Dungeon Finder Needed Badly

I usually don't chuckle at my own posts but it's hard I like my made up word Groupologist.

I prefer made up neologisms rather than wrong made up arguments such as
"A tool that concerns the recruitment phase for the PvE group content only will destroy the entire community."

99.9% of people don't like the current system. A few servers have managed to get a specific channel up but it's not working 100% and that's something Bioware should had the foresight on release. I enjoyed your straw man.

Well clearly you have some control issues. Your not happy enough to just /ignore the person you want to be able to insure that your able to total ruin the persons game.
Which imo is open to abuse and shouldnt be allowed anyways!
I think ill start reporting players i see in chat tattling on other for player harassment.

I'm not sure if these points have been mentioned, I only looked at part of the 400 pages on this topic!

1. Be it an insta-LFG tool, the game's current LFG via the Who panel, or "spamming" general chat, you end up in a group with the same level of comraderie with your fellow group members, namely zero. It's what happens after that's important. If I run several heroics with the same people or have a really good time in a flashpoint with someone, that person is going on my friend list for future socializing and grouping. That's community.

Obviously this doesn't work with cross-server grouping. Cross-server is a band-aid for the wound of faction imbalance and low server population. Separate (and important!) issue; suffice to say I am anti-cross-server LFG.

2. I do like the idea of opting in to cross-server warzones where your whole side is from your server. Not sure how much queueing that would alleviate but I don't see any problems here. If you only want to play against your own server, don't opt in.

3. For heroics, you don't really need the standard tank, healer, 2xdps. Any 4 will work. I heard some people concerned about dps-ers having a hard time and getting booted from auto-made groups, but I don't think it's a problem for heroics.

3.a. But you do need the standard group for flashpoints! However, I think the game is surprisingly well balanced right now in terms of healers, tanks, and dps. Plus lots of classes can fill multiple roles. I think dual-speccing the ability tree with, say, a 30 or 60 minute cooldown on swapping, would make this virtually a non-issue and not take away from the game in any fashion. The last thing I'm worried about when finding a group is class makeup- usually I am just so happy to find 4 people!

TLDR? New group members are strangers no matter what. If you have fun with them, friend them. That's your community right there. Idea: cross-server warzons, but your whole side is from your server. And I support dual-speccing the ability tree.

Its not a control issue, its something seen through experience in WoW when the RDF was implemented. I don't think any of you actually comprehend what I'm talking about, and that is sad for you. However, you will learn if this goes through.

Why do you insist on bringing up the raid dungeon finder (RDF) when we aren't even talking about raids?

starting to think some of these people got their ego's hurt when people would just as well play with strangers as much as their guildees or 'friends.' "They would play with completely random people just as quickly as us? Surely this tool must be stopped at all costs or our cliques will hold no totalitarian power at all!"

If guilds were as meaningful as its proponents claim they would hold together through any new system and if the DF tools were as bad as they claim they would have failed miserably. In either case it would have been self correcting. Neither of these have occurred.

If your guild can be brought down by tools that expand the field of people the members in your guild can play with, I got bad news for you: your guild wasn't that big of a deal.

How is it not a control issue?
You stated
""Cross Realm leads to no accountability and allows more anonymity to where you have no reputation which helps in the community to self policing.""

If it was not a issue of you and others having control over other people you would simply /ignore them and move on and NEVER experience that person again. After /ignore you cant see what they type, you cant be grouped with them. They can have no effect on YOU.

But no by your own words thats not enough for you! You insist that YOU and those like you have the ability to control that persons game play. Black list them, run them off the servers with claims of their bad rep. It screams open for abuse for one thing. Maybe you just dont like me.. Maybe i hit on your game and you go off on a slander campaign with false claims that no one can really verify.

There good reason why i /ignore people like you who scream in chat that so and so are bad.
I will be the judge of who i will be around not YOU! If I have a issue with some one i will /ignore them and move on knowing that they can have no effect on ME.

Sorry but i do not want or need YOU and your kind to protect me from some one YOU dont like!

So as long as people like me exist and there are a LOT like me self policing of your server will not work!

I'm going to split this a little, only bothering with two responses for the moment.

Actually, it is a control issue in some cases. Let me explain what I mean by sharing an experience with one of the guilds I was part of.

Allow me to share one of my experiences with a guild that had some very good members - but a very bad rep on the server I was on.

Now, I played AoC - AoC's LFG is general chat, which is world wide. No local chats etc that I recall, just /global. This was post-massive server merges, the guild I had been in was long gone, and I had no idea where all my friends had gone since I'd taken a year or more break. The guild I joined, well, they were all considered bads, but as a low level going up, none of the other guilds would take me.

