Is an Automatic Queue system required for WoW and MMOs in General?

[temp2021ph]

I am pro auto queue.
Sometimes i get home and all i do is spend 6 hours browsing through the manual group finder trying to find qualified groups for the places i want to go.
This time should be spent on actually playing the game, not group-finding.
The way LFR grouping works now is actually less hassle, i still do them every week if i get queued, even though i am nearing 950 ilvl, just because it requires no extra work/time on my part to get the group together and play.

[Coffeh]

It'll never be taken away, but it heavily contributed to destroying the community.

[Super Kami Dende]

As I think it's largely responsible for the impatient "GO! GO! GO!" mentality I think manual forming of groups is the way to go.

the go go go mentality was well and alive before 3.3

[Lightbull]

In the current day and age, I think a queue system is required to prevent people from going insane.

[cparle87]

I think LFR needs to be removed, however queues for random heroics and scenarios is fine.

So... you want raids to either be much smaller or removed? Cause Blizz said when LFR was added that's where it was headed. They weren't worth the developer time for the number of players who saw them.

[Rotted]

It wasn't required.

Back in the day you'd have fun in itself traveling to a dungeon, or going to a misc zone to find members e.g. If I wanted to find SM members I'd usually got to STV first.

But that wouldn't work now, if we got rid of LFD or LFR - Even if you get kept the LFR difficulty - there would be a mass uproar because we've got used to having a que system as the standard

[cparle87]

I liked the days better where you could only each dungeon on heroic once a day.

So, up until Wrath? I find myself wondering why heroic dungeons and, hell, even mythic dungeons even have lockouts anymore. Seems archaic to me.

[schwarzkopf]

Unarguably Yes.

Given the assumption that group content is required content, and that tank/healer/dps functions are required for that content then it logically follows that some mechanism to allow people to do said content is required.

There isn't any other rational conclusion.

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As I think it's largely responsible for the impatient "GO! GO! GO!" mentality I think manual forming of groups is the way to go.

Manually formed groups means content that is inaccessible to a large number of people. Which is fine if that content isn't stuff that requires a lot of resources to developer and is not required content for the game.

[bufferunderrun]

Im curious to how the community views automatic queue systems in general. Not related to just dungeons, and raids, but also other content like PvP and smaller group content within the questing scene (wqgf).

In your opinion, do you think it is necessary to have?

Could the game do without automatic queues and still be successful?

Considering the numerous ways blizzard has made it easier to group with other people (cross realm grouping, group building tools, open world grouping, etc) do you think there is a necessity to have automatic queue systems in the game, and more broadly, in MMOs in general?

Personally, im on the fence about this. I think automatic queues make sense in some types of content, and others not. But what do you think about this?

yes it is, the main perk of those system is that isn't the player that set the parameter to enter but blizzard fair and square and another big advantage is the ability to group up when you want, at any time you want, from every location you want, if someone drop the group there is no problem put back in queue and the system will find a replacement.
No more deal with peoples who set absurd requirement for group, no more schedules, no more long ass chat spam while stuck in the city for hours to get a daily dungeon done, no more stuck in a remote desolate region to queue for a shitty bg, no more "sorry guys gotta go" middle dungeon and being forced to going back to the city to find a replacement and then the group disband and being id locked for a day.
Those system are probably the best thing introduced in mmo since the flying mounts.

[cparle87]

Depends how large you want the game to be.

No new mega mmo is going to be without it smaller more niche ones can thrive without.

SWTOR tried to do without it. I think they caved in like a month and added one.

[MoanaLisa]

Recent generation MMO's like SW-TOR tried it and immediately moved to make it happen.

Players want it. You're not going to be competitive with other MMO's without it. Every single one that's attempted to sell having LFD-type systems has pretty much rushed to implement them once launched. It may not have saved them but developers obviously received enough feedback that they felt it necessary to do them.

You clearly don't really need them in WoW any longer if you don't wish to use them. But lots of people do and that's why it won't go anywhere.

I think the idea that you commonly see batted around that people play MMO's for the "social" experience is largely a lie. Some do, many don't. Besides, most MMO's of any size at all aren't really that friendly or social. The entire idea of playing with total strangers isn't social to start with.

Playing with friends or finding a guild that's reliable is the way to go. Sustaining that requires some work though and it's hard to get it going and keep it that way in a game where the player population has become as cyclic as WoW has become.

[Armourboy]

Recent generation MMO's like SW-TOR tried it and immediately moved to make it happen.

