Dungeon Finder Needed Badly

Just want to pop in to say that everytime I log into the game, I spend like 20 mins looking for group and then end up logging off to do some boring dungeon in warcraft because I can. I dont even want to play wow, but I do because its easy to do stuff with a group of people. Im at the point where I dont even log in anymore and just go back to WoW and I dont even relaly like playing wow. I want to play SWTOR but its super frustrating

Am fully columni geared + rataka pieces , and I am still doing the hardmodes ..
But I still support that Dungeon Finder be Needed badly for the beter of the game.

Sorry community creation is nice , but sadly this is feature that should be implemented ASAP.
I can understand those people who do not want it .
But even now I don´t have problems forming a group or inviting people to a group.
But I sure do not wish that road on others , who are too shy and modest .

See... this is one of the things people need to get right here.

People that're asking for this are not asking for a wow clone. They're asking for a system that will allow them to find groups - which will keep them playing.

You cannot have a community without players.

Yes, we do have a lfg - but it's not that great since no one uses it. That said... we need a different Flash Point finder that's more obvious.

With this in mind, yes, I want server only LFG first - I personally prefer it.... but honestly it goes back to this - cannot have a community without players. If x-server is the thing that 'saves' low pop servers because we don't get server merges/xfers, then that's what needs done. We'll see what system they put in though, and where they go from there...

Leveling up it's been a PITA for me to get groups running on my various characters - population spread makes grouping a bit harder than it 'should' be.

An obvious server-only lfg would probably solve my issue.... for prime time. During early morning (midnight on) it won't help as much.... maybe once I'm into HM but not before. Which hurts for me and my partner, but I could deal with it with server-only if the LFG were more obvious.... but the more people we lose because they can't find groups, the less a server only function will do for those of us that remain - unless it pulls people back in.

I prefer it go cross server right off the bat but give those who want it single server a check box for server only groups.

With the option for single server there is no reason to not allow cross server.

I hear ya man.. I sit here and play this while watching my wife bounce from wow to rift doing lfg zones constantly.
I do it myself at times since i have subs to both also,

With out a lfg system this game will fail in time.

Unless I'm missing something painfully obvious, the LFG system we have in the game right now is the atrocious thing that flags you for LFG, and allows you to set a 20-30 character comment, yes?

I'm afraid that isn't going to work, even if everyone used it, simply due to how the game's split up. On Harbinger, the majority of the playerbase (at least on the Republic Side) is either on the Fleet or on Illium. If you are anywhere else in the game, the current LFG interface doesn't work, as the player search system has two large limitations: the first being it truncates the list (usually to a max of 100 people), and that it's only capable of allowing you to see a pool of people on the planet you're currently on.

Right there are the two larger problems, not to mention that right now, it's simply easier to use the old school method of shouting in general to try to form a group than try to get a comment on what you want to do in a broken player search function.

As other posters have said: A LFG tool is simply the best fix to this in a game that's so heavily instanced and spread out. Zones aren't easy to navigate like in WoW to get you back to a capital city. You either use a 18 hour cool down or buy a vendor item that's only available to people with a Security Key to get to the Republic Fleet, and once there you're stuck shouting for a group instead of questing, as opposed to WoW or Lotro where you can use a designated global LFF (ala Lotro) or the zone's general chat for a group, since the zone usually contains the instance.

Yes, Bioware tried to resolve the latter issue by adding Flashpoint Couriers, but then the problem arises of "Well what Flashpoint are we looking for, are the other people on the planet in the same level range as the flash point I want to run?" In WoW, an Instance is tied directly with a zone in terms of what level it is (Deadmines to Westfall, levels 15-20 for example), so before the LFG tool, shouting in a zones general was a wonderful way to get a group for a leveling dungeon.

And of course, then there's the problem of wanting to do dailies whilest also wanting to do a dungeon. With the way the current LFG system is set up (again, unless I'm missing something here), it simply isn't viable to go to Belsavis or Illium, do your dailies while also LFG, since you never know how many people are going to be on either planet as opposed to the fleet at any given time, and even if there are people, it's a guarantee there will be less there than on the fleet for most servers.

