But the big emphasis here is that, many times, developers ignore viewing things from a social stand point. It's not considered part of game design at all, except for the interface. I doubt (Maybe I'm wrong) that Blizzard sits down and talks about how people will need to "network" in their game, beyond just saying "lets make our friend and social applications better!"--and then we get things like in game calendars and real ID...And while those aren't BAD...That's not the kind of "in world" exploitation of social design they need to think about. An example should be "how do I get someone to actually WANT to go to this dungeon, and not just LFD there?" ..Asking that question doesn't destroy LFD, it just adds to it.
It almost feels like they can't work beyond extremes. Anytime someone mentions actual dungeons, people freak out and say "ZOMG FORCED GROUPS!!" and if you say you don't need to force it, they say "THEN NO ONE WILL GO!"...Ugh, I just want to know where their balls went? What happened to having fun designing this stuff and seeing what people will like, rather than what your sample groups told you will be used.
Right. Devs are not asking the right questions and there are a lot of devs out there that are flat out bad. There are a lot of talented people that are amazing at creating content, creating events and scripts with the proper code and procedures but a lot of them are not capable of the overall creation of game worlds and tying things together. There needs to be another layer there for content and game creation that doesn't come from people whose main focus is coding.
The problem with "seeing what people like" though is wasted development time. But you have to do it if you want to change and to do that you have to ask the right questions. When you get to the point where you are just making formulaic dungeons, sticking them somewhere on a map and putting them in a list in LFD you've already lost. Blizzard talked about getting people back out in the world for MOP, but the LFD system really killed that. The LFD system really works for what WOW wants to do, but Blizzard stopped asking the right questions. They are asking things like "how long should the average dungeon take to finish" and "how many points per hour/week should you be getting" and that sterilizes everything.
The proper question, to continue using the WOW example is, how do we incorporate the LFD system into our game that also allows players to see the world around them while keeping the accessibility and ease of access?
Here's how I would answer that using WOW technology:
Each dungeon is quite large that represents old school open world areas or Vanilla Dungeons like BRD.
Each dungeon is not a 5 man instance, instead it's a 10-20-50 whatever man shard.
Incorporate each dungeon into the open world much like dungeon instances are now.
Join LFD queue, and when it pops you are dropped outside the dungeon in the open world.
Upon teleporting to the area you join a raid group or party or some new grouping configuration of the other people and you "phase" into this new shard using WOW phasing technology.
You now have a LFD system for "open world" dungeons. I don't know if it's possible but you can do inception style phases within phases so you can separate out boss mechanics that require certain balancing if you're afraid boss fights are too difficult to do in an open world (I don't).
