frethopper wrote: »

This is pure speculation on my part, but the Group Finder smacks a lot of one of those problem areas where devs are trying to fix with code, what really amounts to a design issue. As a developer, you can tell your management until you are blue in the face that it's over complicated, over engineered tripe, but its amazing how very few managers are willing to entertain such notion. They aren't thinking about the best way to get it working properly (i.e throw it in the bin and start again) they are thinking about how they are going to explain all the wasted man hours that have gone into it.

Ok, so clearly I have no idea what really is the issue with the group finder. But if anything above has the ring of truth about it, then I'd urge ZOS to recognise that sometimes you have to take a step backwards before you can take two steps forward. Bin it and do something that works!!!

From the outside looking in, the group finder looks to be an absolute mess of technical debt. The fact that it breaks every time they change it shows that there are deep design flaws that are not getting the time and attention they deserve.

I remember seeing a post from one of the mods before SotH that they were "refactoring" the group finder backend to be more reliable at scale. That sounded to me like an attempt to pay off that technical debt and I was hoping that the group finder would be in a better place come SotH. Obviously that did not pan out, but there's always the possibility that the group finder problems we're having are actually caused by the grouping bug that's supposed to be fixed come Monday. Just have to wait and see I guess.

In my experience as a software developer, managers that are committed to aggressively paying off technical debt are the rarest of breeds. From what I know about the gaming industry I imagine those managers would be even harder to find or be stymied by the general death-march-culture that defines so many game studios.

DRXHarbinger wrote: »

Group finder generally pops after you travel to another zone imo. It never works just using it and standing still. This is an xb thing btw. I usually queue and then go and go somewhere else and it pops quickly. Even for dps on normal.

I might try that. Mail works that way so it's worth a shot.

xskinzcity wrote: »

The ridiculous thing is there's like 50 people standing around at the enclave but yet no one can form a group on their own.

This has nothing to do with knocking out pledges or forming groups manually.

It has everything to do with wanting a reliable match making tool for the random bonus while being able to do productive activities in the meantime when in queue.

Holycannoli wrote: »

Has this problem even been acknowledged? There are multiple threads in multiple forums discussing it and I haven't seen an official reply yet.

Based on one hot fix specifically labeled as "fixing" the grouping tool, and two recent updates with patch notes saying that they've addressed issues matching and assigning groups using the tool, I think it's fair to say that they are both very aware of the issue, and trying to fix it. It seems equally safe to say that they have no effing idea how to actually fix stuff.

Whatever they did to finally get it working is not compatable with the conversion of vet ranks to CP. the tool is functionally incapable of consistently categorizing players that were previously v16 and are now CP higher than 160.

Group finder worked fine for me today? In fact so fine it only took a few short minutes.

Did they patch the game today while I was at work?

I'm still in disbelief they released a dungeon DLC with broken dungeon finder.