Enitzu said:Saying that exploring is just as hard as coordinating a 24+ person raid is outrageous. I can explore the world running around by myself with little to no risk involved. So I should be rewarded with end game gear for that "accomplishment"? Your post is bordering on the entitlement factor that has become the death of modern day MMOs.
You totally missed the point of my post. You wont understand it if I keep explaining it. So let me rephrase your statement in an opposite but EQUALLY ACCURATE form:
Saying that raiding is just as hard as coordinating a 24+ person exploration event is outrageous. I can kill a boss mob in a newbie zone solo, with little to no risk to involved. So I should be rewarded wtih end game gear to that "accomplishment"? Your post is bordering on the entitlement factor that has become the death of modern day MMOs.
This is a discussion on how to make a new game better than existing games. This is not a "description" session for existing game. We are not trying to figure out where loot should go in existing fully implemented game which we have played for years and use existing mechanics as facts. You keep inventing this "Super duper hard raid content" in your head and than inventing this "super easy" everything else content in the game and it just drives you crazy why would anyone ask for similar gear for both. NO ONE DOES. What is the point of this thread if default premise that everyone must follow is that raiding is the hardest content in the game and deserves the best gear. While all other activities MUST be implemented as much easier than raiding and must be relegated to secondary rewards. If that is the intent of this thread, than it should be renamed and re-described as such.
Jimmayus said: I'm sorry moszis, but I believe I agree with Enitzu. It's just not practical to demand that every type of content be equally rewarding.
I agree with you completelly. Sorry, if I came off that way. What I meant is there needs to be "other" context comparable to difficulty/reward as raiding. I certainly did not expect all listed or even more than one or two more. It was just a list of options to choose from. I was trying to exagerate to make my point. I would have no interest to work on exploration or dimplomacy if its any where close to raid difficulty.
Archaen said:tldr: End-game in one word... Questing.
If this was a feasible idea I'd agree with you. However, there is no way for the dev's to be able to create enough quests to keep the playerbase going for a year+. Most people would be done with them in under 4-5 months. Have to give the people repeatable content to keep them going between expansions. Questing should be a big part of it but not the only part. Besides that, quests aren't the only way to portray a story. They are just but one of the building blocks.
Archaen said:Saying that best gear should come from 24-man raiding instead of 6-man dungeons only adds to this problem. If that's the though process, then why not have 100-man content that has the best gear... or 1000-man content. The higher the better, right? Systems and arbitrary restrictions completely kill the sense of the world and our purpose in it. Why would you ever say, "that dragon is tough, but we really don't want that extra man along!" Yes, this puts a huge burden on the devs to create content that is difficult and meaningful... but we've had 15 years of stagnant and limited content and it's time that changed.
Understanding there are limitations, here is my suggestion for end-game:
- Epic quests... Think EQ epic quests, or the race/class quest item original EQ had.
- Slow levelling... This may not seem like and end-game thing, but the longer it takes to reach end-game the longer you have to develop for it along with not needing as much.
- Class abilities/spells... Epic quest lines don't need to be limited to "items", long quests for new/improved abilities would be awesome.
- Crafting... quest lines as well as not limiting how many crafting professions you can do
- Limited "special" drops... yes, long camps for special items was not everyone's cup of tea, but added a certain flavor to the game
- Large amount of content... limited content requires instancing, stay away from that with a plethora of dungeon/raid/areas for max level players to go.
Now you're arguing semantics. We use 24 man as a generalization for the raids simply because there is no info on the scope they wish to implement. However, saying that there should be no cap in place simply argues that the need for mechanics is pointless. Why bother putting in anything at all when it simply can be done by 3 times the number to trivialize it? Having caps allows the devs to tune content in order to make it difficult and provide the challenge. Taking that away makes raids pretty much pointless because you kill their entire reason for existing.
As for your list, you just listed everything we all want. Yet you argued against the same things in the beginning ...
Archaen said:As to specific comments in this thread...
Concerning raiding...
It is not the most difficult or challenging, it is a type of content... nothing more. Yes it is difficult to coordinate a big group, but large groups can cover for individual mistakes a lot easier and allow for a greater variety of skills/abilities.
Raiding should never be arbitrarily restricted or instanced. The dragon at the end of a dungeon isn't a "raid boss" because it has 24-man written on it's forehead, but because it takes more than the traditional group to defeat it. How many? Why would you ever pre-define that for the players? How would you ever know how "tough" something is or what a "boss" is capable of until you've tried it? If 12 players can do it... great! If it takes 23 then so be it. The focus should not be on how many and what classes, but on the boss itself. It is inevitable and desirable that best tactics/classes would "leak" into the community over time, but that info comes from players doing the content not from developers defining the content for players.
