Blizzard killed World Quest Group Finder and other easy ways to group… but why?

This week, Blizzard has made some changes to the way the Premade Group Finder in World of Warcraft works. Addons are unable to automatically search for groups, automatically accept players, or copy and paste into the search bar, which addons used to make groups. This is a huge change to solo players who relied on addons like World Quest Group Finder to party up with other people. And without the ability for addons or players to automatically accept people into groups, raid leaders will have to get used to inviting up to 40 players individually for Invasions and World Bosses. Addons like that took a lot of the hassle out of tackling some of the tougher world quests, like the Elite Wardens and Argus kill target quests. Since these pit you against a buffed up monster some classes and specs have trouble soloing them — especially if you only recently got to max level and don’t have a lot of power yet.

There is still hope for people who create a lot of groups: the addon Premade Auto Accept brings back the auto accept button — and it still works, at the time of writing. Unfortunately this doesn’t do anything for sorting through the world quests. You’re still likely to find a lot of spam in the Group Finder — even after the change to advertising, there’s still a lot of muck to work through to find good groups. It’s possible that Blizzard will make more changes behind the scenes to break this addon, so be prepared for that.

This seems like an intentional change on Blizzard’s part. There have been some small server stability issues the last couple of days, and we’ve seen changes made to the Group Finder in the past to help combat server problems. Hopefully this fixes the randomly changing server shards issue that I’ve been experiencing. It’s pretty annoying to be fighting something, only to suddenly be on another server in the middle of angry monsters. The auto accept and auto find groups features are really hard on the servers, and with Battle for Azeroth right around the corner it’s possible that this is a preemptive change to make sure that there’s no additional server load.

Server stability is a must, but it would be nice if we could have that and the tools to easily make groups. Maybe Blizzard will backtrack on this decision, but until then you’re on your own for starting groups.