Update: I mistakenly titled this Kinship instead of Fellowship originally. My apologies.
People often complain about the Looking for Fellowship (Group in other games) system in LotRO. It certainly has improved from its original incarnation and it’s certainly not awful, but I think it’s safe to say that many people feel that there’s more to do before it’s truly useful. Frankly, I generally find myself forgetting that it’s there in the first place.
The funny thing is that Turbine itself has already developed a successful and smart Looking for Group (or “LFG”) system for Dungeons and Dragons Online (aka “DDO”). I often see this cited by various LotRO players. If you frequent the forums, it’s likely you have as well.
Even so, I’m unsure how many other people out there are familiar with how DDO handles LFG needs. I thought it would be good to cover that a bit here.
In DDO, there are two basic LFG components. The first is simply a “LFG” button in your Quest Journal, which allows you to quickly mark whether or not you are looking for a group for that specific quest. LotRO essentially mimics this concept, but it doesn’t go quite as far as DDO’s Social Group tab.
As you can see in the image above, you can easily see what groups are in the area. It quickly tells you who is heading the group, what quest they’re specifically interested in, what classes are still needed and what the level range is for the quest. All of this is available without making an additional click and there are options to filter this easily if desired.
If you hover your cursor over the group, you’ll be given a pop-up as shown below.
This pop-up shows the other players that are part of the group along with their location, class and overall level. Some of this wouldn’t be necessary in a game like LotRO that doesn’t allow multiple classes for one character.
My feeling is that LotRO would benefit greatly from taking a page from DDO’s book in this regard. It’s arguable that no system is “perfect”, but I do feel that DDO’s LFG system makes a Hell of a lot more sense. It’s strange to me that the more “casual friendly” game (LotRO) has the less friendly LFG system.
I’m not sure why this is the case. Obviously Turbine would be using its own assets and ideas in both cases. Is this difficult to implement at this stage? Are there downsides I’m not seeing? I couldn’t say for sure, but in the meantime DDO definitely has the upper hand here.
Maybe someday we’ll see more of its influence in LotRO.
If it’s so bad no one uses it and everyone forgets it’s even there, then YES it’s AWFUL.
Interestingly, it IS the same LFG from DDO.
Problem #1 arises from the fact that in DDO when you press ‘o’ for the social window, you’re immediately presented with LFG. In LOTRO, ‘o’ shows you the /who pane first. You’re still a mouse click or two away from seeing LFG.
Problem #2 (which may or may not be a legitimate problem since no one actually uses it to test this theory) is that while DDO makes nice BIG rows with all the info for each group and even the sloppiest mouse-controlling player can still manage to hit it to get the mouseover tooltips for who is currently in the group, etc. LOTRO on the other hand only uses a single line of text. It’s not as attractive nor easy to use.
I also don’t recall DDO having an LFG chat channel where LOTRO shipped with one and since their LFG tool was pretty much hidden, LFF (and GLFF) took over. I think I’ll always feel the main problem was hiding the LFF interface, but moving it two years into the game wouldn’t solve anything; it would still be ignored even if it stared us in the face because we’ve had two years of LFF and players DO NOT like change.
Well, like I said, LotRO mimics the concept (and as you know, they use the same basic UI system across their games), but the differences to make it more accessible are important. They’re small, but have significant effects… Even something as basic as class icons, taller rows and the opening page matter. On the most basic level, it’s even just easier to skim DDO’s group window for what you need. I think there’s a reason why you see people actively using DDO’s LFG system and relatively few using LotRO’s LFF system.
But yeah, I think you’re right in that it is awful and that I was being too nice haha.
Perhaps the best thing to do would be to handle it more like WAR does. I wouldn’t mind being told who is active and where when I’m near a group.
This was an interesting article.… but not what I was hoping for based on the “looking for kinship” title. Does the game offer a Kinship interface these days?
I titled it wrong, that’s my mistake. There’s not a Looking for Kinship interface at this point, unfortunately.
An “LFK” interface probably wouldn’t be a bad idea. I think so far, Vanguard has been the only MMORPG where I’ve seen that.
Shin Megami Tensei Online Imagine has one too, but I doubt many people have noticed that haha.