When the game first launched to an eager public the only “official” way to find other players to group with was to make use of the built-in “LookingForGroup” chat channel, otherwise known as the ‘LFG’ channel. If you had this channel switched on in your chat-window then you’d normally see a fairly constant stream of terse messages of the form “LFG – SM Cath – Lvl 30 Lock” or “LF2M – UBRS – Tank,DPS”.

These messages were simply an efficient short-hand language that described what the player was looking for. In the above examples the respective translations would be:

“Looking For (a) Group (to join), (that is going to the) Scarlet Monastery Cathedral, (I am a ) Level 30 Warlock”

…and…

“(We are) looking for 2 more (players to join a party going to) UBRS, (we need a) Tank (and a) DPS”

As you can see, it’s fairly simple to understand although there is no readily available help text to guide new players on what all the various abbreviations are. However, a new player could simply type their requests more fully until they learned the short-hand versions and the system still worked.

There was one single major drawback to the ‘LFG’ channel however and it was one that ultimately caused its demise, as far as the original form of its existence as described here was concerned. It was the only truly global chat channel available in the game. This was irresistable to those players that liked to settle themselves in a capital city somewhere and advertise their various wares and services, reaching as wide an audience as they could for the least amount of effort.

Thus, the ‘LFG’ channel became a secondary ‘trade’ channel and although it was generally considered to be “bad form” to post adverts for goods and services in the LFG channel, there was always a sufficient number of people playing the game to ensure that there were always one or two people online for whom posting an ‘LFG’ advert was perfectly acceptable behavior.

On top of that, there were also those players that found much amusement in spamming messages into the LFG channel revealing the latest Chuck Norris joke they’d just heard or abusing somebody they’d encountered in-game who’d earned their ire. The joys of a global spam-heavy LFG channel were legion and significant numbers of players disabled the channel in their chat windows as a result.

The debate on how to fix the problem with the LFG channel was argued endlessly on WoW’s official forums and probably every other major discussion site concerned with the game’s community. Nobody really found the basic function of the channel to be the fault, it was simply that the level of spam in the channel was drowning out the genuine LFG messages that did get posted.

And then one day an addon called “Group Finder by Moncai” was born. And lo did the world rejoice, for they saw that this addon was a good thing, and they sang and they danced and they smiled. What was this amazing addon? Let’s take a look…

“Group Finder by Moncai” was quite a simple addon at face value but it’s simple facade betrayed a fairly decent level of hidden sophistication behind the scenes. Offering a single window as shown in the screenshot below, it provided a list view of categories for which people were posting genuine messages in the LFG channel.

The vast majority of these ‘categories’ were simply the names of the game’s various instances from Deadmines through to UBRS, Scholomance, Stratholme and occasionally even the raid instances of the time; Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. Next to each category appeared a list of any players that had recently been seen posting ‘LFG’ or ‘LFM’ messages in the LFG channel. Clicking on any of the names showed a description of the message the player had posted in the lower frame of the window.

In essence, all this addon was doing was monitoring the LFG channel and parsing all the posts made in it. If a message was spam it was discarded and if it was a proper ‘LFG’ message then the addon attempted to understand what the player was looking for and then categorise the message appropriately.

Since the addon had built-in ‘knowledge’ about all the game’s existing instances, this meant that most messages were categorised as one might expect. Thus, as you can see in the screenshot, a list would form that would allow you to quickly see what instances/zones/quests were in need of more people and if anything took your fancy, you could delve deeper with a simple click of the mouse.

The joy of all this was that you could now switch off the LookingForGroup channel in your chat window thus cleansing the window of the large amount of now unneccesary text and whenever you were curious about what was going on you could sneak a peek at the addon’s window and if anything looked appealing, a quick whisper to the player or players involved and you would be off and running towards something fun.

And that in a nutshell was the main reason why the original LFG system was essentially better than the version of it that exists today and why this addon made it work nearly as well as it possibly could. The ubiquitous status of the LFG channel meant that is was always possible to ‘surf’ the channel, watching the calls for help going by and when inspiration struck, it was a moment’s effort to jump in.

