f13.net

From the Guild Wars 2 thread...
What exactly is wrong with it?

I understand that the "teleport everybody inside the instance", "place quest mobs inside the instance" and "much faster queue times" are quite popular and have made instances casual playable again. What are the most serious problems and how do you suggest they be addressed?

The only objection I've ever found vaguely sensible is the one that it essentially killed the PUG scene on individual servers. It isn't something I care about personally, but at least it makes sense.

From what I can understand, generally people object to the fact that it's SO easy to form a group, there's no sense of ... I dunno, shared somethingsomething when you're in there. It's you and four strangers, and there's no reason at all to get to know them, because after the dungeon is over the chances you'll ever see those people again is really low. Before that, you were only going to meet people on your server for a PUG, and so if they were cool, you might actually make a new friend.

I have met people from my server in a PUG, and even became friendly with one or two, after the LFD tool went in, but I believe now it's all the servers in the pool rather than just the battlegroup, so that unlikely occurance is even less likely.

I think it's a fine tradeoff, personally, but I am generally not playing the game to meet new people. If I do, cool, if I don't, I won't even notice.

Only thing I found with LFD that is problematic is endemic of the internet itself. You are basically anonymous when you join unless by some chance you get thrown on with a person or two from your own server. That allows carte blanche to act... well it's been said many o' time. Since I did my time in hell in FFXI looking for a group as a DRK for hours on end, I don't see the evils. Items drop, they get ninja'd, run dungeon again, get same items, repeat...people join group and afk, group takes 1 minute to vote kick, new person pops in...person joins who is a flaming asshat and talks shit, leave group, requeue.

I honestly suspect this is the EQ syndrome growing into WoW... everyone wants the new people off their lawn.

This.  You don't play with people on your server very often if ever again.  So basically instead of interacting with people on your own server, you get people from your battlegroup who you likely don't give a fuck about.

I'll be honest, I didn't give much of a fuck about the PUG situation on my server considering how hard it was to run a dungeon before LFD.  I like LFD and the days of having to sit outside the instance and spam looking for group being gone make me happy.

Even though I personally love the LFD tool, I can see people having a problem with it for three reasons.

1. Social: Personally, I couldn't care less what EpICpWner has to say in a dungeon, but some people like to casually chat is up and meet new people. Also, since you are never going to see these people again, there is absolutely no connection to them.

2. Immersion: LFD destroys it. The dungeons are tasks to be completed, and it just so happens you need five people to do these ones. I think after the second or third time, dungeons become this way anyways, but thats just me.

3. Nostalgia: 'Ah remember when I stood outside BRD for two hours spamming in OOC for that healer I needed way back in vanilla? Good times.'

I'm with Sjofn, the trade off was more then worth it. Since this was ported over from the Rift discussion, I think that if it is going to be 'like WoW but X (being the class system) and launches without LFD, they are going to lose a lot of subs. It's become one of those QOL tools that is very hard to live without, although IIRC Rift has an auto join system for it's eponymous rifts, so who knows.

Number one problem of the LFD system for me is not being able to group with the same people again if I want to.  This at least would be alleviated if it were restricted to one server, or if they would add cross server tells, chat, and friends list so we could keep in contact with people we actually liked grouping with through LFD.  When I was leveling my most recent character I grouped with a couple people and we spent much of the day together by not leaving group, but of course eventually we had to break up the group.  To my surprise, I saw them again the next day, and we did a few more dungeons together.  Since then I've never seen them again.  I've now forgotten their names since it's been so long.  This is my biggest complaint with the LFD system.

This spreads out into lots of things.  How do people form or join guilds now?  Just apply for them on the forums or something?  Trade chat advertising?  What?  In the old days I used to just start playing on a server, eventually I'd meet some people that I got along with through grouping for stuff, and when I saw that several of the people I like grouping with are in the same guild, I'd eventually ask about joining.  It also means making less friends since there's less interaction, etc, which makes the game as a whole less sticky for me.  If I have no friends and I'm not being successful at advancing my character, hey, I just quit and don't even look back.  If I have friends and I'm not being successful at advancing my character, it's harder for me to leave.  LFD pushes the game more toward 'bring your friends with you or don't bother' because it's harder to get to know people in-game.  And considering most of the friends I have that play MMO's are people I met in-game and have eventually remained in contact with them over the years, taking out that method of getting to know people seriously reduces my interest in the game overall.

Beyond that, the more I use the LFD system the more my attitude toward the other players in it shifts, and not for the better.  I started out being reasonably friendly and behaving as I would in normal pre-LFD groups.  After some time using it, I rarely speak other than to give orders, call people morons and tell them to quit fucking up, and so on.  The people I mention above is one of the last fun groups I've had in LFD where I've actually had fun interacting with people.  Someone else mentioned in a post around here, the DPS in these groups may as well be NPC's at this point.  I don't care what they want anymore, they're so easily replaceable that I don't have to.

I don't really like the LFD tool, although I won't go into the hyperbole quoted in the OP. But when you were grouping with people from your own server, you had to be a decent person. If you were retarded, annoying, or a ninja, you weren't getting your daily done. If you couldn't get your shit together for half an hour, you'd get put on at least 4 ignore lists and probably called out in trade chat. Player's names and guild tags meant a LOT more than they do now, because if you didn't know someone you could just check the guild.

