So now we move on to raids of 36 slots and here, I think, is the sweet spot for raid size in Pantheon.
@Vandraad, regarding your post about 36 slots being the ideal raid size, there is an issue with your logic.
1) You based your whole argument on the fact that there will be 12 classes... Maybe at launch that will be true, but shortly after launch (if not before if time permits) they will be adding the Necromancer and Bard classes, bringing the class total up to 14.
2) I think you forgot about raids that require help from a dedicated crafter. How will those players who haven't leveled adventuring fit into the 36 man raid concept?
Small raids sizes, such as having 36 slots that all need to be full, ends up turning it into cookie cutter raiding. Oh you're attacking Smaug the Dragon? You need 1 tank, 1 offtank, 3 clerics, 2 druids, 1 shaman, 18 ranged dps, and 1 of whatever melee dps you want to bring along to stand and watch b/c you can't melee him. Sorry if your guild has 3 tanks, b/c you don't have room for him for this fight.
Limiting the number of players that can attack a target is a bad mechanic. Let the problem work itself out on it's own. If a guild wants to bring all 144 of their members, divided into 2, 72 man raid groups to attack one boss, then I say the game should let them. There should be AoE's and other boss mechanics to serve as a Gear Check to eliminate anyone who is undergeared/leveled. And, if the zerg guild manages to kill the boss, it drops the exact same amount of loot that any other raid would receive, except it must be divided among 144.
No body is going to want to spend hours raiding in a zerg guild like that when their chance of getting a piece of loot is less than 1%. There should also be flagging or keys so that a boss kill may only drop 24 keys or flags per kill. That guild will flag/gear up so slowly compared to the guilds that raid with less players, they won't even be able to compete with the hardcore guilds.
BUT... atleast they have the opportunity to include everyone in their guild, w/o making people feel left out. Isn't that what this game is about, building community? How can you do that if you only let 24,36, or whatever number of players participate in raiding?
Wellspring said:Limiting the number of players that can attack a target is a bad mechanic.
Why?
Wellspring said:Let the problem work itself out on it's own. If a guild wants to bring all 144 of their members, divided into 2, 72 man raid groups to attack one boss, then I say the game should let them. There should be AoE's and other boss mechanics to serve as a Gear Check to eliminate anyone who is undergeared/leveled. And, if the zerg guild manages to kill the boss, it drops the exact same amount of loot that any other raid would receive, except it must be divided among 144.
Yeah, and otherwise challenging content dies just due to the sheer numbers of bodies thrown at it. Please no.
Wellspring said:
No body is going to want to spend hours raiding in a zerg guild like that when their chance of getting a piece of loot is less than 1%. There should also be flagging or keys so that a boss kill may only drop 24 keys or flags per kill. That guild will flag/gear up so slowly compared to the guilds that raid with less players, they won't even be able to compete with the hardcore guilds.
If nobody is going to want to zerg then why should it even be an option? It just opens to door to bad situations.
Wellspring said:
BUT... atleast they have the opportunity to include everyone in their guild, w/o making people feel left out. Isn't that what this game is about, building community? How can you do that if you only let 24,36, or whatever number of players participate in raiding?
Guilds can adapt, pretty simple. You're not going to be on a first name basis with 200 people in a guild. It's just absurd.
There's a practical limit to the size of a community before it just gets unwieldy. This is exactly why humans form smaller communities that are condensed into niches. It's just unreasonable to expect to have a community that big. I've never seen a long term successful guild with a huge roster. The internal structure almost always splinters into subgroups and cliques within the guild.
Smaller guilds and raids promote stronger bonds.
Megaera said: The amount of code to attune a raid boss to the amount of people there wouldn't be too difficult I would think. For example...raid boss x is attuned for a 18 man team. The group that is about to attempt it has 30...you know it's 30 because they had to complete the quest to be flagged for the encounter...so you add 1% more hp per person and let's say .5% more boss dmg per person...and 1 additional add per 4 people... So basically you would add in a line of code that assess number of people flagged..then a few more lines up to the point the max dmg a tank would be able to take without being 1 shot...
That sounds great in theory, but less so in principle unless you have a raid member cap, it works in WoW, so it can be done, but it's not going to be easy or simple. Adding more HP and more boss DPS isn't necessarily going to make a scripted event maintain its difficulty level when raid numbers grow. It would take a lot more work than that because you have also have to figure out a way to scale other raid scripted mechanics as well and that's going to be more difficult. For example a raid that has a phase that spawn 4 adds that need to be dealt with by 20 would need to have code to spawn additional adds for more players. AE effects would probably need to be boosted to make it as equally difficult to deal with when you add more healers to raid, etc.
