WoW XX: It's Not A Recolor, It's An Original Thread

[Psyren]

I don't think anyone's advocating a return to the raw, unmediated 'spam chat' method of building groups. I'm certainly not. Here's what City of Heroes did: The group finder inverted the normal convention of letting people browse groups, and was geared more towards letting players list themselves as available to run content. So, if you wanted to run a particular type of content, you just went to the group finder, looked for the Archetype (class) you were looking for, narrowed for the level range that would suit your content, and send them a tell inviting them. Quick, and easy.

You didn't need to squat in a city to wait to get invited to something, you could go out in the world and grind solo stuff, or, heavens forbid, browse the players marking themselves as 'available' for your desired content, and send them tells until you had your group. They also didn't have a fixed group size, so you could have groups of anywhere from 2 to 8 players.

They also had a feature which matched the members of the group to the level of the party leader, so you could get a group of friends and guildies into some new players' content, and everyone could a) have fun, and b) get cool stuff.

The only difference between that and an automated LFD queue is lots of extra clicks and reading. I don't need to peruse a bunch of bios before I swipe right; I'm running a dungeon, not going on a date. This is precisely what I mean when I say they should design their automated system to defeat the jerks, rather than inflict a tedious manual system on everyone who isn't one.

Why could you get cool stuff? Because their loot system was based on all crafted components. There wasn't a 'this gear drops this item from this boss', rather you collected various types of ingredients of varying rarities, and once you had the right bits, you crafted your item. But you could get useful parts for crafted gear from like level 10 to the level cap. All loot was personal, and all items could be traded or sold, so even if you personally didn't have a use for 'Rikti Telepathic Gel' or whatever, you could still flog it on the exchange.

I'm not against this loot model (Warframe uses it.) It does however run into the JC Penney Problem of being an objectively better system (craft exactly what you want) that feels worse (no big rush from a great random drop.) To use another analogy, your paycheck is a much more reliable income stream than gambling in a casino, yet many people would rather go to Vegas than to work if they had the choice. In Warframe it works because it ties into the monetization model so well - you're paying for free, so waiting on your gear to "cook" followed by taking it out of the oven feels like a free lunch. In WoW, having to run to the oven to bake all your drops would feel like a timewaster even if they came out instantly, and time is literally money here.

Finally, they had a difficulty slider, which increased the numbers, health, damage, and control resistance of the foes you fought, so if you found you'd been paired with some less than stellar teammates, you didn't have to choose between a re-queue and a repair party, the party leader could just downcheck the difficulty and finish the content, albeit with a slightly reduced payout of loot and XP. And there's plenty of ways you could put in cheevos and cosmetics to promote people reaching for the tip-top difficulty content.

I'm okay with this too, except noticing that the group leader has done that would feel pretty bad for everyone else. Imagine if a single player game did that without telling you - well actually, you don't have to imagine it because several do. But in this case, whether making that button controlled by the party leader or making it automatic, the players would undoubtedly know it was there and the result, I think, wouldn't be pretty - even for groups that might need the help.