Rathmine wrote: »

One of the most crucial features of an MMORPG is the ability to group with other players and do things together. In ESO, one of those things is running amok in dungeons. It’s fun getting four random strangers together and wreaking havoc. Unfortunately, the tool we have to achieve this end, the Dungeon Finder, is hopelessly broken and it’s ruining the game for many.

The problems with the Dungeon Finder (DF) are many and manifold, and stretch back all the way to release, as far as I understand it. There have been several attempts to fix it, none of which have ameliorated every issue; on the contrary, some of the claimed fixes have only made things worse. Like a chronic illness, the problems are sucking the life out of things and creating a perturbed, persistent state of helplessness through unyielding malfeasance.

From the get-go, the experience using the DF tool is bizarre and irritating. When one goes to their Group & Activity Finder, clicks on the DF, and selects “Join Queue,” oftentimes nothing happens. It actually requires a person to click on this button several times before it works. Two times, three times, a fourth? The actual number changes every time, but is almost never just one. Why can’t it work immediately like all the other buttons in the game?

After that, we are ostensibly put into a queue for an indeterminate amount of time. How long will it take? How many people are in front of me? Nobody knows. There appears to be no logic built into the code to display the estimated time to group in a meaningful sense. I do recall some such predictions in past incarnations of the DF, but those appear to have been removed—and rightly so, since they were almost always hilariously inaccurate. Getting a solid readout here would be great. If it’s going to be three hours, plus another 30-60 minutes to run the dungeon… I have other things to do, probably.

The wait can be short or long, and this is only sometimes related to your role. Back in the day, I would let my DPS sit in the queue for anywhere between 8-13 hours to no avail—essentially let the computer run while doing other things around the house, going to the grocery store, calling relatives, etc., checking occasionally to see if I was in a group. (Spoiler alert: I wasn’t. I really did let it sit for 13 hours one day and have screen-shots to prove it.) This inspired me to level up my healer, in hopes I could get into a group sometime this century. Although it has helped, certainly for random normals, I can still sit in the queue as a healer for longer than two hours sometimes if I try to queue for specific dungeons (such as those that are tasked for pledges, which admittedly only grant a key for yet another prosperous/training shoulder piece, so why bother). I don’t think anyone should have to wait for longer than ten minutes, to be perfectly frank. Some may start frothing at the mouth to hear me say that, but that is because they have been beat-down and conditioned by this system that is rotten to the core. Ten minutes to get a group.

If there are too many DPS clogging the queue, making the ten-minute mark impossible right now, then let regular dungeons be five- or six-person instances with more than the usual two DPS, and tune the monsters to match. This would help the current situation immensely, the one in which we find ourselves at the mercy of both a lack of foresight and acceptance from the developers about how many people actually want to tank or heal, versus just straight-up kill stuff. It takes a special kind of person to want to do non-DPS things; the 1-1-2 role setup sort of acknowledges that but didn’t go far enough, and we’re in denial about it. Accept it. There are far more DPS actively playing the game than there ever will be tanks and healers combined. Everybody knows it but the DF doesn’t reflect this state of affairs because we want everybody to fit into a paradigm that perhaps worked at one point, but now does not. As the number of people playing ESO increases, that balance will only get more out of skew—there isn’t going to be a massive influx of people itching to be a tank/healer when the new paywall’d content is unleashed next month. I don’t see the Warden class changing people’s personality types or interests, either.

At any rate, alright, pretend you actually do make it into that glorious state of forming a group through the tool. Nice! Hope you weren’t on the toilet during those hours you waited, because you officially have 40 seconds to press a key to indicate your readiness. Sadly, even that mechanism is messed up; a sound plays (some play with the sound off for various reasons, so useless to them) and sometimes that message pops up. Other times, it appears in your notifications window, represented on your screen by a tiny little icon that most people ignore when they’re, for example, grinding mobs for sharpened weapons that never drop, clicking through pages upon pages of cut-and-paste NPC dialog from the cut-and-paste quests in every zone, refining stacks of raw materials to find not a single precious gold tannin, and the like. Or my personal favorite: If you’re not in mouse-look mode. The game cannot seem to handle it when your mouse is moving around the screen instead of controlling the camera, and will hide the confirmation dialog until you pop it back into mouse-look. The game will just scoot that all-important keypress nag behind the tiny icon, which you will miss and you will be unqueued for at least the next 15 minutes.

