Incentives for Tanks and Healers(LFG Tool)

[Burtlebe]

QUOTE=LarryRow;4753725]Mathematically, cross server will always smooth out the queue times. The bigger your sample size, the more it tends towards averages. It's only a bummer if your server has a good ratio (obviously)

 

i am neither pro or anti cross server, that said I really do not think it will do anything for this issue. even if by some chance the percent of tanks and healers is equal on all servers its still the same outcome and you run the risk of diluting the amount of healers/tanks if you get a esp dps centric servers in the mix.

 

 

Please explain how dual spec can make it worse. Right now there are players who like tanking - or don't mind it and would gladly do it to get a queue to pop - but feel more effective in pvp as dps. Allowing them to dual spec completely eliminates this issue. Right now respeccing can become prohibitively expensive rather quickly. I just don't see the downside.

 

The issue with dual spec helping is that if someone perfers dps as a tank class and their equipment reflects this and are asked to tank, you will get a inferior tank over one who likes tanking and has the gear. Now once you run enough and if you was serious about doing both you could get you two sets of gear but in a pug its going to be painful to gear up that way. its always easier to dual spec a equipped tank to a dps tank than other way around.

 

 

Hopefully people will begin to realize that while the dps is fun if you want to move forward you either need to join a guild or make you a class who has high demand.

Edited June 28, 2012 by Burtlebe

[RocNessMonster]

Make tank and heal requirement in the largest raid same proportion as group ratios. Why level/gear as a tank when your guild probably has two regular raider and three of four backups?

 

Restore tanks and heals to 1.1 levels for PVP.

[MasterKayote]

The biggest issue is the common misconception brought on by previous games that healers and tanks suck at solo play or are hard to level. This is simply not true in this game. I leveled a vanguard and commando to 50 and the vanguard was by far the easier to level and i did in pure tank spec the whole way.

 

They level slower not harder. Ive leveled both Trooper and Assassin tanks and they were by far the easiest. With a heal pet you can take on almost anything. DPS is much faster though. Obviously, they kill faster.

 

Either way I think people just like to DPS more. Its a videogame, gamers like to kill pixels and seem like unstoppable death machines. DPS is the best way to get that. Youll never see the next Gears of War game play out as the main character mainly healing his squad while they have all the fun.

[Nyla]

 

Hopefully people will begin to realize that while the dps is fun if you want to move forward you either need to join a guild or make you a class who has high demand.

 

Hopefully BW will begin to realize that while designing things is fun, if they want to please their customers they should choose working designs over the bad ones.

 

The lack of tank/healer is common in many many MMOs. Imo they made nothing to make thoses classes more appealing to play in group content and they choose a group composition that really don't use enough DPS.

While we can hope that some players change of roles, it shows once more a lack of understanding of the playerbase.

[anedorivan]

So true.

 

After patch I fired up my main character, a tank. He wasn't fun to play anymore so I've stopped running him. Those solo things one does like cranking out dailies is now so unpleasantly slow and tedious to do for lack of damage output. Started a new char to focus on.

 

Nerf my tank, guess I'll not be playing him any more unless my guild needs a tank in a bad way.

 

I did the same.

[Galbatorrix]

To me, tanks are easier to level up than DPS or healers. My Vanguard was pretty much invincible all the way to 50 with Elara by my side, I switched to Tactics once while going through Voss and I was so squishy... 2 strongs meant death for me. I switched back to SS and went back to being indestructible.

[LarryRow]

i am neither pro or anti cross server, that said I really do not think it will do anything for this issue. even if by some chance the percent of tanks and healers is equal on all servers its still the same outcome and you run the risk of diluting the amount of healers/tanks if you get a esp dps centric servers in the mix.

 

I wasn't really advocating cross server. With the large pops we have now I don't think it's necessary. I just, as a proud holder of a math degree, hate seeing bad math. In your example, it's just as likely a healer-heavy server would improve matters.