Plus pre-LFD, you actually had to fly to dungeons in order to do them, or at least get a summon into the world outside. You picked up the quests out in the world, then went and did the dungeon and it made sense. WotLK did this particularly well, in that each zone had 1-2 instances that fleshed out the story of those zones. As a result, the dungeons actually made sense instead of just being being drawn out slot machines.

Yeah see, I really don't see how having to pick up quests from the outside world was a good thing, especially the way the vanilla ones did them. Some of them were hidden at the end of a chain, some of them were on an entirely different continent, etc. It wasn't fun at all. I like quests for dungeons, but I don't want to go back to having to hunt down all the quest NPCs or hoping someone can share them with me.

As for porting to a dungeon, that doesn't bother me even a teeny tiny bit. The camera cut to the inside of the dungeon instead of detailing my journey. No problem!

LFD was a blessing that alleviated the problem of getting anyone to do any of the lower level dungeons.

At the highest order it's a roll of the dice. Personally, I've found myself doing random heroics before I did them with my guild so I could learn them in a stress free environment. It's one thing to screw up royally in front of complete strangers, and quite another to do it in front of people who won't let you forget it for the next month when telling jokes.  :grin:

With LFD, I might get into a dungeon with party members I'd rather murder with a rusty spork.

But at least I'm in that dungeon.  I dunno about y'all, but on my server if you didn't have gear two tiers above the dungeon and the achievement for already completing it, good luck on that PUG.

I never had any problems getting into PUGs whatsoever before LFD. No it wasn't as fast, but it wasn't that hard. I used auto-LFG which queued you for random questing in some godforsaken place and therefore put you in the PUG channel. Then I would see who was looking and if they seemed serious I'd send a tell. And if I wanted the daily, I'd put myself up for that. The result was that I very very rarely finished my daily quests before I had groups.

Why don't I like LFD?

The social thing is a big part of it. Not just actually talking in dungeons, but any sense that you might actually group with them again. I used to get invites to guilds and things like that. I had people put me on friends lists and got into raids. With LFD I was lucky to get "hi hi" answered.

I think it also forces dumbing down the skill level. There was much hand wringing over how difficult the new dungeons were and the real reason, just IMHO, was that you were forced to do them with random drooling retards who would randomly abandon the group or kick someone or whatever if things went wrong. I quit the game after a long string of dungeons where the strategy seemed to be "Fuck Crowd Control, rush them, and if we die I'll just quit (or in one case 3 of them in a guild booted the tank and I) and find another group until I get one that's overgeared."

LFD is a great system for a free to play MMO that doesn't have anything but the dungeons and keeps them easy. It's great for world of tanks, where even now in the background of this message I watch my PzKpfw 35 burning. I think it would be great if you wedded it to something like what COX has for combat. But for any sort of real MMO, I thought it was terrible. I play MMOs for the social experience of working with other players to get through something--LFD removed that from the game.

They should have taken the next step with Cata and rebuilt the back-end completely, turning it from a conventional sharded game into one giant server with phased/instanced zones to keep crowding and lag from getting out of hand. At this point the concept of individual servers is nothing but an anachronism that prevents people from socializing, messes up population balance for things like Wintergrasp and Tol Barad, and generally holds back the game.

This isn't UO, where all the shards are at least a little bit different. WoW servers are a hundred copies of the exact same thing in every detail. Having walls between them labeled stuff like "Firetree" and "Cenarion Circle" is just a pain in the ass at this point.

I'm worried that I agree with WUA's recent posts the past few months...  But yeah, they need to just tear down the wall.  There's no reason to have closed servers anymore.

There was always a modicum of comraderie and accountability with a closed shard in WoW.  We knew who the bad guys were in PvP, got to know their names and playstyles.  People got called out for being loot ninjas and got blacklisted.  There was more honor between players back then.

It's all so common fucking denominator now.  Almost everyone is being an internet dick, so why don't I?  It's the only way to get ahead, or at least stay even.  Especially when I'm grouping with Troll86 from server X and Orc 34 from server Y. 

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all sunshine and roses pre-LFD.  But waiting twice as long for a quality group was better than what we have now.

This has been my thought lately, especially after getting back into Guild Wars.  'Server' should be nothing more than a channel you have a preference for, and switching is as easy as clicking a button or two.

This is the nub for me.  I liked LFD in Wrath, but oddly adding the Guild (soft-)requirement to Cata sort of exposed an old issue that I had learned to live without. In every previous game I ever played, guild invites and the social aspect grew out of an initial grouping experience.  Cata sort of assumes you need (or at least want) a guild, but there's no really good way to figure out what guild you might like just by simply playing the game.

EQ2 has an awesome, simply awesome guild recruitment tab.  It shows what the guild style is, a short descriptor about the guild, online officers, classes recruiting... the list goes on.  It's worth checking out the F2P EQ2 just to see it, imo.

I'm in a 2-person guild with an IRL friend on the other side of the country. We play WoW because we both enjoy it and to stay in contact with each other. We use guild chat as a private chat channel, so the only reason we use LFD is to make it easy to get access to dungeons that we previously didn't bother with because finding a group was a PITA. LFD is pretty much perfect for us.

My only current complaint with LFD in Cataclysm is that it's so much more difficult to make up for the inevitable errors random people make. In the past I could cover for a lot of mistakes with a bit of intense healing/bubbling on my disc priest. Not so much anymore. That's more of an overall game direction/philosophy complaint, though.

