Originally posted by wormed The problem isn't necessarily that the dungeon finder exists, it's more so the instant teleport inside that absolutely has destroyed the whole idea of community in a MMORPG. Whatever happened to having to brave the lands to reach a destination? The exploration in MMORPG's is gone. Instant grouping with people from other servers doesn't foster any sort of comradery, or community. As a person who absolutely adores the excitement that open world PvP brings, the dungeon finder has decimated games in that respect. Name me one game that has a dungeon finder and continues to have legitimate OWPvP. There are none, and guaranteed, if there were any, I'd probably be playing it. The issue is not so much the time consumption for people, because this can be worked on. Why can't a dungeon finder simply find a group for you? Matches you with the appropriate people, utilize flight paths to reach your desired dungeon, or even have things that WoW implemented like summoning stones where at least 2 people are required to summon someone to the dungeon.This would foster a sense of community as other people are actually required to be good players, competent and able to get you to the dungeon, and also promotes healthy OWPvP between factions.I have no issue with Dungeon Finders, there just needs to be a way smarter way of implementing them instead of collapsing the game's gigantic world into a 2 instance situation (town -> dungeon).
The lands that must be braved aren't a challenge. That's why people are going to the dungeons. The travel time is just that, travel time. It isn't chat time, unless someone is chatting at the same time they are running to a dungeon.
It makes a lot more sense to say waiting around for a world boss to spawn caused some socialization than to say that running to a dungeon caused socialization.
Most games and most players aren't playing on OWPvP servers. Most games that have LFR/LFD tools aren't primarily OWPvP games to begin with. They are PvE focused games that also have OWPvP with no loot, land ownership or any real reason to engage in PvP beyond the joy of PvP itself. I want to say most of the people even on PvP servers in games like WoW and Rift have been running dungeons and raids anyway, so it's not like the OWPvP was the main focus, ever.
Basically what I'm saying is that it's hard to miss something that was a minimal part of a game to begin with. If you're talking about a game like Darkfall or Mortal Online, I can't help you there. I don't understand why a game like that would add a LDx tool.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
LFG tools are great. Most dungeons today are not. Dungeons in Asheron's Call were fun. With todays open tagging and everyone getting their own loot they would be great.
I miss non instanced dungeons. Not every dungeon had a boss. They were places to hunt and explore. There were more than just a few. It was fun finding people trapped because they were in over their head. You could help out or not.
Would like to see more open dungeons that feel like part of the world. With open tagging and loot the way it works today, I think it is time to return to that.
Anything that reduces the need for social interaction in an MMO is IMO an extremely bad thing. It also shrinks the world to an infinitely small level. Travel time makes the world feel massive, and an instance finder warping you here and there ruins any chance of immersion. It turns the game into a collection of carnival rides that you just stand in line for.
Yeah I remember the good old days when you could wait an hr for the healer or tank to decide to make his way over to the dungeon so we could start. Those long moments of silence as everyone in the group thought about how much they'd like to kill that douche was a huge community builder.
Now instead of standing outside a dungeon pissed off at someone I have to go through it with people who are little better than NPCs...and play about as well.
In truth one was never better than the other. It's just the lfg tool was the lesser of the two evils. Antisocial people ruin other peoples attempts to form a community within a game. It's not the mechanics of how the game is made that did it.
Anything that reduces the need for social interaction in an MMO is IMO an extremely bad thing. It also shrinks the world to an infinitely small level. Travel time makes the world feel massive, and an instance finder warping you here and there ruins any chance of immersion. It turns the game into a collection of carnival rides that you just stand in line for.
Yeah I remember the good old days when you could wait an hr for the healer or tank to decide to make his way over to the dungeon so we could start. Those long moments of silence as everyone in the group thought about how much they'd like to kill that douche was a huge community builder.
Now instead of standing outside a dungeon pissed off at someone I have to go through it with people who are little better than NPCs...and play about as well.
In truth one was never better than the other. It's just the lfg tool was the lesser of the two evils. Antisocial people ruin other peoples attempts to form a community within a game. It's not the mechanics of how the game is made that did it.
Mechanics play a critical role in empowering people. If the game allows you to thrive despite being a jerk, poor player, or being antisocial, you have essentially undermined any reason for people to self-monitor.
Yeah those days of waiting for someone weren't always that fun, but generally allowed time for people to chat at least. I know that's how it went for many groups that I was in. WoW approached the problem by allowing summoning stones to be used which meant not waiting around for 1 or 2 stragglers.
It just simply isn't and never has been an either-or argument. People are just making up excuses for being lazy and wanting on-demand content.
Here's a really simple two cents that many of these discussions seem to miss entirely, or which often is just buried by blind rage and elitism:
Player CHOICE: good or bad? Pretty sure most of us with even a modicum of common sense would say that player choice is good, eh? As a matter of fact, the most successful MMOs in history (I would argue that WoW and Gw 1 hold that title, although some of you may interject others as your opinions go) provided the most player choice of them all, hence their long-term success.
And so, when it comes to dungeon finders or LFD or LFG: if you don't like them, don't use them. It really is as simple as that. If you've always got 16 buddies online or believe for some reason that LFG tools are for noobs, then simply put, don't use them. These tools are OPTIONAL, not required. I've used them quite a bit and love them; however, this does not mean that everyone will agree, or that everyone will use them.