Megaera said: The amount of code to attune a raid boss to the amount of people there wouldn't be too difficult I would think. For example...raid boss x is attuned for a 18 man team. The group that is about to attempt it has 30...you know it's 30 because they had to complete the quest to be flagged for the encounter...so you add 1% more hp per person and let's say .5% more boss dmg per person...and 1 additional add per 4 people... So basically you would add in a line of code that assess number of people flagged..then a few more lines up to the point the max dmg a tank would be able to take without being 1 shot...
It's way too simplistic to just scale hit points and max hit with the number of people in a raid. The fights would have to be boring an 1-dimensional as hell for that to be practical.
No. Instead you'd have to have almost an entirely different encounter script for every single raid, and take the time to tune and balance it so that it is equivalently difficult regardless of the number of people engaged. You'd basically be writing 5-10-20 encounter scripts for a given encounter.
It's just not practical for VR to do that.
Liav said:Wellspring said:Limiting the number of players that can attack a target is a bad mechanic.
Why?
Because it is exclusive.
Liav said:Yeah, and otherwise challenging content dies just due to the sheer numbers of bodies thrown at it. Please no.
It doesn't matter how many players you throw at a boss if you don't understand the fight. There are a million ways the devs can make raid bosses challenging w/o artificially restricting the number of players to 24 or 36...
Liav said:If nobody is going to want to zerg then why should it even be an option? It just opens to door to bad situations.
Liav said:Guilds can adapt, pretty simple. You're not going to be on a first name basis with 200 people in a guild. It's just absurd.
There's a practical limit to the size of a community before it just gets unwieldy. This is exactly why humans form smaller communities that are condensed into niches. It's just unreasonable to expect to have a community that big. I've never seen a long term successful guild with a huge roster. The internal structure almost always splinters into subgroups and cliques within the guild.
Smaller guilds and raids promote stronger bonds.
Who are we or the devs to determine the practical limit of a community? What's practical to you may not be practical to me.
When SWTOR launched, I was part of a hardcore raiding guild of about 60 members (a guild I had been with since Vanguard launched), which we were competing for server firsts. Raiding in SWTOR was restricted to 20 players. We elected to have an "A" raid and a "B" raid so that everyone could participate. It truly sucked being separated from half your guild. The whole thing became very divisive. When a player from "B" raid had to be moved to "A" raid there would be outrage. When one raid wasn't able to finish the operation, feelings were hurt. It was not an enjoyable experience, and soon people dreaded raiding.
So tell me Liav... when you have 50 people online ready to raid, how are you going to 14 of your guildies that they can't come along, night after night? Talk about the opposite of fun and community oriented.
Megaera said: Well you could add the dmg and hp buff the all,dmg abilities...all the adds. This tunes entire encounter. For example at lvl 50 with decent gear..the tank has 26k hp self buffed and 31k raid buffed... The encounter original design calls for the boss to do 10 k dps average with certain abilities that hit for 20k... You could set it so that the max dmg of those certain abilities do 26k...and normal dps jumps to 16k. Something simple like this would work for any encounters not designed with death touch type abilities. You would just have to edit all abilities other than the death touch.
Right, but if you just keep throwing players at the raid, it eventually becomes impossible to complete because your entire raid just dies in one hit.
In other words, the difficulty of the encounter is not preserved relative to the raid size.
No, it seems like it's easy but it's not, you would have to test and possibly tune for each additional person or arbitrary number of people. If you don't you could end up making an event significantly harder just by adding 1 person if that person caused an additional add to spawn and the devs feel an add should be handled by 5 people. That would then lead people to building raids to find the easiest version based upon the number of players vs. scaling. As a raid leader, i know i certainly would. Like i said, i am not saying it can't or shouldn't be done, but there is nothing easy about it unless VRI designs very one-dimensional raids.
Wellspring said:... when you have 50 people online ready to raid, how are you going to 14 of your guildies that they can't come along, night after night? Talk about the opposite of fun and community oriented.
I know you are talking to Liav, but this is a problem that raiders in EQ1 have dealt with for 17 years and most other games for whatever time period they have played. It's something you either accept because of the game's design or the guild's direction or you go elsewhere. In EQ1 we have people sitting every night, it's just a fact of life. Most guilds recruit to make sure they have bench so they always have more than enough people to raid. Now this dynamic does change when you have smaller raids as you have stated, i hated being in a two raid team guild, it was always a problem - we always had less problems with people sitting for larger raids than people feeling left out because they joined and were relegated to the B and couldn't raid.
Wellspring said:Because it is exclusive.
