Dungeon Finder Needed Badly

I haven't logged into the game in a while, came on today and saw the 1.2 trailer. Some pretty exciting stuff. I have to say though the LFG tool really is necessary. I've never been one for standing around waiting for something to happen when I could be off gathering mats or playing the space missions. I can't find a decent guild because no one seems to use the forums much since they aren't server specific. I enjoyed the game all the way to 50 (Agent), the storyline was awesome. It pretty much was a single player game for me though, met some cool folks but they aren't on anymore either. Hopefully they'll get an LFG system and I'll be back on again soon.

Regards

Well played the tera beta today and while they dont have a cross server lfg for the beta the have said it will be there by launch. Was pretty fun still some bugs but honestly cbt3 for tera felt more polished than the launch of swtor.
At the end of the night jump over on rift and my wife and myself ran to cross server lfg runs and had a blast. Oh no one ninja'ed any thing no one dropped and the groups were very polite.

I have followed swtor since 2008 thats 4 years of looking forward to swtor. My swtor account expires on the 20th of this month i will not be renewing.

BW has the nerve to give pvp players cross server and then snubs there nose at pve players with the promise of single server lfg months and months from now!

So here is my wallet talking. No word on cross server lfg means no money from this player any more!

Right on brother, I wanted to finish some things but in 25~ days or whatever its at now I'll be out till a proper tool is in place.

I'm thinking of trying the Rift Trial, how big is the d/l for the trial?

This.

Currently I'm pushing my Agent to finish the main storyline, and then I'm outta here. I have 7 days left and I will not be renewing. I find it unbelievable that they expect pve players to be content to wait for 2-3 months for an lfg tool which won't even be cross-server.

Never thought I say this, but I'm going to watch the pandas roll into Azeroth. At least I don't have to waste my time there to get something done, I can actually use it.

Also, I'm not paying a monthly fee for a singleplayer game. Get me an lfg which is on par with other examples, and I might renew subscription.

On a side note, lfg has nothing to do with "casuals". If people measure hardcores at time wasted for nothing, I'm gladly a casual. Lfg is about accessibility.

I've been away from the game for the past two months, and a major reason for that is I want to play group content.

My experience thus far has seen trouble finding like minded individuals that enjoy PvE content. More and more, I find I am being asked to PvP rather than do flashpoints or any of the other group content. PvP is not the game I want to play, and since there is A: no LFG channel to avoid being drowned out by spammers in general, and B: there is no fallback plan like PvE queuing, I'm stuck. I am totally bored with soloing. Every time I get a flashpoint mission, I get discouraged because when I do manage to get into a flashpoint either some noob needs on gear he doesn't need or the party falls apart because someone's internet connection fails, and we have to wait around for nearly half an hour to find a replacement.

No more. I promised myself I would not do group content until BioWare fixes this problem with a creative way to search for party globally or introduces a party queue for flashpoints. Since then, I have played less and less until finally, I stopped playing altogether. It's sad--one of my all time favorite games is not being played because every time I look at the start up icon I remember the pains it takes to create and maintain a functioning party for the things I enjoy most.

The bottom line is we need to have choices. This isn't a bid for instant gratificationists. This is a bid for people who work, have school, or other priorities than games; moreover, this is a bid for people who know that time is precious to them. Four hours looking for a group that ultimately never sees its mission through is a massive waste of time. The human factor of this is we get discouraged. Bioware says that they will lose players if they instate a cross-server dungeon finder. I say they are losing a bigger bulk of their player base by forcing us to fit in with the croud.

Social politics is not what I signed up for. I am not a very social person when I am in game. I have good reasons. I am a mature and functioning adult who values his time spent wherever he is. When I am playing games, I do not like the experience to stop because someone feels I should be chatty Cathy, make friends, and use them to work at group content. I am sorry if this offends you, but I do not play games to cultivate social relationships--if I wanted to do that, I would log off, shut my PC down, and call up one of my real-life friends. This game is just something to pass the offhours between school and work. It's nothing more and nothing less. Anything else isn't fun for me.