Players want it. You're not going to be competitive with other MMO's without it. Every single one that's attempted to sell having LFD-type systems has pretty much rushed to implement them once launched. It may not have saved them but developers obviously received enough feedback that they felt it necessary to do them.

You clearly don't really need them in WoW any longer if you don't wish to use them. But lots of people do and that's why it won't go anywhere.

I think the idea that you commonly see batted around that people play MMO's for the "social" experience is largely a lie. Some do, many don't. Besides, most MMO's of any size at all aren't really that friendly or social. The entire idea of playing with total strangers isn't social to start with.

There very much was a time that people played MMO's for the social experience, but this was also a time when texting, smart phones, and things such as Facebook weren't a thing. Frankly my early MMO experience pre-WoW was a bunch of single people, and bored house wives looking as much for interaction as they were solid game play. Heck SWG was built by it's lead devs to be a social experience relying on others and forced interactions, it's why they only allowed one character per server.

That said, today is a very different beast, and what people want from is as well. I'm not going to argue good or bad, that's a matter of taste, but it is different.

As far as LFD creating the go mentality, that was less about the actual queue and more to with the systems they put in place to get people to use it. It provided a currency people that severely outgeared the content needed during Wrath. If that hadn't been a part of it, I'm not sure that happens to the extent it did.

[WskyDK]

Huge fan of auto-group making. If I’m using it, I’m doing content that is trivial and I just need other bodies to finish it.

Anything that requires real effort I use custom group finder for.

[Deleted]

the vast majority are polished and smooth like WoW... And by polished and smooth I mean reasonably buggy, because WoW isn't polished and smooth, especially when expansions launch.

ok, you are one of the to themself lying "i hate wow these days and back then everything was better" people got it.
ps: legion had the smoothest expansion launch ever. the only bad launch was wod with the garrison screw up (which was predited in beta...)

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LFD makes sense in todays world especially if you have enough players for multiple servers but raids, I still hate them

fixed that for you.

[WskyDK]

So many players here that didnt play in Vanilla or BC. The game without queues was unplayable at times. The best thing that WoW did was add queues. A long queue, sometimes 30 mins, is much prefable than no queues where some nights, you just didn't get to run dungeons at all. There are a lot of players here who want to force onto others the "correct" way to play. Why does having a queue system hurt the way you play? It doesn't.

I dunno, having someone leave halfway through a dungeon, and then having to port back to org to look for another was the pinnacle of gameplay.

[ReD-EyeD]

Yes. 10chars

[Deleted]

Group finder solves the problem of spamming trade chat and allows you to do other things while you wait for people to apply to your group.

No it doesnt silly because people then still have to travel to the dungeon....thats why the lfd system > gf for dungeons.
but I gues you dont pug that much otherwise you would see how FUCKING lazy people are and start yelling "123" instantly after joining a group....

[MoanaLisa]

There very much was a time that people played MMO's for the social experience, but this was also a time when texting, smart phones, and things such as Facebook weren't a thing. Frankly my early MMO experience pre-WoW was a bunch of single people, and bored house wives looking as much for interaction as they were solid game play. Heck SWG was built by it's lead devs to be a social experience relying on others and forced interactions, it's why they only allowed one character per server.

That said, today is a very different beast, and what people want from is as well. I'm not going to argue good or bad, that's a matter of taste, but it is different.

I agree. To clarify I was talking about the game and its players as we are now, not as we were in 2005.

I will also stipulate that Rob Pardo is some sort of developer/designer genius but a new MMO isn't going to necessarily bring 2005 back. I think the social experience could be better than now but we're not going back to that. And developers want eyes on the games so a lot of bad behavior gets a pass or a slap on the wrist at worst.

[Deleted]

Yes, and they are like that because the game changed to make that a reasonable thing to do

No silly thats because its easier to turn the game on and play as long as you can instead of having to take consideration of someone else and there time.
But in your silly mind its probably the games fault too that so lil' numbers of players raid instead of it being the other way around in reality.

[shadowmatrix]

Lets look back at what it was like before the LFD tool

Decide you want to run The Steamvault.
Go to Zangamarsh and start posting the general chat LFM.
Spend the next 3-5 getting a group together.
Finally get the group together and start running the dungeon.
Something happens and a player has to leave.
Back track out of the dungeon and start posting in general chat once more while hoping no one else needs to go.

End result - One dungeon ran, around 6 hours spent dealing with that dungeon, nothing else accomplished since the other content that progresses your character is in another zone.