This is how some found guilds back in the day; aside from either knowing someone before hand of applying via application as if it were a job.

You form a group; if you like them / they're good - maybe you add them to your friends list and ask them later if they want to run something else. If he steals something and / or is a douche; you don't group with him and tell your friends to avoid him.

Now, you sit in town in a queue to be matched with people randomly. Just like cross server PVP killed local server rivalries; cross server PVE killed any last tiny bit of potential to make a new friend in game.

Next, you'll have to wait in a queue just to farm resources. Charge 5$ a month for rights to use a mobile phone app; and farm from your iphone after you've waited the necessary 15 minutes to be teleported to the peacebloom meadows.

I would have LOOOOOOOOVED something like this in WoW for making up raids.

Imagine being able to implement a raid into an online system looking for required classes, gear reqs, style, descriptions, etc and having people contact you via mail with applications. That would make raiding like 10 billion times easier.

It kind of makes the entire game world just a lobby for dungeon runs. Instead of a world where you can find dungeons.

I don't know if they fixed it, but when I was last playing, there were a limited number of guilds and they were listed in order of level, so the list on AB was like 3/4s level 80 guilds that weren't recruiting. Which kind of defeated the purpose.

My response to that is: ok, so what?

There's world out there if you're questing. I don't see how the implementation of better features would stop it from existing.

Sure, at or near end-game it's only a quality-of-life boost.  For leveling though it's completely game-changing.  No single server/side can support a Maraudon or Stockades run any time of day, but 70 of them in a pool together sure can.  Not to mention people that might want to level exclusively through dungeons now can.

Broadly speaking, taking humans out of the matchmaking process is a step in the right direction for casual play.

I will definitely admit grinding out dungeons at lower levels is more entertaining than solo quest grinding. And my feelings about WoW other than dungeons make me an odd bird for hating the LFD system because I absolutely loathe solo quest grinding, I'd rather go back to camping. I guess really, I think WoW is trying to have it both ways and I don't think the result is very good. If you take a simple rampage through and kill everything easily system like CoX, that's great fun, and a great match for an LFD type system. If you take really complicated dungeons where you have to have teamwork and thought and prep and time to drink and all that, then that's great fun, but it really requires a community. WoW's matching complicated dungeons with a total lack of community and it just really doesn't work well. Dungeons are only fun if you bring a group which the LFD system makes virtually impossible or if everyone outgears them, which only happens after you "grind idiots" long enough.

Free to play COX in a fantasy world with LFD and a cash shop would be a WoW killer.

If I'm playing in a world where I'm going to complete content with a bunch of random nobodies that I will never care to know, then why even require me to group in the first place? 

With the addition of LFD, grouping is just a time sink.  While it's still better than not being able to do the content at all, it seems that Blizzard is saying that social ties are less of an issue when it comes to their player retention.  Why not give me 4 NPC's to group with, decrease my random chances at loot, and let me play rather than waiting in a queue?  Seems like it would be a similar experience and I get the added benefit of not having to listen to idiots or have them randomly drop during a run.

I didn't PuG before LFD, I don't PuG after LFD.


All the same noise to me.

I disagree. Grouping has always been a time sink.

This stood out to me after their wanting to turn the WoW forums into the next Facebook.  I don't think they really 'get' social dynamics.

The guild I joined (though I wasn't there right at the beginning), that is one of the most successful raiding guilds on the server formed from about 8 core guys wanting to run UBRS consistently and finding more people in Ironforge chat, in kept snowballing and soon enough it turned into a full scale raiding guild.  That kind of thing just can't happen anymore :-/

Of course it can. There's no cross server LFG for raids, and raiding is basically what UBRS was back then.

I was going to say that was stupid, but Ingmar beat me to the punch.

This matches up really well with the differences between using LFG in Lich King vs Cata.

In LK, I'd have to wait (as a dps) maybe 15 minutes for a group. Sometimes longer, but the point is, not as long as in Cata. But by the time cross-server LFG was in place, the Heroic LK dungeons were faceroll aoe fests, so a couple overgeared toons could carry the rest.

In cata, I cringe at the 40+ minute wait times. That's just one of the reasons I only do heroics with guildmates. The other being the fact that there's social pressure in place, so that when things start to go wrong, we're not calling our groupmates names and/or ragequitting.

I'm with Paelos on that. There is a world out there. If you'd rather sit on your ass in a capital city waiting for your queue to pop instead of doing other shit (and the alternative, of course, was sitting on your ass waiting for a PUG to scrape together, be it sitting at the dungeon entrance or sitting in a capital city), that's not the game's fault.

I don't think it should just be all one server, though. It would wreck Moon Guard, for example, and I love Moon Guard. I also don't want a bunch of phasing to keep the lag down, that would be a goddamn nightmare. Servers ARE different from server to server, I have found. LFD took the server aspect out of dungeon running if you let it (I still see people asking to form groups, because it's faster than queuing for DPSers), but the server itself is not always as cosmetic as some people would like to believe.

LFD does not play nicely with group content that is not facerollable.  That's why it worked well in WotLK and doesn't work so well now.  If forced to choose between LFD and 5-man content that requires you to be slightly awake at some point, some people prefer the latter. I'm not one of them, but I understand where they're coming from. 

