Showing Posts For Werner.9317:
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.
Funny how the comment is made that players are leaving, when I have personally seen the most of my friends online since launch day.
The buggy Karka event caused 90% of the people I know to leave, and the sad reality is that they fell so far behind that they had no incentive to come back.
With the launch of HoT, and the fundamental changes to the game, it was like a big reset button. All of a sudden, everyone had to build characters again, explore new worlds, learn to play the game again.
A ton of players returned, and are still actively playing. I dont have the bigger scale numners, but HoT seems very very well received.
As for raids, its such a tiny blip in the content, I cannot see any reason other than elitism that you would complain about it. The only reason you have to care about raids, is legendary armor, and to put that in context, you want to be rewarded as the best, without doing the work to earn it. That hardly seems fair!
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.
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.
Not sure yet what changed, but everything is working for me now.
Experiencing the same issue from South Africa.
Works on the 3 mobile providers, Cell-C, MTN, and Vodacom.
On Telkom, I have noted the following:
forums-en.guildwars2.com works,
wiki.guildwars2.com works,
www.guildwars2.com does not work,
support.guildwars2.com does not work,
account.arena.net does not work,
account.guildwars2.com does not work,
Game Client Login does not work,I can update the game client from Telkom, however I cannot log in. I can browse all websites apart from “Account” related or sign in related.
@Anet, Is there anything unique with those sites, which would indicate why it would not work?
Still not possible to log into GW2 from South Africa with ISP Telkom.
Vodacom ISP works fine.
My tracert for Telkom:
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright © 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.C:\Users\SlapTjip>tracert www.guildwars2.com
Tracing route to www.guildwars2.com [64.25.47.51]
over a maximum of 30 hops:1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms hi.link [192.168.8.1]
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 255 ms 379 ms 249 ms 172.17.48.13
4 28 ms 39 ms 30 ms 172.17.48.21
5 46 ms 25 ms 47 ms 8ta-150-179-01.telkomadsl.co.za [41.150.179.1]
6 31 ms 29 ms 29 ms 196.25.188.73
7 195 ms 193 ms 207 ms 196.43.9.86
8 205 ms 206 ms 200 ms ldn-b5-link.telia.net [62.115.35.89]
9 211 ms 194 ms 192 ms ldn-bb3-link.telia.net [80.91.246.144]
10 199 ms 201 ms 203 ms prs-bb3-link.telia.net [62.115.134.100]
11 215 ms 211 ms 211 ms ffm-bb4-link.telia.net [62.115.143.194]
12 237 ms 214 ms 212 ms ffm-b1-link.telia.net [62.115.121.11]
13 459 ms 558 ms 879 ms ncsoft-ic-306349-ffm-b11.c.telia.net [62.115.43.
74]
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.Trace complete.
C:\Users\SlapTjip>
Experiencing the same issue from South Africa.
Works on the 3 mobile providers, Cell-C, MTN, and Vodacom.
On Telkom, I have noted the following:
forums-en.guildwars2.com works,
wiki.guildwars2.com works,
www.guildwars2.com does not work,
support.guildwars2.com does not work,
account.arena.net does not work,
account.guildwars2.com does not work,
Game Client Login does not work,
I can update the game client from Telkom, however I cannot log in. I can browse all websites apart from “Account” related or sign in related.
@Anet, Is there anything unique with those sites, which would indicate why it would not work?
Still not possible to log into GW2 from South Africa with ISP Telkom.
Vodacom ISP works fine.
My tracert for Telkom:
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright © 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.C:\Users\SlapTjip>tracert www.guildwars2.com
Tracing route to www.guildwars2.com [64.25.47.51]
over a maximum of 30 hops:1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms hi.link [192.168.8.1]
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 255 ms 379 ms 249 ms 172.17.48.13
4 28 ms 39 ms 30 ms 172.17.48.21
5 46 ms 25 ms 47 ms 8ta-150-179-01.telkomadsl.co.za [41.150.179.1]
6 31 ms 29 ms 29 ms 196.25.188.73
7 195 ms 193 ms 207 ms 196.43.9.86
8 205 ms 206 ms 200 ms ldn-b5-link.telia.net [62.115.35.89]
9 211 ms 194 ms 192 ms ldn-bb3-link.telia.net [80.91.246.144]
10 199 ms 201 ms 203 ms prs-bb3-link.telia.net [62.115.134.100]
11 215 ms 211 ms 211 ms ffm-bb4-link.telia.net [62.115.143.194]
12 237 ms 214 ms 212 ms ffm-b1-link.telia.net [62.115.121.11]
13 459 ms 558 ms 879 ms ncsoft-ic-306349-ffm-b11.c.telia.net [62.115.43.
74]
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.Trace complete.
C:\Users\SlapTjip>
(edited by Werner.9317)