I find it time consuming and a bit frustrating to go through LFG, opening threads, getting excited and then always finding out that they live on another continent entirely.
IMO it would be easier if we had separate forums for different time zone groups. Not one for each timezone, but regions within +- a few hours of each others.
Like maybe
LFG Eastern North America & Western South America
LFG Western North America
LFG Europe & Central Africa
Etc.
This way you'd know by default that the odds of each group's timetable being at least potentially manageable are somewhat good.
This coming from a Northern European. I've noticed a lot of people here are from North America.
And nothing is stopping us from browsing outside of our own zone group if we have flexible schedules.
So please answer the poll and share your thoughts!
The timezone thing does not bother me, I usually ignore LFG posts by the idiots that are too dumb to note that in their posts. What I wish DDB would do is create a seperate forum for paid games thus the LFG forum would not be flooded by paid game spam.
Lol, I just finished up a campaign that lasted 2.5 years of weekly play with people spread across 5 different countries, 4 different continents, and 2 different hemispheres. I don't care if people aren't in my time zone as long as they're available when I am.
That said, I agree that the pay-to-play recruiting probably deserves its own forum or should be moved to Advertisements. Not that I'm ever really in the LFG forum much, but the paid game spam effect is pretty overwhelming and irksome when I inevitably do search for players/games.
I thought the LFP/LFG common sense etiquette was to post the desired time zone in the subject line. "Campaign Title [physical location/geography and day time]" for in person and "Campaign Title [time in timezone or GMT]" for games where it's presumed everyone will be joining online. You don't need an admin forum infrastructure solution if folks are just clear about what they're looking for in the title.
Also think the pay to play posts should be put to advertisements. Seems like they're a few folks wanting to run game mills where they run 8 groups through the same campaign or whatever, and that's a distinction and motivation very different from someone looking for "a" game to play.
Out of 14 threads in LFG, 1 had the timezone in the subject. 😅
It is possible that this is not a common problem, but it seems like the majority here live in in North America. I live in N Europe, so the time difference to N America is like half a day.
I'd like to somehow be able to filter out those that are almost certainly impossible.
Maybe my availability is just too specific, but between work and family and hobbies, my Time Frame is unfortunately quite narrow. So a time difference of 8-12 hours is quite difficult to arrange.
And I'm sure I'm not the only one, even if I am in the minority.
It's super awesome that you pulled off a game like that! 10 years ago I would have been very keen to join a game spread so widely across the planet. Unfortunately now such flexibility is but a dream. 😄
Of course people can still browse far away timezones if their schedule allows that. 🙂 It's not exclusive.
Most of my games have involved people from multiple continants, if something like this was done it would have to be split by start time rather than time zone.
I disagree with banishing paid games to advertisements. I have no problem with DMs wanting to get back the costs of their book purchases and master tier sub and even get a little bit for there hours of prep. I am currently in 2 campaigns 1 free the other paid. Only about 10% of the posts are for paid games and clearly marked and therefore easily ignored.
What I would like a split of is LFG and LFP to be separate this would roughly halve the number posts I need to trawl through.
Ultimately, the current infrastructure would work fine if it were used as intended. The number of people who don't post the requested information, who mis-label posts (e.g., use a tan LFP tag when they really want to join a game), or who don't use tags when they should (looking at you, paid DMs who bury that detail in your posts) make that forum a bit of a mess. And that's not likely to change even if there were a toggle function and paid games were moved. People the world over are very bad at adhering to guidelines.
Could the forum interface be improved? Absolutely. But so could the horrid quote feature and the fact that if you thumbs-up enough posts, you eventually stop seeing custom images on the entire website...Alas, here we are.
This is when you're looking for an existing group that you can join - make sure to set the Prefix field to include LFG and include the following in the title: Physical area or online Timezone
Examples of good titles for your post:
Experienced (20 years) player LFG in Dallas area - weekend games.
New player LFG online UK (GMT) weekday evenings.
Like I said, this would be a non problem if people just used the sub forum as intended.
I don't see any major changes to the way the forums function until One D&D rolls out into a real edition with whatever digital integration or support WotC wants to flagpole it with. Maybe they'll have a more robust game finder that's inspired by something like Start Playing Games but also facilitates in person play.
I don't get this? Doesn't everyone use it already?
We just call it GMT here.
My timezone is GMT/UTC +2.
The problem is that people don't say what their UTC/GMT is, so your suggestion doesn't help here. The ones who do, already use this format most of the time.
Although I have seen some people using these CST etc. zones, which I believe is just an American thing? But even that is better than no timezone info at all.
Maybe people don't know their UTC/GMT?! The admins could make that info visible in profiles and also next to people's username when they post something. 😮
(Edit: Works technically. Unfortunately it doesn't show signatures in vertical. Would IMO be better if it was mandatory and right next to your username)
The site could have a allow is to post Epoch Time so everyone sees the start time in their own time zone. This would prevet confusion with UTC / GMT / CST etc but given vitually noone is posting start times anyway it probably wont help much.
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I find it time consuming and a bit frustrating to go through LFG, opening threads, getting excited and then always finding out that they live on another continent entirely.
