The group finder changes won't change anything - here are some suggestions that might

BlissfulDeluge

we all know the lovely scenario. You queue up for a fungeon, and lucky you, you only need to wait 15 minutes before it pops! "Huh, that's unusual," you think to yourself, but you shrug it off as a lucky day. That is... until you end up in the dungeon.

What you find, is that the would-be tank is rather eager to move ahead. But wait, why is their HP that low? Don't they have a tank set they can put on? Sure, they're queued up as both a DPS and as a tank, but surely they have gear to do both, right?

Wrong.

They even refuse to slot a taunt to keep the boss off of you. They make up excuses like "It's normal, you don't need a tank." or "my dps is so high it will keep the boss off of you either way"

So what do the group finder changes change, except making those capable of doing both roles pick whether to tank or dps or heal or whatever, now, rather than later? That's exactly it. that's the only change accomplished with it so far.

That said, to make the pug experience much easier on players, I have a few suggestions.

Tank health caps. 20k for a normal dungeon, 30k for a vet dungeon. If their maximum health, that is the amount of health they have in total, not their relative health, drops below that, they should be removed from the dungeon, with the queue penalty.

"But me and my friends want to run this together and it's just faster with four DPS".

And that's a fair point, but this is meant to make pugging easier. Hence why I would suggest to make this apply only when you have queued up for a dungeon, and not when you have teleported directly into one. or, alternatively, queueing with a full group could also make the maximum health conditions void.

I believe something similar could also be done by adding caps to max magicka/magicka regen caps on healers (or max stamina/stamina regen caps for the more niche stamina healers).

What are your thoughts on this? Personally I believe it's a healthy compromise to doing group dungeons with strangers, but I want to know your thoughts.

Merlin13KAGL

No offense, but I think it's an ineffective workaround. Proven history is the only thing that won't lie.

If you've successfully tanked/healed/DPS'd XXX dungeons, I'd say you're either crazy lucky, or you know what you're doing.

Whatever code determinations that would be come up with could be circumvented and still won't prove you effective at your role.

What happens, for instance, when a bad ass 30k health tank's food runs out on the end boss?

Give us a method to certify or character voted star rating. After so many successful runs, you're considered qualified.

BS it so many times, you get dequalified.

It comes back down to 'proof,' just as the achievement links were requested way back in the beginning. They gave some indication of capability, at least.

It needs fixed, don't get me wrong, and we're in complete agreement that their proposal does not correct the problem.

VaranisArano

ZOS cant fix the problem, all ZOS can do is make it obvious when someone deliberately queued for a role they don't intend to fill.

That's pretty much what this change does - force people to deliberately choose their role. So its really easy for the group members of the fake tank/healer/DD to say "Dude, play your role" and if they refuse, to kick them if the group desires.

vMaick

I do think we need a sort of rating system. People with a bad rating should only be allowed to play with others with a bad rating, let it decay over time though everyone deserves another chance.

Silver_Strider

There's really no system that can be put in place that couldn't be abused or circumvented without a very strict guildline in place, such as forcing players to adhere to those Class/Role Recommendations that ZOS added awhile back, but that has a lot of drawbacks to it as well, especially in fights that invalidate certain roles from fulfilling its job; pretty much every boss that is immune to taunt being the #1 offender.

A recommendation system can be abused by having a group of friends recommend you for X role only for them to play Y role instead. That's not even mentioning those players that blame others for their own incompetence, like those DPS that run ahead of the Tank, pull everything and die only to blame the Tank/Healer and screw them over with a bad rating.

Nothing, absolutely NOTHING, can be done about the queue system with how liberal ESO is in class/roles. Instead, ZOS needs to look into properly teaching players the intricacies of ESO. The tutorials are jokes at teaching players anything about group roles and what's expected of them in a group setting.

For the Undaunted Tutorial, have a specialied instance for players to fully learn the purpose of X role in a group with detailed explanations about your specific role. Have them explain the differences between SnB and Ice Staff as tank weapons and explicitly say straight up that these weapons are Tank specific weapons. Give them several tiers of practice runs doing X role, increasing in difficulty with each tier and even make it IMPOSSIBLE to queue up until a certain tier is completed (say clear up to tier 3 training out of 10 tiers to qualify as X role for a group.) Sure, people would hate having to do this tutorial every time on a new character but at least the lesson would be drilled into the head of new players to limit their unpreparedness for doing dungeons.

After the basics are established, we get into the actual problem of Fakes. Incorporate a rating system but have it have repercussion if someone is a fake. If you get ~15-20 bad ratings, have that person FORCED to retake the Undaunted Tutorials again. After that, if they continue to fail and get bad ratings, give a temporary ban from X role for an ever expanding period of time (6 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, etc.) that only goes down on that character as long as you are online with that character, none of this switching character to wait out their ban period.