 

The issue with dual spec helping is that if someone perfers dps as a tank class and their equipment reflects this and are asked to tank, you will get a inferior tank over one who likes tanking and has the gear. Now once you run enough and if you was serious about doing both you could get you two sets of gear but in a pug its going to be painful to gear up that way. its always easier to dual spec a equipped tank to a dps tank than other way around.

 

I see what you're saying. Not everyone will respect the idea that they should have the right gear when they queue for a role. It is pretty insane that I have 3 sets of gear in my bag (2 for pvp, 2 for pve, wearing one). I don't think this means that dual spec makes the situation worse, just not a perfect answer. I know I would really appreciate it though! I also think gearing in PvE is fairly painless. Columi basically falls from the sky in story mode ops (not complaining!)

[mangarrage]

Mathematically, cross server will always smooth out the queue times. The bigger your sample size, the more it tends towards averages. It's only a bummer if your server has a good ratio (obviously)

 

 

 

Please explain how dual spec can make it worse. Right now there are players who like tanking - or don't mind it and would gladly do it to get a queue to pop - but feel more effective in pvp as dps. Allowing them to dual spec completely eliminates this issue. Right now respeccing can become prohibitively expensive rather quickly. I just don't see the downside.

 

I'm sorry but it is just simply incorrect on both points. That is if this game follows the same trend as every other game that use cross server

If you allow dual specs you will get less tanks and healers period. That is an absolute fact. You are not going to get more. Right now most people dont respec back and forth between tank and dps, so they resort to tanking. Those same people will just hit a button and bam que as dps. Due to the ratio of tanks and healer to dps and you allow healers and tanks to both que for dps you then increase the wait time for dps

[Celebrus]

I will never understand it, so many people on here talk about entitlement and how others have so much of it.

 

Then they make a thread like this.

 

Nobody needs to hold your hand, or pat you on the back, or give you something that others don't get to encourage you to play a role that you apparently enjoy, otherwise you wouldn't be playing it.

 

Stop beating yourself up so much for failing and maybe you wouldn't think that tanking/healing was such a thankless job. It's a game, nobody gives a **** if you fail a few times, and if they do, they should probably stop taking it and themselves so seriously. If they have time to waste jumping around in circles on the fleet waiting for a group to form, then they have time to waste while you make a few mistakes and learn from them.

 

That said, I see no reason to give tanks and healers anything special just for doing what they are supposed to be doing anyhow.

[LarryRow]

The biggest issue is the common misconception brought on by previous games that healers and tanks suck at solo play or are hard to level. This is simply not true in this game. I leveled a vanguard and commando to 50 and the vanguard was by far the easier to level and i did in pure tank spec the whole way.

 

I agree with other posters that this is a very good point. One of Bioware's signature contributions to the genre is the cast of companion characters, and it really mitigates the issue of role proportions. Imagine if the content was tuned down some and you had to level solo as a healer. It would take frigging forever.

 

With companions, you can either run around dpsing everything to death and healing up after, or using a more synergistic approach where encounters take longer but you don't have to rest.

[asbalana]

Incentives always work. They may not work as expected, or as well as you'd like, but offering people something for their time will always produce some kind of result.

 

Bribes need to happen. It'll produce marginal results, but marginal is better than nothing.

 

.

 

Incentives may move some people but not others. It depends on the person and their motivations. I think that you are right in the sense that many will not be moved by the bribes, but some will and that will produce more healers and tanks for a group finder. It sort of worked to some degree in WOW where people queued for the incentive. Unfortunately, having people queue for the incentive and not the content produced some pretty piss poor runs. It also brought a lot of non healers and tanks out of the woodwork who queued as such just for the goodie bag.

 

I play a healer and play as part of a team with my wife who is dps. I think that she could be a great tank if she set her mind to it. I believe that we are both decent players if not top notch and could hold our own in any group. But we are hesitant about grouping with other people. I think that it is a case of perfomance anxiety in a group dynamic and a desire to play the game as we choose and not have to be answerable to others especially with respect to the pace of the run and the way things are done. I think that if we ended up playing with another couple much like us that we would be running flashpoints with abandon.

