Community request: Search system awareness campaign!

[Majidah]

The search system works great. A lot of people know this and use it to organize plenty of pick up parties. But for some reason an important number of the community won't use it. Most often than not its because other players don't use it, and other times because they didn't know about it.

For the last couple of weeks I've been shouting whenever I can, ever so often, with the following macro:

/sh DID YOU KNOW? There's a search system, and you can flag yourself as LFG!
/wait 1
/sh This has been a message of awarness for the party search system! Thank you.

Surprisingly I got a lot of tells from people asking me about the search system, where is it located and how to open it. I think it'd be great if people would use this macro (or one of your making) and spread the word!

If we managed a cultural change within the community to get the system as a habit in XIV players party making would be much less of a pain and make XIV overall a better gaming experience.

This doesn't mean sit down in uldah and spam a shouting macro, but... every now and then. When you see a lot of party shouts, or when you're running to pick up a leve and so.

A more instructive macro would be great also; please feel free to post your own!

[Raldo]

The real issue, for me, is how unintuitive the whole system is.

[Jinko]

Problem solved !




It's a simple matter of splitting the two functions, right now most people don't know you can seek in the search menu because nothing draws attention to that part of the menu.

It's pretty hard to miss seek party in the UI.

[Raldo]

It's not that unintuitive really.

It just requires a bit of thought and time to learn how to use it.

Not everything can be done with one click of a button.

My issues:

1) There are two searches. Menu > Search and Menu > Party > Search. These are completely separate entities as far as I can tell, and having them both around is confusing.

2) You can only "Seek for party" rather than seek for something specific. Interested in raid runs? Well unless you specify that in your comment (and it's short enough that people can read it without clicking on your name), then you're going to get invites to exp/spiritbond parties.

3) Unless someone knows to click on their name to set their seeking status, they'll never seek for party. We don't need a tutorial for this, it just needs to be done in a more transparent fashion -- a button perhaps? I like Jinko's suggestion of making it a menu option even better -- there's no reason to be setting your seek status from within the search menu.

You may not agree that it's unintuitive, but it's sure isn't as complete as it should be. I'm sure there are more issues, but I don't know about them because I rarely use it because it ssuuuuuuuuuccccckkkkks.

[Jinko]

My issues:

1) There are two searches. Menu > Search and Menu > Party > Search. These are completely separate entities as far as I can tell, and having them both around is confusing.

2) You can only "Seek for party" rather than seek for something specific. Interested in raid runs? Well unless you specify that in your comment (and it's short enough that people can read it without clicking on your name), then you're going to get invites to exp/spiritbond parties.

3) Unless someone knows to click on their name to set their seeking status, they'll never seek for party. We don't need a tutorial for this, it just needs to be done in a more transparent fashion -- a button perhaps? I like Jinko's suggestion of making it a menu option even better -- there's no reason to be setting your seek status from within the search menu.

You may not agree that it's unintuitive, but it's sure isn't as complete as it should be. I'm sure there are more issues, but I don't know about them because I rarely use it because it ssuuuuuuuuuccccckkkkks.

1) I agree, I couldn't believe when they added search that they left the old system in place and it seems they have no intention of taking it out until 2.0 either.

2) Content finder will solve this in 2.0

3) Edited my previous post.

[Elexia]

The issue is (which SE acknowledges) is the fact they didn't remove the Party recruit feature from the UI yet. It's actually fairly easy to use and better than XI's seek party system, it'll be even better once they throw in the ! seek flag since you'll see people seeking when you're running around ul'dah (since lets face it, people will cement themselves here even when they can't use the inn.)

[Majidah]

The real issue, for me, is how unintuitive the whole system is.

There you go, I just made it!

[Majidah]

Problem solved !




It's a simple matter of splitting the two functions, right now most people don't know you can seek in the search menu because nothing draws attention to that part of the menu.

It's pretty hard to miss seek party in the UI.

actually, I had this one guy who couldn't understand that you had to click on the top box to edit your own search settings. He hadn't realized that it was interactive.

[Raldo]

There you go, I just made it!

Since your reply quoted me...

You made a picture explaining how to use the existing system, yes. You can't, however, fix the fact that it sucks.

[Majidah]

Since your reply quoted me...

You made a picture explaining how to use the existing system, yes. You can't, however, fix the fact that it sucks.

I don't think it sucks, at least not until 2.0;
The system works, even better than XI. It isn't final and it isn't perfect, but it works really well and it takes seconds to flag up or make a search.