Well said, and thanks for articulating your position clearly and succintly. However, I have to disagree, and here's why. Your position essentially boils down to wanting to force other people to play the way you want to (be social) even though they personally do not want to. All those people who would desert the "community" to just run FPs silently and quickly are doing so because that's how they want to play. You aren't building a 'real' community if the only reason people talk to you or interact with you is through coercion. There are people in the game who enjoy building a community and prefer making new friends and meeting new people. They will still be there even after cross-server LFG and you can still meet them and interact with them.

Because mathematically they are actually SLOWER leveling. The gear is decent, but usually replaced fairly quickly by planet commendation mods or purple gear from the AH. Social points are just worthless atm, so nobody cares about that.

Why? I'm not being sarcastic or facetious here, I really want to know specifically what your objection is, what you feel the "instant gratification" is, and what you think the "long run problems" are. I hope I've been fairly clear about what I think the benefits of a cross-server LFG are, and so have others in this thread. Not "instant gratification" but a permanent, long-term solution to creating and forming groups for the group content that makes an MMO a multiplayer game. I can defend this position, and I have a logical argument for my position. It's been stated previously and I'll restate it here: (1) Increasing the pool of players to form groups from will decrease the time it takes to form each group. This is simple and obvious mathematics. (2) Decreasing the time it takes to form each group will in turn decrease the wait for each individual player to be placed in a group. Again, simple math. (3) Going from single server to cross server increases the pool of available players. The unknown variable here is the question of how fast the time to form each group is. If a server's population is large enough, the time to form a group will be fairly low to being with. And so the benefit for moving cross-server might also be fairly low. For example if the single server LFG forms groups in 3 minutes and the cross server pool forms groups in 1 minute, there's not a lot of benefit there. The difference between a 1 minute and a 2 minute wait to form a group is relatively minuscule. However, when the server's population is low, off-peak times or on a low population server, the average time to form a group can be unreasonably high. Let's posit that a server has 20 people at lvl 50 on at a given moment. Of those, half are PvP and half are PvE so there are 10 people who are even thinking about running a FP. 5 of those people are currently in a group. That leaves 5 people available for a FP. If one of those 5 people is afk or just wants to do dailies, that means that the 4 people who are in the LFG queue have to wait until someone else logs in or until the current group finishes it's FP and frees someone up to join a different group. This means a minimum wait time of about an hours (the time it takes to finish the FP) and a maximum wait time of 3 hours (the time it takes for the other 3 people in the queue to be done and open up a spot for you. If you don't think it's possible to have 20 people at lvl 50, check out the following graph and scroll down. I wouldn't be surprised if the bottom few servers have 20 lvl 50s online. http://dulfy.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/republicserverdistribution1.png Given all of that, it's beneficial to combine the pool of people looking for groups in those smaller servers to create a larger pool and thus lower the time it takes to get a group. If you combine the bottom 20 servers, you can go from 10 people to 200+ people in the LFG pool. A permanent server merge of those servers would achieve the same effect, but only temporarily. Because in a few months, that new MEGA SERVER might lose some players or gain too many players. With a cross-server LFG tool, if some servers in the pool lose population and become too low, the game will simply add in more servers to keep the pool where it needs to be without affecting anything else. The game could swap servers in and out of the pool every month and people wouldn't be affected. If you did massive server merges and transfers every month, that would be a huge problem.

The problem with the "server transfer" approach is that the server populations keep changing. 3 months ago, The Fatman was no more populous than any other server. And in 3 months, there's no guarantee that it won't become less populated or get so over-crowded that people have to wait in 2 hour queues to log. What happens then? Under your approach, everyone should then re-roll to "Iron Citadel." Except that just turns Fatman into a dead server and turns Iron Citadel into an overcrowded slum. Meanwhile, people are hopping servers every few months. Server Merges suffer from the same problem. Once the servers have merged, their populations will start to change and over-time another server merge will be required to get things back into balance again. I'm not against server merges or server transfers. They are effective tools to fix other problems in the game. Specifically the feeling of not having enough players around in certain planets and the desire to join friends playing on other servers or to join a server that fits your playstyle. However, they are provably ineffective long-term solutions to the specific problem at issue, finding and putting together groups for flashpoints/operations and other group content.

I'm sorry but I'm having a hard figuring out exactly what you are trying to say. Are you trying to say that people who don't want any LFG will be forced to use it anyway? Are you trying to say that people who want single server but not cross-server will be forced to use the cross-server system? Are you trying to say that cross-server is bad and its benefits are outweighed by the costs?

