When I try to play PvE with my friends, we spend so much time looking for each other, and trying to follow each other that it just isn’t fun.
I want to log on, join my friends, and stick with them, and play.
Please implement a party travel system
Jumping directly to them could maybe be abused but what if the world map clearly highlighted the closest waypoint to the party leader?
It would also be good if the system automatically ensured that your character jump into the same instance and such stuff if you are in overflow.
Party play is so difficult it’s as if they didn’t even consider it to be part of the game. There is nothing special about being in a party except you get the blue dot on the map, and from that point on, you have to stay focused on that blue dot.
1) If you are a in a party, and a person is doing their story, every time they jump to their instance, you get a dialog that you get a few seconds to answer in order to go with them. You are in a party! Why wouldn’t you want to go with them? Get rid of the dialog. It’s pointless.
2) Speaking of being in a story instance – what is the point in even allowing that? If I am in a story instance with my buddy the only thing I can help with is the fighting. I cannot participate in any thing else. If it is a scenario where the person has to gather parts or something, all I can do is stand there and wait. What fun is that?
3) The terrain in some areas makes following the blue dot very difficult. Unless the leader is constantly watching the people behind him, it’s easy to get left behind. If I’m concentrating on following the blue dot, I can easily fall into a crevice and get left behind while I try to find my way out. Then hooking up with your party again is a huge pain. There is a whole lot of where are you? Which waypoint is that near? Seriously, it’s usually just my buddy and I, and we spend more time trying to stay together than anything else.
+1 Also, I frequently run into a bug where everyone is in a different map/overflow when the party is formed and the blue dot (when you finally find it) doesn’t accurately represent where the player is.
Surely it takes 30 seconds to group up? Someone links a waypoint in chat, everyone travels there, ensure you are all in the same overflow. Done!
As for the thing about joining personal stories I know I group with people as an easy way to chat to friends even when I am not actively playing with them so I do not particularly want to be dragged into their story all the time.
Rocking on Piken Square – the un-official EU roleplay server.
A group chat is definitely be a cool feature to have. I see that as different functionality from party play though. And for the reason you mentioned, it wouldn’t work to have them one and the same.
It can take longer than 30 seconds to group up. Even then, that wouldn’t be such a big deal if you did it once and that was it. It’s that is compounded by having to constantly do it, simply because you took your eyes off that blue dot for just a second or two.
I agree, if you are in a party you should definitely stick together when travelling between areas of the world map.
I don’t get much time to play with my friends and when we do have time, we spend half of it waiting to get into the same world (and not different overflows). Party members should always stay together. Either in instances or moving from one area of the world map to the next. It should be an automatic feature.