These are some last words for those who don't understand. Choice is all we are asking for; we are asking for the choice to do what we find fun in the way we like to acheive it. No one is forcing you to use a queue to find a party, but we are asking for the choice. This choice in no way conflicts with the interests or design concepts BioWare has in mind. This does not change the game in any way other than the method to accomplish simple tasks. Instance queues streamline the way players find party members. Cross-sever or not, this method is an invaluable tool for those of us wishing to make the most of our time.

Some more LFG info from an interview with James Ohlen:

"Ten Ton Hammer: So possibly before 1.3?

James Ohlen: At the earliest, it would be 1.3. We’re aiming for a shorter turnaround time for 1.3 than the time between 1.1 and 1.2.

Ten Ton Hammer: So what do you prioritize after you get 1.2 out the door?

James Ohlen: Well, that was part of the guild summit. One of the things that we found that was really important was the dungeon finder or group finder. That was a gain of learning in that when the game launched, I was like, “Alright, we’re going to have a whole bunch of fans playing the game and it’ll probably take them 3-4 months until level 50 becomes the place where a majority of where the people are as that we have over 200 hours of leveling time.” But then the average gameplay session turned out to be 6 hours, which is ridiculous. We hired an independent group to do a measurement and they said that it was higher than any other game that EA has ever done. It’s higher than Skyrim by double, it’s higher than any other MMO that we’ve ever measured. Fans play the game and they played for 6 hours.

People just raced through the content and suddenly we had tons of people at the end-game. At which point, the dungeon finder became much more important because when you’re at the end-game, you want to do the group content and group content requires you to find a group. So we pushed that up in priority really quick based upon the telemetry showing us how many fans were getting to level 50. That was a surprise to us. It was both a good and bad surprise. Good in that people are obviously having tons of fun with the game. Bad in that they’re getting to level 50 much faster than our expectations were. I think that’s ok though because what we’re finding is that people at level 50 have a really good opinion of the game, even people who quit. When they quit at level 50, a huge percentage…and I’ve talked with they Mythic guys who have telemetry going back over a decade…and they’ve never seen numbers like those in our exit surveys. One of our questions is would you come back to the game, and the percentage is huge. It means that even though people are racing through the game and get to the end and they have a chance to leave, they want to come back. Which is good because it means that when we give them reasons to come back, they will. That’s kind of our strategy. We want to make sure that fans love the game. They don’t have to go through a grind, they don’t feel like they have to work to make it fun. So even if they do lapse, they have a good taste in their mouth. They do want to return to the game at some point."

http://swtorhub.com/dash-everything-...ew-james-ohlen

Ok firstly I'd love to read more into where they got the information that people playing SWTOR were playing it for double the amount of time people were playing games like Skyrim.

Secondly, they clearly didn't do any bloody research into how fast people consume content in an MMO.

My personal opinion is that a Server only LFG tool would be great, if they merged some servers. Otherwise it'll be just as useless as talking in chat now as well, most servers are empty anyway.

And another Ohlen quote:

"The number of level 50s is a lot higher than we thought it was going to be. Therefore, our group finder has become a much higher priority. It's essentially our highest-priority feature that is not going in 1.2. If there is one feature that 1.3 will have, it will be the group finder.

"A lot of our feedback from the level 50s revolves around the dungeon finder. We have two operations, four level 50 flashpoints, and the hardmodes for all of them. We have a ton of PvE high-level content, but our metrics show that a lot of it hasn't been consumed by level 50s. Dungeon finder is the key there. That's one of the reasons that PvP is so popular because PvP is so much easier to get into than PvE. Once I started getting that data I was like, 'Oh, OK.' I knew that group finder was important. When leveling up, like we found during beta, you don't really need the group finder, but when you reach the max level, it becomes very important."

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/03...or-the-future/

Hmm i notice the same issue too, ppl which i group with while lvling suddenly all stop playing. i add them as friend but none of them is online now. hmmm