Darth Hater

Straight to the chase. I leveled 1-70 during warcraft's burning crusade phase where there was only a basic looking for dungeon tool, with no queue type system. During this time, I made so many friends and ended up being a guild leader of my own guild just running dungeons and meeting people on my server and keeping contact with them.

During Wrath of the Lich King, when I started on a new server, and they introduced the cross-realm looking for dungeon tool, I started a new character on a different server after getting back to the game. Well, during this time, with the new tool, I leveled 1-80 mostly through the dungeon tool (as a tank), met a lot of seemingly nice people, but made only 2 friends that were actually on my server and able for me to play with. In the end, my experience was largely an anonymous one, with few people to interact with on my server and no potential guild mates, much less a guild of my own to form. Those 2 friends I made were just by chance people I met through the tool that happened to be from the same server as I was. Wrath of the Lich King was largely an anonymity experience and generally destroyed the sense of community on the server. I ended up joining that one friend's guild, where we sold gear for cash for people we 'carried' through content. (Mostly fresh 80s.)

So basically what I suggest is just opening a broad channel that anyone logged onto a looking for dungeon tool, that is not cross realm, for the realm itself, and people can advertise their groups there along with being logged into the system. (In wow, it was /4 LFG > bla bla) That way, people playing on alts can see when a heroic group is forming and so on, while still playing and leveling their alt and in a queue for a low level flashpoint. It would encompass the entire community and not splinter it, as a cross-realm LFD tool will undoubtedly do. It was a bad design choice for wow, but people there don't care and have long stopped caring for such design choices.

Those are just my experiences with both systems, hope it is of some use to the developers. As a side note, the global /4 LFG channel was removed once the cross realm feature was added and was long asked for by the community to have it back, because of the reasons stated above. People on lowbie alts, couldn't see when a heroic raid was forming or a regular PUG raid that they would have wanted to join, while being and playing on their alt.