But okay, ignore that! You were lucky and the message popped up in a place where you could actually read it, you weren’t at the fridge refilling your water bottle and you pressed the key. Now you are sent to a dungeon with three other people who are level 14, one of which has listed their role as tank/healer/DPS, and none of whom are eating/drinking anything to boost their stats/regen. They cry when they get one-shot despite them having only 13K HP. Also, they spam light attacks with their bow the whole time, while the tank “holds aggro” with Brawler. Meanwhile, how is the CP600+ healer supposed to either 1) Not take a beating because their Radiant Aura aggros the entire dungeon and the only bright idea the level 14 tank has is sometimes weaving an Uppercut in between those Brawlers as a “taunt” or 2) I dunno, I guess, trade equipment with everybody else, provided they were able to complete the dungeon under those dire circumstances—we don’t really have a use for level 14 gear, after, say, level 18 or thereabouts. Grouping people of similar CP level seems like it wouldn’t be that hard of a thing to add to the DF in order to make completing dungeons with strangers a good experience “culturally” (i.e. those who have made it to a certain threshold because they developed similar playing habits and attitudes that carried them there—their culture) and useful as far as the drops are concerned (folks can freely exchange quality goods without having to eye the level requirements).

Of course, you didn’t actually get to run the dungeon because as soon as the group formed and everybody beamed into it, the DF suddenly thinks the fun is over and kicks everybody back out again. So now somebody has to remember which dungeon you were in, manually find it somewhere on a map, and burn 146 GP to teleport to it directly (or 1,101 GP if you recently teleported, totally reasonable). That person is always me, but by the time I’ve done all that and ported back in, my team has quit the group and I’m stuck with another 15-minute cool-down timer. Sometimes it’s actually longer than 15 minutes, by the way! I and others have gotten hit by a wayward 50-minute timer and it’s hell on earth to have to sit there, all because the game couldn’t handle the arduous task of teleporting four people into a dungeon without having an Existential meltdown. Amusingly, I’ve had it happen that three out of four people will stay in such a circumstance, but queuing for another player almost always leads to wait times that stretch into infinity, even if they were DPS. It’s like our group doesn’t exist, continually haunted by a menacing phantom of murdered expectations.

Pretend the group does exist, though: You have made it—you’re in a dungeon! You are running the dungeon. It is what you have always wanted to do with your free time, the extreme wait notwithstanding. Fantastic. Whoops, somebody got booted off suddenly. Never mind, of course the group leader will requeue for a replacement player. They did requeue, right? No? Yes? Does that person speak the same language as me? Oh, they did select the option to requeue but nothing happened? Funny… well, not really. Expected, more like. The game prompts you to requeue but in true DF fashion, nothing happens. You sometimes have to leave and quit several times, with several different group members, to obtain that coveted queued status again. Other times, the option is just grayed out and subject to the infamous 15-minute cool-down timer—while you’re in the dungeon! This needs to get streamlined somehow so that it works without having to bounce the leader role around or leave/join multiple times. It’s bad enough somebody had to leave in the middle of a dungeon (probably their boss/SO/pet/child/father/swimcoach/scoutmaster hollered, “Hey, you’ve been playing for four hours, enough already!” “But ma, I’ve only been playing for like ten minutes...”), but don’t make those left behind pay the price again.

Somehow though, you get it to work and the DF actually does give you another group member. In an unending path toward misery and pain, even that new person can’t enter your dungeon—they will tell you they are getting an “instance is full” message. Huh? How can that even be possible? After a five-minute wait, this bug will vanish of its own accord and the new player will be able to teleport into the dungeon by selecting a group member from their grouping tool, right-clicking on them and selecting the teleport to player option. More likely, they’ve quit. One would imagine it would take a junior developer a half-hour of scattered code to fix even a low-hanging piece of fruit like this, but perhaps they are already engaged trying to track down that hilarious bug where you can sprint on top of your mount’s saddle. Junior dev, if you’re reading this: Leave that one in the game! It’s much-needed comic relief.

