Locked out of the Duty Finder.

[Mrydeen]

Dearest Devs,

There is a better solution to all this madness...

1) Allow the queueing for IN PROGRESS only option

2) Prevent the same person from being queued into the same party after he/she abandons it.

Any thoughts?

[BreathlessTao]

It's incredible how people can't seem to grasp the concept of collective punishment. Even more incredible is how people still don't want to take responsibility for how their personal actions affect others in a game that is, by definition, social. It would seem like there's a majority of kids playing this game, I swear (that or so many people are actually in-progress fishers, in which case shame on you and your arguments are invalid). I don't know why it is so hard to plan a little further ahead and to be a bit mindful of what you sign up for. Like, honestly, you can "miss"/withdraw twice without a consequence. And even after the third, you get a 30-min lockout only - is nobody used to way longer queues anymore? Is there absolutely nothing else in the whole game for you to do for 30 minutes without the DF? What on earth can you do three times a day to get yourself (and your party) to the actual penalty?? Seriously. Personally, not once since this was introduced have I even gotten to just one strike. It's not rocket science, for cryin' out loud. Grow up, be less ignorant of others and think a little less of yourself, take responsibility and bear the consequences. That's all. (And if you're actually in a party with friends...it boggles my mind if you really don't actually communicate enough to know when everyone's ready to register for duty.)

And with that said, of course, there might have been better ways to discourage withdrawing - theoretically, anyways, I'm not sure most of us knows what it would mean on the technical side to introduce an in-progress-only feature and a ban-from-abandoned/kicked-duty filter. For all we know, these might as well have been considered and discarded for one reason or another.

[Wildsprite]

It's incredible how people can't seem to grasp the concept of collective punishment.

it's incredible how people think that there should be collective punishment for a single party member's actions.
it won't create a better sense of community really it will just create a lot of angry players. especially if the party was made by Party Finder.

yeah "ready check" is a good idea but it isn't a solution

we have had atleast 1 person confirm that you still get a ding if someone in your party error 90k disconnects. this presents a bigger flaw.

we should not have a collective party punishment for DF . it should be per player only period.

keeping the collective punishment is a slippery slope SE should have never considered

[Souljacker]

Grow up, be less ignorant of others and think a little less of yourself, take responsibility and bear the consequences.

I find your post highly insulting and given that you seem to be so attuned to the social aspect of this game, I'm surprised you are expressing this much vitriol. The design of the queue was flawed from day one and allowed exploitation. People exploited it, because it's just human nature to take the path of least resistance. Punishing people for taking advantage of a design that should have never existed in the first place is, quite frankly, a terrible solution to an SE-created problem. Since it is now mostly impossible to fish queues to even help friends (which was their sole reasoning behind leaving that little "in progress" check box there to begin with), it should just go away, along with the newly unnecessary punishment for queue fishing.

People have lives and I'm sorry if someone having to withdraw from a queue interferes with your game, but that's reality when playing a social game (as you clearly wanted to remind us - this is a social game with real people who have real lives that TAKE PRECEDENCE).

I shouldn't have to think about the "consequences of my actions" when I need to leave because of an emergency - and my friends or the PF people I just joined shouldn't have to eat a strike because of my screaming kid. It's ridiculous. The whole thing is just ridiculous and the people arguing that this is the best way to handle the original design flaw should take a serious look at other players around them and see them as humans, not NPCs there to fill a duty finder.

[Niwashi]

What about adding in a feature that grants a 5 min auto-confirm duty when queuing up so that say you have to use the bathroom, and been queuing up for 30+ mins you don't have to run frantically back to make sure you don't miss it rather you put that auto-confirm toggle on and for those next 5 mins it will auto-confirm entry into the duty you are looking to get into.

You don't want an auto-confirm when you're not there. That's like automatically saying Yes to a ready check because you're not ready. It's supposed to mean you are ready.