Why these arguments even ensue is beyond me. What other players do with THEIR play time, and how other people choose to progress through THEIR content, is none of my business, and none of yours, either.
That simple enough?
"Why would I want to loose a religion upon my people? Religions wreck from within - Empires and individuals alike! It's all the same." - God Emperor of Dune
Anything that reduces the need for social interaction in an MMO is IMO an extremely bad thing. It also shrinks the world to an infinitely small level. Travel time makes the world feel massive, and an instance finder warping you here and there ruins any chance of immersion. It turns the game into a collection of carnival rides that you just stand in line for.
Yeah I remember the good old days when you could wait an hr for the healer or tank to decide to make his way over to the dungeon so we could start. Those long moments of silence as everyone in the group thought about how much they'd like to kill that douche was a huge community builder.
Now instead of standing outside a dungeon pissed off at someone I have to go through it with people who are little better than NPCs...and play about as well.
In truth one was never better than the other. It's just the lfg tool was the lesser of the two evils. Antisocial people ruin other peoples attempts to form a community within a game. It's not the mechanics of how the game is made that did it.
Mechanics play a critical role in empowering people. If the game allows you to thrive despite being a jerk, poor player, or being antisocial, you have essentially undermined any reason for people to self-monitor.
Yeah those days of waiting for someone weren't always that fun, but generally allowed time for people to chat at least. I know that's how it went for many groups that I was in. WoW approached the problem by allowing summoning stones to be used which meant not waiting around for 1 or 2 stragglers.
It just simply isn't and never has been an either-or argument. People are just making up excuses for being lazy and wanting on-demand content.
And none of these additions have ever stopped me from being social with people. It's just an excuse people make for a lack of effort.
And of course people want on demand content. If you were given the choice to sit in an empty room and talk to that weird guy in the corner or explore a dungeon and slay a dragon while finding epic loot...which would you choose ?
Guess why spending quality time with your pug while waiting for people to show up got removed from games.... If you want a glorified chat room stay in town.
Here's a really simple two cents that many of these discussions seem to miss entirely, or which often is just buried by blind rage and elitism:
Player CHOICE: good or bad? Pretty sure most of us with even a modicum of common sense would say that player choice is good, eh? As a matter of fact, the most successful MMOs in history (I would argue that WoW and Gw 1 hold that title, although some of you may interject others as your opinions go) provided the most player choice of them all, hence their long-term success.
And so, when it comes to dungeon finders or LFD or LFG: if you don't like them, don't use them. It really is as simple as that. If you've always got 16 buddies online or believe for some reason that LFG tools are for noobs, then simply put, don't use them. These tools are OPTIONAL, not required. I've used them quite a bit and love them; however, this does not mean that everyone will agree, or that everyone will use them.
Why these arguments even ensue is beyond me. What other players do with THEIR play time, and how other people choose to progress through THEIR content, is none of my business, and none of yours, either.
That simple enough?
I have a ton of common sense and I don't agree with your conclusions at all. Player decisions will always be guided by an internal gauge of risk vs. reward. "What's in it for me and how hard do I have to work to get it?". Players will always tend towards the path of least resistance, not for the more difficult path given equivalent reward. The problem is that there is an intrinsic mechanism built in to finding groups yourself..interacting with other players! Why should people waste time interacting with others when they can not interact and still get what they want? Why should players monitor their own behaviors and try and be good game "citizens" when it doesn't matter?
Sorry but if you want to play a game where other players mind their own business, you are in the wrong genre.
Here's a really simple two cents that many of these discussions seem to miss entirely, or which often is just buried by blind rage and elitism:
Player CHOICE: good or bad? Pretty sure most of us with even a modicum of common sense would say that player choice is good, eh? As a matter of fact, the most successful MMOs in history (I would argue that WoW and Gw 1 hold that title, although some of you may interject others as your opinions go) provided the most player choice of them all, hence their long-term success.
And so, when it comes to dungeon finders or LFD or LFG: if you don't like them, don't use them. It really is as simple as that. If you've always got 16 buddies online or believe for some reason that LFG tools are for noobs, then simply put, don't use them. These tools are OPTIONAL, not required. I've used them quite a bit and love them; however, this does not mean that everyone will agree, or that everyone will use them.
Why these arguments even ensue is beyond me. What other players do with THEIR play time, and how other people choose to progress through THEIR content, is none of my business, and none of yours, either.
That simple enough?
Here's the reality. Systems like Dungeon finders have a wider impact on the game than what the system itself is. Take flying mounts for example. Before flying mounts,open world pvp used to occur very often. Once flying mounts was added, it was the death knell of open world pvp pretty much. And when people complain about flying mounts and people like you say , "if you don't like them, don't use them" Well damage is still done elsewhere, namely world pvp.
Now maybe you'll realize that things aren't so black and white and its not as simple as choosing to "not use lfg tools" if you don't like it.
And none of these additions have ever stopped me from being social with people. It's just an excuse people make for a lack of effort.
And of course people want on demand content. If you were given the choice to sit in an empty room and talk to that weird guy in the corner or explore a dungeon and slay a dragon while finding epic loot...which would you choose ?
Guess why spending quality time with your pug while waiting for people to show up got removed from games.... If you want a glorified chat room stay in town.
The problem with this argument is the same problem with your other argument, it is fallacious.
And none of these additions have ever stopped me from being social with people. It's just an excuse people make for a lack of effort.
