How long do you think it will be before WoW has NPC tanks and healers for all the DPS that are tired of waiting over thirty minutes for a group using the Dungeon Finder tool?

Originally posted by Palebane

How long do you think it will be before WoW has NPC tanks and healers for all the DPS that are tired of waiting over thirty minutes for a group using the Dungeon Finder tool?

 You may laugh but I'd be seriously all over that.  EQ has the mercs and I love them.

Venge

edit - maybe thats just me but I have very limited time and really am not the most patient person.  I hate being delayed by people or things when IMO there reallyl is no good reason for the dely.  No that is not an instant gratification syndrome.  I work damn hard for what I have and I put in the time.

But

I don't want to have to wait for someone else to get their slow rear into gear before I can start doing the things I want to do, or need to do.

Originally posted by VengeSunsoar

Originally posted by Palebane

How long do you think it will be before WoW has NPC tanks and healers for all the DPS that are tired of waiting over thirty minutes for a group using the Dungeon Finder tool?

 You may laugh but I'd be seriously all over that.  EQ has the mercs and I love them.

Venge

edit - maybe thats just me but I have very limited time and really am not the most patient person.  I hate being delayed by people or things when IMO there reallyl is no good reason for the dely.  No that is not an instant gratification syndrome.  I work damn hard for what I have and I put in the time.

But

I don't want to have to wait for someone else to get their slow rear into gear before I can start doing the things I want to do, or need to do.

     I'm sure we all get tired of waiting on others at times but this kind of attitude is the driving force behind MMOG's becoming massively online single player games! Sad but true.

Well if they had NPC's that would fill in groups so you can do dungeons and raids that would make it a life saver however the raids could be interesting i mean would npc's know how to react in a raid and for that matter how would loot roles go with players vs npcs in a group/raid ? lol

Originally posted by Palebane

How long do you think it will be before WoW has NPC tanks and healers for all the DPS that are tired of waiting over thirty minutes for a group using the Dungeon Finder tool?

Probably by the next expansion. It seems right now a DPS levels fastest if he can queue with a tank in the DF.

Originally posted by SlyGamer79

Well if they had NPC's that would fill in groups so you can do dungeons and raids that would make it a life saver however the raids could be interesting i mean would npc's know how to react in a raid and for that matter how would loot roles go with players vs npcs in a group/raid ? lol

 NPC loot ninjas???  LOL...

Originally posted by VengeSunsoar

Originally posted by Palebane

How long do you think it will be before WoW has NPC tanks and healers for all the DPS that are tired of waiting over thirty minutes for a group using the Dungeon Finder tool?

 You may laugh but I'd be seriously all over that.  EQ has the mercs and I love them.

Venge

edit - maybe thats just me but I have very limited time and really am not the most patient person.  I hate being delayed by people or things when IMO there reallyl is no good reason for the dely.  No that is not an instant gratification syndrome.  I work damn hard for what I have and I put in the time.

But

I don't want to have to wait for someone else to get their slow rear into gear before I can start doing the things I want to do, or need to do.

Guild Wars has them too.

Originally posted by Neverdyne

The biggest flaw of the dungeon finder is not that it kills community, but rather it makes the game diminish into a lobby in which you stand there doing nothing, chatting away the time,  while you wait for the queue to pop. The world outside the main city walls becomes an empty place reserved solely for those first few weeks when you're leveling up. Couple that with flying mounts, and the world outside city walls suddenly becomes a barren place.  

Dungeon-finder is the product of developers figuring out what is ´fun´about the game.  It is the dungeon encounters.

Social -   For people that say DF kills the social aspect of the game, what happened before DF?   A lot of players would sit in town an spam public channels looking for a group.  is this social?  typing  ´/2 ranged dps lfg for heroic´.  and then repeating that same line 3 hours until you find a group?  That is not social.  DF is actually an improvement because now you can queue for a dungeona and LEAVE the city to do daily quests or some mining etc.  In the past, you had to sit where the public chat was and constantly spam.    But the really important part of the DF is that it is for casual and solo players.  Guilds still do dungeons by themselves... the DF doesn´t affect their social behavior in any way.  The DF allows solo players to see the ´fun´part of the game without constantly having to spam public chat channels.

Fun -  I hear all this stuff about ´lobby´.  And again, it is backwards.  Like I said, having a LFD tool for solo players frees them from having to sit in town.  The other part is travel.  People say it makes the world ´smaller´ if a DF tool ports you into a dungeon.  Wow, so taking a 5 minute flight path while you afk to the bathroom is better?   How about those fun dungeons that were far from the city where you were spamming /trade to find your group.  So you spend an hour spamming trade, you finally found 5 people to group with you.. now comes the 20 minute ordeal of figuring out which people are going to actually take the afk flightpath across the continent to the dungeon.... and hope someone in the group doesn´t decide to quit the group becasue that means you have to port back to the city to spam to find a replacement.

Fun is beating bosses.  Fun is using your combat abiltiies to kill mobs.  Fun is not spamming trade chat looking for a group, or taking 20 minute flightpaths while you eat lunch.

