EQII’s Dungeon Finder: A Player’s Postmortem

Roughly three months ago in October, EQII released a feature that I was particularly looking forward to.  The Dungeon Finder was posed to be a solution to a fairly major problem facing players in the game: quickly finding other people to play with who also want to run some dungeons.

If you’ve played EQII or WoW recently you might be familiar with the feature. But if you haven’t, it isn’t a hard concept. It is a UI window that lets you sign yourself or your partially full group up for a dungeon that is something in your level range.

The feature released and was practically dead on arrival. For the most part, the feature works. If you have a group of similar level people of appropriate classes, it will form them into a group and deposit them into a dungeon.

So why didn’t this feature get used? It sounds good in theory, I was excited. I jumped in on day one, with my tank, so I could learn some new dungeons and find new people to play with.

    Cross Server?

One of the criticisms that was quickly thrown at the Dungeon Finder was it’s lack of cross-server grouping. It seems reasonable for people to expect that it would be a better feature if it had a bigger population of people who could form groups.

There are two fundamental problems I see with adding the cross-server option for EQII.  The first is born of experience watching the cross-server feature in battlegrounds. While the DF has been relatively bug free, the battlegrounds were a disaster and continue to be problematic. For large periods of time, battlegrounds were offline because of bugs. Players who logged into battlegrounds might find themselves stranded or return to their world without any spent AA’s.

If we think that DF has a reputation for being a useless feature now, imagine the negative impression it will leave when those kinds of disasters strike. Add in all the reasons for group dungeon runs namely: shinnies, quest updates, achievement updates, experience, AA exp. Each one of those has the potential to be broken. And while they are making changes to the group dungeons to make them cross-server, they might just break it for “normal” groups too.

The second problem is it would not solve, what I see as, the real flaws with the Dungeon Finder.

    A Group?  Yes.  A Useful Group? Unlikely.

While I was using the Dungeon Finder (DF) my main problem with it was the groups it created were unable or unwilling to complete the dungeons they were placed in. No matter how big your pool of participants is, if you put them into a situation that is likely to result in failure the majority of the time, they will stop coming. And that’s what I think has happened here.

The DF currently selects a tank, a healer and any four others for most dungeons. If they don’t have the required critical mitigation they won’t be given the option of joining some of the hardest dungeons, but even a badly geared tank is given the option of most dungeons in the game.

So far I have not been able to complete any dungeon with the tank provided. In the cases that we were able to complete the dungeon it was because one of the players switched to a tank that was better suited or better geared for the dungeon.

Let me be a little clearer about what I think the problems here are:
* Not all fighters can be tanks but the DF treats them all the same.
* Not all healers can heal a group through all the offered dungeons.
* The DF does not offer the option to anyone to select their role. It assumes any fighter will want to be the main tank ect.

I think the last on the list is probably the simplest so lets look at it first.

    I Don’t Want To Be The Tank (or Healer, or Maybe I Do!)

I think people generally fall into the “I do”, “I don’t” or “I don’t care” camps on whether they want to be the tank.  Let’s assume that by tank I’m also referring to solo healing, crowd control, pure dps ect.

A simple box that would let the player pick their position would solve the problem of under-geared, unknowledgeable, or unwilling fighters being put in uncomfortable psitions. My Guardian would love to main tank in a group, but I know she will die quickly when she attacks many mobs and I only have so many life saving spells to cast.  I want to be able to take her into a group and be a support class in dungeons I can’t tank so that I can get loot, xp and quest updates.

WoW accomplishes this with having three options: Tank, Healer, & DPS.  I think EQII could have the same setup or even add a ‘crowd control’ for classes who can do that.  Obviously, pure tanks shouldn’t be able to sign up as healers.  But let a Monk just do DPS to fill in a slot.  It may not provide the same dps as an equivalent ranger, but it will be some and it will fill out the group with a better play experience.

    And It Solves the First Two

If all fighters can’t tank all dungeons then not giving fighters the option to participate without being the main tank will often doom the group to failure. I am not saying that any particular fighter class can’t tank any specific zone if they don’t have the proper gear and experience.  However, if you are running most mid-tier dungeons it is quite likely that you are attempting to get that gear and you don’t already have something better.

