Join the functionality of LFG and LFP

[Zadkiele]

The 'Looking for Party' flag is sadly underused. It's a shame, because it has the potential to be a great mechanic.

The answer is to somehow link it into the Looking for Group panel.

I'm no interface designer, so I don't know the best way of doing it, but if you create an LFG then you should get a list of people who have set their LFP flag who match your group requirements, and have the ability to send them an invite (ideally not just a blind invite, it would be nice if the invite included the quest name & difficulty)

If you did this, then I could see people using LFP a lot lot more.

Zad

[BDS]

That would be nice, something that allows you to say you are looking for a party doing quests in a certain level range. A lot of times there will not be a group in my level range and I'm still learning all the quests and don't really feel confident enough to take on a leadership role in them. Especially since many are new to me as I level up.

I often see the LFP info is just plain wrong as well. At least when I'm looking at my friends list it will often say people are looking and I go to message them and they respond that they are already in party. I know there is a difference between the two icons and can tell the difference between the two. I generally end up typing their name in the who panel and seeing where they are and then sending them a tell to see if they are interested if they are in a public area.

[Eff]

We already have something like this in place - if you set yourself to Looking for Group you can put a note of what you're looking to do. Your status of looking for group needs to be taken down when you no longer want to and updated by the player(if its outdated then its down to laziness), which is good because at times you may one to be in a group hanging out while waiting for a group to do what you really want.

To find people as BDS does, you use the WHO tab and select players looking for group, if they entered a description of what they are looking for you'll see it in their box area. You can filter by class and level, click on each icon to select or deselect.

Any person who has a Looking for member post up can easily swap to the who tab and use this feature but few rarely do. I don't care to speculate if the newer generation realizes its there but the ones who have been around just don't like searching for people (sit back and chat in a party until it fills).

It requires people to put effort into keeping up their status, they could make it so when in a party it clears but that would isolate you until you found a preferred group.

I haven't any idea if this is of any help but my eyes are half closed! Good luck out there!

[Zadkiele]

Any person who has a Looking for member post up can easily swap to the who tab and use this feature but few rarely do.

This is the whole point, and it's a destructive circle: because people who are LFG never check the Who list for people LFP, it means that people don't use the LFP system.

What it needs is a UI improvement: As I said, I'm no interface designer, but maybe something like this: when the leader of the group hovers over his group on the LFG panel, instead of popping up the list of people in the group (which he can see from his group panel anyway), instead he gets a list of people who are LFP that match the LFG restrictions.

Zad

[Letrii]

I would not like to see people I can invite popping up when I hover over group. I want to see who is in group when I do that.

[Flasharte]

i check the who panel when im trying to build a group. mostly just to see who is left not in a group. but if i see folks weith the LFG next to there names i send them tells first. Especially clerics, poor clerics, always struggling to get into a group, ya gotta feel for em!!

[Zadkiele]

I would not like to see people I can invite popping up when I hover over group. I want to see who is in group when I do that.

Group leader should already know who is in his group, and the party list is a good indicator.

Anyway, the details of just how the group leader is informed about those LFP isn't that important, I'm no UI designer.

Zad

[Angelus_dead]

The 'Looking for Party' flag is sadly underused. It's a shame, because it has the potential to be a great mechanic.

The solution to this is to improve the Looking For Party feature to better reflect the way people actually play DDO.

The biggest shortcomings:
1. You can only set one character LFP at a time. In reality it is players who go looking for parties, not individual characters. A user will often be happy to join a group with any of her characters on this server. Just because only one char can log in at a time doesn't mean they're not all searching for groups.
2. The game doesn't remember LFP settings between uses. The quests a person is interested in running shouldn't be erased just because he joins a party, so when one group is done it should be easy to go back to the prior LFP settings with one click.
3. Your LFP info is not displayed if you are in a group. The reality is that being in a group doesn't necessarily mean you're playing a quest: often it's just a few people chatting and killing time while searching for something to do.
4. Can't set a party as LFP. Often two people playing together will want to join a larger group as an atomic unit.

Those there are the most important flaws with LFP. The steps to solve most of them are fairly straightforward.

I'm no interface designer, so I don't know the best way of doing it, but if you create an LFG then you should get a list of people who have set their LFP flag who match your group requirements

That's not a bad idea, but it would be unhelpful unless the LFP system were first improved. Otherwise not enough players will set themselves LFP for that function to return nontrivial results. The current reality is that very few players set themselves as LFP, and people who run LFGs can easily read that list in a few seconds.