Antiquated MMO Social Organization

While you cannot force players into roles they may not like, you can encourage them to at least try. Blizzard did this in WoW by creating a system of rewarding players to queue in under-represented roles. The rewards were limited but the chance (no matter how minute) to get that cool mount or vanity pet, balanced the queue times: prior to this system DPS queue times were upwards of an hour (on average during peak times) even with cross-server grouping, with the reward system in place DPS queue times dropped to 20 minutes (on average during peak times). The funny part is that even after a 66% decrease in average queue time for DPS players still complained

Yes, initially there were a lot of "bad" tanks and healers. But that did not last nearly as long as some claimed it would or as long as some claim it did.

Further, in all candor SWTOR is a LOT easier than WOW. I have done a number of HM (tier 1) FPs with only three - two DPS and me as healer. You have to be a little more careful about CC and not pulling too much, and you do wipe a little more, but it can be done. My point is that even with the potential for "bad" healers and tanks, groups can muddle through with a little patience and attention to detail.

In 1.5 you'll be able to respec for free as a subscriber making a dual spec a reality and giving extra incentive for the field respec droid.

This should help if you want to be proactive and change your role to get into groups faster. The only thing you can control in an MMO is what you do yourself.

That is interesting. Perhaps people could "flag" for each mode and only see people in those modes kinda like blizzard phasing. So as you said OWPvP would have the full run of the "realm" but only see people that "opt in". If you flag "RP" then you would only see people who "RP".

Praising a game's good points is not necessarily being a 'fanboy' of the game. And would be rather key to let those of us know what you actually think would work.

The problem that comes up, again and again, is the fault of the players and not the game mechanics itself. A lot of players like the lack of responsibility that comes with DPSing, and so MMO games will ALWAYS have a surplus of them. They have a need to be 'top' of the chart, something you rarely do when you are tanking or healing. To be honest, I'd like to see classic UO come back... but the type of person that plays MMOs today make it impossible.

Trying new things can (and has) been the downfall of MMOs in the past. The only way to remove this issue with LFG ques is to remove roles all together. But this does not necessarily work well. Think GW2, running the instance with a group of thieves is possible but slow and sometimes very painful. There will be a few 'elite' players who can still do it quickly without a problem, but as a whole the "No Role" concept simply does not work out flawlessly in this game. (Don't mistake this for bashing GW2, I think it is an enjoyable game.)

A lot of the big MMO gaming companies do keep an eye on new projects. Elder Scrolls Online, for example, promises a no class type of game play. But the question remains if it will require you to fill a certain roll if instances/group zones exist. If there are no roles to 'fill' the next question is 'how well does it work'. If a company were to stumble upon the solution, I can almost promise that other MMOs would adopt the solution in some way as quickly as possible. (Mimicry is the greatest form of flattery after all).

But instead of removing roles, why not simply 'opt' a larger group (slightly harder instance) and allow more DPS into said group? For example if we have 2 tanks and 2 healers in que, but 9 dps, you will have 5 people sitting out until the next tank and healer que up. But if the system were to place 4 dps in the group (making it a group of 6) you would only have 1 dps sitting out. The problem would be coding such a system. The problem would be adjusting current flashpoints. The problem would be balancing loot to compensate for more players. (Same amount of loot but more players never ends well.)

Quite honestly my solution is this; Get more people to play as tanks/healers and que up.

If they ADDED an option to the interface editor to "save button configurations" this would be a "work around for" or "way to implement" dual spec and incentivize people to buy the field respec as you said, rather than have to go back to the fleet.

I think you should have been around back in the "antiquated" days when there were NO fancy tools to find groups.

What they did have were reasons to group. Without those, all the fancy tools won't make a speck of difference. Any game that makes it possible, even preferred to solo from 1-50 has a major problem at its core that must be undone or it will forever remain a solo game.

i beg to differ,,wows success grounded in two things: TONS of faceroll solo content, packed in

a big, fluffy world,,,the easiness of the gameplay enhanced the immersion, because u could

basically spam a couple of buttons,,this game would benefit a lot from the same