No, this system isn't perfect and has a ton of flaws itself but it's the best I got.

Mystrius_Archaion

How about we just do what City of Heroes did and just make anything good in groups because the groups are balanced, at least on the normal level, to be completed by anyone actually trying without needing dedicated healers and tanks?

If they did that then grouping could actually be done for fun and not a constant butthurtfest as people complain about each other all because they just want the shiny loot at the end that isn't really all that shiny anyway.

FYI, people truly did group content for fun back in City of Heroes. Even the actual difficult strategic 50 person raids like the Hamidon Raid:

The new Hamidon was designed to be Archetype- and Power Set- independent, which means everyone will be able to contribute and there are no specifically desirable builds for a player to have when undergoing an encounter.

Source

Check out all the group buffs in the middle left and the upper right here and the amount of skills we had in the lower right of the video of this Hamidon Raid from City of Heroes: Video: City of Heroes Hamidon Raid
Even with the lag and graphics slowdown we still ran pretty well with a ton of effects and AoE buffs and attacks at insane amounts and still nobody cheated with programs, whether it could have been possible or not.
These developers need to learn from the amazing developers of City of Heroes how to actually make a game perform well and be fun even when performance drops due to "too much fun".

Edit:
Here is the other spectrum of raid type from City of Heroes. Hamidon was more of a single target/few targets raid while the Rikti Warzone Mothership Raid was a fight with much more numbers. They even had Rikti Invasion events in the normal zones that would pull everyone into an epic battle.
Video: Rikti Warzone Mothership Raid
Video: Rikti Invasion
....truly AoE required fights though not required.

CoH you are missed....

Edit 2:
FYI, all those videos and fully customizable UI were without addons. It started uncustomizable and the developers added full customization by default in later, without any UI bugs that I remember ever hearing about.

Integral1900

One problem that no system I’ve heard yet will solve is that being a meta tank is just not appealing to most players, it’s as simple as that. The only way to reliably boost the number of proper tanks in this game is to increase their ability to do what most players seem to want to do, namely to let them do more damage, even in vet. But the pvp brigade will whine about balance again and the whole conversation goes nowhere

Mystrius_Archaion

Integral1900 wrote: »

One problem that no system I’ve heard yet will solve is that being a meta tank is just not appealing to most players, it’s as simple as that. The only way to reliably boost the number of proper tanks in this game is to increase their ability to do what most players seem to want to do, namely to let them do more damage, even in vet. But the pvp brigade will whine about balance again and the whole conversation goes nowhere

Yep, or they could learn from older games like City of Heroes and let tanks bring AoE toggle buffs that make everybody else better at damage and help their own solo damage, or help group survivability instead.
The thing about that game was everybody was able to solo and when they came together in groups they had different AoE buffs that would combine to make everyone a "jack of all trades" AND "master of all" so a tank was both necessary and not necessary as the stacking other buffs would be enough to win also, just in a different way.
You could be a fully balanced group or a full imbalanced group. You could kill fast and win or be completely invincible and win slower or be a balanced mix and kill in the middle time. Every group though wouldn't take forever to win.

The longest fights were probably 15 minutes which is reasonable for a play session before somebody needs to go to the bathroom or something that slows things down. The game had its long content from its beginning also, but that was mostly just long tunnels filled with trash enemies and multiple bosses, not a single boss taking that long. They toned those down in later days.

Maryanne

The solution is more options:

- normal queue ( T/H/2 DD)
- undersized party
- role-free full party

(and this is off topic here, but story mode too).

Revi_Nightfire

Integral1900 wrote: »

One problem that no system I’ve heard yet will solve is that being a meta tank is just not appealing to most players, it’s as simple as that. The only way to reliably boost the number of proper tanks in this game is to increase their ability to do what most players seem to want to do, namely to let them do more damage, even in vet. But the pvp brigade will whine about balance again and the whole conversation goes nowhere

This ^

Arenguros

I don't think minimum requirements are a solution, simply because the game is not built for it.
While Max Health might work for tanks at max level, there is no similar stat to determine a healer. Because from a stat perspective healers are barely distinguishable from mag dps.
The same goes for forcing players to slot mandatory skills (i.e. taunts) - just because players have a skill on their bar doesn't mean they will use it - or have the equipment to do it effectively.

Rating systems are a terrible idea. You can be 100% sure that players would abuse them to their limits. Giving players bad ratings for arbitrary reasons, boosting their own rating with their friends, and so on.
I think the current votekick system gives players already too much power.
Queue with 2 players and you can not be votekicked, whatever you do. Trolls love it.
Queue with 3 players and you can votekick until you get the player you want.

