Greedy Goblin

Friday, November 28, 2014

Premade group of strangers is better than randoms

The worst feature of WoW, the one that made me leave the game two years ago was clearly pushing players to team up with morons and slackers. While you could form a group from your guild for any activities, doing so had a large overhead. If you just logged in with no one online, you were stuck with the group finder features for dungeons, entry mode raids, battlegrounds. And these players are just horrible. No, I don't mean "a bit behind", I mean:

While this screenshot isn't the best, you can add their damage percents to see that the three damage dealers combined were equal to the tank and the lowest DPS one, the rogue was probably a bot. We left. Now what? Are we locked out from the daily 50 garrison resources and the random drops?

That point I remembered why I returned. In the previous expansion my girlfriend found that by using third party sites, you could find "friends" to form cross-server groups and she managed to kill the then-normal (second highest difficulty) endboss before the 6.0 patch. In that patch they implemented this group finder into the game. So I fired it up and in minutes we had a group. They weren't stellar, but were leagues away from the M&S polluting the random group finder:

These players were just as "random" and "stranger" as the ones given by the random feature. But they had two qualities: they had 630 ilvl (which is trivial to get, due to the welfare legendary questline) and they used the group finder tool instead of the default tool. These very weak checks were enough to find an OK group instead of those bots, AFK-ers and failures.

I suggest everyone to use this feature and remove himself from the M&S pool. Because without M&S, WoW isn't a bad game.

On a different note, the follower mission code is messed up. There are barely any missions for lvl 100 followers. At the start it was the opposite, if you had just one lvl 100 follower, you got lot of lvl 100 missions. I wonder why they had a beta if basic features aren't working (at least it doesn't crash the server). Anyway, instead of waiting for that 1-2 mission per day, I reactivated a lvl 98 follower and now I'm swarmed by lvl 98 missions. I don't do them with that follower, but with the bored lvl 100 ones for salvage and little XP. The salvage contains item level upgrades for the followers. I hope the missions get fixed soon.

16 comments:

nightgerbil said...

Unfair screens shots. 43k dps on a bear means it was a trash pack and that wasnt a combat rogue, prob a subtley rogue using fan of knifes to apply his poisons. Your second screen shot shows either boss dps or a smaller 1-3 non trash pack.

My subt is only lev 92, but I already know I cant compete on any aoe dps meters. Let me at a boss though, where I can pop my shadow dance on cd, I'll show you dps. Your too ready sometimes to declare people as hopeless. Its why I appreciated your rule that everyone in the PUG was allowed to fail if we payed fines for doing so. It let me have a bad day now and then while still exercising personal responsibilty.

Anonymous said...

Didn't they put something called "proving ground" into the game?
As I understand it, only grp with people that managed to get in endless mode to a certain point. Ilvl becomes somewhat irrelevant if the person has the endless rank you want. and proving grounds can't be carried because it's solo. That is the best M&S filter and I'm wondering how long Blizzard will have this in the game.

Gevlon said...

@Nightgerbil: it was the trash pack of the big elemental before magmolatus. Until he is defeated, more and more small ones spawn. It clearly had a skull on it. Needless to say, everyone AoE-d, and a bear beated them badly. If only they did their job, there would be less small elementals to AoE.

@Anonymous: proving ground for damage dealer is trivial, a gear check at best. You have to kill stationary, non-attacking targets.

maxim said...

Group finder is indeed great for finding 5-mans. Moreso for tank/healers.

That being said...
I am yet to fail a single heroic.

Well, scratch that, i failed one because three people out of 5 were in it for Inn daily

That may be because i am able and willing to carry a slacking dps or two. And even a healer, to a small extent (feral druid comes with built-in free ~15k hps).

At the same time, the only reason i'm even running hcs now are inn dailies and garrison resources. When i'll be done with both (garrison might take a while tho) i'll be done with hcs altogether. If carrying noobs gets me there faster, i'm okay with it.

maxim said...

I find myself constantly training up a follower from the inn, so no shortage of low lvl missions :)

Expect this to last for a while, because need more salvage / epic mount / +exp minions!

Rdrood said...

I did quite a lot of heroics with group finder. (ilvl 633 drood healer) and yes, you often play with horrible players doing less than half the dps of the top dps.

But, as a healer, there's one thing I like in group finder: The added stress in my healing role considering how many mistakes are made by the average player.

Really, when you do the content with a competent group, it's almost boring how easy it is.