If all servers and factions were decently populated then LFD wouldn't have been so necessary. I'm on what used to be a *tiny* Horde pop server and before LFD pretty much never ran dungeons. It just wasn't possible to get a group.

The social-group-forming experience you're all talking about happened again in LK with pug raids. With 10 and 25 mans available and gearing getting to the point that pugging raids was a reality I was pugging VoA and ICC 10/25 pretty much every week for a while, and got to know a *lot* of people during that time.

Making 10s & 25s share the same lockout and the whole guild-run-xp thing has destroyed that entire part of the game and now the only hope of getting into raids is either to be in a large enough guild to be doing them or to be a healer and hope to get into one of someone else's cos loads of guilds seem to be lacking healers atm.

Simply because of the way they implemented dungeon difficulty.  If you could dial in your desired level of difficulty, and that auto-selected for other people that wanted a more difficult experience, and players could only attempt more difficult encounters based upon completing less difficult encounters then the 'we like it tough' folks could group with like-minded players and  ditto for the 'just want to smash stuff to relax" folks.

The only folks that wouldn't be happy would be the, "I want to complete this dungeon, and I don't want n00bs to be able to" folks.  But who cares about those jackoffs?

In the broader context of, "all WoW dungeons become easier over time", isn't difficulty really a matter of taste anyway?  Except that those that like it easy need to wait, and those that like it hard have less options overtime (arguably you could remove your gear, or put on crappy gear, but that seems pretty lame).

I thought that was why we had Heroic and Regular dungeons?

85 Regular dungeons as well not exist after the first 2 months. Nobody wants to bother with the pitiful rewards out of those when you're usually using better quest gear.

Plus there's only what, three of them? Snoozeville, man.

For people who want to do random dungeons , they're perfect. For someone who likes to run with friends and fuck all the asstards out there in internet land, it takes away their friends who already ran Dungeon X with LFD, got their shinies or badges or whatever, and moved on.
The fix is to rip out the LFD feature, but that genie's already out of the bottle for WoW.

I'm not sure I understand you.  Is the problem that your friends don't want to do dungeons (with you?) after they've exhausted the rewards?  Or is it that they don't want to run another one after having done their daily dungeon earlier in the day?  The other option would be that your friends are saved to the particular one you want to do from having done their dungeons earlier.

I can't really speak to the first interpretation. To the second possibility: daily dungeons, in the form of quests, pre-date the Dungeon Finder by two (http://www.wowpedia.org/Wind_Trader_Zhareem) years (http://www.wowpedia.org/Nether-Stalker_Mah%27duun).  My friends and I will run into the third at times, but heroics have always been on a daily timer.

While daily dungeon quests predate LFD, two things in Burning Crusade especially made those a good thing rather than a bad thing like LFD.  First off, the dungeons were considerably more difficult back then.  Way harder than WotLK dungeons, and still considerably harder than Cataclysm dungeons.  This meant it was a lot better to run them with someone you worked well together with already rather than a wholly random group.  Second, it took longer to form the group, so again, you were more likely to wait until your friend was going to be online.

Besides which, dungeons aren't something most people want to do all day in my experience.  When they were difficult, they required concentration and effort, and most people don't want to put that level of concentration in all day, so they want to do one or two dungeons and then maybe farm, quest, or just log off.  Now that they're easy, they're just boring, so you want to do a couple to get your rewards, then go do something else.  If I've done a few dungeons today, I'm going to groan and not really want to go if a friend comes on wanting to do some more.

I do agree with Numtini that an LFD system would fit a game like CoX very well.  Of course, the actual gameplay of CoX was always boring to me exactly because of that; there was no real challenge, it was just running through the instance stomping a bunch of guys flat, which is exactly why I get bored of that game and quit, even though it's amusing for brief periods.

CoX added the ability to choose one of five different levels of difficulty approximately a year after release.  Rewards were better, but not purples versus greens better.  High end difficulty probably needed to be made a bit more difficult to appeal to the, "I enjoy slamming my dick in the door"-level required by the 2% that want that.  And fireworks and phasing in of statues so they can feel good about themselves.

The fact that your friends weren't waiting for you to come online says to me that they couldn't really be sure on any given night whether you were going to be online that night or not.  So, without LFD, on the nights that you don't show up - they are shit out of luck.  Sounds like that is only better for the folks that don't mind putting together groups via chat.  I find it tedious.  With LFD I could queue and let the system do the work of putting together a group.

Here's another thing to think about - if your friends don't want to run a dungeon again when you get online, maybe the answer is for the developer to make the dungeon fun to run multiple times per evening rather then pine for a past that many people really didn't enjoy.

The issue at the time was that you could (can) only do a heroic once a day, and then you were locked out of it until tomorrow. It wasn't an issue of "not fun to run again" but rather, not able.

Oh.  ... well that's very different then, isn't it.  ...  nevermind!

Thirdly, you have to exclude all your friends not bringing a tank, heals, or CC.

Am I doing it right?

Waiting for my friends to be online = playing someone else's game for me.

Mostly because the people I WANT to run instances with are a three hour time difference from me. Or in one case, just has a sleep schedule like he's three hours time difference from me :P

So I'm not good enough to group with you, huh? :cry:

The problem is that I don't want to play with some random jackasses the LFD throws at me.

The cherry on the shit sundae is that the chances of me getting a guild run for a dungeon have gone down when members who are willing to LFD get their runs that way, and are less available for guild runs.