What games have you raided in and at what level? If you simply zerg raided in EQ then sure, there is no challenge there. If you mythic raided (successfully) in wow then you should know the challenges and how 1 simple mistake can wipe your raid. The smaller the raid group and stricter the mechanics, the less room for personal error. In a 72 person raid, sure you can have lots mess up. In a 24 person raid, not so much. I'm not saying instancing needs to happen. They can simply keep the raid size capped to a number and tune for that. This doesn't prevent others from going after and fighting for the same boss it simply means that you can only win loot in one raid. I'd prefer they put in lock out timers myself to prevent the fighting but that's simply my opinion.
Archaen said:Concerning loot...
JDNight hit it on the head... sadly this seems to be ignored in this thread. Having a single piece of gear as the best you can get that comes simply from killing a mob (no matter how difficult) is really poor design. It inevitably leads to everyone looking the same, doing the exact same thing and a sort of "elite" attitude on what you must have to be the best. Please no.
Loot should also NEVER be restricted on trading/selling. The only arguments I've seen on this are RMT and "cause they didn't work for it."
- Let's be realistic, you're not going to stop RMT by adding NO-TRADE to awesome items. Otherwise it would have stopped long ago, not increased. Trivial content and over-eager loot drops is the biggest factor in RMT. Additionally, there are other, better methods to handle this than applying restrictions to the non-RMT population.
- As to "they didn't work for it"... sure they did. A player who spends hours working the market is still spending hours playing the game... what's the point to gold if you can't buy things with it? Just because they didn't get the killing blow should not restrict them from obtaining it in other ways. Frankly, it's the Bazaar/Auction House that has ruined the economy/trading in most MMOs... and killed it as part of the game because "raiders" felt it took too much time/effort to trade their wares.
You must not have read everything in this thread. Many have stated, myself included, that nothing should be BiS and that everything will be situational at best. You should be required to farm many different parts of the game to get the relevant gear.
Again, what games have you played? Some are far worse than others. While most games have RMT with gold and carries, etc games like EQ with the fully tradeble loot are considerably worse. RMT on the TLP servers has become such a problem that you rarely are able to buy high priced stuff for less than 2-3 Krono. Hell there are websites dedicated to selling EQ items/accounts/plat/krono. It's a plague that is far worse for EQ than it is for anything other game. Ignoring that is simply asking for trouble.
Archaen said:
Concerning instancing...
Please no... I loved seeing in the December stream when they were fighting that golem-type boss and another player shows up and helps them out a bit. Instancing turns the rest of the world into a dungeon-finder lobby. Anyone who never played pre-Luclin EQ knows how awesome a difficult/open dungeon is. The social interaction alone is worth the open design.
Additionally, the mention about dungeon levels should be a 5-10 level spread... early EQ dungeons were more like a 15-25 level spread, for a single dungeon. You could spend the entire last half of your levelling experience in Solusek's Eye and it was awesome. Having lots of dungeons with large level spreads is the way to go... no fast travel (outside of player ports and speed buffs), no quick 30 min run to the bottom, tough mobs with trains and corpse runs... love it! Thankfully, the December stream also showed this is most likely the way they are going.
No one is advocating for instancing. We are looking for ways to add things to the game going around it so that we all do have more content to work on for end game rather than the same old stale things over and over.
moszis said:I would have no interest to work on exploration or dimplomacy if its any where close to raid difficulty.
Just remember that difficulty comes in many forms. For example, puzzles can be intellectually difficult. Not everything has to be combat, and not everything has to be a gear check. This thread has beat that to death.
Shai said:moszis said:I would have no interest to work on exploration or dimplomacy if its any where close to raid difficulty.Just remember that difficulty comes in many forms. For example, puzzles can be intellectually difficult. Not everything has to be combat, and not everything has to be a gear check. This thread has beat that to death.
Yep, fully understand that. And to add to your point an example. 24 man raid was able to kill a super rare boss in 20 minutes. They were all positioned in the right spots and no adds appeared the whole fight. The reason they were so good and the fight was so easy is because a group of 3 scouts spent a month (dying dozens of times in the process) doing exploration/scouting quests to spawn this super rare boss without adds in a spot that is best suited for 24 man raid. Unfortunately the scouts could not participate in the raid itself. The scouting quest line required them to be else where to make sure no adds appear during the raid.
