World of Warcraft®

Let me begin by stating my stance - the current LFG system is broken and it serves only to create a community of players whose skill-level as a whole is on the decline.

Throughout the last year or so, I have levelled and geared tanks. Currently I have 5 tanks at 85 and from my perspective, the general level of dungeon grouping has declined dramatically. Now I admit, it might be just that I am cursed to be forever grouping with Int-stacking Death Knights or Str-stacking Hunters (both examples have happened several times) but still, the instances get completed.

In Wrath, these people would never complete an instance. The robust kicking system the LFG had back then was open to exploiting sure but it also ensured that people who didn't contribute meaningfully to the group's adventure didn't reap any rewards from doing so.

Now, in Cataclysm, the whole "vote to kick" feature is almost useless. Lets take today for an example. I was tanking a random ZG where my healer was 2nd on dps as a disc priest. Our dps consisted of a Shadow Priest who had bought tanking rings with Justice Points, a Paladin who had double tanking trinkets and a caster cloak and an agility weapon and a Rogue who just autoattacked or otherwise failed to break 3k dps. Still, we killed bosses. The first two that is. Now consider what would happen if this group went to Zanzil or Jindo. You know it, I know it. People would die.

I tried explaining to them that they have geared their characters in a way that we couldn't do the dungeon with them. I asked them to leave. I begged. I raged. Nothing worked. And I couldn't kick them. Lets take that one again - I COULDNT KICK THEM AND I WAS STUCK IN A GROUP WHERE THREE DPS DIDN'T BREAK 10k DPS AS A WHOLE.

Now, sure, I didn't need anything from there and I thought that I'd just leave the instance but then one of them said "!@#$, my gear doesn't matter, you can't kick me". True enough, I can't kick him. And even if I could, I could only kick one of them under the current system.

-> The problem is that in the current state of this game, decent tanks and healers can carry groups through dungeons without being able to affect the possibly three very sub-par players forcing them to spend ages in a dungeon. I have done Stonecore in 14 mins. I have also been in Stonecore for 113 mins, give or take a few mins. I know that dungeons will be shorter and easier in MoP but in my opinion that doesn't address the problem correctly - this will simply let people to wallow in their ignorance and never improve because the game cannot allow others to (forcibly) encourage them to do so.

Now I could go on and write examples of groups that I have joined halfway through an instance only to find them to be autoattacking, botting or otherwise incompetent and still the message "you cannot initiate more party kicks" destroys all hope of getting a decent group out of the mess. Now as a tank it's all right - I have no queue time and I can pretty much ignore this issue but hell, look what our beautiful game has become!

People abuse this system because they know they don't need to perform at all in order to get better gear. I have no idea why they do it but it's an undeniable fact that they do so. Sadly, I also know that most people who reply to this post will call me elitist or jerk. See what I did there? :D

Still, I would ask that the kicking system be changed back to what it was. If the system remains the way it is, I do honestly believe it to be detrimental to the skill-level of the community and this in turn will result in more and more people being unsatisfied with this once great game.

While i agree with what you're saying i do not think any change to the vote kick system would improve the situation at all. Essentially the reason why i think this is simply because there are too many griefers these days.

For blizzard to fix this problem, they need to do something with regards to the difficulty curve of the game. Likely involving some sort of necromantic ritual followed by excessive surgery so we get a decent difficulty curve that doesnt just start kicking players asses at the maximum level only.

Oh, to pre-empt the people who will inevitably bring up the tired arguments of "i pay the same so i should see the same content as everyone else", "Pugs wont get better if you make the dungeons harder", "Its only an insignificant amount of players that have problems with the difficulty":

1. You're in the wrong medium, you want a film or book if you want to see everything everyone else does on virtue of payment alone. Games are interactive, so you will need to interact with it in such a way to see everything it has to offer.
2. Yes they will. 4.0 proved this. As for the sub losses thats not really because of harder content, more changing difficulty uniformly.
3. It may be a small percent arguing for harder difficulty at the moment. Doesnt mean it would be detrimental to the game, or the business model, to accommodate them.

As for my argument number 2, what i mean is keep some faceroll content for when you cant be arsed with a challenge and just want to grind valour cap, we've all been there. But for the love of god when you get tired of that let us have some dungeons or something with more meaty challenges. Im sick of the only challenge in dungeons being the other people im with.

While i fully expect the people in the faceroll heroic queue to remain pretty much as the community is now, if not decay in terms of quality, i would anticipate people who run the more difficult dungeons to be more polite, more sociable and more sensible, because they would have to be to succeed. If they found that unacceptable, then they could stick with the faceroll dungeons.

I would just leave a group like that. You're always free to leave. Why go through 120 mins of torture, when you can get a fresh group in 15 mins. It's not instant, but it's still fast.

The game is now tailored to IQ lvl70 and casual players (less than 5 hours/week).
Next expansion will be IQ lvl65 and 4 hours/week.
Cheers.

OP I appreciate your post and what you are saying.

However I think you have come to the wrong conclusion about why you saw less of these bad players pre-DF than you do in the DF era.

It is not about kicks.

It is about invites. The intellect geared Warrior wouldn't even step foot in the dungeon in TBC. You rarely had to kick people because you never invited the bad ones in the first place.

The fact that an intellect geared DK can even join your group in the first place points you to the source of the problem.

There are third party amateur websites that can analyse a character and detect that flaw.

Yet the Dungeon Finder (and RF) system only uses a simplistic ilevel filter. As I have said many times, if it just used a slightly modified version of the armoury audit it wouldn't stop all bad players getting in but it would knock out 80% of them.

Such a system could be designed and programmed by a GCSE student.

This modified version of the armoury audit is the exact same system that we human beings used manually in TBC when forming groups - a quick inspect to see if they had the correct gear for their class and that it was gemmed and enchanted correctly.

It worked then and it would now. Thanks to the marvels of modern technology we wouldn't even have to inspect them ourselves.

As I say you would still got the odd bad player slip through but they would be small enough in number that the limited kick system would not be overwhelmed.