I agree 100%.  

The other question I have is "who gives a shit if I got my uber gear solo or in a group"?  It's PvE.  The only reason to get good gear is to kill harder PvE mobs.  If social interaction has fuck all to do with retention rates, then why not just make the entire game either soloable (to scale with grouping optional) or with a group of NPC's?  It's not like my PvE gear affects anyone else's fun and it gives me more content options for my dollar.

That was my situation.  My server is pretty small and isn't very progression oriented.  My night playing also started at around 9 or 10pm server time. You could spend an entire night and not even get a group as a healer.  The dungeon finder might have well not even existed, it never led to a group at max level for a heroic. 

LFD pretty much saved the game for me.  I was starting to get really sick of not being able to do dungeons or spending a high amount of time in Dalaran doing nothing.

In the past, I've joined guilds to help alleviate this, but it really doesn't help much when you play pretty late a night. And then there are organizational issues with this approach that start to encroach on your playing time.   Waiting 2 minutes as a healer or 15 as a DPS was a lot better than shoehorning myself into a social structure I had no desire to be in. 

Then why not just get rid of the gear collection game and make it all pure vanity/pets/mounts for collectables and remove all gear gates to content?  The point of gear progression is that its progression for when you've run out of levels for progression.  This is done mostly at the group level at max.  If you don't like playing in groups to collect loot, why play a game like WoW in the first place?  

The point I'm making is that gear collection and grouping don't need to be connected.  I enjoyed the trip to cap in WoW.  If I could have run dungeons solo during the trip and after cap, Blizzard would have gotten even more of my money.  Isn't that the goal?  To get my money?  Maybe I could pay Blizzard to find me four people to run content with that I won't want to strangle. 

Many of the aspects of WoW don't play together very well. And as the game has matured, Blizz has managed to streamline it so that these problems are becoming more pronounced. World PvP versus instanced PvP, PvP versus PvE balance, solo versus group versus raid.

I, for example, would have been happy as a clam to have Zero solo content in Cataclysm. Just throw in some new raids and I'm good to go. I've quested till I'm blue in the face and it no longer has any interest for me. But I'm required to work thorugh it to get to raiding, and I pooped the fuck out at level 83. I just couldn't do one more goddamn quest.
So I quit. And unlike my previous breaks, where I knew it was WoW burnout and that I'd likely be back, this time I'm not sure that I'll be resubbing.

Making solo content is tough because you have to balance for the LCD. This isn't an issue currently since its all leveling or dailies, but if endgame gearing was soloable balance becomes a real factor.

WoW has become a task to conquer, not so much of an experience. The LFD tool is one factor in that, and if that is all you want from the game then that is great. There is no more exploring to find a dunegon, or running your zone's dunegon while you quest through the zone. I gained as much xp from the LFD randoms as  I did from actually questing. I'll second the idea that it is a shame you can't re-group with cross server party members, and at the end of the day I feel it is just a way to expedite players along to end game so they don't lose that feeling of progression.

I do kind of miss that first couple weeks when I was in Ashenvale and I saw in general chat, looking for a group for the dungeon there.  I was like, oh I'm a druid I can heal!  So I did that, and we had no idea where the dungeon was exactly, but one guy did, so he sort of told us generally where it was and we went and found it and that was neat.  I remember losing a roll on a blue staff because the other guy needed the shard to "level his enchanting" and...I didn't care!

I want my WoW virginity back :(

Remember when WoW showed us that MMOs weren't niche games, they were actually capable of mass popularity? Maybe they aren't.

A lot of the things talked about in this thread are that to make WoW more accessible and more popular, they have taken out the MMO elements and replaced them with solo and instant-match small group elements. And a lot of the suggestions are to get rid of the MMO elements entirely (and I agree fwiw).

When I think about what "niche" WoW fell into in my gaming for the last year, it wasn't in my mental "this is my MMO" category, that was Even. It was as a casual small random group game. Log in, pick up an random ez dungeon, log out. The same way I play World of Tanks or League of Legends.

Or pay a sub.


I like the LFD tool (Becouse i'm old and dont have a ton of time), i'm just saying what it does.

This is pretty much exactly how I treat it now.  But I don't even have a game that REALLY satisfies my "this is my MMO" category. WW2O fills the gap from time to time.  I'm hoping Planetside 2 fills it next.

 Like I said elsewhere, I've been playing Global Agenda lately, but thats effectively just a shooter to me - I haven't done any AvA (though I think the premise is ok), or even any PvE or crafting past the bear minimum required to get to level 10 and start queueing for PvP matches.  I don't really have too much time for playing an MMO "the way I want to" anyways. 

Anyway, that being said, I've got one level 85 in WoW, been leveling a warrior through LFD in Northrend and that has been pretty entertaining, but I can already feel myself tiring of the dungeon running.  WoW does it well, but that being said I still can only run dungeons so much.  I suspect by the time summer roles around  I'll have 3 or so 85s just from running dungeons, and since by then Torchlight 2 will be out to satisfy my loot collections wants and needs, I can't see WoW keeping me past May or so.

It was a little tedious finding a group to run the dunegon you needed without it, but it forced PVE interaction within certain zones, in the sense that individual zones felt like they had their own community instead of everyone standing outside the AH in Org. When I can out level a zone because my LFD tool gives me added XP on top of what I already get from a dunegon, so much for hanging around long enough to try and attack astraanar, or overrun southshore, which are two things I havent seen happen in a long long time.