If your three-person group hasn’t followed suit and quit by now, you bravely try to face the denizens in a one-down position and, finally, make it through. The DPS have decided to spam Snipe instead of merely light-attacking, so praise the Eight, there is a flicker of brain activity. You kill the boss… and then, nothing happens. Well, it dies. But because y’all ported in from the outside world, DF sometimes doesn’t think you were engaged in the “Activity” of running a dungeon, so you received neither the random dungeon bonus XP nor the precious bounty (almost always a training Lightning staff of Endurance and a piece of cassiterite, plus one soul gem). It’s a classic bait-and-switch where you thought you were getting this one thing (fun dungeon times with loot), only when you pressed the lever and hoped for the magical tidbit to come out of that great, big Skinner box that is ESO, you got… absolutely nothing. Well, 3K XP for defeating the boss. You can’t even beg that level-14 DPS for their level-14 Knife of Shadows because they quit and aren’t responding to tells, while the level-14 tank/healer/DPS is now /e dance-ing on your dead body—you died during the last fight because they kept drawing the wide-angle disintegration beam the boss shoots directly over your toon instead of away from the group. That Brawler bubble is strong! For them. But who can fault them—they can’t unlock their execute until level 20. Good luck on the roll dodge tactics, though.

You leave the dungeon (manually, since you basically got there manually this time) and are prompted to join a group almost immediately. Yes, the DF still thinks you’re queued and the little prompt to announce your readiness to join a group has actually been popping up in the background all while you were doing that run. You tried variously to accept or decline those pop-ups, but thankfully in true DF fashion, neither of them actually did anything except get the message to go away for a few minutes. Still, it was quite the annoyance while trying to get into the “mood” or relish that “compelling atmosphere” of the dungeon, having to constantly press the “F” key to join a group while you were already in one. But now that you’re out of a dungeon… you press it and are instantly joined up with a group. Huzzah, no wait at all for that one! Surely the DF is working properly now. Only, it boots you out of the dungeon again. Also, your group consists of you and three DPS. Not a single tank. I mean, the DPS didn’t even have the courtesy of selecting double or triple roles like they usually do this time—bad DPS, bad! They will tell you they know they’re doing it, by the way, if you ask them why they select tank/healer plus DPS: They just wanted to group. I get that and let it slide until the first wipe, then it’s #Ragequit.

When I ask zone chat, “Is the DF broken again?” the universal response is, “Was it ever working?” Touché. Several well-intentioned persons will undoubtedly tell me to do one or more of the following: 1) Roll a healer (already have, plus a tank, but these issues extend far beyond that) 2) Join a guild (I am in five and get a kick out of NOT having to group with them... for free (admittedly sub-par) loot and XP) 3) Spam zone chat with group requests (You can… but even that is iffy: you might very well find one or two people to group with, but using DF to fill the other roles, once again, is not promised to work. Some have even tested this, with potential group mates standing right next to them who swore they were queued, but not matched with the extant group.)

How about the DF just worked so we didn’t have to work around it? When the next big patch hits, the one with the new class and content locked behind a paywall, I will download it, install it, and play the game. If the DF still has these issues, I will know for certain where the developers’ priorities lay and subsequently delete all trace of ESO from my computer until it’s fixed. It may well be my final day in the game. I will leave behind eight characters (that’s the max, until you pay) with full inventories (that’s the max, until you pay), 667 CPs, a 9-trait crafter, golded-out end-game gear sets, minus the money I invested in the base game plus four expansions, and hundreds of days /played time. Why? Something as simple as a grouping tool for an MMORPG shouldn’t be such a low priority. It should just work, otherwise it’s merely an RPG to me. My shelf is already lined with great RPGs, some played, others untouched, and we wonder why we stand on a patch of brown lawn surrounded by sand dunes with such an oasis nearby...

