As good a game as WoW is, there are a few things I'd love to see improved. At the top of my list is the interface we use to find a group. Players quickly learn that "LFG" in a chat channel means "looking for group" and "LF2M for SM" means "looking for two more for Scarlet Monastery," for instance.

This works, but barely and seems to me to be unnecessarily cumbersome. Why should we have to use the chat channels to broadcast to everyone?

Some people use the /who function in the game to better identify candidates for a group and then send them a whisper asking if they'd like to join a group for an instance. For instance, you might type /who Warrior 52-55 and the interface will return up to 49 characters currently logged on who meet that criteria, to which you can then send a private message. This is better, but still not great.

Blizzard put in meeting stones awhile back hoping it'd help us to form groups, but nobody uses them, and so, therefore, they don't work. Good idea, poor execution, apparently.

Posts on Blizz WoW forums tell us two important things: 1) that there was a quite robust LFG interface in the beta testing of WoW but was removed and no one is quite sure why and that 2) Blizzard is definitely working on a LFG interface for us but hasn't told us when it'll be released or what features it'll have. Whatever they give us, it's gotta be better than our current LFG strategies.
 

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard