3 replies to this topic

[I_Que_147]

Hi, my previous topic was fairly damning about new players, and I didn't really suggest any useful ways to improve the experience of new players despite my rant on the poor user experience. Hopefully this topic will begin to address that as I have a fairly good perspective.

 

One of the most tedious things about bfme is finding others to play with, currently really the only option you have is loading up bfme and checking the lobby periodically (you could also use http://online.the3rdage.net/). However using the browser to check means that you won't show up as online so others won't know you're looking to play.

 

Integrating bfme features into the current t3a:online client would go a long way to solving these problems. I have limited knowledge of other third party services such as gameranger, but I believe they work in a similar fashion as to what I am suggesting. If it was possible to communicate via the client, be shown as "online" and launch the game from the client, it would make the process much easier for new players. Also this would help avoid the refresh (bug?) in the bfme lobby, I doubt that new players know they need to refresh the lobby manually so that new games are shown.

 

Thought I'd add that I mentioned about this to ICT but a forum topic never hurt^^

[Mathijs]

We have been discussing and planning such features internally ever since we released T3A:Online. Safe to say, they are in development, but with our limited team of developers/time, it may take a while yet.

[I_Que_147]

@mathijs that's completely understandable I'm sure there more prevalent things on your to-do list. If I could make a suggestion then, as it is time that's most important, an incomplete job would be just as good? Would it not be fairly simple to integrate an irc/user online list into the client? While it's far from perfect would it not help the community communicate?

[Easily]

Just throwing this out there, but:

 

This thread reminds of something Guildwars 2 used before the Looking for Group tool became useful.

http://gw2lfg.com/lfgs/new

 

The idea behind it is pretty simple, if you're looking for a group for something, you fill out the small form I linked, which puts your ingame name on a list for that particular activity / dungeon / whatever.

You can browse the list yourself to see who else is interested in doing the same dungeon as you are.

 

After ~30 minutes your name is automatically removed from the list, although you can manually extend or delete the listing if you have not yet or have already found a group.

 

The site I linked above is perhaps a bit more feature rich than we need.

However a tiny web form which asks you for your name and after filling it out you get added to the online.the3rdage.net page as 'Looking to play!' for 15 minutes could be a great temporary solution? (Later it could be tied to forum accounts to prevent abuse)