grouping problems

[*juggleblood*]

[quote="Thraxas":3v67rb0u]"This is a group mud" <<< sort of really annoys me because I don't enjoy grouping, but that said it is kinda true at higher levels.

"This is a group mud" <<< yet there are only 2 players who lead groups and one of them is quite frankly hopeless at it and both only lead the same bh xp runs, except when you say this lots of players come out of the woodwork and cite examples of groups they led days / weeks / months ago.

"This is a group mud" <<< I'd love this to be true rather than just the optimistic desire of the admin, if it were true there should always be a choice of groups to join at all times.

I know there are niggling problems with getting tanks for groups etc. but lets face these could be overcome if players had incentive, but the biggest bar to this this being a true group mud is the lack of leaders. Rather than leaders being arm twisted into leading and getting flack for not doing it well enough we should have players competing for the chance to lead. Make the lead bonuses signigficant enough and it would happen.

[b:3v67rb0u]Give group leaders say a bonus of 25% of the xp that every group member receives and players would queue up for their turn to lead and all players would be romanced into joining groups by the leaders[/b:3v67rb0u]

Maybe this is over the top, but I would rather have 3 competing bugging me to join their groups when I logged in every time than only seeing a group run once a day normally just before 1am local time.

That all said even with such a bonus I probably still wouldn't lead anyway ...

T[/quote:3v67rb0u]

I dunno. You're right that there's a paucity of leaders, but I don't know if it's from lack of incentive as someone else pointed out. Maybe it's just the personality types that are still putting hours of play into a text based game who's very name is synonymous with laziness. It's a real hassle to lead big groups. You're a loner type yourself, so I'm sure u can understand. I think if we over-incentivized it, we'd see more of the hardcore power xping ala Surfnazi and ilk.

Ideally grouping would be encouraged by fresh content, quests, etc... Low level imms could do a lot in that regard, but you also have to consider that school just started back up and we generally see reduced interest until the holidays. I wish I had the time to build more. I'll be fairly busy until winter.

When I log in and see 2 or 3 groups of 2-4 people each, I'm happy. We have a few xp leaders who come and go in waves and when they start to slow down, people take time to assess their char, see what spells they need, run some eq, etc... I don't think we need to take any drastic measures to assure theres an xp group every night.

just my 2 cents