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Looking For Group or LFG chat channel is often used by a player character when not in a group who wants to join a group, usually to pursue a quest. At time of writing, this is deactivated by default. To join this channel, you have to actively be LFG/LFM.
Patch 3.1[]
Major changes in Patch 3.1.0 include:
- Specifying a role (tank, damage, or healer)
- Specifying leadership
- Showing individuals versus groups in the Looking For More pane
Patch 3.0[]
In Patch 3.0, functionality remained the same. You must be actively looking for a group before you can join the channel. When you join a queue using the Blizzard LFG tool, you automatically join the lookingforgroup channel. /leave and /join lookingforgroup will manually remove or join this channel - again, you must be in the queue for an instance. This is not the same as /join LFG. There is no default channel named LFG; if you type /join LFG, you will be joining/creating a custom channel called "LFG".
Interface Tool[]
In Patch 2.0.1 "Before the Storm", a new button was added to the micro menu in the interface bar to bring up a new Looking for Group/Looking for More panel to search for groups and people to fill-out groups based on a variety of criteria. This new tool largely replaced and obsoleted the Looking For Group chat channel.
- See also
- New Interface Preview, Looking for Group at the official Burning Crusade site
- New Interface Preview, Looking for Group at the official EU (en) Burning Crusade site
- How to use the LFG/LFM interface
History prior to Patch 2.0[]
Early on, each zone had its own LFG channel. Those in Westfall could post on the LFG channel there to go to the Deadmines, or to do any given quest there. This was effective for the lower-level zones where there isn't a whole lot of travel involved in many of the quests. On the other hand, since there are many instances throughout the world that are around the same level range, even low levels (Blackfathom Deeps and Shadowfang Keep are about the same level range but are on different continents; Scarlet Monastery and Razorfen Downs likewise) would benefit from a better LFG channel system.
It was especially ineffective at higher levels where someone might be in flight from one zone to another to quickly perform one step of a quest and they will be back in almost no time at all, but they will miss out on an opportunity to get help on another quest that someone else had wanted help on as well. For example, the flight point at Searing Gorge, Thorium Point is a tad closer to Blackrock Mountain than is Morgan's Vigil in Burning Steppes. For this reason one might want to fly to Thorium Point to travel to Blackrock Mountain. In the process, they may want to be looking for a group. But since Searing Gorge is a land for 40-50, roughly, they would not get as many people who would be eligible to go there as if they went to Morgan's Vigil. This remained the situation for a long time.
For patch 1.9, it was decided that both Trade and LFG chat channels would be linked between each of the cities, so that at least you could be in any of the cities and get the same Trade and LFG chatter. In this situation the two channels were abused some, but most people would shy away after being reminded that they should not be chatting other than about finding a group or trading.
The LFG channel went global in patch 1.11. The first Tuesday night it appeared, there was a flood of chatter which rendered it completely ineffective. This subsided very quickly in the following week or so, but it recurs on at least some servers, where people chat about unrelated things.
Soon after this, GMs started to remove authority to speak from those who abused the channel. If this happened, it would last for some time, after which you would regain ability to use the channel again. Still, there were times when the GMs would not kick those who consistently chatted or spammed some guild-recruitment message, even though there is a guild-recruitment channel.
With patch 1.11.2, Blizzard has made the decision to, by default, deactivate the LFG channel. Players can join it by typing /join LFG
, according to the patch log.
Post-2.0 History[]
With patch 2.0.1, Blizzard had implemented a new LFG/LFM user interface in preparation for The Burning Crusade (see Interface Tool section above), the LookingForGroup channel was disabled to encourage users using the LFG tool more, which caused great discussion about the subject, until Blizzard finally re-added the channel as part of the Looking For Group-interface in 2.1.0
It is thus not possible to join the channel anymore unless you're actively LFG/LFM.