Before we're even playing a game, step one is getting a group together and the tools here for that seem a bit haphazard at best. Maybe a game is posted in the game finder tool, but you still have to manual filter on your own for all the players seeking games vs. games seeking players. A first required radio button option of: I am a GM with a game to run I am player/players looking for a game to be in would make use of computer power to filter out games you could be in if that is what you are looking or for players to be in your game if that is what you are looking for. Right now that is left as full manual effort on a lot of filtering for end users. And then we have the forums where maybe a game or players seeking a GM may be uniquely or redundantly posted. This kind of segmentation only makes it harder to find things. More manual effort on our part when a computer database was right there to do the heavy lifting on that already. And then we also have a player listing directory, again a bit redundant to the players posting that they want a game in the finder tool, if they are also listing as a player looking for a game in the directory. A more unified system that didn't duplicate or spread out separately these things would be a great benefit to all of us out here trying to get a game going. Another example is, for players that are available on a couple days of the week during one time window and another time window on one other day, has no way to reasonably search once for everything landing in their availability windows. Not because a computer database couldn't do something this complicated, but we're simply not set up to take that into account for players. We can't specify time windows to days of the week for better searching power. Another thing i'd have, a simple filtering option to ask a GM about how much house rules vs. from the book their table is. Cause players may or may not be personally interested in house rules vs. what they already know in the books. If a player knows they self well enough, to know they ain't at all interested in house rules/plain vanilla book rules, then why would we not help them out with that? I would so love to see a really unified and robust system for players and GMs to get hooked up. Please spend some time and effort improving the group up/find other players/GMs process, before you go adding more efforts to the game play tools part. It's way more manual effort out here to find a game/find other players than it should be. None of the things the VTT tool can do are useful, until i got a game going first. In the end this is the POV about searching and finding what you want or that what you want can't be had, that mattes most: Are the tools making sure the searchers are most benefited by doing the major work of filtering through everything to get to what The Searcher is looking for? Or would a user get the impression the tools are designed for the advertisers/posters to ensure they got their stuff looked at by people even if those people would have been glad to never have had to see it in the first place? Would love to have the feeling that the search/gamer hook up tools were really trying to help out more around here.
