At first I thought I wouldn't really mind this kind of feature. I would be the kind to engage in global randomness.
Fondly I remember Gysahl where many people used the Party Menu for recruiting members and people were proactive in setting their status in the Search Menu, using these functions to seek out and inform others. I loved having people just jump straight into party without needing to invite them and being able to recruit a specific setup, gathering at the content and having less work to do in recruiting, enabling focus on other tasks as a leader.
Ragnarok was a completely different story. I think this is heavily influenced by the demographic. I would never see Party listings, the occasional person would be seeking in the Search function and people would spam Ul'dah for great lengths of time in hope of finding their members. Ragnarok has a smaller population though, so this could also be a factor.
I think this highlights a reliance not only on the Developers and their tools but also effort in usage by The Community. The party search feature is useful and has a good foundation that could be strengthened by feedback and development.
I've been hoping for change in that when someone was invited by leader it would update the Recruit. You have to close and redo the entire recruit again if you use /pcmd to add a member. It sucks when you end up with more of a class/job than you asked for >_<;
I am fearful that adding a global channel will only drive more people to use that as a mechanism for party building as opposed to putting the small amount of effort Recruit & Search require to do it in a more efficient and functional way.
