I love the game, but what a letdown at level 50. I went from playing all the time I was online to just sitting in the Imperial Fleet hoping to find a group.

 

I guess I've been spoiled with 5 minutes queues in another game, but really, this is incredibly disappointing. Bah.

 

And yes, I've made an alt.. and she's level 50 too.

This is why I'm glad I'm taking my time. It just isn't reasonable to expect that an MMO style game, a genre that is supposed to go on for years, is going to have tons of end game content a hair over a month into it's existence. Play another class or something. Hunt for datacrons. Find lore objects. Even this early there should be plenty of things to do.

I hit lvl 50, did pvp and dailies but had a hard time finding groups for flashpoints.

Hate standing around the fleet waiting for people for 30minutes...then the group breaks up.

Now i dont play my lvl 50 and leveling up a Jedi.

Probably do the same when my Jedi is 50 and level up another character.

I hit lvl 50, did pvp and dailies but had a hard time finding groups for flashpoints.

Hate standing around the fleet waiting for people for 30minutes...then the group breaks up.

 

Now i dont play my lvl 50 and leveling up a Jedi.

Probably do the same when my Jedi is 50 and level up another character.

Exactly... that's the problem. Really hard to find people to run flashpoints. We really need a looking for dungeon mode, or heck I'd make do with a trans planet lfg channel or something... but this bites! I really want to run flashpoints because I enjoy them, but yeah... if they take 2-3 hours, I don't know how it's going to happen, especially if it takes one hour to find a group for them.

I'd be all for a better LFG system than the flimsy attempt that's presently in place, but the random group assembler has done nothing but destroy WoW since they added it.

Tanks refusing to do optional bosses even if everyone else in the group clearly needs the drops.

Players refusing to participate, forcing you to kick them, simply because they don't like the dungeon they got.

The overall reduction in player civility in random groups -- which was tenuous beforehand and disappeared entirely once the system was added.

Loot griefing

Your ability to play, and enjoy, this game is far greater if you put a modicum of effort into finding and cultivating positive relationships with other players. I'm one of the most misanthropic and antisocial people I know, and I've never had trouble finding a group for hardmode flashpoints since hitting 50. It was just a matter of turning off the garbage-out filter and networking.

Don't forget how imbalanced the factions are. That's your real problem -- there just aren't enough players on the Republic side per server.

Our server maintains a realm-wide LFG channel.

That means you can go about your dailies, farm, whatever while still forming groups.

I suggest other servers do the same.

/cjoin LFG and then just promote it so that everyone uses it.

If you don't want to sort through this entire thread...

The answer is yes.

Does anyone want to buy a CE?!

i'd be all for a better lfg system than the flimsy attempt that's presently in place, but the random group assembler has done nothing but destroy wow since they added it.

 

Tanks refusing to do optional bosses even if everyone else in the group clearly needs the drops.

Players refusing to participate, forcing you to kick them, simply because they don't like the dungeon they got.

The overall reduction in player civility in random groups -- which was tenuous beforehand and disappeared entirely once the system was added.

Loot griefing

 

your ability to play, and enjoy, this game is far greater if you put a modicum of effort into finding and cultivating positive relationships with other players. I'm one of the most misanthropic and antisocial people i know, and i've never had trouble finding a group for hardmode flashpoints since hitting 50. It was just a matter of turning off the garbage-out filter and networking.

 

Don't forget how imbalanced the factions are. That's your real problem -- there just aren't enough players on the republic side per server.

^ - qft.

(:

Im a solo casual player that rarely social lvls, but Ive met 3 friends so far by not using a LFG finder, rather i chose talking in chat with ppl when LFG. In WoW, i cant count how many times i joined a random group where if 1 person leaves during the run, anotherone leaves, which makes the whole LFG time excuse flawed. It can take just as much time in WoW with a LFG finder then it currently takes in TOR. In TOR so far a group is formed with trust and most of the time mutual respect. If not the rotten apple is booted and replaced. (Rarely happens so far)

But i think the OP is just another case of MMOBoredom

Im a solo casual player that rarely social lvls, but Ive met 3 friends so far by not using a LFG finder, rather i chose talking in chat with ppl when LFG. In WoW, i cant count how many times i joined a random group where if 1 person leaves during the run, anotherone leaves, which makes the whole LFG time excuse flawed. It can take just as much time in WoW with a LFG finder then it currently takes in TOR. In TOR so far a group is formed with trust and most of the time mutual respect. If not the rotten apple is booted and replaced. (Rarely happens so far)

 

But i think the OP is just another case of MMOBoredom

I agree with this.

Yes, you can;t find a group at all times and at every hour.

