I've been playing MMOs for years with the same pattern: me and one or more than my friends, grouped together, making a party.
I did that before they even implemented the idea of LFD-like feature years ago and I kept doing it afterwards, never playing alone.
Reason is I have no fun playing MMOs with just myself, while I enjoy having some friend to talk, chat and comment with while we do it together.
For me, MMOs, are a chance to play a Co-Op game in a free roaming environment. I can count really a few console games, today, where that happens. And I already played all of them through.
MMOs, thus, have this nice thing: they don't finish. Ever. At worst, they stop being enjoyable.
So, when I discovered they prevented premade groups (even 2 out of 4) to join the queue for Duty Roulette, I was basically left out from the feature.
Don't get me wrong, I know it's not a matter of randomness. I can check all istances with my Group and queue for all of them. That way I get them random anyway (we still prefer doing WP over and over, nevertheless).
The problem is that, with this feature, people PREFER to play alone, since they can cap Mythology much faster and earn bonus prizes while doing it.
So when I login searching for my FC friends to play together, I often find them already into a Duty roulette without waiting me. And obviously, since they cap earlier, they see no reason to doing more istances.
Most of my FC buddies don't dislike playing alone, after all, so it's obvious they prefer this, over doing 5 more istances for week just to get to 450/450 with less money and much slower.
But to be honest, this kinda killed some of the bound we had inside the game.
I supposed this was some kind of "We want people to hang out with strangers more!" message from SE.
Then again, if that was the case, why is 2.1 about "*Free Company* Housing"?
Is this a patch to promote FC's bond, or to wreck my loved family-like kind of gamestyle?
I'm asking this both for hearing your opinion, than to know if any of you know the official reason SE gave for that.
Cause if they explained the reason somewhere, I really missed it.