Southshore is kind of a wreck these days.  It's been overrun enough, I'd say.

Hillsbrad doesn't have a dungeon, so the only people who would have been sitting around in the zone zerging Southshore were waiting for the old 8 hour long AV monstrosities to start. LFD is not the culprit.

LFD probably isn't the culprit in the case of Hillsbrad, but considering you had to run from Hillsbrad all the way to SM as ally to get to your dunegon it saw lots of traffic at one point.

On early dungeons way back in the day, let's not forget there was no system whatsoever at the time, then the idiotic stone things that everyone told them correctly were not going to work. That doesn't help with lower level dungeons now, but when they were current, it would have made a big difference.

So I was amused, today I did a PUG on my Horde rogue. Healer was pretty good, rest of the group made me want to stab someone. We finish, I drop group, and the healer sends me a tell asking if it was just her, or was the tank sort of a moron, scaring me half to death because I didn't realise she was from my server. We're totally BFFs now. So I guess it is still a TINY BIT possible to meet new people that way!

That would be great. I'd even get to socialise with some of you-all occasionally. I guess the reason they don't do it is because of the AH/server economies?

Or you could screenshot it and post it here?

Server economies aren't really a good thing for the average player - the only thing increasing the number of people participating in the economy can do is make things easier for the average player by increasing competition and driving prices closer to equilibrium.  With server-limited economies it's possible to monopolize goods if no one else chooses to be in the same market as you, but if all servers shared one AH there would be no market niche that has no competition, and thus prices would stabilize at the lowest gold/hour that anyone is willing to work for.  The only people this would negatively impact are people that do significant AH business and profit significantly from the limited economies, and I doubt they are a large enough population for it to matter.

When I levelled up my Warrior from 1-63ish after the 4.0 changes but before cata came out I ended up LFD pretty much from level 15-58. In that time I ran across a lot of douchebags, but I also came across a lot of cool people that were fun to group with who also appeared to appreciate my tanking. Certainly more fun than most of the random douchebags n my guild who I've never had any interaction with.

Without LFD, I'd never have come across those cool people. Wth LFD, I'll never see any of them again. And even if I do, I won't remember WTF they are/were.
 :heartbreak:

Koyasha - I don't really AH, and I'm not personally worried about the integrity of my server's economy. Especially since after 3 months on again, I tend to stop playing for 7-18 months at a time. I'm talking about Blizzard's reasons. That and server-first wank-achievements, I guess.

Well, unless they're sticking to discrete servers because they like the idea even if something else would probably be better given the nature of the way the game has evolved (which I certainly wouldn't doubt, considering how hard they sometimes push stupid concepts like the original meeting stones), I'd suspect the reasons are more technical than anything else.  It would likely take them a massive amount of work to rewrite into being able to switch servers at will - the server transfer is currently decently streamlined, but it does have bugs (once my character lost skills after a server switch, for instance - this sort of thing could not be allowed to happen even 1% of the time if you could be expected to switch servers several times a week, or even more often) and the back end of the game would probably need a major redesign to make it work.

Keep in mind that WoW has never been strong on their own technical side of things.  Even after all this time it seems to need near-daily restarts of the servers, as opposed to many other games that run for weeks without the servers going down.  I don't know if they've rewritten code on the back end since the launch troubles that first led them to start doing daily restarts, but the continued restarts seem to indicate they've never completely solved the problems, and only throwing more hardware at the problem and doing regular restarts allows the game to function.

Sounds normal for an Oracle platform, from my experience.   :grin:

They're able to group people from separate servers into battlegrounds and instances.  It's not a significant hurdle at that point.

I installed recount yesterday after starting to level my mage from 80-85, and my GOODNESS some people suck at DPS, its kind of hilarious actually.  How can these people do less than 2000 dps at level 80+?   Luckily normals don't seem to require a very good group as long as your healer is good, though it becomes more important at level 85 and in heroics when healers don't have infinite mana pools anymore.

Some of this i can see a valid reason for (only some mind you).   A lot of it has to do with exaclty how hard the ratings conversions hit you when you make that jump from level 80 in your phat sexy fully buffed ICC gear to level 82 or 83 with your unenchanted greens.

I got yelled at by some level 80 mage in a BRC run the other day while dicking around on my level 83 ret paladin alt.  I am medeocre with my paladin at best (just leveling him to 84 to unlock Twilight Highlands so i can max out his enchanting).   This mage decided to give me an earfull because I am "level 83 on an OP class and only pulling half his dps".  For reference, he was a fully ICC geared fire mage pulling 12-14k dps, while I am pulling around a steady 8k in quest greens as ret.  I told him to stuff it, and get back to me when he hits level 83 and goes from 50% crit, hitcapped, and 40% haste or whatever he had, to 20% crit, 5% hit, and 15% haste.  The Rating conversion curve gets REALLY freaking steep as soon as you break 81.

But yes, at level 85, with decent gear (meaning you have mostly ilevel 320 or so average), anyone pulling under 6k dps on boss fights better have a damn good reason.

I never bitch about anyone's DPS until they are 85 and either in a high level dungeon or heroic.  Before that the adjustment curves per level are just too wild for some classes to really get a feel about what DPS they "should" be doing, assuming what kind of gear they might have found.

