Group Finder And Matchmaking

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I don't quite see how "anywhere" works here. Because you'll still need to run for an hour if you find a group to some content on the other side of the world and the party whose place you took would have to wait for you for that hour. And if you're trying to find a group within your own node or within your current node - you're literally in the same local chat and can just talk to those people.

Group finder is useful when the content can be reached within a very short time, which will not be the case in Ashes. And small local group finders would serve the same purpose as a bulletin board or plain chat. Considering the game's design I doubt we'll have hundreds of people spamming the chat, unless that chat is global, but there's no reason to have global chat because player movement is not global, which is why I think that boards should concentrate on helping people plan future content, while local chat will help to pick up any randos.

NiKr wrote: »

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I don't quite see how "anywhere" works here. Because you'll still need to run for an hour if you find a group to some content on the other side of the world and the party whose place you took would have to wait for you for that hour. And if you're trying to find a group within your own node or within your current node - you're literally in the same local chat and can just talk to those people.

Group finder is useful when the content can be reached within a very short time, which will not be the case in Ashes. And small local group finders would serve the same purpose as a bulletin board or plain chat. Considering the game's design I doubt we'll have hundreds of people spamming the chat, unless that chat is global, but there's no reason to have global chat because player movement is not global, which is why I think that boards should concentrate on helping people plan future content, while local chat will help to pick up any randos.

No, it still works, it allows people to easily form the 'rolling' party.

Discount the actual question of if the board even exists or not, because a guild could, for example, 'ask their other members to /shout in chat in an area'. Focusing completely on the arrangement. Then you just get etiquette.

"Let your party know X minutes before you know you have to leave if you can."
"Your party leader starts looking for your replacement and tells them how long the party itself will continue (other people tend to give their estimates as well)."
"The person who can fill the slot is told in advance."

There's other benefits too, that I've experienced. If you think your own party is going to disband or half-disband, you don't invite a replacement, you inform another leader who is forming their party at the time and 'hand off' the remaining members'. That group then can leave town with 4/8 instead of trying to get all the way up, and they get to meet new people who are already prepared, knowing that those people don't even need an explanation of the content.

https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Importance_of_Search_Comments - Random data to add here I guess, only somewhat related.

Anyways, there you go. There's not much bias here, I think, because I barely used this system myself so I don't have 'fond memories of it' or anything, if anything the opposite because people suck, but it's because people suck and it's so obviously frustrating when they misuse it or don't try to use it properly that I can say it really was just good. It led to a lot of positive situations that aren't obvious.

Azherae wrote: »

Anyways, there you go. There's not much bias here, I think, because I barely used this system myself so I don't have 'fond memories of it' or anything, if anything the opposite because people suck, but it's because people suck and it's so obviously frustrating when they misuse it or don't try to use it properly that I can say it really was just good. It led to a lot of positive situations that aren't obvious.

I guess it's more about my own bias. Not only of constant/static parties, but also guilds. With L2 being all about guilds, you'd pretty much always be in one and any party that lost a player to sudden circumstances or who was just late - you'd always pick them up from the guild chat.

And with Ashes trying to concentrate on Node comradery (and still having guilds on top of that) I expect the game to have tightknit communities that work kinda like guilds, and the node chat would serve the same function as my guild chat did for me in L2. Which, for me, removes the requirement for a global group finder tool.

But as you know, I like to limit players in one way or another, so my bias would probably just not work here.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Anyways, there you go. There's not much bias here, I think, because I barely used this system myself so I don't have 'fond memories of it' or anything, if anything the opposite because people suck, but it's because people suck and it's so obviously frustrating when they misuse it or don't try to use it properly that I can say it really was just good. It led to a lot of positive situations that aren't obvious.

I guess it's more about my own bias. Not only of constant/static parties, but also guilds. With L2 being all about guilds, you'd pretty much always be in one and any party that lost a player to sudden circumstances or who was just late - you'd always pick them up from the guild chat.

