Greetings, glorious adventurers! If you're joining in our Alpha One spot testing, please follow the steps here to see all the latest test info on our forums and Discord!
Options
Group Finder And Matchmaking
NyceGaming
Member
What is your mindset towards group finders, dungeon LFGs, and matchmaking with so much content not being instanced based? Do you feel there should a gear, weapon, or skill requirement to que as a tank if group finder is a thing? For example a tank may be required to slot a shield or at least one to two taunt/threat generator. How would you approach this?
0
Comments
They don't have match matching in the game you got to actually socialize and make groups.
Yea and that’s something I like, but I asked because I know there’s a lot of people who dislike that from what I hear
In AoC won't be so easy travelling around the map, so I wonder how a LFG system will work if you can't just click and go to the group
I'd be okay with Party Leaders having the ability to set a FEW requirements in any 'Party Finder' so that they can filter responses.
e.g. if you're looking for a Paladin, being able to specify 'must have exactly this Body Piece', 'must have this ability at Tier 3', 'must have this much total Elemental Defense', etc.
I think this would possibly HELP with social interactions, if it appeared on the Party Finder.
Scenario A: You can't do this, you get 7 different tanks (this is a Fantasy World don't judge me) all saying they are willing to tank for you, then you have to vet them until you find one (or none) that you feel comfortable actually tanking with, possibly upsetting multiple people.
Scenario B: You can do this, you get who you want, OR you get someone who can look at your requirements, consider 'wait maybe they need this, but I have this equivalent thing/different approach', and then that person contacts you and talks to you about it while already knowing the requirements and can just ask why you need them. Then you just remove the requirements if you agree (admittedly I'm used to something like this already so biased).
Is this 'elitism' or 'gatekeeping' to people? I'm seriously never sure about how this sort of thing is perceived nowadays (I don't play FFXIV, for example, and I have a 'static' for basically everything).
With that said, hypothetically speaking, I think it's ok to specify which basic archetypes or roles the group needs, and a level range, but not more than that. No gear req. or specs. I think that does become too elitist. Also no teleport to dungeon/group obviously. People need to move to location manually.
Boom, a party invite has arrived
Not having a LFG system is not a big deal, plus in AoC there will be barely any teleporting, so you cant LFG your way and be teleported to the party anyway
Having come from a game that did not quite have this but had something similar, here's my reasoning. It will probably seem picky, but I should share the experience anyway.
FFXI has an 'autogroup' function. It also has basically the ability to just 'quick invite' people from far away that match the requirements, and those people are searchable. Here's the thing.
Player A, the Paladin, has their LFG flag up. They aren't looking for a group, they're open to joining one. This leads to the 'blind invite' where the party leader just 'sends the invite outright', and then starts talking if it is accepted.
The result is that the Paladin joins the party and can instantly see the names of the other party members. This is a good thing. If they dislike anyone from that party they can just leave again immediately. If they don't, and they're not too busy, they start moving toward the nearest 'Fast Travel' (usually about 5m away max). And they start talking. In Party chat.
While the Paladin is moving, everyone else can clarify what their plans are, what they need the Paladin to do, etc. But they now need to ask the Paladin some questions about their build. Even in Ashes you would probably want to do at least that, in case of serious incompatibility.
Sometimes you find that such an incompatibility exists during the chatting phase, but this isn't 'social', it's an 'interview' with some questions about 'do you tick these checkboxes for what we need?' That will happen regardless.
The less time that both sides of this interaction spend on the 'checkboxes' portion of the interaction, the better.
That's my opinion. I don't see the point of having a potentially negative/slightly irritating interaction with someone new because it takes 3 minutes of chatting to find out that they specialize entirely in 2Handed Sword and you want a Sword+Shield Tank for some reason (or realistically, something more obscure about augments or abilities).
It can even lead to people 'not liking each other' based on entirely avoidable interactions. If you don't want people to be able to check other people's gear 'basically at will', then the 'requirements' need to be put on the 'Party Leader' interaction side.
Like it or not, a lot of people won't have a ton of time to play and it might overall be better for even socialization if they reduce some of the irritation of 'spending 6 minutes working out details en route from your solo activity only to realize that the group really expected you to have Shield Assault Lv3 and you don't'.
