I just wanted to quickly say that entering dungeon instances as a new player can lead to a lot of hostile interactions. As a newbie solo player, I find dungeons to be a double-edged sword: on the one hand they’re great for leveling, but often come with unwarranted hostility towards anyone who’s not efficient enough.
Players without heirlooms are at a clear disadvantage regarding their potential damage output. As a new player, I’m only able to keep up and do decent damage when using my rotation without any margin of error and when well-geared players aren’t doing their best. This is an issue because a “low” damage output more often than not gets me kicked for “being afk”. This is especially prevalent when I die. “Mage is AFK, look at DPS”. To add insult to injury, getting kicked flags me as a deserter.
Dungeon completion. A number of dungeons don’t require killing all bosses to be completed. This is alright when dungeons don’t have quests, or have quests tied to bosses that are required for the dungeon’s completion. It becomes an issue when a group minority requires the killing of a non-essential boss to complete a quest. So far, we’ve been promised that we’d return after killing essential bosses (this has never happened, everyone else just leaves), we’ve been chastised for slowing down the group, or we’ve been kicked for being a nuisance (see: Deserter debuff).
I may add onto this list later on, but I think that there could be some simple solutions for both situations, namely:
Removing the Deserter debuff for players that’ve been kicked. This is rather straightforward and perhaps there’s room for improvement, but the debuff is for deserters - not those who were forcefully removed from an instance.
I see three options that could be implemented fairly easily for this second issue. The first would be removing the quest altogether. Another solution would be making all dungeon bosses that are necessary for a quest’s completion essential for the completion of a dungeon. A last option would be encouraging a boss encounter by offering more XP or having a small chance of giving a rare drop.
These are my main issues with dungeons outside of the usual comments about gear or (lack of) skill, and general behavior of players within dungeons. It’s a shame, because barring what I just mentioned, I find leveling with dungeons far more enjoyable than with quests.
The debuff itself has been part of the system almost since the Vote to Kick system was introduced. It became an unfortunate necessity as certain players would urge the group, by request or by being a nuisance, to vote them out in order to avoid receiving a deserter debuff.
As for making bosses mandatory, I think this would be better to encourage a full clear requirement/bonus and has been suggested before. I recommend to suggest it again through the ingame feedback box.
The debuff is badly designed, Final Fantasy 14 does not put a debuff on people like this for BEING KICKED. You want to know how they manage it? They actively ban people for abusing the system, maybe instead of penalizing the players, Blizzard should finally look into fixing their moderation system, like people have been screaming at them to do for the past 10+ years.
This is not entirely correct, only players who VTK very often and get counter reported for this may get investigated.
I don’t see any examples of what is broken and needs to be fixed. If referring to the VTK in WoW systems:
Groups are empowered to manage their own members through the vote-kick system. If the majority of the group feels a player should be removed, they can initiate a vote-kick to remove them. The system is entirely under the control of our players. Players may choose to remove any other player from the group for any reason, provided the vote to kick passes.
Therefore being kicked is not considered “abusive” even if no or any reason is used. If you were harassed though besides that, you may report them seperately.
Do you know of any other suggestions that could be suggested in the in-game feedback box that would benefit players who are being unreasonably kicked (without removing the Deserter debuff) and could be realistically implemented by Blizzard? Because the way it currently works is rather hostile towards newbies and casual players.
I’ve seen quite a few VTK threads and honestly, besides the “require all bosses to be killed for rewards” there is not many without downsides.
I don’t think it is acceptable either that new players or casuals get kicked for such reason and it is tedious to create a slower group everytime you’re trying to do the content as well.
In modern Retail they’re going to add full NPC follower dungeons where you can solo + your own party NPC’s though. But obviously, that was not present in the Classic versions.
There is hostility towards anyone, not just new players.
Make one mistake and you’ll get kicked.
Even if you didn’t do anything wrong during the boss fight, but group wipe due to someone else mistake, you’ll get kicked if you take wrong turn in maze that lead to the dungeon entrance and being late to run back in.
You’ll get kicked for absolutely stupid reason, if any at all, but the system is working as intended.
There is nothing wrong with getting deserter debuff for no reason according to blizzard.
Best thing about this is that people who want to get themselves kicked to avoid deserter, can just disconnect from the game which make them get kicked really fast for being offline, and they will not have the debuff once they log in few minutes later.
Got kicked as DPS a few times because my dps was quite low, and I didn’t know the game mechanics. Especially just directly after I dinged my first char.
Never got kicked on my healer though, ofcourse logically as they may have to wait to find a new one. For that same reason tanks are also almost never kicked.
So you want 4 other players to play the exact way you want. Are you a celebrity or a well-known streamer?
You can always make a group and list all requirements you have in the group description box. No one applies. Guess why.
As for the quests and non-essential bosses: Why do you want to complete them? You won’t the loot after few more levels. You can always return later and solo the quests if their completion is so important for you.
All quests are optional. Why would you want them removed?
According to blizzard’s ToS, any reason to kick that passes is legitimate. If I don’t like your transmog, and vote to kick for that, that’s allowed. If I do this to every single ugly transmog I see, that’s also legitimate.
Even queueing as a 3 Stack and voting to kick the 2 randoms purely to grief them from getting valor mid bossfight at the last boss is legitimate according to ToS. Nobody can be reported for that.
Easy fix: make the entire group “stun” debuff for 3 minutes after kicking someone. This debuff doesn’t occur if kicked person was afk (no any actions for 60 seconds or more). In other kick situations:
If kicked person was griefing - okay, it happens sometimes, not a problem to wait 3 minutes debuff once in 50 dungeons.
But this debuff will stop “speedrunners”, kicking someone because of low dps to clear dungeon a bit faster.
Why should the group be punished if there is a player that does abysmal dps? I mean close to making no difference at all deserves to be removed to be honest.
I´ve seen that only once or twice.
People are probably exaggerating the kick problem.
I’ve proposed something similar, to prevent them for 5 minutes from re-entering RDF queue to search for replacements.
Was rejected, because it would apparently severely damage honest players kicking someone for legitimate reason instead of preventing toxic vote kick for stupid reasons.