Dungeon Finder Needed Badly

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.

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.

----

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.

We really need something better than what we have today...

I'm really not interested in a cross-realm tool to be honest.
This is a game where we make friends, some of them will last for a long time (well, some of them are playing with me in SWTOR, people I met in a global LFG channel a few years ago in another MMO). I'm not interested in playing with people from other servers, not because of the bad experiences but because of the good ones. It's sad to never play again with someone that you really enjoyed playing with.

A server LFG tool is really needed imo, and tbh I really don't understand how the hell a global LFG channel was still not implemented (I would see it as a nice *hotfix*, you can shutdown the servers for a day that I wouldn't complain) , this really should be a priority for BW. But the silence is really confusing, what are they waiting for? I really don't understand it.

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?

We really need something better than what we have today...

I'm really not interested in a cross-realm tool to be honest.
This is a game where we make friends, some of them will last for a long time (well, some of them are playing with me in SWTOR, people I met in a global LFG channel a few years ago in another MMO). I'm not interested in playing with people from other servers, not because of the bad experiences but because of the good ones. It's sad to never play again with someone that you really enjoyed playing with.

A server LFG tool is really needed imo, and tbh I really don't understand how the hell a global LFG channel was still not implemented (I would see it as a nice *hotfix*, you can shutdown the servers for a day that I wouldn't complain) , this really should be a priority for BW. But the silence is really confusing, what are they waiting for? I really don't understand it.

Originally Posted by Touchbass
Dr. Blizzard or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the X-LFD

Before we begin our discussion, I'd like to start off with two extremely positive things X-LFD has brought to the MMORPG community. I'm not saying these two particular benefits make the X-LFD mandatory, but for us to have any kind of a civilized conversation you need to first recognize the inherent benefits X-LFD has brought to these two issues.

1) The saviour of low population servers/factions

The global LFD tool basically prevented low population servers from hemorrhaging players and salvaged a ton of communities from what a lot of players had previously written off. For those who are unaware, there are currently servers in WoW with less than 30-40 players on a faction at max level at a given time during peak hours. You can literally spam for hours and not receive any replies, its quiet depressing in fact. To be an unfortunate individual stuck on one of those servers, you tend to have one out of threeoptions: spend real life money to transfer off, quit the game, or play the game in a limited capacity. I don’t have the numbers for each of those three options but I’m sure to some of those left on the server felt as if they were on a ‘sinking ship’. When the LFG hit, populations took surges and people came back again. Players could gear themselves up independently of the server being in shambles and guilds were allowed spend their time tackling raids instead of searching for the elusive member(s) to fill out the dungeon group.

2) Access to low level content

I’ve seen some servers with more naked BE’s running around Orgimmar begging for doubloons than the entire max level base of other servers, even with these massive populations problems can still exist. While the good times were rolling (or dancing on mailboxes), hardly anybody was running low level dungeons. The problem wasn't lack of interest (as inherent of how easy it is now to get a group for lower level dungeons regardless of your group role), the issue was that it is time consuming and a pain in the butt to track down people and fill out the trinity for content that you could of probably leveled out of by the time you finished the bloody dungeon in the first place. With the addition of LFD, leveling became less of a pain if it wasn't your thing and created access. I don't think a lot of people realize that with the LFD a lot of players for the first time got to see these dungeons within the appropriate difficulty parameters.


The next section is some insight into why the whole LFD crisis came up in the first place

1) Gaming demographics have changed

The average face of a MMORPG gamer has changed dramatically over the past, we are melting pot of veterans, power games, stay at home dad/moms, the unemployed, the mentally ill, casual gamers and multi-platform gamers. Due to the mass appeal, subscriptions have soared like never before and have brought unforeseen consequences when the play styles of some of these gamers have clashed. The challenge is how we accommodate players of differing extremes: some want tight-knit communities that encourage and require players to work together, players who support grouping within same server but demand working reliable tools to facilitate the process, and finally players who frankly just want access to the game they paid for at their convenience.

