Making grouping / group leaders life easier

[kiryan]

I think that the game could use some upgrades for group leaders.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to address many of the biggest barriers without severely dumbing down the game, so although theres a lot of dumb ideas below, perhaps one or two are realistic considering that the game more or less centers around leaders and there are a lot of barriers to overcome to starting / leading a fun group.


Leading Headaches:

Gathering.

1. LFG flag is good, maybe we could expand on it, im not sure how. Better would be a ZONE system that let you list your

i. availability to zone
ii. the zones you want to do
iii. the zones you dont want to do
iv. the alts (class/level) that you are willing to play

A channel for people who want to zone. So a leader can get on and check who (zone channel), go who wants to zone and gauge the respones.

2. Which zones are done. Like RP news cept opent to players to add their comments, resets on boots. Limit to two posts every 15 minutes per player, limit to 20 chars per post to limit peoples ability to be a dork.

3. communicating with hidden / invis / dark (!infra) / light (!ultra).

Sucks waiting 12 minutse to talk to a potential group member for ultra vision folks, tell x to tell y is confusing, annoying. Not such a big deal for darkness since most people carry lights, hidden only affects 1 class, and invis is troublesome.

4. group note

A command that allows the leader to create a message that group members can read by entering a command. Common use would probably be like "Going to Jot, gather at TP, I want to leave at 2:25 PST, if you know an enchanter ask them to log on, bids" or "we spanked, consent roguex for drag, wait for tell from clericY for ress". Maybe this would be better as a player finger command so you could finger different people and see what they are doing / into. Also allows a leader to continue momentum while hes taking a 5 minute piss / chow / relax break.

5. Glist / Bids

i. make glist preserve on group leaders death.
ii. bid splitting system. Automate the free for all bid system. Let leader put a time limit on it for each round like 300, 30, 30 (5 minutes for firstround, 30 seconds for 2nd, 30 seconds for 3rd). Could auto give if in same room, or probably just announce to the group the winner.

*** thank you thank you thank you for mmail which has made splitting so much easier


6. Transportation.

Transportation has become increasingly easy, but I think we can take a cue from Everquest... In about their 2nd or 3rd year the players demanded and received a global portal system that cut out about 20 tells and and 30 minutes off travel time which was killing groups.

i. I would like to see at least a city to city portal system so that melee chars wouldnt be at such a disadvantage to traveling and so that more people would get off thier ass instead of begging for wells/ghetto wells/holes. This would also make getting back to your corpse / exp group easier in those off peak times again encouraging people to get out more and do more for themselves.

ii. Vigs could be available in towns for money or perhaps through something like a sleep command that ages you. In the same place itd be nice if you could buy raft / levi / fly

iii. A Translocate type spell, cast on someone to send them back to their guild. This is for sending those people who got to go now back home. Another everquest rip off, but its a good idea for those !teleport zones (not gonna help you if your enchanter has to leave, but might be useful none the less). Would be good if this was a cleric spell or a general mage spell so that most every group has it available.

7. Equipment swapping

i. It would be nice if you could "mail" your equipment from an inn to your storage at another inn. This would be more or less moot if there was a city to city portal system.

8. Spank recovery

i. consent
1a. ability to consent multiple people at the same time
1b. "consent group" toggle that allows anyone in your group to act with your consent
1c. ability to log off and leave people consented while your out of game (consent is merely a tool to prevent theft / damage to your character). You of course wouldnt be able to ress/revive/soul walk them.

ii. drag fail. if you dont have consent or strength or its not in the room (misspell) just show a message and drag what you can anyways. If there is nothing you can drag then you would effectively just go in the direction you indicated.

iii. area preserve... druid / shaman spell... maybe necro/lich maybe ranger/dire???

*** thank you for bard ress reducing song and soul walk.

[Stamm]

Is this thread a joke?

[Dalar]

No it isn't Stamm. I've seen people leave because they said they could commit the time needed for the zone an hour before the zone actually began. Some of the things above, like the zone news and the zone channel would make this game alot more tolerable for newer players and for people who are already getting bored of the game.