I leveled with some of their alts, but with the hours I worked I still ended up playing lone wolf even with my guild tags on more often than not. I ran into other people while leveling, and I continually hit a wall with certain people that didn't know me at all - because I was in that guild. That didn't make me leave the guild though. I'd gotten to know the members, I knew some of them were ex-military, and we had quite a bit to talk about. When I hit end game I had issues finding people to pug with - pretty much everything was held in guild/alliance and those same guilds that'd disrespected me at the start were my 'only' option. I didn't take it, I waited for my guild to move into raiding - which eventually they did.

I talked to the guild leader, I talked to people that had alliances with that guild once we established them with some other small guilds, and I eventually found out the real truth behind why they were considered such bads.

1. Our guild leader made armor/weapons for mats. If you brought him things, he'd make what you wanted and not charge you for it. Most of our guild actually had no issues with doing the same as he was. The money drained out of having the rare schematics - to a point - but it increased the cost of materials. Something everyone could farm, and thus, could profit on. In a system that required a guild city to craft, this pissed off the upper end guilds. He was making what they did 'less' and making everything more open and enjoyable for the rest of the player base, and he was apparently wrong for it.

2. The guild took (almost) anyone. The limits on who they took were there - but you really weren't going to hit them unless you were a gold farmer, or a ninja. The other guilds that wouldn't invite me that slammed my *** into the ground every time I asked for groups? They required high level in guild or **** - it was a server wide issue.

3. We weren't a raid guild. We ran a lot of things for people's alts, we messed around a good bit and we crafted, but the higher end guilds constantly had to talk **** to us because we did do things for each other that weren't limited to raids only.

4. Our guild leader didn't back down. He knew to keep his mouth shut in pugs, he didn't have issues with most people - but if you said something that was fundamentally wrong, like bad mouthing someone's kid that happened to speak up when they had their mic keyed, or criticizing someone for having to bail for family or something RL coming up, he came down on you like a ton of bricks, and if you said something that was really left field the rest of us would join in. RL > Game. The fact that we were outspoken about that turned us into 'bads' even more in the higher ranked guilds on our server's eyes.

Generally, when I joined a group, people would see my tags and we'd get into a short discussion, and my general response was 'give me a shot, if I do badly I'll drop'. Damn near every time I proved I was good enough, and left the group wondering why we had such a bad rep - my response was to explain the above, then leave for another pug.

People had issues with me over my tag, a few ignored me, but not a damn one of them stopped me from finding groups. I actually ended up getting a few of the people that felt the need to /ignore me kicked from groups because I did have a good rep as an individual. The massive smear campaign the bigger guilds liked running against them didn't touch me most of the time, and I eventually started going head to head with them as an individual.

TL;DR: The upper guilds used rep to control who got groups from other guilds - as well as to try controlling which individuals got access to certain content etc with the way their alliances went. Smaller guilds sometimes were able to go head to head with them on it, but usually failed at getting too far into end game without having to make alliances with those established bigger guilds. In the case of AoC - 'server rep' was abused.

Regarding content nerfs. I'm tired of hearing people ***** and blame LFD for it. Sick of it.

Were you around during BC? That was realm only, we had a strong pug community, though groups often took 40min or so to get as dps, tanking was often instant (depending on dungeon you were LFM for and lockouts/time of day).

For those that remember, our 'strong pug community' that was realm only also screamed for nerfs on content - they also got them, as they had in Pre-BC wow.

The steady nerf of content had been there since the early days. The difference is we didn't have the ease of access, nor did we have the higher number of people running through that content with the speed we did in Wrath, or in Cata. The biggest glaring difference is/was that Cata and wrath content don't have lockouts anymore when you hit the random finder. You do get the specific lockouts but you don't have those 'count' if you go random. You could technically hit the same dungeon 8 times on random in a row. Gear became easier to get - not because you have easier dungeons, but because you could run the dungeons till you got what you needed.

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That all said. If we get cross server, they could do a few things that may help foster the sense of 'community' that some are screaming so loudly about. (Or at least reward you for working within your server community or guilds, for those that scream so loudly that x-server or lfd makes them obsolete)

1. Rewards for running with guilds. Not much, but maybe some token or something, bonus to social points/etc.

2. Rewards for running server only. Again, not enough to give too much weight to server only, but a small reward for it. You're going to likely have a longer q because you are server only, so you get some other benefit from going server-only. People using cross server would already have the reward of having a faster Q.

3. Having the option to q either or, and allow people in cross server (that are on your same server) land in q with you when you are in server only. Something that would speed up server qs, without harming the system itself.

What is the dispute here... ?

Dungeon finder when there is no dungeon, is this a term from WoW? I don't think anyone wants to directly copy something from another game.

Star Wars could use a tool that would help players find groups. Why would anyone disagree with that?