LFG Broken?

Hi,

Is the LFG tool working like its supposed to?

Last night I was trying to find a DFB team blueside and not having much luck. Lots of people standing around Ms Liberty, but no one issuing invites. (I was on a F2P account, so I could not start a team.)

I tried the LFG tool (average wait time : 5 minutes) and after about ten minutes I posted in the help channel and got a private tell that the LFG tool was broken.

So is the code actually not working as intended and not forming groups?

Or do people simply not queue any more so no groups get formed?

No, LFG is not broken. People are just not using it like they should to form automatic groups. People are stuck in the iTrial/TF mindset of preforming for performance.

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.

No. The LFG is not broken. For something to be broken it had to be working in the first place. You can call a rock a car. That does not mean it will drive. Also, because it does not drive does not mean it is broken. The LFG never worked, therefore it is not broken.

To say it another way...

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the LFG function. It works as it was intended. Unfortunately, it is not being USED as it was intended. People will form their teams for trials before hand, and then enter the trial. So if you're not already on the team, you're out of luck. And pay no attention to the average wait time, as it means nothing if nobody else is using the queue.

I think it's fair to say that the LFG has some broken features. The wait times, for example, seem to be pure fiction. That's not to say that the rest of the functionality is bad; but it's also not to say that the rest of the functionality is good either. There's stuff that needs to be fixed, and stuff that should be improved.

The Devs did the equivalent of bringing a boat and giving it to people in a village in the Sahara desert. Sure, the boat is not "broken". We flipped the sucker over and used it for protection from the sun and a meeting place. Is it working the way the Devs designed it? NO. Did they even look at what we might do with it? It sure does not look like it.

The Devs designed a tool that if no one (or few people) formed pre-set leagues and started a Trial would work okay. But we have been conditioned since the game began to pre-form teams for all content, missions, task forces, monster killing, etc. That is how we always roll. The fact that they seemed shocked that we would pre-form leagues and teams to do the hardest content in the game actually flummoxes me. Sometimes I wonder if they ever play video games, much less this video game.

But in the end this tool has never worked the way it was designed since it was designed for a community conditioned to never form teams of friends, channel mates, and peeps hanging near them. It was designed for peeps raised in Praetoria I think. Walk to the machine, press button, accept outcome.

I dont think the wait time is accurate, even taking into account preformed leagues.

I don't think it shows past 5 minutes.

I have moderate success with just joining the queue while doing other stuff. Sometimes people run with less than 8.

The wait time seems to show "5 minutes" by default, even if it has little or no data (on beta, the average wait time for every TF is 5 minutes, even though I'm pretty sure most of them have not yet been run at all there, and if they have been it's incredibly unlikely that they all formed in the same amount of time).

The LFG tool is working properly, AFAIK, in the sense that the code operates as intended. However, it relies on multiple people using it, and the playerbase has so far mostly preferred to form their own teams, and queue only after filling the team by normal methods. So, queuing up solo doesn't usually work well, so nobody does it, which creates something of a vicious cycle.

In order for the LFG dealy to work like it's supposed to, there needs to be enough people to start something queued up.

If there are 2 people queued up for a DFB, and people keep forming them outside the queue, then the 2 people queued up will never get into a DFB because 2 people is not enough to start one.

If I'm starting something I usually try to start it with at least one space open so someone who's been in the LFG for a half hour might actually get a chance to do what they've been waiting for.

I usually do that as well, but not for the hardest trials. The problem is the delay to start if your league isn't full is annoying and it's sometimes worth filling just to avoid it, although at least it's not as bad as it was.