I would make apologies for my absence, but I hope you understand.

Tobold has put up another thought-provoking post (man’s good at that) concerning the reward you get out of grouping and soloing.

So if people are trying to maximize the reward per session, they would prefer soloing if the solo session reward is bigger than the group session reward. But they would prefer to group if the group session reward is bigger than the solo session reward. As the term of the group finding time is always greater than zero, if the solo reward rate is equal than the group reward rate, the group session reward is diminished by the group finding time term, and people prefer soloing, because it gives greater rewards.

There’s a variable here he’s not considering, though, and I think it’s an important one.

He goes on to talk about improvements that could be made in World of Warcraft’s grouping mechanisms, and I wholeheartedly agree with them. I’ve had the chance to do a lot of LFGing in Ironforge lately, and to say it’s a crapshoot is a vast understatement. I live on an active server, so it’s actually not finding a group that I find frustrating. A variable Tobold doesn’t take into account is the quality of the group. I would actually amend his equation to this:

Group session reward = ((Group session time – Group finding time) x Group reward rate) x N

Here, ‘N’ represents something I’m thinking of as ‘group cohesion and experience factor’. I know this is a very squishy definition, but it’s definitely a factor to consider. A well balanced group that has good play habits will have an ‘N’ approaching 1. Exceptional groups could even exceed that, making the end rewards of time invested far outweigh the associated costs. Inexperienced (or, unfortunately, in many cases young players) will bring the N down towards 0, as will poor class balance within the party. I’ve participated in a group of all mages, and it was fun, but in higher-level situations it is just not a feasible party.

Defining N so low seems very harsh, but as any raider can tell you it only takes one inexperienced Warrior to wipe the whole party. Inexperience in the face of difficult odds more than just chips away at the value of a party, it effectively nullifies it.

The big problem here is that a potential party’s N is so hard to pin down. For example, I and three of my RL cohorts gathered together last Wednesday for a trip to UD Strat. We were okay, class-wise, with the exception of a dedicated healer. Our friend who plays a healer is doing a lot of commuting at the moment, and he was unavailable for our little jaunt. So, we put out the word via the LFG channel for a priest. We caught one, and after the usual bumbling around we headed in.

We started off quite inaspiciously, but after a little bit of tweaking to get our party dynamics working correctly, we were successfully taking on groups of three and even sometimes five critters without a character death. We managed Nerub’Enkan without incident, and were gathering our strength to take on Baroness Anastari when the priest sends a somewhat confusing tell to the party channel. “I forgot my work I need to go AFK for 15 minutes. brb.”

You already know the end of the tale, as he never returned and we misspent about 20 minutes waiting for him. We’re all friends, and have gotten really good at wasting time with each other, but it was still annoying. The N for that group seemed higher than it was than we started, but during the course of play it was revealed to be quite low.

At the end of the day, while I think teleporting group stones would make forming a group somewhat easier, it wouldn’t neccessarily make the group any more successful.

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