How about dating of similar interests? PvP PvE RP etc

•not dating in a romantic sense, dating as in playdating•

So with affinity instancing we know already that when you enter a scene it will place you in the instance of people you have flagged as friends, people you have met before etc
But also that people with PvP flag.
How about when you start out and get those gipsy questions you could also give a profile on what you like, just like PvP.
That way if you like crafting you are more likely to end up with people who do.
Or if you like RP, then flag yourself as RP and you will end up with more people of similar minds.
Etc
You will still get mixed a lot of course but this way the likelihood of meeting someone with the same interest is higher.

Thoughts?

 

Sounds great in theory, playing with the type of people you like, but two things will happen...

#1 - The wait times will increase
#2 - The realization will set in that you want to be paired with a PvPer who can fight, not a crafter that is likely to lead to multiple wipes. Thus the wait time for non-fighting types will increase.

In WoW the wait time for tanks and healers is much, much shorter because they are more sought after, your proposal generates the same type of bias, unfortunately. Great idea though, in time your own friends list will contain exactly the sort you want to be paired with and I think that's the purpose behind grouping friends first.

 

And I thought it is about love polygons when we date same (N)PCs... What is playdating?
Besides I think something like this is planned, though instead of flagging we will meet more often players with whom we interacted more often... the thing is I prefer it this way, as a crafter I do not want to meet other crafters as much as players interested in my items. I want to meet good customers more often no matter what they game preferences are.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_date
Playdating is usually when parents meet other parents and let their kids play together.

 

Would love to see selective multiplayer logic added to the roadmap at some point. We really need to test this in OPO and FPO because it's very likely the majority of the players don't exactly know how all this instancing works.

Granted, the player population that's in the pre-releases now is likely too small and distributed (even at peak load) to even spin up a second instance of any town, so everyone is being put in one instance anyways.

 

That is a great idea for a testrun though. What about a player run event at a specific time to see how many players we could amass and what happens to the instancing? If its early US and late EU then we could probably max as much as possible.
Have it on the sotecircle and give out time to be there in lots of different timezones so that people don't miss it unless they want to.

Maybe selecting a scene which hasn't many objects on its own, like a plains scene or somesuch?

 

Yep, or artificially reduce one of the hexes to have a max player count of 10?

 

Come to think about it all they would have to do is tell everyone that @RichardGarriott or @Darkstarr or some other devs would be there at the specific time and see if you can make it to the same instance for a short chat. Then put in that random event thingie they have been talking about to test that at the same time.
People would show up in droves just to get that printscreen.