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Blue Milk & Cereal: Should TOR Have A “Dungeon Finder” Tool?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

This topic has been been discussed for years (literally), and has heated up once again with the recent Q&A sessions from PAX where it was reiterated that TOR would not ship with this feature, but BioWare is “looking into it”. Here’s an interview with Gabe Amatangelo that expands on the reasoning for the decision.

But what is a “dungeon finder” you ask? In its most simple definition, it assists a player in fidning other players who are interested in participating in specific (or random) instanced group content. Once players are matched up, they are all transported to the instance to begin their assault. In some games, those other players might even come from other servers, greatly reducing your wait time.

In theory, this sounds like a good idea – a real time saver that will get you into the action that much quicker. But let the players who already experienced the effects of a similar dungeon finder tool in World of Warcraft, tell you their experiences.

Shortly after the addition of this feature, a large number of players agreed that its addition severely impacted the game, and not in a good way either. Before, players had to travel to the location of the instance, generating some traffic and actual presence in the world. After all, MMO games are partly about the community and making new friends. The dungeon finder tool, while speeding up the queue times, completely removed any social interaction prior to making the party, and left the game world feeling empty as players just loitered in the cities waiting for their group to be formed.

So now that you know, how do you roll? Do you think this kind of grouping assistant feature is a good one for TOR? Discuss!

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Posted by ReDDoT | 27 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: What News Do You Hope For From PAX Prime?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

With all of the excitement associated with gamescom slowly winding down, we can finally relax and… wait. What? When? Sigh… Ok scratch that!

The BioWare crew is currenty en-route from Cologne, Germany direct to Seattle, Washington – no rest for them means no rest for us!

If you can believe it, PAX Prime is already visible on the horizon – it starts this Friday! BioWare and Electronic Arts will both be in attendance, and BioWare will hold a panel on the 28th of August at 2PM PDT, at the Paramount Theater, which is capable of accommodating about 4000 fans. You can read more details about the upcoming weekend on the last Friday’s Update post.

With that in mind, we also got a have an inspiring quote from the EA Q1 2012 Earnings Conference call:

“… In the summer we’re going to be ramping up our beta campaign and by around the time we get to September, we’ll be in a position to call the ball and give the hard ship date.“

A very large chunk of the community believes that we’re going to hear some really big news, so let’s hope they’re right! I personally believe that we are going to finally hear some details about the release of TOR, if not the actual release date. For now, we can only speculate!

We did this for SDCC and gamescom, so why not PAX? Let us know what you think/hope to see out of PAX!

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