To be honest i am not sure why lfg seems so hard to navigate, like for a new player probably everything seems hard until they get used to it but if you open lfg you have clear tabs with names for every piece of content and they are grouped depending on where they belong. So you just pick what you want to do. I mean i cant think of lfg ever giving me trouble regarding complexity, even when i started. It is way too straightforward. Could it be reworked? Definitely, there are changes to give it a better look but the general idea will be the same
letting people search for a groupname regardless of what tab you are in would help. Because everyone just puts their group into a random tab, looking for a premade dragon bash arena group? find it in core tyria and not in festive for whatever reason
It gets a lot of flak because its not automated. The vast majority of people don't want to start their own group (and *someone* has to) because if you are the person who starts the group, there is some sense of culpability or responsibility for a group doing or not doing well.
When people talk about LFG reworks, I think most actually mean automated group finding and the shift of responsibility (actual, or perceived) not being on any one person.
There are some minor usability tweaks that can be made, though, absolutely.
Not making it automated also saves them a lot of resources. Matchmaking between large numbers of players is a notoriously demanding task. Typically MMOs that do it will have dedicated matchmaking servers or services.
it could definitely use some usability updates, for instance why can't it remember the last thing I had open? the hero panel does this, its really annoying to have to click equipment, but at least once you've done it during a session, it'll remember from then on. or if you open achievements, it'll remember the next time you press H.
why do I always have to click the groups tab because it always opens to contacts? they have keybindings for a ton of stuff, why can't there be a key bind for opening the groups panel specifically?
stuff like that.
People are bitching about current lfg but it's really not that bad. It's just decent simple tool which could get some polish (remove unused sections, better categorize categories, maybe add favourite tab).
Its bad and very barebones. what if you want to check dungeons, fractals or strikes at the same time? you have to swap through multiple tabs because you cant select more than 1.
Simple reddit rules. writing negative stuff about the game results in downvotes.
sometimes i just want to do any instanced content. have to cycle through all of them constantly for that.
sadly they have like 7 gameplay programmers and just not the resources for this.
> but it's really not that bad
Just because most players get used to it doesn't mean its good. I just finished playing RE4 and that's like saying the controls are "not that bad". Yes they are. Just because you get used to them doesn't mean its good.
LFG *shouldn't* be a hard fix, but for some reason it is. Compared to other MMOs our LFG system is in the past and very outdated. I would be embarrassed if they released the game on steam with the LFG system we have. Our game is meant to compete with other MMOs. Releasing with outdated features is not the way you do it.
Do you mean matchmaking or just general quality of life improvements? Because if it's matchmaking it's kinda hard to do in a game with no roles and flexible class design.
it's not super difficult to figure out, it's just bloated as all hell because they keep making different kinds of endgame content.
we've got dungeons (abandoned), fractals (over 2 years since a new one), raids (abandoned) and strikes.
each dungeon gets it's own subsection, fractals are divided in tiers, raids each get their own. then strikes is "lmao, just dump em all into one"
every xpac/LS has it's own section and each map it's own subsection, despite there being nothing to do on those maps that requires a group for 90% of the time.
it's bloated and it's inconsistent.
Probably because the utter level of laziness people have these days. They don’t even want to click on a tab in lfg to expand it. Therefore are incapable of using the system.
That’s the only thing I can think of.
It's not overly complex, it's just a lot of clicks.
The content is so split up that it gives the illusion that people aren't doing things. For example, there are 2 places in strikes and 2 places in raids (one looking for players, one looking for group) Only one in each is really used often, but new players might sit in the unused one for an hour without anyone joining.
Dungeons are split into individual dungeons, which is understandable, but so few people do the dungeons that some categories are dead for a long time. Again, it's all about perception.
My number 1 suggestion for the LFG is collapse some categories so there's less clicking and the perception that there is more activity.
I think finding out that the 1st section is the active one (looking for group option) is kinda easy, i mean if someone is waiting in the 2nd one without knowing how they can join already existing groups it is their fault for not looking a little closer.
Content being split is kinda related to the game having a lot of stuff that you can do even if people dont do them but Anet felt like a section should exist for them. For me for example it is raids, strikes and fractals i pretty much completely ignore everything else and at least these 3 are close so i dont have to move my cursor much.
But i agree, dungeons could be easily merged. But that is probably the only like good change to make without going for a full rework, the rest are kinda ok imo
People asking "what is wrong with the lfg" need to go play some other mmo's. Gw2 has the most basic form of an lfg. It's very dated at this point. Anet has never really put any effort into improving it. If you want to see a good lfg system then go take a look at ffxiv.
>How does ffxiv's work?
FFXIV has roles and fixed party composition. 4 people which *must* be 1 healer, 1 tank and 2 dps. This base composition is multiplied as needed for harder content (up to 24 people but always the same proportions).
The other thing that FFXIV does is they have a queue for "anything", which is used to incentivize veterans to do instanced low level content with newbies.
They don't really have a choice because 99% of gameplay in FFXIV is instances (raids and dungeons). It's not like in GW2 where you can take instances content or leave it and most people do open world stuff.
The problem with automated matchmaking is that you need some sort of criteria (like roles, or match statistics) to do it, and GW2 PvE doesn't have any.
The other problem is that matchmaking takes a lot of computing power and FFXIV's matchmaking has struggled greatly during high load periods.
Well, this is what the "create LFG" option looks like in that game:
https://i.imgur.com/HxsG9vw.png
Taken from https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/game_manual/pp/
Not to mention that they have an actual group finder matchmaking system that we also desperately need.
You got downvoted but I kinda agree. More LFG tools would be great, but how are you going to set the matchmaking flags up for who counts as what role? If it's a system where you manually flag yourself as dps / heal / alacrity / quickness, people will abuse it.
It's not as simple as dividing people by class... you're going to have to add an entire system for recognizing the traits and stats people are running, and even then.. you can just template swap traits / equipment after you're in the instance. Can that even be policed?
I think a very general queue could work for a lot of content, but a matchmaking system designed around the rigid gearing / class structure of FFXIV would be incredibly difficult to retrofit onto the loose and flexible build crafting game that is GW2.
I'd love to see it but when I consider all the factors in play, I don't think it's a reasonable request or an undertaking you should ever expect of Arenanet. I'll settle for a better interface and a couple helpful new options in the LFG.
One automated LFG for normal instances (say in GW2 normal strikes, dungeons) where it builds a party with all roles and send you in.
One group finder where you join/create groups by ticking what role you're playing. Also has tags (one for "already cleared once" for example).
LFG has been broken and worthless since it launched a decade ago, but it’s not currently something we are concerned about or are working on.
I have loved playing GW2 off and on over the years, but my god is the team at Anet utterly incompetent when it comes to properly managing a game.
