Classically Trained: Meeting Stones

by JR Cook - 7 years ago     show comments

Classically Trained is a series discussing topics related to the Classic WoW gaming experience, now that Blizzard has committed to bringing official Classic servers live. 

Let’s talk about meeting stones.

In the classic WoW game, the stones in front of raids and instances were called meeting stones. This was because the stones were meant to be an overworld waypoint that players met at before advancing into the dungeon. It was a signal of “hey there’s a dungeon here, get a group.” This is important, since a number of dungeon entrances (e.g. Deadmines, Wailing Caverns, Blackrock Depths) were actually buried behind regular overworld content that you needed to clear before you could zone into the dungeon itself; it was fairly rare to just come across a dungeon entrance willy-nilly. (Another reason for the name was because the summoning functionality wasn’t added until Burning Crusade, 

natch.)

Now, meeting stones weren’t just signal markers for dungeons; they did have a purpose, in that you could post your name on them. The intent (which was iterated upon multiple times during Classic) was that you’d be matched up with other players in the intended level range of the dungeon so you’d be able to walk in together and have a smooth run. Aside from matching for this level range, it didn’t do any other matchmaking; fixed roles weren’t a thing in classic WoW, so if you were five warm bodies in the right level range, the meeting stone said you were ready to start clearing to the entrance.

… yeah, any five will do. Go win all the loots kids!

The problems were that you had to touch the stone in order to do this (later, innkeepers were given the ability to act as meeting stones in the same fashion for nearby dungeons), which meant you weren’t in one of the cities spamming general chat trying to find players. In the either/or comparison of which method was more effective for getting a group together, doing it in the city just hit a much wider audience.

As we fast-forward through the history of dungeon grouping mechanisms in the post-Classic game, you can see that all of them stem from extending the functionality of the meeting stone/summoning stone and automating the process of putting a group together, speeding it up dramatically to where we’re at today (i.e. queue for a dungeon, get ported to the dungeon, kill bosses, loot, requeue). What classic purists argue, however, is that this automation injured server communities. It’s important to unpack that here.

• Players who demonstrated they were reliable and effective players tended to make a name for themselves, which led them to being on the shortlists for other players to take to future dungeons or even forming the kernel of guilds or raiding groups.
• Players who repeatedly demonstrated that they’d abandon a group midway through the dungeon, or after ninja-looting something from a boss, or just for being abusive to teammates also developed a bad reputation, effectively punishing them for their behavior and/or seeing them blacklisted on their realms.

when you’ve got this many bosses to get through, having someone drop two bosses in is REALLY awful

These are both events that don’t happen with great frequency in the modern era of LFD: even if you have a positive experience with a player in a cross-realm group, you won’t be able to invite them to your guild. You could exchange BattleTags or RealID, but that’s a rather permanent commitment, and you might end up filling up your friend list. At the end of the day, finding good players in matchmade content is more the exception than the rule.

On the other side, while bad players are generally intended to be punished by getting reported to Blizzard for bad behavior, that punishment never feels like it lands when the players impacted by the bad play don’t see the punishment. Moreover, abusive players can always just re-queue and get another group in comparatively little time. The sense that the community itself is punishing a bad player for poor play isn’t there when the punishment is invisible; it’s as though purist classic players want the ability to say “this guy ninjas loot, don’t group with him” in order to enforce the punishment themselves rather than leaving it to Blizzard to action the offending player.

So at the end of the day, purists have come to the conclusion that the time spent in assembling a party and traveling to a dungeon is intended to make it more challenging for players to abuse each other, because the time investment is so much greater. From the perspective of a designer who wants players to be able to focus their time on play rather than logistics, this is a pretty perfect example of “this is why we can’t have nice things.”

… yeah, steve, you’re the reason.

So, solution #1 is to just leave meeting stones alone, giving purists the experience they say they want. Giving meeting stones the summoning functionality they gained in BC would help to cut down the travel component, at least, which should preserve the social components of the practice while saving time. The solution I like the most, however, is giving meeting stones the functionality they were intended to have: the Group Finder tab added in Legion.

Think about it. Group Finder allows you to browse through groups who want to engage in content, where you can look for the content you want and then petition to join the group. The group leader still has to invite you (ensuring that your name can still get flagged as a good or bad player), and you still have to travel out to the dungeon’s entrance one way or another. The additional functions of the Group Finder allow a leader to specify whether or not dungeon quests or optional bosses are on the table, or if certain boss drops are reserved, without having to spam general chat in order to do it. If this tab is only accessible when talking to an innkeeper or touching an actual meeting stone, it will still serve the original design intent, while adding modern functionality but WITHOUT much of the automation that purists claim injured realm communities.

At the end of the day, whether or not changes should be made to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Classic is going to be a business decision, and the debate about it is surely raging within Blizzard just as readily as it is out here. That, however, is the reason for opening up the discussion, as well as talking about specific differences between the classic game and the modern version we’re playing now. So let us know where you stand in the comments.