Guild Wars 2

I apologise if this is a dead horse, or if I’m in the wrong forum. It just seemed the most appropriate place to post this. Though my first suggestion is a simple one. My second suggestion expands on that using tools already in the game and that will drastically improve the enjoyment of the game.

So what is it I want? I want to be able to taxi people into a map using my commander tag. Currently I can’t be tagged up when I taxi people in and this is something that commanders are expected to do. I can ask people to also do the same but I get no feel for how many being are getting into the map or would it be better to just look for one myself.

They’re multiple benefits to using a tag to taxi people in.
1. Commander is in a squad even while alone. This means should people join or leave, you don’t count as leaving a party and therefore LFG. This prevents spam.

2. People can see that it’s a commander looking for more and they would have some confidence that the map they’re joining will be organised.

3. Should the squad get full the commander can begin to kick people from the squad to make room for new comers.

I don’t wish to sound condescending to say that this would be an easy change, I don’t understand the programming and I imagine it’s something that would take time. But it would certainly be an easier fix for my next suggestion for an ideal. Meta-map LFG.

Each new map has a meta event. The system itself does a poor job at putting you in an appropriate map for various reasons and people want to find those few maps that have like minded players, doing the meta events. Each meta requires multiple commanders for people to feel confident that it can succeed. Although the above suggestion fixes that issue to a point. It doesn’t, however, help commander’s find other commander’s. So what would be the ideal LFG system for this?

Let’s take a look at PvP hot join. A server system that gives you a list of available instances and tells you the amount of people in them, including when they’re full. If we create a system based on this. We move a good stride in the right direction. This is also a system that already exists in the game and Anet are clearly familiar with.

So hypothetically, we’re now looking for an Auric Basin map. We open LFG. We have a new section called maps. We go through the drop down menu’s and get to Auric Basin and we can see they’re 8 maps active. 3 are full, the others are sparsely populated. We can even see that the 2 lowest pop maps are closing and we can see a timer.

Now let’s expand on this. What else can we do to make the new meta map experience more enjoyable? Let’s reveal commander tags on the maps. Which what ever tag they choose to represent. Let’s show how many people are in each squad. Let’s also allow the commanders to advertise their objective. Let’s say. ‘Auric Basin, West’ and of course, let us see their name.

So now we can see the list of Auric Basin maps. We can see that 3 maps are full, 4 commanders each. There is another map. It’s increasing in population, we can see this. It has 3 commander tags. Each labeled what they intend to do. I can now join map. Tag up. Set objective to fill the gap and people begin joining the map and my squad. We live happily ever after.

What does this achieve? This achieves easy access to maps and content that you want to do, when you want to do it. This allows people to see popularity and trends. With further expansion you can even show the event timers on this page so we know when they begin, we know the times anyway! Let’s make it friendlier for casuals and new people. Further expansion can allow for a queueing system for when maps are full. Though I dread to imagine how that can be abused. So really think about that. If you really expand more. You can. Let people buy private maps with a password and it’s own reset timer. Allowing guilds to perhaps come together and complete with only people they know or better yet, allow some of the larger guilds to attempt impressive speed runs.

I feel this system would dramatically improve the game. The immersion factor can still exists as this is an LFG tool to be used not forced upon us. The less time people spend in menu’s, trying to get into a good map with what precious time they have. The better.

Tl;Dr. Add a list of instances to the LFG tool similar to PvP hot join. Give us the information we want to know such as the amount of commanders, amount of players and if the map is full. Let commanders LFG in squad.

Would it be possible to add a Raid section to the LFG interface? These days the “Open World Content” section is flooded with single individuals looking for Raid. Raids are not Open World content and it makes it hard to find a party for anything else (such as taxis for meta events) when you have to keep scrolling past all the raiders.

Thanks

There are plenty of threads with this topic already.
I suggest reading these for a bit.
I believe as far as we know right now:
A-net does not have the resources/tools to adds a LFG Raid section.
This is because the LFG tool may look simple but it’s balanced around teams of 5.
addings raids, which are 10 man, would be hard to implement.

It’s the completely wrong subforum. Put it in HOT.

I’ve posted a lot of criticisms in this forum and the HoT one about the design of meta events and how the LFG tool is deficient in working with those maps to make the events accessible to players.

In response to that, I wanted to post something more constructive which is features that the LFG tool can have that would greatly improve the user experience of the game. I don’t expect all of them to be taken seriously, but the goal is to show why I harp so much on this, because of all the untapped potential there is.

The existing LFG tool is ideal for dungeons and fractal groups and doesn’t need a revamp in and of itself, but rather what it really needs is an additional feature that targets map instances.

