The lfg doesnt represent what the game is today.

[zealex.9410]

In a recent post by anet they outlined a group content philosphy that was based around set roles(quickness alalcrity and migfht were called out specificly) thats all well and good im not against or for this philosophy when it comes to group composition but if thats the way anet is going i think the ingame tools that help us set up groups need to be brought to today and accomodate such philosophies.

Problems with lfg and group making in general today:
1) Group forming takes too long and requires constant fiddling from the group leader.
( The group leader needs to constantly engage with the new ppl that join to see what roles they fill in and take down the lfg so they can regulate the new entries without getting swarmed by newer ones, this is unintuitive and trakes too long)

2) Lack of costumization in the forming of an group ad.
(this goes from setting up entry requirements from within the system to role requirements and clarity of whos filling what when they join as well as group ad exposure)

3) You cant tell at a glance who is bringing what when you watch at the party or squad ui.
(if a group rn has 3 firebrands in a sub you cant at a glance tell who brings what who does what and if you should move someone to a diff group to avoid duplicate roles)

4) lfgs can be hijacked groups can be force merged and leaders can have their group stolen as well as a bunch of bugs.
(player join a  group leaves it immediately and deleted the lfg and the lfg group ad with them)

5) Squad qol and functionality locked behind a paywall and completely inaccessible to 5 man parties.
6) The archaic nature of lfg has pushed ppl to use community tools like discord lfgs leading to a dead looking lfg ingame which hurts the perception.
7) Lack of filtering options when you are looking for a group.
(lfg doesnt save our search info, it doesnt let you hide and black lsit lfg group ads that you are uninterested in [selling groups etc, training or experienced groups etc] and also doesnt update dynamicly, in case of ow squads if the map is full the squad will still be there and players have taken up to themselves to combat this by using map ip (this is convoluted and still doesnt tell you if at any time the map is full or not).

These are some of the problems lfg suffers from due to lack of updates to keep up with where the games has gone over the last 7 years.
Some solutions i could suggest for lfg and group will be posted bellow but first i want to bring awareness to a reddit thread that shows the basic of group forming but also showcases how convoluted is to make a group.
 

As you can see this goes over what some of the popular options for boons, dmg and support are as well as some basic group compositions for ppl to follow when forming their group.
Outside pointing out how overloaded this is (not taking jabs at the creator this is just how much build options the game provides) i also wanted to show this because the maker of this takes the liberty to also add role icons to the squad ui and this is smth that massively improves clarity and makes at a glance understanding ppl's roles so much easier.

Now with that out of the way my proposed qol updates:
1)a)Problem: Group forming takes too long due to a lack of clarity and players leaving causes confusions as to what role they lost.
Proposed Solution: change the ui of the squads so each player has thier role and what they bring displayed (you can use the above graph as a rough guide for this) this imo should have an options menu that each person can individually set up to see the info they want.

E.g: Im the squad leader and i want at a glance to see what dmg type, role and boons/buffs each player brings to the group, I want  to be able to set it up so their role(healer, dps[power/condi], boons, control etc) displayerd so if someone joins as a power quickchrono they will show up as power dmg icon, quickness boon icon, if a hfb joins i want them to show up as healing power icon and quickness icon. If im not the commander but just a player I may just want to have just the dmg type and or boons and spec icons displayed for my subgroup only , thats something I should be able to customize. Theres also some extra suggestion as being able to colour code someone for their role as opposed to doing it with icons (yellow for quick, green for alac, red for power dps, blue for healing, purple for condition dps etc)

1)b)Problem: Requires constant fiddling from the group leader.
Proposed Solution: change group joining into a process to applying and being accepted or denied by the group leader and officers, Ill use WoW as an example here, in wow theres a buffer queue that the group elader has access to which they get a list of every person that is applying to get their group and can either accept or deny them entry on the group (this system in wow allows ppl applying to a group to aply to multiple groups at a time to avoid extreme downtime).

WoW's group application queue.

For gw2 this would need to be a bit different however, upon applying to the group the player will get a menu where they can tick options for what their role is and what they bring (boons, buffs, dmg type, healer, tank etc) you fill that short form then hit apply and w8.

2)Problem: Lack of costumization in the forming of an group ad.
Proposed Solution: Allow group leaders to have the ability to set up what they need and who they want with a more robust system. For this I'll mention ff14 becasue that game has a very robust list of option when it comes to forming group including the ability to exclude ppl that dont meet your requirements (that in ff14 goes as far as haing cleared the cotent or not afaik) gw2 moving into a state of role based combat the lfg would need checkboxes for what roles, boons, unique buffs etc.

FF14's group finder menu options

3) Problem: You cant tell at a glance who is bringing what when you watch at the party or squad ui.
Proposed Solution:  Change the ui of the squads so each player has  thier role and what they bring displayed (you can use the above graph as a rough guide for this) this imo should have an options menu that each person can individually set up to see the info they want.

