Dungeon Finder Needed Badly

When you change the system for doing something there bound to be adjustments that may or not cause internal strife. When they added X-pvp and X-LFD there must of been some impact for a certain portion of the playerbase. My personal opinion is some players lost their sense of importance and direct contribution to the world and tight knit groups were not longer necessary in the same capacity.

Are those issues for certain people? Hell yes, I don't think people are complaining just to complain, well most of the people anyways. That being said, the amount of good the X-LFD and X-PvP did for WoW grossly outshines any negative onsets that may or may not have been brought on by the X-LFD/PvP. We keep hearing these generic "I quit" posts, personally I think they just wanted to quit WoW for the "right reasons" to makethemselves feel better about their decision to leave it.

I've been skating around the issue, thanks for barring with me. Currently there is no way to quantify any damage, if any the X-LFD/X-PvP did to the WoW community. Feelings of community are personal subjective stances that are highly susceptible to human error. People are telling us that quit because of the X-LFD in one paragraph, but yet if you follow them into their later posts they admit to playing the next expansion, so clearly it isn't a very big issue as people say it has become. If someone can demonstrate subscriptions went south after the implication of the X-LFD then they'd have their evidence, frankly everyone tries to avoid that evidence and goes straight to anecdotal evidence.

When examining the X-LFD issue, all we have to do is notice that Blizzard didn't scrap it, they expanded it's function and other games have adopted it. This makes it a success, there is no way to look it other than a massive success. Why on earth would people be posting in another game forum asking for a feature if it wasn't a massive success? People are more concerned with making it seem like a failure than presenting arguments to convince us that it may not work in SWTOR. Who knows, not all games are similar to each other, maybe there are specific reasons why a X-LFD tool wouldn't work in this type of a game, they should be spending more time trying to look for those kind of reasons instead of trying to discredit a known market hit.

Now, I'm willing to compromise and implement the X-LFD in stages so server stability and cohesion isn't affected, whatever that means. I was fortunate to end up a very populated server so whether it's X-LFD or internal won't it affect me all. Well actually that's a bit of a lie I can't find anything in the day hours, I doubt anyone can either. The only reason I am advocating is for the other players who will probably just quit without voicing their concerns and leaving the rest of the population on their backwater server in a terrible state.

/rant off

I wouldn't recommend trying to have a logical conversation with that person. If you scroll back a few pages in the thread I've listed some blatant lies she's committed and not owned up too.

I'm going to keep making this point. LFD do not make people lazy nor does it remove the social interaction in this game. Do you know how I know this? We have a PvP que. It finds a group for you and guess what, people still talk, chat, even coordiate when they all get grouped up. The social landscape of the game has not been destroyed and people have not gotten lazy.

Expanding this feature to include flashpoints will have the same effect the PvP tool is already having....allowing people to enjoy the game while out doing stuff rather than just sitting around in fleet all the time.

LFD tool in WOW was used at your own risk. If you "had" to do a dungeon you used it. 50% of the time there was a least one jerk yelling "hurry, let's go, don't do it that way do it this way...." Sometimes I got a good group and we ran several more dungeons together because the chances of getting another "good" group was slim.

In SWTOR I have all but given up on 2+ quests. Public chat has proved to be less than useful. The Who feature works, but very slowly. I am not one of those people that have four hours to wait for an answer. I guess if I played eight hours a day it might work out well.

You have to decide if you can put up with the 12 year old jerks in LFG so that you can get your 2/4+ quests done. I think putting up with the jerks is worth it.

Round and Round we go, eh? /Ignore is as amazing on forums as it is in game!

Amen.

Thank you all for the constructive feedback. I would like to know explain better some points that I made that have been called into question.

This is exactly why I used it as well, I don't deny that I used it, it's just I feel that the negatives the system brought outweigh the positives. This is highly opinionated though and everyone experience could be different. Thus we now move into why I brought Gear Score up in the first place. On my server back in WoW, GS only came around when Bliz added a built in gear check to the LFD tool. People now needed to know their score and how it was compiled in order to improve it so they can run instances. People started downloading the addon and everything went downhill. Elitism was horridly rampant.

I'm not saying people weren't kicked due to gear before GS. I'm just saying, in my personal experience, that it got worse and blown out of proportion. In my mind due to this experience Wrath LFD and GS were something that walked hand in hand. I didn't even think that this wasn't true on all servers. I do now see how they could be separate issues and will drop this tangent.



As I stated, you don't even need to reduce the CD on the Emergency Fleet Pass, although I don't know why they felt the need to increase it by so much, because there is already a FP shuttle on almost every planet. However I do realize that so people wouldn't want to even do that so the best option is to make it so you could accept the group invitation and not be immediately teleported. When you are ready to go you just hit a "Travel to FP" button and away you go. Of course a timer, maybe 5min, would have to be put on this so somebody doesn't hold the group up for an hour.




I wholeheartedly agree.

Now that you mention it I do remember this being issue from BC to Cata. I wouldn't be against having a random option that could by pass locks. I do think having my specific ques like I previously described would be a vast improvement over only random ques. We should have the best of both worlds!

You bring up a valid point about the fear of it being abused. I could see how people could go Batman on trolls and ninjas but at the same time someone posts "LOL LOOK AT THIS N00B!!!!!" and shame people for the wrong reasons.

Thus I open it for discussion: What would a better reporting tool look like/be?

I firmly believe that if a LFD tool is implemented that a better reporting system is needed.

"Why? Just suck it up and get over."

For the same reason people have locks on doors. It isn't to keep bad guys out, bad people will still break into your house regardless of a lock if they really want to, it is to keep good people good.

If there were some sort of consequence for being a indecent person than normal people would be discouraged from becoming trolls just because others are trolls.


Here here! These are indeed great options and ideas. i would love to see a xserver friend and ignore list. I don't know how feasible it would be but we can hope! As I also stated i am a for role options and I will accept, expecially after reading more of the constructive posts in these forums, that the option for xserver ques may be an inevitablity. It NEEDS to be an option though, or they could pull from the server first and then after 10min or so start to pull from xserver.

Keep the constructive feedback coming!

Amen, it works in pvp which have a worse crowd it'll work in pve

The biggest reason pro-LFD advocates harp on the ignore function is because its the only way (and i can't stress enough the one and only way) to ensure you don't have to mess around with people you've had a bad experience with in the past. Server blacklists don't get it done. And mostly I'm just not comfortable with the more punitive suggestions people make - its always too open to abuse. Ignore fixes the problem in a more permanent way. Barring something truly obnoxious, you don't have to report someone you'll never group with again.

I think a better way to go about this is to put more control (even via cross server) in players hands regarding who they group with using an LFD tool. Its been suggested multiple times (some of them in this thread) that along with cross server friends lists/chat, you should have the option to rate players that you've grouped with previously. A purely personal rating that only serves to rate your preference for grouping with that person again in the future and isn't in any way attached to the player being rated. You'd be able to rate people up or down and the LFD system would then attempt to place you with people you've previously rated up while avoiding those you've previously rated down. Yes, you'd still be subject to bad behavior while you're populating your lists, but it avoids the possibility of abuse that would come with a more public rating system.

How i would do it is leave things the way they are. Allow players to group up within chat or there guild to run a flashpoint. Then add A thing called Group finder. This would just group 4, 8 or 16 players up. You would pick if you wish to be a tank, DPS or Healer and what Flashpoint or Op you wish to run. From their make them get themselfs to the Flashpoint or Op.