Exclusivity is not intrinsically bad.
Wellspring said:It doesn't matter how many players you throw at a boss if you don't understand the fight. There are a million ways the devs can make raid bosses challenging w/o artificially restricting the number of players to 24 or 36...
Dynamically? Really? You can make a boss fight that challenges 24 and 240 players equivalently? That's what you would have to do to not make the content 100% zergable.
Wellspring said:Who are we or the devs to determine the practical limit of a community? What's practical to you may not be practical to me.
When SWTOR launched, I was part of a hardcore raiding guild of about 60 members (a guild I had been with since Vanguard launched), which we were competing for server firsts. Raiding in SWTOR was restricted to 20 players. We elected to have an "A" raid and a "B" raid so that everyone could participate. It truly sucked being separated from half your guild. The whole thing became very divisive. When a player from "B" raid had to be moved to "A" raid there would be outrage. When one raid wasn't able to finish the operation, feelings were hurt. It was not an enjoyable experience, and soon people dreaded raiding.
So tell me Liav... when you have 50 people online ready to raid, how are you going to 14 of your guildies that they can't come along, night after night? Talk about the opposite of fun and community oriented.
I won't have to, because I won't recruit 50 people for 36-man content. Or, some people will just have to sit out. It won't be a ton of people though and it's usually entirely practical to cycle people out unless the content is severely class restrictive.
Ideally the cap on the number of people in a raid will be above what is required to complete the content so we just won't have to run into that issue. For instance, you can have content that demands 24 people but have a raid cap of 30-36 for overflow. It hasn't really been done before but it seems pretty reasonable to me.
Allowing a small overflow pool won't make the content super easy if it's tuned well. Either way I consider it superior to 100% uncapped.
In EQ during PoP where the cap was 72, i think we rarely were at or above 72. I think we were anywhere as low as 50, and often in the mid-to-high 60's which was enough to defeat any PoP content including Coirnav (which was timed). There was the occasional spike it attendance after a big kill (we had 80+ for our very first elemental planes god) but it pretty quickly normalized. So if raids are capped at 54, I'm sure quality guilds could do it with 40-45 leaving 10-15 slots for "extras" without having to tell people that can't come.
*edit to add the following point* Also regarding zerging, I don't know for sure, but wouldn't performance decrease both client side (for those without uber PC's) and server side, causing the raid to be that much more difficult
Quintra said:*edit to add the following point* Also regarding zerging, I don't know for sure, but wouldn't performance decrease both client side (for those without uber PC's) and server side, causing the raid to be that much more difficult
That's another issue that is very relevant and it's a great point.
Performance is a huge factor with regards to raid design. There's absolutely no chance that Pantheon will support rendering anything more than 50ish players with reasonable performance, if I had to guess. I can't even imagine the lag that would exist with 100+ simultaneous high quality character models with unique armor and animations. It transcends hardware.
Quintra said:I don't know for sure, but wouldn't performance decrease both client side (for those without uber PC's) and server side, causing the raid to be that much more difficult
It could, but that's really something outside our realm of brainstorming to consider, at least at this point. That may become an incredibly relevant issue once we are into pre-alpha, alpha, etc. and see how the game handles larger numbers in a small area. I am optimistic though, having seen Unity in Crowfall (yes, i understand they are using different graphics etc.).
Quintra said:I don't know for sure, but wouldn't performance decrease both client side (for those without uber PC's) and server side, causing the raid to be that much more difficult
That's a valid concern. If EQ1 could have 72 man raiding (in 1999 using dialup), then I certianly hope they could do much better than that 17 years later, even with the superior graphics.
Liav said:Wellspring said:It doesn't matter how many players you throw at a boss if you don't understand the fight. There are a million ways the devs can make raid bosses challenging w/o artificially restricting the number of players to 24 or 36...
Dynamically? Really? You can make a boss fight that challenges 24 and 240 players equivalently? That's what you would have to do to not make the content 100% zergable.
1) De-incentivise the zerging.
a) Flags/Keys: If raid boss "A" drops the 24 keys to access raid boss "B", then it will take the zerg guild 10x more kills for the full raid to even access raid boss "B".
b) Lockout Timers: If everyone who participates in the raid is locked out from killing the boss again for a week, then the larger the raid size you go with, the less likely you will be to get loot.
2) Mechanics to penalize more people (however, not artificially prevent them)
a) Boss AOE's: the boss will AOE the entire engagement area. The more players found within range, the more damage it does.
b) Same as above, but with boss healing, spawned adds, player mezzes or charms, etc.
3) Leadership/Coordination Challenges
a) If everyone is not standing in a certain area or if someone is in range of an AoE, then {insert something bad happens}. The more people to coordinate, the more likely someone will mess it up.
b) Decreasing platform sizes. As the lava level rises, there is less room to stand. The more people you bring, the less room you have to spread out.
These are just a couple off the top of my head. I'm sure there are much better ideas out there besides my own.
Regardless of any other points, the above post reminded me of the horror of back flagging. Having to flag and back flag members over and over in PoP is what lead to me quiting EQ. Myself and others don't want to have to redo trivial raid content repeatedly in order to help others flag just so that everyone can progress to something better.
Can we please have keys and flagging be limited to 1 or 2 group content max? It is one thing to have 5 people volunteer to help 1 person get keyed/flagged. It is another thing to have 40 people volunteer to get 8 people flagged...repeatedly. I know it breaks down to the same percentage but it isn't the same as far as willing volunteers. That is rough. Can we please limit the required flagging to small group content only? Please?
I think flagging should be used sparingly. I also like the idea of the flagging process being something that can mostly be done in group content. When killing raid mobs is required, that means your entire guild has to be dragged through the process again and again, and it also means eliminating content that your guild may not particularly need.
VP was a fairly good key process. It was pretty tough, but could be done solo or group except for one piece (trak teeth). Multiple teeth dropped each time, so a single kill could key 4 or more people. You could also negotiate with other guilds to get a tooth and let them kill it.
I would love to know why some MMOs began to cap their raids. Personally I believe it is because they are easier to code, they prevent zerging, they prevent having to ask guild mates to sit out raids, and they are more easy to plan out than uncapped raids. Would be great to get a devs perspective on this though.
If you ask me, you have to ask more of your guild mates to sit out of a raid if the raids are uncapped or are capped at 72 man raids. Because unless every boss requires 72, or unless some bosses are zergable, then some bosses are going to be designed to become extremely difficult unless you have the intended range of players. So if a boss requires 30-40 and you have 72 then well you are going to have to ask 30 some players to sit out because if you bring more than 40 the boss is going to get extremely upset and enrage and start gaining HP and more DMG and start popping crazy adds and the roof will start caving in and the floor beneath you will start giving way and etc etc. Do you see the dillemma here?
At least with capped raids you know how many can come each and every time and you can build your guild/raidforce around that. With capped raids you actually have to ask LESS people to sit out because you don't build a guild to have a crazy amount more players than what raids are capable of unless you have a lot of casuals or you plan on building two raid forces. I never had to ask many ppl to sit out because there were only ever a small few on after our raid was full so they either went about their business and waited to join or didn't intend to join.
One way to have uncapped raids and not have every boss require 72 players would be to have some bosses zergable. And last I knew most people were against zerging as well as the tenets (PRF will be a challenging game and zerging is the definite opposite of challenging).
The only other way imo to have uncapped raids and mean something without having bosses be zergable is to have intended ranges of players for bosses and if that amount is exceeded then the boss enrages and becomes extremely difficult to defeat. But then this would mean either every boss is the same intended range such as every boss is intended for 20-30 players or every boss is intended for 30-40 etc (which then there should be no reason for not capping raids, if every boss is intended for 20-30 then just cap at 30) OR the bosses vary in ranges where some are 20-30, some are 30-40, some 50-60, 60-70, etc because at least in this case you may have planned your raidforce to hover around 40 people and possibly come upon many bosses you can defeat with that 40 but then come across one boss that requires more than 40 and you have to ponder whether you just need more people or if it is beatable at all. (I now see what you were talking about Dullahan) If this is the case though then if you have 72 raid mates a lot are still going to have to sit when you plan to fight the 20-30 boss, some will sit during the 30-40 boss, etc etc. This just seems like a headache to me.
So, at the end of the day you just can't have 72 man raids, where nobody sits out, and none of the bosses are zergable unless every boss requires 72 players. And not only do I not want to play an MMO where the requirement to raid is 72 players, I don't know if the sub count will support it well. Maybe, maybe not. I also don't want to have some fights require 30 players, some 40, and some others 50 just to prevent bosses from being zerged. Even if you tone the numbers down to some bosses being 30-40 and the other 40-50, you will need a force of at least 50 and during some fights you are still going to have to ask a lot of players to have to sit out.
