Yo,
My intention with this post is to try and get people to join the lookingforgroup channel when looking for a group, as opposed to standing in a city and joining trade.
The benefit of this to the player is that the lookingforgroup channel is a truly global channel; it’s everywhere, including instances (yep, you can begin to look for your next group whilst coming to the end with your current one). Whereas trade is not. It’s cities only. You also cannot join city trade remotely like you can lfg so you must be standing in a city to view the trade channel that people are using for group purposes. Try it: stand somewhere other than a city and type /join trade - city. You will notice that you join the trade channel of the zone you’re currently in.
The reason to do this (and maybe even temporarily ostracise those who don’t), is so we’re not compelled, particularly at max level, to park our arses in a city, unable to do anything with our character, whilst we’re looking for a group to an instance.
As far a i can tell, trade is spammed with lfg because of the habit developed on retail of doing it. It wasn’t always like this. Trade became the lfg channel on the exact same day that Blizzard removed the ability for people to join other channels remotely, such as /join lookingforgroup - ironforge/orgrimmar. It was never the goto lfg channel before this, lookingforgroup was (which makes sense, because it was designed for that exact purpose).
I remember well the day it happened because we could no longer go about the game world doing whatever we wanted whilst also looking for a group to an instance, rather we had to stand in a city if we wanted to reach a large amount of players. It was a sad day because it closed down your play experience from all and everything all the time to either/or; you could look for a group to an instance or develop your character another way, but you really couldn’t do both at the same time (excluding friends list and guild).
There’s a problem with this though and that is the need to break people’s habit of doing it. Convincing people of the benefit of doing it is also problematic because due to everyone cottoning on to the fact that it’s done it results in a large audience in /trade. But i’m certain sure that this is precisely because they want a large audience and not because they’re happy standing in a city doing nothing whilst they wait for their group to fill up. Ergo, if everyone who's looking for a group joined the lfg channel it would result in the largest targeted audience for lfg/lfm. People who aren't interest can just /leave x, where x is the number of the channel.
Ask yourself, do you prefer standing in a city, most likely just tolerating boredom by, say, re-searching the ah for umpteenth time whilst you look for a group? Or would you prefer the potential and ability to be out doing something with your character that you want done whilst also sitting in and looking for that same group? I feel confident that the majority does not prefer the former.
/join lookingforgroup
gl hf