IMO it would be easier if we had separate forums for different time zone groups. Not one for each timezone, but regions within +- a few hours of each others.
Like maybe
LFG Eastern North America & Western South America
LFG Western North America
LFG Europe & Central Africa
Etc.
This way you'd know by default that the odds of each group's timetable being at least potentially manageable are somewhat good.
This coming from a Northern European. I've noticed a lot of people here are from North America.
And nothing is stopping us from browsing outside of our own zone group if we have flexible schedules.
So please answer the poll and share your thoughts!
Finland GMT/UTC +2
The timezone thing does not bother me, I usually ignore LFG posts by the idiots that are too dumb to note that in their posts. What I wish DDB would do is create a seperate forum for paid games thus the LFG forum would not be flooded by paid game spam.
Lol, I just finished up a campaign that lasted 2.5 years of weekly play with people spread across 5 different countries, 4 different continents, and 2 different hemispheres. I don't care if people aren't in my time zone as long as they're available when I am.
That said, I agree that the pay-to-play recruiting probably deserves its own forum or should be moved to Advertisements. Not that I'm ever really in the LFG forum much, but the paid game spam effect is pretty overwhelming and irksome when I inevitably do search for players/games.
I thought the LFP/LFG common sense etiquette was to post the desired time zone in the subject line. "Campaign Title [physical location/geography and day time]" for in person and "Campaign Title [time in timezone or GMT]" for games where it's presumed everyone will be joining online. You don't need an admin forum infrastructure solution if folks are just clear about what they're looking for in the title.
Also think the pay to play posts should be put to advertisements. Seems like they're a few folks wanting to run game mills where they run 8 groups through the same campaign or whatever, and that's a distinction and motivation very different from someone looking for "a" game to play.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Out of 14 threads in LFG, 1 had the timezone in the subject. 😅
It is possible that this is not a common problem, but it seems like the majority here live in in North America. I live in N Europe, so the time difference to N America is like half a day.
I'd like to somehow be able to filter out those that are almost certainly impossible.
Maybe my availability is just too specific, but between work and family and hobbies, my Time Frame is unfortunately quite narrow. So a time difference of 8-12 hours is quite difficult to arrange.
And I'm sure I'm not the only one, even if I am in the minority.
It's super awesome that you pulled off a game like that! 10 years ago I would have been very keen to join a game spread so widely across the planet. Unfortunately now such flexibility is but a dream. 😄
Of course people can still browse far away timezones if their schedule allows that. 🙂 It's not exclusive.
Finland GMT/UTC +2
Most of my games have involved people from multiple continants, if something like this was done it would have to be split by start time rather than time zone.
I disagree with banishing paid games to advertisements. I have no problem with DMs wanting to get back the costs of their book purchases and master tier sub and even get a little bit for there hours of prep. I am currently in 2 campaigns 1 free the other paid. Only about 10% of the posts are for paid games and clearly marked and therefore easily ignored.
What I would like a split of is LFG and LFP to be separate this would roughly halve the number posts I need to trawl through.
Ultimately, the current infrastructure would work fine if it were used as intended. The number of people who don't post the requested information, who mis-label posts (e.g., use a tan LFP tag when they really want to join a game), or who don't use tags when they should (looking at you, paid DMs who bury that detail in your posts) make that forum a bit of a mess. And that's not likely to change even if there were a toggle function and paid games were moved. People the world over are very bad at adhering to guidelines.
Could the forum interface be improved? Absolutely. But so could the horrid quote feature and the fact that if you thumbs-up enough posts, you eventually stop seeing custom images on the entire website...Alas, here we are.
I guess a lot of folks don't bother with the best practices that were posted in the "read this before posting here" post that's been up for over four years:
Like I said, this would be a non problem if people just used the sub forum as intended.
I don't see any major changes to the way the forums function until One D&D rolls out into a real edition with whatever digital integration or support WotC wants to flagpole it with. Maybe they'll have a more robust game finder that's inspired by something like Start Playing Games but also facilitates in person play.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Start using ZULU-time/UTC
playing since 1986
I don't get this? Doesn't everyone use it already?
We just call it GMT here.
My timezone is GMT/UTC +2.
The problem is that people don't say what their UTC/GMT is, so your suggestion doesn't help here. The ones who do, already use this format most of the time.
Although I have seen some people using these CST etc. zones, which I believe is just an American thing? But even that is better than no timezone info at all.
Maybe people don't know their UTC/GMT?! The admins could make that info visible in profiles and also next to people's username when they post something. 😮
1. People could see their own UTC
2. People could see other people's UTC
😎🤯💪
Problem solved!
Finland GMT/UTC +2
Testing. Added it to my signature.
(Edit: Works technically. Unfortunately it doesn't show signatures in vertical. Would IMO be better if it was mandatory and right next to your username)
Finland GMT/UTC +2
The site could have a allow is to post Epoch Time so everyone sees the start time in their own time zone. This would prevet confusion with UTC / GMT / CST etc but given vitually noone is posting start times anyway it probably wont help much.