I am usually against hard-coded limitations in MMOs but this is one area I think it helps out just too much. Imo there is just too much benefit from placing caps on raids that it should not be avoided.
edit. I stated I don't want to raid in an MMO that requires 72 players to raid. Nor do I want to raid where 50 are required. I would really love for 24 maybe 30 but 36 is prolly pushing it and I think 40 is going to be too many for me. I have led raids before and I would not want to lead a raid where some bosses require this number while other bosses require some other number. This is when and where guild mates have to sit out and can't join your raid, because the boss will get crazy if we bring X amount of players while the boss requires Y amount. I may have already stated this 'edit' but it's late and I just wanted to make sure I added this if I didn't already say it lol. I've stated my opinion and have read others and will wait in earnest to hear what the devs have to say. Good day to everybody.
Wellspring said:...
So tell me Liav... when you have 50 people online ready to raid, how are you going to 14 of your guildies that they can't come along, night after night? Talk about the opposite of fun and community oriented.
This is a logical fallacy. Just because you were in that situation, and the guild allowed itself to get in that situation, doesn't prove itself to be a valid argument point for someone else.
As someone who helped lead multi-game guilds, that is not a fun scenario to be in. But in regards to what a valid size for a game is and establishing a point, it's next to invalid. We may as well cater the raiding game to the few guilds who will have 500+ members.
NoobieDoo said:I would love to know why some MMOs began to cap their raids. Personally I believe it is because they are easier to code, they prevent zerging, they prevent having to ask guild mates to sit out raids, and they are more easy to plan out than uncapped raids. Would be great to get a devs perspective on this though.
There was previous a forum called Fires of Heaven that Brad and many other developers frequently posted at. When WoW was about to be released to even when Vanguard was released, raiding sizes were a hot topics that saw many, many developers post. The topic of providing a better experience for those X players (X being 24, 30, 36, 40, 42, whatever) was common. It provided more engaging encounters because a set size was expected. Because they could tailor the content before the raids (gear prep) accordingly. To allow guilds and organizations get X tanks, Y healers, etc. While it may not have been fair for every single player (it never is), it provided more challenging content that wasn't solely based on warm bodies and managing a mana pool. In summary, games advanced beyond tight complete heal rotations, a warrior being in the corner of a room, and crowd controllers knowing how to tab-target properly. They wanted more engaging experiences for players.
NoobieDoo said:
If you ask me, you have to ask more of your guild mates to sit out of a raid if the raids are uncapped or are capped at 72 man raids. Because unless every boss requires 72, or unless some bosses are zergable, then some bosses are going to be designed to become extremely difficult unless you have the intended range of players. So if a boss requires 30-40 and you have 72 then well you are going to have to ask 30 some players to sit out because if you bring more than 40 the boss is going to get extremely upset and enrage and start gaining HP and more DMG and start popping crazy adds and the roof will start caving in and the floor beneath you will start giving way and etc etc. Do you see the dillemma here?
Maybe the reason that this doesn't seem logical to me is because I haven't played MMORPGs the last couple of years?
How does "you have to ask more of your guild mates to sit out of a raid if the raids are uncapped" make any sense at all? That only makes sense if the developers are putting restrictions on the raid as if it were capped.
Lets make sure we are discussing the same point here.
When someone refers to an uncapped raid I think most people take that to mean a raid without restrictions. If it is a raid that doesn't officially have a player limit, but the boss despawns when 50 players attack it; it is still a capped raid. Yes that might be an extreme example but it is just that, an example. A boss that enrages to the point that it is unkillable, under the current gear set, when a certain amount of people attack it is the same thing.
Please lets try not to argue semantics. The difference between a capped and an uncapped raid should be clearly and easily defined as far as discussion goes.
I think very good arguments have been made for both sides regarding raid size and how it can impact raid difficulty.
Lets move on to talk about raid size and how it will impact raid content longevity...
If it takes 24 players to defeat a boss (versus say 72 players) you've got one of two problems. The devs have already stated that the raid content will not be instanced (meaning you cannot have more than one raid attacking the same boss in individualized shards at the exact same time).
Problem 1) Not enough raid content. If you have no lockout timers and long weekly respawn times for bosses (like original EverQuest), then only 24 players will get to experience raiding that boss once per week. If a server has 480 players on it that like to raid, even twice per week, that is twenty 24 man raids total equaling 48 raid bosses per week. Designing 48 raid encounters to satisfy only 480 players does not seem like a realistic approach to me. As you increase the raid size, the more players at a time it can satisfy.
Problem 2) No raid competition. If they do a system such as weekly lockout timers and 1 hour respawns for bosses (like open world bosses in SWTOR), then most 24 player raids will get to experience the raid content nearly as much and at the time they like. Which means virtually no competition for raid bosses. You might as well be raiding in an instance at this point...
I don't know the solution to this problem. I hate instanced raiding, but I also hate batphone raiding. I guess you have to compromise somewhere.