How to start the new year.
I’ve picked up (at least for 2011H1) another six heads for my team at work (this lot based in Kuala Lumpur to go with the teams in Bristol, Dallas & Vienna) and I appear to be throwing my hat into the ring to raid lead progression content, in addition to the Team Pirate raiding. Which hopefully starts to kick off again this coming weekend.
Someday, hopefully not to far in the future I will learn to duck, take one step back and generally not volunteer.
“Fixing” LFD, once again the discussion arises over how to fix LFD and more specifically the behaviour of players using the feature.
What are the problems?
Or put more simply the problem with LFD is players.
So, the requirement is for the LFD system to have mechanics and systems bolted on top which can regulate in a technical manner meatspace behaviour. This is going to fail, it’s going to fail in spectactular fashion.
This isn’t the first time I’ve come across attempts to resolve meatspace issues with technical solutions, the most widely known is email spam filtering. All the technical attacks are based around trying to identify sources and block based on content, those who’ve known me for a while will be more than familiar with my “consent not content” ranting about the filtering attempts. One person’s spam is anothers requested communication. Filtering on the content alone at a central level is simply broken and prone to false positives.
Anyway coming back to our problems in LFD, which are simply put down to the dynamics of the group of five living and breathing human beings, scattered potentially across the region their realm services, they might all speak different native languages. Though certainly in the EU if a player is on a language specific realm I believe they’ll be matched with other players from the same language group and potentially with different expectations of the run.
Some of the expectations we typically find are :-
and so on, we’ve all encountered at least one, if not all of those stereotypes and if we’re honest we’ve almost certainly been at least one of them at some point.
The WoW blogs are discussing what can be done to make LFD work better, looking at reputation systems, we’ve seen how easily these are twisted into a perversion of their original intent because the definition of “a good player” is so wide. It means one, some or all of the following – “overgeared”, “full epics”, “target switching”, “chainpulling”, “no mana breaks”, “effective cc” and so on. Adding the ability to cross-server friend players, to have a system by which those who run well together will tend to re-group. Scoring players based on their ability to play, again this is massively subjective and what works with one tank will annoy another .. and thus the whole mess builds up again.
The vote to kick system requires some work, I see no reason why the reason for the kick cannot be reported to the person being kicked. Where the reason is valid it gives feedback, and where it’s simply abusive then it’s reportable and to be honest it allows the person being kicked to update their ignore filter.
I don’t believe so, because the mechanics are not broken, the people using it are. In any group there will always be aggressive morons on both sides of the fence, the Internet Dickwad Theory remains the controlling factor and will remain so. Adding in something based off cross-realm friending (allowing two players who have mutually friended to increase their chances of running together again) might help but I believe that any attempt to build in a reputation system will rapidly collapse under the weight of players gaming the system.
The only true solution is to have a core group of players within your own realm which allows the bulk of a 5-man group to be formed before looking at LFD to fill a gap or two.
Patch 4.0.6 – “Rebuke can now be trained by all paladins at level 54. Existing characters will need to visit their trainer, even if they had talented Rebuke before.”
Finally, a decent cc for Paladin tanks.
This is pretty much how I’m feeling about LFD at the moment, anything other than certain normals are simply too much pain with a group which I don’t have a connection and more importantly voice comms running.
So if you’re running a dps and wondering where the tanks and healer are, here is your answer, the dungeons are no longer a faceroll, cc is needed, sensible pulling is needed and everyone has to do their thing and notstandinfire/runfromadds/dpsadds/movetothegood/etc.
In LFD there are too many of all roles (tanks included) who have not yet adjusted from the Wrath “we are all gods” mechanic of the last six months of the expansion where it was almost possible to solo heroics.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAG39jKi0lI]
Unsurprisingly the 1800 honour for a win has been nerfed, there will be a day, a glorious day when Blizz remember that their customers are not all drooling morons and can spot how to min/max a given mechanic they’ve been provided with. They’ve given us communication channels between factions alongside all the non-Blizz forums so the message gets around rather quickly.
However neither the “1800 honour” fix or the nerf of it change the underlying problem, the zone is broken.
Five minutes before close the gates on the bridge and port everyone out of the zone
At start port in those selected
Fixed
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E54wycZaYE]
Oxhorn at his festive best, as always.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4IkPkelbrg]
Only for a moment though, but the artist is worryingly talented, and patient.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGMj7o6AwnM]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM0VnL30rDc]
When watching, particularly when he’s working on the Tiger’s stripes, just take note of the size of the piece he’s working with, the chisel and his finger for scale.