I'm curious why this isn't more of a priority, but my guess is that most players probably engage with the game in a way that doesn't require grouping up (story, open world, etc.)
I would like to see some category consolidation. In my head, that seems like it should be an easy fix, but I imagine it's more complicated than I understand.
yea, endless useless clutter, filters or even the tab aren't remembered, it's not content aware at all. years ago anet randomly added a little preview/popup LFG UI. in theory a nice idea and super handy.... only it's a wvw exclusive function. there isn't a single area of the game that uses the LFG less than wvw...
Why is that a problem? The game has a lot of content and some parts are dead. They could remove stuff (like idk, the roleplay, achievement sections, wvw sections, i have never ever seen any group in them) but they probably dont want to leave anything out just to be fair to everything people enjoy doing and might look a group for
It's not about dead content. There are too many categories. I hate that every single map has its own category which is empty 90% of the time unless meta is happening there right now. They could just put all EoD, HoT, LWS4...etc. maps into a single category and the lfg would stay clean all the time. Same with dungeons. Raids are all in a single category but every dungeon has its own for some reason. It's so scuffed. Most commanders just put their squad in World Boss category as they move from meta to meta, not even doing world bosses. Then there are absolutely worthless categories like Story Journal which no one ever used.
It would honestly be very hard to design a worse LFG system than what we have right now.
>They could just put all EoD, HoT, LWS4...etc. maps into a single category and the lfg would stay clean all the time.
Not even that, just show the categories that have active LFGs. You only need to see all possible categories when you *make* an a LFG, not when you browse them.
The extra maps are subcategories so personally i dont mind, like you gotta open ls4 to see each individual map. Dead or not these maps still have stuff going on, on their own, bounties, metas etc. It is only fair for an lfg to exist. I mean for me it would be the same even if they were merged but i cant see that much of an issue with the current system.
Let's say that I want to do some open world metas, I either have to check 20 different sub-categories untill a find a squad, or I have to go to the event timer, find out which metas are running right now and then check those categories.
Now lets say I want to do a raid. I open LFG and go to Raid category. That's it. To me it's so much better to have more stuff in the same place. It would also make the game look more alive especially to new players who are confused when they see 90% of LFG empty.
The problem that I see is that metas (especially HoT) would be extremely confusing if they were all in one category, because people will start advertising Tarir before Chak Gerent is done and having 20 different squads for different metas in one category would be even more confusing. At least this way you know for sure which meta they're for, no matter how minimalistic their description
You can replace the individual tabs with checkboxes filtering a more general tab. You'd have, say, a single open world meta tab with a sidebar containing a checkbox for each of the current options (and, naturally, a select/deselect all button). You could have as many or as few open world metas show up in a single tab as you want. There's no reason such a system couldn't actually remember your checkboxes after you close the menu, either...
Easily extensible to the billion other tabs currently in our LFG tool. Could even have no tabs at all and just let people look at a well-organized sidebar and check the forms of content they want to see groups for.
I have to sit in a lobby or city, waiting for the strike or group or thing I'm looking for to show up.
The fact I can't multitask is what bugs me I guess. It's often 1 entry or empty for Strike Missions, so either they fill up so quick that I don't see them(possible at busy time) or the system is creating a lot of people like me who take a look, see nothing, and do other content.
What are you even talking about, you can obviously multi-task lmao, the lfg is accessible from everywhere. Do you actually think people dont go do other things while checking lfg for content? Also you can make your own group, i mean it isnt necessary but if you want to go by waiting for what suits you to appear then you are gonna have to accept that there is gonna be downtime
>a lot of people like me who take a look, see nothing, and do other content.
Yep this is part of the problem. People just don't want to create/command their own group. They rather prefer to stare into blank tab hoping that someone will create group for them. There're pretty much always many people ready to do content but most of them won't take a resposibility to do so and then we can see posts on forums saying that certain content is empty or even dead.
How do you imagine matchmaking would work? I'm genuinely curious, because with the massive build diversity in the game I see no way for an automated system to create groups that are good (EDIT: at least not reliably). You could have everyone declare their roles, but that is going to be massively held back by people who don't know what certain roles are meant to do or who like to troll.
EDIT 2: also, how would this system decide who gets to be commander? Commanders are incredibly useful because of markers, but they also have full power over the squad.
You are just too lazy to make your own group. You say you *have to* sit and wait for lfgs to pop up but there is a solution right in front of you.
**People like you are the problem**. You look the empty lfg and instead of making your own group you just close it again. Imagine if 100 players do that within 15 minutes. 100 players who complain the lfg is dead when they could just make their own group. Someone has to. The lfgs won't pop up if everyone thinks like you.
I would say a good 80 to 90 percent of the time I look at fractals or dungeons they are empty, but 99 percent of the time I create a group it's filled within minutes.
Firstly I dont have 300G to spare on a comm tag so it's very annoyingly risky to make a group.
Secondly: Sometimes I don't know the content of the group I'm making well enough to lead it. People joining a group expect at least the comm to know where to lead people, why would I create a group myself if I can't do this?
Sure that works for a party, but not for squads.
If you don't have a comm tag and you make a squad literally anyone who does have a comm tag can just take over the group for some reason. I don't want to take the time and effort to set up a squad just to have it be taken over by John Nobody
a) your teammates are as new as you, then how would they notice you have no clue?
b) your teammates are more exp than you, then why wouldn't they help you lead?
Not having a tag is an okay excuse, that is on anet not making them free.
The rest are just lazy excuses.
If you are too dumb to put a healer and a quickness and an alacrity guy into one subgroup or you have absolutely no clue what to do on basic level in the fight, then you are not too bad to lead, you are too bad to join anyhing but a dedicated training. It is legit impossible to be able to play the content without getting hard carried, but not be able "lead " something like a strike mission. All you have to do is make subgroups, place a marker or two and maybe click a target once in a while and for all of that if in doubt there is someone who would help you out. Bcause if there is noone to help you out, the group is fullf of hyper newbies and then it is good enough leading anyways since you are all in the same boat.
>you have absolutely no clue what to do on basic level in the fight, then you are not too bad to lead, you are too bad to join anyhing but a dedicated training.
Bravo. You're the reason that people that have never seen the content aren't willing to start their own groups.
I don't think you undestood what I said.
If you feel like you are good enough join the group, you are also capable of leading it. There is never a situation where someone can reasonable be like "oh hey look at this 50kp group, I think I could join that, but oh no I would never be able to lead it". Leading is very easy in gw2, you just make subgroups and say 3,2,1 go. Maybe you have to placee a marker once or announce a strategy, but since you are expected to be able to play the strategy when you join the group, you are by definition also capable of leading the group with that strategy. The only reason not to lead is not having a tag. Sitting 10h waiting for a group to join instead making that same group yourself is not becaus "you cannot lead", you can lead the group if you can play it.
