A Meeting of the Minds on LFG.

Join a Guild

Guilds are the best LFG tool in all MMOs. There's a sense of community, you can often find people doing the same content as you and people tend to know their roles.

PuGs in any form or however they are contrived make for a poor group experience. Participating in them is inviting grief.

Get some IRL friends together, hang out in the forums, do whatever it takes to find good people to hang out with and form or join a guild.

there you go

problem solved.

have a nice day

people play games for enjoyment.

i am asking you how me enjoying auto-grouping with other players who also enjoy auto-grouping is going to stop you from enjoying grouping up manually with other players who also enjoy grouping up manually?

Are you going to answer?

I did answer.

You can find/join/create a guild, you can find, make and maintain friends, but somehow finding a couple of people to do small party content is beyond your abilities. For some reason, your brain shuts off and you can't figure out how to type or put a group together. So much so, someone has to create a tool to do it for you.

I'd be fine with all of that, if it just ended there....but it never does.

So you get your group finder and then you "need" the devs to create a loot distribution tool because the loot is not going out how you would distribute it and of course there is always a risk of someone playing ninja. After that gets implemented, its time to start telling people how to play and how to gear their character because your time is so valuable and the call goes out for a gear score type thing to make sure youre being grouped with people worthy of your company.

All this has been done before and it sucked all those times. Getting easy groups is great until you have to deal with the consequences of easy groups. Which you will never do because you couldn't even get it together enough to run four man content.

This whole debate is tragically lame and Im supposed to take my cues from people who can't perform the most basic of all functions in a group/party based game.

I don't see an answer saying how me and players like me are stopping you and players like you from grouping up manually together?

Bravo! Encore!

Reading comprehension is very useful...

My response was thus:

People flock to incentives. Providing a cross-server LFG tool is an incentive (i.e. easy groups), therefore, people flock to it.

This means that the mere presence of an LFG tool creates an incentive which drains the pool of people who will find a group manually, or use any vestigial tool for this purpose (in WoW's case, the tool was entirely eliminated), which impacts the ability of people who want to develop a sense of community to form their own PuGs.

Moreover, people are very often incapable of seeing the macro effects of their aggregate actions. Individual people switching from finding groups the traditional way to using a cross-server LFG tool will not believe that they -- individually -- are causing the problem, and will not -- therefore -- exercise restraint in not using the tool to find their own groups, they will, however, feel the effects of this action in aggregate -- i.e. by all/most members of the player base.

Lastly, once this proverbial ball is rolling, people will not "roll back" the action for the same reason stated above: They feel that their individual action of stopping usage of the system will not revert the effect as the effect is the result aggregate action, and therefore they feel that their reversal will have little-to-no effect, so they continue, hoping that someone -- not them -- will start, and that they can bandwagon once the movement is big enough that they won't feel the effects.

so, you are saying you don't REALLY enjoy grouping up manually, nor does anyone else?

that if there was an auto-grouping tool, that you and players like you, would use it because you all really don't enjoy grouping up manually?

No. He's saying the masses using the tool will eventually overcome and assimilate any resistance because that's what the masses do. Ultimately, those who would do it a different way will have to succumb if they want to be afforded the same opportunities as everyone else.

I enjoy grouping up manually because I know the effects of not grouping up manually, and because I enjoy the effects of grouping up manually.

Other people resent it either because they don't care about the effects of grouping up manually (i.e. people who'd be better-served playing not-an-MMO) or because they lack the analytic ability (or will) to see the effects of another solution.

It's like having a job, except the effects of having a job are much more obvious.

You could say that people don't like having a job, and you might be somewhat correct (or technically correct). But people like money, and, barring that, like the things that money can buy, and therefore they work.

If you said that someone would never have to work again, they'd probably jump at the opportunity, but everyone can never have to work again, they can just stop working. The issue is that then they'd run out of money, and the things that money buys, which they like (or need to survive), and therefore, they keep working.

So basically, the reasons that LFD is a bad idea is the same reason socialism (or "welfarism" if you prefer that term) is a bad idea: Perverse incentives.

I really don't understand one objection raised against LFG tools: you might get grouped with a griefer or a bad player. What exactly prevents this from happening when you put together a group with general chat spam?

Edit: and someone just compared an LFD tool to socialism. Nobel Prize incoming.