In the recent roadmap reveal, SE says they're going to implement a Dungeon Finder system. I assume this is going to work much like the WoW Dungeon Finder, which essentially pools random people across servers and teleports them into instanced dungeons and back once they're done.
There was much discussion about implementing this during the Rift beta, as well. Most people were against this. Here is what Riftwatchers said about the idea when it was proposed by the Rift devs:
MMOs are as much about community as they are about gameplay. Even great MMO gameplay generally cannot compete with great non-MMO gameplay, so it needs to take advantage of its MMO nature in order to succeed. A Dungeon Finder will arguably improve gameplay by increasing convenience, however, it is absolutely fatal to server communities. I saw Blizzard dismantle its server communities first hand, at first with cross-realm Battlegrounds and then also with the Dungeon Finder. Today WoW servers have no identity whatsoever. None. You will not meet the player you grouped with ever again.We all know how the cross-server dungeon system works in WoW. You select a dungeon, hit the queue button, within 30 minutes you’re in and fighting away (less if you’re a tank or healer). The chances of you grouping with somebody on your server are slim. The chances of you ever grouping with those same people are infinitesimal. Every run is a toss of the dice: sometimes you get nice people you’d enjoy grouping with again (you can’t make this happen), other times you get the most base of players that remind you why WoW got such a bad name in the first place.
It is a system that solved one problem and raised the other, genre-spanning issue of the de-socialization of MMORPGs. For the majority of its life cycle thus far, players have been nearly entirely silent in groups. Relationships between players have eroded away into intra-guild cliques. Interacting with people on your server is meaningless outside of your guild, the auction house, and raiding. It has propelled the idea of “massively single player” to whole new levels.
What this means is that player actions have no consequences. You can be the greatest douche in the history of mankind and nobody will know nor care. You can be the most awesome group member the game has ever seen, but again, nobody will know nor care. The only other players you will learn to know are those within your LS because you will rarely interact with anyone else more than once.
It will also further splinter the game world into a series of instances rather than a complete world because there is no travel involved. I bet half the people playing WoW have no idea of where the dungeon entrances are even after having beat said dungeons a two dozen times.
I believe this trade-off is absolutely horrible.