As fake roles, especially tanking comes up again and again over time, I had a few thoughts about it, and have some ideas to share.

1) Group forming
The main problem with the fake tanks and roles, that they actually not the core issue, just a symptom. The core issue is the discrepancy between the required group roles and the role distribution among the players: the grouping system requires 25% of the players being tank, and we have far less tanks than that among the players. Fighting the derived symptom itself proved to be pretty useless without addressing the underlaying issue, and as we cannot just make tanks appear from the thin air, it's might be the time to look at it from the other side: de we need the 1/2/1 group setup?

One of the reason fake roles often justified that you don't need tank/healer for many of the dungeons, just dds with enough tankiness and self heal can blaze through the dungeon. Which in itself not an invalid argument, and can be done easily if everybody agrees. But here lays the main problem with setting a fake role for yourself: everybody agrees. Setting a fake role you forcing it on unsuspecting people, they are expecting a tank/healer and they are not getting one, so you essentially ruining other peoples play.

My thought on this, why not allow people to run groups without tank/healer if they wish, in a group with other people who want the same? It's just needs a new setting page where everyone can set for each dungeon and difficulty (normal/veteran) if they are happy to run the given combination without tank and/or healer. And the dungeon finder after doing the current 1/2/1 groupings like now, would do additional matching rounds of 3/1 setups and 4dd setups for people still in the queue who have declared that they are able to run without tank/healer. This would make everybody more happy, since each 4 such people they can immediately form a group and happily do the dungeon, and removing these people from the queue would considerably shorten it for everybody else who want tank/healer.

So my first suggestion: setting page listing all dungeons and difficulty in a big table with checkboxes in each cell stating if they happy to run that without tank or healer, and additional matching rounds in the dungeon finder for these people to form their groups


2) Fake role flagging
There are always different ideas coming up on the forum how to require tanks/healers to be real tanks/healers, needed skills, setups, etc. I don't think any hard wired condition would work, the real question what we should ask here: do the players do their declared roles or not? It's not just ability, it's doing it. And that only can be decided on your performance. So I'd say that instead of any hard wired condition, we should have a fake role flagging option during votekick. I would not make the flagging itself a vote, the players still vote on the kick, but if the kick passes the kicked person could get 0-3 fake flag depending on how many of the others said s/he is a fake role. The fake flags should be counted for the given dungeon+role combination and for the role overall (if you get kicked from Scalecaller with 3 people flagging you as fake tank, thats +3 for scalecaller_tank and +3 for overall_tank counters) If you have more than 15 flag for a given dungeon+role you cannot queue for that dungeon on that role, and if you have more than 40 flag for the role overall, you cannot queue for that role at all. Note: it intentionally a high number to protect inexperienced new players, but 40 flag is 40 unhappy people with you, and if that many saying you aren't a tank or healer, chances are you indeed isn't. I also would not make the flag counts public information, everyone should see their own but not the others, you should make your own judgement based on their performance not what someone else says.

To prevent abuse and for more protection I would put additional restriction up:
- in correspondence with my earlier suggestion about group forming, only people can flag as fake who want to have the given role in the group (if you are happy to run the given dungeon without tank/healer, you have no rights to complain not getting one)
- no fake flagging before first fight (what are you flagging if they had no chance to perform their role yet)
- no fake flagging after first boss dies + 1 minute (if you had no complaints in the first part of the dungeon just later, that's an inexperienced player with l2p issue not a fake one)

As further helping new players who may occasionally get flagged, when someone successfully clear a dungeon in a role, it should remove 2 fake flags from their dungeon+role and overall role counter, so you can remove your previous flags easily, you just have to do your declared role.

Also to prevent permanent lock out, I would add that once in a month (beginning, end, whenever), all the flag counters above limit are set to limit-1, so in a month time you will get a chance to start clearing out your flags if you want (but if you faking again and get flagged, you will out for the month immediately)

So my second suggestion: fake role flagging option during votekick for each of the voters individually and players not allowed to queue to queue for the given dungeon+role having above 15 flags and for the role at all having above 40 overall role flag, with the mentioned flagging restriction and ability to clear up flags


3) Dungeon restrictions
This one is not about fake roles but another issue with the dungeons and dungeon finder: people queueing for dungeons which they are not prepared/experienced enough. ZOS tried to address this issue with the 300CP limit, but I don't think thats a good enough solution. Not because it's too low or too high, but because it's hard wired and not flexible enough, and does not actually tell anything about the abilities of the given person. My thinking, that it is not possible to tell in advance if the given person has a good chance to do a given dungeon, it can only based on statistics and historical data. It also very easy to collect a statistics of success rates for dungeons (like an example they tried a dungeon 10 times and cleared out 8 of those times) and have some rules based on the success rates. I would introduce two restriction rules here.

a) People only allowed to queue for a given veteran dungeon if they have at least 75% success rate for that dungeon in total, across both normal and vet. How this would work:
- at the beginning you never did this dungeon, 0% success rate, you can only go for normal
- you do normal, get at least 75% success rate, after which you can queue for veteran (1 success of 1 try would give 100% success rate if you do in the first try!)
- as long as you can do at least 3 times from 4 tries in veteran you can just keep doing it in veteran as you are able to maintain the 75% success rate in veteran only
- if you cant maintain 75% success rate on veteran, then you have to go back to normal to improve your success rate above 75% (this is a sign that the given dungeon is to strong for you in veteran)
- if you cannot get to 75% success rate even on normal for a dungeon, you really have no place in veteran difficulty for the given dungeon at all

b) People only allowed to queue for a given dungeon tier on a given difficulty (see later the tiers) when they have at least 75% success rate on the lower tiers on the same difficulty.
- the dungeons should be separated out into 3 tiers: easy, medium, hard: And example easy are the version 1 dungeons (spindle 1, fungal 1, etc), hard are the dlc + imperial city dungeons, medium are everything else. (ie: ZOS/community should collect what easy and hard, all the rest are medium, and later tiers can be readjusted at chapter releases if needed)
- you can only do any hard dungeon if you have 75% success rate for easy and medium dungeons (does not matter which particular ones it's success rate in the tier, an example 10 of 10 easy and 8 of 10 medium would do with 100% easy and 80% medium success rate), and you can do medium if you have 75% success rate on easy tier. no restriction on easy
- normal and veteran are separated: veteran hard depends only on veteran easy and medium only, and veteran easy not depends on any normal you can try them any time

Note: I chose 75% deliberately, as my intention would be that you are able to perform and clear that dungeon reliably on a consistent basis at least 3 times from 4 tries, so your group mates can count on you.

The main point for this rules, that they not just one time check but enforce that you only queue consistently for those dungeons what you reliably can do, while still allowing anyone to try out and see how it goes. It also not a hard wired limit, if you are skilled and able to maintain the success rate you can go for it on low level, while being an unskilled high level character not going to give a free pass either.

So my third suggestion: a maintained success rate for a dungeon to queue for the veteran difficulty of the given dungeon, and also a tier separation of dungeons with required success rate on easier dungeon tiers to queue for harder ones