Sad it took patch 1.3 to get a group finder which was identified as needed in Beta numerous times by myself and a horde of others.
Though, here's the thing: There were way more people in beta *against* the implementation of a group finder than there were people who were *for* the group finder.
So... You can say Bioware did listen to their playerbase alright.
In my opinion, the early guild leaders panicked EA as they came in from WOW and various games and derailed a lot of dev intentions, and caused a lot of chaos. A great deal of the story based game we might have seen got re-engineered in ways we might never seen to give us a half-assed WOW clone, because the beta crew wanted to see familiar stuff they then rejected.
Gamer culture is such that you go in as an early adopter beta tester with preconceptions -- you say you want innovation but if you don't find things you can comfortably criticize against what you already know in order to make your ego enlarge so you feel you know better than the devs, you aren't cool. So you tear down the game like a school of piranhas, and the money people derail the devs, and anything original in the game gets excised by marketing. I've seen it over and over again.
The community around this site is Exhibit A.
I agree, I really do. I have beta tested a load of games over the last fifteen years, and in every single one of them, there's a vocal group of players trying to bring "convenience features" from other games never minding whether those features make sense within the core design philosophy of the game they're testing.
And, well, that's to be expected: Players are not professionals and however deep they might reckon their understanding of game design is, what they say they want is really soft grounds to up and change your design - because, yeah, I'm gonna say it, it might really turn out they don't know what they want, or rather, need.
On the other hand, I think the Bioware developers are also guilty of this exact same thing...
It's not a mistake that they didn't go along with the group finder idea back then; it's a mistake that they're going along with it now. They should never have implemented it; they should never have made the game into something that necessitates the implementation of a group finder. Given that storytelling is their forte; they should never have made this into a dungeon-running / tier-raiding game.
Really, they up and say there's something very wrong with the reigning MMO paradigm in that it doesn't tell a story; they decide to remedy that and make a storytelling MMO.... And a daily-questing, battle-grounding, dungeon-running, tier-raiding WOW endgame is what they make of that promise?
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I agree, I really do. I have beta tested a load of games over the last fifteen years, and in every single one of them, there's a vocal group of players trying to bring "convenience features" from other games never minding whether those features make sense within the core design philosophy of the game they're testing.
And, well, that's to be expected: Players are not professionals and however deep they might reckon their understanding of game design is, what they say they want is really soft grounds to up and change your design - because, yeah, I'm gonna say it, it might really turn out they don't know what they want, or rather, need.
On the other hand, I think the Bioware developers are also guilty of this exact same thing...
It's not a mistake that they didn't go along with the group finder idea back then; it's a mistake that they're going along with it now. They should never have implemented it; they should never have made the game into something that necessitates the implementation of a group finder. Given that storytelling is their forte; they should never have made this into a dungeon-running / tier-raiding game.
Really, they up and say there's something very wrong with the reigning MMO paradigm in that it doesn't tell a story; they decide to remedy that and make a storytelling MMO.... And a daily-questing, battle-grounding, dungeon-running, tier-raiding WOW endgame is what they make of that promise?
Bioware, son, the Force is disappoint.