2) Why should we be catering to these different crowds?

Money. The things money buys is good for an MMORPG, it allows it to evolve and address the concerns of players in a reasonable amount of time. The wheeled engine of WoW costs a tremendous amount of money to run, if we got rid of all those players that didn't fit 100% into our ideologies of what a gamer should be we'd see substantial loss of customer service, R&D and free content patches to just name a few things. More importantly, life sometimes makes you transition your availability due to work/school/annoying wife, if a game you truly enjoy is built around one play style you'd be up the creek without a paddle if you can't obligate that time anymore. All of us are probably guilty of taking advantage of the benefits brought to us from our fellow gamers; we need to be more sympathetic to their plight.

3) This isn't Kansas anymore

Don't let anyone fool you, traditional MMORPG's were built on the concept of ludicrous grinds that basically required an obscene amount of time to reach max level. Now don't confuse my words, this isn't a discussion of how long the leveling process should take or am I advocating the hitting of max level of not being an accomplishment - what I am trying to say is the gaming atmosphere of old which doesn't exist in any practical sense to the target markets Western MMO's are trying to reach out towards. We are spending countless resources trying to redo the leveling process and making it alt friendly, why would we do that when the hard cores spend most of their time at max level? We do this because they are no longer the majority of the player base and the genre has evolved for better or worse, the pockets of the many out weight the pockets of the few.


4) The Rise of the Titans

The height of MMORPG's are communities (think of the name itself), they are living bustling entities that evolve even when you aren't logged on. One of the most efficient and memorable ways of binding a community is the requirement of other players to facilitate something, whether a crafting ingredient or his/her help in a group for example. This created an atmosphere were people who put any resemblance of effort to becoming actually integrated into server and those who caused any problems where chastised and shunned. Imagine advertising your group intentions in whatever deemed appropriate channel and being able to categorize all of your responses with the notation of whether that person is worth grouping with or a waste of time. Don't underplay the notion that servers felt distinctly different from one another and had an identify, rolling need for an off spec item if that was taboo on the server could literally blacklist you. Wait, why is any of this deemed a problem?

5) Square peg meets the round hole

I'd like to take a moment to introduce myself at this point, hi my name is Charles and I'm a tank. I was the living breathing personification of the aforementioned lifestyle, I'd log to receive a plethora of tells to clear up dungeons for friends on off nights and raid like men on main nights. Everything was going great until I had my son; life and my game time started to change drastically for me at this point. No longer could I commit set chunks of time to play due to child raising duties and I was conversely dropped off the guilds active roster as the tank. I was still able to complete dungeons and occasionally fill in to OT but something fundamentally changed, getting premade groups became difficult for me. What changed wasn't that I become unpopular or my skills had waned to the point of “noobery”, what had fundamentally changed was how much of a hassle everything had become. Before I’d plan to play only 3 hours due to other obligations, I’d log on, see who’s on and we’d negotiate when we’d start. This would allow me to delay my set chunk of time to later or start it immediately and get off, now when I tried to get groups together it was a one shot deal and if people were indisposed at the moment I was unable to get anything done. After weeks of incomplete game time I regrettably said my farewells to my server top guild and only came back for expansion releases (when groups are easy to find) and permanently when the LFD came out.

This next part I attempt to highlight why certain situations paved the way for the LFD in the first place, I’ll be making some assumptions but anyone with a dog in the fight (aka has a job and/or family life) will understand that they are reasonable and fair.


1)Not everyone has 24/7 availability

If you work a full-time you only really have between 3-4 hours of playtime a night before you are significantly affecting other areas of your life. Weekends are a different story, sometimes you get to play a lot and sometimes you have less time then weekdays, but let’s say you squeeze in 10 hours total across the weekend. I’m being very generous with the above allotted times, if you have any outside obligations, hobbies, studies, other games of interest or a family, those times allotted are going to skyrocket down. That equals 25 hours of playtime roughly week for a medium to borderline hard core gamer, where I personally think most people are between 11-16 hours. Some people think spending an hour to form a group of “friends” online is acceptable gameplay, while I won’t say that they are wrong but I’m going to say a lot of others disagree strongly.


