#66 - Nov. 6, 2012, 9:33 p.m.
The ability to get in quickly and easily by being automatically matched with other players has a ton of great benefits, including just being able to get in and do dungeons without needing to spend time coordinating a group or spamming chat channels. Plus it has the whole Set It and Forget It benefit of being able to go do stuff while you're in queue. But the ease of entry has a downside in that tolerance goes down, and the fact of a random group is a lack of consistency from run to run. Random players being matched together injects a ton of inconsistency, but if it goes bad you can just jump back into queue and are probably not much worse for the wear.
Cataclysm dungeons tended to require things like CC, and in general a fairly in-sync and coordinated group to be consistently successful (at least until enough people outgeared them). The problem comes when matching random players together that there is no consistency. While you may go in with a group and all learn something, that a specific mob needs to be CC'd, or a certain boss behavior to avoid a wipe, those lessons are more than likely out the window with the next group you're matched with. While you may have some knowledge, maybe no one else does, and most people don't want to spend every run waiting for everyone else to learn all those same lessons. That can just be a frustrating experience. So instead of trying to force a group of strangers to be so heavily coordinated (maybe even having to jump into voice chat) just to complete the first steps of progression, we reduce the complexity to a point where the random groups that are being put together can most of the time be successful without needing to be hyper-organized or educated on each pull. Instead, that organization is far more important for the organized content where random people aren't matched together: normal and Heroic raids.
Of course there are players that want every piece of content to be very challenging, even going so far as wanting hard questing and daily quests, but the breadth of types of people playing World of Warcraft mean that we need to have a wide variety of content, and a wide variety of difficulty, to try to appeal to a variety of tastes. Obviously it's not an exact science, as you'll see from expansion to expansion, or even patch to patch, we may change difficulty to suit what we believe will achieve the best results for the people attempting that content.
