Honestly, we need this - Instant PuGs

Instant PuG at a touch of a button

The new find a group system in WoW seems pretty awesome:

* Cross realm (or in our case, cross server)
* Allows you to choose a role (in their case - healer/tank/dps; in ours - aggro control/damage/support/debuff)
* Join as a group or solo (possibly allow groups to advertise available spots and have the computer fill with LFG players)
* Bonuses for teaming (in their case, you get an animated pet; in ours - maybe reward merits?)
* Looking for raid (in their case, dungeons; in ours - TFs)
* Smart matching

I honestly think that many (not all) CoH players overthink things when forming teams and a system that streamlines and make getting to groups faster would be an excellent addition.

I'd love to see a City of Hero-ized version of this

Cant hurt to have this feature at least. Some are just terrible in forming teams. Or annoying asking all over the place for one.

To have it aside the normal way of making teams would be ok. Not instead!

a couple things...

I'm not sure that cross server would be possible.
And we already get bonuses for teaming. It's called higher XP and more drops.

not to be a jerk.

Okay, I am with this... but... you seriously think WoW came up with this? BZZZT WRONG!!!

Planetside had a cross-continent auto-join team feature for, well, couple of years now. In the Planetside system you could setup spots asking for a Medic, an Engy, a Pilot, a Combat Engy, and Advanced-Med, a specific vehicle driver, and so on. You could also state what the purpose of the team was for. Dropping Gens, taking towers, CC holds, Courtyard holds, and so on.

At the time of it's inception, the Planetside LFT system was possibly one of the best aggregate Looking for Team systems implemented in any MMO. Unfortunately, many of the teaming improvements came after the dev team had successfully chased off the majority of the player base.

This feature looked awesome to me as well. However, some past experiences with a similar system in WoW kind of makes me hesitant about wanting to see this in CoX. When Blizzard added cross-server battlegrounds, it abolished all sense of server community from the BGs. It went from friendly server rivalry and camaraderie to an endless stream of different faces. Now, maybe it won't have such an impact in CoX due to its smaller playerbase, but I think I'd rather take it slow and start off with an improved LFG/LFM interface first.

On paper this is a great feature. In practice, every time I used it in WoW, I wound up getting onto a team that had no clue what they were doing or were looking for someone to complete their quests or were farmers.

Sounds like a computer aided blind invite system. No thanks

Yeah, it looks all glittery and stuff, but you do realize a similar thing could be facilitated with a simple serverwide channel? Or, for cross-server functionality, a global with no member limit?

An open letter to NCsoft

Sounds very interesting indeed. Biggest change would be that you meet inside the mission instead of outside. I would love it even more if it would also mean that you can team with NA and EU at the same team.

<QR>

Match-making sucks. Stop being a wallflower.

That said, for the wallflowers, it would probably be convenient, although I'd imagine the scenario would probably boil down to:
1) "This team doesn't have [x], retry."
2) "This team has too much of [x], retry."
3) "This team is too small, retry."
4) "This team is too large, retry."
5) "This team is fighting [z] mobs which are lame, retry."

And about a hundred other increasingly inane excuses.

I've yet to try the system in WoW, but what I've heard from people who were is it's opening up whole new avenues for people to be annoying and potentially grief.

CoH would have to find some kind of penalty system similar to what WoW uses, but make it, you know, efffective, and I don't look forward to that aspect of it. Because you know whatever penalty they come up with will generate a lot of drama, and potentially bite a lot of people who inadvertantly disconnect in the rear.

CoH has talked in the past about coming up with a cross server system. I feel the queuing upgrade they put in the last issue is part of a precursor to that. I'll wait and see what comes of that before I put money on a hopped up team matcher like what WoW implemented.

It's pretty easy to form a team in CoH but tools to make it easier never hurt (at the very least allow mt to filter the search so I can avoid seeing people already on teams). I see two primary problems with this. The first is that as LostHalo says in many cases this is City of Wallflowers. An automated matchmaking system would probably work ok for TFs where you have a preset objective but for anything else you need at least one person who is willing to say "we're going to go to X and do Y". I've seen many teams disintegrate due to people panic-quitting when the star gets dropped on them. With an auto-match system the chances of you ending up with this the moment your team forms are pretty high. You might be able to avert this with a "make me the leader" check box but for that to be useful you need one guy who'd happy being leader for every seven who aren't and my observation is that the ratio is significantly worse than that.

The second problem is getting people to actually use it. Relatively people use the LFG flags as it stands, will enough of them use this to make it useful?

The new LFG in WoW is awesome sauce on a stick. By far, my and my boyfriend's experience has been HUGELY weighted on the "you guys rock my socks!" side of things. And the fact that it's cross-server is just candy coating on the awesome sauce.

Boyfriend says 90% good rate, and the bad hasn't been jackasses so much as people bailing when they see which dungeon they're doing (if doing a random dungeon the game chooses for you - for instance, "Oculus" is pretty much always bailed on since it sucks). He hasn't done the "select specific dungeon" thing yet, so no comment on that one but the response would probably be pretty similar.

And you can always put your group back on LFG if one of your members bails, to fill the hole left. Even in the middle of a dungeon.

EDIT: ALSO!! Awesome news I totally forgot about, if you joined a random auto-PUG dungeon (unfortunately does not work if you select a specific dungeon), you can vote out a jackass. Everyone on the team can vote, and if a majority vote a group member out, he's gone. So jackassery is punishable.

EDIT2: Boyfriend has grouped with 44 random people. He can think of *one guy* who didn't say anything or pay attention to directions...but still finished the dungeon, he just blew getting an achievement (sort of a badge) for the group. That's all.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

I would support this only on one condition:

THE ABILITY TO TURN IT OFF

It seems like something that could be used to grief people to a mass scale, but with the option, in the options menu, to specifically turn off the Hero-Finder, and NOT turn down normal team invites, I'd be far more supportive.

In WoW, it's not something that you can turn on and off. Well, I guess, sort of... it's a supplemental auto-PUG feature built onto the LFG feature that still exists.

You click the "dungeon findier" icon. You select your role [tank/dps/heal] (in City, this may not be necessary; in WoW, it's VERY necessary) and whether you're willing to lead. You select "random dungeon" or you select which dungeon you want to do specifically. This puts you in a queueueueueue. Eventually, you (or your group, if you are in a group) will be placed in a random group.

This is completely ON YOUR ACTIONS, so if you never touch the dungeon finder icon, you never auto-PUG.

ALSO WICKED COOL: If someone is on your ignore list (which works cross-server), you will NEVER group with them, which means if you're teaming, everyone's ignore list filters all the idiots out. Which makes using the ignore feature way, way better than normal.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Sounds interesting. Though I'd still put "Team looking for more" as a higher priority

I don't know if they still have it, but way back when DDO's lft system was superduper awesome. If you were looking for a team, you could bring up a list of the other people, much like CoH, but you could also bring up a list of teams that were looking for more, and could even invite yourself to their team, instead of having to go through the hassle of begging the leader to invite you. The team could even set it up so they could exclude people who didn't fit the criteria for what they were looking for. I think something like this would fit very nicely into CoH.