lot of time finding a group and while in queue you can do lots of other stuff.

[Cairhiin]

One of the best things ever implimented in the game, by a wide margin. Without it you'd likely never do 90% of the pre-end level dungeons in the game.
If you really hate the system, then you never played without it. An hour plus looking for a group, and MAYBE you'd get one. Being a dps practically meant you'd only get one dungeon a day, maybe. Now we have what, a 20minute wait? At most? And we can queue from anywhere in the world? I dont have to spam trade chat for hours? Pretty damn good to me.

Eh? I've played this game for a very long time, and I've played with and without LFD, and I certainly liked it better without. Waiting for hours? Not really, you know right that there's guilds for such a thing? The whole purpose of guilds has been slowly devaluated over time. I don't mind LFD, I think it does serve a purpose, but I don't think it was good for the social aspect of the game.

[mysticx]

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.

Yeah, content sucks when you can access it... /sarcasm

As for difficulty, spending 2 hours in vanilla-Scholo only to have the group fall apart before reaching Gandling (T0-helmets dropped off him), and thus having wasted most of my afternoon on absolutely nothing, sucked more than easy heroics do now.

[Amerissis]

No, I wouldn't. It took me 8 months to level to 60 in classic and I did no dungeons at all. Why not? Because you had to stay in town and spam the channel continuously to get a group. For the first months I didn't even know how to get a group, or that there were dungeons and when I found out, it was so tedious and almost impossible to get a group, that I gave up. Who in their right mind wants to stop leveling for 1-2 hours just to find a group? It makes no sense.

Edit: Oh, great poll you have there... Your post asks "So, if you could travel back in time, and stop LFD from ever being implemented, would you?", but your poll asks "Should LFD ever been implemented?", which is the exact opposite. You can discard the results of that poll, as I'm sure people answered 'no' after reading your post while they should have answered 'yes'. Stupid poll = stupid.

[Outofmana]

No, I wouldn't. It took me 8 months to level to 60 in classic and I did no dungeons at all. Why not? Because you had to stay in town and spam the channel continuously to get a group. For the first months I didn't even know how to get a group, or that there were dungeons and when I found out, it was so tedious and almost impossible to get a group, that I gave up. Who in their right mind wants to stop leveling for 1-2 hours just to find a group? It makes no sense.

The LFG channel was worldwide? You didn't have to stay in the city? Only when they removed the channel it became the ridiculous city camp because we had to use /trade now. Before with the LookingForGroup-channel, it was fine, the way it's still done on private servers (with a realmwide worldchannel) and it works perfectly. Or am I going senile and I'm making things up here? :P

The queues, but more the combination of queues AND crossrealm (aka grouping with unknown you will never ever meet again) killed a big social aspect of this game. Half of the game these days is looking at menus standing afk in the city minimized until you hear a dungeon ready-sound woohoo.
Also, can't really queue for these epic in-world group quest chains, so instead of letting people have the option to find groups and go on an epic journey through the world....they just removed all elite questhubs. gg.

[shadowmouse]

LFD is invaluable. If we did not have LFD, those who want to complain would have had to invent it in order to fuel pointless, horse beating threads. They'd still have to complain about welfare epics in order to brag that they'd been playing World of Warcraft since they played it in Morhaime's mom's basement with a graphing calculator and toy soldiers (and that is really why orcs are green).

[Deleted]

I am glad they did implement it.
It saves a lot of time finding a group and while in queue you can do lots of other stuff.

Pretty much this, anything that saves time with the amount of things to do in MoP is fine by me

[Deleted]

Social interaction isn't real if it's only forced upon you by a game.
Maybe next time you should try talking to people instead of being silent for 20 minutes followed by complaints that "everyone else was silent all the time!".
The game didn't lost its social skills, you did.

Difficulty is in challenge mode, that's the one you should try out. Hence the word: 'challenge'.

I have already obtained gold in all of the challenge modes... I'm happy about Challenge Modes, I truly am, but that's really not the issue here.

