eainen.9467

This idea was born out of the well known frustration with the inability to select the shard to be filtered to for RP purposes. But of course, that's not the only place where this comes up. As we all know, oftentimes this involves asking for taxies and general wrestling with a system that should be invisible to the player. So, how is my idea different than many other complaints about this problem? After all, many suggestions and grievances have been made about the lack of a shard selector. Well, this concept starts with the assumption we don't want to or cannot change the instancing system that already exists in the game. In other words, it works within the existing framework rather than introducing an alternative one that may be undesirable or prohibitive from a development point of view. But enough of beating around the bush. The concept is a form of self-identification through player tags. In other words, giving the player a tool to tell the server "hey, I'd prefer to go here, please", without taking away the final decision from the instancing server. As a player, you'd enter a tag you want which would function as an identifier, and the server would first try to filter anyone with the same tag into the same map. If it can't it would fall back to other filtering options. My initial idea was custom tags made by the players, similar to a guild tag, which then populates a cloud of common tags in the LFG system. More common tags gain more visibility. However an alternative option with presets may work as well. This would mean that anyone who is tagged with "RP" would be preferred together. Making organized metas with a common tag would be a possibility, where you and your guildies/friends use the same tag. You could do farming runs tagged as "FARM" or something of the sort, where you could be grouped with people with the same intentions. Of course, if there's many tags and they all fit into the same map, that's where everyone would go. As is my assumption, the current problem is purely caused by the game not knowing what you want. It kind of tries to guess, but it's got very little to go on after takes many variables into account, some of which conflicting. That's not very helpful and it can't really make an adequate guess. This solution would give it a tangible weight to base its decision upon. It's not meant to replace the variables, but give it a weight or priority to try before working in the usual way.

So. The idea is, Clocktower, but consider this: Using the Social Awkwardness mechanic.