Too bad there's no group finder for challenge mode :/

Anonymous said...

The statement that ilvl 630 is trivial due to the welfare quest line is clearly wrong. That chain rewards a single item of 640 (or 680). You are effectively demanding an ilvl of 629.3 (or 626.7) for the other ~14 slots.
Default heroics give 630 items. The specified ilvl requirement effectively requires that eligible players have a decent of experience of WoD instances.

Your "evidence" does not support the suggestion that an enforced opt-in defeats the M&S. What it does support is that bunch of random group-finder players with decent gear and experience will be better than a random group of LFG which includes potentially inexperienced and undergeared players.
For me, that is justification enough to favour using group finder. I don't need to find some tenuous evidence to prove that group finder is used by a superior players.

Anonymous said...

"proving ground for damage dealer is trivial, a gear check at best. You have to kill stationary, non-attacking targets."

Not saying it's hard, but you have to avoid an attacking debuff that can stun you. You proved basic mobility and awareness, decent dps... i'd say it's enough. I've yet to fail an heroic since i started, so it must be effective in filtering idiots :)

Anonymous said...

You have to kill stationary, non-attacking targets.

well that is "derping grounds". so Blizz failed to implement any mechanic they use throughout the game in the proving grounds.
what a fail.
It could have been a great tool. *sigh*

Gevlon said...

@Dobablo: being AFK in Tol Barad (yes, the lvl 90 content) or on /follow in battlegrounds, gives you PvP gear, that's ilvl 620.
The legendary questline gives you a 680 ring.

Being on /follow in Molten Core LFR gives you a 640 head.

Leatherworking/Tailoring/BS has produced 200+ BoP crafting items, creating 2 pieces of 640 armor

1*680 + 4*620 = 5*630
3*640 + 3*620 = 6*630
Since there are 13 slots (only the bigger ring and trinket counts), you need only 2 "real" 630 piece to have 630 average ilvl.

@Anonymous: the tank and healer proving grounds do need you to perform in dungeon-like tasks.

Since Burning Crusade the design philosophy of WoW "heroics" is to be achievable by a team of
- 1 good tank
- 1 OK healer
- 3 /follow damage dealers

And then they are surprised that the DD queue is long.

Anonymous said...

What about the morons and slackers that read your blog, or other online references to the crossrealm group finder? What about slackers whose only insight has led them to surrounding themselves with unwilling good players?

Anonymous said...

anon What about the morons and slackers that read your blog, or other online references to the crossrealm group finder? What about slackers whose only insight has led them to surrounding themselves with unwilling good players?

Rest assured that M&S will not seek outof game reference. maybe specs and wowhead + mmochampion ... but they will not think on their own or seek other resources to makeup their mind.
nope.

Chris said...

Dude, bots aren't this bad.

If you can program a bot to run through instances and even play a little, it's extremely trivial to program them to do good dps.

lowrads said...

G., only a small percentage of your readers probably know what those numbers are supposed to be even out of those who know what they represent. The rest of us can't really follow along without being presented with some kind of baseline or average - or some considerable amount of time spent in a search engine for a game we'll likely never play.

The dungeon matching system is bad, apparently. Would WoW benefit from an equivalent to the open or affiliate fleet advert system in EVE?

For that matter, people are occasionally mentioning that they'd like to be members of more than one corp-like or affinity system. Such a system would be useful for adverting fleets beyond standings lists. Lots of NPSI groups depend on channels or out of game resources, so I can see how something like that would benefit them.

Péter Zoltán said...

Interesting, since the silver PG requirement I haven't seen horrible DPS in random groups. I've seen some jackasses and subpar performance but nothing _horrible_.

McJigg said...

A note of follower missions. The games doesn't spawn 'x' missions for your followers. Based on your follower levels, it will spawn 'x' missions in the 90-94 range, IF you have a follower in the 90-94 range. Plus and additional 'x' missions in the 95-99 range, IF you have a follower in the level 95-99 range.

Once a follower is level 100, you can focus on his item level by finding upgrade items from missions. But, level 100 missions are different.

You get 1/4 'x' level 100 missions, plus 1/4 'x' level 100 ilvl 615 missions if a follower has the required ilvl. Same for ilvl brackets 630 and 645.

If you want the most garrison mission, try to get a least one follower to max item level, keep one follower unleveled in the 95-99 range and one in the 90-94 range.

Personally I think that is a flawed system, as you end up with less missions to run if all your followers level up. But there it is.