Remembering LFD

In case you missed it somehow, the announcement of Classic Wrath of the Lich King was accompanied by a disclaimer that the devs weren't planning to include the automated dungeon finder that was part of late Wrath, since it seemed to them that this would go against the spirit of WoW Classic. This piece of news caused a huge uproar in the community and I believe there's been a bit of back-pedalling on the subject from Blizzard since then, though last I checked nothing definitive had been announced.

I went back and forth a bit on whether to write anything about the subject at all. Since I've settled on not wanting to play Classic Wrath, my first instinct was that it wasn't really my place to express an opinion... but after seeing that this hasn't stopped a lot of other commentators, I figured to hell with it.

My actual opinion on the question of whether the Looking for Dungeon tool should be in Classic Wrath is extremely easy to sum up anyway, because my approach to Classic has always been one of striving for authenticity - not because I necessarily believe that Classic was the perfect game, but because we've had more than a decade of Blizzard trying to make the game better for one group of players or another, and the results are never quite as expected, so I just wanted to stick to what was a known quantity. Therefore, I would also strive to emulate the original Wrath of the Lich King by adding the dungeon finder with the ICC patch, just like it was the first time around.

It seems that neither Blizzard nor the players care that much about authenticity at this point though. #nochanges is out, endless arguments on the WoW Classic subreddit about why you think your personal vision of the game would be the best are in. Blizzard said they want to spend more time listening to the players, so you never know when shouting loudly will suddenly pay off. But that's a subject for another post...

Really, what I'd like to talk about in this one is not so much whether LFD should be in Wrath Classic or not, but how I experienced it changing the game and how that has affected my views on it over time. I'm in a great position in that regard, since I started this blog five months before WoW dropped its 3.3 patch and I wrote a lot about my experiences with pugging dungeons, so I have receipts for my experiences back in the day (as the kids say these days).

My observations of dungeon finder day one were overall quite positive. There were technical mishaps, DCs and ragequits, but generally it was all one big adventure. As I stated in that post: "The main advantage of the new tool is simply that it's incredibly fast." If you liked running dungeons, you could now do more of the thing you liked! 100% win.

However, only three days later I already wrote another post with the title: "Three things I don't like about the dungeon finder", which included the line "some people seem to forget that there are other human beings playing with them, not bots created for their entertainment". And that after three days! I concluded by saying: "Don't get me wrong, I still love the new dungeon finder, but clearly the added conveniences are not without a price."

That largely remained my attitude throughout the months that followed, with the main thing that changed over time being the importance I assigned to getting things done fast vs. being treated like a bot. In the early days the advantages just seemed to outweigh everything, and the bad behaviour seemed largely forgivable. After all, I'd sometimes had manually assembled pugs go bad too, right? And even when people were being rude, we were still getting stuff done, right?

However, I was basically a slowly boiling frog. I don't think I ever wrote a post where I said something like "I hate the dungeon finder now", but you can see things deteriorating pretty quickly, as my "fail pug" stories went from mostly amusing to increasingly exasperated. In February, only two months after the dungeon finder's launch, I wrote a post called "An exemplary UP pug", in which I had nothing but praise for a run in which only one person dropped group randomly and where, upon me causing a wipe, only one member of the group was mildly rude to me. My standards for what made for a fun dungeon run were in free-fall and I wasn't even really noticing it.

Or maybe I was. In June I wrote about an awful Pit of Saron pug which I had to drop after the people in it voted to kick my boyfriend's warlock for no real reason, and which ended with a rant about how this sort of thing never would've happened in pre-dungeon finder times. In July I wrote about my "pug peeves of the week" because there were now so many bad behaviours on display in my dungeon runs that you could sort them into categories. In September, on a more humorous note, I wrote a checklist of the many ways in which pugs can fail in Halls of Lightning, which consisted of twenty-five different items.

In October I wrote a post called "Ten months of dungeon finding in review" in which I summed up the major pros and cons of the feature as I saw them. The main pro was the revitalisation of levelling dungeons... but the cons were a loss of immersion (what a novel concept, I doubt many people playing WoW even care about that anymore) and the deterioration of people's social skills. However, I still concluded: "Looking back at the dungeon finder's release with all the knowledge that I have about it now... I'd still want it to be introduced again, because I think the basic concepts of automating the group-finding process and enlarging the pool of available players are absolutely worth it."