So, you travel to a particular map and get randomly assigned to an instance just like you normally would. Upon arrival, you then go to this new feature which then presents a list of all instances of the map available.

Each listing for each instance would provide information unique to the map itself. Stuff such as…

• Some unique identifier so people can communicate with each other about what map instance they are going to
• Population of the map instance in relation to it’s max capacity ( Ex. 23/70 players)
• If the map contains a world boss or world event, a timer showing much time is left until it begins or whether or not it’s in progress. (There is no reason we should be going to an external website to get this information. Having world bosses that only appear for a window that occurs every 2-4 hours is already contentious enough, because most adult gamers don’t schedule their lives around video games)
• If the map contains a meta event, the overall progress of the meta event can be displayed. (Like in AB, it would should the number of active pylons and the timer until the city invasion)
• In addition, people who purchased a commander’s tag (A real one, not a pleb tag) can pin notes to the instance they are in that would get taken down when the commander left the instance.

The concept of pinning notes is important, because a lot of activity in certain maps is community driven events. For example, some Silverwaste maps are totally devoted to digging up chests. This is a community event that can’t be tracked formally by the system and a commander posting a note would make it clear why that map has a high population, but no progress on the meta event. A similar event would be commander’s leading Hero and Mastery Point trains in HoT maps.

Another example is if a commander jumps into an empty instance with the intention of organizing an effort to complete that maps’ meta, he/she needs a way to inform players of their intentions since they won’t be represented by the map’s population or event progress.

Another example is maps with large populations due to a large guild doing a guild mission. That’s another example of something you would want to inform people about so they didn’t jump into a high population map expecting it to be focused on a meta event. It would hopefully actively discourage player’s from coming to the map, leaving more space for future guild members that log on.

You could also build on this feature, so commanders could flag the event they are advertising as public or private. If it’s public, you could have people automatically added to the commander’s squad when they joined the map for that advertised event.

So, anyways, in conclusion, from that information, you would then decide whether or not you would want to stay in your instance or join another, which you would then do by clicking the instance you want, hitting join and then being teleported to the instance in the same manner that we do when taxing via groups.

So, boom, multiple game problems solved. No more playing Russian roulette with the map system to try and find other players actively working on a meta event. No more trying to ferry in 40 players to a map via joining a group intended for 5. If you get disconnected from a map during the Dragon Stand event, you have the option to find other instances with similar progress if the one you were previously in is full. You could also have kind of grace period where switching instances after a disconnect didnt result in a loss of your accumulated participation.

i’ve never done this before but i felt like it needed to be said.
i think we can all agree that the current LFG system is a bit lackluster.
i don’t know wether Arenanet is planning to take a look at this anytime soon.
my personal issue is the integration of regular open world content and HoT content in one single tab. we’re all just LFG’ing in the same tab wich makes it pretty hard to find what you’re looking for. especially when you try to find an organised DS map and all you can find is chest farm taxis. i know there is a search bar now but i found that this doesnt always show every result.
i would suggest making a seperate LFG tab for HoT content/maps and maybe even a seperate one for raids.
then again, this might just be me having this issue, but nevertheless i can try.

There are currently more than 15 different lfg tabs. Usually even during primetime not more than 4 are used (open world, fractals usually). We have so much different tabs and still a lot pvp, wvw, story, fractal searches are in the open world tab.

I can unterstand why you might think more tabs could be helpful, but they won’t help anybody! That said, the temporary lfg search function from anet is extremely awesome and probably the best solution. Anet could and should remove all lfg tabs and remove the 5 min lfg restriction now! Because everyone can know just use the search and get exactly what he wants! Search for ‘sw event’ and you get only sw enetmaps, search ‘raid’ and you get only raids, search ‘tarir’ and you get only tarir meta maps, …

I was just thinking, yeah, that was what that smell was, shouldn’t there also be an LFS (Looking For Squad) built into the LFG tool? I must apologise if this exists and I have just not seen it.

So I’ve seen reports in the past staying Anet doesn’t intend to create a Raid section of LFG, and I’m curious as to why.

The reasons I seen were because they were meant for organized groups and deemed too difficult for PUG groups to complete. I guess Anet underestimated the player base, because completing with PUGs is exactly what we have done! =D

That said, I think it’s a fair request to ask for a Raid section of LFG.

It’s not so much that there are multitudes of people looking for raids (the majority of the player base probably haven’t completed Vale Guardian) but that I don’t think it really falls under “Open World Content.” The thing is is that some of us, like myself, who don’t have the time to run with an organized raid group at specific times on specific days require LFG to find a group. And our posts often get lost in the sea of advertisements. (I can’t say I’d be against a separate section for HoT content/meta’s either….or even having that combined with raids.) Especially now that Fractal LFG’s are split into four different groups, surely we could have OWC split into more if it isn’t going to get a new section?

