When did the game start having to be designed around pugging?

[Echo of Soul]

I see this a lot (especially now with the covenant abilities), the demand or entitlement from players that the game needs to be changed because getting in to pugs will be too difficult otherwise.

Not that many years ago the standard reply to such demands was always "find a guild and your problems will go away" but now players expect the game to be catered towards pugging. When this mentality replace the old mentality? It's a MMORPG after all so I would assume that forming long relationships like you do in guilds would be the goal, not fleeting ones (at best) you get from pugs.

[Razion]

What? People PUG'd raids and dungeons since the onset of the game, what are you on about?

[Phunkle]

Where do you get the impression from that the players want the game to be centered around pugs?

I don't mean that in a demeaning way, I'm genuinely curious because I didn't come across that mindset yet.

[oblakoff]

I believe OP means the whole mindset of "if i choose class X or covenant X i can't get into groups" which is the most common argument against covenant system. This problem, however does not exist if you are in a guild.

NB! I am not saying covenants are ok.

[Kaver]

What? People PUG'd raids and dungeons since the onset of the game, what are you on about?

Listen to the question the OP is asking. He didn't say that the people didn't pug. He just said the the game is moving in a direction where it's more and more designed around pugging.

[Echo of Soul]

Listen to the question the OP is asking. He didn't say that the people didn't pug. He just said the the game is moving in a direction where it's more and more designed around pugging.

That's exactly what I said but some people only see things in black and white apparently

[thilicen]

Well I don't do PUGs myself but I can see why being denied a spot because of your quasi-permanent choice of covenant would be annoying to anyone, and that has nothing to do with entitlement as much as it does poor game design.

A side point, the definition of what the social aspects are in a MMO these days are not what they were back in the days at all. Accessibility is a definite focus in video games all around these last years, that means catering to the masses in a lot of cases.

[Aphrel]

since the introduction of mythic+ no doubt.

The harder tuned something is, the less variance from the best possible setup can be tolerated be4 the run becomes bricked.

This is why we see so similar setups of specs and classes aswell as corruptions and gear of the top m+ runners and of cutting edge guilds. Because theres no room to play suboptimal builds when the encounter you are playing is tuned as tight as it is.

You can bet that unless covenants are nerfed to become irrelevant we are going to see very similar setups of covenants everywhere something is tuend very tightly aswell.

But then, this is probably inevetable anyway, just look at classic wow. There we see the same theme because when the content lacks difficulty, players instead create their own competition of endgame pushing in speedruns.

[Lochton]

I see this a lot (especially now with the covenant abilities), the demand or entitlement from players that the game needs to be changed because getting in to pugs will be too difficult otherwise.

Not that many years ago the standard reply to such demands was always "find a guild and your problems will go away" but now players expect the game to be catered towards pugging. When this mentality replace the old mentality? It's a MMORPG after all so I would assume that forming long relationships like you do in guilds would be the goal, not fleeting ones (at best) you get from pugs.

I believe it has done such a change because of the whole, "go find your own raid".

[burek]

"find a guild and your problems will go away"

I guess people didn't know better back then. Playing the game when you feel like it and on your own time is far superior than playing it on a schedule that you can't miss like its a job. And it's not like joining a guild is some magical answer, they are usually full of cliques. Why limit yourself to only play when enough of your pseudo-friends that only share a guild tag are free and willing, when you can play whenever you want with anyone available?

M+, that is puggable, challenging and rewarding, and that you can play whenever and with whomever is the best feature added to the game since launch.

[Thage]

I see this a lot (especially now with the covenant abilities), the demand or entitlement from players that the game needs to be changed because getting in to pugs will be too difficult otherwise.

Not that many years ago the standard reply to such demands was always "find a guild and your problems will go away" but now players expect the game to be catered towards pugging. When this mentality replace the old mentality? It's a MMORPG after all so I would assume that forming long relationships like you do in guilds would be the goal, not fleeting ones (at best) you get from pugs.