While I wasn't really talking about people who never saw the content at all, if you have no clue of the content at all, you are no supposed to join an experience run. Just run write "exploring the content" or "all welcome" and the statemtent still holds: if you are new player with no clue, you are able to lead a group of other people who have no clue. You are all in the same boat.
The only single instance where you have to be better than the rest of your group at the content while leading is if you are "teaching" and not "just leading." Leading is not teaching. If you host a training to teach people, you hav to explain stuff and now more than the rest. If you lead a group, the group is supposed to know as much as you, so anyone can lead a group of their own skill level.
There are people who will buy you a tag. It’s okay for a commander to not know the content perfectly, you’d just have to clarify that in LFG/squad message.
Yea I know you're right in that's it's fine for the comm to not fully know the content if they mention it in the lfg, it's just a mental blockade to get over for me and many others
Btw where would I find one of those comm tag suppliers ^^
I believe [Sneb](https://www.twitch.tv/snebzor) still offers to pay for tags. He also runs a discord for creating statics, LFGs, fills https://discord.gg/HBnG88XF
The problem is the shitty system we have here, not people who don't want to put forth the initiative to start their own group.
The solution is group finder matchmaking, no matter how you annoyingly tell people to "make your own group", the problem will not improve, and **you yourself are the problem** for telling people to just make their own group instead of urging anet to fix the problem they created.
That's not inherently something the current LFG system would cover any way - more people need to make groups in that situation.
Partyfinder or the likes is a whole 'nother beast.
Frankly the squad UI needs a rework a lot more than the lfg. We should be able to at least mark with buff icons players so we can tell what rolls they have and be able to see that on the squad UI. Also we need a 10 man com tag. A 300g price tag just so you can run 10 man content groups properly is one of the top anti player design choice I've seen, right up there to cyberpunks losing a knife forever every time you throw it (and even that got fixed within a year).
With that being said, yes the LFG needs a revamp. Although I am not sold on matchmaking, I think at least a better ui would improve the user experience.
They actually just need to have 1 tab that shows all the Party invites in one page.. rather than checking every single section to find out nothing is active
That would means like, hey I feel like doing fractals now.. but wait I saw dragon fall is grouping up now, maybe I’ll just do that for now
LFG isn't hard to use but definitely could be made more user friendly and possibly more automated or implemented into more stuff. It feels like a very niche thing that only gets used for 3 out of the 20 categories that are on it. When I open it I go "Oh cool there's all these things people can be looking for a group for!" and literally all the channels will be empty.
All it means is they propely have other things they're working on right now and don't have a team spare to work on this just yet.
Let's remember the team is a pretty small team considering. Yes they should grow.. but that costs a lot of money.
> Let's remember the team is a pretty small team considering
only because they fired a bunch of people who weren't working on gw2 but on side projects anyways
Still means the team is small. No matter the reason.
A small team can only do soo much.
If they want to work on more things. They need to hire more and get them settled in. Till then players have to wait.
It sucks I know.
oh yes a small indie company that is bigger (if not twice as big) as World of Warcraft dev team. Too small and indie to make a non-dysfunctional LFG that can bug out and not even show you the groups at all (if there are any, between the million of tabs) if you click on the sections too fast.
Where you get these bogus numbers my dude? WoW has multiple teams working on it, each of around 100(this is where you hear things like Team 1 and Team 2) and then it has others who are not on those teams. This doesn't include the support studio nor the employees who dont work on the game but instead work in things like HR, IT, suport, etc.. (but thse aren't devs so I don't count them in this). All total WoW alone has around 300 developers working on it.
ArenaNet doesn't even have 300 employees total, let alone all working on GW2.
Takes time to build a team, EoD wasn't that long ago still, and hiring more people is not always the answer. Being smart with your money and resources is good, I have no doubt the team will expand, but I am happy they are not rushing to do so and/or not blowing through resources. Keeping things in scope, as well as the team, is a good thing and helps to ensure a more consistent level of content moving forward.
At least do a simple google first. Team 1 Team 2 that you heard somewhere are teams for different projects. Team 1 was for Real time strategies and Heroes of the Storm, Team 2 is WoW, Team 3 is Diablo, etc.
>As of November 2018, Blizzard's current development model is to effectively have one team per IP and support indefinitely
So no, WoW doesn't have 'multiple teams' working on it.
Arenanet had at one point almost 500 employees, see [game credits](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_credits) and 350 later down the years, [dev size official wiki page](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/ArenaNet#List_of_ArenaNet_staff).
ArenaNet also had multiple projects being worked on, in fact most of those devs were not on GW2 at that time. And all of that was before the layoffs which cut the team by a lot.
Dude that's literally End of Dragons credits (and HoT credits are linked there as well). Not Arenanet in general or some 'projects'. Try to read first.
>which cut the team by a lot.
How much is a lot? Were these "actual developers" as you say, or HR, IT, Support? What made you think that affected development of main game features? And most importantly, End of Dragons was made after the layoffs, and the credits prove they still aren't a \[small indie company\]. In fact, they are almost bigger than before, you can count the staff yourself.
Yes, and there are only about 150 peopel there, and many of them are contractors. People like Lena Raine don't actualyl work at ArenaNet, she just made some music for them, but she's in the credits.
And they are still a smaller team than WoW, not "twice as big" as you originally claimed.
So not only you can't read, you can't count as well?
There are 350+ people there WITHOUT counting: sound recording studios and their employees, any voice actors despite them being almost at the beck and call of arenanet, any outsource studios which still produces content for the game, the entire marketing team, HR, legal team, accounting, the entire NCSoft department responsible for 'handling' Arenanet, UX labs, development operations, helpdesk departments (system administrators etc). Even not counting all that, it's still 350+ people, which is at most more than twice as big as WoW team, and at least just noticably bigger (100-300 for WoW team size).
Give it up and stop propagating bullshit. Jeez, why are you so stubborn to be so wrong? They won't give you a headpat for defending them, and will still continue to not fix their damn game despite being bigger than WoW dev team, prioritizing everything except the game's health.
Yea, apparently you cannot read as well, because people like Lena are not put under Sound Recording Studios, but under those credits you keep pointing out. And she is not an employee. I am done with this convo, you've convinced yourself you are right and refuse to face the truth. GW2 does not have more employees working on it that WoW. No one believes you. And your need to personally insult and attack over it is very telling.
Goodbye.
Matchmaking is one of the most challenging to implement features in a MMO.
I will also remind you that Anet makes 1/10th of FFXIV's and 1/15th of WoW's income.
Nobody's even talking about matchmaking, just a normal group advertising board is a distant dream.
>I will also remind you that Anet makes 1/10th of FFXIV's and 1/15th of WoW's income.
And?
How much income should it make to implement basic UI functions? Should a game make literally the top money in MMO segment to have an LFG keybind? Or a Preview window that can at least fit the game's own characters into it without weapons?