But yeah, anything less than 5-6k in my opinion deserves a "seriously, what's going on here?" comment because the encounters are tuned so that you pretty much *have* to be doing that DPS to win them.

People at 85 can be hrrbl. I did my first heroic on my rogue the other day, who is JUST BARELY allowed even in them (his score is like ... 332 or something). I blew the other two DPSers away, and I am just ... not that good a rogue. I mean, these dudes, with the 15% buff were only in the 5-6k's on bosses, while I was doing 12-ish.

The best was when I accidently pulled aggro in a normal dungeon (like I said, I am not that good  :grin:), died, and basically got to watch the rest of my group take about 50 years to down the boss. :P

Even if there was some kind of way to befriend people from other servers (without realID) so you could group with them again if they're cool people. That would be good.

This kind of thing always amazes me.  I mean, I know I'm not the most knowledgeable player in the world, but I finally got around to installing recount and found that I'm pulling something like 4k when I'm questing, or up to 6k on the training dummy with 230-ish gear.  My stuff isn't optimal (not enchanted or anything, not at hit cap) but that seems like that's a chasm that I'm not going to be able to bridge just by rubbing a scroll on my pants.  How are people getting this DPS?  I'm playing a ret pally, and it looks to me like they're one of the most retard proof classes in the game right now (button lights up = hit button; else Crusader Strike) but goddamn, I must be missing something obvious, just wish I knew what it was.

Lots of people just suck at pressing their fucking buttons.

It's pretty easy to out DPS people, even if you are in inferior gear, when you cast twice as many spells as they do in the same time frame.  :oh_i_see:

I always wonder if thats an issue when I see really low DPS, but I never bother to actually watch.  What are people doing if they aren't hitting buttons, watching?

Are you 85? I ask because 230 is pre 85 gear...

I ramped up pretty quick once you start putting on blue level 85 gear (make your weapon a priority), really. Which is why I was wtf in the heroic, because it has a minimum high enough where they should be doing more than they did.

There's a chance lots of them just don't understand how latency effects casting in this game, so they may even think they are doing it right, when they are not and are actually losing minutes of casting in a boss fight.


Honestly though... lots of people just suck, suck tremendously and will forever continue to suck and nothing can be done for it.

Mouse clicking abilities and keyboard turning.  Hell, I'll bet there's a significant number of players who don't reshuffle ability bars and just leave them where they pop-in when they train.

I thought someone here had a story about a player who was actually using abilities out of their spellbook because their single hotbar had filled up.  Pretty sure it's in the Bad Groups thread.

I mouse click abilities and keyboard turn.  :grin:

It's just PvE, dammit.

I keyboard turn. It's not a big deal when you are tanking. In pvp you're a walking HK.

Do you care that there is a better way to do it?  I mean that as a sincere question.  In pretty much anything I do, gaming or otherwise, if I know of a better way to do something I can't bring myself to keep doing it sub-optimally.  Maybe this is why I simply can't relate to the majority of gamers.

What works for some people doesn't work for others. I'm left handed, mouse-click buttons, though only partially keyboard turn, mostly strafe and my reaction time does not suffer in the least but YMMV

I do the same, and cluster core skills on multiple hotbars so the mouse doesn't have to move much.  I just find that moving with the mouse (especially while tanking) can lead to losing your target way too easily.

Sticky targetting is a must, tank or otherwise.

Haven't bothered with that since vanilla. More of a PvP thing, but even there, haven't bothered since vanilla. Never found it that useful over all. Would help most in 5mans, but haven't felt particularly handicapped without it. Although, now that I think about it, after last night's spaz tank, might be worth trying again...

What I"ve seen, the really bad dps number are probably from not paying attention (i.e. not pressing buttons) and lack of enchants/gems/whathaveyou. I've seen a shocking number of people that don't seem to bother enchanting (especially weapons  :ye_gods: ) or gemming. They seem to think that if it's not purple, it's not worth spending money on. Hence 346ish il and them pulling 5k while those who bothered are pulling 10k. Motivation to do well seems the real root cause. They simply can't be bothered so they blow GCDs, don't tune gear, and don't run a decent rotation/priority, though that dovetails with not paying attention.

It was more a suggestion for Minvaren who has trouble losing target while moving with the mouse.

I mouse click everything outside the core 6 or 7 things, but I don't keyboard turn. I play too many alts to memorize 30 keybinds for each one.

I hotkey pretty much everything, and always have.  It's not too bad for alts, since I just put things that are vaguely the same on the same keys.  Shift-1 on the warrior is Challenging Shout, so Shift-1 on the druid is Challenging Roar - those are basically identical so it's easy; 8 on the mage (my first character) was Blizzard, so therefore 8 on the druid is Hurricane, 8 on the warlock is Rain of Fire, and 8 on the hunter was Volley (before that got removed).

It takes me a few minutes to adjust/remember wtf the icons are if it's a character I haven't played in a few weeks or months, but in WOTLK I would routinely tank 3 dungeons in row with my 3 different tanks (brb, switching to warrior) and I could mentally switch adequately enough.

The switching hasn't come up as much with Cataclysm since I haven't been playing it nearly as much, but that's the other thread, I guess.   :awesome_for_real:

Which button is Iceblock.  :oh_i_see:

Oh, I don't keybind that one.   :why_so_serious:

(I'm lying, it's alt-1).