The game has been designed for pick-up groups since launch. Tools implemented since launch to make it easier to find groups has been a response to certain parts of the community unnecessarily inflating requirements to run basic entry-level dungeons and raids, not necessarily to further focus the game on pick-up groups.

If anything, I would argue that most organized endgame gameplay these days is most surely not designed for pick-up groups. One of the biggest ongoing criticisms about raiding is that there isn't really a 'sweet spot' for pugs/friends-and-family guilds. Flex/Normal was supposed to address that demographic since its implementation in 5.4 but it hasn't really panned out as well. Mythics, once you pass +10, work much better with a static group than with slotting random players into the team. In PvP, all the good stuff comes from rated play, and rated play rewards organized teambuilding far above pugged mobs.

Just because there's an easy mode players can queue up for doesn't mean the game emphasizes pugging over organized teambuilding. If anything, the extra rewards in organized game modes and the staggered content release for matchmade game modes strongly suggests the opposite.

You're like... almost 20 years late on this discussion because this discussion has been steady and ongoing since the day WoW launched.

[Loveliest]

Someone said before me so I'm only repeating the same thing: since M+
Here's the thing: having a guild doesn't solve the requirements for doing M+ if you want to progress at a certain level. For example, you might raid and be very happy with your guild raid-wise but that guild might only meet up once or twice a week to do a couple Mythic+.

This means that if you want to push high keys, which requires doing a LOT of keys, you have to either pug or find a group / community that's fitting. Which is slightly harder than finding a raiding guild. Small groups are very volatile - your tank leaves because he thinks he can do better, your group is out and you have to find a replacement and do what in the meantime? Pug, I guess?

And then you have the other end of the spectrum, where some people are socials in a raiding guild and can't commit. These are usually those people in the guild that say at random times "I have this lvl 8 key, anyone want to help?" And hardly anyone rushes to help, because they interact so little. I mean there are even raiders in my guild I don't bother to help - I do my weekly 15 or whatever I can push and I cba to help with lower level keys, and I'm the only main spec tank in the guild who does keys. There's two other offspec tanks, but if they get a key done on their main specs with me, they won't help either. So the only option for these people is to pug.

So overall, people are worried about getting accepted into pugs. Not sure if it justifies the whole covenant thing, but there is this one feature that heavily rests on pugging.

The one thing form the past I recall was back in Wrath, before LFD, when you had to do your heroic, you'd have to pug and you had high requirements because it would lock you on the id. So people only picked tanks with high health and defense rating (even if it was useless to have more than 335 for dungeons) and others would just not get in. This bit stayed the same, but what changed is that you don't just want to do one dungeon, you want to do more. And in the past it wouldn't matter if you didn't do your dungeon, because raids were covering all your gear, but now M+ gives comparable gear and sometimes some pieces are more desirable.
And the dungeons themselves gave gear for... what? To help with questing and maybe at raid before you got something better. But now the dungeons have a different path - you need gear to progress the same dungeon, not necessarily for raid. So they no longer overlap.

- - - Updated - - -

You're like... almost 20 years late on this discussion because this discussion has been steady and ongoing since the day WoW launched.

What he means obviously doesn't refer to the existance of pugging. What he's refering to means "Why are people yelling so loud all of a sudden that their lives depends on pugging, they didn't in the past".
This is exactly what you're saying yourself, that raids are heavily designed for proper groups and NOT for pugging. They aren't pug friendly and it's been like that for ages. it's actually even worse. So he's wondering "Why all of a sudden this isn't OK anymore?"

[Thage]

What he means obviously doesn't refer to the existance of pugging. What he's refering to means "Why are people yelling so loud all of a sudden that their lives depends on pugging, they didn't in the past".
This is exactly what you're saying yourself, that raids are heavily designed for proper groups and NOT for pugging. They aren't pug friendly and it's been like that for ages. it's actually even worse. So he's wondering "Why all of a sudden this isn't OK anymore?"

I am aware of this. He's still wrong. People have been calling for the game to be pug-friendlier since launch, mostly because of community gatekeeping. That's why LFD/LFR were implemented--LFD was specifically noted as being designed with servers where it was difficult to find groups without full tier sets in BC in mind. However, even as far back as Vanilla, people were pugging in warm bodies to fill spots in Molten Core and BWL.