I still prefer GW2, in GW2 you don't need to party up anyone, people with no party or from multiple parties just gang up on the boss and if you participted in any way then you have your own treasure chest. So everybody gets their loot and no party is required
In GW2, it is seemless, no party is required
Oh, my bad, I got confused, in your other thread I'm pretty sure you noted that you did play it but just forgot everything about it.
Maybe your memory's out of phase again? (no mockery no sarc)
I'd appreciate knowing, since I figure there's not as much point bringing up similar stuff (at least not without proper explanations) if you really didn't play it.
From my experience that is basically what happens either way, just after a long time of mixing and matching newcomers until you get the best possible setup.
In other words, the game should position itself as a long-time party relationship one, rather than a "pick a rando on the ground and play for an hour together" one.
I never played FFXI and I did like all your comments about FFXI
My memory is fine about this
Maybe if there's inns or taverns by crossroads, they could be gathering points for possible parties
Maybe it is!
It avoids all gear or level shamming, you can just pass by and leech loot, but it is great for PvPers waiting the matchmaking qeue to go on... like me!
It all boils down to why you are doing it
Got it, thanks, I'll readjust and let the others know too (I think you were responding to someone else in the post I misunderstood).
Now that you brought this up, I might have installed it, in the past I installed many games, but I only played a few. I did play some FF, then you started talking about FFXI and I understood that I did not play it, made me very curious about the game and I liked everything you said about it
Yeah, it's one of the many reasons I absolutely hate GW2.
its true.
and the answer to that is: this game isnt for you.
This game isnt trying to be #1 biggest MMO
this game isnt trying to be a wow killer
this game isnt trying to appease everyone
Steven made it clear - this is a niche game. All the hype, AOC will have a stupid huge numbers of players day one, but like New World, expect to see a massive exodus of 90%-95% of the player base. Steven acknowledged this and is fine with this.
Yea I feel like everyone who complains should just play the mmos that are out. This game is looking to do something different because we need different
In my own unbiased opinion, the idea of a bulletin board is a pretty good medium between either side of the spectrum (say, auto-grouping with a queue system vs walking up to people around you and asking them).
In theory it should allow people to be picky about gearing if they really want, but if you're limited to the pool of people in your local node, being too picky might mean you just don't find someone. Hopefully that cuts down on gear-score elitism.
We shouldn't really need to rely on group finders.
Especially since we should be more focused on eliminating actual threats to the region.
Most people should be wanting to engage the Winter Dragon that's causing perpetual Winter in the region because that perpetual Winter is problematic for Harvesting and Crafting, etc...
And we should be able to find those same people who typically play when we play at their homes or Freeholds or at the local Tavern.
At the same time, isn't this a little exclusionary?
Even if we consider that Ashes has a design goal to make this happen, there will still be a lot of people, quite possibly a majority of people, who fight the Winter Dragon because it is there.
And many other situations where you need to get enough people together for something, particularly something not top-end, and you don't have enough people, so you need to recruit wanderers and visitors. I don't think it's good to frame this in such a way that people like CROW3 for example 'wouldn't end up being recruited to help' even for Dungeons or leveling parties.
This definitely comes off to me as 'not caring as much about the wanderers and nomads', those are the people who benefit from the Group Finder the most.
These kind of comfort tools like a group finder are the reason why at some point WoW felt like an empty shell. You could stand in Orgrimmar cue to dungeons throughout all the worlds, port back and forth, instantly repair your gear on return and sell what you did not need. Hence at some point the only people left in the actual world were farming players (and bots) and alts leveling up, when they weren't going through the dungeon finder funnel to level faster than by actually doing quests and connecting with the world.
So if you want to find a group in Ashes, I think it should go back to actually interacting with the people, via chat or maybe an adventurer board (or a tavern) where we can post our requests for assistance on a later day, so that interested players can send us a letter to apply for the spot.
I'm not sure what "not having enough people" means in an open world environment.
I also don't understand what's preventing people from talking to and inviting wanderers and visitors.
When there is some kind of barrier to a dungeon or raid that prevents individuals from entering without a group, sure, you might need to LFG to enter.
But, that's not the case for the Ashes design.
Why would "people like CROW3" not be recruited??
I wouldn't need to use LFG to contact CROW3 and party with him - if we're on the same server and he plays when I play.
what we might get is a menu option to make a group and then people can request to join and you just walk up to your farming spot