Dungeon Finder Needed Badly

Something like this would be nice - http://i.imgur.com/57vZf.jpg

I already canceled my sub. this game sucks. done.

Just officially cancelled my sub this AM. I put the lack of a LFD tool as my major reason.

If the LFD haters want to play by themselves they are free to do so. I have better things to do.

all i will say abouts the OP cry for a Dungeon find is .... GOOD GOD YES PLEASE ADD THAT NOWWWWWWW. thanks all is said

I can understand your emotions in the matter but remarks like this nothing for our side of the conversation and only deminish our POV. Try and keep the remarks more friendly.

Oh sorry I didnt know this was a kiss-*** convention.

It shows the devs that we DO have emotions, and our emotions DO have consequences.

And if they only want to cater to the ultra-polite, then I dont want to play it anyway.

They sold us a car with 4 wheels and no engine. They just put a picture of an engine in its place and told us its real. And since we had no way of seeing it in person till we spent money, we are the suckers for falling for it.

I have not cancelled my sub, but if things do not get better soon I'll have to. The game no longer serves as my escape from reality if I cannot really play the game because of the difficulty in group formation. I'm getting bored of solo & PVP which are things I do just to pass the time while waiting for a group. IMO not having an LFG is a serious impediment to group play.

I do not understand why the naysayers are hung up on some kind of "automated" bit, who says it is entirely automated? Other LFG systems (such as DDO) put the group leader in total control of defining who/what they're looking for, what they are running, loot policy, and even approval/rejection of individual group applicants.

This isn't rocket science. It has been solved and done before. Just do it already!

Agreed.

Just put out a basic one at least to begin with. Auto select a tank, and a healer and some dps. Later when the flashpoints get more tuned and tweaked and require better group adaptation, then make the Finder tweak and tune its own group placement parameters. Its not that big of a deal.

The solution to this problem is not an automatic, cross-server LFG tool that encourages asocial behaviour in a game that's supposed to be social, the solution to this problem is twofold:

1. Merge lower population servers.

2. Increase maximum server population.

3. Implement a server-wide LFG tool and channel which allows people to mark themselves as looking for a group for specific instances, in specific roles, with a note, and then allows other people to assimilate them into their group as needed.

It's clear that lower population servers are the number one issue when people cry for cross-server LFG, because they want to capitalize on the player base that their realm doesn't have. The solution to this is simply merge realms that drop below a certain average activity level.

Increasing server maximum population will also increase the odds of finding a group. This is felt harder Republic side, as even at times when the server is HEAVY there may be only 80 people or so on the Republic Fleet. But this is a problem of underlying faction imbalance, and cross-server LFG or not, this will not be fixed unless the devs address why people overwhelmingly roll Empire rather than Republic.

A server-wide LFG tool allows people to conveniently mark themselves as looking for a specific group, and allows other people to find them. The current tool is underpowered insofar as searching for and finding people, since people just type their own note, and can't categorize themselves.

The server-wide LFG channel also allows people to just go into that channel if they're looking for group play in general, and go into any group they see "spamming" which interests them.

The issues with cross-server, automatic LFG tools is that they represent a fundamental paradigm shift on the emphasis of the game. Instead of a game you play with other people, it becomes a game you play, with other people as the means to accomplish that end. Instead of the game being the means, and people the end, this relationship is inverted.

The ability to form a lasting connection with someone based on grouping with them once in a randomly composed group of people from all over the world is very limited. Your can't really contact them again for a follow up group, you can't really add them to friends, and attempts to encourage this (Real ID) have revolved around the disclosure of information (e-mail address) that people would rather keep secret.

There's also the fact that forming groups automatically is going to form categorically inferior groups to manual selection, which means lower skill, lower co-ordination, lower group cohesion, and certain social activities -- such as vent, which was standard for heroic groups manually formed in early BC -- are eschewed in favour of an assembly line style of group activity completion. You're there to get through it, get your rewards, and leave, the journey -- which was supposed to be the whole point -- is lost amidst this.

I played WoW for years before cross-server LFD, and for years afterwards, and I can honestly say that the game is much worse for it. Sure, the cross-server LFD tool is attractive to the "casual" player, who thinks that 90 minutes is plenty of time to do something in a game that requires hours upon hours of dedication, but at the end of the day, it just ruins everything that the genre had going for it.

It's like automatic game finding/joining in FPSes, except in FPSes you can always come back to a good server (assuming the game support dedicated servers), whereas with automatically-formed PuG groups, the group is lost and you can never really reform it.