This is why the community/DF is so terrible.

[Artamie]

After seeing all these topics about people's duty finder woes I can't help but wonder why they don't seem to have any plans to fix it. Putting players with different goals in mind into a single party was a really bad idea. That said, I am always upset to see anyone have a bad day over duty finder so I've spent some time thinking of a possible solution. This may be conceited of me to post this but in my opinion they need to...

1) Implement a play style check box in the duty finder options. These can be speed run, casual-friendly, immersion, roleplay, you name it! (by this I don't mean we make our own labels but that SE designates a couple of categories) This groups people with similar interests together so you won't be fighting over whether or not you want to speed run or watch cutscenes etc. If you're unable to successfully duty-find the one of your choice at least you shouldn't complain if you checked the other boxes. Better yet, start your own party on your server.

2) Implement a rate-up system reputation system that gives the option for people to rate up the reputation of other players. If you believe the players in your party have done well and they would be just as pleasant to people in other parties you can give them a thumbs-up on a menu which pops up after the completion of a dungeon upon clicking the exit node. Note this does not give the option to rate players down. Players are assigned best matches depending on how close their reputation points are. Reputation points from the same player can only be obtained once a week and reputation points are only obtained in duty finder runs.

3) Implement a vote-to-quit system in the event the party believes it’s impossible to progress either due to improper setup or player disagreement though the former shouldn’t occur with upcoming item level restrictions. This requires the consensus of a majority of the party and negates the duty finder re-queue penalty. This is in addition to still being able to voluntarily leave the party as an individual where you do suffer the penalty and a reputation decrease.

4) Add more stringent system of determining player contribution to a dungeon run. If you get 100 tomestones per run and someone was with you 80% of the way, give them 80 tomestones. If they were afk the entire run they get 0. The difficulty with this idea is how to determine what is considered contribution. Obviously a person setting their character on follow won't be considered a contributing member so contribution by dungeon segmentation won’t work very well. For this make a boss encounter require the player to be on a system similar to the hate list forcing them to attack/do something that angers the mobs. For this they should split the boss monster's hate system into like maybe 4 segments at 100%, 75%, 50%, and 25%. If the character is actively contributing during at least half these they will get credit (since they might be dead at points but you certainly shouldn't expect a player to be dead over 50% of the time during a boss fight unless they’re seriously not trying). Loot that drops after certain bosses can only be lot upon if the player contributed during the fight. Those who disconnect and don't come back or show very little contribution have their player reputation-ups decreased. Your reputation can go into negatives in which case you'll end up being matched with other negatives and have a poopy party. Newbies should start with positive reputation to ensure they aren't matched with scums of the earth.

5) With respect to 4, trash mobs can be useful to some extent by causing them to be additional contribution evaluators. Using a similar system introduced in point 4 you can make it so that if the contribution points between members reach a predetermined gap the lowest is automatically ousted and replaced. So in the case of a chest farmer who refuses to leave after opening up chests, the remainder of the party can kill a few trash mobs causing the contribution gap to grow and oust the member which also results in the system taking away reputation points from that player. Depending on whether group chest farming is considered okay by the devs, they can implement it so that at least 1 group of trash mobs must be cleared before all chests prior to the first boss can be opened.

To give an example of the reputation point system II think maybe the numbers should be arranged something like this:

Newbie Default Reputation= 50

Player input reputation= +1 per player who thumbs you up

Disconnect/Leave= -4 reputations (to further clarify if the disconnection lasts for 5 min the player is automatically ousted and replaced)

Lack of contribution= -4 reputations per boss

This way at the end of a 4 man dungeon you can get a possible +3 reputations and +7 reputations in an 8 man party.

If you’re in the scenario where you really have to drop out of a party then cut your losses and take -4 rather than hinder the

party and take -4 per boss you fail to contribute to.


Pros: The perks of this system is that it not only does it ensure everyone automatically shares similar goals prior to entering a dungeon; it also groups similar people together by their reputation number. Since we know that within a MMO community there are several different niches it’s possible that by playing solely within these niches you have a higher chance of meeting similar people multiple times. Tired of serious speed-running? Why not check the box for role-play and explore the game from a different perspective? It eventually separates the friendly and the unfriendly players without causing unnecessary animosity since its punishment is doled out by the system rather than a player on player basis. It becomes the player’s own fault if they can’t get into good parties. It gives no incentive for those who afk to try to get away with loot by giving them no rewards and kicks them into the negative pool of players pretty quickly in multi-boss dungeons characteristic of higher difficulty and thus higher reward dungeons. Note that this doesn’t mean that you can’t right yourself if you start out as a horrible human being and go negative. You can party with a higher reputation player and complete the duty finder dungeon as a nice player and have eventually get up-voted back into positive albeit rather slowly. An entertaining twist to this is that in the process of building up their reputation again they will most likely be paired with newbies and be forced to conduct community service.
Cons: It feels overly rigorous and will make troublemaker players who enjoy the havoc they cause very very angry. If the uncooperative player is the healer problems may still persist; the healer may decide to not raise an individual because they’re “a noob” or countless other reasons but if the contention that the majority of the community does not act this way is true then it should only be a short term problem. The others in the party will not rate up the particular healer causing each of his or her consecutive problems to decrease their reputation faster than they can build it. Finally, it’s possible that partially formed parties can still horrendously grief a player. Ex: a group of 5 speed runners queue for immersive/cutscene dungeon then proceeds to speed through the dungeon while the other 3 are still watching their cutscenes and get ousted and have their rep points taken away. In this case I find making this behavior reportable might be a good idea since these instances of griefing would have to be pre-meditated.

Anyways, posting this was probably kind of pointless but I figured I get it off my chest than keep thinking about possible duty finder fixes. I apologize for the long and incredibly useless post.