Broken DF will be my red-text “Goodbye.” from the quest of ESO; you can keep your Prosperous Glacial Staff of Nomeg Haga and 120 GP. The extreme hassle of using it is not worth the rewards anymore. Running dungeons became the one thing left that I liked about this game, but it has gotten so bad that I just can’t take it anymore—there are better games out there, online or otherwise, and the hour has come when we must set aside the fancy costumes and interior decorator compulsions, to effect meaningful change on something that has been broken far too long.

CaptainBeerDude wrote: »

Rathmine wrote: »

If your three-person group hasn’t followed suit and quit by now, you bravely try to face the denizens in a one-down position and, finally, make it through. The DPS have decided to spam Snipe instead of merely light-attacking, so praise the Eight, there is a flicker of brain activity. You kill the boss… and then, nothing happens. Well, it dies. But because y’all ported in from the outside world, DF sometimes doesn’t think you were engaged in the “Activity” of running a dungeon, so you received neither the random dungeon bonus XP nor the precious bounty (almost always a training Lightning staff of Endurance and a piece of cassiterite, plus one soul gem). It’s a classic bait-and-switch where you thought you were getting this one thing (fun dungeon times with loot), only when you pressed the lever and hoped for the magical tidbit to come out of that great, big Skinner box that is ESO, you got… absolutely nothing. Well, 3K XP for defeating the boss. You can’t even beg that level-14 DPS for their level-14 Knife of Shadows because they quit and aren’t responding to tells, while the level-14 tank/healer/DPS is now /e dance-ing on your dead body—you died during the last fight because they kept drawing the wide-angle disintegration beam the boss shoots directly over your toon instead of away from the group. That Brawler bubble is strong! For them. But who can fault them—they can’t unlock their execute until level 20. Good luck on the roll dodge tactics, though.

TL:DR
I stopped reading when you said you get level 14 gear to trade with your DF group, when you are cp 600 When did you last play?

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

So your issues with the DF aren't really issues.

There will always be exponetially more DD players than Tanks and Healers. You want that change stop being *** to tanks an healers when you die from standing in big red dumb on the ground, or trying to pull aggro from the tank.

No MMO is going to give you a queue and breakdown of what and who is in the queue. You join a queue and it says there are 5000 DD ahead of you are you going to stay in the queue? Nope you're going to leave.

It can't give you an estimated time cause it doesn't know. If people that are just farming dungeons keep requeuing (tanks and healers mostly) and they are quick then the wait won't be long, if people are just running the daily then that's it then you are going to be waiting longer.

The button works fine essentially. The only time it takes me multiple times to push is when I first load into a zone or the game. This is because the game is still loading the rest of the zone or all my add ons. So stop being so impatient wait a minute. Once the zone/area loads in and addons (if youre PC) then the button works just fine.

Frankly these were the only topics you wrote about that I saw and read...after this point I just stopped cause the rest of it was probably just whining anyway.

The only thing I've noticed that is really broken with DF is if somebody leaves you have maybe a 10% chance of it ever finding a replacement. I've had people join the queue to test as the role we are looking for and it never joined them.

CaptainBeerDude wrote: »

@Rathmine my bad. It was late and I thought I read what I thought I read.

It may have helped to bring some cheese to go with all that whine though.
It's a normal dungeon. Be a man, pick up your resto staff, gird your dress and queue as a healer and a dps. Using stam? Grab a S+B and queue as tank and dps. I can just run off heals on my damage bar for most of a normal dungeon (switch to resto at bosses).
I find that you get more control over passing or failing these if you can fill multiple roles. Or just keep doing what you're doing, Champ. It doesn't really bother me.

zaria wrote: »

Finding replacements in dungeons tend to work, downside is that if you do an pledge and end up just helping on last boss you will not get it, if queued solo you should get pledge even if on last boss,

psxfloh wrote: »

zaria wrote: »

Finding replacements in dungeons tend to work, downside is that if you do an pledge and end up just helping on last boss you will not get it, if queued solo you should get pledge even if on last boss,

..but if you help to do the last boss on HM, you can do the other bosses for the pledge on 'normal' and you'll get 2 keys!