And of course people want on demand content. If you were given the choice to sit in an empty room and talk to that weird guy in the corner or explore a dungeon and slay a dragon while finding epic loot...which would you choose ?
Guess why spending quality time with your pug while waiting for people to show up got removed from games.... If you want a glorified chat room stay in town.
The problem with this argument is the same problem with your other argument, it is fallacious.
You just said no one makes their own groups if a game has an auto matching system...and the only reason anyone " acts like a good game citizen" is because the game makes them do it....and you're calling my argument fallacious ?
And none of these additions have ever stopped me from being social with people. It's just an excuse people make for a lack of effort.
And of course people want on demand content. If you were given the choice to sit in an empty room and talk to that weird guy in the corner or explore a dungeon and slay a dragon while finding epic loot...which would you choose ?
Guess why spending quality time with your pug while waiting for people to show up got removed from games.... If you want a glorified chat room stay in town.
The problem with this argument is the same problem with your other argument, it is fallacious.
You just said no one makes their own groups if a game has an auto matching system...and the only reason anyone " acts like a good game citizen" is because the game makes them do it....and you're calling my argument fallacious ?
Do you even know what that word means ?
I didn't say that. I said that in general, people will always tend towards the path of least resistance. Given equivalent rewards, players will gravitate towards the easier solution. Do I even need to defend that principle?
What I am arguing is that instance finders plays a detrimental role in regards to social interaction. Those social interactions are an extremely important element in developing and nurturing a community. (IE Reputations matter) Removing social interactions, even small ones like finding groups, is detrimental to the game at large.
Your argument is that there are only two alternatives... A or B, but ignoring any other possibility to prove a point. This is the logical fallacy of a False Dilemma.
And none of these additions have ever stopped me from being social with people. It's just an excuse people make for a lack of effort.
And of course people want on demand content. If you were given the choice to sit in an empty room and talk to that weird guy in the corner or explore a dungeon and slay a dragon while finding epic loot...which would you choose ?
Guess why spending quality time with your pug while waiting for people to show up got removed from games.... If you want a glorified chat room stay in town.
The problem with this argument is the same problem with your other argument, it is fallacious.
You just said no one makes their own groups if a game has an auto matching system...and the only reason anyone " acts like a good game citizen" is because the game makes them do it....and you're calling my argument fallacious ?
Do you even know what that word means ?
I didn't say that. I said that in general, people will always tend towards the path of least resistance. Given equivalent rewards, players will gravitate towards the easier solution. Do I even need to defend that principle?
What I am arguing is that instance finders plays a detrimental role in regards to social interaction. Those social interactions are an extremely important element in developing and nurturing a community. (IE Reputations matter) Removing social interactions, even small ones like finding groups, is detrimental to the game at large.
Your argument is that there are only two alternatives... A or B, but ignoring any other possibility to prove a point. This is the logical fallacy of a False Dilemma.
You don't see the a or b in what you just wrote there ?
Did it ever occur to you that mmos are full of people who don't want to be social and just want to kill stuff. They use instance matching tools. There are also people who want to be social and they talk to each other.
Your own false dilemma is that they can't exist in the same game together. Everyone has to be forced to be social or they're in the wrong genre of games.
I dont believe that it's dungeon finders by themselves, but DFs plus the token system, you know you have to do 10, 20, 30 more dungeon runs to get your gear, so you want them over fast, the dungeons become a means to an end. The drops dont really matter that much and are DE fodder, or vendor trash.
This is what happens when you play a bad game that relies on shinies instead of FUN content. So the issue isn't the DFs, its the game.
The LFD tool took away the countless hours wasted trying to find a group to do them. Anything that leds to being able to actually play the game, is a good thing.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
And none of these additions have ever stopped me from being social with people. It's just an excuse people make for a lack of effort.
And of course people want on demand content. If you were given the choice to sit in an empty room and talk to that weird guy in the corner or explore a dungeon and slay a dragon while finding epic loot...which would you choose ?
Guess why spending quality time with your pug while waiting for people to show up got removed from games.... If you want a glorified chat room stay in town.
The problem with this argument is the same problem with your other argument, it is fallacious.
You just said no one makes their own groups if a game has an auto matching system...and the only reason anyone " acts like a good game citizen" is because the game makes them do it....and you're calling my argument fallacious ?
Do you even know what that word means ?
I didn't say that. I said that in general, people will always tend towards the path of least resistance. Given equivalent rewards, players will gravitate towards the easier solution. Do I even need to defend that principle?
What I am arguing is that instance finders plays a detrimental role in regards to social interaction. Those social interactions are an extremely important element in developing and nurturing a community. (IE Reputations matter) Removing social interactions, even small ones like finding groups, is detrimental to the game at large.
Your argument is that there are only two alternatives... A or B, but ignoring any other possibility to prove a point. This is the logical fallacy of a False Dilemma.
You don't see the a or b in what you just wrote there ?
Did it ever occur to you that mmos are full of people who don't want to be social and just want to kill stuff. They use instance matching tools. There are also people who want to be social and they talk to each other.
Your own false dilemma is that they can't exist in the same game together. Everyone has to be forced to be social or they're in the wrong genre of games.
I'm not presenting two solutions and asking you to pick one. I'm stating my case, presenting evidence that admittedly is somewhat anecdotal, and suggesting that there is a relationship. I can't claim causality because I haven't performed an actual experiment, but I'm arguing there is a direct link between the socialization in a game and its community.
