How to make a Duty-Finder system that helps rather than hurts community

[Makeda]

Seems like this ought to be in 'Dungeons' but everyone's putting these kinds of threads in general so here I go...

My suggestions on how to make a Duty Finder system that would help community, and a call for others to post their own ideas after it.

Not a 'this community sucks/is great' or a 'the devs are/aren't making one' thread - but just suggestions.

1. Give the option to form same-server only randoms.
2. Give the option to make friends across servers.
3. Allow grouping of friends from any World. So you could just go down your friend list and invite/tell/linkshell chat with any friend on any World.
4. Make Vote-Kick a power ONLY the party leader has (see below for why).
5. Pass party lead in order joined group if party lead DC's or is AFK more than 2 minutes.
6. Allow random groups to stay grouped after completion, and re-queue together.
7. Allow cross-world blacklisting.
8. Make the blacklist account-based not its current character based. If I blacklist 'leetpwns' ALL of my characters should end up blacklisting ALL of 'leetpwns' characters.
9. Keep people from grouping with anyone in their blacklist. On accident or purpose.
10. Let people privately see the number of blacklists against them. Updated not more often than once/day (so you can't tell the moment a person blacklists you and thereby know who to send your buddies to harass). If you're starting to get on people's nerves, you can't know to correct yourself unless well, something is there to give you a clue.
11. Do all of the above in ADDITION to the MVP system.

Thoughts on why to restrict kicks to ONLY the party leader:

Frankly I know it was crueler, but WoW originally had a 'party leader can kick' fiat system... and it was less abused.

One dictator can often be less harsh than a mob tyranny... at least on a small scale like this.

If there is one person with power over these things - the person that formed the party - that person tends to have a vested stake in the nature of the run: They want it to be successful, and/or polite, and/or whatever... so when the kicks happen, they happen for consistent reasons - and people learn to set expectations.

Back in the old WoW, due to all grouping being same server only, and only leads having kick power - folks gained a rep. You knew to or not to group with 'leetpwns' as (s)he'd kick people for saying 'Hi' or being 1.23% too slow on hitting A+B and UP...

Or you knew to or not to group with 'ponyhugs' because (s)he'd kick people for saying anything that didn't have a smiley on the end, but would tolerate any noob that could get past the login screen...
- Expectations could be set based on server rep.

And when kicks are not random because one person holds the power - if you know that 'jerk' running the group is a jerk and kicks for jerkish reasons, its not griefing.
You just know... 'group with the jerk if you agree with how they kick' or 'avoid the jerk if you disagree with how they kick.'

[Zakalwe]

Entirely agree, even with the leader kick issue. Great set of positive suggestions.

[Crica]

1) players already have the option to play with random players on their own server, so there is no need to place undo stress on the Duty Finder tool which would cause it to form groups slower then needed by adding this option to it as well (as Yoshi-P has already explained)

2) players already have the option to add random players on their own server to their friends list, if there is no one on their server they want to be friends with, switching servers when the feature goes live in 2 weeks would be a better solution

3) you are asking for a tech to be implemented to a game that is very young - use "server transfer" feature that will go live in 2 weeks until the game has enough money to actually do this - WoW is the ONLY mmo that does this, and it is a game that brings in a TON of money compared to this one

4) there is NO party leader in a random Duty Finder group because NO ONE formed the group themselves, SE formed the group for everyone

5) see #4

6) that would cause the tool to become NON RANDOM - if you want to play with the same players over and over, form your own groups instead of using a tool that matches you with RANDOM players

7) again, a tech like this for a very young MMO just is not going to happen - take a break from using the Duty Finder and go play the rest of the game or play with your friends and family if you happen to be unlucky once in a while - personally i have yet to encounter more then 2 players that i could not just ignore and continue the run anyway

8) see #7

9) see #7

10) what? why does it matter if you know i blisted you or not? most players do it without telling why they do it just so they can avoid any ingame drama, so knowing whom blisted whom doesnt help anyway

11) stop using the Duty Finder as your SOLE means of player interaction and the game will be alot more fun

[GabrielK]

I agree with most if not all of your points. Great stuff.
Especially love the cross-server grouping with people in your cross-server friends list, that's brilliant and enlarges the community.