I dont understand, no matter how I try, why is there such a hard belief that those scouts do not deserve a chance to get a similar rewards as 3rd line of dps during the final raid?
moszis said:Please tell me why you disagree with the following statement. If you dont disagree than I will ask the next question. This is the only thing thats being asked:
Pantheon should have other end game content that is on the same level of difficulty as raiding.
I don't disagree with the thought. It's the implementation that I don't think is possible. I've done dungeons in almost every mmo to date and the closest has been wow's mythic+ but it still misses the mark for a lot of reason imo.
moszis said:Shai said:moszis said:I would have no interest to work on exploration or dimplomacy if its any where close to raid difficulty.Just remember that difficulty comes in many forms. For example, puzzles can be intellectually difficult. Not everything has to be combat, and not everything has to be a gear check. This thread has beat that to death.
Yep, fully understand that. And to add to your point an example. 24 man raid was able to kill a super rare boss in 20 minutes. They were all positioned in the right spots and no adds appeared the whole fight. The reason they were so good and the fight was so easy is because a group of 3 scouts spent a month (dying dozens of times in the process) doing exploration/scouting quests to spawn this super rare boss without adds in a spot that is best suited for 24 man raid. Unfortunately the scouts could not participate in the raid itself. The scouting quest line required them to be else where to make sure no adds appear during the raid.
I dont understand, no matter how I try, why is there such a hard belief that those scouts do not deserve a chance to get a similar rewards as 3rd line of dps during the final raid?
This would be something that would be a part of the encounter mechanics meaning they would be a part of the raid and therefore eligible for loot. Unless you are saying that they would need to be in another zone which would be impossible. Each zone functions as its own shard/server so tieing in mechanics across multiple isn't very realistic. It's possible I'm sure but highly unlikely that it would ever happen
Of course I would be fully satisfied if we took it from a totally different angle. Lets say raiding is the only source of top tiered gear.. BUT, raid itself is a reward. To get in the raid zone, you need to be keyed. To get keyed, you need to do a looong epic quest line that involves exploration, crafting, diplomacy, solo/group challenges, etc.. You basically have to prove yourself that you are worthy of raiding through other disciplines. Making other disciplines just as valuable in end game as raiding.
As it stands raiding is simply not difficult. Its very difficult to be fully immersed in raiding when it has nothing to do with MMORPG but more of real life logistics and organizing. I simply want to start feeling some RPG in MMORPG again. Even if I raid multiple times per week, I would be happy if on other days I can follow other paths and enjoy the game, knowing that I’m still improving my character within the endgame context.
Enitzu said:This would be something that would be a part of the encounter mechanics meaning they would be a part of the raid and therefore eligible for loot. Unless you are saying that they would need to be in another zone which would be impossible. Each zone functions as its own shard/server so tieing in mechanics across multiple isn't very realistic. It's possible I'm sure but highly unlikely that it would ever happen
There is absolutely no logical or technical reason why they can not be in a different zone. Zone is a "view" and does not need implementation engine logic to run within the context of that view or be attached to any specific zone. In addition, no I did not mean for their quest line to be part of the encounter. Their quest line is part of their scouting end game development process. It happens to trigger the boss for other disciplines (raiding) to benefit. It may also, trigger some group content, etc.. The world is interconnected and events can trigger each other, which would promote different end game disciplines to work together. Of course, their quest line does not have to trigger the raid. Only their effort can be weighted to the effort of raiders to see if its comparable and hence deserving of similar tier gear.
moszis said:Enitzu said:This would be something that would be a part of the encounter mechanics meaning they would be a part of the raid and therefore eligible for loot. Unless you are saying that they would need to be in another zone which would be impossible. Each zone functions as its own shard/server so tieing in mechanics across multiple isn't very realistic. It's possible I'm sure but highly unlikely that it would ever happen
There is absolutely no logical or technical reason why they can not be in a different zone. Zone is a "view" and does not need implementation engine logic to run within the context of that view or be attached to any specific zone. In addition, no I did not mean for their quest line to be part of the encounter. Their quest line is part of their scouting end game development process. It happens to trigger the boss for other disciplines (raiding) to benefit. It may also, trigger some group content, etc.. The world is interconnected and events can trigger each other, which would promote different end game disciplines to work together. Of course, their quest line does not have to trigger the raid. Only their effort can be weighted to the effort of raiders to see if its comparable and hence deserving of similar tier gear.
In this scenario I see everyone doing the scouting quest (1 piece of uber gear) and then killing the spawned MoB (1 piece of uber gear). You have not added anything new only given another piece of gear to every raider.