Blizzard with World of Warcraft came as close as humanly possible, and a lot further than they should have, to turning mmorpgs into single player experience. I don't think they understand that the main point of these types of games is interaction with other players, both positive and negative.

No, it's a game.  The point is to have fun.

It's not hurting me doing it the way I do it, so no, not really. In PvE, keyboard turning almost never matters. I CAN mouse turn when it's extremely pressing I do so, but it's not my instinct. I have my important always use shit bound, obviously, but anything past 6 on my hotbar, I just click, which is much easier for me than "shit, which bind is LoH, I haven't played my paladin in two months, nevermind, I'm dead." I doubt anyone playing with me would notice I am a clicker.

Basically, I would have to re-learn how to play if I wanted to do it the allegedly "optimal" way, but I doubt very much it would rocket my gaming ability up so high it would be worth the effort.

I click my trinkets and oh fuck buttons on my right hand toolbar

Yeah, that's where most of my oh-shit buttons are. The middle is random shit I might want to use but probably won't.

(http://stdfree.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/britney-retarded-hrhr.jpg)

Yegolev quality.  Good work.

Point stands, derpity derp derp as it is it.  IMO, WoW was at its absolute best for casuals when it removed as much need for social interaction as possible.

I think this is the disconnect.  To me that learning to play IS the fun part of any game.  So if it means I have to really start from scratch, well, not such a big deal in principle. Granted, sometimes I reach a point where I really need to start from scratch, but I don't have the time to invest, usually I quit those games.

There was a time when I would have agreed with you. Now, I think those kinds of players would be better served with a solo online game that has ongoing content patches. It's already happening with Bioware style DLC.

Don't take this as a shot, man, but we covered this with you already in that other thread. I think we can point to that as the reason and move on. You are different than a lot of gamers on this community and the fact that you only have two speeds: zero or 200mph, is a mentality you may eventually want to temper as you get older. Lest it drive you nuts.

Its not really a choice...

This isn't like being born a certain race. Saying you aren't in control of your mental approach to your entertainment is a copout.

Alternatively, if you really ARE that much of a Type-A, why are you wasting that drive on a video game instead of your career.

I'm not going to derail this thread with a discussion of my approach to video games, so I'm bowing out.   If you want to talk to me about it, PM me.

I think it's easy to forget how much of a difference to your DPS it can make if you're not paying attention, are slow to target & change targets, if you sausage-finger your rotation badly, etc.

Did a LFD dungeon today for the first time in 2 weeks (had shingles, been too painful to sit down) and managed to pull about 8k on my elemental shaman. Normally I do 12-14k, and I did indeed manage than on the end boss (it was Grim Batol), but I was all over the place at first.

So if being a bit out of practice (and away with the fairies on meds) can almost halve my DPS I can easily see how keyboard turning, button clicking, bad gear choices (I'm sure I've mentioned our guild enhance shaman who for the longest time wore caster gear cos she casts lots spells), not focussed, throw in some latency and low framerate for good measure could all combine to produce very, very low DPS from people.

Shingles sucks! My dad had it once when I was little, I wasn't allowed to hug him. :(

I'm trying to work out why I just don't feel any love for wow any more.

I think it's a combination of things. A large part of which is also the age of the game and the boredom that engenders.

1) The LFD thing means these people are totally anonymous. So there's little reason to consider them as fellow players. We're not going to chat, we're not going to discuss tactics and in most cases if stuff goes badly they're going to cancel out.

2) They've tried to make the instances like mini-raids. Reasonably challenging and full of scripted events. That's great for the easily bored and ADHD console players but old farts and chatty social gamers not so much (I'm in both). This is an intentional side effect of them going for the mass market.

3) The dungeon is a points dispenser primarily. So people expect to be able to run it fast to get to the points. I somewhat miss the old EQ "camp an area and chat" (though I wonder if I'd find that boring if I had to re-do it). The loot is not interesting, working out tactics is inefficient. You should have watched the youtube tactics video in advance so you don't have to stop running forward. And if you fail then expect PUG's to fragment. The random drops from a deep drop table did not encourage this hamster wheel sprinting in the same way. Likewise if the content is old, forget it.

4) I just don't really care (due to the fatique with the game). I'm not excited to get points which might buy a piece of armor with bigger numbers.

Heck, I'm even enjoying Eve (which is a terrible game) because I can sort of chill out and chat while playing it). Though it goes maybe a little too far.

I'm just going to point to this recent blue post about something from LFD and their design points:


I think they are right to look back on their content are draw the correct conclusions. Optional bosses in 5 mans are a stupid idea since it's all about points. However, I still don't understand their policy of throwing their hands up and saying there is nothing they can do. If you feel it may have been better to require people to kill all the bosses, just change it. We're not talking about something very complicated here. It's another situation where it's actions speaking louder than words, and Blizzard is taking the stance that changing anything (even if it's admittedly stupid) is a long, drawn out process if it happens at all.

If they changed it, the fury would be amazing, that's why.

An easy fix for HoO would be to just split it into two instances, upper and lower, then require full clears for each (say, put a gate in front of Rajh that doesn't open until you kill the other three). Suddenly you've taken the longest (if you full clear) heroic and made it into two new, short ones.

Oh it would be classic. I just don't understand people who admit they messed up and do absolutely nothing to fix it.

That's how Blizzard rolls, they fix it in the NEXT dungeon/class-review/expansion etc.