Dedicated queues (queue for < lvl 50, queue for experienced, queue for no-roles) can work to bring likeminded people together, but they also mean longer queues for everyone.

Instead of trying to change the group finder (players will fight it, can have unwanted negative effects), why not change the actual cause of the problem:
The dungeons.

Players queue as fake tank, fake healer, no-dps not because they want to troll other people (well most of them), but because they get away with it. Most normal dungeons can be completed without a full tank or healer and often faster than with dedicated roles. Players take this mentality to vet dungeons and fail. Players learn they can ignore most mechanics - even standing in the red - in leveling dungeons and once they get to dlc dungeons they will die over and over. Suddenly just standing still and pumping out dps isn't enough? Must be the healer's fault. And why does the tank have to constantly move around?

How to fix this?
Normal dungeons need to be hard again.
Not in the sense that you need tons of dps or decent gear - that's what vet is for - but in the sense that you can no longer ignore mechanics.
Charged boss attacks need to be deadly to non-tanks.
Aoe effects need to be deadly to non-tanks or require a healer with stacked healing abilities / shields.
Mechanics should never be skippable with tons of dps - they should always be tied to boss health and make the boss invulnerable or something similar.

Only if players realize they can't just breeze through normals with their fake tanks they will stop doing so and it will payout once they start to tackle content that is actually challenging.

Would rebalancing dungeons be a lot of work? It would, but so would creating a "proving grounds" sort of tutorial - with the difference that it would have a lasting effect on the game instead of offering a one-time content that players might try to cheese though with guides and then forget as soon as they get to easy dungeons again.

aetherial_heavenn

I would suggest completion of version 1s on vet is required before queuing for 2s ie dungeon finder checks character achievements for FG1 vet before you queue for FG 2 vet and that completion of DLC normal on that character in that role before allowing a character to queue for DLC vet. But I suspect that the dungeon finder couldn't cope.

And there remains the problem that the mechanics on even dlc on normal can be bipassed so not sure this would solve the dps check/fake tank/fake heal problems which arise because the gulf between normal and vet is too large.

Most players could agree on a list of VET dlc in order of difficulty. Maybe the dungeon finder could open up vets in that order only. So you can't be queued into vet bloodroot in a random unless you've completed the easier vet ones.

Otherwise a toggle that groups content in difficulty and allows random vet queuers to opt out of the hardest vet could solve the problem of not all vet DLCs being equally difficult. Maybe add a key to the hardest group but that group of dungeons is only available/unlocked when all the others are completed.

None of these suggestions are perfect but Zenimax does need to structure the dungeon finder and the pledge rewards better so a player who has just learned to tank a vet 1 isn't thrown to the wolves in the newest vet DLC. And so those who want a quick vet run with the random rewards attached get the 20 minute run they expect. A storymode option would be cool too.

Then there's the problem that the 'I play as i want because i pay for it' toddlers would hate that zos enforced some minimum requirements for harder content. Dunno how you deal with that attitude.

Mirrrr

Why not just force mechanics in every dungeon. The reason why so many people say normal WGT is harder then ICP when they are new is cause you get forced to learn the mechanics of pinar. Icp after a while is a bit of a dps race and at the end you hardly even reach the point where Lord Warden flies.

But wgt took me 1,5 hrs the first time on vet. ICP 2x4 hrs

witchdoctor

Spit-balling here.

For normal GF dungeons:

Each role gets a 'buff/debuff.' Tank gets an increase in threat, Healers get an increase to HPS (resto, class, passives, et.al., and a decrease to DPS), DPS get an increase to DPS, and reduced resistances.

So, if you queue as a fake tank, well, guess what, you are now face-tanking by default. Queue as a fake healer, your DPS epeen will take a hit. Fake DPS may actually get a boost.

Would probably make normal dungeons even easier, but it may help somewhat.

I agree with others that the PTS change won't do much beyond highlight the faker. If the community wants something more, then it may be tough to balance between complexity, abuse, and accessibility for new players.

kojou

Fake tanks are only 1/3 of the problem. I have also had groups that came with fake damage dealers, and fake healers. Do we penalize healers that don't watch their groups damage and let them die, or damage dealers that can't seem to figure out a way to break 20K group DPS?

Only the DLC dungeons can sometimes need a tank at a normal level, and normal (non-DLC) dungeons can be "tanked" with just about any build as long as you know when to block or shield, which is why you can run them with 4 damage dealers and no taunt.

BTW... You *can* make a tank that does reasonable DPS if you want. Run Vicious Ophidian, Seventh Legion, and your choice of DPS oriented monster set on a Stam DK. Run sword and board on your front and bow on your back bar and slot all the normal DoT's and a taunt. Use your Pierce Armor, or Heroic Slash as your "spammable", but I digress...