There will NEVER be another game that backtracks on a DF tool.  I promise you NO game will require you to spam a public channel to find a group and then travel with that group to a dungeon.   The future is now, players don´t want to have to play 3 hours to complete a 30 minute dungeons.  They also don´t want 3 hour dungeons at all.

WOW definitely has issues, but the DF is not the problem.  But again, it is hard to argue that point on a forum about MMORPGs. because all of us are so far away from being the áverage´player that our views are jadded.

Originally posted by gainesvilleg

Originally posted by SlyGamer79

Well if they had NPC's that would fill in groups so you can do dungeons and raids that would make it a life saver however the raids could be interesting i mean would npc's know how to react in a raid and for that matter how would loot roles go with players vs npcs in a group/raid ? lol

 NPC loot ninjas???  LOL...

 Hilarious  Made me wonder how long before our entire party can be NPCs? No more worrying about other players at all.

Originally posted by Neverdyne

The biggest flaw of the dungeon finder is not that it kills community, but rather it makes the game diminish into a lobby in which you stand there doing nothing, chatting away the time,  while you wait for the queue to pop. The world outside the main city walls becomes an empty place reserved solely for those first few weeks when you're leveling up. Couple that with flying mounts, and the world outside city walls suddenly becomes a barren place.  

And people complains about no down-time to chat? Waiting for the dungeon to pop is the perfect time to chat.

And what is wrong with a lobby game? Diablo is a lobby game and it is 100x more fun than most games out there.

And i dont complain about the world being too empty. Just the other day, a guy stole the titanium node i was trying to mine. I wont complain if he wasn't there.

Originally posted by SlyGamer79

Well if they had NPC's that would fill in groups so you can do dungeons and raids that would make it a life saver however the raids could be interesting i mean would npc's know how to react in a raid and for that matter how would loot roles go with players vs npcs in a group/raid ? lol

NPCs are probably more competent than some of the tank/healers out there.

If a tank/healer can't get through the first trash pull, i am quiting.

Dungeon Finder is just a symptom of the real underlying problem.

The problem is that players whine for more and more and more until there's nothing left to ask for. Then one day, after everything has been handed to the gamers by the developers who want to please their customer base because of dollar signs, everyone turns around and wonders why the MMOs of today are broken and boring.

The moral of the story? Be careful of what you whine for.

What happened before lfd. Before lfd you actually had to make friends.

Dungeon Finder:

Dungeon finder is a good way of allowing players to complete group content quickly, but it has sort of divorced a lot of the social aspect of MMOs.  It can be used as a diagnostic tool to understand what's going on though.  Part of the problem is the reward system encouraging dungeon finder behaviors that are not the most ideal.  If should not have to feel like a chore to have to pug your random, so it's not so much the dungeon finder that's the problem , but rather the concepts of dungeons themselves and both the reason for running them and the people that do.

Dungeon Finder really isn't the problem, or a symptom, but rather a megaphone.  Any problems become amplified by it, and any benefits become amplified as well.  It's not a bad thing, but it certainly spotlights many bad things.

It's just a symptom of Modern MMO's. Content is designed to be soloed except for the dungeons which need a group. People spend their entire time soloing so don't need or talk to other people. When they need to enter a dungeon they have no friends to ask for help, they lack the social ability to ask over chat channels for help, plus they've been playing solo the entire time so really don't want to be bothered with grouping anyway.

And so to help these no-friend skill-less idiots out, they put in a Dungeon Finder to allow the soloers to effectively summon a bunch of people to help them solo through a dungeon.

To be honest, it's really pathetic the way MMO's have gone since their glory days.

Originally posted by UsualSuspect

It's just a symptom of Modern MMO's. Content is designed to be soloed except for the dungeons which need a group. People spend their entire time soloing so don't need or talk to other people. When they need to enter a dungeon they have no friends to ask for help, they lack the social ability to ask over chat channels for help, plus they've been playing solo the entire time so really don't want to be bothered with grouping anyway.

And so to help these no-friend skill-less idiots out, they put in a Dungeon Finder to allow the soloers to effectively summon a bunch of people to help them solo through a dungeon.

To be honest, it's really pathetic the way MMO's have gone since their glory days.

I wouldn't call it a symptom but more of a 'control/power' type design.

If your game forces grouping before the level-cap, you are effectively limiting the growth of your playerbase as eventually the existing playerbase levels beyond the grouping content. This leaves any new players at the mercy of existing player's 'goodwill'.

You can kinda of mitigate via mentoring/reward system but at the end of the day, the game developer has now lost control of the growth of the playerbase. This is probably not acceptable for a lot of companies (esp publicly listed ones).

If your game has grouping as optional than the vast majority of the playerbase will not group and solo it through.

Dungeon finder is a good solution for all the wrong reasons.