2)Think LFD causes problems? The old model was worse

Now picture you log on for your daily bread (I mean hours) and instead of going out and enjoying the world you have to stand around a capital city to ask for a group. You just got off work and already you’re not having fun, you’re being forced to work to enjoy yourself. Under the old model it used to take around 20 minutes at minimal for assembling the group and arrival at the instance, some people could get it done faster and others, well couldn’t get it done at all for various reasons. Now imagine someone has to go, god forbid it’s a tank and that means someone has to leave the instance to ask again, by this point another player may drop and your run could be over. Having a run collapse can eat upwards of 2 hours of someone’s play time, if not more. Losing that time may not be a big deal to someone but if they only have 11-16 hours to play a week, not being able to get a dungeon off the ground is going to cost them a significant chunk of their playtime for the week and not including the time it takes to assemble another one.

3)The solution that worked for most gamers

With the addition of the LFD tool, gamers where finally given a tool that could maximize a person’s time in an efficient manner. When you click that button you know you have roughly between 10 and 30 minutes at longest before you group starts. This gave players the option of doing some dailies, farming some particular items or doing something quick in real life, regardless of their choice they were finally using their time to something they wished. This isn’t as much about the length of time but the expected duration of how long a particular task will take which is important. If I know I that when I log on and I have 3 hours to play and I can calculate it’ll take me 30 minutes to assemble a group, 1 hour to complete it and 45 minutes to do my dailies afterwards I’ll be a happy customer. Now imagine I log on, spend over an hour trying to find a group and can’t complete the group, by the time I reach the point where I can no longer finish the dungeon due to time constraints I’m going to rush through my dailies in a bitter mood. This doesn’t have to happen many times for people to throw up their hands and say to “hell with it”.

4)Work odd hour or strangely irregular hours

One of the biggest groups that got punished were those who didn’t game when the rest of us were online. Think you got issues assembling a group in the pre-LFD days, trying being online when there aren’t even 5 people online at your level. For years they were told to relocate to a server that best fits their needs, ignore the content entirely or quit. I shouldn’t have to go into why there is something substantial wrong with the above helpful advice and in fact I won’t.

5)The player level bubble

This sort of ties within an earlier point but I just wanted to expand on it quickly. Group content is great when it’s accessible now imagining having no one around you to complete it. If the majority of players are at max level how are you supposed to perform group activities prior to the level cap? The old model was beg in /1 or coerce a guildie into feeling bad enough to run you through it. This is the reason WoW removed the majority of elite group quests, not because people weren’t interested in them but because people couldn’t get them done in a reasonable amount of time.

The next section is my attempt to reconcile the two crowds and try to break the ignorance that is plagued towards us “second class citizens”

1)The LFD destroys communities rant

This is the biggest and loudest argument and deservers the most attention, we need to think about what the perspective is of the person who is advocating this and what are his intentions. His premise is very understandable, why on earth would you want anything you cherished to be besieged? The players from this perspective are happy with their current gaming experiences and view anything dramatically changing as threatening their positive experiences. They may claim they are community individuals, but they aren’t in fact they really only looking out for their own interests and have no regard for the majority of the player base.

