The LFG Tool's Broken Promise and the Open League
By
AmazingMOO,
Posted on: 2011-05-26 23:24 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
One method I've seen is making the incentive buff scale based on how many people were added to the league by the turnstile.
I personally think that the biggest hurdle to the LFG being used is that it doesn't let you do other stuff while in the queue. Global channels pre-empt it rather significantly because of that. And the 'very common' sit in an organizing zone is mostly a perception issue since you are still stuck doing nothing while in the far less structured queue of zone-chat 
.
Will be interesting to see though if a full-league will be able to enter the queue as Open or not, I can see it potentially not being possible. Of course, that just slides the issue to 23/1 or whatever instead, but I imagine you'll find some more folks willing to move into the queue with less than the maximum.
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It's actually very common on Champion for people to start the BAF with 18-20 people, either on purpose to lessen lag or because they don't want to stand around waiting for more. I've been on a few of these where someone has popped in from the queue, and I've done it myself, although that's probably less an intended use of the feature and more of an "I don't want to travel all the way to the RWZ" thing. That's why I used it anyway. Laaaazy.
Lambdas are more often filled, in many cases due to demand. I've been denied a spot several times because the league was full. People generally seem willing to go with 12.
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I've been doing research both with my teammates and here in the forums. The conclusion I'm drawing is that most players consider to be LFG tool a waste of time.
If you want a trial league, you have to assemble one for yourself or join one someone else is assembling.
Then, because of the perception that anything other than a bursting full team cannot win on the trials, the organizers generally laboriously fill every last spot on the trial and go to the LFG queue it only when the there's a full trial team ready to go.
The Promise of the LFG Toll was that you could login, hop in the queue, fight some baddies, get a smidge of incarnate progression, and then move on with no organizational skills necessary.
This is obviously not happening. The LFG Tool is now simply the 'My league is ready to go' button.
Open Leagues look as if they're trying to address this issue by awarding players who open their leagues to outsiders. But there are a few problems here.
How open is a league with 24 members? They'll certainly leave the 'open' flag on to net that extra merit if they can, but this provides no gameplay change over how it's already works.
If you're trying to award players extra for using the queue, there needs to be a stick there to knock apart what's a painful, but successful mechanism for building trial leagues.
Instead of 'Open Leagues earn another merit upon completion,' the way it should work is reward the behavior you want and discourage the behavior that you don't want.
The extra merit for being 'open' should only be awarded when at least any leagues joining the trial compose less than half the total trial population. In other words, no extra goody for you unless you actually got at least half your trial league from folks who were using the tool.
The completely fictional 'average start times' that are skewed out of reality by reflecting the start times of pre-built leagues already drive players away from the tool. Fix the timer and fix how the awards are handed out to truly 'Open Leagues' and you'll start to see some usage.
Additionally, it wouldn't hurt to institute 'minimum night'. Every so often. Don't allow any player to start the instance with more than the minimum required. Players quickly disregarded this as a winning strategy based upon first-night impressions. Pick a day, once a week, and even give an extra Astral for participation, and turn down the limit on those trials from 16 to 8 and from 24-12.