The real problem underlying games like WoW is that they're poorly designed. Players want to experience game content and have fun with their friends, but the leveling mechanic makes this difficult. People level at different rates, and the power differential alienates individuals that may have started playing together, as one can no longer keep up with the other. Players power through to the level cap, because of a prevailing misconception that the game starts at the end, and so the leveling curve is getting increasingly shorter. To facilitate this, and to help new players who can't find other players to experience low-level content, the Dungeon Finder was created. However, it's been co-opted by the same mentality that the game doesn't start until the end, and so again, you get players running dungeon after dungeon just to get to max level, max badges etc. It's all part of the same treadmill that PVE games create: you run dungeons to power-level, then you run more dungeons to get better gear, so you can run more dungeons to get even better gear ad infinitum.

It's the commercialisation of virtual space. MMOs started off as virtual worlds where people could escape and live out a fantasy. As they've evolved, they've become more and more commercial, and more and more sinister. What's the difference between a perpetually growing economy in which people have to keep spending on items that break, to fuel a chain of consumption, and a system in which the only goal is to get gear, so you can kill higher-level monsters, to get better gear? I'll tell you what they both have in common: they generate huge amounts of money at the cost of the individual, and they're both unsustainable in the long run. In terms of an economy, resources will eventually run out. In terms of a game, the demands on the developer, and the extraordinary cost and complexity of churning out expansion after expansion, ultimately undermine the whole point of the exercise. Even now, the WoW playerbase is consuming content so fast that Blizzard has stated they will decrease the time between expansions, but there's a finite limit to the speed at which a quality product can be produced.

The solution to all of this is to remove levels altogether. There are other game models out there that are far more robust in the long run. Hell, UO is still going after all this time, and it looks like something I drew in 2nd grade. Even MUDs are still going strong, and they have no graphics to speak of. The real problem is that creating games like this is risky, and the outlay on a modern triple A title is massive, with no guarantee of return. There's a solution to that as well; use older, proven technology, tone down graphics, stylise art direction, and rely on fun, simple mechanics. Create player freedom, and give them control over they way they move in the gamespace. There's a lot to be said for things like gliding in Aion, or being able to run up walls and bounce off objects. Make gear disposable, and have a variety of pastimes that are part of the internal architecture; e.g. chocobo racing, poker, gambling, fishing, flying/gliding, etc. Finally, make a game that you think will be fun to play, not a game that you think will sell well.

Originally posted by Brakedancer

Dungeon finder is a good solution for all the wrong reasons.

 

The real problem underlying games like WoW is that they're poorly designed. Players want to experience game content and have fun with their friends, but the leveling mechanic makes this difficult. People level at different rates, and the power differential alienates individuals that may have started playing together, as one can no longer keep up with the other. Players power through to the level cap, because of a prevailing misconception that the game starts at the end, and so the leveling curve is getting increasingly shorter. To facilitate this, and to help new players who can't find other players to experience low-level content, the Dungeon Finder was created. However, it's been co-opted by the same mentality that the game doesn't start until the end, and so again, you get players running dungeon after dungeon just to get to max level, max badges etc. It's all part of the same treadmill that PVE games create: you run dungeons to power-level, then you run more dungeons to get better gear, so you can run more dungeons to get even better gear ad infinitum.

 

It's the commercialisation of virtual space. MMOs started off as virtual worlds where people could escape and live out a fantasy. As they've evolved, they've become more and more commercial, and more and more sinister. What's the difference between a perpetually growing economy in which people have to keep spending on items that break, to fuel a chain of consumption, and a system in which the only goal is to get gear, so you can kill higher-level monsters, to get better gear? I'll tell you what they both have in common: they generate huge amounts of money at the cost of the individual, and they're both unsustainable in the long run. In terms of an economy, resources will eventually run out. In terms of a game, the demands on the developer, and the extraordinary cost and complexity of churning out expansion after expansion, ultimately undermine the whole point of the exercise. Even now, the WoW playerbase is consuming content so fast that Blizzard has stated they will decrease the time between expansions, but there's a finite limit to the speed at which a quality product can be produced.

 

The solution to all of this is to remove levels altogether. There are other game models out there that are far more robust in the long run. Hell, UO is still going after all this time, and it looks like something I drew in 2nd grade. Even MUDs are still going strong, and they have no graphics to speak of. The real problem is that creating games like this is risky, and the outlay on a modern triple A title is massive, with no guarantee of return. There's a solution to that as well; use older, proven technology, tone down graphics, stylise art direction, and rely on fun, simple mechanics. Create player freedom, and give them control over they way they move in the gamespace. There's a lot to be said for things like gliding in Aion, or being able to run up walls and bounce off objects. Make gear disposable, and have a variety of pastimes that are part of the internal architecture; e.g. chocobo racing, poker, gambling, fishing, flying/gliding, etc. Finally, make a game that you think will be fun to play, not a game that you think will sell well.

Disagree.

Giving players the choice of how they wish to play is a good thing rather than forcing them to a specific playstyle. Rather than forcing the issue, offer incentives. 

As a person who does shares if a company I have invested money into does the last line (and they are NOT Google/Apple) I'd be fairly upset as an investor/shareholder.