The other reason that this addon worked as well as it did was that it simply extended the usefulness of the LFG channel. It did not matter to you when using the addon if you were the only person on the server with the addon – it was still the same basic LFG chat channel that you were interacting with. Only now, you had a clear view of what people were looking for and saw none of the spam that made having the channel switched on annoying.

A mere couple of months after this addon reached the height of its functionality, Blizzard finally changed the LFG system to what it currently is today. There have been a few revisions of the system since the overhaul but what you see today is roughly what you saw on the first day following the overhaul. Now, if you want to find help in the game, you open the new ‘LFG’ window (press “I” in-game typically) and then click buttons and tick boxes to indicate your preferences about what you are looking for.

All this sounds like a good idea and in theory it is a good idea. After all, if there was nothing wrong with the original system then addons would have not been able to offer improvements to the degree that they did. However, in implementing their solution, Blizzard chose to incorporate a number of restrictions that removed functionality from the LFG system, thereby making it harder to find help. In short order…

• The LFG chat channel is disabled by default for everyone.
• Access to the LFG channel is only possible by using the GUI tool.
• The LFG GUI tool is limited by “level appropriate” restrictions.

The consequence of these changes meant that it was no longer possible to simply “surf” the channel, watching casually what activities people were looking for assistance with whilst getting on with other pursuits in-game. Similarly, it was also no longer possible by default to choose to run a dungeon instance that was deemed lower than your level because the GUI tool only offered options “appropriate” to your level. As a level 60 player, this meant Dire Maul was fine but Deadmines was not. And that’s when LFG stopped working.

Today, you can seek help via the GUI tool and maybe if you’re playing during a fairly busy period on a well populated server then you might just get lucky and find enough people to do whatever it is that you want to do. Strangely though, once you have entered some options via the GUI tool, Blizzard then switches the LFG chat channel back on. The first question one might ask is “why?” because if the tool was doing the job it was meant to do, the channel would not be necessary.

Regardless, if your level-60 self wanted to run a lower-level instance or gain help with a particular quest in Tanaris, you would first have to open the GUI tool and select any option available simply to gain access to the LFG chat channel into which you could begin typing your requests once more. Except now, the number of people able to see your request had dropped exponentially – being now limited to only those people who were already looking for help with something else for which they’d already made a selection from level-appropriate options provided by the tool. And since your LFG chat request was not supported by the GUI tool, only those actively watching the LFG chat channel would be viewing. From a pre-tool audience of “almost everybody” your potential audience was now “almost nobody.”

And that, to cut a long story short, is the state of affairs that remains with respect to the current in-game LFG system today. It barely works and then, only for the most mainstream and common types of LFG needs. It’s clunky, unsophisticated and is very limited in the options it presents. It’s a bad piece of design and a bad piece of work.

It seems somewhat rare to say that about a feature of the game. Blizzard’s default user-interface for the game is relatively simplistic and many people, myself included, find it inadequate for playing the game at the level-cap end of the spectrum where raiding or ratings-based PVP are the order of the average day.

However, that’s exactly where Blizzard made a perfectly smart decision in leaving the game open to the development of addons. I can build the user-interface to my own preferences and needs via addons and that’s great. There’s a basic interface provided for free for the new player and the option to go “fully customised” via addons once we’ve learned how to play the game.

The LFG system though precludes an addon from being able to remedy the poor design of the default Blizzard GUI tool. Thus casual surfing of “LFG requests” is not really possible and the token effort one can make to gain access to the LFG chat channel by lying to the GUI tool simply compounds the issue further.

There does not appear to be any indication from Blizzard that they feel the LFG system they now have is not working adequately and although they have tweaked the GUI tool a couple of times, the basic limitations described above are still the cause of its lack of usability. Until Blizzard undoes these limitations, the LFG system they provide will continue to provide poor service to the player community seeking other players for whatever part of the game they want to play.

In recognition of this, today’s “Remember When…” is therefore dedicated to the memory of the brief period of time when LFG really worked. And for that happy memory, we send a grateful nod and a respectful salute to Moncai, the developer of the addon that Blizzard should have used as the inspiration for their GUI tool!

-B-