I haven’t tried the new tool yet since I’m multi-boxing but I can surely see the benefit. Gamers are maturing in age/responsibilities and new gamers have arrived. Their patience for searching for groups during their precious game time has become more limited than in previous generations of MMOs. We should also consider the age of a game that continues to draw new customers. The gap between the veterans and new players grows each year. New players and older players with alts need an easy way of grouping to see the instanced content, ESPECIALLY for the older content. Veterans and even guild-mates get tired of being humped with requests to run old instances they’ve seen more than their share of when they were that level or on their 1st or 2nd alt. Blizzard can’t revamp all the old content for higher level characters and new players still want to see the low content. And even players who roll alts might not want to only solo quest to level. I think it’s a win-win.

EQ2 should do this. Sorry for people who don’t like the method. There’d be a much higher probability of me resubscribing if I could more easily see/do some of the dungeons versus their quests which I just can’t stand. As it is now, it’s much to hard to find groups at the lower levels even in a big guild. Big guilds aren’t the answer for everything. They get tired of the old content. Bottom line for a lot of players happens to be how easy is it for me to log in and have some fun, while getting something accomplished. The days of floundering, wandering, begging, camping, etc. being perceived as a badge of honor in a game, have largely disappeared. My age, priorities, responsibilities and time constraints changed that not WOW.

I miss playing with you Tipa!

I do miss the old days, when the world was full of people. You had group quests in areas of elites and you had to group up with strangers at the quest hub nearby and go tackle it. Lots of fun.

But Blizzard can’t bring those days back. The people aren’t there, and they won’t be, because we all did it about 10 times already. That’s why they got rid of the elites, so we could solo those areas. Blizzard would have to bring tons of new people in, and somehow get them all on the same few servers.

Or an idea that has been thrown around is “leveling” servers where everyone levels on then transfers off of, but that would introduce a host of unintended consequences to the economy (for instance hard to level crafting unless your AH is full of mats low level players farmed)

I wouldn’t say that WoW had a particularly high proportion of good quests, though, sadly. Questing in Fallen Earth, or Allods, is a lot more amusing and entertaining, to name just two superior examples.

I have still only done the one WoW dungeon. I found it utterly exhausting. I literally had to go and lie down for 15 minutes at the end. I can’t imagine doing more than one of those in a session. I wouldn’t say it was fun, either. It was interesting, but not really enjoyable. Maybe if I did more I would get used to it.

I also loved LDoN. One of my favorite ever expansions. A big part of the fun, though, was meeting people and putting groups together from an extended list of people you’d got to know doing LDoNs. I don’t know that it would have been somuch fun with randomly-assigned groups.

As for Add-Ons, if they increase your enjoyment, of course you should use them. They decrease mine, so I don’t.

Imagine that, though; jumping in and playing with other people being the point of an MMO, not a death march through a leveling grind to get to the “real game” at the level cap where you run instanced dungeons over and over and over. What a novel concept.

If someone has gone to all the trouble to hand write you a letter and walk around to your house to drop it through your letterbox then I think such criticism is entirely justified.

On the other hand if they’ve used easy mode methods of communication like computers you should feel free to disregard it.

If anyone from SoE is reading this: PLEASE steal this feature. Blizzard is trying to steal your cool guild leveling system for Cataclysm, so take this idea from them now please. I constantly waffle between being subscribed to EQ2 and not being subscribed. I love the game, but soloing through the low levels just gets boring after a while.

@Longsac – The thing is, the instances are just pockets of content within an otherwise persistent and shared world. In Guild Wars, 90% of the world, and 100% of the world you are interested in exploring, is instanced.

This tool just lets people ignore the gristle and cut right to the meat of what they want to play. I DO wonder what happens to the persistent world around us when nobody leaves the towns though. I played the WoW of long ago and, yes, I adored the world and the lore. However, I also remember struggling to find/build groups to run the content I wanted to see. When you have kinds, a full time job, and maybe are going to school full time to boot, you simply don’t have an extra hour or two to spare to find people willing to run through instance X. WoW has done nothing if not cater to the people who want to cut the chaff and get right to the action.

Yet I still claim that the WORLD is what made World of Warcraft popular, not the raiding that not so long ago was only done by a minority of the population – who raided Molten Core, Old Naxx etc.?

Now it turned from “World of Warcraft” into “Lobby of Instancecraft”.

I find it just fascinating that Guild Wars 2 tries to become more a persistent, less instanced world than GW1, yet WoW, LOTRO and the by now really popular DDO are so heavily leaning towards instanced content nowadays!