Sorry, but there won’t be LFG addons in WoW Classic
@MatthewWRossi
I am staunchly and proudly pro-anything that makes WoW Classic feel as close to how WoW actually felt back in the dear departed days of vanilla WoW as possible. If it were up to me, instead of launching at patch 1.12 it would launch at 1.0 and patch throughout its life cycle so people would have to experience the game the way it was on day one, but I understand why they’re going with the patch they are — at least patch 1.12 is as close to bug-free as vanilla WoW ever got.
But any time I hear anything that smacks of bringing modern conveniences like group finder to WoW Classic, my immediate response is no. Easy grouping up wasn’t part of the vanilla experience, and if you want that, you don’t want WoW Classic at all. So I’m thrilled to see this post on the forums from Bornaak.
We’ve been closely following the community discussion around this add-on for WoW Classic, as well as analyzing it to make sure we understand how it works. After careful examination, we believe the nature of ClassicLFG is incompatible with our social design for Classic. Thus, in an upcoming patch (in the weeks following launch), we will be adding restrictions to the Classic add-on API that will significantly limit this add-on and others like it.
In line with what we shared at BlizzCon last year, we intend to be very careful about allowing add-on functionality that might undermine aspects of the social dynamics that are core to the Classic experience, even in cases like this where it’s clear that the addon author had no ill intent and was simply trying to provide a service to the Classic community. Ultimately, if a streamlined group-finding system was something we considered compatible with Classic, we would have kept the modern Premade Group Finder tool rather than choosing to remove it from the Classic client.
It’s difficult to articulate a clear-cut rule for exactly when an add-on crosses the line. However, when an add-on goes beyond presenting information or providing aesthetic customization, and attempts to create an interconnected social network that relies on other players also using that same add-on, we are likely to scrutinize it particularly closely.
I believe this to be a fantastic decision on Blizzard’s part. Easier group finder changed WoW forever when it was introduced in Wrath of the Lich King and it absolutely wasn’t part of the vanilla World of Warcraft experience. To preserve the purity of the recreation — to really give players that old-school experience that they’ve demanded for years now — then there cannot be addons like this that remove the necessity of standing around in Orgrimmar for hours and hours spamming trade to put together a PuG for Scholomance. It would undermine the necessity of forging a tight server community and would make it not at all a faithful recreation of the game as it was between 2004 and 2006.
I mean, I’ll be grouping out here in Battle for Azeroth where I can use tools that have been in the game for over a decade now, but that’s not how vanilla WoW worked. When I fire up WoW Classic, I want the experience to be as faithful as possible and that means that each server should be a closed system where you need to actually interact with other players to get groups together. It’s what the game was then, and it’s what this recreation of the game now should strive to emulate.
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