Implications of a Dungeon Finder

[Frein]

People still spam LFG and Trade chats for groups. You see the same names a lot, ESPECIALLY during leveling. People still do premades for everything, and it's easy to make friends if you aren't sticking to pick-up groups made via the dungeon finder exclusively.

Why would anyone bother to LFG shout with a DF in place? You're still grouping with randoms.

And why does it matter if I met that same person more than once or not? If I liked them, I would friend request them the first time. It's not a dating game, I don't need to meet up with the person more than once to determine if I want to be friends with them.

Yes, it matters a whole lot. When you play with the same people a lot naturally rather than out of a conscious attempt to make it happen, the community grows much stronger. Networks of friends' friends form and the server becomes more like a rural village than a bustling metropolis.

Throwing BGs to make it go by faster happened a long, long time after cross-realm BGs were implemented and aren't a direct result of cross-realm BGs. It's a result of people 1) finally figuring out how to exploit the system for more points, and 2) one faction always being unbalanced in a battle group. Whether or not the BGs were cross realm wouldn't have made a difference, because the scenario of one faction being more unbalanced than the other is even more extreme when you look on a server-by-server basis; and the underdog faction would have learned to throw BGs anyways, to get more points faster.

I don't know about your server(s), but EU Vashj turned from a great server with a strong community and friendly rivalry between the factions to a nameless vessel virtually overnight as soon as cross-realm BGs were added. People didn't give a crap about optimizing point gains, they fought because they wanted to win, or at the very least give the opponent hell before falling. All of this ended immediately when the floodgates were opened and all kinds of losers flowed into our BGs.

[Wolfie]

Why would anyone bother to LFG shout with a DF in place? You're still grouping with randoms.

Because people aren't zombies and realize the drawbacks of a dungeon finder, and still prefer to find a regular group of people to do content with, than to stick to strangers. It's human nature. The DF is a fall-back resource provided for people who are too lazy or cannot find a group of regulars to do content with.

It's why people are still organizing into guilds and adding people to friends lists in WOW, despite DF (and now Raid Finder) being part of the game. If DF ruins communities like you say it does, then WOW should have seen a sharp decline in guilds and guild runs, but it didn't.