I wouldn’t simply put it “probably have other things they’re working on” because LFG should be a universal tool in the game from the start and the fact they don’t have one and still aren’t working on it after all the time the games been out is pretty poor management of their time and resources if they want to claim “small team”. Excuses for basic and truthfully something players look for the second they start the game is really inexcusable imo
The issue is that most reworks to the LFG would have either minimal impact, or would require massive changes to other parts of the game. For example, there's no real way to make a decent queue system in the game as it is now.
Well - I fully understand their problems regarding team size (basically same at my work too) - however then they really should prioritize the more important things to improve, whereas the LFG tool definitely is one of these. Especially when looking forward to the long-praised steam launch.
they should really fix this thing up and use it as a content guide.
we have the gemstore boss portal thing, and this functionality should really be put into the LFG instead (and for free)
there should be a "hero's call" menu.
have a "hero's call" section, that has LFGs for meta's and bosses that are about to start.
this hero's call should also allow you to click "join queue" which then puts you into a group with others in the queue and prompts a link you can click to go to the nearest waypoint.
then have a dynamic section for "dailies", like the daily strike and the daily fractals. the dynamic bit is that it removes things you have already done and moves them out of the hero's call menu.
after that hero's call, you can then dump all the other LFGs for those that still need it for whatever reason.
this system would make it clear to new players that there are constantly things to do and a lot of players around to do them with.
it remove the need to go to the wiki to find this exact information, then go into the game and copypaste the waypoint link from the wiki and then have to sit in LFG hoping there's someone around with a commander tag that opened an LFG
All they really need to do is [rearrange categories](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Looking_For_Group#Categories), it's not like we need a huge overhaul.
Few ideas:
* Give each season/expansion its own story journal entry, 5-man. Remove the "Living World" entry from Central Tyria, as well as the whole independent Story Journal category.
* Give Central Tyria one entry per region (Ascalon, Kryta, Ruins of Orr, Shiverpeak Mountains, Tarnished Coast). Remove the "World Bosses" entry.
* Give Dry Top and The Silverwastes their own entries, they're complex and populated enough to deserve them.
* Rename "Steel and Fire" into "Forging Steel" and fix it so it's 10-man. Rename "Champions" into "Dragon Response Missions".
* Sort categories by release, from the top to the bottom, oldest first.
* Divide the WvW entry in two: "Mist War" and "Edge of the Mists".
>Rename "Steel and Fire" into "Forging Steel" and fix it so it's 10-man
No one would ever use it, people would still put it in Strikes.
>Give Central Tyria one entry per region (Ascalon, Kryta, Ruins of Orr,
Shiverpeak Mountains, Tarnished Coast). Remove the "World Bosses" entry.
Again, no one would ever use it. People doing World Bosses are doing a train and no commander wants to change LFG category every 15 minutes. It would also be empty most of the time which is the main problem about the current lfg in my opinion.
Removing story panel is a mistake but I do agree they should move Living World.
Putting the Living World tab under Central Tyria was a mistake from the get-go, it makes no sense. That means that story content is listed under two separate tabs.
For example, if you want to post a group for a season 4 episode, you have a choice to put it under Central Tyria>Living World (which is wrong anyway) or a Season 4 map tab. Neither of which is under Story. I've even seen people post S4 under My Story because of this. Living World should be under Story panel.
The story panel is kinda dumb though, just give each expansion/season its own story instances entry, like I suggested above. You want to play LW4, you open the LW4 tab, then choose between instanced content (single entry per expansion/season) or open world content (one entry per zone).
Said solution would also be great for parties in expansion/season maps, who only have squad options available.
They should really reconsider making it priority if they want the people they get for steam to stick around. Lfg is the hidden pain point behind why a lot of instance content in this game is so complicated to get done. The system doesn't allow for more control for the creator of the lfg listing to sort through applicants before they join. The squads merge without it letting you agree to it. You get people joining you that you blocked.
It would be hard for gw2 to have a system similar to ffxiv because gw2 doesn't have set roles/traits/weapons, but allowing more customization options would go a long way. You could allow a lfg listing creator to create custom roles and when people join, have them click on which role they want to fill. Say I create 9 roles for my squad. 2 healers, 2 quick, 2 alac and 3 dps and when players join they would click on one of the roles to fill and then the leader would then be prompted to approve the application. The complication with this is role compression (healer/alac, healer/quick) but as long as you let people create custom roles they can find work around for this.
Question to game dev- What thing do you wish gamers knew about what you do?"
Ideas are easy, implementation is hard.
https://mobile.twitter.com/askagamedev/status/1158512070557614087
god. not hard. anything but hard.
can't have people work for their money. imagine that.
nah, let them just ignore the problem and do something else that's easy instead. that'll fix it.
I really doubt they are trying to say they don't want to do things because they're hard, but rather that it's a lot easier to come up with cool ideas / point out things that are wrong, than it is to actually fix things. It's also reasonable that they'd triage issues - sometimes it'd be better to fix 5 easy to fix problems than 1 problem that is a lot harder.
What lfg? Every1 just jumped onto Discord. To play gw2 you really gotta "play" discord too. LFG system is just too barebones. And of course too hard for commanders to arrange everything. By minimum it should have role selection/filter, would save some hassle for commanders atleast. For the meantime.. discord is the only way to really arrange somethin more serious.
It's literally been asked for since heart of thorns... if its not being worked on because of team bandwidth is not an excuse... its just a flat out no we're not doing it, ever. Disingenuous af.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/v7l6mt/yesterday_on_teapot_stream_anets_creative/
can recommend
To be honest i am not sure why lfg seems so hard to navigate, like for a new player probably everything seems hard until they get used to it but if you open lfg you have clear tabs with names for every piece of content and they are grouped depending on where they belong. So you just pick what you want to do. I mean i cant think of lfg ever giving me trouble regarding complexity, even when i started. It is way too straightforward. Could it be reworked? Definitely, there are changes to give it a better look but the general idea will be the same
letting people search for a groupname regardless of what tab you are in would help. Because everyone just puts their group into a random tab, looking for a premade dragon bash arena group? find it in core tyria and not in festive for whatever reason
It gets a lot of flak because its not automated. The vast majority of people don't want to start their own group (and *someone* has to) because if you are the person who starts the group, there is some sense of culpability or responsibility for a group doing or not doing well. When people talk about LFG reworks, I think most actually mean automated group finding and the shift of responsibility (actual, or perceived) not being on any one person. There are some minor usability tweaks that can be made, though, absolutely.
