Quote Originally Posted by Alxyzntlct View Post
I have no issue with how people make their own groups in party finder, to each their own. And right now everyone has the means of reviewing their teams and making their own decisions. I just personally like how the Devs have approached this game and hope they maintain that standard, I feel giving more players more reason to interact with each other in a healthy manner is a good thing, not building tools that further enforce excluding others.
I agree that gatekeeping is generally a bad thing, but it's sensible as you start to climb the ladder into more and more difficult content. A lot of this content takes a significant time investment, and players may have a limited amounts of hours per-week that they're able to spend tackling it. As unfortunate as it may sound, there is a point where the scale tips, and you become too inclusive at severe cost to your own time and ambitions. Making such filters available won't instantly encode some kind of hard toxic meta into the game; ilevel restrictions and one-player-per-job are applied responsibly in most cases, and I would expect similar behavior around meld-required parties.

I've seen both edges of this issue; I teach a lot of people in this game to raid, I've lost count of how many people I've sat down with and explained melding to, linked BiS to, etc. A lot of high-end players want to share their passion and help to grow the fairly niche raid community, and this game has no shortage of inclusivity at the moment despite fairly similar restrictions already being available. At the very same time, I don't owe my time to anyone. I shouldn't be expected to always be ready to donate my time to other people at the drop of a hat, particularly at the cost of my own goals and ambitions. To that end, giving players tools to try to control the quality of their experience in a custom party setting isn't inherently evil or something. There is a time and a place for inclusivity, but a party full of people working hard to push narrow margins may not be it.

A balance has to be struck between allowing players to try to control the quality of their experience, and making sure other players aren't completely left behind. A lot of the time this comes down more-so to the culture of the game, rather than the actual mechanisms provided by the game itself. If the game itself did a better job of teaching players how to play it, I don't think any of these types of things would really be necessary tbh.