And with Ashes trying to concentrate on Node comradery (and still having guilds on top of that) I expect the game to have tightknit communities that work kinda like guilds, and the node chat would serve the same function as my guild chat did for me in L2. Which, for me, removes the requirement for a global group finder tool.

But as you know, I like to limit players in one way or another, so my bias would probably just not work here.

I'll go ahead and say yeah, this time it's bias.

Sometimes your limitations create new gameplay types or 'shift the benefit/convenience', but this one is just exclusionary and not in a helpful way.

There's a lot of effort and emotional cost involved in committing to a new guild, especially in those periods where your old one just disbanded and so on. People quit games in those situations. Particularly in the current era of games where there is no equivalent of this.

When your guild shatters and you become a wanderer looking for a new home, you need the tools to find one by trying out many more, but 'Hey join our guild it's chill and nice and there's no problems!' shouts? Well, to each their own, but there's a lot of psychology at play here that makes your limitation style inappropriate.

Azherae wrote: »

When your guild shatters and you become a wanderer looking for a new home, you need the tools to find one by trying out many more, but 'Hey join our guild it's chill and nice and there's no problems!' shouts? Well, to each their own, but there's a lot of psychology at play here that makes your limitation style inappropriate.

This is why I just make my own guilds with blackjack and hookers This most likely just reinforced my bias over the years. Can never had guild problems if you're the one making the guild each time.

Oh yeah, also this.

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'LFG' systems without auto-teleport are vital for avoiding this too. Players take the path of least resistance, which creates some organic things that you might not want, such as 'everyone congregating to a single node or general area because no global chat means they won't be able to find groups if they don't'.

Effect isn't huge, but it does snowball. It doesn't affect you or me @NiKr but there's no real benefit to letting the snowball even start rolling, the sort of person on the opposite end of the spectrum from us isn't going to 'force themselves to try to form a guild or static party'.

You can either give them some easier LFG or say 'this game is not for them'. Seems like a waste to me to say the latter, but if that's what the community wants...

Azherae wrote: »

Effect isn't huge, but it does snowball. It doesn't affect you or me NiKr but there's no real benefit to letting the snowball even start rolling, the sort of person on the opposite end of the spectrum from us isn't going to 'force themselves to try to form a guild or static party'.

You can either give them some easier LFG or say 'this game is not for them'. Seems like a waste to me to say the latter, but if that's what the community wants...

This is why I want the boards to be for "future content". I'm probably being a bit too idealistic and definitely quite naïve, but I feel like pushing people (even if just a bit) into groups would benefit the game way more than having a super easy pick-up environment. Help people make foe-statics as easily as possible, in hopes that they turn into real statics that then have potential to turn into guilds. And I'm probably wrong, but I just feel that, just as you said, people would always go for the path of least resistance and keep going to the group finder every day instead of trying to find a group of people that they could play every day with (or just every available to them time).

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I don't know it for sure, but considering that AoC's dungeon design will supposedly be somewhat close to L2's I feel like I'm not too far off with my estimation, but I think that those locations will always be dominated by people already in guilds and already in pre-established parties. Ashes won't have instanced dungeons that you could clear with a group of randos.

While you spend 20 minutes filtering out newcomers, a static party will have already taken your farming spot. While you waited for that perfect newcomer to come to you from the other side of the world - the same shit happened. And now if you want to contest that location you're supposed to be better coordinated than a static party, who then could even ask their guild for help.

Will this push away a ton of super anti-social solo players? For sure. I hope that the game can provide them some other content to keep them in the game, but I'm almost sure that majority of good-best content in the game will be utterly dominated by guilds. And what I want to do is to push those anti-social players out of their shell and help them experience that content by joining a guild or at least creating a semi-static party that would play together as often as possible, so they would get coordinated and would be able to stand up against other parties.

Azherae and I discussed this before and came to a conclusion that my approach is probably just a result of my survivorship bias, but I feel like current Steven's design will just lead to the same bias in the end. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but we wouldn't know until the game comes out.