Osteos wrote: »

psxfloh wrote: »

zaria wrote: »

Finding replacements in dungeons tend to work, downside is that if you do an pledge and end up just helping on last boss you will not get it, if queued solo you should get pledge even if on last boss,

..but if you help to do the last boss on HM, you can do the other bosses for the pledge on 'normal' and you'll get 2 keys!

OH NOES!

actually who cares

psxfloh wrote: »

Osteos wrote: »

psxfloh wrote: »

zaria wrote: »

Finding replacements in dungeons tend to work, downside is that if you do an pledge and end up just helping on last boss you will not get it, if queued solo you should get pledge even if on last boss,

..but if you help to do the last boss on HM, you can do the other bosses for the pledge on 'normal' and you'll get 2 keys!

OH NOES!

actually who cares

oh.. looks likes someone wants to get some attention - well, here you are! Are you happy now?

CaptainBeerDude wrote: »

TL:DR
I stopped reading when you said you get level 14 gear to trade with your DF group, when you are cp 600 When did you last play?

Rathmine wrote: »

One of the most crucial features of an MMORPG is the ability to group with other players and do things together. In ESO, one of those things is running amok in dungeons. It’s fun getting four random strangers together and wreaking havoc. Unfortunately, the tool we have to achieve this end, the Dungeon Finder, is hopelessly broken and it’s ruining the game for many.

The problems with the Dungeon Finder (DF) are many and manifold, and stretch back all the way to release, as far as I understand it. There have been several attempts to fix it, none of which have ameliorated every issue; on the contrary, some of the claimed fixes have only made things worse. Like a chronic illness, the problems are sucking the life out of things and creating a perturbed, persistent state of helplessness through unyielding malfeasance.

From the get-go, the experience using the DF tool is bizarre and irritating. When one goes to their Group & Activity Finder, clicks on the DF, and selects “Join Queue,” oftentimes nothing happens. It actually requires a person to click on this button several times before it works. Two times, three times, a fourth? The actual number changes every time, but is almost never just one. Why can’t it work immediately like all the other buttons in the game?

After that, we are ostensibly put into a queue for an indeterminate amount of time. How long will it take? How many people are in front of me? Nobody knows. There appears to be no logic built into the code to display the estimated time to group in a meaningful sense. I do recall some such predictions in past incarnations of the DF, but those appear to have been removed—and rightly so, since they were almost always hilariously inaccurate. Getting a solid readout here would be great. If it’s going to be three hours, plus another 30-60 minutes to run the dungeon… I have other things to do, probably.

The wait can be short or long, and this is only sometimes related to your role. Back in the day, I would let my DPS sit in the queue for anywhere between 8-13 hours to no avail—essentially let the computer run while doing other things around the house, going to the grocery store, calling relatives, etc., checking occasionally to see if I was in a group. (Spoiler alert: I wasn’t. I really did let it sit for 13 hours one day and have screen-shots to prove it.) This inspired me to level up my healer, in hopes I could get into a group sometime this century. Although it has helped, certainly for random normals, I can still sit in the queue as a healer for longer than two hours sometimes if I try to queue for specific dungeons (such as those that are tasked for pledges, which admittedly only grant a key for yet another prosperous/training shoulder piece, so why bother). I don’t think anyone should have to wait for longer than ten minutes, to be perfectly frank. Some may start frothing at the mouth to hear me say that, but that is because they have been beat-down and conditioned by this system that is rotten to the core. Ten minutes to get a group.

