At times EA/Bioware is just dumb (LFG)

As I stated a few posts ago my subscription ends on June 23rd and I'm hoping for an announcement of new features if I'm going to continue.  My current goal is to get my Empire characters to max level so I can play through the class story.  Right now I've been able to accomplish this with 3 characters (Bounty Hunter, Imperial Agent, and Sith Inquisitor).  This has highlighted an issue that I'd only read about up to this point and that is the frustration of what to do that comes at level 50.

When you hit max level you get 2 quests that point you to Ilum and Correlia and you can start dailies.  If you include the Belsavis dailies it can take 2-3 hours to complete and will give you a daily credits of around 250k.  This is nice and after a week you have enough credits to buy everything you need and the commendations will upgrade your gear so you can start doing heroics.  It's at this point where you have issues.

My operative has upgraded all her gear and now is ready to start doing heroics.  My choices are either to sit on the fleet and spam general chat hoping someone will want to run heroics or run dailies.  I can't do both because there isn't a global chat feature in the game and as I take the 2-3 hours to run my dailies I will never know if someone on the fleet wants to run a heroic.  I might join them if I knew but there's currently no way to do this in the game.

Simple solution: Create a global chat channel.  Considering they already have chat channels I find it hard to believe it would take more than 10 developer hours to implement this.  Instead we are 6 months into the game and have to make a choice - play the game or sit idle on the fleet to find a heroic.

Even if they implemented the solution I suggest there is another problem.  The best example is when you are doing dailies on Belsavis.  I've complained in past posts that the map/quest developers made huge mistakes by making quest chains linear instead of circular.  One thing I didn't mention in that post is even if you were aware someone wants to run a heroic, you are faced with a choice of spending 15 minutes to get to the heroic then running it and spending another 30 minutes getting back to the point you stopped doing your daily.  I may be exaggerating a bit but not by much.  This means that even people in large guilds have only certain points of their daily playtime when they are available to run a heroic or they will end up wasting a lot of time in travel.

Simple solution: I actually thought this would be a much tougher challenge until I started PVP.  Bioware has been surprised by how popular PVP is in the game and there's a simple reason for it.  When you queue for PVP you can do your dailies until a box appears asking you to join.  Once you click OK you are ported to the PVP realm.  After the match is done you are ported back to the exact same spot you were when you joined.  I leveled through PVE and figured the reason Flashpoints didn't do this is because the coding wasn't available.  Imagine my surprise as I joined a PVP group while doing my dailies on Belsavis and when it finished I was returned to the same spot I left.  It can't be that hard to modify this code for PVE.  That would allow people to continue to play the game as you spam the new global chat channel to find others for the group.  Bioware already even has an EXIT button coded for flashpoints which seems to be tailor made way to tell the server to return the player to their original location.  The programming time on this wouldn't be as simple as a global chat channel but I'd be surprised if it took more than 100 hours to accomplish.

These two changes would have a HUGE improvement on the  game.  They've had 5 months to do these two simple things but have totally ignored it.  After being max level for a short while I certainly have more empathy for the level 50s who quit.  I know that patch 1.3 will include a looking for group feature which I'm sure will be great but this is only one of a hundred issues that need attention and the LFG feature is the only thing that will be included in that patch.  We haven't even been given a time frame on 1.3 so I wonder if it will happen before the end of June.  With 6 month subscriptions running out in July/August, Bioware better be working on more than just LFG.

I know the standard response from the Bioware defenders is WOW didn't originally have these features but if that game launched today they would lose subscribers too.  The dumbest part of this whole thing is if the people at the top of the development chain aren't doing the simple things it makes me wonder if they will be able to fix the game before it is too late.