The new Que

What does makeup have to do with coming out of the closet? Cosmetics =\= orientation.

I really cannot support that choice. Rouge's are overpowdered. I think that many people who choose them are just wanting to be more powdered than the people around them.

Suppose there are 100 people in the LFG queue waiting for "First available", and nobody putting themselves in the queue for anything specific. What happens? Is everyone stuck waiting until someone comes along and selects something specific?

I believe that you'd have 33.3 instances of the Positron TF

What does a bundle of wood, a cigarette, or being happy have to do with someones orientation? What does the generic name for the part of a tree that contains it's seeds which is sweet and can be eaten have to do with someones orientation? (They aren't called vegetables)

Yet for some reason those widely diverse words have become slang for peoples lifestyle preferences.

The origins of slang rarely make sense. So there's no reason cosmetics couldn't be slang for something else.

100 divided by 8 is 12 with 4 left over, so 13 instances of Posi (one with only 4), but yeah, basically this.

That's assuming the Queue fills teams to the max before starting TF's. If on the other hand it uses the minimum number required you'll get 33 instances with 1 player left over. And judging by what I've seen in the current queue system it doesn't try to fill out full 8 man teams.

If the queue behavior for iTrials can be extrapolated to other things, the queue seems to wait something like 90 seconds after there are the minimum number in the queue, and then launches with however many people it has. So if 100 people queued up for "First Available" all at roughly the same time, you'd get a bunch of full or nearly-full teams. If they queued up individually over the course of an hour, you'd get smaller teams, although not necessarily all minimum size. Which TF they'd end up on might be some default value (Posi 1 would be the most obvious, but it might also choose the first alphabetically, or the highest-level TF they're all eligible for, or some other criteria), or maybe it would choose randomly, depending on implementation.

I've done DFB with only 2 or 3 other people, all of them blasters. It's not exactly hard. And TFs in general don't need full teams to finish. In fact, if low level vahz are involved, it's often best to not have a full team.

It's not hard at all - that's not the issue. The issue being that with a smaller team the bosses do not spawn as Archvillains, thus reducing the XP per run, as well as losing the large team (7 or 8 members) XP bonus.

Que?

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

So I take it the "default" selection algorithm for the new LFG queue has not been publicly described/explained by the devs (yet)?

It's not just the challenging thing though. It's annoyance factor as well. And reward. Eg the blue side respec are dead boring easy and not run as much as the ITF. I'm sure Numina's taskforce would be run more if it wasn't so annoying hunting greys across just about every zone.

Even when the ITF was considered hard, people still lined up in droves for it. More than they seem to now.

I don't mind some gimmick stuff in the itrials, but when its the same gimmick repeated to pad it out, that annoys me into not wanting to do it.

I've found virtue runs with however many end up in there via random LFG. People forming them seem to wait until 8.

Well, with trials, it's first in the map.

Can't recall - does teh TF queue send you to contact or load you into the first mission?

Right.. and then let's say I am on my 14 level blaster fresh from DFB and wanting to continue teaming to advance quickly and tp start working on my TF Commander ASAP. I start the queue and it puts together the MINIMUM number of players required fora Posi part 1 TF.. 4. As we gather to begin the TF we discover that we now have 4 (14 level) blasters that all had the same idea. So the four of us, with minimal powers, and not one person on any sort of character that can even think about controlling aggro, debuffing, buffing or healing are supposed to face off against COT, Vahzilok and Clockwork... or to put it another way against one villain group that resists damage and is a major PITA at that level (COT), a second that has a ton of toxic damage which even higher level character have limited resistance to (VAHZ) and a third that can fire off holds leaving most if not all of the team helpless while they tear us to shreds (Clockwork).

Until they fix the Queue it is a totally unreliale way of putting together a team because it doesn't care about ANY of that. If FOUR players enter and say "We'd like to do Positron part1" alll it sees is that the minimum amount required to start the TF exists and it WILL make a team. It doesn't care what ATs or power sets they have, it doesn't care wha the chances are those 4 can actually survive and succeed in completing the TF.. all it sees is .. the proper number of potential players exist to form said team!

And then there is the other side of the problem.. I enter the queue and there are not enough players with the mimimum skill level that are interested in doing a Sister Psyche or Posi 2 or whatever.. On Beta I entered the Queue to try and test out the new DIB trial (14 level +) and after an hour of doing other things I finally logged off without ever getting to do what i wanted.

