Which one of these hurt the community more?

[Joshdatroll]

The only thing that hurt the community is the community itself.

This 100%. No feature innately injured the community; it's how the community chooses to receive the features that hurts the community.

[Magpai]

I will say one thing: Blizzard's obstacles for removing asshole players are one aspect of LFD that hurts the community. 15 minute wait and limit to one per group does little more than enable blatant griefers.

[Henako]

No one is forced to use either of these features. People had the option to not transfer or do groups the old fashioned way, but didn't, because most people WANTED to use the LFG tool. This idea that Blizzard gave players an extra choice somehow forced them into doing something in a way that most of them did not want is ridiculous. If the community was "hurt" by the use of these tools, then it was by collective player choice.

This is bad logic, at least in the case of LFD. Blizzard released a tool that was a huge QoL improvement. Most players will always take the path of least resistance. You can argue that people could have chose not to use it, but it isn't much of an argument. Standing around yelling "N2 DPS Stocks" just seems silly when you can just queue for it.

I'm also not totally convinced that LFD is an evil monster, because when I actually ran PvE content heavily in wrath, I still never queued alone. Shit just isn't fun w/o friends, so I made sure I always ran with friends every day.

[Deleted]

What caused the community to become toxic? Or has it always been that way?

Competition.

[Raiju]

I also think your analogy is hilarious. I mean you're basically saying that if you, YOU, want these birds to do what you want them to do, that is, stay in your relative's captivity, then you have to cage them. I guess the wishes of the birds themselves for their own life don't need to be considered in the slightest.

Except that's how pets often are. They may return for food but in general when noones there they will run off and go somewhere else. This isn't unique to birds its just exemplified in them. Personally I'm a cat person but I know that for outdoor cats the reason they return to the house is food. If someone else starts feeding them they will stop returning to you.

Much like if another game company starts catering to people they go to them - the point of a subscription is to keep a grip on your customers. The point of dailies is to keep you logging on each day. If it were legal to keep people playing your product by law like it is legal to keep animals enclosed, companies would do it too.

I also didn't say I blamed blizzard, I was asked what I felt ruined the community and answered that. You don't disagree with the point it seems - you just say you won't blame them (or imply I will through strawman, your choice).

The magic thing is, the very people you stick with for the most part are exactly the same. It's quite clear you are exactly the same too. We all have our friends and we all enjoy being sociable with them, but often when we want something and the extra interaction isn't needed, we won't do it. I'm willing to bet 95% of the people don't talk in most of their LFR/D's. That's not what you're there for and as shitty as it sounds - you don't befriend people there because you don't NEED to. Now I have befriended a couple in LFD, but a couple over 4 years is much less than a couple per week on the old system where I was encouraged to talk. Or do you feel social groups are also causing people to be dishonest?

[Magpai]

This is bad logic, at least in the case of LFD. Blizzard released a tool that was a huge QoL improvement. Most players will always take the path of least resistance. You can argue that people could have chose not to use it, but it isn't much of an argument. Standing around yelling "N2 DPS Stocks" just seems silly when you can just queue for it.

Not seeing where the bad logic is, since the points you made about it being a QoL improvement don't change the fact that you *could* choose not to use it. And what makes that option difficult? The fact that other people PREFER queueing. It's a case of a feature that the majority likes to use making it harder for the minority to play the way they want to play. And the minority bitching because essentially they believe their collective gaming experience to be more important than that of the majority.

[Jaese]

Pretty sure it's the community that hurts the community. It is vehement and vile.

[Firebert]

Guild Reputation and Guild Levelling hurt the community far more than LFD, as it constricted normal guild movement.

[Tziva]

A think a lot of factors contributed to it, but the biggest two for me are simply growth (people are less likely to treat some random guy they will never see again well, whether they encounter them on their high pop server or in LFD) and apathy.

Obviously things like LFD/LFR, cross-server battlegroups, transfers and anything that increases population size, anonymity, and limits social repercussions is going to have that affect.

That said, I think all these features were necessary evils and I also think we all have the potential to create a community on our server at any time, but that most people would rather just reminisce about the community of old then work on rebuilding one.

[Henako]

Not seeing where the bad logic is, since the points you made about it being a QoL improvement don't change the fact that you *could* choose not to use it. And what makes that option difficult? The fact that other people PREFER queueing. It's a case of a feature that the majority likes to use making it harder for the minority to play the way they want to play. And the minority bitching because essentially they believe their collective gaming experience to be more important than that of the majority.

It's unreasonable to expect people not to use the feature. That's where your logic fails. However, I won't argue with you. I doubt I'll change your mind.