I know right now, this isn’t a very big issue (more of a slight annoyance) but with the introduction of new raids coming in the future, I’m sure it will entice more people to attempt them and thus need to find groups for them. I’m sure all of this has been discussed internally with Anet staff and I’m just curious about the outcomes of those conversations and the points for/against that have been brough up. So, is there any chance we see something like this in the future?

All of my sucessfull raids have been in pugs

I too have been more successful in PUGs than with my guilds. It’s fun meeting new players to attempt challenging content with and I think the social aspect of the game is very important. It’s the same idea as meta’s where it requires lots of organization with new people and I think having an LFG raid tool would be beneficial to that.

The current state of the LFG is one of the reasons I find it hard to play and it really needs some redesign love to be much more useful.

Filters are the solution and using areas as the first filter is something that just needs to be added. If I were to remake the system I would add tab filters for each of the main game types: Living World/Fractals/Dungeons/Raids/WvW/Personal Story. I’m not sure if sPvP needs the LFG as I don’t play that game type.

From those main tabs the tool would then further filter with area tags, for example:

LW—>Tyria—>Boss Runs
LW—>HoT—>Verdant Brink
LW—>HoT—>Auric Basin
LW—>Tyria—>Sparkfly Fen

Then allow the player who is searching for groups doing specific content to click filter check boxes to weed out all the stuff they don’t want to see.

How would you redesign the tools?

I have to agree the program needs much more improvements. the subcategories you mention are needed and also if they could stop theremoval of a LFG request everytime someone accidently joins your group then leaves which then boots you out of the list. the merge parties so far only causes problems there should be like a drop down menu after clicking on another party to then have the option to merge parties. I get constant mergers for fractal runs or SW chest runs when Im not doing either of those.

The lfg map area should be a subcategory because everyone just puts in any open world party in the general living world section. even dungeons with no names.
maybe make a selection tool before posting to require location/dungeon/ pvp area/ etc. before being able to post a group like the way you can put what language is spoken. maybe add atleast icons to indicate dungeon, raid, open world boss runs…

lfg is a great tool for use just wish it would be user friendly. I still like the overview of all groups maybe make a tab for a complete list which may change your mind to play say a dungeon or join a world boss group instead of doing fractals.

Amen. This really deserves a bump in my opinion.

At the very least it would be nice to not lose participation when following the recommendation of switching instance because the current one is dead.
It would be nice if it was possible to request a clean instance and ask for it not to be listed, but then you can invite players or taxi them in somehow. That way, listing the instances wouldn’t ruin the massive effort that GW2Community, for example, is putting in.

Generally, things like taxiing are workarounds and thereby a sign of flaws in the game’s design.

Nero.8047:

There are plenty of threads with this topic already.
I suggest reading these for a bit.
I believe as far as we know right now:
A-net does not have the resources/tools to adds a LFG Raid section.
This is because the LFG tool may look simple but it’s balanced around teams of 5.
addings raids, which are 10 man, would be hard to implement.

Completely irrelevant. Last I checked the Living world section is 5 man too and it is flooded with raid anyway. All a new section would do is move that garbage to a relevant section.

By the way saying Anet does not have the tools is total BS too considering they built the game, including the whole LFG functionality.

It’s the completely wrong subforum. Put it in HOT.

Yes, because the Living world LFG section is completely unrelated to Living world, makes sense, the fact that the name is 100% identical just confirms how unrelated it is.

PLEASE I mean these “abandoned” dungeons have their own tab and pvp which no one needs lfg for that I know of, why not raids?

With the release of HoT, we are in a dire need for a better LFG system. One with more rooms and better sorting. This might not be a new topic, but I haven’t heard any news about the LFG tool being expanded or optimized.

At the very least, each HoT map needs its own zone so people can organize HP runs and metas without clogging the “Open World” tab.

There should also be a Raid section, for all raid zones, and possibly each raid wing.

Maybe split up Living World into Map Completion, Boss Runs, Event Chains (like Orr), etc? I know there’s a General Story section, but it seems most people use Living World for everything…and it gets so crowded trying to look for something specific.

-Attached is a great example of why we need a more efficient LFG tool.

Can we please get a subsection in LFG for raids. The sheer number of looking to do this boss or that makes it hard to find anything else like world bosses and such. It’d be nice to have raids, and then one section for each wing, so one area for Spirit Vale and another for Salvation pass, and a third for the final wing whenever it should come out. Thanks!