Except this doesn’t work as an argument. According to article “It Was More Than Just the Game, It Was the Community”: Social Affordances in Online Games (2016) they mention someone who made an experiment called “The Empty Friend List Experiment”. What year this was is not mentioned, but it’s a player who tells of her story of how she tried to create a group without using the Dungeon Finder, and she managed to form 0 groups.
The following excerpt is from that article:
To test whether players could continue to be friendly after adapting to a new system, one player performed a social experiment to subvert Group Finder. In a thread called “The Empty Friend List Experiment,” the player explained that she would only perform group activities if the group was formed “the old fashioned way” through chat channels. She described the results:
“I formed exactly zero [dungeon] groups using the old school method…Some responses I received were rather polite, such as ‘if youre looking to run a dungeon you can just use the [Looking for Dungeon] thing…its what everyone does now,’ and others not so much (‘press the i key noob’ was my absolute favorite)…When I explained my reasons for not using the [Looking for Dungeon] method [players] tended to either wish me luck or flat out tell me it was hopeless to form a group in such an outdated fashion.”
This player actively tried to resist Group Finder to recreate the social experience that she believed happened through “old school” group finding. While it was not impossible to return to more “outdated” methods, the community had willingly or unwillingly adopted Group Finder as the norm. Many players argued that even if they wanted to, it was impossible to find a group without using Group Finder. The post elicited many sympathetic responses: “This post makes me sad, because I remember how it used to be too.” The friendly sociality of group activities— making new friends and socializing with other players from one’s realm—had declined considerably.
(Crenshaw & Nardi 2016)
Now on behalf of the pro-RFD crowd I’ll admit that this is just one story from one person reported in one article from 2016 about an experiment that (as far as I’ve searched) is no longer accessible. But serious researchers do not make things up so we can at least assume that the thread and experiment did exist. It is not damning proof that you can’t form groups with strangers manually in retail, but it’s certainly better than pulling numbers out of the air (like so many others wont to do).