If there are too many DPS clogging the queue, making the ten-minute mark impossible right now, then let regular dungeons be five- or six-person instances with more than the usual two DPS, and tune the monsters to match. This would help the current situation immensely, the one in which we find ourselves at the mercy of both a lack of foresight and acceptance from the developers about how many people actually want to tank or heal, versus just straight-up kill stuff. It takes a special kind of person to want to do non-DPS things; the 1-1-2 role setup sort of acknowledges that but didn’t go far enough, and we’re in denial about it. Accept it. There are far more DPS actively playing the game than there ever will be tanks and healers combined. Everybody knows it but the DF doesn’t reflect this state of affairs because we want everybody to fit into a paradigm that perhaps worked at one point, but now does not. As the number of people playing ESO increases, that balance will only get more out of skew—there isn’t going to be a massive influx of people itching to be a tank/healer when the new paywall’d content is unleashed next month. I don’t see the Warden class changing people’s personality types or interests, either.

At any rate, alright, pretend you actually do make it into that glorious state of forming a group through the tool. Nice! Hope you weren’t on the toilet during those hours you waited, because you officially have 40 seconds to press a key to indicate your readiness. Sadly, even that mechanism is messed up; a sound plays (some play with the sound off for various reasons, so useless to them) and sometimes that message pops up. Other times, it appears in your notifications window, represented on your screen by a tiny little icon that most people ignore when they’re, for example, grinding mobs for sharpened weapons that never drop, clicking through pages upon pages of cut-and-paste NPC dialog from the cut-and-paste quests in every zone, refining stacks of raw materials to find not a single precious gold tannin, and the like. Or my personal favorite: If you’re not in mouse-look mode. The game cannot seem to handle it when your mouse is moving around the screen instead of controlling the camera, and will hide the confirmation dialog until you pop it back into mouse-look. The game will just scoot that all-important keypress nag behind the tiny icon, which you will miss and you will be unqueued for at least the next 15 minutes.

But okay, ignore that! You were lucky and the message popped up in a place where you could actually read it, you weren’t at the fridge refilling your water bottle and you pressed the key. Now you are sent to a dungeon with three other people who are level 14, one of which has listed their role as tank/healer/DPS, and none of whom are eating/drinking anything to boost their stats/regen. They cry when they get one-shot despite them having only 13K HP. Also, they spam light attacks with their bow the whole time, while the tank “holds aggro” with Brawler. Meanwhile, how is the CP600+ healer supposed to either 1) Not take a beating because their Radiant Aura aggros the entire dungeon and the only bright idea the level 14 tank has is sometimes weaving an Uppercut in between those Brawlers as a “taunt” or 2) I dunno, I guess, trade equipment with everybody else, provided they were able to complete the dungeon under those dire circumstances—we don’t really have a use for level 14 gear, after, say, level 18 or thereabouts. Grouping people of similar CP level seems like it wouldn’t be that hard of a thing to add to the DF in order to make completing dungeons with strangers a good experience “culturally” (i.e. those who have made it to a certain threshold because they developed similar playing habits and attitudes that carried them there—their culture) and useful as far as the drops are concerned (folks can freely exchange quality goods without having to eye the level requirements).

Of course, you didn’t actually get to run the dungeon because as soon as the group formed and everybody beamed into it, the DF suddenly thinks the fun is over and kicks everybody back out again. So now somebody has to remember which dungeon you were in, manually find it somewhere on a map, and burn 146 GP to teleport to it directly (or 1,101 GP if you recently teleported, totally reasonable). That person is always me, but by the time I’ve done all that and ported back in, my team has quit the group and I’m stuck with another 15-minute cool-down timer. Sometimes it’s actually longer than 15 minutes, by the way! I and others have gotten hit by a wayward 50-minute timer and it’s hell on earth to have to sit there, all because the game couldn’t handle the arduous task of teleporting four people into a dungeon without having an Existential meltdown. Amusingly, I’ve had it happen that three out of four people will stay in such a circumstance, but queuing for another player almost always leads to wait times that stretch into infinity, even if they were DPS. It’s like our group doesn’t exist, continually haunted by a menacing phantom of murdered expectations.

