i have a confession to make: i am fascinated by the WoW Dungeon Finder. it is basically a crossover between a “Looking for Group” tool and the cross-realm PvP battlegrounds. that means from any place in WoW you can queue up for five man (PvE) instances and within a short period of time a group will be assembled (from your cross-server battlegroup) and ported to the instance. no more lfg spamming, no more waiting around to get a group going and no more frustration if someone has to leave in the middle of the instance!? oh wait, i’m not so sure on the last point.
so the basic promise of the Dungeon Finder is to provide easy and fast access to five man group content. each instance party needs one tank, one healer and three dps and if you queue up you get to select the role(s) you want to take over. for dps classes the average wait time until a group is found is around 20 minutes, whereas tanks (and possibly healers) get a group significantly faster (apparently the wait time for tanks at lvl 80 is 3 seconds!). if some member of your instance party drops out, you can tell the Dungeon Finder to look for a replacement. which works well if your healer or a dps bails, but if your tank legs it, you are most likely screwed.
i love the underlying functionality of the Dungeon Finder to be able to access five man instances from everywhere in the game world. porting you directly to the instance and using the cross-realm battlegroups as “pools” for player recruitment it does enable indeed easy and fast access to small group content. however, the social side of doing instances gets a bit lost. you don’t know which people you end up doing an instance with which can be both a blessing (if they suck) or a curse (if they are awesome). either way, if those players aren’t from your server the chances that you will ever meet them again are slim. so what i would love to see included in the Dungeon Finder is being able to add people from your cross-realm battlegroup to your friendlist so you can invite them to a party and queue up with them for instances if you enjoyed playing with them.