Daily Thoughts: Dungeon Finder/Vote Kick Changes

Blizzard decide to make a couple significant changes to the Dungeon Finder system to help curb the rampant abuse that’s been going on recently. Personally, I’m a fan of some of these changes but one I really could do without.

The Good:

* Players who are outside a dungeon for more than a few minutes are now immediately able to be kicked.

Players going AFK or off doing some for an extended period out of the group should be able to be kicked without waiting for the cursory 15 minutes that had been opposed up to this point. I absolutely agree

* If queuing as a group with a tank or healer, and the tank or healer drops group (or is kicked) soon after joining, those that queued with them will also be removed from the dungeon.

A simple change that prevents the “wtb tank queue 50g” attitude that’s been plaguing a lot of groups. This way a tank cannot insta-queue a group and then leave, forcing the people who waited legitimately to wait longer for a tank who actually intends to run to join.

* If three or more players group queue with each other it will require an additional vote for them to kick anyone they did not group queue with.

This is also a great change to issue that 3 man guild groups can’t as easily “bully” other non-guild member, at least not without the support of the other non-guild member in the group. Typically if the 3 guild members AND the 4th pug want to kick the 5th pug, there’s a pretty good change he was a baddie and needed to go. Good choice blizzard.
* If someone initiates a vote kick for someone they group queued with they will not incur a penalty to their ability to initiate future kicks.

Nothing really significant here. You won’t get punished if your guild member DC’s and you have to kick him.
The Bad:

* If a group queue of 4 kicks the one person that they did not group queue with they will each receive a more severe penalty to their ability to initiate future kicks.

I have a little bit of a problem with this. If you join the Dungeon finder with a 4 man guild group and there’s a bad or inactive player you’ll get a significant mark against your ability to kick future bad or inactive players. This is a pretty unfortunate case of protecting the minority at the expense of the majority. Hopefully though, it still takes a few cases of this happening before it becomes a problem, otherwise getting a bad streak of AFK pugs joining your 4 man guild run could be detrimental to your ability to initiate legitimate kicks.

Overall, it’s a pretty good change. I imagine the penalty for 4 member queued groups kicking won’t end up too ridiculous so we should just have a little less douche-baggery in our overall Dungeon Finder experience.

The full text from blizzard can be found HERE.

Luck of the Draw Buffed

The buff we receive for being in groups with random party members through the dungeon finder system is getting buffed, says Ghostcrawler – the leader systems designer of Wow. Each party using the dungeon finder system will see a 5% buff to health, healing and damage for each random member up to 15% increase. This should make pugs a significantly easier process, at least in terms of gear, organization, and skill needed to complete them. In the post GC also comments that the 5% buff we should have been getting already was broken and only working in some dungeons. 4.0.6 is bringing all sorts of goodies. Check the full text out after the break. (more…)