 

I ran a lot of group content when I played WOW and did pretty well although I was dps, but found it not much fun. When using the group finder, I usually ended up being grouped with nice people (lucky there) but found most wanted to run throught the content that they had done many times as fast as possible and played as indiviiduals in the group rather as members of a team. Dungeon runs ended up as a mad dash with people charging willy nilly all over the place (pity the poor healers there). A few people said hello at the beginning of a run and thanks at the end, but that was it as far as conversation went. Although I was in a group, it was not really a group experience. I did try a guild to be able to run tcontent with people that I knew, but found that did not do the trick. My experience was that the guilds had a core group of players who did a lot of things together and everyone else was just there to bring up the numbers and add to guild's bank or XP.

 

So if my healer was offered a gold speeder and a bag of augmentors as a prize, I still would not queue him for a run.

[LarryRow]

I'm sorry but it is just simply incorrect on both points. That is if this game follows the same trend as every other game that use cross server

If you allow dual specs you will get less tanks and healers period. That is an absolute fact. You are not going to get more. Right now most people dont respec back and forth between tank and dps, so they resort to tanking. Those same people will just hit a button and bam que as dps. Due to the ratio of tanks and healer to dps and you allow healers and tanks to both que for dps you then increase the wait time for dps

 

You sound like one of the angry drunk dps I mentioned earlier.

 

Unless you are claiming a Tragedy of the Commons situation where lots of people think, "Since there is dual spec, more people can dual queue, so will just queue dps and hope some sucker dual queues," I don't understand your point. The situation you describe is no different from what we have now, except that with dual spec, someone can choose to dual queue and not incur a cost if they have to switch specs.

 

PvE also does not happen in a vacuum. In my opinion, the 1.3 class balancing made pure tank trees very undesirable for PvP, which a lot of players enjoy. Dual spec would allow people who like tanking to have a tank pve spec and whatever pvp spec they want.

[KindlyOne]

Actually, it is correct. Almost every server has a shortage of tanks and healers in the queue, and a ridiculous number of dps compared to them. Take this example:

 

Server 1 has 15% Tanks, 20% healers, 65% dps

Server 2 has 20% tanks, 5% healers, 75% dps

Server 3 has 25% tanks, 25% healers, 50% dps (optimal)

 

Add all 3 together and you end up with:

 

20% Tanks, 16.66% healers, 63.33% dps.

 

For servers 1 and 2, dps queue times go down. For server 3, they go up.

 

BUT, servers 1 and 3 now have a smaller proportion of healers to queue with than they had with the single server architecture, whereas server 3 has a much larger proportion of healers. So 1 and 3 take a hit to their average queue time.

 

Now, obviously It's impossible to know for sure, but some servers would experience an increase in queue times by going with cross server, and some would experience a decrease.

 

Nicely put.

 

Cross-server Group Finder solves the problem of having a server where your population is so small that the queue is literally waiting for someone to hop on. For larger server populations, it just normalizes the role-division across the linked servers.

 

But to answer the original poster's question: I don't know if there's anything a healer or tank would like as incentive other than being paired with DPSers that are good at their game. Here's my meaning: I find that with some MMOs, if the DPSers are lacking, the healer or the tank can make up for it by having better gear or playing better. With SWTOR, it doesn't seem like there's a lot a talented or well-geared healer/tank can do.

 

Coming from many other MMOs as a healer, it feels like my healing hands are tied down in SWTOR. So that's one issue.

 

The other issue is this: failing a flashpoint is painful. These bloody flashpoints take ages to complete compared to another MMO that I will not mention. When it takes forty to sixty minutes to complete a random flashpoint, you want to be sure that your group will succeed. So what do you do if you're a talented/geared tank or healer? Simple: You queue with guild/friends almost exclusively. You take the gamble out of the equation -- and this, I imagine, is what most tanks and healers do.