Another suggestion would be bind points or reseting your hometown. I hate having to taxi people from 3 different hometowns. Having to do a CR for 10-30 minutes just because we died for some weak reason isn't my idea of fun.

[kiryan]

what im getting at is leaders are a large part of what keeps interest going. make life easier on them.

[Kegor]

Some good ideas there. My favorite being communications issues, which would mostly be solved if ultravision was fixed anyways. The red shape thing is real irritating sometimes as well, but not near as irritating as "Someone has just given you thier consent." and you dunno wtf it is.

[Crumar]

As a leader the one thing that gets me frustrated the most is having people constantly afk while zonging. It has gotten so bad now that I hardly ever want to lead anything at all, and there are people I refuse to take because I know they will not pull their own weight within the group. The problem is that there is a low player base and sometimes you have no choice but to take these people zonging. So how to deal with this problem?

I doubt it can be solved until there are more players willing to play the game rather then log on and tag along. Perhaps immortals can give warnings to repeat offenders because its sorta like botting only they are not doing jack all unless its in a major fight if at all.

The ideas above have some merit and would make life easier for a leader. Would love to see us be able to reset our hometowns so that if we die, we can all get together in WD or DK for instance. Don't know if I would put in portals from one city to the next sorta like how EM is now because a lot of people would not even explore the mud and just bypass some zones along the way. Better to have them walk to a certain town and find the inn and then set that place as a hometown so if they die then CRing themselves near the last town would be ideal. A command like rent home or something would set it for the persons pfile. Number of times in a day to do it would be limitless so long as your at a inn and type the right command it should always set your character to that specific inn.

Your other ideas are sound would help leaders get groups quicker specially if we had a channel to recruit. Something I would like to see is as follows:

Zone list: Twisted Temple of Flesh | Current leader: Crumar (Dwarf, Good)|

Time till zone: 15:00 hours | Players Required: 15| Mininum level:42|

Estimated time till zone completion: 4 hours|

Ideal players classes: 3*warriors, 2*clerics, 2*shamans, 1enchanter, 1 rogue, 1 illusionist, 5*other ( people would know that other would mean a mix of classes not listed can be invoker ranger druid you get the idea.)

Current filled slots: 2*warrior, 1 cleric, 1 invoker, 1 druid, 1 enchanter (the rest would need to be filled and may be highlighted as whats needed so people can get a idea as to who to bring.)

Note: would like to have a apply command so that if someone is intrested have the person applying to zone leader with alts and levels so they can better decide who would be ideal for a certain spot. Time to finish the zone would be in red so they have no excuse to bail unless a real life problem came up. People would know before hand how long this will take. A list like that would let me get people quicker. Also can do this for Exp. so that people looking for exp can apply for that to the exp leader instead. Don't know how hard this would be all to code but its worth a shot to try and ask for it. Keep the ideas comming they are all great so far! Thanks for your time.

Crumar

[Sarell]

I like the idea of multiple consents.

I like the idea of glist not dissolving on death. Same pot as group not disbanding on death / spell slots not fubaring on death.

I don't really like any of the other ideas...

Transport is stupidly easy already. (PS i thought the idea of giving squids wormhole and rift was laughable even still :P)

Infra / Darkness is meant to make life a bit harder. Really not a problem. Have to make some challenge for death.

The portal / transport idea for melee is just insane. Moonwell is never used for zones as it is.

People afking in zones is a major problem,, but hard code certainly isn't the solution, bigger pbase is.

I would like leaders to have the power to deleted and directly take funds from peoples RL bank accounts who tog LFG on while they are AFk!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *MOAN*

Don't like the idea of automated bidding. If you want to do this is really a client kind of setup fro your groups? there are lots of ways to bid gear out. Sometimes people have a valid reason to be afk that extra 1 second.

Don't like the idea of a group forming channel. There just isn't that many people, you generally know who is on when etc, and enlisting through a hardcoded thing like this could cause all sorts of leader haedaches with the amount of bad blood between people you would get in your groups, happens already just forming on spur of moment. Also I think it would be annoying as people would be able to claim zones then not actually get the people to do them, perhaps you get like a 10K fine if you don't do the zone. Perhaps we could just start posting it on the RP board... or anothe board *grins*