By forcing your view of social stuff, You've ensured that I won't be doing things in groups anymore. If you think removal is a good thing, then at least you don't suffer from any form of anxiety. From those of us who do, %^&* you blizzard.
For player housing I'd rather see something along the line of Guild Garrisons. Maybe it's an instanced area that is built in to an area of your capital city. In this case, you'd go in and only players in your guild would be able to see it. A neat place for your guild to hang out. All while being right in Stormwind/Orgrimmar, so people are still bound to roam the city, go to the auction house, etc.Maybe a new "wanted"/trading board system where players could put up their own "quests" (i.e. bring me 100 cloth got X gold) and it automatically does the trade for them, even if the person was offline.Offline crafters, where you assign one of your guildmates to a craft building, and while they're offline you can use them (like an NPC) to craft some items. When they're online, they have an apprentice NPC that handles it.And maybe, just maybe, inside that guild garrison is a house that becomes an instanced personal house for each player, with a transmog "closet", storage chest, and a place to display certain trophies, similar to statues in garrison, archaeology artifacts, the tier set dummies from order halls.... Of course there should maybe be some other features, and a way to invite friends in for tea ;)
Though I was disappointed by the removal of the easy LFG options and add-ons, I do accept their reasoning. They spent time and effort making sure that rewards were justified by the time and effort that would be required to complete the quest. A quest that rewards 150g might require a time investment of say, at least 3 minutes. If you were able to queue into a group, and complete the quest as soon as you landed and killed a single mob, then the rewards far outmatched other quests. I specifically only targeted gold quests in Legion for this reason (avoiding any quest that required me to dismount and walk through a cave to reach the quest mob). I go the free to play route and was easily able to pay for my monthly fees with tokens, using this tactic. If you watch the price of tokens, you'll see that tokens have dropped from 220k gold from the last patch to 180k gold now (I realize there's more reasons for the loss, such as no more gold rewards from followers, but it's at least part of it).Now, if I want 150g, I'm going to spend at least as long as the developers expected it to take me. Either I'm going to spend 3 minutes soloing mobs, or I'm going to spend a minute or two trying to find a group manually while killing several of the mobs myself, and finish up quickly after the group is formed. Either way, i'm not getting out of there in under 2 minutes.
the response for the LFG addon removal was true but it doesn't explain why they removed the ingame group finder for WQs as well (except elites). Killing 12 satyrs is just tedious and not difficult content so let us join others using the blizzard built in system. Don't limit us to only the elite quests. That is just artificially stretched out to make us play longer and progress slower. WQ's aren't fun content after the first week or two its just a means to an end.
Glad to know this decision was as much bullcrap as any other micromanaging-player-activity decision they make. They've basically killed using the group finder for "legitimate" uses over a handful of bad eggs (who are, in all honestly, likely the devs themselves).Also now, as a group leader, I have to afk in order to accept new people to the few things I actually used the group finder for. Instead of setting up an invasion point group and going to town, I've gotta sit there and micromanage it right up until we kill the boss. Casually pugging Legion raids for transmog has also been a complete wash ever since they pulled it. RIP even more reasons to actively play the game.
There still is no removal of LFG as a whole, just of the automation, please stop crying, instant grat spammers.
To be honest I usually did laugh at the 'Blizz is trying to prevent us being social and grouping by disabling this addons!' when in reality it was just 'I can't do the WQ as quickly now!' as the vast majority of these people never once actually socialized when grouped with these addons.
I really don't like their reasoning behind not implementing player housing. Final Fantasy XIV has all of the multiplayer stuff Blizz says are WoW's strengths AND a player housing and it's working out just -fine-. Ugh.
I've never understood the desire for player housing. Seems like more of a segregation.
Making world quests harder to to because it screw with pacing is dumb. Players will end up doing the same quests dozens maybe even hundreds of times over a given expansion....there's no great feeling of accomplishment after the first couple of run through its just more painful. Players leeching may be a concern....but not enough of a concern to warrant making world quest universally more time consuming to run.
At no point in time did I ever consider a WQ a "social" experience, what a load of bunk. Raids, mythics and group PvP are a social experience, guilds and communities are social experiences - sitting in TRADE CHAT is a social experience, but world quests? Those are just as grindy as any daily that's been in the game and provide no social benefit. What a silly excuse.