Dungeon Finder

[OJtheLIONKing]

I disagree with the OP on this, and on every single one of the things that was mentioned as a bad idea. There seems to be a culture from FFXI that any increase of playability, usability, readability or convenience is automatically a bad idea. I could (and have, in previous posts) gone on for ages about why this isn't a healthy attitude to have when developing a game that's desperately trying to attract new users after a disastrous launch caused by pandering to the people who most complain about the changes that have been made. However, I want to try and keep this reply shorter than an essay.

A Dungeon Finder system does have problems, yes, but they don't exist in games because the developers felt like screwing up balance. As an anecdotal example, when I played WoW along with some other friends in FFXI, we almost never did dungeons until the dungeon finder was implemented, and did them daily or more often afterwards. It's a great solution to people who want to do PUGs, but can't or don't want to spend hours finding groups for them as in FFXI. WoW's implementation also solves the problem with class favoritism that plagued FFXI for years and made finding PUGs a nightmare. Put another way, no one will force you to use a dungeon finder, but it can allow people who might not otherwise do this content to do it, and making content more accessible is the stated goal of the dev team.

That's not to say there aren't problems with it, but there are corrective steps that can be taken. Off the top of my head, a rating system for players that play nice as opposed to being jerks and leaving mid-fight that can result in them being placed higher in the queue in the future is one idea. This would incentivize good behavior while not completely excluding a paying customer from the content if they had a bad night, drunk-played, or what have you.

Lastly, I'm for a teleport simply because the content itself is currently time limited. Especially considering how long it takes to get from point A to point B without teleporting in this game, spending 30-60+ minutes to get to a dungeon that's less than an hour long is a phenomenal waste of time. It also gets annoying if you do the content more than every once in a while, having to walk to it every damned time.