Guild Wars 2

Good Day/Evening to you in support reading this.
I’m composing this message to attempt to describe to you a problem I’ve been having with the way the looking for group system has been working today, namely in the sense of the party restrictions imposed on a player after joining a couple of others and leaving them within 15 – 30 minutes.

Today i logged into gw2 planning to run through all the dungeons and amass a bit of gold.
I had planned to do it within a set amount of time that I’ve gotten used to over the past year. I joined a party for path one in Crucible of Eternity and after we completed it, as usually i left the party to look for another to join, seeing one for path 2 and path 3 i joined it and did those and again at the end left the party, it was then that i discovered that the join button was grayed out and saw the message about “joining too many parties recently”.
Now I was very confused at this as between the first and second party joining there was at least a 10-15min period, and by the time path two and three were done another 20 to 25 minutes must have passed, yet I still had to wait about 10 minutes for the join button to become useable again.
Next I joined a Sorrows Embrace party in need of explorable mode opener and we did paths one and three, at the end of which, after we all got our chests and rewards I thanked them all and left using the /leave command coincidentally closing the dungeon instance we were in and which i had onened. as it was done with.
I was then blocked from joining another party for another 30+ minutes.

So here is the problem. Before this weird restriction began to occur I could join parties whenever and leave whenever, but more importantly I could complete the maximum number of dungeons in the minimum amount of time , making sure to lose as little time on the food items I use to boost my combat effectiveness, with this restriction its like wasting those items (and the gold spent on them) after one short run, unless I already join a party for all paths or something, and those are rarer and often require exceptional quickness to join, further more there is all the waiting time in between which is frankly a waste of time :\
Now what is even more odd to me is that yesterday evening I joined quite a number of different parties trough the LFG system without any such issues.
At first I debated this being a bug with my guild members but trough our conversation I learned that its supposed to be a built in feature to prevent trolls from joining peoples parties just to spite them, and while I have encountered such trolls I have never felt them being more than a mild annoyance and I certainly did not feel nearly as inconvenienced as I’ve been today with these joining restrictions.
Can you confirm to me whether or not this joining restriction is a new system or a bug that I got stuck with somehow?
And if it is a system, could you consider changing it so that if a player joins and leaves two parties or more in less than one minute and in no more than 3 minutes, it is only then that the restriction is applied for no more than 5 minutes as any longer penalisation seems excessive and unnececary.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, i hope im not posting it in the wrong place.

I get the message frequently when using LFG, but every time I’ve seen the message I was placed into the party anyway. I think it tries to join the same party multiple times when you join through the tool. I guess if you did enough dungeons back to back the penalty may stack for each time the message comes up? It’s probably a system to defeat bots.

I’m sure support knows way more than I’d do, but I’d see if leaving the window open for a few seconds results in you being placed into the party you requested.

DMac – in case i didnt write it clearly in my post, the “Join” Button becomes grayed out for me and refuses to do anything, clicking on it is as if i were clicking on the side of any other window ingame and has no effect, i cant even see the names of the people in the parties that are listed to ask them to invite me to party since the only way for me to enter a party when the bug occurs is to be invited to it.

@Altriba: you might want to update your post (or restart it) with a tl;dr at the beginning, so whichever ANet employee reviews it can see the key issue without having to absorb all the details.

My best understanding of the issue you are reporting:

• LFG tool disables joining a new group for 15-20 minutes after dropping the previous one.
• This prevents you from doing more than 1-2 dungeons within the hour.

You might want to use a new title, too: it’s not “confusion” (you don’t sound confused in the least), it’s that group joins are getting throttled, so maybe: “LFG timer preventing joining a new group after completing a dungeon with the old” (or something along those lines).

(I think it’s probably ok that you included the full story, since it’s hard to know what details the QA team needs to reproduce the issue.)

In the meantime, have you tried forming your own group instead? Or are you blocked from doing that? (Obviously, requires that you have story mode completed, but, hey, any port in a storm.)

Good luck (and please let us know what you find out, if anything).