My Thoughts on the Subject of RDF in Lordaeron

[Diernor]

This isn't so much a suggestion as it is my personal thoughts on a matter, shared in the hopes of inspiring a reasoned, civil discussion. As such, if this is not the appropriate place for such, I take no objection to this thread being moved, or deleted with a PM telling me where to put it.

Now this has already been milling about in the back of my head, but I was going to leave it be, until a discussion... or rather a very poorly reasoned, emotionally-driven argument, about it arose in global chat. After seeing that, I thought I should collect my thoughts and try to engender a discussion in a less heated environment.

My general attitude towards RDF and its lack of presence on Lordaeron is one of confusion. Reading through stickies and the automated messages on the server, it appears that the staff approach is that A: They want players to experience the game as it was without the Dungeon Finder, and B: They hope that this will create an environment where people will seek out friends, and in so doing make these dungeon runs into memorable experiences. So let me tackle each point in turn here.

Now, I could understand wanting people to experience the game without Dungeon Finder if this were TBC or vanilla, or even earlier WotLK. However they specifically chose 3.3.5a, a version when the Dungeon Finder had existed for several versions prior, to the point of being a very natural part of the experience at the time, at least from my perspective(I got into non-trial WoW at the tail end of WotLK, so admittedly I'm not familiar with the general climate of discussion surrounding the feature back then). Why not choose an earlier version and then patch in specific content and bugfixes as needed? Would that have just been too much unnecessary busywork to achieve what they desired? Alternatively, why not bring the older LFG system that existed forward? Even that was more convenient than the current setup, and that leads into my next point.

Now the second part. While the idea that a lack of RDF will create a climate conducive to seeking out friendships which would then make the dungeons more memorable is a very nice sentiment, I'm very much finding the reality in contrast to that vision. Very stark contrast, in fact. What I'm seeing, and subsequently doing myself, is a lot of people just spamming global and other chat channels to gather groups of randos to knock out a dungeon real quick. And this is... a massive pain. It takes easily half an hour to get 3 DPS, a healer, and a tank together, and during all of this you HAVE to pay attention, and doing all of this you still have no guarantee of a remotely good group, should you even manage to get a group together. Of course sometimes when it takes too long you can get a high-level player to carry you through, but that's neither as fun nor as rewarding overall.

Continuing on that point, the presence of RDF does not even inhibit people making friends and going through dungeons together. When I played retail Wrath/Cata, it was not at all uncommon to see people in guilds getting ready to run through certain dungeons manually. Maybe it's because all the groups they got through DF were crap, or maybe they just preferred doing things that way because running with friends was more fun. But regardless, they did it that way while Dungeon Finder was in place. So the idea that Dungeon Finder has to be disabled to encourage that behavior is, from my perspective, completely baseless.

So ultimately, my issue is two-fold. I don't see the logic in the basic premise behind disabling the dungeon finder, and I find that the overall experience without it is one of needless, frustrating busywork to get together the same group of randos most people would get anyway. Personally what rewards you do or don't get don't really matter to me, as the rewards from the RDF were never my main reason for using it anyway.

Now, with all that said, this is very much intended to be a discussion, so I'm quite interested in hearing, and hopefully understanding, opposing viewpoints, as well as different approaches to the same opinions.

[Bazromark]

Well to add to that, on my hunter, I completed every quest i could find in westfall, and spent a good deal of time trying to find a group for DM. With no succes.
No i'm stuck in westfall, trying to find people to do the DM, with nothing to do but stand around.
If I move on to a new map, I can't look for people in westfall.
Joining the global channel isn't really an option for lowlevel instances, everything drowns in the spam

What I would suggest, IF at all possible, to experience the game partly without dungeon finder.
Make the dungeon finder work, but WITHOUT the option to teleport people directly to the dungoen. Make people run from whereever they are to the dungeon.
That way, dungeonfinder only takes care of asempling the group, but you still have to manually move your but to the dungeon, OR use the summuning stone :)

[Gskill666]

Hello everyone.

I have the agree with OP on this one. As a horde player, while leveling i will never visit Gnomergan or the Stockades NEVER, RDF was there to form fast groups, and on low level it took me 1 hour to make a group to Shadowfang keep, 1 HOUR. Looking at global, looking at general, i don't get this you need to communicate to make dungeon idea.

This would be a great idea to do if the server was linked to another one but it is not, every person you play with in the dungeon you can find on YOUR server so this eliminates the whole point in disabling it.

And for the running part, many of the people who are on the opposite faction will never run low level dungeons of the opposite faction, unless it is for achievement run but till you get there you are already level 80 and can solo most of them.

I was playing on retail when Wrath was still current content, and the RDF feature was a neat little addition, you managed to gather a couple of quests for BFD ? nice you que up do the dungeon and hand them in, without going all the way to ashenvale to the end of the world, everyone wants to get Azeroth content out of the way cause its boring and takes to long to do, and finding a dungeon for low level zones is a pain.

Maybe just enable RDF for low level dungeons, or put some cap on it like you can join 5 dungeons/day with the RDF tool or something but this way half of the content is trow out the window.