Guild Wars 2

I’m under the impression the “Auto-Grouper” function is being “tested” with Toypocalypse Dungeon before being brought over to Fractals and the original eight dungeons, so I might as well shed in on some feedback before the feature phases in with the rest of the dungeon content by bringing in some key points and some improvements.

Assumptions
Based on how this grouping function is implemented, it’s obviously based on how grouping in sPvP works. In fact, you end up using your sPvP gear and build instead of your regular PvE gear and build. I’m assuming that this is an error and should expect to be using my regular dungeon gear in a future revision of this feature. Right now, the Auto-Grouping feature seems to be a copy-and-paste from sPvP joining features.

With that said, I would also expect that similar NPCs would be found at the front door of each dungeon instead of in Lion’s Arch. This ensures that people have to at least discover the instance portal leading to that dungeon before participating in it. It’s one of those “immersion” things, I suppose.

This feature doesn’t work well with non-full parties of any size.
On a dungeon stand point, I don’t see this as a big deal if you have a party of five. You got your party of five, and the only thing this feature would do is essentially auto-port your party to the dungeon. In a game with no griffins, pegasii, or other flying animals to lug your lazy butt around, it would make sense that this wouldn’t be able to auto-port your entire party. After all, porting to the dungeon is just as simple as pressing M, zooming out of Lion’s Arch, zooming in to the dungeon door, and teleport.

However , if you’re in a party of 4 or less, you currently would not be able to use the feature to find a random person to fill in that spot. What the feature ends up doing is breaking your party apart and having you placed with totally random people. That means resorting to spamming “LFM” in Lion’s Arch or similar locations just for that last person, which is a very troglodyte way of finding people.

Party-chat seems to be borked
Oddly enough, if I do queue up using the Auto-Grouper while in a party, I can communicate with people who are in my original party (even when party members are split up) but in order to communicate with PUGs, I would have to use /say chat.

You can join a dungeon in progress!
However, you don’t have a choice to accept or deny that invitation. Though this is great for groups who may end up with members that could leave mid-way, this also means that those who want to start from the very beginning are stuck with whatever party they end up with, regardless of progress made.

For Toypocalypse, this means that if you’re attempting the achievement in keeping all the dolyaks alive and you find out that one yak has died before you walked in, your only choice would be to leave the party and hope for a new instance.

It would be nice to have a notification of a dungeon in progress before joining them so that we can make logical decisions whether to reap the entire benefits of the dungeon, or just grab our ending tokens and book it.

No penalties for leaving early
Okay, so you ended up with a bad group. First notion for some folks is to leave and requeue. That leaves your other party members wondering where you went. I suppose that with no dedicated roles (“The Holy Trinity”), finding a replacement would be incredibly simple as opposed to waiting on a replacement for a healer or tank. However, I do think there should be penalty for constant leavers, possibly by putting the Auto-Grouper on cooldown. That cooldown could be based on how long you have been with the party, with the longest cooldown enacted if you leave within the first few minutes (possibly due to an early “ragequit”). This ensures that party members stick together until it gets really bad instead of first sight of problems that could be corrected if people cooperate. There might be other penalties for leaving early, or even more rewards for sticking around regardless of how bad your party is.

[continued]

You can’t kick party members out
I tried it in Toypocalypse. There was no menu upon right-clicking a character’s name in the party UI. Maybe this could be a good thing if we all lived in a perfect world, but since there will always be trolls running around, there should be an option to boot unruly people out of the party. It should also be limited in that party members shouldn’t abuse the feature by booting people for silly reasons like “You’re NOT 80!” or “Your class sucks!” or “No first-timers allowed!” or something to that effect. Instead, it should be used to boot out people who do not cooperate, talk trash in party chat, or people who are AFK/disconnected for a prolonged period of time.

On the other hand, the ability to kick people should be disabled while in combat to prevent those from booting party members during the final boss fight, thus preventing them from obtaining their final reward.

Path choices?
Since Toypocalypse only has one path, we don’t know if our paths will be chosen before queuing up, or after the party has been formed and in the entrance of the dungeon. Most people who look for groups in Lion’s Arch generally advertise their path that they will attempt before the full party has been formed. It would be nice to see if we could choose a path that we would like to run before entering the queue.

That’s all the comments I have for now when it comes to the Auto-Grouping feature currently in effect for Toypocalypse, but I do appreciate the effort in the teams involved in putting in a feature that would allow us to be participate in the Toypocalypse dungeon without having to spam LFG.

Personally, I think it’s not ready for primetime yet, but with more feedback and suggestions, I think it would be the greatest thing ever! I’ll say “Thanks!” to that! The feature is well over-due, but it’s very welcoming as a great Wintersday Gift!