Therefore yes.. call me crazy but I believe everyone needs to be forced to be social.
Hard decision, ultimately I'd say bad. Its probably one of the reasons I quit FFXIV. I found myself just standing around in town waiting for the buzzer to pop.
On the other hand, I remember the pain of spamming LFG chat for hours and eventually not even able to do a run. Maybe implement some kind of local DF; players within a certain radius can queue up for the dungeon. In this way if you really want to do a certain dungeon, you should be able to get a group and otherwise you can stick to the old fashioned LFG.
At least make it so that the party has to enter through the dungeon entrance, and not just port in and out from any place in the world.
"Bill: I think this is where WoW’s Dungeon Finder spoiled the bunch. Along with their tool, they also dumbed down the dungeon content quite a lot, because they assumed that players who didn’t know each other couldn’t learn tactics to proceed. But they never gave us a chance."
Never gave us a chance? Really? They tried it out in Cata, watched the community become a toxic cesspool because of all the fighting that took place in heroics, watched subscriptions take a nosedive. Only when people started to completely outgear heroics did they start chill a bit, and then they released ZA/ZG and it was even worse than the heroics just after release. They watched their subs bomb for an entire expack, and the effect it had on the community is likely irreversible at this point.
Go back to vanilla and BC, and you realize that a lot of people weren't doing the content. It wasn't only that it was hard to get a group together but also the difficulty. The problem was that people were getting bored and leaving, as there wasn't enough content for a large segment of their player base. They made LFD in wrath to give these people more stuff to do. At the time LFD came out in wrath heroics were fairly easy to do and to get into. There was a large segment of the population who were interested in having stuff to do and character progression but not necessarily interested in the traditional group dynamics of heroics, raiding and challenging content, and they now had content to keep them busy. They got used to having this content and having character progression. The issue is/was that they were not the core market for whom heroics and raids were originally developed for, but they far outnumbered the people who enjoyed heroics and raids as challenging content. When Cata came around these people essentially no longer had that content they felt comfortable doing anymore to the change in difficulty, that combined with the fact that the expack was already short on high level content due to the revamp was a recipe for disaster.
The problem isn't really are dungeon finders good or bad. Dungeon Finders are awesome. The problem is that when there is only one path to reasonable character progression in your game everybody is going to want into it. If you have different paths of progression for different player types then you can have hard dungeons without having to worry about locking out a large number of players. WoW is in the boat they are in now, because they let all these people in by scaling down the difficulty and scaling back up is essentially taking candy away from a baby. It isn't dungeon finder that did this, it was trying to shoehorn everybody into the same content to save money on development. If you want everybody to do it, it has to be stupidly easy so everybody can do it. If you want to make it hard, you better find a way to keep all those people you are going to lock out of it busy or be prepared to lose those subs.
Originally posted by Haites Originally posted by FlawSGIOriginally posted by dreamscaperDungeon Finders, by themselves, are fine. I don't really have any issues with them, though I prefer the Aion and City of Heroes style over something like WoW. What needs to be taken out back, shot, and tossed in the incinerator are cross-server grouping tools. These are the bane of every MMORPG I've encountered them in.
^^ This. I don't have a problem with LFG tools themselves because it beats seeing LFG chat spam. What I do detest is cross server LFG tools because it is another level of anonymity that almost encourages poor behavior. If people are not punished for their poor social interactions, what's to stop them from continuing if there is no repercussions? It was about the time that WoW did this that I started getting turned off by the game actually so for me the experience of cross -server LFG was awful. I'll echo that. X-server is a community assassin. Dungeon Finders that are not Cross Server are worthless.
If you are on a low population server or on at a non-prime time hour then the Dungeon Finder is worthless.
When Rift first introduced their Dungeon Finder it was server only because of feedback from the forums.
However, Trion quickly made the Dungeon Finder cross server because of overwhelming negative feedback from the players.
So, with things like Dungeon Finders dont listen to the forums, listen to the players.
Personally I think the only way a dungeon finder could be implemented well is if they take the way WoW used to do dungeons. You join queue and can see a list of people also in the queue and invite them at your leisure. The problem with that system in WoW was that it was restricted to only the server that you're on. If they just open that up to include every server, you could still start groups up in a social way and be able to filter out the people you don't want to group with from the people you do, while also allowing for the quickness and convenience of the current dungeon finder.
My 2 cents>.>
Yes I have a dream And its not some MLK dream for equality. I wanna own a decommissioned lighthouse And I wanna live at the top And nobody knows I live there. And theres a button that I can press, and launch that lighthouse into space.
The kind of question that will bring trolls talking crap. If you're in a nice guild with lots of people with free time , then it's normal that you won't need a dungeon finder tool. Why even cry about it being in a game? It's like people here that cry and moan for the past 5 years don't yet realise that the MMO genre is primarily owned by casual gamers. We're not in the mid 90's any more where only a handful of people had a PC at home and played online games 24/7. Pretty much everyone has a PC these days and only a small fraction of people compared to the 90's are dedicating over 10 hours of game play a week.
So yeah, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much you cry about Dungeon Finders being bad, it's here to stay to satisfy the needs of the many. As a famous Vulcan once stated : "The needs of the many out weighs the needs of the few."
But that's online media today, people just cry on anything to turn something with no significance in to something major, and those who cattle and join the fuel being poured in to the fire aren't in any way better.