But my friends list is now littered with people I know and connect to because of HM flashpoints.

I ***** about SWTOR as much as anyone but one thing it has, and that's community.

And believe it or not, but community is one of those fundamental elements that makes an MMO.

I love the game, but what a letdown at level 50. I went from playing all the time I was online to just sitting in the Imperial Fleet hoping to find a group.

 

I guess I've been spoiled with 5 minutes queues in another game, but really, this is incredibly disappointing. Bah.

 

And yes, I've made an alt.. and she's level 50 too.

2 lvl 50's?

Get a job.

I agree with this.

 

Yes, you can;t find a group at all times and at every hour.

 

But my friends list is now littered with people I know and connect to because of HM flashpoints.

 

I ***** about SWTOR as much as anyone but one thing it has, and that's community.

 

 

And believe it or not, but community is one of those fundamental elements that makes an MMO.

Agreed!!! completely I honestly say this game drew a bad crowd....ish? not like vader hater status or anything lol just people who give up too easily or are just rude or what ever lol.

I think the issue is not really with the lack of an LFG tool but more with the length of HM flashpoints. In WOW, you get in the queue, you are teleported to the instance and after 30 minutes the run is finished.

 

In swtor, betwwen finding the groupe, travelling to the instance and completing the run, it takes more than 2 hours. There is not a lot of people that can regularly have such a long game session (apart from raiding which is planified).

 

In that sence running flashpoints is much less casual than in WOW and why it is so hard to find groups.

That might be true in a pug I don't know but most of the hard mode guild runs I've done have only taken around 30 minutes. The only one that I can think of that really takes longer is the new one they just put in.

There are reasons tempered with years of trial and error and steeped in over seven years worth of refinement behind why the other raidy-geargrindy game does things how it does them.

Why do dungeons take no more than 30-45 minutes? Oh, sure, there's always a squeaky wheel pining for the fjords of archaic content that took 8 hours and took 40 people and then there was snow and uphill both ways and blah dee blah.

In tabletop gaming, we call them folks Grognards. They're the sorts that, for whatever reasons though usually out of sheer, stubborn nostalgia, refuse to adapt, and so stay stuck in the past.

Bad thing? Good thing? Irrelevant thing is what it is when measured against the facts.

Blizzard's defined a genre. Just about everything WoW does is not any single person's idea of perfect. Intriguing how, for a great many, something about it is though, or is close enough to being that it evens out.

They didn't drum up a dungeon finder, a raid finder, tier their PVP brackets, stratify their warzones, tune and time-test their dungeons and raids or incrementalize and balance their gear sources as a haphazard process of kneejerking or just eyeballing it and doing whatever seemed like a good idea at the time.

At least, not for the last 6.5 of those 7+ years, probably.

Here we have SWTOR. Bioware seems to be trying to do a lot of things with the thought model in mind of 'Same But Different'.

Makes it easy for people to transition from other WoW-like games, and certainly WoW itself, when a lot of things are familiar; that's the bait. The hook is, ideally, in the differences. Grab 'em with the similiarities and ease of transitions and the encouragements to confidence in at least feeling like you know what to do straight out the gates with familiar layouts of UI and controls and class roles and general abilities...

...and then hook them with the New-Oooh-Aaah factors of the differences.

Ideally, that's the goal of the Same But Different approach.

When a major corporation is taking that approach for breaking into or even further establishing into a market, there are an awful lot of very industry-familiar experts working on numerous segments and phases of the lead-in projects.

There are marketing strategists collaborating with sometimes rather unlikely-seeming professionals in other industries and employing marketing data agencies to design and execute market data gathering projects.

For years, this is often true before a single move is made. Conservatism is common, but when things start to move, they tend to move explosively and in unison. Five years of preparation to move into a market might presage 6-12 months of synchronized deployments of advertising campaigns, introductions of product lines (or reintroductions of product revisions), street marketing, media marketing.

The elaboracy of such things can look deceptively simple from the outside. From the inside, it is, ideally, an orchestration of effort on the parts of hundreds, if not thousands, reaching for resources and anything that can give a viable edge to assuring the success of the ultimate goal.

Honestly, for those that are familiar with raiding, being a project lead in such an endeavor is a lot like the most epic raid in existence. For an executive directly engineering and orchestrating whole phases of such an endeavor, it's a lot like leading a 1000+ person raid over the course of, frequently, 1-3 years.

That's really the best way I can translate it into readily and commonly familiar terms of comprehension.

Now, to the point of why I waxed so descriptive at all; Bioware, LucasArts and EA have collectively achieved less than optimal success in this endeavor. Some of the most ground-level apparencies suggest to me that they didn't know what they were doing quite as well as they perhaps surmised.