4)Problem: lfgs can be hijacked groups can be force merged and leaders can have their group stolen as well as a bunch of bugs.
Proposed Solution: Have dedicated ownership of parties and squad and can be shared or passed along by the party owner/squad leader and cannon be interacted with by ppl without clearance.

5) Squad qol and functionality locked behind a paywall and completely inaccessible to 5 man parties.
Proposed Solution: The ability to use the above functionality as well as squad markers witout having to own a commander tag, the functionality of squad marker as well as the above suggestion introduced for 5 man parties as well.

6) The archaic nature of lfg has pushed ppl to use community tools like discord lfgs leading to a dead looking lfg ingame which hurts the perception.
Proposed solution: This is a symptom of the lfg  being outdated and I believe will be adressed overtime as lfg gets improved and modernized.

7) Lack of filtering options when you are looking for a group.
Proposed Solution: Any and all players should ahve the ability to to black list specific groups they dont care about (here im not refering to custom keyword bans but rather being able to blacklist tags that would be built into the functionality like "Practice" "Progression" "Experienced" etc, this naturally gets more complicated when you add things like li, bananas and kp into the mix but im hesistant to say anet will make any of that as built in part of the group forming tool.

I would also close on a controversial suggestion about a feature that the more the game has gone has only become more and more needed, I am talking about an inspect function, gw2 went from a game in 2013 where you only player power zerker to a game today that has a plethora of viable roles builds (gear and traits) and that fracnkly complicates things. Im not looking to add a tool for some players to kick others without a word over but its a tool that much like dps metters can be very benefitial for groups. I would also make kicking ppl without an solid reason an reportable offense (other mmos treat such things seriously and use chat logs to even track how things lead to group kicks to see if it warrants punishment).

This are some identifications of the problems I see with lfg as well as some suggestion as to how to go about improving it, I want to clsoe this post by saying i dont expect every single one of these to be easily doable, i dont believe anet can just flip a switch and make a state of the art lfg system but i do believe something needs to be done and we shouldnt let perfect be the enemy of good but we should strive for perfect regarless.

Edited May 2, 2022 by zealex.9410

[Infusion.7149]

I'd be happy if they just fix the LFG to have role flags and also allow you to change the description instead of the suppressed meme.

You can't even PM the squad leader without adding them or blocking them which is also bad (or obsolete) design.

Edited May 2, 2022 by Infusion.7149

[Hume.2876]

They need to change the game such that the group finder can "see" the spec/gear of the player.  I bet it cannot now - I think there are some technical changes that need to be made. Flags would be okay but it would be better for leaders to have some assurance that the alac guy can really provide alac etc.

 

I would also suggest some kind of opt-in voice chat maybe built on top of discord. That would take group finders into the 21st century..   Before you hate - just imagine with one click and not leaving GW2 you can listen to a commander in the raid.  How nice would that be? Or you could shut him off. 

 

I'd argue this is more important then roles.  My thinking is that players could turn on or off any mics of people in the group. And they could turn on or off their own mic of course. This would mean that in theory you could listen to the commander if you wanted to. This is all you really need. People are so scared of voice chat because  they don't want to speak on line. I get it. But would should have options where the leader can speak and people can listen if they want to.

 

If they made these kind of changes instanced content would be far more popular.  People think instanced content is not popular but the main issue is that they don't make it that friendly for players. 

 

Of course I would strongly suggest that they bring in official tanking to the game as just a general design. Buffs and Healing is about halfway there. Just go all the way and make the game great.. But I digress.

Edited May 3, 2022 by Hume.2876

[Infusion.7149]

They're not going to implement discord integration beyond adding a way to add the link easier with a popup (squad message works for this). Discord already has an overlay so there is no reason for them to invest development time into that. In addition, if anything happens in the discord that is against TOS it cannot be proven which opens up another problem which is why it must be opt-in. Arenanet would need to make a discord and police it as well which means a massive developer investment. That's essentially the same reason Teamspeak/Ventrilo/Mumble integration never existed.

Instead of that pipe dream it's better to focus on low hanging fruit so to speak. Having role indicators is the simplest way to implement it since we have language flags already and the profession icons: people could just have an indication of which role they are filling so you don't need to keep asking as the group fills. Implementing a gear check or some other thing is meaningless since people can have multiple templates and may not join on the character they are filling the role on (i.e. if you are playing in WvW or openworld as the group fills). In addition, if someone doesn't play a build properly the boon duration doesn't mean anything either. I had someone put out 12% alacrity uptime on alac ren yesterday in a random group I joined.


 

[Cuks.8241]

Fully agree. 

Permanent guild advertisement LFG postings through which you can apply for guild and leader can review and decide upon later. 

Enter 10 or 5 man instance through lfg from anywhere. 

Just better UI. Prettier, customisable, pinned sections... Lfg feels like it is from a bad game from 1998.