"Content Finder" - Please be careful

[Nikita]

I am happy to see they are adding this feature, it is one I kinda missed from WoW. In my experience, people generally still did most of the dungeons with their guilds, and I always saw trade chat filled with people looking for members (sometimes just the tank) from their own server. If you don't like this feature then simply don't use it. Features like this are convenient to people who don't have a ton of time to play, though.

It is quite obvious that Square wants to allow both casual and hardcore players play in harmony in FFXIV, and a feature like this would facilitate that. Casual players, and sometimes even "hardcore" players sometimes like to just log in and get something done with what small time they have on a particular day. Heck, I am sure plenty of you saying you won't use this feature will find yourselves with only 1-2 hours of play time one day, log in, queue up for some group activity and really appreciate it.

And on the note of "WoW has this and it sucks" - Just because you may have seen it play out badly in WoW, doesn't mean that FFXIV can't do it right.

[ellohwell]

Yoshi said MMOs are like themeparks. At no point in time has he mentioned the virtue of MMOs as virtual worlds, so I think we can expect a version of this feature as seen in Rift or WoW, since it seems like (at least from the impression I get) that the dev team no longer values nor sees merit in creating a virtual world or trying to maintain the illusion of one.

FFXI was an extreme in that you had to physicall traverse the landscape in order to get, well, anywhere! And you had to painstakingly form parties the old fashioned way (with the help of a search feature).

And I think SE are trying to step as far away as possible from this "old fashioned way" of doing things. They don't trust their instincts anymore. And will therefore embrace anything that WoW and Rift ever did (because those games are money makers right?).

So I think it's pretty safe to say that we will get the WoW style of dungeon finder.

I honeslty hope we don't, but i think we will. They've mentioned wanting to pair players up with other players from other servers, and also that they want to convert all dungeons to instanced dungeons, so when taking these two factors into account, one is almost forced to draw the conclusion that we will be entering a very different (entrance-lobby-esque) game come Version 2.0.

[Answa]

Yoshi said MMOs are like themeparks. At no point in time has he mentioned the virtue of MMOs as virtual worlds, so I think we can expect a version of this feature as seen in Rift or WoW, since it seems like (at least from the impression I get) that the dev team no longer values nor sees merit in creating a virtual world or trying to maintain the illusion of one.

FFXI was an extreme in that you had to physicall traverse the landscape in order to get, well, anywhere! And you had to painstakingly form parties the old fashioned way (with the help of a search feature).

And I think SE are trying to step as far away as possible from this "old fashioned way" of doing things. They don't trust their instincts anymore. And will therefore embrace anything that WoW and Rift ever did (because those games are money makers right?).

So I think it's pretty safe to say that we will get the WoW style of dungeon finder.

I honeslty hope we don't, but i think we will. They've mentioned wanting to pair players up with other players from other servers, and also that they want to convert all dungeons to instanced dungeons, so when taking these two factors into account, one is almost forced to draw the conclusion that we will be entering a very different (entrance-lobby-esque) game come Version 2.0.

Where do you come off reading what he said completely ass-backwards? He said in that same analogy that you can decide to do whatever you want in a theme park: take in the sights, ride the thrill rides, ride the wimpy rides, but everything is there for everyone to enjoy.

Seriously.

[ellohwell]

but everything is there for everyone to enjoy.

That's why WoW and Rift put in dungeon-finder though.

Ease of access at the expense of the game's scope.

[Answa]

That's why WoW and Rift put in dungeon-finder though.

Ease of access at the expense of the game's scope.

You can still run around, nothing is taking that away from you.

[ellohwell]

You can still run around, nothing is taking that away from you.

How do you know that?

If they make most content instanced, then you can't just run around freely.

Also, even if they did leave players that one vestige/scrap of gameplay to play with, they'd still be depriving the servers of other elements, such as solidarity and community.

[Tsukino]

I posted this somewhere else, but I think my ideal "content finder" would basically just be a cross-server search/seek function.

When you go to make a party for something you can look on just your server or you can look at all of them, read their comments and see what classes/jobs they have, then send them a tell before inviting and to provide more information ("Hi, we're currently 4/8 for <dungeon you want>, PLD WHM CNJ DRG. Interested?"). Then once you have everyone invited you can "meet" at the dungeon entrance on your respective servers and it will take you all in together. I think there should be a kind of pseudo-party structure in place for this, where you can chat but still do solo stuff until you have enough people and are ready to go. That would allow you to talk more about what you'll do on the run, and also give people the chance to search their respective friend lists, linkshells, and companies for more members if there somehow aren't enough seeking across all the servers.

I think this way you get the advantages of being able to find enough people to do things with and play with people from other servers, but without the disadvantages of getting completely random people you haven't even spoken to or destroying a sense of world continuity by turning the game world into a dungeon lobby.

Of course, I'm trying to prepare myself for a wholesale import of WoW's dungeon finder, because the team won't likely listen to our concerns about it. If they do though, it's a chance to really make some improvements and stand out in the sea of modern MMOs.

[Llewelyn]

I'm so completely on the same page as the original poster. If the content finder ultimately behaves like a beefed up FFXI search, it'll be fantastic. If it just groups people without you having to invite them yourself... a LOT is lost.

Not just in the case of griefers.

In FFXI, the /sea command was pretty advanced. You could search for people in the 50-54 range with a speicific job. say 5 show up seeking parties, and lets assume they all want to do whatever you're recruiting for.

Being able to choose among those people to invite means you can invite people you've partied with before. So while the ultimate goal might be to get a party together, the real goal is to get a group of people to have fun with. Given the choice between someone you've partied with before and a stranger (or someone you KNOW is terrible/an ass), I think most people would pick the one they've met.

And the strangers shouldn't be worse off for it. If the content finder works well, then there'll be other people wanting to do the same content, and they'll manage to hook up for it.

The auto-party in FFXI was never used. There are reasons for that besides the fact it didn't work well mechanically.

[bobbygunz]

I'm so completely on the same page as the original poster. If the content finder ultimately behaves like a beefed up FFXI search, it'll be fantastic. If it just groups people without you having to invite them yourself... a LOT is lost.

Not just in the case of griefers.

In FFXI, the /sea command was pretty advanced. You could search for people in the 50-54 range with a speicific job. say 5 show up seeking parties, and lets assume they all want to do whatever you're recruiting for.

Being able to choose among those people to invite means you can invite people you've partied with before. So while the ultimate goal might be to get a party together, the real goal is to get a group of people to have fun with. Given the choice between someone you've partied with before and a stranger (or someone you KNOW is terrible/an ass), I think most people would pick the one they've met.

And the strangers shouldn't be worse off for it. If the content finder works well, then there'll be other people wanting to do the same content, and they'll manage to hook up for it.

The auto-party in FFXI was never used. There are reasons for that besides the fact it didn't work well mechanically.

Let's just hope that they implement the content finder as badly in FFXIV as they did the autoparty in FFXI.

[ThePatriarch]

Let's just hope that they implement the content finder as badly in FFXIV as they did the autoparty in FFXI.