Even if we were to assume this is a 'recent' phenomenon, 'recent' in this context means WotLK when pug raiding saw a massive uptick. That's 2008. It's 12 years later now and nothing meaningful has shifted in community dynamics since WotLK in regards to pug raiding and people calling for pug raiding to be made more accessible, and just like 12 years ago, the biggest thing limiting pug raiding is... the community inflating requirements to enter raids on Normal.

Either the OP has missed the last 12 years of chatter in his server's LFG channel and on the official forums, or he's intentionally ignoring them to make a 'kids these days' rant.

[Azerate]

People just like whining. Nothing new there.

[A Chozo]

It kinda ramped up during Siege of Orgrimmar, because it had Flex raiding with the system were you could queue to specific wings. That was like a signal that raids were puggable, albeit on a easier difficulty. But you get it. It slowly spread towards the harder difficulties.

Then it worsened with Mythic+ because it was "Dungeons, but Rewarding!" culturally dungeons are done with PuGs, so it kinda applied to M+.

[Tuor]

I see this a lot (especially now with the covenant abilities), the demand or entitlement from players that the game needs to be changed because getting in to pugs will be too difficult otherwise.

Not that many years ago the standard reply to such demands was always "find a guild and your problems will go away" but now players expect the game to be catered towards pugging. When this mentality replace the old mentality? It's a MMORPG after all so I would assume that forming long relationships like you do in guilds would be the goal, not fleeting ones (at best) you get from pugs.

The idea i got is that you didn't played wrath, about everyone pugged back then, if not with their mains, with their alts. You say that people shouldn't pug because that should be the guilds job providing you progression, but back in wrath, people just appliyed to a guild for social reasons, and there was so much more people playing back then that getting a place for a 25m run wasn't that easy.

EDIT:
The solution was pugging.

[Sansnom]

Not that many years ago the standard reply to such demands was always "find a guild and your problems will go away" but now players expect the game to be catered towards pugging. When this mentality replace the old mentality? It's a MMORPG after all so I would assume that forming long relationships like you do in guilds would be the goal, not fleeting ones (at best) you get from pugs.

Because some people find guilds based on different criteria? I assume you chose your guild based on what the guild can offer you in terms of accessibility. The raids/pvp/dungeon, time and duration etc.

Others chose their guild based on the people there, not what the guild can offer in term of content access. So for these people, access to the content is limited. These players may have long term relationship with the guild and do not wish to leave the guild for a new one simply it is compatible with their playtime.

Pugging has always been around. Blizzard simply acknowledge that and provided tools to make the process of finding a random group easier.

Finally, Blizzard made the content more accessible, they have not removed any content for pre-made. This is actually a good thing. So why the complaint?

[korijenkins]

What? People PUG'd raids and dungeons since the onset of the game, what are you on about?

I think he means designed around being able to find groups with minimal effort. LFR, LFG, and the premade group finder.

To that, I'd say during Cata. LFR is a pointless, waste. It does nothing for the game, and treats high level content as something trivial, to be auto attacked and finished. Without a proper endgame, which this game really doesn't have because of LFR, guilds and server communities are dead. Recruitment is impossible.

They furthered the problem by adding a 4th raid difficulty, and then went even further by letting you run all 4 difficulties in a weekly lockout, praying for titanforges.

[Twdft]

I would argue patch 1.7 with the introduction of Zul Gurub.

Dungeons were pug content from the beginning, raids not so much because you needed 40 players on a steady basis. Zul'Gurub changed that and was pugged all the time already in 2005.

Burning Crusade changed the raid structure to 10/25 and while 25 was still mostly run by guilds, Karazhan, Gruul and Magtheridon were absolutely pugged right from the beginning.

So I don't think WoW was in some later expansion made to be puggable, it already was.

[Gorsameth]

When the developers realised the VAST majority of players do not engage in organised raiding and just do their thing without interacting with other players and that they quit when they run out of content.