LFR and LFD brilliant fix

[BigAinCA]

With the way LFR and LFD work I can actually do other things while it forms a group for me. Dailies, archaeology, farming for mats, etc. it's great. If people want to sit in SW and Org then that is their choice. I do agree we need more things to actually bring us outside, but not like this idea.

This is totally me. LFD and LFR are fine the way they are. I would actually spend much more time in cap cities if they did not exist. If you want people to leave the cap cities then Blizzard needs to give some incentive to actually leave them. As it is, I bet most people sitting in the cap cities are not even sitting in LFD/LFR queues but are wowaholics that just sit there and chat in /2 for lack of anything better to do.

[namelessone]

Why not simply make a "Would play with again" button and then assign a rating to a person based on how many times his button was pressed?

[Szemere]

The idea in OP doesn't solve the first issue named at all.

Create "safe zones" or "queue zones" outside of raids and dungeons. Lfr and lfd only work if you are inside these zones. So, you spam once or twice in trade,.find a few spots, still missing some, then head out to instance, get inside queue zone,.wait for full team go kill and get free loot.

The way I see it: people will NOT spam trade, they will just instantly head over to the instance and queue up from there. There is totally no incentive to take the first step you mentioned, of looking for people in the LFG channel. Put in an incentive for this, and it might work. Then again, I think Blizzard may put some more effort into the environments outside of raids, especially Dragon Soul is just an opening obviously carved out in the wall of CoT, some portals thrown in, and easily reachable through a portal in Dalaran.

On a side note: the mention of "spamming" to get a group kinda irks me a bit, as well as the mention that this has to happen in /2... People actively spamming their message as often as the system allows them, especially in /2, which is not designed for this, usually ends up being reported for spam after 10 minutes by me, when I actually try to do trading in the trade chat. Being interupted by a spam of twice the exact same message in .1 seconds every 30 seconds, usually consisting of "LF tank FL brain req link ach ilvl gogo" can seriously be annoying, and is hardly able to be called an improvement over the way LFR does it. It just doesn't ask you for the achievement.

[ComputerNerd]

Why not simply make a "Would play with again" button and then assign a rating to a person based on how many times his button was pressed?

Because the reasons for voting someone up or down are not fair and simply based on the potentially biased opinions of other people.
If I pick fault with a player for lack of understanding in a given dungeon I may be voted down by their 3 guildies/friends in the group simply because they are sticking together.
I would have more difficulty getting groups simply because I spoke the truth, yet your voting system would penalise honesty and promote political voting.
We do not need a wow version of the horribly biased Eurovision Song Contest.

Reputation is personal and any such attempt to put it into numbers will fail because of the inability to get honest and consistent reports from other players.

In short - no system which tries to rate or score players ability to perform will ever work, despite the persistent belief that we can rely on a simple score to make decisions for us.

[foxHeart]

Or you could just make lfr a realm only deal. Loot bullshit would still happen, though, and that's the only thing I care about, so this alternative doesn't appeal to me at all, especially with the superficial way it forces you to come out of SW only to idle somewhere else until your queue popped.

[Deleted]

I wasn't. If you re-read what I said, I stated a customer wants to get enjoyment from their game, and I agree that people garner different enjoyment. I didn't in any way state that what I want, is what the whole player-base would like. That's a misinterpretation on your behalf I am afraid, and apologies if it came across like that in the post. The point is though, the majority of the player-base now (I think everyone can agree there) is comfortable and relatively satisfied with the LFD/LFR system as it is. Any changes would no doubt be met with massive criticism, and may not actually work, causing huge chasms in player feeling for something that is a gamble.

All true. Agree with you there.

I seriously disagree with you that somehow making people queue at each instance or at a stone would somehow improve the game, I feel it wouldn't. As a quality of life issue, its staid, boring, and enforces players to do something they might not wish to do. As it stands, there is nothing stopping players putting together their own groups, and there are still areas in game rife with possibility for World PvP, its just people do not bother with them. This isn't Blizzards fault, but the playerbase, and I feel if Blizzard were to try and force some issue onto players, it would have a massive negative impact on the game as a whole.

I never actually thought that queuing at a stone in and of itself would be a good idea. I'm more of a fan of the reasons behind it and the goal of the idea than of the actual implementation. That's because I disagree with the bolded part here - Blizzard create everything about the environment we play in including the incentives to do stuff in the world. World PvP and other spontaneous player interactions in the world cannot be created on purpose, not by Blizzard and not by players. They happen organically if you create a game where a lot of people are doing stuff in the same areas. When you create a game that basically encourages everyone to do nothing other than sit in Org then you'll lose out on all that stuff.

That IS Blizzard's fault. Getting rid of or restricting LFR/LFD might not be the solution but it intentions are sound - there needs to be something that encourages players to leave the cities and do stuff that isn't instanced. For example world bosses in MoP would be a decent step in that direction.

Although in hindsight, I do have to say that imo the worst thing they did for the game to date was add Flying Mounts. After the novelty of it wears off I they don't really add much fun to the game and they take away from immersion and player interactions in the world. But again, once you've done it you can't just take it away so they gotta add something else and new to make things work.

[Deleted]

Imo the simplest solution to get everyone back out into the world...bring back the global LFG channel.

It was there when you logged in, you didn't have to queue for it, you didn't have to add a channel or try to encourage people to join it.

Sure it could be turned off and used to be flooded with trading but it also allowed you to quest/grind/etc, while still having an open channel to your faction. Removing it was a big blunder on Blizz's behalf.

For convenience LFD and LFR are great, don't take away the queuing just improve it by expanding our servers communication abilities. As long as trade chat stays the most viable way to recruit for raids/dungeons/etcs, cities will remain packed while the world is empty. Another proper default LFG channel may not stop it completely but it's a step to improving it.

[Nayura]

Wow, not to bash anyone, but I really don't even understand what you just said. Maybe I'm the stupid one, but that was so poorly explained I really didn't get it.