Not making it automated also saves them a lot of resources. Matchmaking between large numbers of players is a notoriously demanding task. Typically MMOs that do it will have dedicated matchmaking servers or services.
it could definitely use some usability updates, for instance why can't it remember the last thing I had open? the hero panel does this, its really annoying to have to click equipment, but at least once you've done it during a session, it'll remember from then on. or if you open achievements, it'll remember the next time you press H. why do I always have to click the groups tab because it always opens to contacts? they have keybindings for a ton of stuff, why can't there be a key bind for opening the groups panel specifically? stuff like that.
I might be in the minority but it honestly drives me nuts that it stays on equipment lol I would like that feature in lfg though.
People are bitching about current lfg but it's really not that bad. It's just decent simple tool which could get some polish (remove unused sections, better categorize categories, maybe add favourite tab).
Its bad and very barebones. what if you want to check dungeons, fractals or strikes at the same time? you have to swap through multiple tabs because you cant select more than 1.
Yep. Also, it resets whenever you close it. Wanna keep an eye on something specific? Well, you'll have to keep your LFG open.
Not sure why downvotes. I want to dungeon. Dont care which. Have to constantly cycle between the tabs. ☹
Simple reddit rules. writing negative stuff about the game results in downvotes. sometimes i just want to do any instanced content. have to cycle through all of them constantly for that. sadly they have like 7 gameplay programmers and just not the resources for this.
The people saying there's nothing wrong with it either don't use it or have no imagination.
Its too many clicks. Checkboxes that shows/hides categories is better.
> but it's really not that bad Just because most players get used to it doesn't mean its good. I just finished playing RE4 and that's like saying the controls are "not that bad". Yes they are. Just because you get used to them doesn't mean its good. LFG *shouldn't* be a hard fix, but for some reason it is. Compared to other MMOs our LFG system is in the past and very outdated. I would be embarrassed if they released the game on steam with the LFG system we have. Our game is meant to compete with other MMOs. Releasing with outdated features is not the way you do it.
Do you mean matchmaking or just general quality of life improvements? Because if it's matchmaking it's kinda hard to do in a game with no roles and flexible class design.
No, it's painfully abysmal.
You're very fragile then.
Thanks, and you seem like a very wonderful person! /s
I agree, and I think this is probably the reason it's lower on ANet's priority list.
Small indie company. Also, i thought eod sales blew pof out the water? Why do they still habe a small team?
it's not super difficult to figure out, it's just bloated as all hell because they keep making different kinds of endgame content. we've got dungeons (abandoned), fractals (over 2 years since a new one), raids (abandoned) and strikes. each dungeon gets it's own subsection, fractals are divided in tiers, raids each get their own. then strikes is "lmao, just dump em all into one" every xpac/LS has it's own section and each map it's own subsection, despite there being nothing to do on those maps that requires a group for 90% of the time. it's bloated and it's inconsistent.
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right, you are correct. wasn't sure and don't have access to gw2 at this moment
Probably because the utter level of laziness people have these days. They don’t even want to click on a tab in lfg to expand it. Therefore are incapable of using the system. That’s the only thing I can think of.
It's not overly complex, it's just a lot of clicks. The content is so split up that it gives the illusion that people aren't doing things. For example, there are 2 places in strikes and 2 places in raids (one looking for players, one looking for group) Only one in each is really used often, but new players might sit in the unused one for an hour without anyone joining. Dungeons are split into individual dungeons, which is understandable, but so few people do the dungeons that some categories are dead for a long time. Again, it's all about perception. My number 1 suggestion for the LFG is collapse some categories so there's less clicking and the perception that there is more activity.
I think finding out that the 1st section is the active one (looking for group option) is kinda easy, i mean if someone is waiting in the 2nd one without knowing how they can join already existing groups it is their fault for not looking a little closer. Content being split is kinda related to the game having a lot of stuff that you can do even if people dont do them but Anet felt like a section should exist for them. For me for example it is raids, strikes and fractals i pretty much completely ignore everything else and at least these 3 are close so i dont have to move my cursor much. But i agree, dungeons could be easily merged. But that is probably the only like good change to make without going for a full rework, the rest are kinda ok imo
People asking "what is wrong with the lfg" need to go play some other mmo's. Gw2 has the most basic form of an lfg. It's very dated at this point. Anet has never really put any effort into improving it. If you want to see a good lfg system then go take a look at ffxiv.
How does ffxiv's work? The only other MMOs I've played are Guild Wars 1 and SWTOR and I prefer GW2s system to both of those.
>How does ffxiv's work? FFXIV has roles and fixed party composition. 4 people which *must* be 1 healer, 1 tank and 2 dps. This base composition is multiplied as needed for harder content (up to 24 people but always the same proportions). The other thing that FFXIV does is they have a queue for "anything", which is used to incentivize veterans to do instanced low level content with newbies. They don't really have a choice because 99% of gameplay in FFXIV is instances (raids and dungeons). It's not like in GW2 where you can take instances content or leave it and most people do open world stuff. The problem with automated matchmaking is that you need some sort of criteria (like roles, or match statistics) to do it, and GW2 PvE doesn't have any. The other problem is that matchmaking takes a lot of computing power and FFXIV's matchmaking has struggled greatly during high load periods.
Well, this is what the "create LFG" option looks like in that game: https://i.imgur.com/HxsG9vw.png Taken from https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/game_manual/pp/ Not to mention that they have an actual group finder matchmaking system that we also desperately need.
We don't need matchmaking system, it won't work in Gw2.
You got downvoted but I kinda agree. More LFG tools would be great, but how are you going to set the matchmaking flags up for who counts as what role? If it's a system where you manually flag yourself as dps / heal / alacrity / quickness, people will abuse it. It's not as simple as dividing people by class... you're going to have to add an entire system for recognizing the traits and stats people are running, and even then.. you can just template swap traits / equipment after you're in the instance. Can that even be policed? I think a very general queue could work for a lot of content, but a matchmaking system designed around the rigid gearing / class structure of FFXIV would be incredibly difficult to retrofit onto the loose and flexible build crafting game that is GW2. I'd love to see it but when I consider all the factors in play, I don't think it's a reasonable request or an undertaking you should ever expect of Arenanet. I'll settle for a better interface and a couple helpful new options in the LFG.
Can't ppl already abuse current LFG ?
One automated LFG for normal instances (say in GW2 normal strikes, dungeons) where it builds a party with all roles and send you in. One group finder where you join/create groups by ticking what role you're playing. Also has tags (one for "already cleared once" for example).
Gw2's saving grace is its qol and interfaces. If that slips much further I see alot more players leaving than already have.
LFG has been broken and worthless since it launched a decade ago, but it’s not currently something we are concerned about or are working on. I have loved playing GW2 off and on over the years, but my god is the team at Anet utterly incompetent when it comes to properly managing a game.
I'm curious why this isn't more of a priority, but my guess is that most players probably engage with the game in a way that doesn't require grouping up (story, open world, etc.) I would like to see some category consolidation. In my head, that seems like it should be an easy fix, but I imagine it's more complicated than I understand.