It's like saying if that bus stop at the corner of the street is good or bad? It's good for those who take the bus, for those who don't take the bus, who cares where the bus stop is at? Left Twix or Right Twix? who the hell cares. That's how childish I see this thread being.
I'd take one run a play session like it used to be over a hundred easy spamfests any day of the week.
Grinding dungeons was never fun by itself, but it used to be actually fun to do when you were cracking jokes with people you just met, whispering the other dps to see if you guys could pull aggro from the badass pally tank or competing with another hunter to see who could get the other's pet killed first with misdirect and they like. I met most of my friends in MMOs that didn't come with a guild by running instances with them.
Dungeons are just soulless spamfests now, it really is just pulling the lever to see if you get your food pellet. The dungeon finders are also, as Bill pointed out, instrumental in dumbing down the dungeons so groups of strangers who won't communicate can still complete them. There is no way in hell a convenience option should affect how you tune your content. That's just batshit crazy.
Chris: Dungeon finders were introduced with the best intentions, but I don’t think anyone anticipated just how much of an impact they would have. The biggest, in my opinion, is that they’ve changed the culture. Everyone wants a speed run. Nowadays, if you’re learning a dungeon for the first time, even if it was just released, asking for help is a good way to become trimmed fat. Running dungeons after a prolonged break is almost nerve wracking. Dungeon finders made players the meat grinder and not the bosses.
Bill: I think this is where WoW’s Dungeon Finder spoiled the bunch. Along with their tool, they also dumbed down the dungeon content quite a lot, because they assumed that players who didn’t know each other couldn’t learn tactics to proceed. But they never gave us a chance. I think the Dungeon Finder would have applied just fine to old Zul’Gurub, Stratholem, and BRD. People follow leaders, and there’s bound to be one in every group. Some would be bad, and others would be good, but there’s always someone who knows how to take that role, and if not? The players would learn as they go, as is intended. Speed Runs came about because the developers almost made them an integral part of the dungeon experience. It needn’t be that way, and it’s not the group finder tool’s fault.
I agree with pretty much every pro and con of the dungeon finder you guys bring up, but wish to talk more on these points specifically, particularly Bill's section.
I think you hit it on the nose that the dungeon finder in WoW wasn't solely responsible for the present "gogogo" speed-run dungeon mentality players tend to have. Perhaps it contributed in that making the party forming phase significantly shorter prepped players for the mentality that they should push everything to go a bit faster, but I think this is a minor contribution at best. Instead, I think there were two much larger design decisions at play, and I'll continue to use your WoW example to illustrate them.
The first shift is from the open, cavernous, HUGE dungeons of vanilla to the much more linear dungeons of the Burning Crusade. Think about Sunken Temple, BRD, UBRS/LBRS, Stratholme, Scholomance and the Dire Mauls. They're all extraordinarily open ended. Players could get lost in them for hours if they didn't know where they were going. Indeed, one of the characteristics of a good group leader back then, even for PUGs, was to be able to successfully navigate the group to all the relevant bosses. In BC, by contrast, while the quality of the heroic dungeons was still absolutely superb, this sense of open ended dungeon exploration was all but dissolved. Almost every dungeon could be navigated effortlessly by a full group of players who were new to the dungeon.
The second shift is seen in the transition to Wrath of the Lich King, which is the shift from crowd control and threat management based combat to AoE tank and spank combat. Prior to WotlK, threat management and healing aggro were huge concerns that dictated a certain measure of caution with every pull. Tanks - before the rise of prot paladins, that is - simply couldn't hohld aggro on more than 2 or, at the most, 3 mobs. The more mobs they tanked, the more healing they required, the more threat they needed to produce to out aggro the healers, etc. Similarly, mobs often possessed devastating abilities that needed to be controlled. Damage dealers had the additional, in my opinion, engaging role of keeping enemies trapped, sheeped, sapped, charmed, kited, whatever. Everyone took the dungeons seriously. Fast forward to WotlK, none of this was necessary; not in any single dungeon. Players were able to run heroics in their quest greens the moment they hit 80 and never had to look back from there.
This is the expansion where the dungeon finder was first introduced (although not until quite a bit into the expansion, if I recall correctly). I do wonder if there's any truth to Bill's assumption that this content was intentionally "dumbed down" specifically with the ensuing dungeon finder in mind. If I could ask Blizzard developers any question, it would definitely be what went into this design decision and if they regret it in retrospect.
Lastly, I do think there's at least one more significant contributor to players' contemporary "gogogo" dungeon mentality, and that is that players are simply more experienced today. Back in 2004, while there were certainly UO, EQ and AC veterans, there was a huge slew of brand new players being introduced to the genre. As a result, everyone was more patient because everyone was learning together. Nowadays, 90% of players in any given game have been around the MMO block, multiple times. If you've played a dungeon in WoW or Rift or SW:ToR, you've played a dungeon in Aion or GW2 or FFXIV. It's the same routine, and players carry their experience and expectations over from game to game. The entire dungeon running MMO community now expects the WotlK tank and spank speed run style.
Lastly, I do think there's at least one more significant contributor to players' contemporary "gogogo" dungeon mentality, and that is that players are simply more experienced today. Back in 2004, while there were certainly UO, EQ and AC veterans, there was a huge slew of brand new players being introduced to the genre. As a result, everyone was more patient because everyone was learning together. Nowadays, 90% of players in any given game have been around the MMO block, multiple times. If you've played a dungeon in WoW or Rift or SW:ToR, you've played a dungeon in Aion or GW2 or FFXIV. It's the same routine, and players carry their experience and expectations over from game to game. The entire dungeon running MMO community now expects the WotlK tank and spank speed run style.
