Originally Posted by
Thunderaan
Okay, let's be realistic for second here.
A game with such a huge map must have some kind of way to "fast travel", whether it's portals, goblin zeppelins, "queing up", flight masters or like in other games where you simply click on the map or pay a sum of money to an NPC to get a carriage and instantly end up at your location.
It's fun to explore the world the first time, but slowly it becomes boring and tedious, especially for older players. That's why as we level we learn faster, more efficient mounts, as we explore we find new flightpaths etc. UNLIKE some other games where you just click on the map, I think there's a balance here between fast travel and exploration.
The new LFG tool is excellent because it actually makes leveling in instances a viable alternative to questing. Would you rather be teleported to the instance within minutes and have your "immersion" ruined a little or not be able to do it AT ALL? Before the LFG change it was almost impossible to get a decent group for dungeons within a reasonable amount of time, okay maybe people ran a few of the dungeons, but nobody was ever in Dire Maul, Gnomeregan or Shattered Halls, most (active) players these days have already leveled to level cap, the low levels are generally alts and they prefer a speedy solo leveling, rather than spending 45 minutes looking for a group, then disbanding because nobody wants to go to summon or becaues of one wipe or ninja drama.
I'm not a casual player at all, but the LFG change was overall great. Now I can actually do the routine stuff like daily heroics faster.
The only alternatives (I can see) to this would be to make dungeons give 5 times more experience than they do now and remove all or 99% of experience from "boosting" by much higher levels, so people their own level would find it worth grouping up. Or, redesign the game so low level content actually MATTERS, cause right now everyone just wants to rush to 80. (But really that's not realistic for an old MMORPG, so hopefully they learn their lesson for the next.)
And even then there would be some problems, you'd still be qqing about how the game is too "casual" and low pop servers would still have trouble finding groups.