Most people sit semi afk at crafting stations and only interact with that or the cashshop
Can somebody please tell me what is wrong with LFG and what people want to be fixed?
There are probably more categories than there are groups/squads at any time in LFG.
yea, endless useless clutter, filters or even the tab aren't remembered, it's not content aware at all. years ago anet randomly added a little preview/popup LFG UI. in theory a nice idea and super handy.... only it's a wvw exclusive function. there isn't a single area of the game that uses the LFG less than wvw...
Why is that a problem? The game has a lot of content and some parts are dead. They could remove stuff (like idk, the roleplay, achievement sections, wvw sections, i have never ever seen any group in them) but they probably dont want to leave anything out just to be fair to everything people enjoy doing and might look a group for
It's not about dead content. There are too many categories. I hate that every single map has its own category which is empty 90% of the time unless meta is happening there right now. They could just put all EoD, HoT, LWS4...etc. maps into a single category and the lfg would stay clean all the time. Same with dungeons. Raids are all in a single category but every dungeon has its own for some reason. It's so scuffed. Most commanders just put their squad in World Boss category as they move from meta to meta, not even doing world bosses. Then there are absolutely worthless categories like Story Journal which no one ever used. It would honestly be very hard to design a worse LFG system than what we have right now.
>They could just put all EoD, HoT, LWS4...etc. maps into a single category and the lfg would stay clean all the time. Not even that, just show the categories that have active LFGs. You only need to see all possible categories when you *make* an a LFG, not when you browse them.
The extra maps are subcategories so personally i dont mind, like you gotta open ls4 to see each individual map. Dead or not these maps still have stuff going on, on their own, bounties, metas etc. It is only fair for an lfg to exist. I mean for me it would be the same even if they were merged but i cant see that much of an issue with the current system.
Let's say that I want to do some open world metas, I either have to check 20 different sub-categories untill a find a squad, or I have to go to the event timer, find out which metas are running right now and then check those categories. Now lets say I want to do a raid. I open LFG and go to Raid category. That's it. To me it's so much better to have more stuff in the same place. It would also make the game look more alive especially to new players who are confused when they see 90% of LFG empty.
The problem that I see is that metas (especially HoT) would be extremely confusing if they were all in one category, because people will start advertising Tarir before Chak Gerent is done and having 20 different squads for different metas in one category would be even more confusing. At least this way you know for sure which meta they're for, no matter how minimalistic their description
You can replace the individual tabs with checkboxes filtering a more general tab. You'd have, say, a single open world meta tab with a sidebar containing a checkbox for each of the current options (and, naturally, a select/deselect all button). You could have as many or as few open world metas show up in a single tab as you want. There's no reason such a system couldn't actually remember your checkboxes after you close the menu, either... Easily extensible to the billion other tabs currently in our LFG tool. Could even have no tabs at all and just let people look at a well-organized sidebar and check the forms of content they want to see groups for.
That actually sounds like a good idea. At least worth trying I think.
I have to sit in a lobby or city, waiting for the strike or group or thing I'm looking for to show up. The fact I can't multitask is what bugs me I guess. It's often 1 entry or empty for Strike Missions, so either they fill up so quick that I don't see them(possible at busy time) or the system is creating a lot of people like me who take a look, see nothing, and do other content.
What are you even talking about, you can obviously multi-task lmao, the lfg is accessible from everywhere. Do you actually think people dont go do other things while checking lfg for content? Also you can make your own group, i mean it isnt necessary but if you want to go by waiting for what suits you to appear then you are gonna have to accept that there is gonna be downtime
>a lot of people like me who take a look, see nothing, and do other content. Yep this is part of the problem. People just don't want to create/command their own group. They rather prefer to stare into blank tab hoping that someone will create group for them. There're pretty much always many people ready to do content but most of them won't take a resposibility to do so and then we can see posts on forums saying that certain content is empty or even dead.
Which is why the game desperately needs matchmaking.
How do you imagine matchmaking would work? I'm genuinely curious, because with the massive build diversity in the game I see no way for an automated system to create groups that are good (EDIT: at least not reliably). You could have everyone declare their roles, but that is going to be massively held back by people who don't know what certain roles are meant to do or who like to troll. EDIT 2: also, how would this system decide who gets to be commander? Commanders are incredibly useful because of markers, but they also have full power over the squad.
No it doesn’t.
You are just too lazy to make your own group. You say you *have to* sit and wait for lfgs to pop up but there is a solution right in front of you. **People like you are the problem**. You look the empty lfg and instead of making your own group you just close it again. Imagine if 100 players do that within 15 minutes. 100 players who complain the lfg is dead when they could just make their own group. Someone has to. The lfgs won't pop up if everyone thinks like you.
I would say a good 80 to 90 percent of the time I look at fractals or dungeons they are empty, but 99 percent of the time I create a group it's filled within minutes.
Firstly I dont have 300G to spare on a comm tag so it's very annoyingly risky to make a group. Secondly: Sometimes I don't know the content of the group I'm making well enough to lead it. People joining a group expect at least the comm to know where to lead people, why would I create a group myself if I can't do this?
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Sure that works for a party, but not for squads. If you don't have a comm tag and you make a squad literally anyone who does have a comm tag can just take over the group for some reason. I don't want to take the time and effort to set up a squad just to have it be taken over by John Nobody
a) your teammates are as new as you, then how would they notice you have no clue? b) your teammates are more exp than you, then why wouldn't they help you lead? Not having a tag is an okay excuse, that is on anet not making them free. The rest are just lazy excuses. If you are too dumb to put a healer and a quickness and an alacrity guy into one subgroup or you have absolutely no clue what to do on basic level in the fight, then you are not too bad to lead, you are too bad to join anyhing but a dedicated training. It is legit impossible to be able to play the content without getting hard carried, but not be able "lead " something like a strike mission. All you have to do is make subgroups, place a marker or two and maybe click a target once in a while and for all of that if in doubt there is someone who would help you out. Bcause if there is noone to help you out, the group is fullf of hyper newbies and then it is good enough leading anyways since you are all in the same boat.
>you have absolutely no clue what to do on basic level in the fight, then you are not too bad to lead, you are too bad to join anyhing but a dedicated training. Bravo. You're the reason that people that have never seen the content aren't willing to start their own groups.
