I love that you've been "waiting for ages" on this, like you had your nerdrage all prepared on a Word file somewhere on your hard drive. The problem with this group of people is, they don't even know WHAT the features are, how much it costs, or ANYTHING and they're ALREADY whining whining whining. Clearly you weren't going to give it a chance, even if it's only $0.25 a month, it delivers a free pizza to your house once a month, and comes with the option to see all the female characters naked.

Hey, they gotta make up for the profit shortfall from losing 5% of its userbase.

Actually, I just happened to be refreshing Wow.com as this story hit and quickly summed up my response. I am by no means raging, merely expressing my opinion. If they are going to make it premium, all the power to them. Just saying that I will not be paying for yet another service, even if it is cheap, all these micro-transactions add up.

"I am not paying more for something that should have been included for free many years ago"

The dungeon finder itself hasn't been around for "many years" yet, so how could Blizzard have possibly made that possible?

"Hey, they gotta make up for the profit shortfall from losing 5% of its userbase."

True...except there wasn't a profit shortfall this quarter. They actually made MORE money, despite losing customers. Perhaps you refer to a future shortfall? That's sure possible.

@Leo
I don't think it's fair to say we should have had it "many years ago." As was mentione, Dungeon Finder itself is fairly recent and it was only extremely recently that Blizzard was able to expand that beyond Battlegroups. It's certainly a difficult feature to implement and it's awesome they are trying to get it in. Far as I know, it's pretty rare in any sort of game to be able to play with friends who are on a whole different server.

@Skarn:

"True...except there wasn't a profit shortfall this quarter. They actually made MORE money, despite losing customers. Perhaps you refer to a future shortfall? That's sure possible."

That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it:

Blizzard left somewhere in the neighborhood of $9M on the table for ONE month (600k players * $15/month). Whether you count that as a shortfall in profit or not is up to you, but they clearly didn't get as much money as they could have.

They need to address concerns and re-engage the people that left. I still don't see that happening.