Pretend the group does exist, though: You have made it—you’re in a dungeon! You are running the dungeon. It is what you have always wanted to do with your free time, the extreme wait notwithstanding. Fantastic. Whoops, somebody got booted off suddenly. Never mind, of course the group leader will requeue for a replacement player. They did requeue, right? No? Yes? Does that person speak the same language as me? Oh, they did select the option to requeue but nothing happened? Funny… well, not really. Expected, more like. The game prompts you to requeue but in true DF fashion, nothing happens. You sometimes have to leave and quit several times, with several different group members, to obtain that coveted queued status again. Other times, the option is just grayed out and subject to the infamous 15-minute cool-down timer—while you’re in the dungeon! This needs to get streamlined somehow so that it works without having to bounce the leader role around or leave/join multiple times. It’s bad enough somebody had to leave in the middle of a dungeon (probably their boss/SO/pet/child/father/swimcoach/scoutmaster hollered, “Hey, you’ve been playing for four hours, enough already!” “But ma, I’ve only been playing for like ten minutes...”), but don’t make those left behind pay the price again.

Somehow though, you get it to work and the DF actually does give you another group member. In an unending path toward misery and pain, even that new person can’t enter your dungeon—they will tell you they are getting an “instance is full” message. Huh? How can that even be possible? After a five-minute wait, this bug will vanish of its own accord and the new player will be able to teleport into the dungeon by selecting a group member from their grouping tool, right-clicking on them and selecting the teleport to player option. More likely, they’ve quit. One would imagine it would take a junior developer a half-hour of scattered code to fix even a low-hanging piece of fruit like this, but perhaps they are already engaged trying to track down that hilarious bug where you can sprint on top of your mount’s saddle. Junior dev, if you’re reading this: Leave that one in the game! It’s much-needed comic relief.

If your three-person group hasn’t followed suit and quit by now, you bravely try to face the denizens in a one-down position and, finally, make it through. The DPS have decided to spam Snipe instead of merely light-attacking, so praise the Eight, there is a flicker of brain activity. You kill the boss… and then, nothing happens. Well, it dies. But because y’all ported in from the outside world, DF sometimes doesn’t think you were engaged in the “Activity” of running a dungeon, so you received neither the random dungeon bonus XP nor the precious bounty (almost always a training Lightning staff of Endurance and a piece of cassiterite, plus one soul gem). It’s a classic bait-and-switch where you thought you were getting this one thing (fun dungeon times with loot), only when you pressed the lever and hoped for the magical tidbit to come out of that great, big Skinner box that is ESO, you got… absolutely nothing. Well, 3K XP for defeating the boss. You can’t even beg that level-14 DPS for their level-14 Knife of Shadows because they quit and aren’t responding to tells, while the level-14 tank/healer/DPS is now /e dance-ing on your dead body—you died during the last fight because they kept drawing the wide-angle disintegration beam the boss shoots directly over your toon instead of away from the group. That Brawler bubble is strong! For them. But who can fault them—they can’t unlock their execute until level 20. Good luck on the roll dodge tactics, though.

You leave the dungeon (manually, since you basically got there manually this time) and are prompted to join a group almost immediately. Yes, the DF still thinks you’re queued and the little prompt to announce your readiness to join a group has actually been popping up in the background all while you were doing that run. You tried variously to accept or decline those pop-ups, but thankfully in true DF fashion, neither of them actually did anything except get the message to go away for a few minutes. Still, it was quite the annoyance while trying to get into the “mood” or relish that “compelling atmosphere” of the dungeon, having to constantly press the “F” key to join a group while you were already in one. But now that you’re out of a dungeon… you press it and are instantly joined up with a group. Huzzah, no wait at all for that one! Surely the DF is working properly now. Only, it boots you out of the dungeon again. Also, your group consists of you and three DPS. Not a single tank. I mean, the DPS didn’t even have the courtesy of selecting double or triple roles like they usually do this time—bad DPS, bad! They will tell you they know they’re doing it, by the way, if you ask them why they select tank/healer plus DPS: They just wanted to group. I get that and let it slide until the first wipe, then it’s #Ragequit.

