Personally I find application useful to filter windows shopper. Sometime some people seem interest only in having the pearl and not in the ls itself. They get it and never show up or appear in chat. In other game you could just remove it from the ls but in this game it's troublesome. If someone won't even take 5 mins to complete a short application than there's a good chance that the person wasn't really interest in joining and would have left soon enough.