Dungeon Finder Needed Badly

I don't see how this argue AGAINST porting people to an entrance, only for it.

Remember as well that we potentially loose the Aussie community in March when their servers go live. Apparently Bioware/EA have servers down under that they may start up for them. Which if that happens, our off hours loose more people to pull from because of them migrating.

That will open a whole new set of issues for us. Most Aussie players pre-ordered/ordered through US to get theirs - it's not released for them yet. We don't know if they'll have the option to stay on our servers yet or not, if I'm remembering my information right.

That right there has the potential to mess with low pop and off-peak players for server-only LFD.

Which... if they remove Aussies from our servers/don't give us the chance to roll on theirs this game will lose me when my sub is up. I'm in the us dating and Aussie and he's my partner on here so....

Yeah I was just thinking of that earlier. Will they still do that if things aren't going so well? Or have you heard lately anything about it still going on?

Just wanted to quote your post, MalignX. Love this.

We don't know yet.

Last I heard it's still being discussed. For now, as far as we know we'll find out in march when Bioware/EA go "Surprise!" and release it.

Loosing the Aussie players though - if it happens - will likely have a big impact on if they have to do more to the LFD system, and it may push them looking into x-server sooner rather than later or may have them looking into it where they might not have done it at all.

Edit: http://www.swtor.com/community/showt...ight=australia

Best answer that can be given - they're looking into it.

I feel the need to respond to this.
I am a veteran mmo gamer i can trace my game times back to before the mmo genre was even here. Back to the days of MUD's.
I disagree with you. You like most of the anti lfd tool people are looking thru rose colored glasses. The mmo genre and the player base has evolved and i personally prefer this newer brighter experience. As a whole we and the mmo genre are no longer a small minority. Where once a game was successful with 200k players the numbers now reach into the millions!
The whole concept of single server communities needs to vanish the way of the dino.
Those of you anti cross server lfd people call me anti social.. I call you the anti social ones.
I want my community to be the whole player base hundreds of thousands of people ( if not millions) to have a chance to interact with. Regardless of if i ever meet them again or not. You see i feel they are people and i am richer for having interacted with them (the good and the bad) regardless of if i ever meet them again or not.
I fully support cross server lfd tools. I also fully support cross server chats friends list and guilds!
DAOC pull off server clustering long ago where in most of the game we were no longer restricted to one server worth of players. I can not believe that in todays age even more can be done. Why wait till the servers are small to do clusters? To many people could end up in one zone? Swtor already has phase tech built in to keep that from happening!

What all this boils down to me is people insisting they live in a gated housing area, Where most of us would prefer the life and the excitement of the metroplex!
I get excited about meeting new people playing with them. Even if its one time and for only 1 hour or even less. I do not live in fear of the bad player or the ninja looter.
I almost feel like asking some of yall to tell me where the bad player touched you.
Since some of you seem to be scared for life from the bad experience.


I can only hope that these anti cross server lfd people do not apply the same requirements to your real life social actions!

lie
in that_game i'm "to lazy" to take the time for solid group for dungeon
and in the same time am not lazy to find guild and raid 25ppl content…
wrong
real problem: they not so wrong as you think, this game is actually played as another KOTOR
bad game design is bad
deal with it
ofc you can argue with that but all that "insctanced stuff" will remain there, and it's nothing even close to mmo, that's single-player
Massively Multiplayer Online game not Join Guild Online
and when people will join you guild for only one purpose:
get groups and at last play the game they will realize that even 40ppl online is not enough, they will leave for guild with 200ppl online and there they (if not dumb) will saw that this "guild" is not different from general chat
that is cruel truth of real world

yeah you right here

and "they" (anti-LFG crowd) now want to turn massive multiplayer into multiplayer with what? 20-30 people in your guild?… and erase others

I know people like to play the "BUT IT WILL MEAN THE GAME IS DYING" on server merges... but they have to happen. Literally HAVE to happen. And not because the game is dying, but because *the game is doing well*. People keep joining SWTOR all the time, and because they are just picking whatever server their friend is on, or picking a server out of the hat "oh that one is Standard pop, sounds good"... we are winding up with server balance issues.

The admins stepping in and consolidating the imbalanced servers together to form a couple of higher pop, balanced servers would be ideal. Yeah, it means some players are going to wind up losing their name, but frankly that's a small price to pay for a healthy game.

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The alternative is to wind up like WoW. You have a game that had probably twice as many US subscribers at its peak as it does now (talking active players, not subscriber numbers), which means that there are a lot of servers with just no players on one faction or the other... and what do they do? They introduced cross-realm dungeons and raiding.

That's NOT a solution, it doesn't change that there are no guilds, no one to level with, a poor AH, and deserted cities on their side of the fence. It doesn't change that if they go to do the much touted world PVP in Mists, that they're going to be outnumbered 50 to 1.

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It's a poor business model, as has been pointed out, that so many of the modern day MMOs are scared to mess with server pops. Merges are fine, we need to stop viewing them as the dark herald of "OMG THE GAME MUST BE DYING" - I would *far* rather we stop playing the marketing game of padded subscriber numbers, and focus on the player experience.

Sit down with a piece of paper (no phone, facebook, etc) and write down all of the people you know. List every person you can fully name and picture a face for. Count it. I can guarantee your list will not be longer than 200 names. Our brains are not built for a social structure encompassing millions of people, and in fact we do not think of numbers larger than about 200 as actual people.

The expression "one is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" is frank, but it's true.

Your social interaction at the "metro level" is based on shared cultural norms. Thanks to westernization and the internet, we're all fairly alike in our memes, norms, standards and culture.

The idea that having millions of people in a X-LFG is going to be "better" is dubious at best, it's a claim that random social interaction is superior to more invested relationships. You can't possibly tell me that someone has been enriched by having 1000 random people on their friends list - they're going to get far more out of having a single real friend to count on.

I don't see the world of earlier MMOs with rose-tinted glasses, they had some significant problems, not the least of which was the required to play the game insane amounts of time just to be able to do anything... but I do view a healthy community as something that was a guarantee of the early days of not having the mass populous dictate the direction of gameplay.

I don't see there ever being another "serious MMO" that gets as many people playing as WoW, not in the days of Free-to-Play and Farmville. I want SWTOR to be a success in the long term, and I don't see appealing purely to the populist "quick button is shiny" crowd as being the way to do that. There are tools that I'm sure will go into place, and server consolidations that need to happen... but going too far in that direction is just as bad as going back to 100 days played to level cap.