Because I Enjoy a Good Spanking

I guess I should feel grateful that I'm small potatoes --okay, more like the size of a single french fry-- in the MMO blogosphere.

After reading this post over on MassivelyOP and then Wilhelm Arcturus' rebuttal, I was certainly happy to not be in the crosshairs of the very vocal pro-LFG tool crowd. But then again, more than a few bloggers I follow have had commentary regarding the latest tempest in a teapot that is TBC Classic, so why bother posting about it this far after the announcement?

Catharsis, perhaps?

Indeed!
From Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

 

***

The automated LFD tool, when it was first released, was a godsend for people who --like me-- operated at off hours. Trying to find a dungeon group in the early morning or late at night was painful at best, and if you weren't on when your guildies were on, well... That kind of sucked. But with the tool, when you were on was suddenly no longer an issue.

Oh yeah, it still kind of was, given that the available pool of players shrank in off hours, but it was certainly better than just about nothing at all.

But like anything else, what you get out of the tool is a direct correlation to what people put into the tool. And if people are being asshats because the tool allows them to, well...

Garbage in, garbage out.

***

Perhaps it's better to step back and look at things from a larger point of view. Just what would the automated LFD tool solve in today's Classic community?

The tool as created in original Wrath was set among battleground groups* --a subset of servers in a region grouped together for random Battlegrounds-- and matched players to a selected instance, or a random instance, in either Normal or Heroic mode. Furthermore, players wouldn't have to use the meeting stones to be summoned to the location, the players would automatically be ported to the beginning of the inside of the instance itself. 

Convenience, we are it.

Regardless, the biggest problem the original LFD tool was meant to solve was getting players grouped and into instances painlessly, which most people took to mean avoiding the Trade Chat cesspool. And that's putting it politely, given that Trade Chat back then was a haven of racist and sexist material.

Think about that for a minute: WoW's Trade Chat back then, when Admins were far more numerous and attentive to players, was worse than LFG Chat in Classic is now.

Were there server balance issues? Yes, there were, but WoW was still in a growth/expansion mode, so the Battleground Groups evened things out a bit. It was only in a post-Cataclysm world, when the WoW population began to shrink, did server balance issues become a problem. I still remember how stunned I was when in 2014 I discovered that Ysera-US, one of the old WoW servers and where my Alliance toons resided on, had shrunk so far in population that it was a recommended landing spot for new players.

But before there were balance issues, grouping balance issues became a thing. As in, if you weren't a tank (or, to a lesser extent a healer) you were going to wait. A lot.

Yes, yes, I know, some things never change. 

But still, the tank problem from Cataclysm onward was severe enough that waiting for upwards of an hour or more as a DPS for a queue to pop could be maddening. And then if you ever thought about tanking so that you could avoid the wait, the abuse heaped on tanks --and to be fair, the tanks/healers would heap on DPS too-- could get pretty extreme.

I pretty much gave up on heroic instance runs in Cataclysm based on the crap slung around in normal instance runs, and by the time Mists dropped I found Battlegrounds preferable to running instances where everybody was expected to know everything and "lol L2P noob" was one of the nicer refrains I heard.

So why would we want to return to that?

***

I suppose that people in Classic who are in favor of a return of the automated LFG tool have forgotten what it was like to be learning the fights via said tool.

In my personal experience, zoning in and declaring that hey, I'm still learning this instance could be enough for at least one person to drop. Or that someone would initiate a "vote kick" against you. It might not be as bad as to have that happen all the time, but I'd say that about 1/3 of the time when I did that in Cataclysm --as a DPS-- I'd see someone attempt one of the two options. And that was for a normal instance, mind you, not a heroic. I have absolutely no idea how people behave in normals and heroics instances these days in Retail, now that mythic+ exists. I suspect that based on this thread, M+ and other instance runs are not a lovey dovey place at all. 

If everybody knows the fights and has at least a decent set of gear, then yeah, the tool can be useful for getting your badges and gearing up, but notice the "decent set of gear" part. Where to you go if you need gear to get to that "decent" level? It becomes a circular problem.

Yeah, like this.
From the Blizzard Forums.

And if your entry into running a normal instance --again, so you can learn the fights in a practical manner and get gear-- is toxic, why stick around? 

***

As a tool, the automated LFG tool does make the process of getting into an instance relatively painless. But the tool also operates as, well, an accelerant. It takes a potentially combustible situation and pours gasoline on everything, because it eliminates any sense of responsibility for your actions. 

I also believe that it is easier to overlook the problems with the LFG tool when you're in a guild. If you're in an active guild, you can get a group together, punch in the tool, and away you go. No fuss, no muss. Even if you need a single DPS, no big deal. You get in a lot quicker, you can do whatever while you're waiting, and it's a rather painless affair. 

If you pug, however.... That's when the problems begin. You have to prove yourself time and again,  and constant usage of the LFG tool is an accelerant on the process.** Make a mistake, and some people will judge you faster than middle school kids at lunch time. When it is soooo easy to just kick or leave instead of working through problems, you can bet that people will choose that option.

***

The automated LFG tool, if they were to implement it covering "Battleground server groups", would also mask other problems with the WoW Classic community, allowing them to fester without a long term resolution.

Such as server imbalance.

It needs to be said, but in the WoW Classic community the Battleground server groups are practically all the servers in a specific time zone. Which is great and all for the automated LFG tool, but when you transition to raiding.... Not so much. I've covered this before, but the reality is that the raiding scene on the smaller servers has been declining close to the point of no return, while a couple of gigantic servers are so huge because layering hides problems normally associated with them being too big: being unable to farm materials and the consequent inflation of auction house prices.

Spreading the server population out would help a LOT, because it would prevent the brain drain that is currently happening throughout TBC Classic and stretching back to the last few months of Vanilla Classic. It's one of those "it sounds great in theory" solutions that nobody seems to want to tackle head on, because it means that Blizz would have to confront one of their big cash cows: paid server transfers.

***

Do I know the answer to the automated LFG tool conundrum? 

No, but I do know that installing the solution implemented in Retail Wrath is a disaster in the making. 

What we know now about WoW as implemented in Classic, courtesy of 50 million walk through videos/podcasts/blogs/websites, would likely make people less tolerant of others, and that accelerant capability that the automated LFG tool has could be the spark that the community might not recover from.

Remembering the old definition about insanity as "performing the same actions over and over, and expecting a different result" is worth remembering right now.

Something different is called for here. Perhaps server merges, perhaps bans on toon creation/transfer to the giant servers, perhaps free transfers off of said giant servers or servers with huge faction imbalances, or even perhaps some combination of both, is worth trying. But what I do know is that simply going down the same old path and then expecting it'll all be fine is being incredibly naive.

*Thanks to Shintar for reminding me of this. I thought for the longest time that it was on individual servers, even though I did know it was among Battleground groups when it released; selective memory, I guess. I do know that with Mists and the coming of "don't-call-them-server-merges" the automated tool's reach did expand.

 

**Once, before I joined my current guild, I tagged along on an instance run of theirs. "I'm so glad we're all friends," one of the people in the run said, "because I absolutely hate pugging instances." I could understand the sentiment, but given that I got to know most of my in-game friends via pugs I felt somewhat slighted.