When I ask zone chat, “Is the DF broken again?” the universal response is, “Was it ever working?” Touché. Several well-intentioned persons will undoubtedly tell me to do one or more of the following: 1) Roll a healer (already have, plus a tank, but these issues extend far beyond that) 2) Join a guild (I am in five and get a kick out of NOT having to group with them... for free (admittedly sub-par) loot and XP) 3) Spam zone chat with group requests (You can… but even that is iffy: you might very well find one or two people to group with, but using DF to fill the other roles, once again, is not promised to work. Some have even tested this, with potential group mates standing right next to them who swore they were queued, but not matched with the extant group.)

How about the DF just worked so we didn’t have to work around it? When the next big patch hits, the one with the new class and content locked behind a paywall, I will download it, install it, and play the game. If the DF still has these issues, I will know for certain where the developers’ priorities lay and subsequently delete all trace of ESO from my computer until it’s fixed. It may well be my final day in the game. I will leave behind eight characters (that’s the max, until you pay) with full inventories (that’s the max, until you pay), 667 CPs, a 9-trait crafter, golded-out end-game gear sets, minus the money I invested in the base game plus four expansions, and hundreds of days /played time. Why? Something as simple as a grouping tool for an MMORPG shouldn’t be such a low priority. It should just work, otherwise it’s merely an RPG to me. My shelf is already lined with great RPGs, some played, others untouched, and we wonder why we stand on a patch of brown lawn surrounded by sand dunes with such an oasis nearby...

Broken DF will be my red-text “Goodbye.” from the quest of ESO; you can keep your Prosperous Glacial Staff of Nomeg Haga and 120 GP. The extreme hassle of using it is not worth the rewards anymore. Running dungeons became the one thing left that I liked about this game, but it has gotten so bad that I just can’t take it anymore—there are better games out there, online or otherwise, and the hour has come when we must set aside the fancy costumes and interior decorator compulsions, to effect meaningful change on something that has been broken far too long.

Huyen wrote: »

The part where dps outwages healers and tanks is a known issue in every MMO out there. Problem is mostly that healers and tank usally lack the dps to do solo-content in an acceptable speed. So unless thats changed - not that they are up-top with the dps mind you - the DF will be an issue while being dps.

Magdalina wrote: »

Some of the stuff you're complaining about is legit. "Instance is full" is because you can't have >4 people in a dungeon and after someone leaves they stay in the dungeon for some time before getting kicked out(they did reduce this time mind you) so your new group member would in fact be person #5 inside the dungeon which is not possible. It takes like a minute for it to go away normally, they do need to work some on making it realize former #4 is aready out as sometimes it can take all 5.

The bugs, well, yeah, it's broken and they don't care. Tbh it's kind of a dead horse at this point.

The rest...well Zeni can't fix stupid. What they can do however is add a learning curve within the game and/or a mandatory dungeon tutorial but that's also something they don't care to do. End result is somewhat funny actually, I know plenty of tanks and healers but they don't like queueing on these characters. If they do queue for a random or something, it's on their dps. Hell I have a tank and a healer, I ran quite a few randoms on them and it was...challenging and sometimes fun but it got old pretty fast and now I mostly queue on my dps too. Why? Because as a dps I can carry an incompetent group through most dungeons, and do it fast. I can relatively quickly finish the boss even if all of them die. As a tank/healer, well, only so much you can do if both my dd have 5k dps each. And only so many times you want to spend 2 hours in a dungeon sloooooooooowly finishing the boss with your amazing tanky 4k dps as there's no point even ressing your groupmates since they just keep dying again. Or being unable to finish it whatsoever because group dps is low enough to fail even the minor dps checks like Urata and Ash Titan in vet CoA 2.

doggie wrote: »

You have to wonder what's actually going on at this point, from the job listenings they don't appear to be directly recruiting anyone to fix this problem, and they don't appear to be trying internal either. It's weird you think they would try and fix it, if for nothing else to have experience with this type of systems for future games.

In the broader picture at division level they need these types of programmers for the new Quake game, but that's made in Texas and far away from ZOS. But you would think they could give som heads up if nothing else? Like have a skype chat with the team responsible for this?

I remeber the Quake team gave some pointers to the team behind Anarchy Online back in the day, and they're on the other side of the planet and not part of the same family of companies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0F228Rkhxk&t=1622s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uia9jADhav8