Question to players

[Sebazy]

At the risk of taking someone elses thread and running off with it:

Let's take the OP's suggestion and lay down a few firmly defined rules for it:

The ranking would be completely hidden from players, you wouldn't be able to see your own rank, let alone anyone elses.

It would apply to Expert Roulette only, storyline stuff, levelling, trials and 24 mans would be completely unaffected by it.

The odds of it actually causing you to fail your duty are next to non existent, how frequently do you fail an expert roulette?

It would only be a system of prioritisation, it's not going to segregate casuals from hardcores, in short, if there's 4 dps in the queue, it'll pair the highest ranked pair and the lowest ranked pairs together along with any corresponding healers that might be waiting. If there's only 2 DPS in the queue, they will get put together irrespective of their rank. Tanks would still end up first come first served unless a number of them queue at the same time.only

The only legitimate issues that I can see are the following:

Someone can be a 90th percentile Ninja but have no idea what they are doing on Scholar, so would they be paired with people who know what they're doing and expect others to do so as well, even if they queued up on a job they don't know how to play? That might make for unnecessary toxicity.

You could have a rank per job I suppose, but the odds are that that's just going to overcomplicate things. Frankly I'd rather lean on the fact that someone who is seriously good at one job will be more than likely to put in the effort and playing another at a fairly solid level. Even if they don't, their APM is still likely to make them above average thanks to how huge the skill gap can be at times.

• Lack of diversity. It's not that I like running with bad players, but one of the reasons I like random stuff is the wide variety of different types of people you get. Running with the same (type of) people every time, all the time, would get boring fast.

Probably the most legitimate complaint really, if you're a DPS (or healer to a lesser extent) it's likely going to reduce the variance of your expert roulettes to some degree. My thinking here is that in all honesty, unless an expert is horrifyingly bad to the extent where it's going to earn you those sweet likes in the Duty Nightmares thread, it's usually instantly forgotten once you're done. There are those occasions where you do actually meet a fresh player that's actually willing to listen and learn, but then, as 2 posts down shows, that's typically in levelling content, not Expert (you don't pay my sub!). Which leads me onto my next point.

One common view I've not addressed above is the view of it meaning that low tier players won't have the ability to learn from veterans.

I'm sorry but no, that's just garbage at least as far as Expert roulette is concerned. Few people take notice of even an especially high standard of play in Expert, especially those that are underperforming. A good portion of the time it's not because they are bad, it's just because they aren't paying much attention or simply don't care and either way, they aren't going to learn from me irrespective of how many Amazon vouchers I chalk up pulverising my Holy key into dust. People are much more likely to notice cool little tricks and quality play in more challenging content such as trials (My TitanHM landslide baiting was the stuff of legend back in the day) where they are actually going to be paying a bit more attention.

Some of these things are hard to automatically judge. Tanks using cooldowns properly, for example? How does an algorithm judge that? Does SE have to sit down and decide "you should triple pull and use Hallowed Ground here"? That seems impractical. Healing done is another one, because healing done and HPS skyrocket in a group that's taking more damage... which is not a thing you want.

IMHO It'd be best to keep it to a purely DPS related weighting. Why? At the end of the day, this is more about trying to put people together with a similar taste in dungeon speed. We're more concerned about trying to put a tank that's more likely to rush and gather up large pulls with a healer that's expecting just that. It's not about filtering out the 'goods' from the 'bads'.

Top tier players need the occasional reminder that not everyone is them and newer players need to be exposed to people who know what they're doing rather than just each other.

I do actually agree on this one. I guess my gripe is that it's very rare for the bottom rung players to actually pay any attention when they end up alongside someone good.