There are 2 major flaws with Dungeon Finder that I bring to the WoW team today. Each of them on their own are frustrating enough, but mixed together, they create a situation that’s critically harmful for the experience.
Problem 1
Dungeon Finder’s pickiness around group member levels seems nonsensical to me. There are several “hot spots” in the leveling process where it’s especially bad, but basically: The system won’t allow you to queue for random dungeons together when a player is either too low-level, or too high-level.
There are some level ranges where even a 2-level difference cuts you off from queueing with a friend, which is extremely excessive, and just downright impossible with a full group. I had an alt-leveling partner who ended up quitting the game because we were forced either to level in precise lockstep, or to have to wait for the other to catch up any time there was a level disparity.
It’s extremely frustrating when dungeon finder forms a group, and after killing the last boss, everyone wants to run another one, but you can’t queue because someone leveled once during the first run. The way the system is tuned is getting in the way of people playing together.
Problem 2
In several level ranges, you’ll be placed in dungeons where you out-level the mobs so severely that you collect very little, or even no experience from killing them. Not only does it feel terrible for dungeon finder to place you in dungeons that are essentially useless to you, but you’re often “stuck” doing these dungeons for long periods in the leveling process. Just off the top of my head, in the ~29, ~66, and ~76 level ranges, you’ll be getting dungeons that are mostly useless to you in 8/10 runs, getting Stormwind Stockade, Hellfire Peninsula dungeons, and Nexus/UK respectively. There are a couple other level ranges I’m forgetting.
And as if that wasn’t already bad enough on an individual level, this also triggers the anti-boosting mechanic (which doesn’t stop boosting by the way), so you end up killing experience gains for your group as well. I can’t even imagine why that system would be enabled for a group formed in dungeon finder, so I’m guessing it’s just an oversight.
This would be a bit more understandable if someone was sitting in queue for a long time and the system was simply “widening the search” by tolerating lower level dungeons to give that player a group sooner. But as it turns out, it’s often half or more of the entire group who are overleveled for the content.
In the last handful of dungeons I’ve run on my now level 76 alt, 4 group members were at least 3 levels higher than our lowest group member, and the dungeons we ran weren’t even the highest that low-level member could be running. So we’re blowing through these dungeons insanely fast, collecting very little experience from it, probably killing the experience gains (and fun) for the low-level member, and most people immediately leave the group hoping to have better luck in the next run. Often times the reward for doing a random dungeon is the main source of experience gain for these runs, and even that is paltry compared to what we’d get for running appropriately leveled content at a normal speed.
So we can’t level in dungeons with our own friends without the game constantly imposing stringent artificial barriers, we can’t count on Dungeon Finder to provide consistently relevant content unless we’re at level cap (…where Dungeon Finder’s value proposition is arguably at its absolute weakest), and we can’t just not use dungeon finder because it’s the path of least resistance and no one wants to manually travel to the dungeons. (…as I’ve predicted here many times)
The way I see it, Dungeon Finder should be adjusted to:
- Give more leeway to level restrictions on groups queueing together; Like changing the rule to compare the level deficit of the highest/lowest members against the mean level of the group rather than adhering to strict level ranges for the dungeons for every. single. person.
or
- Give far more weight (or even just make it a hard rule in the algorithm) to prefer higher-level dungeons when determining which dungeon to place a group or individual in.
I know you guys are overworked and probably have far more pressing issues on your plate, but please give this a look, at least before MoP launches. I find that there isn’t too much to do out side of my weekly raid in Cata anymore but to level alts, and that experience could be so much better if these issues were fixed.
