No groups to 55+ instances

[Tobbolina]

So I have had a blast from the past lvl'ing my toon up to 60.
So many players and most of them very friendly and getting groups to quests and dugeons have been no problem.

I was very happy when I finaly dinged 60. I started to try and find out what kind of gear I would need if I was to try raiding again. And the list shows me that I need to do the typical lvl 55-60 instances: UBRS/LBRS/STRAT and Scholo.

I am on Horde side pvp server and there is soooo many ppl online, but getting groups to mentioned instances seems near impossible.

I did not think that would be a problem when I started lvl'ing on Nostalrius seeing how many ppl are online.

Can anyone please explain to me why it is so damn hard or near impossible to find groups to menitoned instances???

[Wrathran]

It's pretty simple really. In a 40man raid you need 2 tanks and 38 non-tanks (5%) and in Dungeons you need 1 tank and 4 non-tanks (20%). So there are simply to few tanks around. Sure you can find some druids and paladins but the question is why they should they tank, what would they gain? It's A LOT of work and little reward unless you need gear and quests.

[Dr. Doom]

I think that the current amount of tanks is somewhere in between those two %. There are guys consistently being sidelined in pug raids, yet dungeons lacking tanks. It's probably something like 10-15% of the total players.

[metrolol]

Yup, what you are seeing is 2 major issues here creating this concern.

1. is WoW's fault. As you can see by just looking at TBC, dungeons need to have incentives. A lot of people here say things like "this is when dungeons were fun and challenging" but painfully few people do them because of that. They do them because they need gear... or they THINK they need gear. That is another issue - people are far too aware of what they need here, unlike real Classic. People target certain bosses and just farm those, never completing the others, or even RESERVE items in a five man (which is absurd, but a topic for another day.)
In TBC, the daily Heroic and Badges of Justice completely irradicate this issue, and even people in t6 have a reason to do Steamvaults Heroic. For some classes, there is literally zero peices of pre-raid BIS gear from certain dungeons, and as such it will be much more difficult to find a group for something you want here.

2. Is Nostalrius's Fault. 1x Classic is awesome for a lot of reasons, but the major difference between 10k people online at 1x and 1k people online at 12x is that in the high rate server all 1k of those people are max level and looking for max level things. Now I know a LOT of people want to experience leveling, and I can't support anything I'm saying with math, but I am quite sure a vast majority of the population is sub 60 here. Another chunk is way beyond geared for dungeons, and that loops back to the first issue.
So the population here looking for dungeons is probably not exceeding 1k at any one point in time, which really puts things in perspective for me.

Really what you are seeing is just how poorly made Classic is on some fronts. Its brilliant on some, but Blizzard learned a LOT in the years between Classic and Wrath.
One thing they learned, is that spamming chat is not an effective and engaging way to form a group!.
Bringing us to...

#3. A minor issue, but one that really needs to be addressed by the community. Finding a group is utterly painful on this server for a few reasons. One is that there is just SOOO much clutter in world/trade chats. Two is that most of the clutter is for low level stuff. The final issue is just that there are way too many people on the server in general to all fit in a chat channel like this.
The only reasonable solution is one WoW figured out, but one that took them 10+ years to do. An interface for properly forming groups. Now I'm NOT advocating LFG, as I do not feel that is the right addition to the game for any reason, but what I would like to see is an interface (likely an addon) that helps you form groups.
Luckily there is one that attempts this known as VQueue, but in my experience it fails quite heavily. I'm not sure if it just doesn't get the promotion it deserves here, but it should be a mandatory addon for everyone to use on a server with this much congestion. I love how large the population is but with these issues in mind, its just chaos. Everyone fights over the few tanks there are, and there is so much power in guilds and coordination that pugging is a nightmare.

The only solution in my eyes is either to go non-blizzlike for leveling (which wont happen, I know) or perhaps for rewards. Make dungeons drop more gold? Or some type of currency that can reward people for doing dungeons, especially bosses they would NEVER consider otherwise.
Or we can just push harder for a VQueue type addon to become dominant and NOT rely on chat to populate lists.

I don't think there is a solution to be had here though, sadly. Doing dungeons is one of my favorite things to do in any expansion, and its sad to say I can do more, more regularly on a TBC server with less than 1/10th of the population here.

[Norjak]

Get vQueue, it will help you search for groups without keeping your eyes glued to the scrolling chat window 24x7.
The 55-60 instances have fewer people running them now, but groups still exist, especially at certain times of day.