[bpphantom]

and this, I imagine, is what most tanks and healers do.

 

Thus why they are not queued in the LFG tool, cross server or not.

 

I'll eventually be one of the tanks in the LFG queue simple because I don't have a guild, all my friends quit months ago, and while I'm playing a lot now I might vanish for 2-3 months at any time if I get bored (so why get in a guild).

[Galbatorrix]

I disagree with the people that say Dual Spec and a goody bag of some sort doesn't work. If you're mainly a DPS PVP player and you decide you're going to run a few flashpoints, currently, you'd simply do so as DPS (who's going to pay to respec just to tank/heal a FP when they'd have to pay again in order to go back to DPSing PVP right after?). But, if this same person could switch to a tank/heal spec free and instantly, plus get an instant pop for a FP, plus get some extra credits/a goody bag, they would be a lot more likely to choose to tank or heal over DPS. At that point, it would be silly to wait longer in a queue just to DPS. Especially when you're getting freebies for tanking/healing.

 

Tanks and healers get a bag of goodies (credits, mats, the odd piece of gear) and DPS get shorter queue times. Everyone wins. Heck, in WOW, I know raid geared tanks that tank heroic dungeons because of the goody bag. They don't need the gear that drops in those any more at all, but they're still willing to do it for the goody bag.

Edited June 28, 2012 by Galbatorrix

[Aikagi]

Give free respecs. I would consider respeccing to tank if it didn't cost me to do so. I have the gear for it.

[DiLune]

I started a SW Tank on one server and got him to 50 as the server was dying. I re-rolled a SW Tank on another server and started leveling him along with friends and that server was dying. Stopped leveling him for a while and played Mass Effect 3, Diablo 3, etc. But I came back and finally finished him to 50, along with my friends and moved to the new Super Server with free transfers. I know how to gear a tank, I've been tanking and healing in games for many, many years.

 

So I've never run an HM but my base HP are 20k and defense are about as good as you can reasonably buy with daily tokens and credits. Last night I got into my first HM KUS, via LFG, and told the group "this is my first time here." I got harrassed by the healer who proceeded to complain the whole time that we were going to have a wipe fest. I asked for refreshers on bosses (I read up on them but hadn't done them) and got none. The healer wouldn't top me off after a fight, I had to do it myself.

 

The only time I died was when the healer refused to establish LoS on me. Otherwise we had no wipes, he never had agro on him and we finished the instance in decent time.

 

But I had to eat **** the entire time just because I had never done it before. I'm a good tank and had decent gear...

 

What is my incentive for queuing in LFG again?

Edited June 28, 2012 by DiLune

[Galbatorrix]

I started a SW Tank on one server and got him to 50 as the server was dying. I re-rolled a SW Tank on another server and started leveling him along with friends and that server was dying. Stopped leveling him for a while and played Mass Effect 3, Diablo 3, etc. But I came back and finally finished him to 50, along with my friends and moved to the new Super Server with free transfers. I know how to gear a tank, I've been tanking and healing in games for many, many years.

 

So I've never run an HM but my base HP are 20k and defense are about as good as you can reasonably buy with daily tokens and credits. Last night I got into my first HM KUS, via LFG, and told the group "this is my first time here." I got harrassed by the healer who proceeded to complain the whole time that we were going to have a wipe fest. I asked for refreshers on bosses (I read up on them but hadn't done them) and got none. The healer wouldn't top me off after a fight, I had to do it myself.

 

The only time I died was when the healer refused to establish LoS on me. Otherwise we had no wipes, he never had agro on him and we finished the instance in decent time.

 

But I had to eat **** the entire time just because I had never done it before. I'm a good tank and had decent gear...

 

What is my incentive for queuing in LFG again?

