@i@ wrote on Sep 15
th, 2016 at 9:35am:
that's not only turdbine fault though. Sure they fucked up and lot of ppl left, but the ones remaining, for whatever reason, prefer to guild/friends/solo run, even if that means shotman, rather than using LFM to complete groups.
Even that is mostly Turbin's fault. You are right that some is a shift in gamer psychology, with "gaming with people I already know" surpassing "making new friends" somewhere in the early 2000s, but "making new friends" didn't disappear entirely, and they could make it much easier.
For example, a power gap discourages grouping with strangers unless you have a way to judge their power. It isn't fun for most people to be either carried through or to do all of the work. Most people who would group would do it to be part of a team. Power creep creates a wide power gap between players of similar levels, so a random group of similar level players is much more likely to be painful for some or all of them. That's Squarely on Turdbin's shoulders.
Another example is the tools they provide. They choose to work on new systems instead of improving the systems people use. What if the Friends list were more than a simple notepad like affair? It wouldn't be hard to come up with a system that shared information between your own characters, with friends you chose, in your guild, etc. And allow more than 50 characters of text - store rankings on play style, persnality, etc. what if they had a way to scale your character so you could run with a wider group? Or tools to deal with griefers? That would do much more to encourage grouping than yet another crafting system with a difficult grind.
And some of their choices are downright hostile to random grouping - look how long it took them to address the party death penalty, or Bravery bonus. And even when they finally addressed it, the answer was lame. You have to run to an NPC and pause it, and remember to un-pause it after? We're running on a compter ffs, just automatically pause and un-pause.