QOL Improvements for Group Management Outside of Missions

[Derbon_]

Hello,

When playing with friends or trying to add friends who have just logged on, I experience pain points that make the entire process a lot more cumbersome than it has to be.  I can't help but compare it to other online games with group management tools that don't force me to disband my group just to reform it 30 seconds later. 

My considerations on what would improve the group finding are informed by the things I find frustrating to deal with, specifically:

A: The group breaks due to changing zones.
B: Sending out new invites to reform a group that had only broken because of Point A.

The following would address those pain points by reducing or eliminating the need for them. 

1. Allow Squad Leader to remove individual Squad Members, Between Missions
   It happens often that I am playing with two friends and playing missions that are open to the public while we wait for our fourth friend to come online in join us.  We gain a fourth through the match-making and finish the mission.  After the mission, we decide to include our fourth friend, who is now available post-mission.  In order to include our fourth member into the Squad, we have to disband the group and reform.  In most other online games, a "remove from group" option is available to the group leader.  In Warframe, I have had to disband our entire group, resend invites to two of the players I had been grouped with five seconds prior, and an invite to the third player who just got online.  This is clunky, cumbersome, and counterproductive. There's no reason to disband a squad just to swap out one random player for a friend to fill the fourth spot, and the ability to just remove one individual player to invite another streamlines the entire effort.

Let it be said that this is a function that is only needed after or before a mission, not during.  The time between missions is when players are making decisions about either continuing to play with their squad, finding a new squad, or finding a different squad in an entirely different part of the game.  Decisions about group composition between missions, and tools to make this as easy as possible are a good thing.  Electing to remove a player from a Squad before a mission has started or after the mission has concluded-- for whatever reason-- is not harassment.  

Furthermore, the restriction does not prevent undesirable behavior.  If a Squad Leader is suitably motivated to eject a player for their choice of loadout outside of a mission, they can still just disband the Squad and reform without the player who wasn't to their tastes.  All this accomplishes is extra steps to reform the group.  The player motivated to police loadout choices will be motivated to jump through this extra hoop, which is also present for players who just want to make room for their friend who is now available to join them.  At best, this restriction doesn't reduce undesirable motivation to remove players outside of missions.  At worst, it punishes well-meaning players making room for their friends by making the effort more tedious than it needs to be, and in other games simply isn't. 

1. Retain Squads through transition to Dojos, Relays, and other similar spaces.
   A more mild but equally frequently gripe can be demonstrated with this scenario:
   I am Squad Leader in a full group with three friends.  We are in the Relay.  One of us wants to go back to the Orbiter to begin some crafting, access the market, upgrade Mods, or just immerse themselves in the environs of their personal craft in the downtime between missions while the rest of us fuss with gear and loadouts. That player has to leave the Squad, and needs to be invited again in order to join the mission.  That player can be given a new invite while they are in their Orbiter, and do not have to return to the Relay with us. The problem is that anytime one player leaves the space the other players are in, that takes them out of the group.  It's unclear why that can't be fixed. 
   
   Another scenario is the same thing played out from within the Observatory of our Dojo.  We like using our space club house to launch missions from.  Ejecting players out of the group because they have to return to the Orbiter for a task-- or, in this case, go to a Relay-- feels counter productive. 

All in all, group management amounts to a small aspect of an online game, but felt keenly when it isn't very good.  Warframe's is bad, creating a lot of needlessly resent invites to needlessly reform groups that didn't intend to disband at the moment the game forced it.  It immediately stands out against other games that handle group management so smoothly that I realize I had taken it for granted.  My hope is that these are not such monumental things to address and we may see in the game before long. 

[krc473]

35 minutes ago, Rolav said:

Allow Squad Leader to remove individual Squad Members

This has been asked and rejected many times. Something to do with griefing is cited as the reason.

36 minutes ago, Rolav said:

Retain Squads through transition to Dojos, Relays, and other similar spaces.

This makes sense but could have issues depending on how matchmaking works.

[Derbon_]

1 hour ago, krc473 said:

This has been asked and rejected many times. Something to do with griefing is cited as the reason.

Simple: You can only kick outside of missions. Players are making choices about whether to stick with their current squads or find new ones. 

Post-mission, whether a player is kick or the group is disbanded to reform, the result is the same: the player that needs to be removed to make room is no longer in the squad. 

I'll amend my OP to clarify that this is not a plea for in-mission abuse or bullying for choice. It's purely for group management.

1 hour ago, krc473 said:

This makes sense but could have issues depending on how matchmaking works.

I read that being in a dojo is technically a "mission". Probably the same for Relays.  It's very odd.  May be necessary to create a 'hub state' of sorts, though I'm not sure how these spaces operate technically.