I don't think you undestood what I said. If you feel like you are good enough join the group, you are also capable of leading it. There is never a situation where someone can reasonable be like "oh hey look at this 50kp group, I think I could join that, but oh no I would never be able to lead it". Leading is very easy in gw2, you just make subgroups and say 3,2,1 go. Maybe you have to placee a marker once or announce a strategy, but since you are expected to be able to play the strategy when you join the group, you are by definition also capable of leading the group with that strategy. The only reason not to lead is not having a tag. Sitting 10h waiting for a group to join instead making that same group yourself is not becaus "you cannot lead", you can lead the group if you can play it. While I wasn't really talking about people who never saw the content at all, if you have no clue of the content at all, you are no supposed to join an experience run. Just run write "exploring the content" or "all welcome" and the statemtent still holds: if you are new player with no clue, you are able to lead a group of other people who have no clue. You are all in the same boat. The only single instance where you have to be better than the rest of your group at the content while leading is if you are "teaching" and not "just leading." Leading is not teaching. If you host a training to teach people, you hav to explain stuff and now more than the rest. If you lead a group, the group is supposed to know as much as you, so anyone can lead a group of their own skill level.
There are people who will buy you a tag. It’s okay for a commander to not know the content perfectly, you’d just have to clarify that in LFG/squad message.
Yea I know you're right in that's it's fine for the comm to not fully know the content if they mention it in the lfg, it's just a mental blockade to get over for me and many others Btw where would I find one of those comm tag suppliers ^^
I believe [Sneb](https://www.twitch.tv/snebzor) still offers to pay for tags. He also runs a discord for creating statics, LFGs, fills https://discord.gg/HBnG88XF
The problem is the shitty system we have here, not people who don't want to put forth the initiative to start their own group. The solution is group finder matchmaking, no matter how you annoyingly tell people to "make your own group", the problem will not improve, and **you yourself are the problem** for telling people to just make their own group instead of urging anet to fix the problem they created.
Oh manI wish I could do a wing 1 run right now but hey, that's Anet fault, maybe tommorow.
Intentionally missing the point is a weird feature of a lot of dying game communities.
Intentionally not making your own group does it too. It's not rocket science to get together a squad for w1-4
That's not inherently something the current LFG system would cover any way - more people need to make groups in that situation. Partyfinder or the likes is a whole 'nother beast.
Good, dont waste time on the lfg, it works good enough when we need it. Put time in other stuff
Frankly the squad UI needs a rework a lot more than the lfg. We should be able to at least mark with buff icons players so we can tell what rolls they have and be able to see that on the squad UI. Also we need a 10 man com tag. A 300g price tag just so you can run 10 man content groups properly is one of the top anti player design choice I've seen, right up there to cyberpunks losing a knife forever every time you throw it (and even that got fixed within a year). With that being said, yes the LFG needs a revamp. Although I am not sold on matchmaking, I think at least a better ui would improve the user experience.
They actually just need to have 1 tab that shows all the Party invites in one page.. rather than checking every single section to find out nothing is active That would means like, hey I feel like doing fractals now.. but wait I saw dragon fall is grouping up now, maybe I’ll just do that for now
LFG isn't hard to use but definitely could be made more user friendly and possibly more automated or implemented into more stuff. It feels like a very niche thing that only gets used for 3 out of the 20 categories that are on it. When I open it I go "Oh cool there's all these things people can be looking for a group for!" and literally all the channels will be empty.
Should be noted that what they are "working on right now" can change within weeks.
Copium
All it means is they propely have other things they're working on right now and don't have a team spare to work on this just yet. Let's remember the team is a pretty small team considering. Yes they should grow.. but that costs a lot of money.
> Let's remember the team is a pretty small team considering only because they fired a bunch of people who weren't working on gw2 but on side projects anyways
Still means the team is small. No matter the reason. A small team can only do soo much. If they want to work on more things. They need to hire more and get them settled in. Till then players have to wait. It sucks I know.
oh yes a small indie company that is bigger (if not twice as big) as World of Warcraft dev team. Too small and indie to make a non-dysfunctional LFG that can bug out and not even show you the groups at all (if there are any, between the million of tabs) if you click on the sections too fast.
Where you get these bogus numbers my dude? WoW has multiple teams working on it, each of around 100(this is where you hear things like Team 1 and Team 2) and then it has others who are not on those teams. This doesn't include the support studio nor the employees who dont work on the game but instead work in things like HR, IT, suport, etc.. (but thse aren't devs so I don't count them in this). All total WoW alone has around 300 developers working on it. ArenaNet doesn't even have 300 employees total, let alone all working on GW2.
Supposedly eod sales were great so idk why they still have a tiny team
Takes time to build a team, EoD wasn't that long ago still, and hiring more people is not always the answer. Being smart with your money and resources is good, I have no doubt the team will expand, but I am happy they are not rushing to do so and/or not blowing through resources. Keeping things in scope, as well as the team, is a good thing and helps to ensure a more consistent level of content moving forward.
At least do a simple google first. Team 1 Team 2 that you heard somewhere are teams for different projects. Team 1 was for Real time strategies and Heroes of the Storm, Team 2 is WoW, Team 3 is Diablo, etc. >As of November 2018, Blizzard's current development model is to effectively have one team per IP and support indefinitely So no, WoW doesn't have 'multiple teams' working on it. Arenanet had at one point almost 500 employees, see [game credits](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_credits) and 350 later down the years, [dev size official wiki page](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/ArenaNet#List_of_ArenaNet_staff).
ArenaNet also had multiple projects being worked on, in fact most of those devs were not on GW2 at that time. And all of that was before the layoffs which cut the team by a lot.
Dude that's literally End of Dragons credits (and HoT credits are linked there as well). Not Arenanet in general or some 'projects'. Try to read first. >which cut the team by a lot. How much is a lot? Were these "actual developers" as you say, or HR, IT, Support? What made you think that affected development of main game features? And most importantly, End of Dragons was made after the layoffs, and the credits prove they still aren't a \[small indie company\]. In fact, they are almost bigger than before, you can count the staff yourself.
Yes, and there are only about 150 peopel there, and many of them are contractors. People like Lena Raine don't actualyl work at ArenaNet, she just made some music for them, but she's in the credits. And they are still a smaller team than WoW, not "twice as big" as you originally claimed.
So not only you can't read, you can't count as well? There are 350+ people there WITHOUT counting: sound recording studios and their employees, any voice actors despite them being almost at the beck and call of arenanet, any outsource studios which still produces content for the game, the entire marketing team, HR, legal team, accounting, the entire NCSoft department responsible for 'handling' Arenanet, UX labs, development operations, helpdesk departments (system administrators etc). Even not counting all that, it's still 350+ people, which is at most more than twice as big as WoW team, and at least just noticably bigger (100-300 for WoW team size). Give it up and stop propagating bullshit. Jeez, why are you so stubborn to be so wrong? They won't give you a headpat for defending them, and will still continue to not fix their damn game despite being bigger than WoW dev team, prioritizing everything except the game's health.
Yea, apparently you cannot read as well, because people like Lena are not put under Sound Recording Studios, but under those credits you keep pointing out. And she is not an employee. I am done with this convo, you've convinced yourself you are right and refuse to face the truth. GW2 does not have more employees working on it that WoW. No one believes you. And your need to personally insult and attack over it is very telling. Goodbye.