Now look at the globals channels we have now and use constantly .. I decided I want to do a Posi part 1 and post on 5 different channels i belong to on Virtue. Unless its just a totally bad time of day within a very short period of time I have gotten numerous responses back and even have players alting to log on characters they have that NEED and WANT that task force. Some players even send tells asking "WHAT DO YOU NEED ME TO BRING?" So I can monitor my teams build and make sure I have buffs, debuffs, heals, aggro management and sufficient damage to ensure success. Best of all I accomplish ALL of this in a matter of minutes . not an hour and half later. Oh and I decide if I want to run a 4 man minimal sized team or a full sized 8 man one .. not a program.

Maybe you weren't around when the trials first started and the queue first became available but I tried it, so did a lot of others, and found myself on an 8 man team heading into Lambda. No one on the team wanted to lead because no on on the team had ever seen a lambda trial before and had no idea what we needed to do. We didnt have half the powers we needed to attempt to battle Maurader and because no one knew where to find them we only managed to acquire a few grenades and acids.. We were quickly overwhelmed by ADDs and failed after multiple deaths. Noiw there have been SOME improvevments I will grant you back then I couldn't do half the things I can now ewhile waiting for an invite.. like travel from one zone to another, place fresh enhancements in my powers slots or anything else that required a full screen .. IF I did I was bumped out of the queue and had to begin all over.

Players got tired of finding themselves on teams with absolutely no chance of victory and before long it evolved into what you see now.. Trial league being built in locations like the RWZ or Cimerora or Pocket D by a leader who HOPEFULLY knows what to do and they can examine the ATs they have and search for ones they may still need. I realize on many servers population is small and finding enough people to do a single trial is hard but on Virtue we an have so many trials running at once we fill up 1, 2 or more RWZs and not a single one is built by the QUEUE. It didnt work for the trials and I can just aout gaurentee it won't for task forces either.

The minimum for Positron 1 is three, not four, and minimum-sized Posi is much easier than on a team of eight because you don't encounter bosses. That means no Ruin Mages, no Eidolons, no Clockwork Princes. The only point at which a small team is likely to have trouble is the fight against your duplicates, and there, a support-heavy team will have much more trouble than your hypothetical four blasters.

Except for Sutter, all the low-level task forces are like this. Having a full-sized team with a good mix of character types is nice, but it's far from essential.

Thanks for reminding me. I was on a crappy team doing a DfB recently. We started off with 8 people.

One person stood at the DfB entrance the whole time and his only comments to the team inquiries was "I'm lost."

Two people managed to get themselves killed at the Hellion AV and kept demanding they be rezzed by players who were all Tanks, Blasters, and Scrappers.

When we got to the Vaz AV three of the five remaining players (the two deaders ended up quitting because we "refused" to rez them, and the doofus at the entrance was still claiming to be "lost".) who wanted the badges ignored instructions and started killing minions.

Then when we got to the Lost AV they did just the opposite and managed to kill the AV before the Lost minions were killed. One of them quit then because he didn't like being told that they screwed up the badges themselves by not following instructions.

That left us with four people and the door sitter to finish off the Booger monsters at the end. And after it was over the door sitter got pissed because we disbanded the team and made sure the team leader of the new DfB knew what he did on our previous DfB run.

Don't know what happened to the ones that quit the trial early. They weren't around when we finished and joined the new DfB team.

¿Que?

Yuck. Maybe one way to minimize that situation is to play on the Exalted server? *shrug*

I honestly don't know if there is any solution to teaming with bad players since you don't know they are bad players until you're stuck on a team with them. This is going to be a perpetual problem in the DfB trial since it is like Mos Eisley, but replace "scum and villainy" with "newbs and cluelessness". They bring in too many bad, or just plain inapplicable, habits from other MMOs, and a dozen runs through DfB isn't necessarily going to cure them of that. These days, a level 16 character doesn't imply "I know how to play reasonably well," because it could just as easily be a case of "I know the DfB really well but I don't know a thing about any of the powers I got after level 2."

Right now the only tools we have to avoid such players is the "star system" and the ability to pre-form our own teams. The LFG queue isn't likely to be a viable alternative to these vital "manual" methods any time soon.

I should have gone back and explained but was too lazy to edit that one of the deaders had 33 months of vet rewards.

Now I won't say it wasn't possible that the person on the vet account wasn't an actual vet player but I expect a certain basic level of game knowledge from a player when I see that many vet badges.

That's why I never check anyone's badge list...I'm too afraid of what I'll find.