[Deleted]

I think here in mop, its the ûber bots. Blizzard hasn't been able to do a massive banwave in wow yet, so a lot of bots are out there. My friend used a hack to be able to fly in without flying mount. He used it in 4.3 in 2 arena games, and his account is still fine.

[Magpai]

It's unreasonable to expect people not to use the feature. That's where your logic fails. However, I won't argue with you. I doubt I'll change your mind.

It's not failed logic, it's failed interpretation on your part. I'm not "expecting" anyone to not use them. It's the people who bitch about them who wish people wouldn't use them. I'm saying the only reason they make it harder to get a dungeon group the old fashioned way is because people prefer the new tool. That's the mark of a successful feature, not a failed one. The people who say LFD "ruined the community" are really saying that LFD provided the majority of people a tool that they like better, but the complainer doesn't.

[Deleted]

Disobedience. Disobedience hurts the community. You must not criticize Big Blizzard!

[Deleted]

Community killers:
LFD (Dungeon Finder)
LFR (Raid Finder)
Cross Realm Battlegrounds
Cross Realm Zones
Server Migration
Faction Change
Character Renames

[Deleted]

Character Renames

Not at all.

[Littleraven]

The only thing that hurt the community is the community itself.

^this. the community is WAY too bloated and diverse for a game of this type. not saying diversity is bad because its really not but when you have 10+ million people all with different tastes playing the same game. literally ANYTHING blizzard does is going to create outcry.

[shokter]

Transfers gutted my old server. The community there suffered a bit from LFD (imo), but the mass of server transfers (whose ranks I eventually had little choice but to join) was the gutshot that left it pained and bleeding out for the entire length of Cataclysm. Mercifully, it is now dead (or...in the words of Miracle Max...mostly dead).

[Deleted]

Not at all.

I lost many contacts because of that.

[Okacz]

LFD. As much as this feature makes WoW easier and less annoying, it pretty much destroyed anything that could be called "server community".

I'm playing since Vanilla, but was experiancing max level only in WotLK. There was one thing I simply LOVED: server reputation. There was no meter there, no points, but you knew that you have it, and were proud. You had to work for yourself, you had to do 200% in every HC. If you didn't, well, people would remember, and not take the ninja/slacker/whiner on a daily adventure again. Remember server announcements like "Beware: Xxxlegolazxxx is a ninja, don't team up with him!"? Thats what made the system work. And if you were good? You logged in a day after doing a daily, and a minute after you got a whisper from a guy who yo did it with. "Hey, wanna join daily HC? We did it yesterday, I remember you were good". Thats what this was all about. It simply wasn't worth being a slacker or a ninja.

But what if I had an option to go back in those times? Well, I'll pussy it out: I would take it, but with an option of coming back to the future. I remember how happy I was with LFD at the beggining. No more tedious flying from one instance to another. No more "omg our tank DCed, we need to look for another for 30 min". And the server community worked along with the LFD - it came out with pretty hard ICC Heroics, so people usually formed server groups and used LFD as a teleporter. I can't say LFD is all bad.

Since then, my server got pretty deserted. There are no pugs here, no RBG groups, barely any interaction. I guess it may be the reason of LFD tho. Without the importance of server communication and reputation there was no reason not to transfer, nothing kept you. I guess LFD really had a big part in ruining community in WoW.

[Rizendragon]

I don't think it's argued that these didn't harm the community, so I want to know, which do you think hurt the community more?

I think it's faction/server transfers. Even with LFD, there's still a lot of things in-game in which you have to interact with people on your own server (raiding, guilds, challenge modes, rated battlegrounds, occasional dailies, world bosses, etc), and you still do have to mind your server reputation and keep it good. However with faction/server transfers, it doesn't matter if you have the worst of the worst reputation on your server; troll it up as much as you want, you can simply pay to do it all over again.

edit: explanation added

I actually think that the Server/faction x-fers were good for the game. Say you roll on the low population side of a server. You don't know this until you're a bit more experienced in the game. Why should you have to completely re-roll or suffer through just because of a nub decision when you first started playing? The mount of people that server x-fer due to being shunned because of trolling is much lower than the amount that leave for raiding purposes etc.

LFD is where things went wrong though. I agree that it opened a portion of the game to extremely casual players, but is that something that's really "good" for an MMORPG? the traditional MMORPG game play is gaming for 3-5 hrs at a time 3 or more times a week. I think taht is why we've seen people that leave runs so much more quickly lately. They only have an hour to play so one wipe is unacceptable. I could go on and on, but to me LFD was the thing that killed the game for the long run while fixing a short-term, nearsighted "problem".