LFG has become a needed evil in WoW. You need it to get groups quickly and efficiently. It has also brought the douchebag phenomenon to a whole new level.
Back in the day, we had to walk 10 miles, uphill, in the Snow, with no shoes to get a group for instances. That sucked. A lot.
There were also great advantages to this method. You met people. If they were good, you put them on your friend list and would whisper them for future runs. This built up a team, and this is how I met a lot of my in-game friends.
Those days are mostly long gone.
Now, you get into a random instance, blitz it, and get on with your day.
People have free reign to be a dickhead, because if they are....who cares? Not like they are going to see these random people ever again.
Back in the day, your reputation meant something. If you were classifed as a BAD or a Ninja, you did not get groups. You either did not run anything, or you transfered servers. There was a price for being a douchebag.
Now there is not.
I think that they could add a couple of options to LFG to make it a little bit better.
1) Add and option for realm only LFG. Just a check box. If there are sufficient people on for this, then it throws you into an instance with people that are on your server. If not, it gives you a warning message and asks if you would like to join regular LFG.
2) Add a rating system for players. After a run, a screen pops up and it lets you rate each person in the group with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. There could also be a place to leave a comment. This would be a way to give someone contructive criticism as well as ensure that bad players get grouped with bads and vice versa. Maybe the rating system will group people of similar ratings.
These are just a couple of quick ideas off the top of my head. I do not miss waiting around to get a group. I do miss the friendships that were made and the accountability that people had to face if they acted like fucktards.
10 comments:
The problem with #2 is that people still might use it to be dicks via bad ratings -- even when nothing warranted them though. :-/
Yeah, I considered that as well. I would just hope that the people being people would outnumber the douchebags.
There was an add on for a while that served as a rating system. You could rate each member of your group and somehow could share it with other people that had the add on. But I think it was pretty clunky and fell apart.
Maybe if there were a limit on how many/often times you could rate someone as "bad." That way the honest people would reserve their votes for the truly bad members and the dicks wouldn't have so many available to spam. The higher your "good" rating gets maybe the more bad votes you're given to spend.
Any upvote/downvote system that has any actual consequences would immediately be destroyed by the Machiavellian players who realize that if they just downvote everyone else, regardless of performance, then they'd wind up with the highest relative score, because some people would use the system as intended and upvote them.
I wasn't think about using relativity as the measure, otherwise new players would be SoL compared to those that have been around since the inception of the program.
It would have to be some sort of complicated algorithm, much like how LFG works anyway, that calculated a score that compared how many good votes you received against how many bad votes, combined with number of dungeons/raids ran, your astrological sign, and the day of the week trash gets picked up on your street.
Defiantly there are huge issues with gaming a rating system, but let's assume those can be solved for a moment.
If you only have people grouped into good / bad, do you really think Blizzard wants to separate these further? I mean the trolls/dicks separated would be a good thing for all in my opinion.
But just all good players separated from bad I believe Blizzard would not want to do. Worse players would have a harder time learning by example, have much harder time clearing and could potentially get frustrated and quit.
I don't think a rating would be good just look at how metacritic scores and Amazon scores are gamed. Ratings are only useful if your screen name and distribution were attached.
I think a statistic for how many times you've been voted out of a group would be useful, however.
A simple honor system that rewarded you for finishing groups with the people that you started with would do it. Finish with the 5 people you started 100 honor,or 50 extra justice or valor points or whatever.
to reinforce it subtract 50 points for every person you boot. It would suck when you had to boot someone but I predict something this simple would end most of the LFG Asshattery.
A simple honor system that rewarded you for finishing groups with the people that you started with would do it. Finish with the 5 people you started 100 honor,or 50 extra justice or valor points or whatever.
to reinforce it subtract 50 points for every person you boot. It would suck when you had to boot someone but I predict something this simple would end most of the LFG Asshattery.
I want a speed run check box. Separate the valor farmers from the people who want a laid back run and both groups would be happier. Both groups get what they want by self selecting correctly, so there's no reason to game the system.
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