 

 

Honestly, this happens. It sucks, but it does. Just ignore that person so you never have to group with them again and move on. When they start having longer than normal queues due to the hundreds of people they've alienated, maybe they'll reevaluate what it means to act decently to others.

[DiLune]

Honestly, this happens. It sucks, but it does. Just ignore that person so you never have to group with them again and move on. When they start having longer than normal queues due to the hundreds of people they've alienated, maybe they'll reevaluate what it means to act decently to others.

 

I know, and I'll put up with it for now (my friend is getting his level 50 healer in shape for HM's so it will only be an issue when he isn't around.) But this is why I didn't spam for groups in LFG before (past experience has told me that not knowing an instance this late in a game's release, as a tank, will get you nothing but grief.) So its safe to assume a lot of people aren't queuing as tanks for this reason. The tank is expected to be the guy charging ahead and running the show and if you don't know what you're supposed to do (in the beginning) its a crapfest.

 

Now, my second HM was False Emperor, with a decent group and we blew the place up with no deaths, including tossing Malgus off the bridge (with Force Push) and getting the mount. So I would say its a mixed bag.

 

But it really sucks being a first-timer (as a tank) this late into a game where everyone expects the tank to know the instance better than they do. Gear incentives won't make this better, you'll just get a whole lot of people who don't know how to tank or don't have the gear to tank.

Edited June 28, 2012 by DiLune

[RocNessMonster]

So much wrong with your post.....in WoW they added extra incentives to get tanks and healers to que up using the LFG tool and guess what..it worked! The average wait times now for dps for '" random" dungeon runs in WoW is 15 mins...as dps. Of course it works esp well because it is cross server.

 

That has more to do with the latest WOW dungeons only lasting fifteen minutes.

[DarkSaberMaster]

Want an incentive to get tanks to queue more? Quit nerfing them and reverse the nerfs they were given.

[Daeada]

Want an incentive to get tanks to queue more? Quit nerfing them and reverse the nerfs they were given.

 

Funny, I'm having more fun in my new hyrbrid spec on my juggernaut than I had pre-patch.

[lordofdamornin]

That has more to do with the latest WOW dungeons only lasting fifteen minutes.

 

Indeed, Vakirus's memory seems to be using the cherry-picking method. I am sure the Dragon Soul 5-man queues are quite short indeed, since they quickly lead straight to the Raid Finder.

 

These are the kinds of Flashpoints that Bioware should be looking to build in the future. It's win for everyone, including them.

 

Riôt

[Jedi_Wannabe]

So I was reading in another thread that WoW at one time had extra incentives for tanks and healers to queue for raids, or dungeons or whatever, to help reduce the DPS queue times.

 

INSTEAD of everyone jumping on the Cross Server/Single server bandwagon. What are some good incentives that Bioware could use to help entice the Tanks and Healers to queue up for flashpoints?

 

I think XP would be ok. . .but then the incentive stops at 50. So what about a multiplies to how many credits they get or even just extra comms(which is what I assume would be done if implemented).

 

EDIT - Please try to remember this is not a discussion about cross server vs single server. Please keep the topic on incentives for healers/tanks to bring them into the LFG system more often(instead of just tanking/healing in guild runs)

 

Bullet points so far

- boost in comms

- dual spec

- rebalance for 6 person groups(1 heal/1tank/4 dps)

 

My suggestion would be to give 2 coms for each additional run through after the first. 5 coms for the first run and 2 for each one after that. This gives incentives for tanks and healers to do multiple runs, without actually excluding DPS. Sure, the DPS could queue for extra runs as well, but how many would do so if it meant waiting 2 hours per run just to get 2 more coms?

[Tahana]

Incentives always work. They may not work as expected, or as well as you'd like, but offering people something for their time will always produce some kind of result.

Actually they only work for as long as there is a new carrot for the tanks and healers to chase.. and then only in that content window. For me I took advantage of it, but stopped after I had my gear. It is a temporary fix nothing more.