Look what just happened in Duty !

[yoshikwalla]

This elitist mindset may question my faith in humanity, but it's fostered by the game itself for two reasons:

1. The Glass Ceiling (or "Skill Barriers"): Compared to 1.0, this game is very challenging for some people. Different people have different skill levels in different things. People improve at their own paces. This is a fact of life that a lot of people tend to forget. Everyone bought this game to have fun, and while glass ceilings don't ruin games in general, the group mentality created as a result of this ruins fun. And why else would you play a game?

The best way to fix this, in my opinion, would be to add a system of dynamic difficulty that revolves around the group or player. This would require a lot of balancing to keep the game challenging (and people tend to hate balancing updates for one reason or another) and the endgame raiding community that shed blood and tears to get their gear would quit (though this wouldn't be a bad thing in retrospect since most endgame raiders are whiny, elitist assholes, to be completely blunt), but it would result in a game that's simply more fun. Players and their friends, doing a dungeon that provides just enough challenge to keep their blood rushing and help them gradually improve at their own paces.

2. The Dungeon Finder: Easy to access, but ruins communities. Just rends them. People use the dungeon finder to play in a group quickly and self-servingly. As a result, dungeons aren't group content. You're not in a group mindset going in and other players are just tools you can utilize to get past the gear barrier as quickly as possible. Most of the time you never go in with people you've met and as a result you don't care about their welfare. They're pixels on the screen that you have no personal connections to. You don't know their personalities, their play-styles, nothing. And why would you? Once the dungeon is over they'll go back to their server and you'll go back to yours, rendering the act of meeting people in an online game fucking useless. They are simply there because the dungeon finder added them, not you. You had no choice in the creation of a party so the only thing you can utilize to vent your frustrations, aside from quitting, is the kick function. Who cares? Another pawn will come in his place, hopefully with some better stats.

Just remove the dungeon finder so people can make groups with their own rules with people that they know or have time to actually meet and make the slightest sliver of a personal connection to. People tend not to help strangers. People will inevitably complain that it takes too long to do dungeons compared to the "days of the dungeon finder," but I will eat my entire left leg if the community doesn't improve as a result.