I think what people who remember blacklists fondly want is a way to learn from the experiences of others so that they don't have to suffer through a revolving door of jerks before they get all the bad players in their server pool placed on ignore. Maybe if you could "share" ignore lists with other people? Or, combining with the queue lobby idea, if when a group is formed you could see how many times each person has been placed on "ignore" and then you can ignore him and drop him from the group quickly.

Interesting idea. It has the same capability for griefing as a upvote system though, because people can just kick you at the last boss to keep you from getting points. I do see where it has a better psychological impact though. I get the feeling that a lot of players don't want other players "judging" them and would prefer a theoretically "impartial" arbiter like the game's algorithm. Griefing is always possible. If people want to be jerks, they'll find a way to do it no matter what. All you can do is keep them from upsetting you or ruining your personal experience.

Nobody here is arguing that Bioware has to copy blizzard's LFG exactly. Personally, I think that there are places to improve and i would like to see Bioware make some innovation and evolution of the idea. This is an interesting idea, giving people a short time window, like the queue timer for PvP, to chat to other people in the group, discuss things, and leave the queue without penalty. Thinking about it, I also think it would be interesting and beneficial to add a "rating" system, like youtube likes/dislikes. Each time you finish a dungeon, people can vote you up or down if they feel really strongly about the run. On an average run, people will just not click anything. If the run was amazing, people will 'like' you. Act like a jerk and you get a permanent black mark. Then, whenever you get queued into LFG, you can see the ratings for other people before the group forms and decide if you want to be in that group. It would keep griefing fairly low because someone would have to take time out of their way to downvote you, and since you are unlikely to see the same person again, it is unlikely that griefers could have any sort of meaningful campaign against a single person. Again, the core of this debate should not be a referendum on World of Warcraft, but a discussion of the likely effects, benefits and downsides of restricting an automated group forming tool to each individual server, or opening it up to multiple servers.

1. Here's how it will "make it better." Cross-server LFG has the same effect as a "perfect" server merge without requiring either (1) constantly mergers every few months to rebalance the population, and (2) splitting server communities to form the perfect balance. See, if you are on a low population server, you need to group up with people on other servers to get a large enough population to keep queue times low and have groups constantly forming. This is basically what you are asking for with server mergers, collecting the population of multiple servers to enlarge the pool of players to group with. The problem with implementing a permanent server merger, rather than a virtual merger limited only to formation of groups is that server populations change. A high population server today will not be high pop forever. And when it changes, the developers have to then re-merge or split that server. 2. As we have said repeatedly, we do not agree that the problems you refer to were created by LFG. Nor have you proven that they were. Sure, there were problems in the community post-LFG. But they existed pre-LFG and there is plenty of evidence to show that they were created by factors other than the introduction of LFG. 3. Your characterization of Wow's LFG as a 'failed' attempt is simply wrong. I liked Wow's LFG, as did many other people. The Wow developers also like the system and feel it was a success. Even if you feel that it introduced adverse side-effects into the game community, you cannot dispute the simple fact that it helped people find groups. It did what it was supposed to do.

I can easily prove that the attitude existed before LFG. I remember running heroics in BC, long before LFG was implemented, and seeing people get booted from the instance because they had too little hp. I remember seeing people whine and call you a bad tank if you pulled a single extra trash mob in Slave Pens. I remember rogues needing on cloth, hunters needing on throwing weapons, and every single example of bad behavior that you mention. I remember people leaving groups after a single wipe. I remember people starting up PuG raids and having the group leader ninja all the gear. I remember people stealing raid lockouts by inviting someone, switching it to raid real fast and then walking into a half-cleared karazhan. I remember all sorts of horrendous jerk behavior that was never seriously curtailed by the 'community.' LFG didn't turn people into jerks. They were already jerks. Remember "Leroy Jenkins"? Was that pre or post-lfg? Isn't that the quintessential example of a dps being too impatient to wait for the tank, facepulling and wiping everyone? Part of the reason it was so famous was because that stuff happened to enough people to make it a common experience for just about anyone. See, for every post on the forums about how people are getting worse behavior and worse groups post-LFG, you had posts (and actual experiences) like http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1021053154 Why the discrepancy between perceptions? Because of confirmation bias. If you already think that LFG is a bad thing, you'll remember the bad experiences more and forget the smooth running groups. If you think it's a good thing, you'll remember the good groups and forget that one bad run you had last week.

Haha, no. It's a website. Banning him for posting it would be like banning people for posting a link to a blog post or a youtube website. Not to mention that there have been several very long-running threads in the PTS forums about this very topic for a while now, one of which has devs asking for feedback on how to improve the combat log output to make coding parsers easier. Please don't post incorrect information.

