WoW is a game that takes time to play. The time/effort investment is one of the hallmarks of an RPG. Besides, joining groups manually doesn’t take significantly longer than queueing for them unless you’re an on realm with horrific population health (and statistically speaking, very few people are).
If anything, Dungeon Finder will actually make it take way longer for people who are already forming their own groups. Most people are lazy or too nervous to start a group, so they just wait for one to come along. For those of us who actually do form the groups, putting a dungeon run together is a pretty quick process even when it’s not on a “mega server”. If Dungeon Finder becomes the norm, the vast majority of people will use that to run dungeons, so we’ll generally be forced to do so as well.
Then the people who form the groups will have to wait equally long as the people who just want to wait until they can be invited to a group. It takes the time reward away from the people who take action and distributes it among everyone, including the people who don’t. It actively encourages people to be more idle rather than to engage with each other.
And I’m just talking about taking initiative here. I’m not even talking about the social and cooperation aspects of dungeon runs, which are also very important to the experience for many of us.
It depends on what you mean, specifically. On average, it’s definitely faster because the system forms the group without sending whispers to people and waiting for a reply, which cuts time. It also teleports you to the dungeon, which obviously cuts travel time. But that’s just about it.
If we’re talking about the individual experience that people have, results will vary. As I pointed out above, Dungeon Finder creates a situation that is unequivocally worse for the people who form their own groups now, and a better situation for the people who sit and wait. It’s not shortening the time magically, it’s taking the time spent on one side and balancing it with the time spent on the other.
I would never disagree that this is a quality of life improvement for people who don’t want to form groups, but it sucks that it comes at the cost of a quality of life detriment for the people who ‘do the work’ when it comes to forming groups as things are now. Artifically equalizing outcomes is bad game design because the system doesn’t naturally reward people who do more.
Oh definitely, I know that a lack of Dungeon Finder is an issue for many people. I totally get that it can make it easier to do dungeons quicker when someone’s on a tight schedule, it allows people on dead realms to find groups for dungeons, and it’s also good for people who would rather multitask during queue downtime than for their game “uptime” to be spent looking for people. I get that 100%.
I just disagree about altering the game’s core design philosophy to mitigate these things.
I would disagree with you if you mean to say that server population and Dungeon Finder’s absence are related. I see no reason why it would be.
Classic’s population hasn’t significantly decreased since the start of Classic (depending on what you think is significant) but if anything, I’d think that population decrease is probably happening simply because WoW Classic isn’t Retail. There’s less busy work. There’s less content. People will stop at absolutely nothing to blow through the content as fast as they possibly can (see: boosting) and then they complain on the forums that there’s nothing to do (see: raid logging). It’s got everything to do with the fact that this is a different playerbase than it was in 2008.
That being said, I see no evidence that WoW Classic is actually hurting. There are population and faction distribution problems that Blizzard has shamefully done nothing about, but overall, this game is doing just fine. The TBC Classic population is quite similar to where it was in Classic Vanilla. (See: ironforge.pro/population/all )