*shudder*

As mentioned though, people take this to a limiting case, reducing th interest of the run without actually making it much more challenging – but, critically, without recognising that they are not achieving what they want by following this strategy.

So “gogogo” becomes the warcry of those who haven’t worked this out, while others use the same challenge (do it faster) in a place more appropriate to it, and benefit.

I’d be a bit leery of hopping onto voice chat with 4 strangers. Admittedly, it might shield me from the bastardisation of language in the form of so-called internet speak, but I don’t have great faith in the masses of WoW players to be scintillating conversationalists. AsKatherine mentions, one is far more likely rto come across extremely objectional view points, gratuitous obscenity generally people who one prefers to avoid.

Whether that would be worth it to meet the occasional gem of a player, I don’t know. It’s nice when it happens, but I’m never sure if that’s the novelty of the occurrence or genuine pleasure.

People who wanted to banter or discuss pulls and strategy could at least be sure they could do it efficiently.

Often people complain that LFD is impersonal, anonymous and fleeting; you don’t make friends in dungeons. In this case, though, I think this may be a strength of LFD in terms of implementing a voting system.

Bribing for votes would be difficult because players are typically from different servers. Trading inside LFD is disabled and trading afterwards (by logging to an alt on another server) would be more trouble than it’s worth. So long as votes are kept secret, it would be impossible to enforce actual delivery of what was purchased (the vote).

While it is possible to bring friends to a run, potentially skewing the vote, one option might be to disable voting on people from the same server. Getting votes from strangers means the votes are less likely to be coming from people who have other reasons to like/dislike you.

For such as system, it might be useful to add both weighting and decay. What I mean by weighting is that it might be desirable to count 4-0 (favorable-unfavorable) votes as the same or very different than 1-0 votes in terms of how they affect overall score. How these would compare to 1-1, 1-2, 2-1 (and so on) votes would also be tricky things. A 0-4 vote might mean that somebody was very bad or that they were ganged up on by a 4 person premade. Likewise, a 1-0 vote might be seen as perfect or inconclusive. Getting the weighting right would be a touchy thing. I don’t have any good ideas right now on how to resolve this.

By decay I mean that more recent votes should count for more when determining the overall score. This would allow players that made mistakes to repair their reputation through good play without it being a terribly long grind (cf. Insane in the Membrane). An appropriate rate of decay might need to be determined from actual player data, but my guess is that things from 6 months or 100 dungeon runs ago are mostly worth forgetting.

Predictably, a fast run is seen as better and a slow run as worse; just as predictably, some people confuse cause and effect or simply desire the outcome without the effort to bring it about. The result is a demand to “go faster” even when a faster pace isn’t productive (e.g., a big pull resulting in a wipe).

Fast is just a symptom. What’s really wanted is a competent group.

There are some ways around this, I may post about it next week because I’ve had the experience of implementing a voting system in an online RPG. But for example, you can limit the number of times anyone votes for a single person per week, you can measure amount of time spent in instances, you can monitor the amount of chat, you can make someone’s votes count for more if they have grouped with a wider variety of people.

The big thing you can do is actually not reward the voting either way. Just let other people see the scores and decide for themselves who they want to group with. If there’s no reward then maybe people won’t bother trying to grief it.

(I suspect Blizzard’s answer now would be ‘just join a guild with people who play like you’, which isn’t going to help LFD much in the next expansion. I also worry that people in general have just forgotten how to play with players of varying skill levels – I know as a tank I always used to take the first couple of pulls fairly easy just to make sure everyone could cope before stepping up the pace. Now I’d prolly be yelled at if I did that.)