The problem is that you have to find IMPORTANT places to attack. Nar Shaddaa and Tatooine don't have the numbers of players or the psychological significance that Drumond Kaas or Coruscant do. If someone is ganking nubs on Tattooine, 9/10 times people will just go quest on another world or take a taxi to a different quest hub. If someone is killing peeps on Coruscant though, people will be more interested in defending it. Frankly, I don't see why the fleet stations are immune to attack. Nothing motivates people to fight than having their bank and auction house held hostage by the other faction. Or better yet, having the flashpoint entrances under blockade. It's frustrating, but that's the whole point of joining a PvP server, to take the risk of someone else wrecking your day and having to fight him for it. What would be really awesome is if there a shuttle spawned on Ilum every 5 hours that led to the opposing faction's fleet. So there'd be a window where you could fight for control of the shuttle to be able to fight your way into the fleet while the other side would be fighting to defend it. It would provide a lot more incentive for people to engage in world PvP on Ilum.

Oh god yeah. I remember having to keep a specific list of healers/tanks and having to beg them every time I wanted to do a heroic on my hunter. **** was not fun. Nor was getting random whispers from some guy I didn't remember or care about seconds after I logged in on my paladin tank. Especially when I have to let the poor guy down cause I just logged in to check the AH or move stuff to a bank alt.

Someone who is new and is more interested in finding new tanks/healers than in completing stuff quickly can still ask in chat for people to queue up with. They probably won't get a full group, but they might get 1 more person to queue with. It's actually beneficial for them to do so because queuing up with more people in the group decreases the time to queue. Nothing about a cross-server LFG prevents that from happening. For example, I was levelling on my juggernaut and did a couple of quests with a guy I met on Hoth. I was a tank and he was a healer. When we finished, we both kinda wanted to run a FP to get a bit of gear. We checked the LFG tool, nobody at our level anywhere on the server. We asked in general chat, nobody responded. If there had been a cross-server LFG, we'd easily just queue up and get more people from other servers added to run foundry or whatever. A cross-server LFG wouldnt have hurt my ability to make friends with that guy or see how he played in a FP at all.

Think this through. You are arguing that a cross-server LFG is not needed because it does not foster your personally prefered playstyle. However, it does not force YOU to play that way, it simply allows others to do so if they want to. Personally I don't usually care that much about making friends in HM FP groups. Sometimes I meet new and interesting people and make friends, more often I'm just running something quickly before I have to go do something else. I don't deliberately avoid making friends, but it's just not a huge priority. What is a huge priority for me is having fun and experiencing the game content. If I could run flashpoints solo, I would. I can't though, so I need to be able to find other people to run them with. Even if I'll never meet those people again, I'd rather still be able to run the flashpoint. What you are basically saying is that my priorities and my goals are worthless, and I shouldn't be able to group up with random strangers I won't meet again. Why? It won't affect you. If you want to make friends in every run, just don't use it and form groups the old-fashioned way.

We're trying to figure out why you believe that a cross-server LFG would limit your ability to meet people. Your stated concerns have been that if LFG is cross-server, then the people you meet in LFG will be on other servers, so you won't be able to group up and hang out with them later on after the run is over. We're saying that you can still have those sorts of groups if you do the same things people are doing now. I.E. form the group (or part of the group) on the server before running the flashpoint. As I see it, you have the same ability to meet people and make connections after the addition of an optional tool as you do before it.

Just do dailies. Seriously, they take about 1.5 hrs a day and get you ~250k creds just from the quests alone. Then you can sell the purple armorings and mods that drop from the heroic quests for ~20k each. In addition, if you save up, after about 5 days of dailies, you can get a rakata implant and sell it for ~1million creds. All told you should be able to get 2million creds within a week (or after 2 weekends if you only play every Fri-Sat-Sun).

They can still meet people the same way they do now. They can still post in trade/general for anyone willing to run to queue with them. They can still make friends while questing or doing heroic missions. They can still join guilds and run with those guilds. Nothing about adding an option cross-server LFG tool prevents them from doing so. It's not that we don't want server merges. It's that server merges will not work. See, server populations are dynamic. A high pop server today might lose subscribers for whatever reason and become a low pop server in a few months. A low pop server might gain a few and become high pop. The whole game might gain or lose subscribers and alter the server balance. Leaving aside the inherent problems of trying to get the perfect balance of players with a server merge and the issue of investor confidence, let's say that Bioware DOES do a server merge. They manage to get it just right and get everyone into 10 servers with each having the population of The Fatman. What happens two months down the road when subscription numbers go up and they have 3million subscribers? What happens if one of those servers is the unofficial "Brazilian" server and then they decide to put in real Latin American servers? If you try to use server merges as a bandaid for the long term fix of equalizing the play experience across multiple server populations, Bioware will end up having to do server merges/transfers/etc every few months just to keep up with the ebb and flow of the game's population. And I don't mean "free server transfers" either. That doesn't work because it relies on the players to equalize the population when they have other priorities. What they would have to do is to literally forcibly move people on or off the server arbitrarily every few months. That's not a good solution.