Didn't ask enough questions, or the right questions. Didn't do enough of the right things with existing information, or didn't interpret it correctly. Got certain prioritizations wrong.

By no means are we looking at anything like the equivalent of a raid wipe here. But what we're seeing is, again in raidgamer terms, the direct equivalent of one of the tanks dying because a healer went OOM for overhealing a couple of DPS that were handling adds and were standing too close to the boss, and so almost died for being in the AoE.

Boss went down anyway. It's been salvaged. Raid's not over yet; oh no, not by a long shot.

But they have some serious cause to be going "Ok, that was sloppy. What the Eff went wrong there people?"

I cannot for one second imagine that they are not doing so.

Still, it could all have been avoided...almost as simply, in terms of relative magnitude. None of anything that's apparently gone shoddily needs to be attributed to exceptional varieties of unfortunate circumstances.

No, not at all. Not a single thing they fumbled somewhat to pretty blatantly on cannot be absolutely explained by plain ol' amateurism. Possibly a bit of arrogance, but that's only merely somewhat probable and is, by no means, required to explain any of it.

They'll learn. And, from someone that's been handling, in my own industry, the functional equivalent of raid-leading roughly 25,000+ people for several years now?

Oh yeah. I not only understand, but I sympathize. They'll learn. I learned when I stuck my foot in 'it' here and there.

Crow gets eaten. Hindsight with its wickedly clarion view educates. You don't get to be Bioware or EA or LucasArts because you're too stupid to learn even when the lesson bites you in the bank account, after all.

You don't get to be Bioware or EA or LucasArts because you're stupid at all, in fact. New to something? Sure. Made the...heh, yes, NOOB mistake of thinking ya knew enough when ya didn't? You betcha. Thought you knew what to expect and how it would go? Been there fellas.

They teach us about the perils of Groupthink in friggen first year intro to sociology. Introduce the concept and the term, and then more or less let it explain itself as for why it's bad.

Go through a business path of education and you learn a lot more about the breakdowns of how to avoid it, why to avoid it in all its incarnations.

Go down a sciences path and you'll get procedurally ram-rodded with all the layers of objectivity-enforcing, thoroughness-demanding group[think-murdering methodology until its coming out your own mouth by your own volition...by about year 4. Absolutely by the first six months of grad school.

And still, it remains quite possibly the single most recurring source of problems for groups of people trying to administrate and engineer pretty much anything for other people.

So, why exactly are we standing around in Fleet having to nag in chat for groups when, here in 2012, there are games with streamlined group/dungeon/raid finder tools and a whole heck of a lot else, and I can log into some of those games from my phone, manage my market data, or elsewhere view my characters and edit costumes, and'a so on, so on, so forth ad nauseum?

I'd bet a nickel that good ol' groupthink is at the heart of why.

So...that wall of text ramble issued...cheers!

I love the game, but what a letdown at level 50. I went from playing all the time I was online to just sitting in the Imperial Fleet hoping to find a group.

 

I guess I've been spoiled with 5 minutes queues in another game, but really, this is incredibly disappointing. Bah.

 

And yes, I've made an alt.. and she's level 50 too.

Should have grouped with more people and stayed in contact. Whenver I had a good run I told the others I would add them to my friends list. I then use that list as my starting point for building a group. Picking up new pugs only when that was the only option. If that new pug was good, they got added to.

Run instances with the same people multiple times. Makes them more likely to remember you and invite you back next time. Also being in a guild helps, voice chat isn't required obviously but it makes things faster, which means you can fit in multiple hard modes.

Lastly, get real life friends to start playing. I got 2 buddies I play with all the time, I'm dps, one is a tank, other is a healer. Instant group like that lets me farm the crap out of every HM flashpoint.

No, they're just in no rush to get to 50, lol. I kinda want to run hardmodes but yeah... I really don't want to spend 3 hours in an instance.

.

None of the hard mode flashpoints take 3 hours. They don't even take 2 hours. Black Talon can be done in 35-45 mins. All the others aren't much more than an hour (Boarding party might be closer to 2 hours, not sure). 8man normal Eternity Vault takes less than 2 hours to clear. Same with Karaggas Palace.

try typing /cjoin lfg

this is a global channel so you dont need to sit in the fleet to look for a group, most if not all servers are using it for convenience.

dailies

FPs

OPs

Datacron/matrix hunting

trying to get different schems from REing Crafts

PvP (i personally dont do this bit)

alt lvling for more crafts.

and personally if that dont fill your day then you play way to much lol. i barely get time to finish dailies and the odd datacron and maybe 1 FP hm