I’ll preface this with saying I’m 100% on board with the core concept.
I prefer the most important decision about group forming.
Accepting an invite or inviting someone to your group remains in Player hands and not handled by code.
This is not a covert “we want LFD” post, I explicitly do not want that.
That out of the way the implementation of the group finder for me leaves much to be desired.
Create Listing.
Verdict: Mostly ok.
Improvement:
- I would like to be able to list in multiple categories.
Not having to delist from fx Dungeons to list to Raids or BGs.
You can be interested in participating in more than one category of content at the same time.
Group Browser.
Verdict: Bad.
Improvements:
- Doublewide UIPanel (can be optional with a button to expand)
- Prepend recommended (summoning stone) level range to dropdown entries for instances
- A flat listing of individual players and groups is really bad for finding what you’re looking for. Having to mouseover each entry when the player/group is looking for multiple instances is cumbersome. Possible mitigation: Add a text search box that looks through the listing metadata for quick filtering.
- Make it so it looks more like QuestLog (see also doublewide).
Left pane: Headers by Activity (Dungeon X, or Raid Y or BG Z) with number of interested players/parties in parentheses. At the very least for the top level categories (Dungeons/Raids/…)
Expand the tree view to see individual entries or click a header to populate the Right Pane: (if expanded to doublewide)
TL;DR: Keep the tool a bulletin-board style helper for LFG/LFM but improve presentation it so it’s at least as useful as player made tools, not less so.