However the blacklist thing, I don't wish to be restricted from accidentally grouping up with blacklisted people for the simple fact that even if I have the person blacklisted, I may still wish to take part in that "24 man PUG raid" since I have no problem with the other 22 people. And many of the others may have no reason to blacklist the person I did blacklist, I can't possibly ask them to remove him from the party on account of my problems with him.
Sure, he may end up sabotaging me in that group, but it's a risk I might be willing to take but I simply don't wish to see what he says.
I'd prefer that the person I have blacklisted would show up as with a certain color or something that tells me "hey, this guy is in your blacklist, are you sure you want to be in the same group as him?"

Again, great post Makeda.

[Errors]

I'll give a shot at what my opinions are on your post.

Give the option to form same-server only randoms.
In theory I'm all for it, but expect long queue times. Since you are only localizing your search to your own server, you have to deal with a much smaller pool. You think being stuck in queue waiting for a tank or healer is bad now, just wait when you reduce your selection pool to your your server only. Not everyone who uses DF is doing the same content as you. The pool gets smaller even more so.

Give the option to make friends across servers.
Eh, not really something I care much about really. They aren't on my server, they aren't running FC/LS content for me, they can't trade with me, they can't buy my items, they can't craft something for me, they can't meld something for me, they can't run through content outside of DF. See a trend here? They really have zero influence on my world. Sounds selfish? It probably is, but that's why I have friends, LS mates, and a FC on my server.

Allow grouping of friends from any World. So you could just go down your friend list and invite/tell/linkshell chat with any friend on any World.
This will cause longer queue times as well. Perhaps not for you, but for the community as a whole. So, you are pretty much blocking out other people who want to do a quick PUG group. IE. reducing the amount of people in the selection pool that the DF servers are trying to match up with.

Make Vote-Kick a power ONLY the party leader has (see below for why).
A simple vote kick is a lot more complicated than it sounds. There has to be a lot of thought put into this, when can it be used, what are the times it can be abused, how to avoid people getting screwed at the last minute, etc… I don't think people have really thought the implications on implementing a system that doesn't allow people to totally screw other folks over. Hell, I don't even have a good solution for this and have milled over a good way for a while now just for a suggestion. What most folks don't realize is that SE probably has a much bigger picture in mind and more insight on what's going on that the small minor vocal community you see here on the forums.

Pass party lead in order joined group if party lead DC's or is AFK more than 2 minutes.
DC'ing isn't really that much of an issue, as the person can log back in and get right back into the party where they left off. What about the situation where they don't come back? Yeah system should kick them after a certain time and then DF hopefully finds a replacement. Of course you are hoping that someone has clicked the option to join mid-run.

Allow random groups to stay grouped after completion, and re-queue together.
This, I'm all for. Seems silly that folks even PUG can't technically farm dungeons. Especially since you've managed to successfully complete the run.

Allow cross-world blacklisting.
Yeah, again this will cause so much problems with the queue times. Lets say you have 8 people in the queue. Each of those 8 people have at least on of the other 7 people on a blacklist. Guess what? No one is going to get a party setup and everyone is raging at SE for the long queue times. Now scale that up and you'll run into this problem quite a bit. The more people black list the smaller and smaller pool you get. Imagine the DF making a party 7/8 and your group needs just one healers. A healer signs up for DF queue, sweet! Oh, no party member number 4 in your party has them blacklisted. Sorry your group can't party with them. Back to waiting. Now scale that up when DF will allow folks to queue up for 24 person content. It would be insane.

Make the blacklist account-based not its current character based. If I blacklist 'leetpwns' ALL of my characters should end up blacklisting ALL of 'leetpwns' characters.
See my comment on blacklisting above. Also, keep in mind everyone has different degrees on what they would consider a blacklisting offense.

Keep people from grouping with anyone in their blacklist. On accident or purpose.
See my comment on blacklisting above.

Let people privately see the number of blacklists against them.
Yeah, not so much. Do I have anything to hide? No. The reason someone get's blacklisted doesn't have any information attached to it. I've seen people get blacklisted for no apparent reason other than hive mind mentality. You're own server knows how to filter the bad seeds. It happens on a daily basis especially as the community matures.



Do I have any personal ideas for fixes for what's going on right now with DF and bad behaviour? Not really, however I'm curious to see how SE's MVP system will actually work or when/if they do implement a vote/kick feature on how they apply rules to it. Best thing I can do in the meantime? Wait and see what is instore for us.