2)The LFD killed WoW (or severely crippled it)

This has to be the most erroneous statement I’ve heard in the debate and I have to applaud who came up with that conjecture for how much is has swamped the MMORPG community. First off, how would you analyze this statement for any shred of truth? I’m not going to take your anecdotal evidence as fact, because quite frankly the LFD tool brought me back to the game and I know countless others who came back to the game because of it. In fact, the only evidence we can look at that is considered fair is how many subscriptions came back with the addition of the LFG feature versus who left the game at the same time. I wonder who’s going to come out on top of that one

3)The majority of these people opposing the LFD are hypocrites

The only thing that changed was that we could no longer force people to communicate with others when they didn’t wish it or it wasn’t convenient. If you had a laundry list of friend’s pre-LFD to always do groups with, you should have seen absolutely no change at all in your gameplay experience. What could have possibly changed? You would log on, talk to your guildies and friends and come up with a time to run dungeons as you always did prior. If you were unable to facilitate a group as it sometimes can happen, you’d ask if anyone knew anyone or you simply just ask in trade. When someone refers to bad experiences with the LFD tool, I ask myself how they found themselves interacting with the tool in the first place. You clearly couldn’t find anybody to group with so instead of sitting around in Orgimmar spamming for groups you realized what the rest of us realized years ago that it that wasn’t fun. You then took the approach of joining a queue intended for a different gaming experience and got upset when it wasn’t to your liking. I can’t be the only one who is baffled by this, can I?


4)Ask not what your server can do for you but what you can do for your server

With every major patch people leave and quit which swings servers into mayhem. One of the servers a buddy of mine played on was Smolderthorn, it had a top 100 guild and a fair balance till WOTLK server instability issues forced transfers. Within a few content cycles the server was completely damaged and people jumped ship. If someone quit during TBC and came back after the LFD was introduced he’d logically think it killed the server when it fact did not. Become part of the solution and not the problem, post your attentions on the server forums that you want to participate in a server event. You don’t even have to do know what to; you can usually leverage someone with ideas that has no warm bodies to fill them. Start small and work your way up. There is tons of information on Google on this so happy hunting!

5)Players have diminished in quality since the LFD for reason X,Y, and Z

No, what has happened is people are of different skill backgrounds and you’ve just never realized just how many of them take up your player base who keeps your game running. This isn’t the days of yore when everyone who plays strongly understands the genre, blizzard has opened up the market for different crowds and it’s their playing experience too. Think of it from the other side of the coin, how do you think it is for us more casual player base to deal with you people on a more regular basis? Don’t got 100% optimized gear and talent spec for an encounter that don’t require it, get ready to get instructed on the values of life and potentially booted. Ask to a do all the bosses to a geared tank, better believe that’s a vote kick.

6)The Z in “X,Y, and Z” is for laZy

One concern is that queue based systems will make people lazy and lethargically spend their time throughout the game world. We’re living in the country that works one of the most hours per person in the world and has severe time poverty and you’re confused why people are trying to take shortcuts? You’d have to be insane or unemployed not to take every time related advantage that doesn’t spoil your own experience in a game that soaks them up like nothing. Being lazy has no discrimination for which it strikes, whether it’s elites afking in bg’s for High War Lord titles or Johnny McNoob /afking in the raid finder

7)People are ******es in the LFD

This is the only argument I particularly agree with, it is true that anonymity breeds people to make actions that may have not made in a different situation. Blizzard has given us a tool to deal with it; it’s called the vote kick. If you DO NOT abuse the vote kick, it is available almost every time you’ll ever need it. The majority of incidents that I’ve personally witnessed have been people taking someone’s words to seriously or someone “ninjaing” something. Now, for the latter it’s impossible to ninja in this game, I need you to understand that. “Ninjaing” for the sake of this argument is taking something that didn’t belong to you, entering into a rolling chance with someone when both parties legitimately want an item is not stealing. If someone has the same armour class or item proficiency, then casually speak to them in public or private to get their intentions, you’d be shocked in how people are civil once you make that communication leap and instead of assuming. For the attitude part, that is everyone’s job to try and keep a cool head. If you see people fighting over something in game, first off don’t make it worse by saying who’s right and who’s wrong. Secondly try and defuse the situation, I’ve been able to do this a few times or at least get to the point where everyone agrees it’s best to move on but be silent. Lastly, if else fails, Blizzard has given us the vote kick for these types of measures, use accordingly though or be warned it may not be there when you require it.