What you want when you're momentarily unavailable is the ability to briefly defer entry without canceling out altogether. So it's like you briefly step aside and let a few other people go ahead of you in line, without getting out of line altogether. So instead of being the next group to go, you'd be in maybe the third or fourth group to go, but you wouldn't have to start over and go all the way back to the end of the queue.

[Violyre]

1) Allow the queueing for IN PROGRESS only option

Why would anyone not choose this option? You can't have an in progress if no one starts one.

[Giantbane]

It's incredible how people can't seem to grasp the concept of collective punishment.

We get it. It's a good idea to train soldiers who need to depend on each other for their very lives, or intense group efforts like sports teams who need to rely upon each other pretty heavily. It's bad for a game you play as entertainment, especially one that's supposed to have pretty casual grouping options.

[Neira]

I would just be happy if the queue timer were increased to something a bit more practical. I live in a one bedroom home, with my kitchen and bathroom both within sight of my TV, but 45 seconds if I'm in the middle of doing something in either simply isn't enough time for me to finish, wash my hands, and return to the TV. In the other MMO I play, I believe the timer is set at 3m, and I never had issues within missing it due to being in the middle of something.

It isn't really a big issue as a tank or healer when queues are often instant, but when I'm waiting for 30m in the middle of the night or on a damage class, having to remain ready is impractical.

[Kerwin]

Lol @ the kids bickering their insensitive opinions.

Punish the individual who withdraws, not the party. Simple as that.

[polyphonica]

What you want when you're momentarily unavailable is the ability to briefly defer entry without canceling out altogether. So it's like you briefly step aside and let a few other people go ahead of you in line, without getting out of line altogether. So instead of being the next group to go, you'd be in maybe the third or fourth group to go, but you wouldn't have to start over and go all the way back to the end of the queue.

This is actually a good idea in concept, but the real problem from a programming point of view is the mix of different party configurations and the imbalanced need of various jobs.

I mean if you think of it as if we're all individual people queuing, you could imagine that it just fills slots as "first-come, first-serve," with slots for each job category. In that scenario, the closer you get to the "front of the line", the sooner your number is likely to come up; in that sort of world, a "defer" option that lets others step in front of you could work. But if you're a tank or a healer, and there aren't enough of those to go around, your deferral could essentially have the same effect as a withdrawal to all the other players involved, because unless it so happens that another tank or healer shows up, they just have to wait for you anyway. So, "defer" is good for high-supply roles (since there are plenty of people in line behind you), but bad for high-demand roles (since one deferral makes a lot of people wait). (Perhaps you could make it so that the defer option is only available if there are others available who could readily fill your place.)

When you add party configurations, it can get more complex, because they don't necessarily actually get placed at the back of the line. The queue system is going to generally try to form parties as quickly as it can, so if you're a party of 6 and needs two more DPS, you may get those two DPS immediately even while there are 5 other players who were waiting for 1 healer or something. And back to the scenario above, if you're an individual queuer who defers, that still may not allow the group to move in front of you, because they may not have a gap that matches the slot you were filling.

Because of all this, there can't really have an indicator that's like "you're in position <x> out of <y> in line" (which would let you know how likely you are to be "called" soon), because it's a constant flux. The system would be constantly evaluating every single combination it can come up with given what it has to get as many people in as quickly as possible, of course prioritizing those who have been waiting the longest. (That's why you can kind of see it sometimes coming up with a combination, trying to make it work for a while, and then abandoning it to come up with a different combination.)

Anyway... it's an interesting puzzle to think about.

Punish the individual who withdraws, not the party. Simple as that.

As was discussed in this thread before, from a system point of view, the party is the queue entity. When one person in the queue withdraws, it's exactly the same as if every single one of those members had withdrawn. So while people may not like that they share in the punishment when it's not directly their fault, from a systematic point of view, it's the equitable thing to do. It's a punishment that attempts to discourage every occurrence of match failure. (In other words, whether you consider it "fair" all depends on who you consider as the party who was most wronged: the other people in the party, or the non-party people in the queue. The system is more worried about the latter than the former, because it assumes that the people in the party have more chance of interacting with each other.)