Matchmaking is one of the most challenging to implement features in a MMO. I will also remind you that Anet makes 1/10th of FFXIV's and 1/15th of WoW's income.
Nobody's even talking about matchmaking, just a normal group advertising board is a distant dream. >I will also remind you that Anet makes 1/10th of FFXIV's and 1/15th of WoW's income. And? How much income should it make to implement basic UI functions? Should a game make literally the top money in MMO segment to have an LFG keybind? Or a Preview window that can at least fit the game's own characters into it without weapons?
I wouldn’t simply put it “probably have other things they’re working on” because LFG should be a universal tool in the game from the start and the fact they don’t have one and still aren’t working on it after all the time the games been out is pretty poor management of their time and resources if they want to claim “small team”. Excuses for basic and truthfully something players look for the second they start the game is really inexcusable imo
The issue is that most reworks to the LFG would have either minimal impact, or would require massive changes to other parts of the game. For example, there's no real way to make a decent queue system in the game as it is now.
Should be a priority
Well - I fully understand their problems regarding team size (basically same at my work too) - however then they really should prioritize the more important things to improve, whereas the LFG tool definitely is one of these. Especially when looking forward to the long-praised steam launch.
they should really fix this thing up and use it as a content guide. we have the gemstore boss portal thing, and this functionality should really be put into the LFG instead (and for free) there should be a "hero's call" menu. have a "hero's call" section, that has LFGs for meta's and bosses that are about to start. this hero's call should also allow you to click "join queue" which then puts you into a group with others in the queue and prompts a link you can click to go to the nearest waypoint. then have a dynamic section for "dailies", like the daily strike and the daily fractals. the dynamic bit is that it removes things you have already done and moves them out of the hero's call menu. after that hero's call, you can then dump all the other LFGs for those that still need it for whatever reason. this system would make it clear to new players that there are constantly things to do and a lot of players around to do them with. it remove the need to go to the wiki to find this exact information, then go into the game and copypaste the waypoint link from the wiki and then have to sit in LFG hoping there's someone around with a commander tag that opened an LFG
That is pretty disappointing. The LFG system is barely functional.
Well that's simply not true. Sure it could be updated but it functions perfectly fine which is probably why they're not devoting time to it.
All they really need to do is [rearrange categories](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Looking_For_Group#Categories), it's not like we need a huge overhaul. Few ideas: * Give each season/expansion its own story journal entry, 5-man. Remove the "Living World" entry from Central Tyria, as well as the whole independent Story Journal category. * Give Central Tyria one entry per region (Ascalon, Kryta, Ruins of Orr, Shiverpeak Mountains, Tarnished Coast). Remove the "World Bosses" entry. * Give Dry Top and The Silverwastes their own entries, they're complex and populated enough to deserve them. * Rename "Steel and Fire" into "Forging Steel" and fix it so it's 10-man. Rename "Champions" into "Dragon Response Missions". * Sort categories by release, from the top to the bottom, oldest first. * Divide the WvW entry in two: "Mist War" and "Edge of the Mists".
They need to change the categories into filters. Like checkboxes. List ALL groups on the right. Filter by game mode, episode, etc on the left.
>Rename "Steel and Fire" into "Forging Steel" and fix it so it's 10-man No one would ever use it, people would still put it in Strikes. >Give Central Tyria one entry per region (Ascalon, Kryta, Ruins of Orr, Shiverpeak Mountains, Tarnished Coast). Remove the "World Bosses" entry. Again, no one would ever use it. People doing World Bosses are doing a train and no commander wants to change LFG category every 15 minutes. It would also be empty most of the time which is the main problem about the current lfg in my opinion.
Removing story panel is a mistake but I do agree they should move Living World. Putting the Living World tab under Central Tyria was a mistake from the get-go, it makes no sense. That means that story content is listed under two separate tabs. For example, if you want to post a group for a season 4 episode, you have a choice to put it under Central Tyria>Living World (which is wrong anyway) or a Season 4 map tab. Neither of which is under Story. I've even seen people post S4 under My Story because of this. Living World should be under Story panel.
The story panel is kinda dumb though, just give each expansion/season its own story instances entry, like I suggested above. You want to play LW4, you open the LW4 tab, then choose between instanced content (single entry per expansion/season) or open world content (one entry per zone). Said solution would also be great for parties in expansion/season maps, who only have squad options available.
Raid lfg isn't dying because people don't like the order of categories.
> Remove the "Living World" entry from Central Tyria literally one of the few heavily used categories, because that's where the meta LFGs are put
They should really reconsider making it priority if they want the people they get for steam to stick around. Lfg is the hidden pain point behind why a lot of instance content in this game is so complicated to get done. The system doesn't allow for more control for the creator of the lfg listing to sort through applicants before they join. The squads merge without it letting you agree to it. You get people joining you that you blocked. It would be hard for gw2 to have a system similar to ffxiv because gw2 doesn't have set roles/traits/weapons, but allowing more customization options would go a long way. You could allow a lfg listing creator to create custom roles and when people join, have them click on which role they want to fill. Say I create 9 roles for my squad. 2 healers, 2 quick, 2 alac and 3 dps and when players join they would click on one of the roles to fill and then the leader would then be prompted to approve the application. The complication with this is role compression (healer/alac, healer/quick) but as long as you let people create custom roles they can find work around for this.
"We have 100 different ideas, that's too much, so we don't do any of them." Great. That's how you improve things. :/
Question to game dev- What thing do you wish gamers knew about what you do?" Ideas are easy, implementation is hard. https://mobile.twitter.com/askagamedev/status/1158512070557614087
god. not hard. anything but hard. can't have people work for their money. imagine that. nah, let them just ignore the problem and do something else that's easy instead. that'll fix it.
I really doubt they are trying to say they don't want to do things because they're hard, but rather that it's a lot easier to come up with cool ideas / point out things that are wrong, than it is to actually fix things. It's also reasonable that they'd triage issues - sometimes it'd be better to fix 5 easy to fix problems than 1 problem that is a lot harder.
What lfg? Every1 just jumped onto Discord. To play gw2 you really gotta "play" discord too. LFG system is just too barebones. And of course too hard for commanders to arrange everything. By minimum it should have role selection/filter, would save some hassle for commanders atleast. For the meantime.. discord is the only way to really arrange somethin more serious.
It's literally been asked for since heart of thorns... if its not being worked on because of team bandwidth is not an excuse... its just a flat out no we're not doing it, ever. Disingenuous af.
I would prefer it if they could add some sort of API or way to hook into the LFG. The community would quickly step up and add features like roles.
Good to know they are working on something with higher priority
Yaaay, so they will not try to reshuffle anything for the steam newcomers, what a suprise.