I disagree with your point here. That back in 2004 people were more patient because most of us were new to the genre and were learning together. People were still short with you if you fucked up. In raids, it wasn't as bad because 40man raids really only took like 18 competent people, the rest could be trash really. And dungeon wise, i remember lots of fights breaking out over people breaking eggs in UBRS.
The problem lies outside of gaming. People have changed. The newer generation are in the "access now" generation. So games had to change accordingly. More and more you see people with the mentality that they should get something without paying or doing any amount of work for it else they'll move on elsewhere for that quick-fix.
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The lands that must be braved aren't a challenge. That's why people are going to the dungeons. The travel time is just that, travel time. It isn't chat time, unless someone is chatting at the same time they are running to a dungeon.
It makes a lot more sense to say waiting around for a world boss to spawn caused some socialization than to say that running to a dungeon caused socialization.
Most games and most players aren't playing on OWPvP servers. Most games that have LFR/LFD tools aren't primarily OWPvP games to begin with. They are PvE focused games that also have OWPvP with no loot, land ownership or any real reason to engage in PvP beyond the joy of PvP itself. I want to say most of the people even on PvP servers in games like WoW and Rift have been running dungeons and raids anyway, so it's not like the OWPvP was the main focus, ever.
Basically what I'm saying is that it's hard to miss something that was a minimal part of a game to begin with. If you're talking about a game like Darkfall or Mortal Online, I can't help you there. I don't understand why a game like that would add a LDx tool.
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I miss non instanced dungeons. Not every dungeon had a boss. They were places to hunt and explore. There were more than just a few. It was fun finding people trapped because they were in over their head. You could help out or not.
Would like to see more open dungeons that feel like part of the world. With open tagging and loot the way it works today, I think it is time to return to that.
Yeah I remember the good old days when you could wait an hr for the healer or tank to decide to make his way over to the dungeon so we could start. Those long moments of silence as everyone in the group thought about how much they'd like to kill that douche was a huge community builder.
Now instead of standing outside a dungeon pissed off at someone I have to go through it with people who are little better than NPCs...and play about as well.
In truth one was never better than the other. It's just the lfg tool was the lesser of the two evils. Antisocial people ruin other peoples attempts to form a community within a game. It's not the mechanics of how the game is made that did it.
Mechanics play a critical role in empowering people. If the game allows you to thrive despite being a jerk, poor player, or being antisocial, you have essentially undermined any reason for people to self-monitor.
Yeah those days of waiting for someone weren't always that fun, but generally allowed time for people to chat at least. I know that's how it went for many groups that I was in. WoW approached the problem by allowing summoning stones to be used which meant not waiting around for 1 or 2 stragglers.
It just simply isn't and never has been an either-or argument. People are just making up excuses for being lazy and wanting on-demand content.
Here's a really simple two cents that many of these discussions seem to miss entirely, or which often is just buried by blind rage and elitism:
Player CHOICE: good or bad? Pretty sure most of us with even a modicum of common sense would say that player choice is good, eh? As a matter of fact, the most successful MMOs in history (I would argue that WoW and Gw 1 hold that title, although some of you may interject others as your opinions go) provided the most player choice of them all, hence their long-term success.
And so, when it comes to dungeon finders or LFD or LFG: if you don't like them, don't use them. It really is as simple as that. If you've always got 16 buddies online or believe for some reason that LFG tools are for noobs, then simply put, don't use them. These tools are OPTIONAL, not required. I've used them quite a bit and love them; however, this does not mean that everyone will agree, or that everyone will use them.
Why these arguments even ensue is beyond me. What other players do with THEIR play time, and how other people choose to progress through THEIR content, is none of my business, and none of yours, either.
That simple enough?
"Why would I want to loose a religion upon my people? Religions wreck from within - Empires and individuals alike! It's all the same." - God Emperor of Dune
And none of these additions have ever stopped me from being social with people. It's just an excuse people make for a lack of effort.
And of course people want on demand content. If you were given the choice to sit in an empty room and talk to that weird guy in the corner or explore a dungeon and slay a dragon while finding epic loot...which would you choose ?
Guess why spending quality time with your pug while waiting for people to show up got removed from games.... If you want a glorified chat room stay in town.
I have a ton of common sense and I don't agree with your conclusions at all. Player decisions will always be guided by an internal gauge of risk vs. reward. "What's in it for me and how hard do I have to work to get it?". Players will always tend towards the path of least resistance, not for the more difficult path given equivalent reward. The problem is that there is an intrinsic mechanism built in to finding groups yourself..interacting with other players! Why should people waste time interacting with others when they can not interact and still get what they want? Why should players monitor their own behaviors and try and be good game "citizens" when it doesn't matter?
Sorry but if you want to play a game where other players mind their own business, you are in the wrong genre.
Here's the reality. Systems like Dungeon finders have a wider impact on the game than what the system itself is. Take flying mounts for example. Before flying mounts,open world pvp used to occur very often. Once flying mounts was added, it was the death knell of open world pvp pretty much. And when people complain about flying mounts and people like you say , "if you don't like them, don't use them" Well damage is still done elsewhere, namely world pvp.