[GabrielK]

*snip*

I disagree with the "switch servers" bit. You mean we're not allowed to befriend people cross-server ?
The feature to be able to befriend and group on DF with them seems extremely nice to me and it would be a welcome and brilliant addition.

Also "stop using DF" for player interaction ? It's a nice tool that can be improved upon greatly, and there's little reason not to, in my opinion, at least in the long run.

[Crica]

I disagree with the "switch servers" bit. You mean we're not allowed to befriend people cross-server ?
The feature to be able to befriend and group on DF with them seems extremely nice to me and it would be a welcome and brilliant addition.

Also "stop using DF" for player interaction ? It's a nice tool that can be improved upon greatly, and there's little reason not to, in my opinion, at least in the long run.

read the ENTIRE thought instead of glancing over it

i said that the game is young and does not have the money for the TECH for this atm like the ONLY MMO that does this does, WoW...

i said stop using DF as your SOLE means of player interaction and the game becomes more fun...

[nawrot]

I agree with OP, this is community based game, so please let us make real community.
For me WOW killer was LFG system, in matter of days i stopped to play with people and started with rude bots instead.
This kills reason to play MMO for me.

I would also add, crosserver invite to replenish ranks, again for leader only.

[Swishytail]

I believe in regards to the same server randoms, they are adding something to do just that.

It's going to be some option you can check like "Join In Progress" so that it will only group
you with people on your specific server. I apologize for not citing it, let me see if I can find
where I read it from and I'll edit post.

[Makeda]

EDIT: Hit my daily post limit here right after this response. So any further comments from me will be... eventually... or maybe in the New Players forum. :P

SE, re forum posting limits... really? I mean I get it for really new folks, but once you've shown you're not a spammer... come on... :P

10) what? why does it matter if you know i blisted you or not? most players do it without telling why they do it just so they can avoid any ingame drama, so knowing whom blisted whom doesnt help anyway

11) stop using the Duty Finder as your SOLE means of player interaction and the game will be alot more fun

It looks like you misread almost all of my list, and in fact read number 10 as the exact opposite of what I said. I'm suggesting people be able to see how many times someone has blacklisted them. But not be able to deduce who.

And for 11... if that is a solution, we could just pull the tool out of the game. I'm looking at ways to make the tool work, on the assumption that removing it is NOT an option.

As for the money. They had the money to put the tool in there - they had better find the budget to make it work, or with a game this new, it could kill the game. WoW only survived its duty finder because people had 5 years prior to become addicted to the product, their characters, and the lore. Enough inertia to survive killing its community. Even now, almost a year from leaving active play in WoW, just thinking about it makes me fondly remember my Tauren Warrior and Druid... then I remember that for the last 2 years that I was there, once the last of my friends had given up on the toxicity, I was playing mostly alone despite being a raid tank in a guild of about 300-500 active people...

The longer they take to find solutions, ANY solutions - mine or those of others, the less likely this MMO will survive. People right now have a new shiny, but don't yet have 'vested time'... and could easily move on.

Maybe my ideas are all the wrong ones. But some set of ideas needs to be put in. So I'd love to see what ideas others have. Maybe suggest some low financial cost to develop ones?


EDIT #2:

I like the idea suggested after here to have a "vote to promote" option, as my party-leader idea is mostly about putting a check and slow down on kicks.

On preventing people from grouping with folks they've blacklisted - I was thinking of 'stalker avoidance' - so perhaps a popup saying:

To the person who did the blacklisting:
"[Insert name] that is on your blacklist is also queued for this group. Both of you must accept removing the blacklists or you will both be removed from this particular party. You will not be able to blacklist them again for 48 hours. [Yes/No]"

To the person who was blacklisted:
"Someone (name withheld for privacy) who has blocked you is also queued for this group. Both of you must accept removing the blacklists or you will both be removed from this particular party. You will not be able to blacklist them again for 48 hours. [Yes/No]"

Alternatively, just a checkbox, checked by default, that says "Do not group with folks you have blacklisted."

On seeing the number of people who have blacklisted you, I was thinking it would look like this on your social panel:

11 People across all Worlds have black listed you.
3 People on [insert your world name] have black listed you.

Period. No more detail than that. It would just tell me... "oh... I'm doing something that is getting people mad at me, maybe I should change..." (if I cared).