The Glade 4.0

Ugh, lag has been absolutely terrible since the Halloween event started. We're hearkening back to the good old days with 30s+ loot/vendor lag, frequent dc's, and all the other fun stuff.

If the event is going to do this crap, please turn it off. Thanks.

The World of Warcraft Team has enabled the Looking For Group (LFG) Tool on the PTR 3.3 build 10623. Many fans will feel shocked to the huge and drastic changes made to the UI and its function. In live realms, you choose whether you join LFG as a tank, dps or healer. Then you choose from a drop down menu if you will join a normal, heroic or raid group. Then you select which dungeon to queue in -- sometimes you have a very limited amount of dungeons depending the level you are. On the Looking for More tab, you usually are able to see other players queued and you can invite individual players from that list.

Well, keep your jaw tight. Say bye to the LFM tab. You no longer see other people in the queue, nor can whisper or invite them.

NEW LFG TOOL

The changes are drastic, some of those functions such as LFM tab will be very missed, but apart from the setbacks, the benefits of this new system might be a payoff.

Were you annoyed by having to go through the drop down system, and to not have access to Burning Crusade and Classic WoW dungeons because you are level 80?

Now you will be glad to hear that the dropdown menus have been replaced by a hierarchy tree that you can collapse or open. Each hierarchy tree shows:

* all the normal dungeons under Wrath of the Lich King
* all the heroic dungeons under Wrath of the Lich King
* all the normal dungeons under Burning Crusade
* all the heroic dungeons under Burning Crusade
* all the normal dungeons under WoW Classic



Basically you can queue on all those dungeons at once. You will be matched with other players who also check marked any of those dungeons. So far all are enabled by default. We really hope they are disabled by default so that you only queue where you wish to queue in.

When the LFG Tool has found five candidates to create a 5-players group, all five players will get a popup message giving you the option to join or to cancel. When you click accept, you will see onscreen a window with five icons (representing tank, dps, healers) and view a ready check on each icon. Once all have successfully agreed to be ready ... drumroll ... you are automatically teleported into the dungeon itself. Goodbye, Meeting Stones !!! No more clicking individual players to summon.

Basically this system shortens the amount of time to search for a group, the amount of time to wait until two people reach the meeting stone -- yea, have you been in that situation where everyone is in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdom, and only one is in Northrend? How many times have you had to waste 10 minutes for just one person to reach the meeting stone to help you summon players? No worries. The system searches players for you, and it teleports you straight inside the dungeon.

What about when you are in a group, and zone in, then realize the leader forgot to set the dungeon to heroic? Everyone goes ... /facepalm. Zone out, wait for the leader to change difficulty to heroic, then zone in. How often does that happen? Could that be one of the reasons there are many instance full messages? Well, this new LFG tool helps to avoid this type of mistakes, and makes sure there aren't instance limit exceeded issues.

Another issue about LFG is that not everyone always uses it, or there aren't enough people for your Occulus Achievements. Blizzard is addressing this problem by giving raiders the opportunity to earn gold and tokens for using the LFG Tool, in addition to the solo daily quests and raid daily quests. Many have used this popular raid daily quests as a means to acquire Emblems of Heroism, Emblems of Triumph and other tokens. By voluntarily joining a random Wrath of the Lich King LFG, you can get 49 gold and two emblems of Triumph. For a random Wrath of the Lich King heroic LFG, you will acquire 68 gold and two Emblems of Frost. Rewards for joining random Burning Crusade or Classic WoW dungeons haven't been enabled or specified.

Do you have questions or concerns about the new LFG Tool? Feel free to post your comments below or at our following forum thread. We are gathering questions for the developers through the US Community Manager: Nethaera.

I am among the fans who feels upset about not been able to see people on queue under the LFM tab, but I have to agree this was a very nice and well-thought out design that deserves to be tested thoroughly before complaining about it. It's worth it.

By voluntarily joining a random Wrath of the Lich King LFG, you can get 49 gold and two emblems of Triumph. For a random Wrath of the Lich King heroic LFG, you will acquire 68 gold and two Emblems of Frost.

The no meeting stone thing sounds pretty nice, I suppose, though this:



WTF?

And I'll never pug oculus. Ever. When it's the daily, if I don't get a guild group, I don't do it.

ou spend all this time and energy learning to play your class, and now all of a sudden it doesn't mean squat.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

Thoughts? Input?

A friend who is now mostly retired from the game sent me these screenshots of his UI.

They are based on the CaithUI bundle from wowinterface.com. He also has some additional add-on's loaded as well.

http://www.hansenonline.org/images/wow/UI-Raid.jpg
http://www.hansenonline.org/images/wow/UI-annotated.jpg
http://www.hansenonline.org/images/wow/UI-nocombat.jpg

Hes done a lot of 'state' customization to keep the interface clean and only expose certain buttons/bars during certain situations.

The UI-annotated.jpg has the specific add-ons he uses tagged in the image.

That's a very nice ui. I love the way pitbull is set up. Do you happen to know if that is pitbull 3, or 4?

Q: May I create a group with 4 friends and then use the LFG interface to gain the random dungeon reward?
A: Yes. In fact, you can join it with a full group of 5 and still get the random dungeon reward. The reward is for doing a random dungeon, not necessarily for having random members.

To stop the QQ about LFG rewards...