Once upon a time, a night elf rogue by the name of Sevielle squatted in Ironforge. Although she would have much rather been out questing for great justice and farmable loot, this was not an option, for Sevielle wished to do an instance, and to do an instance, she needed Ironforge general chat. 
“LF3M to UBRS,” cried one persistent tank, and she recognised the name as the same fellow who had been seeking members over an hour ago. “Just need healers!” he continued, quickly explaining everything. “PST!”
Sevielle rather doubted anyone would send him that tell for at least another forty minutes. Buttering a crumpet out in the real world, she mused vaguely that if she was especially lucky she might actually gain her first member for a group to Stratholme before mister Upper Blackrock zoned into his instance.
Some eighteen months later, Sevielle had inexplicably morphed into Miriah the Forsaken shadowpriest and was idly flying from the Undercity to Arathi to poke the PvP vendor there. Text gushed across her chatbox in the bottom left of her screen.
“Tank LFG SM Cath!”
“WTS [Righteous Orb]!”
“TRADE in TRADE, idiot.”
“Stop spam.”
“When you say stop spam, you're spamming, duh.”
World-wide LFG had been born and already Miriah's brain had learned to compensate by only reacting to certain combinations of letters, namely MC, Strath, Scholo and LBRS. Nevertheless, some subconscious part of her brain couldn't help but twitch at the escalating idiocy the world-wide channel apparently provided, and deduce that the added convenience of being able to travel while seeking an instance group just wasn't worth it. She would later roll her eyes and tut “I told you so” when Blizzard apparently came to the same conclusion and world-wide LFG was no more.
More time passed, and Miriah became Aelystriel the Forsaken warrior, scratching her head as she worked out defence scores, checked AtlasLoot and chose instances from drop-down boxes. Irritatingly, she could only queue specifically for three instances at a time, but it didn't take long for her to realise that, once queued for anything at all, she could click the LFM tab and search through every single heroic instance for a group or group-like gathering of un-grouped people.
First, she chanced across a group of two paladins, a druid and a priest for heroic Steam Vaults. Brilliant, she thought, and sent the leader a quick tell.
“May I join as tank or DPS?”
A long pause. She wondered vaguely if the group leader was trying to find her and inspect her, as they were both in Shattrath. Another player asked her to come tank for him in heroic Mechanar, but as she'd already asked the other group she felt bad about potentially having to let the first fellow down and said no.
“Need healer or DPS,” came the reply at length, and she noticed that he was indeed standing right next to her.
“Brilliant,” she replied immediately, “I'd love to DPS.”
“You are prot,” he stated simply.
“Well, yes, I'll respec.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No time.”
“It really won't take that long.”
“Respec takes time.”
“But surely you already have one member who's volunteered to respec if you need 'healer or DPS'.”
“Full now.”
Aelystriel sat in Shattrath and practised facedesking. As if whispering strangers wasn't irritating enough without exchanges like that. Time passed and she metamorphosed from warrior to rogue to warlock to disc priest to blood death knight to frost death knight to druid to warrior to paladin to mage, and over the course of it all she slowly ceased whispering group leaders and potential group members altogether. Her little comment in the LFG tool said all she needed to say, so frankly those other people could whisper her and save her quite a bit of effort. Occasionally, when she had come home late and tipsy, she would log on and wax lyrical to close friends about the slow degradation of human contact within the game. She remembered a time, oh yes, when she had to sit and talk in a chat channel to get a group! Oh, she thought, easily skimming over the hours wasted in Ironforge, those were the days. To have to speak to people again...!
It was around this point when she changed again into Daelythir the dual-wielding frost death knight. Although she might have been perplexed by her new gender, this was all easily overruled by such a huge change she wasn't quite sure what to make of it: cross-server LFG.
Cross-server LFG came complete with ticky boxes, which the she-male inspected while hovering over the Stadium in Hellfire Peninsula, waiting for unsuspecting Alliance to kill for Marks of Thrallmar. Tick one to queue as DPS, tick the next to state she was quite willing to tank, select “Queue for random dungeon” from the dropdown box and then hit the button marked queue. Within minutes she had a group, the result of a painless process that required no effort on her part. No cries of “LFG!” in a chat-channel, no humble whispers to an irritable party leader, no rejection and no endless clicking through instances to find a group for a heroic, any heroic, only for every party to lack a helpful comment announcing what they needed.
Oh yes, thought Daelythir as his/her Howling Blast stuck a magnificent triple pull of nine mobs to him like Taffy to the roof of one's mouth, Blizzard had done it this time, hadn't they. Mindlessly easy group formation. And all it took was to remove human interaction from the process. Funny, that.
