When attempting instances in World of Warcraft, long has been the lament of players who haven't been able to get a group together due to missing players for certain roles. Blizzard has attempted various iterations to deal with this problem, from a Looking For Group chat channel to the first lousy incarnation of the Meeting Stones. When WoW originally launched only the Looking For Group channel was available and it didn't work cross-server, meaning it was rarely useful to find random players unless you happened to be sitting in a city in the first place. The first version of the Meeting Stones would allow you to enter a queue specific to the instance they sat outside, but in practice they were rarely used. Blizzard revamped them entirely in patch 2.0.1, turning them into portal-generators that could be utilized to summon other party members not near the instance, which made them significantly more useful in conjunction with the additional revamp to the LFG channel to make it work across greater distances.
In the latest patch to drop last week, Blizzard has again improved upon ways to find additional players for instances. The new Dungeon Finder tool is their newest toy and after playing with it for a few days I have to say, I'm completely blown away by how helpful it is.
To start, you select your role and whether you want to queue for a specific dungeon or a random one. As my main character is a dual-specced Discipline/Shadow priest, I can choose between a healing or DPS role (though I tend to be exclusively a healer). From there you're automatically assembled into a random group of players and automatically teleported inside your assigned dungeon when that group is completed. Living in Australia but playing on a US server I rarely am around for peak hours, but every queue I've entered has lasted under five minutes before I was inside an instance and ready to kick some butt. The reason for this is that the Dungeon Finder tool works cross-realm, finding players to join your instance even if they aren't on the same server as you are. Blizzard originally implemented this functionality to improve queue times on Battlegrounds and it's great to see it make its way to other parts of the game as well.
Gone are the days of gear arguments or feverishly trolling through /who in capital cities to message healers or tanks to come fill in a spot. You don't know the identity of your other party members until you're inside the instance, though a vote can be called to boot an unruly or unhelpful player.
The tool also comes with further incentive to get people to use it; the first time you complete a random heroic dungeon you get armor tokens and a decent amount of gold, and each subsequent use of the tool nets you a lesser set of tokens and a lesser amount of gold. Using it repeatedly also gets you various achievements and a random chance at receiving a Perky Pug in-game pet too. The tool can be used for both heroic and normal versions of any five man instances; 10 and 25 man raids are not supported, unfortunately, though this is likely due to the fact that they require a lot more time and coordination to accomplish, while the five man instances are over faster.
In the end this is probably one of the most impressive interface changes I've seen happen to WoW; in the space of a day I managed to complete four instances that I could never get a group going for previously, and have successfully completed all the Wrath heroic dungeons available now. It's really the cross-server support that makes this tool as handy as it is, and I can only hope that other games take a page from Blizzard on this and release their own versions in the future.
Possibly Related Posts:
World of Warcraft Patch 3.3: Icecrown opens its doors
World of Warcraft turns 5/Warcraft series turns 15
A tale of two guilds
Pseudo-review: GroBoto procedural modeling tool
On playing MMOGs and being anti-social
Allowed HTML tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
This is a Gravatar-enabled site. To get your own globally-recognized-avatar, register at gravatar.com.