Guild Wars 2

Hi Anet,

Since the introduction of the LFG tool, we have had some lingering issues. It seems like a point in time solution, published as a beta product, and never received any attention since.

Grouping vs Teambuilding
The first issue is that it does not lend itself to anything more than party formation. By nature of some content, we must be able to be selective with the classes we invite, due to certain synergies and efficiency. My suggestion is to allow us to tailor the LFG to ask for specific classes, and build priorities. How I see it could be implemented is as follow:

Allow us, for the size of the party, to be able to select professions and stat priorities from dropdowns. These can be represented in the tool by their icons, such as sword for power, profession icons for classes. When users peruse the parties listed in LFG, they can even get highlights when a spot for their current profession is available. Other examples may be to select any power class, or any druid build etc. Builds I think can be represented as Power, Condi, Toughness, Healing Power. This would also require that the tool show all members of 10 man parties. I really dont think that there is a use case for 50man, which would be hard to view on the tiny tool anyways.

Scalability
The current tool seems to suffer under scale. Raids are incredibly popular these days, and the current tool can no longer keep up with the rate at which parties are created. The problem is that raid content has very specific requirements that contribute to the success of the party. This means that parties have a very large churn rate while looking for the best fit for each scenario. The chat tool’s description is using the same throttling as the text chat, which means that if we make small changes to the description, we get suppressed after only a few alterations. The ideal would be to filter players before they join, but since we are not able to do that, we must go through the review and replace process.

Again, the ideal would be a matchmaking system, but this would mean that exclusion is built into the system, something I am keenly aware that you want to avoid. I agree that in most cases, the exclusion criteria are unfounded and unnecessarily strict, but the type of content made for the game has changes, and the very inclusive nature of the game isn’t wanted. Using the success of raids and fractals here as the proof.

My personal views on this is that if you allow anyone to join, you are dumbing down the content to match the worst players, rather than focussing on bringing out the best. You may hate me for saying that, but its true. Easy content is mind numbingly boring.

Exclusion Criteria
The final part to making suggestion is the exclusion criteria. If correctly implemented, it will vastly improve the way we group up. I suggest that players are allowed to provide some way to show off their capability to be selected above someone else. This is my first thoughts on this, and would require careful consideration, as nobody wants to build a community that is impossible to get into. If raiders only select those who have raided from day one, the community can only get smaller, as player stop and start to play. I however also think that players are fundamentally goodwilled, and will create an environment to include others. I myself host many raid training runs to try skill up the community.

I would suggest that the Looking for Group side of things facilitate players to add items they currently own in their bags or bank, to show as proof that they have completed specific content. This could be armor, weapons, legendary insights, boss drops, miniatures, skins, whatever they feel best builds their case and capability. Because they own the item, they cannot fake it with chat codes, and therefore foster an environment of honesty. Due to fake chatcode spam in raids, the frustration levels have slowly been building, and the game does not facilitate any way to be selective.

Final Thoughts
I realize my ramblings have been very focussed on raids, and exclusions, but its worth noting that Anet has already done a tiny first pass at it. With fractals, you can use LFG to see the level of other players, which in it self can be used as an exclusion tool.

Raids rely almost exclusively on the LFG tool. Very few guilds are so focussed on raids that they can only use guild chat to form groups. It would therefore be in the communities best interest to make LFG as good as it can be.

Maybe I see it differently because I’m very much in the “will group with anyone to do anything” camp but this seems like a lot of work for someone at Anet to try and come close to a result that could be much more effectively achieved by making use of the free text field and taking a few minutes to talk to your potential team mates.

Danikat.8537:

Maybe I see it differently because I’m very much in the “will group with anyone to do anything” camp but this seems like a lot of work for someone at Anet to try and come close to a result that could be much more effectively achieved by making use of the free text field and taking a few minutes to talk to your potential team mates.

The do anything and with anyone approach works well with much of the content of the game, but not all. If, for example, you are someone who raids, then I cannot see that you would retain that point of view of you were ever involved with maintaining a party. You may be one of the few players who are of good skill, well prepared, and ready to join for any content, but the vast vast vast majority does not.

Maybe I wasn’t clear but I wasn’t suggesting that the solution to this is to accept who comes along, that was just background on my perspective/disclaimer.

My main point was that every LFG gives you a free text field where you can write literally whatever you want. If you want a specific profession, or any profession but with a specific gear set, or certain items in their bag you can ask for that. Because it’s free text it’s much more flexible than any set of check boxes Anet could ever provide and won’t need to be constantly updated as trends and preferences change.