Now maybe you'll realize that things aren't so black and white and its not as simple as choosing to "not use lfg tools" if you don't like it.
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The problem with this argument is the same problem with your other argument, it is fallacious.
You just said no one makes their own groups if a game has an auto matching system...and the only reason anyone " acts like a good game citizen" is because the game makes them do it....and you're calling my argument fallacious ?
Do you even know what that word means ?
I didn't say that. I said that in general, people will always tend towards the path of least resistance. Given equivalent rewards, players will gravitate towards the easier solution. Do I even need to defend that principle?
What I am arguing is that instance finders plays a detrimental role in regards to social interaction. Those social interactions are an extremely important element in developing and nurturing a community. (IE Reputations matter) Removing social interactions, even small ones like finding groups, is detrimental to the game at large.
Your argument is that there are only two alternatives... A or B, but ignoring any other possibility to prove a point. This is the logical fallacy of a False Dilemma.
You don't see the a or b in what you just wrote there ?
Did it ever occur to you that mmos are full of people who don't want to be social and just want to kill stuff. They use instance matching tools. There are also people who want to be social and they talk to each other.
Your own false dilemma is that they can't exist in the same game together. Everyone has to be forced to be social or they're in the wrong genre of games.
This is what happens when you play a bad game that relies on shinies instead of FUN content. So the issue isn't the DFs, its the game.
The LFD tool took away the countless hours wasted trying to find a group to do them. Anything that leds to being able to actually play the game, is a good thing.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster
http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
I'm not presenting two solutions and asking you to pick one. I'm stating my case, presenting evidence that admittedly is somewhat anecdotal, and suggesting that there is a relationship. I can't claim causality because I haven't performed an actual experiment, but I'm arguing there is a direct link between the socialization in a game and its community.
Therefore yes.. call me crazy but I believe everyone needs to be forced to be social.
Hard decision, ultimately I'd say bad. Its probably one of the reasons I quit FFXIV. I found myself just standing around in town waiting for the buzzer to pop.
On the other hand, I remember the pain of spamming LFG chat for hours and eventually not even able to do a run. Maybe implement some kind of local DF; players within a certain radius can queue up for the dungeon. In this way if you really want to do a certain dungeon, you should be able to get a group and otherwise you can stick to the old fashioned LFG.
At least make it so that the party has to enter through the dungeon entrance, and not just port in and out from any place in the world.
"Bill: I think this is where WoW’s Dungeon Finder spoiled the bunch. Along with their tool, they also dumbed down the dungeon content quite a lot, because they assumed that players who didn’t know each other couldn’t learn tactics to proceed. But they never gave us a chance."
Never gave us a chance? Really? They tried it out in Cata, watched the community become a toxic cesspool because of all the fighting that took place in heroics, watched subscriptions take a nosedive. Only when people started to completely outgear heroics did they start chill a bit, and then they released ZA/ZG and it was even worse than the heroics just after release. They watched their subs bomb for an entire expack, and the effect it had on the community is likely irreversible at this point.
Go back to vanilla and BC, and you realize that a lot of people weren't doing the content. It wasn't only that it was hard to get a group together but also the difficulty. The problem was that people were getting bored and leaving, as there wasn't enough content for a large segment of their player base. They made LFD in wrath to give these people more stuff to do. At the time LFD came out in wrath heroics were fairly easy to do and to get into. There was a large segment of the population who were interested in having stuff to do and character progression but not necessarily interested in the traditional group dynamics of heroics, raiding and challenging content, and they now had content to keep them busy. They got used to having this content and having character progression. The issue is/was that they were not the core market for whom heroics and raids were originally developed for, but they far outnumbered the people who enjoyed heroics and raids as challenging content. When Cata came around these people essentially no longer had that content they felt comfortable doing anymore to the change in difficulty, that combined with the fact that the expack was already short on high level content due to the revamp was a recipe for disaster.
The problem isn't really are dungeon finders good or bad. Dungeon Finders are awesome. The problem is that when there is only one path to reasonable character progression in your game everybody is going to want into it. If you have different paths of progression for different player types then you can have hard dungeons without having to worry about locking out a large number of players. WoW is in the boat they are in now, because they let all these people in by scaling down the difficulty and scaling back up is essentially taking candy away from a baby. It isn't dungeon finder that did this, it was trying to shoehorn everybody into the same content to save money on development. If you want everybody to do it, it has to be stupidly easy so everybody can do it. If you want to make it hard, you better find a way to keep all those people you are going to lock out of it busy or be prepared to lose those subs.
I'll echo that. X-server is a community assassin.
Dungeon Finders that are not Cross Server are worthless.
If you are on a low population server or on at a non-prime time hour then the Dungeon Finder is worthless.
When Rift first introduced their Dungeon Finder it was server only because of feedback from the forums.
However, Trion quickly made the Dungeon Finder cross server because of overwhelming negative feedback from the players.
So, with things like Dungeon Finders dont listen to the forums, listen to the players.
Personally I think the only way a dungeon finder could be implemented well is if they take the way WoW used to do dungeons. You join queue and can see a list of people also in the queue and invite them at your leisure. The problem with that system in WoW was that it was restricted to only the server that you're on. If they just open that up to include every server, you could still start groups up in a social way and be able to filter out the people you don't want to group with from the people you do, while also allowing for the quickness and convenience of the current dungeon finder.