If the most common occurrence is that you have aspiring rather than already high achieving fighters on your hands then an option to play in an alternate role is absolutely necessary.

This is just as true for healing classes. While they may be able to heal a group solo, they might be more effective as a spot healer and dishing out damage.  If you combine the case of an ‘average’ tank with an ‘average’ healer and put them into a hard dungeon it just isn’t fun.

So have I beat this horse to death? I want to pick my role, not have it picked for me.  Let’s move on.

    Lack of Granularity

As of now, the DF will exclude you from a few dungeons if your crit mit is low.  But is that really the best way to form a group?

Should a level 90 tank wearing level 30 gear and no AA’s be treated the same as one wearing level 90 gear with max AA’s?

WoW solved this problem by giving each piece of gear in game an ‘item level’ and then requiring you to meet an average ‘item level’ requirement for each dungeon.  Generally, by the time you had all your gear from the current dungeons you were running you are ready to move on and allowed to enter hard dungeons.

I really don’t think EQII needs to add another stat to items. We definitely have enough numbers to make a value judgment on items right now.  But is any one stat appropriate to define a class? There is the base stats for each class but that becomes muddled when you take into account all the other stats like critical chance, critical mitigation, multi attack ect for each of the types of classes.

What I think would make sense is to create an average based on the level and tier of your items. For example, my fairly well geared raiding Bard currently has almost all “Fabled” and “Level 90″ gear. My Guardian, who is also level 90, has a mix of Public Quest gear, a few raid hand-me-downs and some quested items.  She would probably come out at “Treasured” and “Level 88″ gear if they were all averaged.

So if my logic is clearer than mud, I am proposing taking the tier (Mastercrafted, Treasured, Fabled ect) combining it with the level and then taking the average to create our very own EQII item ranking.

Each zone would then need a value added to it that basically says “Hey you need to have mostly Treasured gear at <the level of the zone -5>”. Or for harder zones it could be the level of the zone and a higher tear of gear.

I personally think this would make each zone much more likely to be completed by the group that gets sent into it. And if I’m following my own logic above, more successful groups means more goodwill towards the feature and more people using it.

I also see one big problem with this idea. Each zone would have to be given a ranking. That means each zone would require hands on effort from a developer and a decision on how hard it is.  This is much more time intensive than a few crit mit checks and requires someone who is either knowledgeable about all the class combinations and their gear or someone who is given a lot of time to find this out.

    What Dungeon Finder?

In addition to the problems I’ve laid out, the DF suffers from a lack of any marketing. Anyone who missed the DF launch in October of 2011 might not even know that the feature exists, whether they are brand new players or returning players.

This one is easy to fix. If the feature is solid and useful, people will talk about it with each other and people will find out that way. There is also in-game messaging on the launchpad, welcome screen, the zoning “Did You Know…” and MOTD.

If it were a better feature right now, I’d think the UI for it should be more prominent in the game so it is easier to find.

    Good Groups, Easy to Find, So What?

So what if the Dungeon Finder did make zone appropriate groups and let you play in the role you wanted. Would it really be better than player created groups? Players are so ingrained now to use their friends or in-game channels to create groups that I think we need a carrot for the DF.

Players wanting to run dungeons often want to get gear for their character. Again, there are exceptions to this that I won’t argue, but there are many casual players who would hop into a group if they had a good chance of getting a piece of gear out of it. So I propose (by stealing the idea from other games) that once a day you should be awarded a piece of gear that is level and class appropriate and would be a suitable piece of gear for running groups. Something on par with what you would need to rise up into the next rank of dungeons from what you are running now.

There is also the well established EQII tradition of offering tokens that can be used to buy unique items. I don’t see a problem with adding a DF token that is given only if you choose to run a random dungeon in your appropriate level/tier. And the rewards can be the standard carrots we are all used to: gear, house items, illusions, food, temporary buffs, ect.

I don’t think that the DF should just be the shard camping that normal dungeons require.

If we could just get every casual player to log in once during their weekly or twice weekly play sessions it would greatly increase the amount of people using the feature. And if those groups are capable of winning the dungeon they are put into, we will greatly increase the number of players who leave the game happy and with a potential new in-game friends they can play with again.