This week the Scrying Pool looks at an upcoming feature in GW2: an LFG tool.

The later of these two features worked well for GW1 due its largely instanced nature. Players could only join parties in the different towns and outposts as the maps and missions would be instanced for the current party. Missions would have specific outposts they would start from, and each outpost would never have more than a single mission that would start from it.

With this setup, only seeing party listings in the current outpost worked in GW1 as players would go to the outpost corresponding to the mission they wanted to complete. There they would see the listings for that specific mission and not have to wade through all of the non-relevant listings.

While not having the same largely instanced setup as GW1, I like the idea of finding party listings relevant to a certain location. Are you doing PvE content in Wayfarer Foothills and want to find some to party up and explore with? Opening the LFG tool would show people looking for groups in only Wayfarer Foothills. Joining a group wouldn’t result in accidently joining a Diessa Plateau group.

The same would work for dungeons. Want to find a group to run Ascalon Catacombs? Going to Plains of Ashford would show two tabs, one for open world exploring on the map and one specifically for finding a group for the dungeon on that map.

Why split up all of the listings to only show in certain locations? Simplicity is the key remember. You only see what is relevant to what is happening around you. No joining groups doing content on the other side of the world and no looking through hundreds of listings to find the five relevant to that map. Since players can guest on other servers and do cross-server dungeons, an LFG that showed everything all the time would soon get congested even with proper categories and sorting.

That said, I don’t think the LFG should be completely limited in this manner. While I want the LFG to show content relevant to specific areas, I want some neutral place to show everything. Maybe you want to do a dungeon but don’t have any preference to which one, like when wanting to finish any story dungeon path for the daily achievement.

The first place that comes to mind is Lion’s Arch. Since this map is already heavily populated, adding the full LFG tool here just makes sense. In this map players would open the party window and see everything listed. All the dungeons, all the maps to explore, fractals, sPvP, WvW, Keg brawl and hopefully some listings announcing community run events hosted by some of the amazing community that GW2 has.

While we are adding it to LA, why not add it to all five of the racial cities as well? One of the biggest complaints is that none of the other cities get the same love that LA gets, a sentiment that will only grow stronger with the LA centric festival Dragon Bash coming out next week. A case could even be made to make LA the only city without full coverage as it will get more than enough traffic through Fractal groups, though that is not a case I’ll be making here.

One thing that having full coverage would prevent in the cities, however, is map announcements. In GW1, the party tool would announce in map or trade chats (depending on how it was listed) all postings and periodically re-announce them if the listing was still open. This would very quickly become spam even if it only announced the listings created on the world the player is currently member of.

Having a map announce for open world maps, however, could be integral to the success of the LFG tool. How many times would you keep opening the LFG tool on the off chance that someone posted a listing either starting a group or looking to join a group such as your own? How easy would it then be to spot if upon listing creation it announced to the entire map that someone was looking for a group?

Consideration would still need to be taken with this system and the player base. Will everyone enjoy seeing those map wide announces even if they don’t happen very frequently? No. Maybe there would be a new chat channel called Announcements where they would show up, possibly just using the same color as map chat. Don’t like the announcements? Then you can easily disable that specific chat channel in the chat box options and won’t ever see them.

Matt “Mattsta” Adams can be found on the Blackgate server, currently working on Fractal leveling (woot, Fractal level 16!).

So I'm really excited to see that the RNG chests are making a return in two separate forms: Dragon Coffers and Rich Dragon Coffers. The regular coffers will be dropping from anything in the world during the festival as well as rewarded for winning Dragonball while the rich coffers will be bought in the gem store. They seem to have the same loots, but the rich will give a higher chance at giving the good and rare stuff. This is nice because the Southsun crates didn't drop enough in my opinion while it was a waste to buy them from the gem store due to the poor rates. With the coffers we will get a lot of regular coffers to drop (though they will almost always give Zhaitaffy I imagine) while the rich won't be as much of a waste with the better chances at the better goods.

As always, if you have a question for me you would like to see answered here, comment below or tweet it to @MattstaNinja.