Soldato
I'm sure there was some kind of party finder in vanilla at some point. It was nothing like the automatic thing we have now though.
World of Warcraft: Classic
- Thread starter agnes
- Start date
I'm sure there was some kind of party finder in vanilla at some point. It was nothing like the automatic thing we have now though.
I think Blizzard basically forgot about the human interaction part of MMO's that makes them attractive when they introduced gear score, achievements and LFG. Playing on a private classic server a few years back I found that again, you could talk your way into groups, you could barter and socialise with people, that's not half the game, it's 90% of what an MMO should be. It's why Diablo 2 was great and Diablo 3 is dull, there was a bit of a wild west feel to Diablo 2, Diablo 3 is basically too organised and safe.
Soldato
#1 Blizzard never introduced Gear Score. They adopted it after a player made mod introduced it and then a player enforced GS requirement to do content became the norm.
#2 Achievements I am not sure how that relates to human interaction when attaining many achievements when they are relevant requires human interaction.
#3 I think that is an unfortunate side affect of LFG but not within Blizzards control either.
Soldato
1. IMO Gearscore was one of the worst things to be introduced to WOW but yea, that wasn't blizzards fault and if they banned it I'm sure something similar would have popped up.
2. Never really had a problem with them, they don't affect game play in any way really.
2a - Except for "link achieve for inv" which they should have got rid of, I don't think they should really have achievements linked to anything other than maybe mythic clears.
3. This is all on Blizzard. They didn't need to introduce this. At the time, I actually thought it was a good idea but it was really the beginning of the end of the MMO part of WOW.
No longer did you need to interact with people end game (pre raiding I mean). Just AFK till the dungeon queue dings.
I'm looking forward to having to form groups etc even though realistically I probably won't have time to do it. During Vanilla I could be looking for a group for an hour just to run DM. Now I'm lucky if I have an hour a night in total to play.
If you want stuff to miss, guild vs guild pvp for the opportunity to fight a world boss.
One word - Azuregos.
For Heroics/LFR yeah, Mythic Plus and pre-made raids you make your own way there, or get a summon from a warlock/summon stone (which were in classic btw).
The teleporting to dungeons was the huge nail in the coffin of WoW for me. It was that which made people just sit around in cities and beam to and from dungeons, theres just no good reason to include that "feature" in an MMO, all it does it take players out of the game world and move them to an ingame lobby. Once people were just sitting about in cities and beaming into dungeons , they weren't travelling around the zones and by not travelling around the zones , world PvP was impacted as people weren't on the move. Its not the only example of how WoW wrongly put convenience over gameplay but its certainly a biggy.
Almost feel for the people who designed the zones, with all the beaming about the zones became empty and you had a nicely designed gameworld which was pointless. By the time I left WoW, you frankly could have scrapped all the zones in the game and just had a city lobby and then a bunch of unconnected dungeon instances on a server and have people sit in the lobby and zip in and out of the instances of dungeons in much the same way as people select a map from an FPS game lobby
Almost feel for the people who designed the zones, with all the beaming about the zones became empty and you had a nicely designed gameworld which was pointless. By the time I left WoW, you frankly could have scrapped all the zones in the game and just had a city lobby and then a bunch of unconnected dungeon instances on a server and have people sit in the lobby and zip in and out of the instances of dungeons in much the same way as people select a map from an FPS game lobby
Soldato
I may be remembering it incorrectly but I seem to remember being sat in a town, Trawling through the /LFG for an instance...to get one an hour or so later to then run to the instance and be asked to summon 3 other members of the team as they were off messing about doing what they wanted to do. Fairly often you would get into an instance only to have someone leave relatively quickly as they had spent so long trying to get into the thing that they no longer had time to do it. All it did was make it so 5 people could then go about their day and still get an instance.
For me the only time I consistently did instances was part of Guild runs or content with friends as the time and effort required to get into a instance group far outweighed the benefits of doing the instance a lot of the time.
I do however utterly dislike how I may as well just be playing with 4 AI characters as the interactions you have half the time are none existent. I jumped into an instance with my wife and said that it was her first time playing and please excuse any mistakes. No one said anything at all and then 10 minutes later they did a vote to kick her and the only comment was "TRASH". It is a problem for sure but I think the current system of being able to do the content while still being able to go about farming\questing\whatever else instead of being stood in a town shouting for a group etc.
I don't have an issue with LFG, I'm fine with that for arranging instances, its purely the teleporting to instances that ruined it for me. Played countless dozens of MMOs and I've never had any problems with having to run to dungeons to get into them, I used to do it all the time in the golden era of MMOs (1997-2005) before things started going terribly wrong (imo) with the genre. LFG is a good tool, helps to get things arranged (should only ever be single server though imo, no x-server LFG nonsense), but the beaming from city to dungeon and back without ever setting foot in a zone, that to me is hugely detrimental to the genre.
I'm pretty certain since WoD you had to physically travel to the dungeon entrance, in order to be able to queue for it in LFG. Legion was the same and I believe BFA was like that too.
Like @Woogie said above, you can moan at how LFG ruined the game all you want, but he's right. Trying to get a group together in Vanilla was a pain in the arse. 45 minutes getting the correct comp, then travelling there and waiting another 15 mins for +1 to get the summon stone going. That's an hour wasted, someone leaves as they need to eat and the group disbands.
Realistically, no one really idles in a main city waiting for the queue to pop, you're always doing something. Farming materials for flasks/pots. Doing world/daily quests etc.
Like @Woogie said above, you can moan at how LFG ruined the game all you want, but he's right. Trying to get a group together in Vanilla was a pain in the arse. 45 minutes getting the correct comp, then travelling there and waiting another 15 mins for +1 to get the summon stone going. That's an hour wasted, someone leaves as they need to eat and the group disbands.
Realistically, no one really idles in a main city waiting for the queue to pop, you're always doing something. Farming materials for flasks/pots. Doing world/daily quests etc.
I wonder why this was such an issue in WoW, I never had that issue (the difficulty of getting groups together, 45mins to get the "correct" comp, and so on) in any of the other MMOs that I played which didn't have teleporting to dungeons in. Seems odd that it was such a pain for WoW players but UO/DAOC/EQ/AC players were fine with it.
It depends what class you were playing and what time you were looking for a group. If you're playing a Rogue and trying to get a UBRS group it could take a while. The thing about this was because groups were harder to put together, it made getting good gear more special.
Yeah but even with my rogues on EQ and DAOC for example, it didn't take an hour to get a dungeon group and nobody in the group then minded travelling to the dungeon rather than just teleporting in from a city. Only thing I can think of is that there is some difference in the mindsets of the userbases of EQ/Daoc and WoW or some such. Perhaps people were more patient back then or something.
Probably just a younger audience playing WoW, less people wanting to play the "boring" specs like tank and healer and more people wanting to play Rogues and Mages, etc; in classic you only had Warriors who could realistically tank as well.
Anyone else going to Blizzcon? I'm actually super excited to try it out there in November.
Yea MMOs have turned in to 3D hubs with a bunch of mini-games.
I wouldn't even consider WOW to be an MMORPG anymore really. It was also a very different (and far better tbh) community back in pre-wotlk. But that's long gone now and that crowd is unlikely to return.
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