Love for Team Leaders

It is relatively easy in this game to get a team together and maintain it. However, I have found that most ppl don't want to be bothered by putting a team together and some will drop out of the team rather than become the leader. I often look at the roster of players in a zone and think why doesn't someone get a team together. So let's make it easier for folks to get involved. Very small changes, I believe, could accomplish this.

1. When you click on a character in the Find search field, have one of the choices be "send team invite message". This message could be entered previously in a box from the options menu. Most ppl seem to not like blind invites for some reason, and I don't like typing a separate message to each invitee. It's is more trouble than it needs to be. Devs, make it easier to put teams together.

2. Allow everyone on a team to invite others. As it is, if you see someone you want to invite, you have to ask for the star or ask the leader to invite X who may have a name like TyuIUiJuyGg -- which you have to type out exactly. There is no reason the team leader has to be the only one who can invite. It slows down the game and makes many ppl not want to be team leader. At least make it an option for the team leader to enable this function.

Easy stuff that would not be much trouble to make happen and could have a major effect on the game.

I like the theory.

Though I thought it would be about a bonus of some sort for the team leader rather than QoL improvements. Nonetheless I approve of making teaming easier.

I don't think allowing multiple inviters is a good idea though.

I'm with the others that the second idea is not exactly stellar. As Panzerwaffen said, when I'm the team leader, I want all the rights and responsibilities. I have the responsibility to recruit people and in turn the right to kick people.

That said, here's two things I would love to see that would hopefully make forming a team easier.

1. Make an official, server-wide LFT channel

Yes, I know we have many global channels dedicated to that purpose, but there's a couple of issues with them. For starters, they're not exactly intuitive or easy to find. Unless someone directly points you to a global channel, chances are you'll never know they exist. Then there's also the fact that since they are player-maintained, occasionally you'll find several LFT global channels for one server. Last but not least, you can only join so many global channels, so if you play on many servers and join global channels dedicated to other topics, you'll probably never have enough to join LFT global channels for all your servers, especially since about every server has an LFT channel, a TF channel, a badge channel and general chitchat channel.

So if you don't know about global channels or you cannot join any more, you're stuck with Broadcast, which has its own huge issues. I feel we only got that channel because the devs saw that other popular MMOs have this channel, so we ought to have it, too. Not necessarily wrong, but most other MMOs are open-world based whereas CoH is instance-based. For every 29 missions I spend in instances I spend one minute in a city zone. Even worse, specially blue-side you have several zones for one level-range, so chances are someone's broadcasting looking for a team in your level-range while you're in a different one.

A server-wide, official LFT channel would hopefully solve all these issues. Since it's official and has a dedicated button on the chatbox, a lot more people would use it, and as a server-wide channel it would reach teams even in instances. So by making it easier for players to stay in touch with each other no matter how knowledged they are or where they are, it should become a lot easier to find and form teams.

2. Make a counterpart Searching For Team system to the Searching For Members system.

Now the Searching For Members system is a great way for team leaders to find more members,sure, but I feel it helps solo players more by allowing them to set themselves as LFT and making themselves the first on the search list and therefore the first to be picked out for teams. A Searching For Members system would allow team leaders to set themselves as looking for members for mission teams, TF teams, etc, making it easier for team leaders to fill teams by having solo players approach them instead.

The idea behind that feature is that team leaders already try to have people approach them instead. After all, even team leaders use Broadcast and global channels to say they're looking for more members and that you should send them tells if you want to join the team. A Searching For Members system would basically eliminate that step and allow your server to know you want more members without perpetually broadcasting "level 23 team LF3M" or sending tells to people that never respond or aren't interested.

One issue I see is that there are several people that cannot stand getting tells asking to join their team, so you would only show up on the Searching For Members list if you actively set yourself to looking for members. That way, if you aren't looking for members, nobody will even know you exist and just leave you alone.



So, any thoughts? Any glaring problems I missed? Is this too far into Standard Code Rant territory to happen in the foreseeable future?