Guild Wars LFG panel sucks as much as WoW’s one

I was giving a look at the latest update notes and beside the great feature of “reconnect after disconnect” there’s also the mention of a new “party search” that works along the lines of the one introduced in WoW.

First consideration: you need WoW to make a basic MMO feature take the spotlight?

That’s an important point. MMOs have been broken on a basic level for a long time. They were niche because only a niche of players could swallow the bullshit they fed us for years. Our communities kept underlining those flaws for a long time. Like it happened against questing, soporific combat, solo play, insanely long treadmills and so on. But all that stuff was blatantly ignored and considered worthless. The same was with decent interfaces and not that shit pre-WoW, with movable panels sitting randomly at the border of the screen that had no sense.

Then WoW comes and EVERYONE goes on a copying spree.

I wonder. Devs copy WoW because they understand it’s good, or they just copy for the sake of it? Considering what Mythic is doing with their PvP/RvR the answer is kind of obvious. Devs don’t copy the good part because they RECOGNIZE them, they copy just everything. Good and bad things together. They chase and love the smell of WoW’s ass.

But then we also get this. That revealed another important truth: you need talent even to copy.

Anyway, Guild Wars LFG tool sucks as much as WoW’s one. It does one thing worse and one better. With the difference that a good LFG panel would be much more necessary in WoW than in GW.

The worse thing is that it lets you flag LFG just for ONE purpose, while at least WoW gave you three.

The better thing is that when you are searching you can see the whole list of those LFG or LFM. While in WoW you had to repeat a search for each different topic listed.

So the point is: WoW is infectious.

Till WoW spreads good habits, then all it’s good, because games improve. But the same happens even in the other case. WoW does something wrong and you can be sure it will spread like a plague.

Good game design would need to go through WoW to be recognized.

P.S.
I gave it a look in-game and it actually sucks more than WoW as it only “sees” players in the same location (or the different instances of it). So it’s even less powerful. But at the same time GW is a game with a different structure and there is no real need for a more complete tool. Overall GW’s LFG tool accomplishes its purpose better than WoW and its respective tool.

They were smart to use five general categories, including “trade” and “guild” and then just letting the players set their custom messages. When you open the panel you have the complete list with all the categories and this helps to have a broad view (the good point I underlined above).

It’s not surprising that people use the tool mostly in the capitals where they can reach a wider population and override the limits of the one location.

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