Grouping Favor

[Cardoor]

Your idea went to **** with this first part. Astral shards shouldn't be a reward for anything. They should be removed from the game, and anyone encouraging their use and distribution needs to stop.

Give us something to work with. Astral shards can be used universally by most players. What would you use?

P.S. by "us" above I mean anyone willing to hash out a good system with me.

[Cardoor]

This needs some attention. Multiboxing can exploit that. And multiboxing is not grouping.
Otherwise, a good idea (if you get past what I said - which I doubt you can).

Multi-boxing is harder than it sounds lol if they want to hassle with 4 toons I'd say just let them

I was all set to hate the idea reading the title, but the idea presented in the OP is pretty good.

I don't think multiboxing would be an issue because it's a massive PITA to multibox 4 characters into every quest. Few would bother, and for those few, more power to you.

Maybe skip the first 100 favor reward just to make it more of a hassle to try and game the system by constantly rolling up throw-away alts to farm up 100 favor. (3 multibox alts plus a fourth disposable one on your main account that keeps getting deleted and rerolled to get to 100 favor.)

Multi-boxing for turbine points might be easier? I haven't done the math, but I think farming TP would be more profitable. For that reason, I do not see astral shards being too much of a draw to go through all of the work (though it does give them some AS too).

From Turbines perspective, I wonder what increased grouping by even 20% would mean. If pugs, guild groups and friends group more I do not know what that would mean to their sales (whether the AS investment is even worth it to them).

[Cardoor]

If encouraging more grouping is to help retain newer players then more grouping at random may have he opposite effect and cause players to leave. For a newcomer to have an enjoyable experience in a party several factors should be matched with other players but there is no matching and scheduling tool available that I am aware of.

Without having a better way to match players for parties offering shards to encourage more grouping is a good but premature idea.

I see it as a way to retain all players, not specifically new players. I think a full LFM panel with a variety of skill levels and playstyles available will give everyone including newbies a place to group. Newbies might see raids and quests being posted with the "All welcome" message attached more frequently. In short, my hope would be more groups equal more variety and grouping opportunities for everyone.

[Cardoor]

...

Trying to force people to group with you will never work out the way you hope it will.

I am against forced grouping and it is some of the reason I posted the thread in the first place (Incentive vs mechanically forcing others to change their playstyle). Where are you seeing the "forced" part of the OP?

[Cardoor]

Lots of people believe that but in my experience veteran DDO players are pretty forgiving. There are a lot of nice people playing DDO but I amost never group with any of them. The few times I have grouped nobody ever made any unforgiving comments about my mistakes.

That was nice but I stopped joining groups anyway because my mistakes are unacceptable to me. My character Sir Diesalot would be happy questing with Sir Diesevenmore and Lady Walksoffcliffs but the current matching tool does not allow misfits to find each other.

Until it does my character will continue to solo where he can do no harm to anyone else. Offering shards to join groups will not change that.

It will likely take some patience, but I see people post for specific groups on the forums. For example some people post perma-death groups. They can take awhile to fill. You could try a new angle on the server forum you play the most on.

[Waaye]

I see it as a way to retain all players, not specifically new players. I think a full LFM panel with a variety of skill levels and playstyles available will give everyone including newbies a place to group. Newbies might see raids and quests being posted with the "All welcome" message attached more frequently. In short, my hope would be more groups equal more variety and grouping opportunities for everyone.

Thanks for the response, Cardoor, but the "All welcome" message sounds great but should usually lead to a random group which can be bad. Sir Dies-a-lot and Sir Can-ace-it-all really can't adventure together because there is too great a difference in their effective levels. Even if their indicated levels are equal Sir Die's effective level is something like 0.95 times the indicated level and Sir Can's is closer to 1.25. That is a difference of three tiers at level 10. Since power increases exponentially with effective level that means Sir Can is able to deal out and absorb several times the damage of Sir Die. Under those conditions Sir Die is always piking when questing or raiding with Sir Can.

To reduce the disparity between characters the message should read something like "All first-life 28-point build characters welcome" The veterans' characters are probably still going to have greater effective levels than the newbys' but at least the difference should be small enough to allow the newer players to contribute something of value towards the success of the quest without always piking.

Matching levels would help but even with that there are other things like speed and the use of spoilers to coordinate as well.

The existing grouping tool is quite limited and does not match many important things. It is too random to lead to good parties that all participants can enjoy. This needs to be corrected before encouraging more players to join groups. Offering shards for grouping is a good idea but a little premature until matchmaking is improved.

It will likely take some patience, but I see people post for specific groups on the forums. For example some people post perma-death groups. They can take awhile to fill. You could try a new angle on the server forum you play the most on.

Sorry to give the impresson that I am looking for groups because I'm really not. After they nerfed archers and made us all into pikers I stopped joining parties entirely. The main reason I would like to see better player retention is so that newcomers without much gear will stay and buy the stuff I sell on the ASAH. The shards I earn from that will allow me to buy more of the Gold Seal contracts I need to solo the harder quests. There is no way to pike solo so that is pretty much all I do these days.

[Cardoor]

What do you guys think of this addition?

Raid Incentive:

-- 15 grouped raid completions is worth 5 astral shards one time per raid

-- Raid Incentive can only be earned by groups of 7 or more

-- 100 AS total (20 raids * 5) but keep in mind, would require grouping up 300 times (20 *15) to earn them all.

The reason for 15 completions (and not 20) is to give a 5 raid cushion for real life events during game play. The idea is that someone wanting the 20 completion end reward could probably still pick up the raid incentive along the way without getting tense about someone needing to leave a raid for whatever reason.