My 2 cents>.>
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The kind of question that will bring trolls talking crap. If you're in a nice guild with lots of people with free time , then it's normal that you won't need a dungeon finder tool. Why even cry about it being in a game? It's like people here that cry and moan for the past 5 years don't yet realise that the MMO genre is primarily owned by casual gamers. We're not in the mid 90's any more where only a handful of people had a PC at home and played online games 24/7. Pretty much everyone has a PC these days and only a small fraction of people compared to the 90's are dedicating over 10 hours of game play a week.
So yeah, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much you cry about Dungeon Finders being bad, it's here to stay to satisfy the needs of the many. As a famous Vulcan once stated : "The needs of the many out weighs the needs of the few."
But that's online media today, people just cry on anything to turn something with no significance in to something major, and those who cattle and join the fuel being poured in to the fire aren't in any way better.
It's like saying if that bus stop at the corner of the street is good or bad? It's good for those who take the bus, for those who don't take the bus, who cares where the bus stop is at? Left Twix or Right Twix? who the hell cares. That's how childish I see this thread being.
I'd take one run a play session like it used to be over a hundred easy spamfests any day of the week.
Grinding dungeons was never fun by itself, but it used to be actually fun to do when you were cracking jokes with people you just met, whispering the other dps to see if you guys could pull aggro from the badass pally tank or competing with another hunter to see who could get the other's pet killed first with misdirect and they like. I met most of my friends in MMOs that didn't come with a guild by running instances with them.
Dungeons are just soulless spamfests now, it really is just pulling the lever to see if you get your food pellet. The dungeon finders are also, as Bill pointed out, instrumental in dumbing down the dungeons so groups of strangers who won't communicate can still complete them. There is no way in hell a convenience option should affect how you tune your content. That's just batshit crazy.
I agree with pretty much every pro and con of the dungeon finder you guys bring up, but wish to talk more on these points specifically, particularly Bill's section.
I think you hit it on the nose that the dungeon finder in WoW wasn't solely responsible for the present "gogogo" speed-run dungeon mentality players tend to have. Perhaps it contributed in that making the party forming phase significantly shorter prepped players for the mentality that they should push everything to go a bit faster, but I think this is a minor contribution at best. Instead, I think there were two much larger design decisions at play, and I'll continue to use your WoW example to illustrate them.
The first shift is from the open, cavernous, HUGE dungeons of vanilla to the much more linear dungeons of the Burning Crusade. Think about Sunken Temple, BRD, UBRS/LBRS, Stratholme, Scholomance and the Dire Mauls. They're all extraordinarily open ended. Players could get lost in them for hours if they didn't know where they were going. Indeed, one of the characteristics of a good group leader back then, even for PUGs, was to be able to successfully navigate the group to all the relevant bosses. In BC, by contrast, while the quality of the heroic dungeons was still absolutely superb, this sense of open ended dungeon exploration was all but dissolved. Almost every dungeon could be navigated effortlessly by a full group of players who were new to the dungeon.
The second shift is seen in the transition to Wrath of the Lich King, which is the shift from crowd control and threat management based combat to AoE tank and spank combat. Prior to WotlK, threat management and healing aggro were huge concerns that dictated a certain measure of caution with every pull. Tanks - before the rise of prot paladins, that is - simply couldn't hohld aggro on more than 2 or, at the most, 3 mobs. The more mobs they tanked, the more healing they required, the more threat they needed to produce to out aggro the healers, etc. Similarly, mobs often possessed devastating abilities that needed to be controlled. Damage dealers had the additional, in my opinion, engaging role of keeping enemies trapped, sheeped, sapped, charmed, kited, whatever. Everyone took the dungeons seriously. Fast forward to WotlK, none of this was necessary; not in any single dungeon. Players were able to run heroics in their quest greens the moment they hit 80 and never had to look back from there.
This is the expansion where the dungeon finder was first introduced (although not until quite a bit into the expansion, if I recall correctly). I do wonder if there's any truth to Bill's assumption that this content was intentionally "dumbed down" specifically with the ensuing dungeon finder in mind. If I could ask Blizzard developers any question, it would definitely be what went into this design decision and if they regret it in retrospect.
Lastly, I do think there's at least one more significant contributor to players' contemporary "gogogo" dungeon mentality, and that is that players are simply more experienced today. Back in 2004, while there were certainly UO, EQ and AC veterans, there was a huge slew of brand new players being introduced to the genre. As a result, everyone was more patient because everyone was learning together. Nowadays, 90% of players in any given game have been around the MMO block, multiple times. If you've played a dungeon in WoW or Rift or SW:ToR, you've played a dungeon in Aion or GW2 or FFXIV. It's the same routine, and players carry their experience and expectations over from game to game. The entire dungeon running MMO community now expects the WotlK tank and spank speed run style.
I disagree with your point here. That back in 2004 people were more patient because most of us were new to the genre and were learning together. People were still short with you if you fucked up. In raids, it wasn't as bad because 40man raids really only took like 18 competent people, the rest could be trash really. And dungeon wise, i remember lots of fights breaking out over people breaking eggs in UBRS.
The problem lies outside of gaming. People have changed. The newer generation are in the "access now" generation. So games had to change accordingly. More and more you see people with the mentality that they should get something without paying or doing any amount of work for it else they'll move on elsewhere for that quick-fix.
Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!