Forced interaction is to a degree required, or else it won't happen at all. Nobody is going to try to get a know a person they will spend 10-15 minutes with and no longer meet again, to then start over with a new person in the next run. If however you will meet again, be it out in the world, in the city, in the battleground, or in another dungeon, you are much more likely to be inclined to actually talk to the person.

If it's truly me and not the game, this wouldn't be brought up as much as it is. The groups wouldn't be as quiet as they are, with the exception of trolling and flaming.

[Deleted]

Granted it's no fun to wait for hours to find a group, even though that was pretty damn rare, I recall easily getting groups in 5-10 minutes... I still don't feel that the end result of the dungeons were worth it just for having a short queue. In the end you're still sitting around SW/Orgrimmar, only that the queue is looking for you. In exchange the difficulty is pretty much removed and all senses of social interaction is gone.

If all you want is to enter the dungeon, smash through it and then leave, wouldn't it have been better to have a solo option so you could do it at your own pace whenever the hell you felt like it?

Why would you want to get in smash and get out its beyond me really. Why would you want that? So you can do it again and again and again faster and faster till the end, so you can start doing the exact same thing at max level?

Lfd killed it for me. I NEVER EVER waited 1 hour, that because I am a polite, sociable, skilled enough to use cc and not grab aggro kind of person. And my friends list was filled up with people like me that enjoyed taking the trip rather than reaching the destination.
I know there were people waiting 1 hour for a group. But they deserved that. I always ignored "LFM RK" or the likes on trade. And rightly so. It's a social game. Be social, be polite.

Not saying lfd isn't handy. LFD is EXTREMELY handy. Too much. Everyone likes efficiency. Me, you, everyone. We enjoy hearing the "ding". It's what people focus on. The mistake from blizzard was to create a system that wasn't balanced between "efficiency" and "fun". And for many many people (the fall in subs could be a proof of this), the current system that stepped in since the end of wrath, just isn't fun enough.

A developer has to create a system that's fun and efficient in a balanced way. I believe the perfect balance was reached in tbc's heroics system. One shotted if you grabbed aggro, causing wipes if you fucked up cc's, yet efficient enough to allow players that cared to run them all the time without being a hassle.




My opinion anyway.

[Amerissis]

The LFG channel was worldwide? You didn't have to stay in the city? Only when they removed the channel it became the ridiculous city camp because we had to use /trade now. Before with the LookingForGroup-channel, it was fine, the way it's still done on private servers (with a realmwide worldchannel) and it works perfectly. Or am I going senile and I'm making things up here? :P

I believe there was, but I didn't know at the time or it was already gone by the time I actively searched for dungeons.

The queues, but more the combination of queues AND crossrealm (aka grouping with unknown you will never ever meet again) killed a big social aspect of this game.

It might have done so for a while, but now you can add friends crossrealm and group up, so there's no reason to never meet again. It's also perfectly viable to be nice and social to stranger you'd never meet again, but apparently people forgot that.

Half of the game these days is looking at menus standing afk in the city minimized until you hear a dungeon ready-sound woohoo.

No, the thing is, you can do whatever you like to do WHILE waiting for your queue. You choose to sit in town waiting, but you could be out doing dailies, killing rares, pet battling, PvP or whatever else you can do in this game. You can even queue for multiple things and the other queues will wait for you. I usually queue for raid, dungeon and then scenario. Scenario pops almost instantly, when it's done my dungeon is ready and when that is done my raid is waiting. No sitting around in town

Seems to me that everyone who hates LFD and complains about losing the social aspect, needs the game to force them to be social, because there is no reason not to be social now, except the unwillingness to be so. You can still find groups on your own, add people to your friendslist for future groups (even crossrealm) and you can still talk in groups. Guess when the game doesn't force it upon you, your simply not social.

[Spl4sh3r]

I believe LFD should have been implemented, however it could have been implemented in a better way than it was. I mean it does give a free teleport to the location, instead of taking use of the Summoning Stones, which should have been placed inside the dungeon instead.