I think there needs to be more Coldain Shawl type quests. More three or four way faction quests. More farming for gems and patterns... (can you tell Velious was my favorite expansion?)
My best case scenario is to keep raiding as the endgame but determine WHICH raids you can do based upon your choices in game.
An example would be: If you have a very high friendly faction with a town and you go try to kill the leader then the whole town should yell "TRAITOR" and drop an A-Bomb on you.
There is no reason factions cant be used in both directions.
Maximis said:I think there needs to be more Coldain Shawl type quests. More three or four way faction quests. More farming for gems and patterns... (can you tell Velious was my favorite expansion?)
This is my dream as well. I have stated this many times before (in this and other threads). Although, to be fair the ring war quest line was better than shawl :P I'm guessing you played a caster in EQ, haha. Coldain quest lines were by far #1 best part in my lifes MMO experience. I would kill for any game that can bring something similar back. Same difficulty and time.. spanning through your characters life.
Unfortunately, at this point i'm not arguing for what I want. But trying to break this ingrained ideology that HURTS RAIDERS most of all.. The ideology that raiding must be implemented as the only source of endgames most difficult content and end game gear. This destroys raiding in modern games. It makes the devs forced to create raid content accessible to all and easy. Everyone has their play styles and and their playtimes are distributed differently. To make raiding so easy that anyone can do it, makes raiding not interesting to me and not immersive.
Enitzu said:Archaen said:tldr: End-game in one word... Questing.
If this was a feasible idea I'd agree with you. However, there is no way for the dev's to be able to create enough quests to keep the playerbase going for a year+. Most people would be done with them in under 4-5 months. Have to give the people repeatable content to keep them going between expansions. Questing should be a big part of it but not the only part. Besides that, quests aren't the only way to portray a story. They are just but one of the building blocks.
Patently false since early EQ did this very thing. A single epic quest could take 4-5 months of play, not all of them combined. You're thinking far too much in WoW terms in this thread.
Enitzu said:Archaen said:Saying that best gear should come from 24-man raiding instead of 6-man dungeons only adds to this problem. If that's the though process, then why not have 100-man content that has the best gear... or 1000-man content. The higher the better, right? Systems and arbitrary restrictions completely kill the sense of the world and our purpose in it. Why would you ever say, "that dragon is tough, but we really don't want that extra man along!" Yes, this puts a huge burden on the devs to create content that is difficult and meaningful... but we've had 15 years of stagnant and limited content and it's time that changed.
Understanding there are limitations, here is my suggestion for end-game:
- Epic quests... Think EQ epic quests, or the race/class quest item original EQ had.
- Slow levelling... This may not seem like and end-game thing, but the longer it takes to reach end-game the longer you have to develop for it along with not needing as much.
- Class abilities/spells... Epic quest lines don't need to be limited to "items", long quests for new/improved abilities would be awesome.
- Crafting... quest lines as well as not limiting how many crafting professions you can do
- Limited "special" drops... yes, long camps for special items was not everyone's cup of tea, but added a certain flavor to the game
- Large amount of content... limited content requires instancing, stay away from that with a plethora of dungeon/raid/areas for max level players to go.
Now you're arguing semantics. We use 24 man as a generalization for the raids simply because there is no info on the scope they wish to implement. However, saying that there should be no cap in place simply argues that the need for mechanics is pointless. Why bother putting in anything at all when it simply can be done by 3 times the number to trivialize it? Having caps allows the devs to tune content in order to make it difficult and provide the challenge. Taking that away makes raids pretty much pointless because you kill their entire reason for existing.
As for your list, you just listed everything we all want. Yet you argued against the same things in the beginning ...
It's not semantics... it was meant to show you the flaw in your thinking (ie. 24 man content is more difficult/better than 6 man content). The irony is you argue my point for me... the limitation was implemented to allow devs to design content to be done a specific way. This is a flaw in both design and thinking. You seem dead set on having raids the way they've been implemented for the past 15 years with only varying degrees of numbers.. that's arguing semantics.
Passing off my list as what we all want when half this stuff wasn't even mentioned in this thread is pretty obtuse. Are we discussing alternatives or not? I understand there are limitations to questing and to world design. The list I gave was with this understanding in mind and to expand end-game outside of the traditional narrow raid-only view. If this is stuff you want from end-game, why are you so focused on raid > all and everything else should support it?
Enitzu said:Archaen said:As to specific comments in this thread...
Concerning raiding...
It is not the most difficult or challenging, it is a type of content... nothing more. Yes it is difficult to coordinate a big group, but large groups can cover for individual mistakes a lot easier and allow for a greater variety of skills/abilities.