After that, Cataclysm dropped and I didn't end up talking about the dungeon finder as much for a while, as I was busy focusing on the new quests and doing things with my guild. I did write a post in January called "State of the dungeon finder", which I think got a lot of link love based on the number of comments on it and which basically posited that the increased difficulty of Cata heroics made pugs a bit scary, but people's bad behaviours hadn't really changed in significant ways. It wasn't long afterwards that I noted that my passion for WoW in general was decreasing for unrelated reasons.

The general perception of the dungeon finder definitely seemed to be shifting by that point though. Rohan of Blessing of Kings wrote a post in March of the same year in which he wondered why he wasn't seeing all those bad groups that people were complaining about and speculated that it might be related to playing the healer role. I actually responded to that post with a comment of my own, which I think shows a lot about my state of mind at the time:

The majority of my runs are successful too, but that doesn't equal "fun". The other day I ran heroic Halls of Origination with my hunter, and the tank decided to skip four of the seven bosses and the rest of the group kicked our healer for "not healing enough" even though he had kept everyone up with no problems and we even got the Faster Than the Speed of Light achievement. This is fairly representative for my average run - yes, we'll get it done, but not without someone being a jerk to someone else (not necessarily me) for no reason. I "grew up" in WoW enjoying dungeons for the social experience they provided, even when pugging with strangers from the same server, but since cross-server LFD this experience has become a sour one more often than not.

I had definitely soured on the whole concept by then, which becomes even more evident in a post from a few months later that includes the line "it's widely known that the dungeon finder has a bad reputation" in its opening paragraph. The actual title of the post was "Dreaming of a different dungeon finder" and funnily enough, the features I described in it sound eerily similar to the pre-made group finder that WoW ended up adding in Warlords of Draenor. I'd never thought about that!

Anyway, what all this shows is that my descent into dislike for the dungeon finder was a very gradual process. I'm not saying that everyone's feelings necessarily followed or would follow the same trajectory - if all you care about are rewards/results, then getting runs faster might still be preferable even if people behave badly in them, compared to dealing with the decreased efficiency of a manually assembled group. However, for me it became evident over time that the rewards were worthless if I didn't enjoy the gameplay leading up to them, and I missed having pugs engage with each other as fellow human beings.

Now, the really interesting thing is that for all that, I'm still not entirely against automated group finding for PvE content in MMOs nowadays... I just think that the dungeon finder as it was introduced in Wrath was truly set up to bring out the worst in people. When I started playing SWTOR it didn't have a group finder, something that many people complained about, but to me this was actually refreshing after the cesspits of Cataclysm's LFD. When SWTOR did go ahead and added an automated group finder with its 1.3 patch a few months later, I was worried about what that would do to the game, but it actually turned out to be okay.

You still get a little bit of that sort of "I don't care" behaviour, such as tanks dropping group if the randomiser puts them into an instance they don't fancy at that particular moment, but it's not nearly as bad as some of the stuff I saw in WoW during Wrath's heyday. I couldn't tell you exactly why that is, but let's just say that I  suspect that the details of how this sort of group finding is implemented do make a difference.

Lack of cross-server queues means that there's some accountability for example, and the fact that pops can be slow sometimes gives players a vested interest in not dropping group instantly the moment anything looks less than ideal, because it will mean more time spent waiting. From what I remember, SWTOR has also never offered unique incentives to focus on running random instances over other content - in comparison Wrath's dungeon finder was ridiculously over-incentivised, meaning that lots of players were running heroics purely for the reward, even if they didn't enjoy the gameplay at all. In hindsight it hardly seems a surprise that this led to unpleasant behaviour and conflicts of interest.

It remains to be seen whether Blizzard will cave and add the dungeon finder to Wrath Classic after all, or whether they'll try to achieve some sort of compromise with a modified tool, e.g. by adding something like retail's current pre-made group finder. Considering how much the community has changed, I expect that those deciding to play Wrath will be in for an "interesting" time either way.