[Deleted]

The LFG channel was worldwide? You didn't have to stay in the city? Only when they removed the channel it became the ridiculous city camp because we had to use /trade now. Before with the LookingForGroup-channel, it was fine, the way it's still done on private servers (with a realmwide worldchannel) and it works perfectly. Or am I going senile and I'm making things up here? :P

The queues, but more the combination of queues AND crossrealm (aka grouping with unknown you will never ever meet again) killed a big social aspect of this game. Half of the game these days is looking at menus standing afk in the city minimized until you hear a dungeon ready-sound woohoo.
Also, can't really queue for these epic in-world group quest chains, so instead of letting people have the option to find groups and go on an epic journey through the world....they just removed all elite questhubs. gg.

Yes I still have to find a valid reason as to why they removed the lfg channel actually.

[Amerissis]

I know there were people waiting 1 hour for a group. But they deserved that. I always ignored "LFM RK" or the likes on trade. And rightly so. It's a social game. Be social, be polite.

So people who aren't very good at making friends or sucking up to people, are just screwed? I'm polite, friendly and skilled, but not very apt at making friends and I'm really bad at being a hypocrite (being friendly just so you can get them for your next group, while IRL you wouldn't even want to meet such a person), so I didn't have a very extensive friendslist. Add to that that endgame guilds would only group with each other and shun new people and grouping became very difficult.

And then you try to find people in trade, but that's not social enough for you? How else are you supposed to find people exactly? Whispering random people isn't well received either, is it?

Your ability to make friends should not interfere with playing a game (and there is a difference between 'being able to make friends' and 'being social/friendly' as I am the latter but suck at the first). If you are skilled and not a total douchebag, you should be able to group up for certain content. That was completely impossible before LFD.

[Seriss]

LFD has just been wonderful. I still remember how much time it took to find a group for Uldaman back in the day. Or a group willing to clear Blackrock, quests and all. The worst memory I have is spending an entire afternoon looking for a tank for Mana Tombs, because my friend wasn't online that day, and nobody wanted to run Mana Tombs, but I still needed an item from there.

I also remember whispering to people who were looking for a dps and being declined because I was a warlock and they wanted a mage because they wanted decent CC. And warlocks were just the stupid guys who randomly feared everything and added additional trash (pah, and that when I had perfected the Curse-of-Recklessness-Curse-of-Weakness ping-pong on a feared mob, making it run back to me whenever it seemed it would run somewhere dangerous - and then send it away again before it could hit me).

You could spend a lot of time looking for groups and people to finish your own group and not find anybody.

And then it would take you a good 30 minutes to reach the likes of Maraudon or Caverns of Time, a timeframe during which it often happened that someone said "Sry guys, gotta go" and you'd be stuck looking for a replacement again.

How can you people find it an enjoyable thought to imagine that WoW could revert to such a user-unfriendly, unfun, time-stealing activity? "So, what did you do last night on WoW?" "Oh, I was trying to build a group for Caverns of Evil Bad Monsters Part 1. Almost got the group complete, but then the healer had to go to bed after 2 hours of us looking for a tank."

[Amerissis]

'Whatever else', kinda points out that you already know there isn't fuck else to do.

No, it points to the fact that it's too much to type and I don't know what other people like/do. My 'whatever else' consists of:
- Brawlers
- Killing rares
- Finding and taming certain pets
- Collecting all wild battle pets
- Doing a few dailies for stuff I am interested in (fishing, cooking, durotar weekly)
- Pet battling
- Farming at the dino Isle
- Playing the AH
- Running old raids for fun and transmog gear
- Achievement hunting

Happy? It beats sitting in town for 2 hours trying to get a group together.

edit: Oh, and I level a lot of alts, so they just quest while waiting for a dungeon. I did quests on my main too, to get loremaster, but that's done already. Ah yes, and added Achievement hunting.

[LeperHerring]

So people who aren't very good at making friends or sucking up to people, are just screwed?

No, but just because you're not very good at making friends doesn't mean that there cannot be any content for those that are. There should be different content suited for all play styles, not the same content for everyone. Some people prefer soloing or pick up groups, there should be some content for them. Some people like making friends, building fried lists, guilds and teams, and there should be some content suited for that. The problems start when you try to use the same content for all different play styles, which just doesn't work.