For a lot of things it’s obvious as soon as someone joins the group whether they meet your requirements, but for things where it’s not (like what items they’ve got with them) you can ask them to prove it. Yes chat codes can be faked and all that but I’m sceptical that it’s really that common for someone to pretend to meet the requirements of a group when they clearly don’t.

Also other games have these check-box systems and they’re far from fool-proof. My other MMOs forum is forever full of complaints that people “maliciously” queued as a healer when they’re not because they know they’ll get into a group quicker or that the options are out of date or not comprehensive enough to make sure they get exactly the people they want. (And that it takes far too long to find a group, because the exact person they want isn’t looking at the time.) And it always comes back to the same thing – you have to talk to your group members before or after they join to make sure you suit each other.

Your entire objection is built around the fact of cost vs benefit. The text box is the best solution, because its currently the only solution. If you look at the performance and issues with the LFG tool, especially now that the raid groups have picked up very significantly, you would notice that it isn’t able to keep up.

There are bugs with it, which means that developer time will at some point be allocated to it. This brings me to the effort of implementing something like this. “A lot of work” is very subjective, and the reality is that most of the tools are already baked into the lfg. If we are to rely on the text only nature of lfg, then the suppression limit needs to be increase or lifted. I have to resubmit my LFG’s at least 20+ times to get one raid group formed, which increases frustration, and the time it takes to form a group, which can be anything from 15 minutes or over 1 hour just for 1 boss!

The reality is that in its current state, its not working. Something has to be done about it. If they do something about it, they might as well take the due care to find a more fitting solution.

Werner.9317:

Hi Anet,

Allow us, for the size of the party, to be able to select professions and stat priorities from dropdowns. These can be represented in the tool by their icons, such as sword for power, profession icons for classes.

I like this idea, let people know quickly and easily what class and or role a group is looking for.

Werner.9317:

Exclusion Criteria If raiders only select those who have raided from day one, the community can only get smaller, as player stop and start to play.

I would suggest that the Looking for Group side of things facilitate players to add items they currently own in their bags or bank, to show as proof that they have completed specific content. This could be armor, weapons, legendary insights, boss drops, miniatures, skins, whatever they feel best builds their case and capability.

This part you lost me. It appears you state that it’s a good thing for new players to join the raids and not be excluded or the raid community just shrinks. Then the solution you offer is to show proof of “specific content” you have completed. Which sounds alot like showing raid drops, or cheevos… How does that help the community expand and welcome new players?

Miku.6297:

Werner.9317:

Hi Anet,

Allow us, for the size of the party, to be able to select professions and stat priorities from dropdowns. These can be represented in the tool by their icons, such as sword for power, profession icons for classes.

I like this idea, let people know quickly and easily what class and or role a group is looking for.

Werner.9317:

Exclusion Criteria If raiders only select those who have raided from day one, the community can only get smaller, as player stop and start to play.

I would suggest that the Looking for Group side of things facilitate players to add items they currently own in their bags or bank, to show as proof that they have completed specific content. This could be armor, weapons, legendary insights, boss drops, miniatures, skins, whatever they feel best builds their case and capability.

This part you lost me. It appears you state that it’s a good thing for new players to join the raids and not be excluded or the raid community just shrinks. Then the solution you offer is to show proof of “specific content” you have completed. Which sounds alot like showing raid drops, or cheevos… How does that help the community expand and welcome new players?

My observations:

“you state that it’s a good thing for new players to join the raids and not be excluded or the raid community just shrinks”
- This method included “time-checking”(?). He doesn’t agree with it, because he doesn’t use this method currently

“Then the solution you offer is to show proof of “specific content”
This is basically the same method, just dressed yellow. He uses this method, so this one “is automatically better”.

I agree that the LFG needs some TLC. I don’t think it needs anything as complex as what’s suggested by the OP.

• Rework the tree so that it can be changed without a major patch. As it stands now, the categories and subcategories are out-of-date within a week of an update.
• Add some filters, including a (ahem) “raid-ee-o” button to change the tree to show only raids.
• Include some checkboxes for “requirements” which would allow leaders to offer very broad categories, such as “experienced” vs “training” or “DPS” vs “Support”

The nature of GW2 suggests that LFG should never be a matchmaking tool. Instead, it makes sense to keep its functionality and feature set limited, while making it easy to find groups or players interested in the same instances.