A lack of LFG tool would be fine in Star Wars if the game had an easier to access capital city, and a built in global LFG channel that everyone can access right out of the gate. Star Wars has neither, and with how heavily instanced and spread out the game is already (not to mention that the Republic Fleet is the central hub for all but two Flashpoints), there's really no question anymore if a LFG isn't needed. It is, and it must be added, or there's going to be a lot of unhappy PvEers in the future.

Hell, Heroics Groups are more or less dead now on Harbinger outside of the level 50 daily ones on Belsavis and Illium simply because it's too hard to find a group for them on a leveling planet that may only have 20-30 people on at any given time.

Yea, I pref server only.... but at this point server only is like putting a band-aid over a sucking chest wound - it's not going to do a damn thing worth mentioning. Especially when looking at low pop/off peak hour play times.

You can make it level specific, and make it level/AC specific.

IE: I searched "34 Mercenary" and got one on Taris, one on Nar Shadda and one on The Aurora. That said, this does not solve the issue if there's over 100 of a class and the one LFG is bumped off showing because there's too many.

The current system - if it weren't hidden, and people actually used it, would technically work.... but people don't tend to flag, so it's a useless system. I /who people that are posting LFG all the time and they're not flagged in the system.

I can't tell if you're LFG or LFM if you don't post it in the system - I just can't.

But the current LFG system, as has been stated, still requires you to sit around waiting at the Fleet until a group can be formed.

What a lot of us want is the ability to continue levelling up on planets while either queued for a group for a FP or keeping an eye on a universal LFG channel.

Not exactly true. *if* they intended it to work like the LFG used in FFXI (which is exactly what it appears to mirror) you're able to run around with your LFG flag up and occasionally check /who to see who's looking for groups, who's looking for the instances you want, and form groups while out farming/questing with your flag up.

It works. It's worked in FFXI that way since 2002 in Japan or 2003 US - whichever you want to mark as the start of that game. That LFG system is still used in FFXI as far as I know, 10 years later.

In FFXI, to a point, how well you're known, how well you play your class etc, depends how fast you get a group, and determines, if you're the DPS that sits for the day with a flag up, or if you're the one that gets picked up as soon as you log on - if you're not the one forming your own groups to avoid the wait. Obviously class/class population plays into that. If you played the class that was most common/considered useless, even if you were an awesome player, you didn't get picked up unless you established a rep.

Mind you, in that game, if you ran a character up, that was your character - for all classes/jobs. IE my character was Nightfall - my jobs were... 68white mage (healer), 60 beastmaster, 40 red mage (healer/debuffs) .... If I got to be well known on the WHM job, when people searched my name and saw me on the others when they leveled other jobs, I was more likely to get picked up than the random guy that no one had really seen around before.

Now, this is pure speculation, however, I believe, what happens/happened in FFXI when I was playing, is what the devs for SWTOR wanted. With legacy titles helping with cross-character recognition for people knowing who they've grouped with and enjoyed grouping with once they get to where they're going.

The issue is that most players are not familiar with the LFG system, don't want to use it, or simply don't realize we have it. We all seem very reliant/set on the concept 'I have to spam LFG in a hub, or I won't get a group at all'. Many, I'm sure, also don't realize how far you can narrow those searches down to get the groups they want. The comments I've seen saying 'it shows who's in my zone, that's it' actually show that very clearly.

If a population doesn't use a tool because it's out-dated or because they don't know how, the tool is useless. In this case, TOR has both an out-dated system (I'll call it - I enjoyed it in FFXI.... however...), and one that people don't seem to understand how to fully use.

I'll call a spade a spade in this case. The system is/was dated, just because it works/worked for FFXI, does not mean it is ideal. My Ideal would be a dungeon finder which fills two needs.

1. Finding a group quickly
2. Helping low population servers(low population time) players find groups quickly

Which.... the best suggestion I've seen for that is the one with server only/optional cross server rolled into one LFFP system.