Yeah, yeah, we were all super stoked on LFG when it came out in 3.3. But with the nightmarish hellscape of daily heroics behind us, we can look with untainted eyes on LFG, and see that there are indeed problems with it.
The biggest problem is the grind. Every single day, log in, play for 20-40 minutes. That is not how I spend my leisure time. Mondays I go straight from work to tabletop night, but there's always this small pang of guilt for not getting my two badges. And doing just one dungeon one time isn't a fulfilling recreation either; I like to play games for a few hours at a time, but without a real incentive, I feel like I'm wasting my time doing more than one dungeon.
This is more of a problem with the whole daily quest model than with LFG itself. There's this whole paradigm in WoW of incentivising daily play, and I hate it, and I can't be alone in that. Solution? Scale everything you do daily to be a weekly quest. Imagine instead of logging on every day to do one dungeon, you could do 7 in one day and be set? Or do one every day, or three one day and four the next? A weekly of "do 7 dungeons get 15 EoF" would be like sweet ambrosia.
The other problem I see is that there's no way to give real positive feedback about a player. If someone's bad I can ignore them or vote to kick, true, but friending someone doesn't make you more likely to group with them in the future. If bad behavior can be punished, there ought to be some symmetry there.
If you use Pandora, firstly, congratulations, you're living in the future. But more importantly, you've seen how effective its heuristics are at matching you with songs you like. Imagine if this was done with players in WoW, and you could give individuals thumbs up or down. Maybe you love multi-pulls and thumbs-up every geared tank who moves real fast. The system would match you with tanks other people with similar tastes also recommended. Conversely, if you hate chatty types, thumbs-down the chatterbox and subsequently see less of them! The math is all there, these kinds of things have been done before, it just needs to be put in the WoW architecture.
I don't mean to suggest LFG is fundamentally broken, or bad. It's smart, easy, and a VAST improvement on the suck of daily heroics. But there's still room for improvement, and in the case of the daily -> weekly transition, it's an easy fix. Blizz've said themselves LFG feels to grindy, so maybe Cata will move away from the daily grind somewhat.
And there was much rejoicing.
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While I think your idea for Pandora-izing the LFG system is fuckoff awesome I do have to point out that Pandora has never been more than a colossal disappointment to me personally.
ReplyDeleteIt takes all of about five songs for it to shift radically away from anything I've told it to play and I end up listening to spoken word covers of Leonard Nimoy's 1960's ode to Bilbo Baggins. That's not at all similar to the Paul Oakenfold I told Pandora to play.
The fact that I can't skip as many songs as I want is like being slapped back to the 80's too. Its 2010. If I don't want to listen to a song, I'm not going to listen to a song.
Sooo yeah, but adding those functions to LFG would be pretty tight.
I know what you're talking about, and it's Pandora trying to introduce you to music you MIGHT like. It tends to do that, and there's three solutions if you hate it. One, thumbs-down like crazy until it LEARNS. Two, become a paying member which (I think) lets you unlimited skip. Or three, create multiple stations and jump whenever it starts diverging too much. It'll reset its guessing.
ReplyDeleteWhich is pretty off-topic to the blog itself, but it saddens me to see Pandora fail, even for someone with as insipid a musical taste as yours.