IMO I think "Vote to Kick" serves this purpose just fine. If a player is not doing his or her job or is preventing the group from completing it is usually pretty obvious even without this change and you can just kick the player and get another one. Even then with the right amount of coaching you can get inexperienced players through completion as well. Which for normal dungeons completion is the only thing that matters. Its not like there are "speed run" and "no death" achievements for them.

Hixtory

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

No offense, but I think it's an ineffective workaround. Proven history is the only thing that won't lie.

If you've successfully tanked/healed/DPS'd XXX dungeons, I'd say you're either crazy lucky, or you know what you're doing.

Whatever code determinations that would be come up with could be circumvented and still won't prove you effective at your role.

What happens, for instance, when a bad ass 30k health tank's food runs out on the end boss?

Give us a method to certify or character voted star rating. After so many successful runs, you're considered qualified.

BS it so many times, you get dequalified.

It comes back down to 'proof,' just as the achievement links were requested way back in the beginning. They gave some indication of capability, at least.

It needs fixed, don't get me wrong, and we're in complete agreement that their proposal does not correct the problem.

This seems like a very good idea, but what if you join a group and try to teach mechanics, they wont listen, you end up leaving the dungeon. The other 3 will surely give you a poor rating.

But so far this rating seems like the best idea

SlippyCheeze

Hixtory wrote: »

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

No offense, but I think it's an ineffective workaround. Proven history is the only thing that won't lie.

This seems like a very good idea, but what if you join a group and try to teach mechanics, they wont listen, you end up leaving the dungeon. The other 3 will surely give you a poor rating.

But so far this rating seems like the best idea

The problem with being rated by people who are involved in the situation is, as you say, it is easy to game to punish people, etc, so it is hard to trust. Not to mention that things like guilds that carefully reward each other with high ratings... you end up with the eBay situation where everyone is a five star seller with all their reviews being "A+++++ would buy again, was not paid for this review, honest"

I would be very interested to see one of the existing MMR systems applied; each role has well defined responsibilities by ZOS, so there are concrete things to measure there, and by giving credit for things outside core responsibility at a lower rate, you can recognise that, eg, a tank who also delivers 25 percent total DPS without slipping at all on tanking is better than one who just tanks perfectly.

Essentially, by replacing human judgment with machine judgment, you still suffer the problem that "you get what you measure", but you don't suffer the problem that the ratings are generated by people invested in the situation.

The challenge would be defining the metrics appropriately so you don't, eg, reward overhealing, or penalize healers for excellent DPS who take little to no damage, etc.

Hixtory

SlippyCheeze wrote: »

Hixtory wrote: »

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

No offense, but I think it's an ineffective workaround. Proven history is the only thing that won't lie.

This seems like a very good idea, but what if you join a group and try to teach mechanics, they wont listen, you end up leaving the dungeon. The other 3 will surely give you a poor rating.

But so far this rating seems like the best idea

The problem with being rated by people who are involved in the situation is, as you say, it is easy to game to punish people, etc, so it is hard to trust. Not to mention that things like guilds that carefully reward each other with high ratings... you end up with the eBay situation where everyone is a five star seller with all their reviews being "A+++++ would buy again, was not paid for this review, honest"

I would be very interested to see one of the existing MMR systems applied; each role has well defined responsibilities by ZOS, so there are concrete things to measure there, and by giving credit for things outside core responsibility at a lower rate, you can recognise that, eg, a tank who also delivers 25 percent total DPS without slipping at all on tanking is better than one who just tanks perfectly.

Essentially, by replacing human judgment with machine judgment, you still suffer the problem that "you get what you measure", but you don't suffer the problem that the ratings are generated by people invested in the situation.

The challenge would be defining the metrics appropriately so you don't, eg, reward overhealing, or penalize healers for excellent DPS who take little to no damage, etc.

That's another valid pov, why can't I go with my 25k DK with whom I dont have to keep block up 100%, why cant I do DPS with my healer when I see that dps has vigor or use self heals, and there's room for more damage so speeding up things.

As for DPS we all have been there, I used to think Completing COS HM (Before nerf) was what qualified me as a good dps/player, then I met VMOL, then came VHOF etc, which were out of league at that moment but I met wonderfull players who were willing to teach and I was willing to learn.

The standards are very variable, and to be in a group that are able ro reliable do MOL doesnt mean they wont ever wipe. OR for example with the insane amount of one shots, NOT MECHANICS, that have the last 2 dungeons I think evaluation based on metrics are hard to acomplish. I wouldnt say you suck as dps, healer, tank when you are instadead if you miss a ghost (FL) or are instadead by poison (SCP).