Guild Wars 2

The LFG tool is the second most important tool for finding groups after guild chat. The following proposals are intended to make it easier for individuals to find groups and guilds for the content they want to play.

More Categories

First, the LFG tool would benefit from having a few more categories. Currently, open world content is a catch all and is over populated. Here are my proposed open world categories.

— One channel for each map in the game grouped by region (Magus Falls, Kryta, etc) or by expansion (Heart of Thorns vs Central Tyria)
— Guild Recruitment (Very Important!)
— Other Open World Content

These categories will address overcrowding problems in the open world category now and in the future.

Guild Recruitment

You may notice I included a channel for guild recruitment. I included this not because I believe guild recruitment messages contribute to overcrowding, but because there is currently no good way for a new player to find guilds they may be interested in. Currently, new players are at the mercy of map chat recruitment messages. A guild recruitment category would allow guilds to recruit from the whole game rather than one map at a time while giving new players a path to finding the guild that is right for them.

You may be thinking that this dilution of the information over several categories would hinder the LFG tool in its current state. You would be right. This leads me to my next proposal.

Display the Number of LFG Requests for Each Category

There is currently a feedback loop where people don’t post LFG requests because no one checks a given category and no one checks the category because no one posts LFG requests.I propose that the LFG tool should display the number of active LFG requests next to the title of each parent category.

Example:

Magus Falls (18)
— Verdant Brink (9)
— Auric Basin (5)
— Tangled Depths (1)
— Dragon’s Stand (3)

This brings important information to the player with much less clicks. Normally, a player would need to click and view each child category individually. If anything proves that players are not willing to do this, it is how dead the PVP and WVW categories have become. I personally never spend the clicks to check these categories for LFGs because its usually a waste of time.

Now with both of these changes implemented we are ready for the icing on the cake.

A New LFG Menu Icon

LFG tool should be split off into its own main menu dialogue rather than being a child menu of the friends list. In addition, It should have its own menu icon in the upper left corner and a hotkey just like WVW, mail, and the TP. The LFG icon would show a number of active LFGs for your current map or game mode similar to how the TP icon changes when you have waiting gold or items.

Are you in the heart of the mists? The LFG icon shows the total lfgs for the pvp categories. Perhaps your queue preference could be used to show event more specific information. There could be seperate LFG channels for stronghold and conquest and your queue preference would indicate whether you would like to see the LFG count for one or both categories.

Are you in WvW or PvE? Then your current map’s LFG count is displayed on the LFG icon.

Are you in a capital city such as Lion’s Arch or Divinity’s Reach? Then the LFG count for the guild recruitment category is displayed on the icon.

I believe these changes would reinvigorate dead LFG categories as well as improve the overall GW2 social experience.

What are you thoughts?

I posted on this earlier, and I fully agree some rework would be excellent! Thank you for a well written post.

One addition, don’t let anyone in a Spvp match join a lfg advertised group. (I have accidentally done it, and couldn’t leave the party. Ya, I’m terrible). Probably a bug lol

Guild recruitment is not the purpose of the LFG tool so I don’t see that category every being implemented.

I could see the benefit of creating another section specifically for HoT.

Yes, yes and yes!

More than anything, I would like to see additional categories (at the very least, a separation for Tyria and HoT). It was fine when we were mostly posting Tequatl or Silverwastes taxis; now there are dozens of different types of lfg and they usually disappear/fill by the time I find and click join.

Yes.

Since HoT, the Open World category has been really busy. Lot’s of groups that change so fast you can’t read them before they’re gone, much less click on one. Some reorganization is necessary for the LFG tool to be useful.

Some folks can’t seem to select the right category (Fractals and Dungeons advertised in Open World for example). Don’t know how to fix this.

I like the idea of joining groups only in my current map, but still want to see what’s going on in other maps before I go there. If I find one that’s busy I can go there and then select a group. Cool.

On other threads there is lot’s of talk about the importance of guilds and whether the 1, 2, and 3 person guilds still make sense. It’s Guild Wars for crying out loud. So why not support guild recruiting in the game? If we don’t want recruiting in chat, why not head over to the Guild Hall and talk to that “Guild Recruiter” NPC that has all the info about which guilds are recruiting and how to get an invite. All the guilds can add an advert for themselves, and anyone looking for a guild will have one-stop shopping. And chat will not have recruiting messages interrupting our otherwise clever banter.

I think a text filter feature would be better than more Category. Because people will just put everything in Open World since it’s the fastest.

A filter where I put in “teq”, it will only display lfg with “teq” in name. It would be more helpful.