Just when you thought the April fool’s day jokes had come and gone for another year, Blizzard has announced a real doozy that I honestly wish were a joke. Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms for Patch 4.1 is very much real, however, much to my dismay.

Here’s a quick rundown of the basics to get you up to speed on how this system will work…

• Any time the queue is longer than a few minutes for level 85 Heroics, the Call to Arms system kicks in. In other words, expect this system to be on all the time.
• The role least represented gains additional rewards for joining the queue. So basically there will be a tug of war between tanks and healers, with DPS never seeing a single reward from this system.
• To get the rewards, you must complete the dungeon by killing the final boss, but there is no limit to how many times you can obtain the goodie bag each day.
• Rewards range from gold as a standard, a chance of receiving a rare gem or flask/elixir, a good chance of receiving a non-combat pet (including cross faction pets) and a very rare chance at receiving a mount.

In theory, this is a good idea. But in reality, part of why the queue times are so horrendously bad for DPS players is because tanks have been spamming [trade] to “sell their services” to DF groups. So to add to the above list, here is what this system does in reality...

• Encourages tanks to NOT queue, because then they can be rewarded twice. Once for selling their role to desperate groups, and then again with an extra bag of rewards at the end of the dungeon.
• Thumbs its nose at DPS players who are the ones suffering the long queue times to begin with. But why reward the players who have been real troopers and sat out the 45 minutes to get into a DF group? That would be preposterous.
• Compounds the entire issue, and rewards bad behavior.

Keep in mind that this hasn’t gone live yet, so like all things pre-patch, there is a good chance this will see further iteration before hitting the live realms. At least we can hope so.

In the meantime – and I can’t stress this enough – I encourage all PlayerScore users to actively use the built in rating and commenting system in the add-on, or here on the site. You know who the “tanks for hire” are on your realm because they sit and spam /trade all day long. Considering that those turds are a part of the problem, I consider it my duty to give them a big fat thumbs down.

Maybe you don’t think that will make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, but consider this. The next time your guild is recruiting tanks, a negative PlayerScore rating can clue you into the fact that maybe you want to check out the comments on their profile page to see why. Do you really want to recruit Rentatank for your guild? Do you want that person in your Rated Battleground group, or even your Arena team?

If you do, then you’re also part of the problem and there’s not much that can be done about that.

But if you care about addressing the problem – something that Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms does not do – then it is up to us, the players, to use whatever tools we have at our disposal to improve the situation. The PlayerScore rating and commenting system just so happens to be one such tool, so be sure to use it.