Every once and a while you really do need to kick someone from the group, and when that time comes, the kick feature is a dream. But 99.999% of the time, the kick feature is probably being abused. I’ll send you to the TL;DR right now, this one might be a bit long but obviously I want to complain about it. That’s why I came here.
This is a tale that I’m sure has been told, but I’ll tell it again. A group of five PUGs works for over an hour to get through Fractals 18, getting along fine and doing their job right. It’s a smooth run. At the end of the third fractal, one member needs to go AFK. Fine with everyone, we can wait a minute. After about four minutes, we decided we can continue on to the Jade Maw without him, and if he comes back during the fight, great. If not, he obviously had something besides a quick bio to take care of and can’t expect us to stand around for fifteen minutes waiting on him. Most likely he will have come back sometime in the Jade Maw fight and everything will be fine.
Except it’s not fine, because as soon as we port into the Jade Maw (remember, the AFK guy has only been away for about four minutes), two of the members of the group who are in the same guild vote-kick and invite one of their guild members in. So now he gets a free fractals daily chest, the Jade Maw chest, an advance in level, and so on. Another member and I protest, saying we can easily 4-man the final fractal and that it’s not fair to kick the AFK person after such a short period of time. Together we vote-kick the new member, and luckily the other person still has the kicked AFK guy’s name, so we invite him back.
The two in the guild together then decide to kick the other person, and most likely me next, from the group. Except she was the instance starter, so everyone got kicked back to Lion’s Arch. And there’s nothing any of us can do about it. No one got the Jade Maw chest, no one got the daily chest, and most importantly no one got the level advancement.
This is clearly a flaw in the system. Because two people in the group happened to know each other, the two people standing up for the right thing lost out. Not to mention the person who went AFK. People have real lives, and he’d fought valiantly up until then, so we can’t hold it against him.
So, a few suggestions:
On Kicking
The simplest solution is to require three people to kick, or even four. Why shouldn’t a group kick be completely unanimous? Or, have it like choosing a dungeon path, where everyone picks yes or no but if the timer runs out you go with the majority. If it’s two-vs-two, you either have to bear the person you wanted to kick or you can leave the group yourself.
Another option is to only allow the instance leader the option to kick people, but still have it have to be seconded (or preferably thirded).
Kicking someone is not something you should be able to do on a whim, it should be something where everyone has to pause and talk to each other and make sure they’re on the same page about. Two guildmates in a PUG shouldn’t be able to gang up on people who are just playing for fun.
On Joining
I like the way the you can invite someone into the group if someone has left. Just today someone (who was especially ineffective) left our party during the dredge boss, and it was easy to find someone who wanted to pop in and continue to the next fractals with us. That’s where joining an already formed party works.
Where it doesn’t work is in my situation above, where two people in a guild kick someone else and then invite a guildie for the final credit/reward.
I propose a voting system similar to the kick system when someone wants to join your group and you’re already inside the dungeon. Two, if not three or four, people should have to approve the new group member. Or, alternatively, only the instance starter should be able to /invite, meaning people would have to actually talk about it before it was done.
Unfortunately my story is not unique. People abuse this system all the time, and it’s the normal nice people who are just playing the game who lose out. More people should be required to accept kick requests and join requests, meaning once you’re in a party all decisions are made democratically instead of by one or two people who happen to hold more cards because they know each other.
TL;DR Three or four people should be required to accept kick from party requests and join party requests once the party members are inside the dungeon instance.