Lithose
Buzzfeed Editor
Just because the lobby has a fucking town and an AH doesn't mean it's not a god damn lobby. If you're going to devolve your game down to instanced, fast port, specific zones--then why not do what D&D did and simply have a town, where you form groups and go to an instance, that IS a lobby--just because it's in 3D makes no difference, you know the old adage a rose by any other name?You keep saying lobby and I think you are talking about Starcraft 2. I played WOW and I never once felt that that way because I did not exit the game to queue up LFG. I was no forced to sit there waiting for other players to join. No, I just queued LFG AND THEN WENT OUT IN THE WORLD AND DID WHATEVER THE FUCK I WANT. In fact, these "lobbies" as you keep calling them, were LESS restrictive than the old way of forming groups where you literally sit at the zoneline spamming shout and sending tells. THAT is your goddamn lobby.
Every time you say "lobby" I want to reach through the monitor and choke the life out of you. LFD is thesolutionto a lobby, not the fucking cause of it.
The fact is, once you're done with leveling content, you can exist outside the world forever. You can grind badges from town, into instanced zones. You can grind PvP from town, into instanced PvP gear. And both those things are fine--earlier in the conversation most people said that such systems like LFD/LFBG were perfectly reasonably in a game, so people could log in and get things done.
THEN the conversation turned toward how to get people into the world. Like offering rewards for non-instanced dungeons, where you have to travel to them--the rewards could be as simple as making the gear from those dungeons non-BoE/BoP. You could also augment the experience to have it be slightly superior to grind in the community version, and with the value of "no-bind loot", plus slightly better experience (With a soft cap system), you could get people into the community versions BUT still offer the instanced version for people without the time. But everyone's had this conversation, we've laid these ground rules, accepted a bunch of stuff in WoW is fine and great, but there is no reason to develop MMO's with such a linear mindset. Instancing shouldn't have killed community dungeons and the existence of community dungeons shouldn't preclude instancing.