What is this feature? The Dungeon Finder allows you to find a party for a dungeon and teleport to its entrance at the touch of a button. That’s probably the only way you know it today.

Before the Dungeon Finder, there was its predecessor, the LFG tool. Here you had to search for groups in a kind of bulletin board or alternatively via addons or chat and then travel to the entrance of the instance yourself. This often took as long or longer than the dungeon itself.

The Dungeon Finder appeared with the latest WotLK patch, which also releases the Classic version. We’ve known for a while that WotLK Classic will come without the Dungeon Finder, and that should make Classic players happy. But now they are complaining.

WotLK Classic will be released on September 27th as a new expansion. You can see the trailer here:

The Dungeon Finder is actually hated and yet now people are bitching

This is the criticism of the Dungeon Finder: Actually, the idea behind the tool is to make MMORPGs like WoW more convenient. And indeed, WoW became so more convenient, but also more antisocial, as players have been criticizing for many years.

Especially veterans from vanilla WoW and Burning Crusade appreciated about the groups back then that you got together to actually tear something up – even if the run takes several hours. As long as you could finish the dungeon.

Getting the group together and getting there already provided small talk and social bonding or cohesion in the guild when you could quickly ask for help. The social bonding issue is precisely the reason Blizzard cites against implementing the dungeon finder (via WoW Forums).

Since many of these factors are eliminated by the Dungeon Finder, veterans feel the game is more impersonal. On top of that, early versions of the tool in particular gave players massive penalties if they disappeared early. Especially rarer roles like tanks have taken advantage of this from time to time to hold entire groups hostage, as users explain on reddit.

Why are the fans grumbling now? Blizzard confirmed once again in a forum post that the Dungeon Finder will not appear in WotLK Classic, not at release and probably not later. This was met with much criticism.

Defenders of the Dungeon Finder appreciate the convenience and see no loss of social interaction. Especially compared to the Classic version of the LFG tool, the Dungeon Finder is a much more pleasant experience. On reddit, user Ranec writes:

Look, if we can’t get the Dungeon Finder, at least make the LFG tool like it is in Retail. The current one is SO bad. I’m really amazed they just made a new one. [Tool] but worse than what they already have.

The decision is also met with criticism in the forum, especially with regard to the LFG tool. Here people also want the Dungeon Finder as a new feature or at least a better version of the group search than the one that currently exists.

By the way, MeinMMO editor Alexander Leitsch is a big advocate of dungeon finders in all MMORPGs:

More changes to WotLK Classic

With the release on September 27, WotLK Classic will be different in some respects than you remember. In the latest post, Blizzard once again explains some of the changes:

• Raids share an ID in normal and heroic modes, but not in 10- and 25-player variants.
• Faction and race changes will be possible later in the expansion.
• Titles and achievements will also be playable in the 2v2 arena.
• Mounts and achievements are tied to the character, not the account.

There was also an earlier decision to remove the “Quest Helper” from WotLK Classic. The feature marked quests directly on the map, for example. However, this decision was reversed and the feature remains in the game.

Since Blizzard has already rowed back here, fans are now also hoping that perhaps a dungeon finder will come into the game after all. Whether that will happen, however, remains to be seen – at the moment it doesn’t look like it will.

Those who were also looking forward to the Battle of Thousand Winters will probably be a bit disappointed:

WoW WotLK Classic changes legendary PvP battle: “We are disappointed in ourselves”.