It's not about personal rewards to the person mentoring. If he's higher level, there's nothing to be gained for him by running stuff at a level lower than he already is. No xp, gear is worthless, and the cash is the same. The problem is that you get less xp for running low level content, which includes your group members. So if a lvl 50 goes to help a lvl 20, the lvl 20 guy is basically getting zero xp. Which defeats the whole point of helping since you are actually hurting your friend. What people are asking for is the ability to run with their friends without hurting that friend's ability to level.

You do realize that's a problem with the Cata difficulty curve right? Not cross-server LFG. Hard modes in SWTOR aren't hard enough for people to bail on without at least trying, and if they do, they won't care if its single server or cross-server. People bail when they don't think the run will be successful. It doesn't matter whether it's a single server group or a cross server group, if they are not likely to get the rewards they signed up for, they just won't put in the effort. Again, even with a cross-server LFG, you can still do this. You can still run with tanks you know from your server and just pug in other people from other servers. And if there isn't any tank on your server willing to queue with you, then you wouldn't have a group at all anyway. Expanding the list of players you can group with does not decrease your options, it increases them.

The problem there is that you are working from a base assumption that WoW's grouping is an "antisocial cesspool of ******s" while SWTOR's is not. Not everyone agrees with you about that. Some people didn't have a problem with WoW's community post-LFG. Some people did have a problem, but found the same problems with the WoW community pre-LFG. Some people are also finding the same problems in the SWTOR right now, where there's no LFG. You cannot make a statement like "We should not eat Swiss cheese because it will turn the ocean red," while dismissing people who point out that the ocean is not red, nor does eating cheese have any connection to the ocean's color. It MAY be possible that overconsumption of cheese will increase a specific bacterium that leads to 'red tide,' but if you are making that claim, you need to back it up with logic and not be surprised when people make counterarguments. In the same way, you cannot say "Cross-server LFG will lead to a worse community" without having to defend against people who have a counterargument. Again, to repeat the statements made multiple times in the past thread, single server won't fix the problem on low populated servers. Sure, Bioware "might" reconsider and move to cross-server after they realize this, but it's fairly obvious to anyone who has been on those servers so there's no reason to implement a situation that will not work just to appease an illogical fear. At best, it delays a proper solution for another 3 or 4 months; at worst it will tarnish the adoption of the tool by giving people a poor impression and making them less likely to use it when it does get fixed.

Yeah, waiting on elevators sucks. Especially when you get there just as the thing leaves so you have to wait for it to come back. Needlessly frustrating, imo.

Imagine that you have 500,000 players in Imp Fleet. Designing a system to handle that, and a UI to make transitions smooth is a significant additional cost. Significant enough to likely require a redesign of the entire game. It can be done, and I would be very interested in an MMO that did it, but it's a much bigger challenge than just adding a LFG queue. I can personally think of how I would implement a LFG queue. I.E. what data structures would be required and what likely programming challenges might crop up. I envision a global data structure on each server with methods for adding and removing characters, plus some overhead algorithms for matchmaking. Not a trivial task, maybe a month's work, but not particularly difficult. I can't even begin to imagine trying to write code to convert 120 different servers into a single server. Or how to handle load balancing on that server.

Just wait, it'll smooth itself out once you hit 50 and start doing HMs. See, the thing about tanking is this, it sucks for soloing, so nobody wants to spec tank. Therefore if you can hang in there long enough, at endgame everyone is all dps spec and starts needing you.

Few points: 1. Quick travel is only every 30 minutes. What happens if it's on CD? 2. Not every planet has a shuttle. 3. I don't know about you, but my loading screens are often significantly over a minute. 4. You conveniently forgot the travel time back. Personally, I've found 10-15 minutes (and up to 20 minutes) to be the average time it takes for people to get to a given instance from wherever they are. Certainly not 30seconds. Besides, the point isn't that 15minutes is too elusive to manage. It's that in order for running a FP to be worth it, the rewards have to be equal to the time investment. Currently they aren't because there's a lot of wasted time spent on finding a group and on travelling to the FP. LFG will solve the time wasted on finding a group, having a port or a summing stone will solve the time waste in transit.