ince the release of WoW Classic, Azeroth heroes have had to do without comfort features such as the dungeon and raid browser or the “Organized Groups” tool. The result: Players pull themselves together into groups, write to each other, help, laugh, argue – which ultimately makes for a much more lively server community. So could it be said that the introduction of the LFG and LFR tools ruined World of Warcraft?
A modern feature of World of Warcraft (buy now) , which has been criticized for years, is the automated group search, which is divided into Raid Finder (LFR) and Dungeon Finder (LFG). But would the Blizzard MMORPG actually be a better game today if this tool didn’t exist? At least that’s what critics of Retail-WoW regularly claim. Your “Previously, a lot was better and we would like to have this “before” back!” argument is often justified by the fact that these comfort functions did not exist at the time and the whole community aspect was therefore much more pronounced and important, which in turn was the quality of playing fun.
Until recently, this discussion had to be conducted in a very theoretical manner. Reservations about the current WoW met nostalgic memories that were almost 15 years old. But today things are different. WoW Classic is now more than three weeks old and we have a direct comparison: A WoW version without and a WoW version with a dungeon and raid browser. But before I go into my experiences so far, first a little context.
The Birth of LFR and LFG
The dungeon browser was introduced with the Wrath of the Lichking expansion and since then has enabled players to find a group for an instance in a comfortable and timely manner. With Cataclysm, Blizzard then expanded this feature to include the Raid Finder, so that high-level heroes can also quickly find a team for the raid challenges. The latter are designed so easily that even casual players without too much knowledge of the boss mechanics can lay them, bag reasonably decent loot and experience the story of the raid and complete quests linked to the raid. And since you are ported directly to the instance, you don’t have to worry about getting there. It looks similar for the way home after work.
The two versions of the group search are again criticized because they torpedo the sense of community in Azeroth day after day and because the challenges are not much more than tourist modes in which the fun falls by the wayside due to the low level of difficulty.
Vanilla = classic
In vanilla WoW (and the first expansion, The Burning Crusade), the two tools did not yet exist. So the players had to use their keyboards to search for fellow players in the chat. Many players had also joined guilds with like-minded people to find groups for dungeons faster or to get a place in a raid squad. The search in the chat was quite tedious and often took some time. The guild list, on the other hand, was full almost around the clock, someone was always in the mood for an instance.
History is now repeating itself in Classic. The search for group chat (and sometimes also the trade chat) is on fire 24/7, people are wanted for dungeons of all levels. Since there are currently a lot of players online on the various servers, you can quickly get a full group together for an instance trip, at least in most level areas. However, fast is relative. After all, you sometimes have to walk long distances before you reach the dungeon entrance, and at times you have to wait a little while until you finally find a tank, for example.
pure community
In my opinion, the disadvantages of the manual group search are currently outweighed by another point that clearly speaks for the Classic system: The community feeling in the game is completely different. In dungeons, people are suddenly talking to each other more than “hi” and “bb” again. Of course, from time to time you also come across unpleasant fellows. The bottom line is that I’ve made mostly positive acquaintances in the dungeons (as well as in the open world) so far. Sometimes my healer just got a few potions from an alchemist, sometimes some stuff just changed hands or they agreed on the distribution of the loot without luck of the dice.
A particularly nice group then invited me to their guild, in which I have felt very comfortable ever since. A few other noses have now ended up on my friends list because we level up at about the same speed and have therefore already been on the road together several times. My point here is that I haven’t seen things like this in retail WoW for a very, very long time.
LFG to blame for everything?
So I do believe that the LFG tool has played its part in weakening the sense of community in WoW. But I don’t think that the tool alone is to blame or would have ruined World of Wa
rcraft in its entirety. Patch 1.12 already started with the introduction of realm pools, which had an extremely damaging effect on the PvP communities on all servers. Also responsible is the ever lower level of difficulty for certain areas of the game or the offer of easier modes, so that WoW became more and more solo-friendly. When the cross server function was introduced, the players in the open world eventually turned into anonymous characters who were just as interchangeable as the fellow combatants in dungeons or in LFR challenges.
The thing is, there were reasons for all these changes. Before the introduction of realmpools, some factions simply had inhumanely long waiting times for the battlegrounds. Anyone who hadn’t found a tank for a dungeon in Vanilla-WoW and TBC after an hour or longer, will certainly have been happy about the introduction of the LFG tool in WotLK. And, of course, servers that simply don’t have enough active players on them benefit from the cross-server function.
All these “improvements” in combination also ensured that the community feeling in WoW was lost more and more over the years. In WoW Classic, on the other hand, there is a real server community again. You meet names you’ve already seen. You have to manually form groups and get involved if you want to experience the dungeons to the end. And even the somewhat more complex level phase strengthens cooperation in many cases. Buffs are unselfishly distributed, mobs are smashed that don’t do you any good, or badly battered players are healed. Honestly, I’m only too happy to do without a convenient LFG and LFR tool for all of this. how do you see it?
What is WoW Classic?
World of Warcraft Classic is a true recreation of the original WoW as you know it from 2006. All parts of the game – from combat mechanics and talent trees to character models and zones – have been recreated, contributing to the authentic experience.
Getting Started
All players with an active World of Warcraft subscription or game time on their accounts have access toWoW Classic at no additional cost.
- Open the Blizzard Battle.net Desktop App and select World of Warcraft from the menu.
- Select World of Warcraft Classic from the Version menu. If you have more than one World of Warcraft account, you’ll see a second Account drop-down list. In this column, select the active account you want to play with.
- Click the Install button. The progress bar will tell you when your game is ready to play.
- Click the Play button when the installation is complete.
You will need to select the realm you want to play on from several different realm types. Make sure you choose the same realm as your friends – in World of Warcraft Classic, you can only group with characters that are on the same realm as you!
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