Quote from: Zarhym

Come join the fun on the PTR and instead of getting the PUG blues, you could end up grouped with a blue. Members of the Development Team (including the encounter designers themselves) and the Community Team will be on the PTR to test out the new dungeon system and want you to come join in the fun. Join us tomorrow, November 4 beginning at 4 PM PST.

For a chance to group with us, be sure to use the Dungeon system and choose the "Random Heroic" option.

[...] To be specific, we'll be queuing using the "Random Heroic" option in the new Dungeon system. If you want a chance to join a group with one of us, you'll need to queue up this way as well.

[...] All Blizzard employees participating should have the tag in front of their names. Each employee will be able to pick whatever class, realm, and faction he or she wants.

[...] In total there should be 30-40 Blizzard developers, producers, and community team members using the Dungeon system for at least an hour.

said by xenograffiti :

Hopefully I get grouped with Eyonix so I can tell him to go get hit by a bus.

said by djlar :

What I didn't see is if the player joining in mid run will get some sort of message that the dungeon is in progress or not..

Being "unlimited runs every 15 mins" thing some wouldn't mind to join a started group, since the reward comes from killing the last boss, and you'll get your gold and emblems faster

Will the new members be warned, say, that they’ve been chosen to join a dungeon already in progress with X bosses dead and be given an option to join or wait for a fresh run?

Yes.

said by Deo85 :

This should be a great system! I am sorry that I dont have much info on it as I am stuck behind a fire wall majority of the time. But can some one post the up coming new LFG design and what its about? I love to here about its features if you will.

Quote from: Zarhym
Since our first test went so well, we’d like to invite everyone out again for round 2! Come join the fun on the PTR; and instead of looting the PUG blues, you could end up with a PUG blue (see what we did there?). Members of the Development Team (including the encounter designers themselves), the QA team, and the Community Team will be on the PTRs to test out the new dungeon system and want you to come join in the fun.

To have a chance to group up with one of us, just queue up for a random Heroic through the Dungeon tool. We will be playing both Alliance and Horde, and since the Dungeon tool allows players to group cross-server, it doesn’t matter which of the two PTR realms you join from.

Join us Wednesday 11/11/09 at 4:00pm PST. We'll see you then!

Oculus nerf in 3.3

As is evidenced in this thread, players have strong opinions on Oculus in contrast to the majority of the other Wrath of the Lich King dungeons. With the implementation of the new Dungeon system and Random Dungeon option in patch 3.3, many players were asking for the ability to black list at least one dungeon from the selection pool. If a large number of players want to black list Oculus because they don't find it enjoyable -- and it can often times be a pick-up group killer -- we view that as a problem. We do not, however, see a viable solution in giving players the ability to simply remove any dungeon they want from the Random Dungeon rotation. That takes away from the idea of randomness. In addition, we feel the benefits afforded players when running random Heroic dungeons (extra emblems, the chance to run a specific Heroic instance more than once a day, etc.) are too good to let them narrow down the list as they see fit.

As a compromise, we've made the standard fights in Oculus a bit easier, and increased the benefits of item-based vehicle scaling to make the drake combat less cumbersome. We hope these changes deter players from deserting a random dungeon when it happens to be Oculus.

Pugging in 3.3

Just a couple of observations from our point of view:

1) Players who don't pug dramatically underestimate the number of people who do.
2) Players often assume every realm has the same dynamics that their realm has.

Pugging is something an awful lot of players do and our (frankly inadequate) tool didn't facilitate that experience very well. The new tool is pretty fast and simple. If you enjoy pugging (or don't enjoy it but do it anyway ) the new tool should let you spend less time organizing and more time killing (or wiping ).

If pugging isn't your thing, that's cool. We're not trying to push you into it... unless you really like pugs (by which I mean the pooch). The tool will also benefit premades.

Dungeon System

1. You can run with whoever you like. You can /invite or have the tool find random players to fill it in (it is pretty smart in who it finds too). If you find random people, we place some restrictions on your group to discourage griefing.

2. I don't want to get into this too much in this thread because the discussion has already gone on and on regarding this topic. However, an old style LFG channel doesn't make much sense (because 1, the tool finds groups pretty quickly, and 2, we don't like people lurking in the tool and messing up matchmaking just to use the chat channel). Making a new LFG channel world wide would instantly become the new channel of choice for gold sellers, spammers or people who are bored and want attention. Making a second city-wide "trade" channel might at least draw some of the legit LFG lookers from the traders.