Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Déjà vu

So the Cross Realm Dungeon Finder has been out, what, 3 weeks now? Since then, I've relearned fights that I had forgotten, cleared dungeons that I hadn't been able to in the past (Occulus, ugh), and earned enough badges to pick up 3 pieces of Tier 9.
However, the introduction of this tool has also brought a rather unsavory side effect: running the same dungeon at least 3 times a day. When the daily heroics were present, we had seen Utgarde Pinnacle so many times within a month period that we literally banned it from our weekly dungeon crawls unless someone desperately needed a piece of gear from it or wanted to try an achievement.
Since 3.3 and the Cross Realm Dungeon Finder has come out, a lot of players are seeing the same instances coming up time after time while seeing other heroics left out completely. I've seen Halls of Stone, Utgarde Keep and Utgarde Pinnacle until I could scream. They're not hard runs when my typical group consists of T8/9+ geared players who can easily pull in 3k dps and healers that barely need to touch a button. We can usually rip through in about 15-20 minutes. Gundrak and Drak Theron Keep are coming in close too. However, I've only been placed in the 3 new dungeons once or twice. If I want in those, I usually have to specifically queue for them.
According to this article on wow.com, this is becoming a nuisance for a lot of players across all realms, specifically Halls of Stone.
While I appreciate the emblems to no end and these dungeons are all good for at least 4 badges plus the 2 extra from doing it through the tool, mix it up a bit! Placing the dungeons on a weight scale of some kind may help, giving priority to dungeons you haven't been through as often on perhaps a weekly basis and resetting on Maintenance Tuesdays. For example, you start out after the servers come back online Tuesday with zero weighting on any dungeons. After the first dungeon you run, say Nexus, it gets weighted by 10% that you won't have that dungeon again in a given week. This still leave a pretty good chance that you could have it again. Two days later, you have Nexus again. The 10% weighting increases to 20% and so on until there's virtually no chance that you'll see Nexus again in that week.
This would also possibly need to take into consideration the number of random dungeons you run in a week so that if you run 10 dungeons a day, obviously the weighting would need to be adjusted. If you ran every dungeon in the game on one day, the weighting could be reset back to zero after completing the full gauntlet.
Of course this is just my idea, I'm sure Blizzard, after receiving enough complaints about it, will implement something to balance it out.

Questions or comments? Tell me!

No comments:

Post a Comment