Raiding should never be arbitrarily restricted or instanced. The dragon at the end of a dungeon isn't a "raid boss" because it has 24-man written on it's forehead, but because it takes more than the traditional group to defeat it. How many? Why would you ever pre-define that for the players? How would you ever know how "tough" something is or what a "boss" is capable of until you've tried it? If 12 players can do it... great! If it takes 23 then so be it. The focus should not be on how many and what classes, but on the boss itself. It is inevitable and desirable that best tactics/classes would "leak" into the community over time, but that info comes from players doing the content not from developers defining the content for players.
What games have you raided in and at what level? If you simply zerg raided in EQ then sure, there is no challenge there. If you mythic raided (successfully) in wow then you should know the challenges and how 1 simple mistake can wipe your raid. The smaller the raid group and stricter the mechanics, the less room for personal error. In a 72 person raid, sure you can have lots mess up. In a 24 person raid, not so much. I'm not saying instancing needs to happen. They can simply keep the raid size capped to a number and tune for that. This doesn't prevent others from going after and fighting for the same boss it simply means that you can only win loot in one raid. I'd prefer they put in lock out timers myself to prevent the fighting but that's simply my opinion.
First off, my raid experience has very little to do with the efficacy of my argument. And I never said raiding presents no challenge, only the difficulty of raiding is different than the difficulty of grouping... thank you for proving my point. If there is some limit that is required to make content challenging, then why should the limit be 6 or 12 or 24? Instead, make the content difficult and let the players decide how much of a challenge they want. The more players you add, the less there is to go around.
Your mentality that because you mythic raided in WoW makes your arguments have more weight than anyone elses is the exact problem, "I raid therefore I'm the best in the game and you all should bow to my wishes." All the things you're requesting they do for raiding were the "improvements" that post-Luclin EQ, EQ2 and WoW brought to the raiding world... and they all sucked! Why tell a person they can't raid again and have to do something else if raiding is what they enjoy? It's an artificial constraint to expand the time it takes to acquire things. I'd prefer mine to be more tied to the world itself (questing).
Enitzu said:Archaen said:Concerning loot...
JDNight hit it on the head... sadly this seems to be ignored in this thread. Having a single piece of gear as the best you can get that comes simply from killing a mob (no matter how difficult) is really poor design. It inevitably leads to everyone looking the same, doing the exact same thing and a sort of "elite" attitude on what you must have to be the best. Please no.
Loot should also NEVER be restricted on trading/selling. The only arguments I've seen on this are RMT and "cause they didn't work for it."
- Let's be realistic, you're not going to stop RMT by adding NO-TRADE to awesome items. Otherwise it would have stopped long ago, not increased. Trivial content and over-eager loot drops is the biggest factor in RMT. Additionally, there are other, better methods to handle this than applying restrictions to the non-RMT population.
- As to "they didn't work for it"... sure they did. A player who spends hours working the market is still spending hours playing the game... what's the point to gold if you can't buy things with it? Just because they didn't get the killing blow should not restrict them from obtaining it in other ways. Frankly, it's the Bazaar/Auction House that has ruined the economy/trading in most MMOs... and killed it as part of the game because "raiders" felt it took too much time/effort to trade their wares.
You must not have read everything in this thread. Many have stated, myself included, that nothing should be BiS and that everything will be situational at best. You should be required to farm many different parts of the game to get the relevant gear.
Again, what games have you played? Some are far worse than others. While most games have RMT with gold and carries, etc games like EQ with the fully tradeble loot are considerably worse. RMT on the TLP servers has become such a problem that you rarely are able to buy high priced stuff for less than 2-3 Krono. Hell there are websites dedicated to selling EQ items/accounts/plat/krono. It's a plague that is far worse for EQ than it is for anything other game. Ignoring that is simply asking for trouble.
I don't understand you... "you should be required to farm many different parts of the game"... "but raiding should have the best gear." Of course I read the thread, and it's rife with the idea of BiS and it coming from raiding. My point was the best items in the game should never come from a single activity (like raiding), and having a plethora or different items that are viable makes the game my diverse and enjoyable.
As for the RMT, you missed what I was trying to say. NO-TRADE was a method to try and combat RMT and over-twinking... and it hasn't worked very well. Of course you should try to combat RMT, but NO-TRADE is not a good way to do it as it punishes the players without really accomplishing its goal. Also, RMT is only one aspect of why prices on servers are out of control. Ironically, NO-TRADE would reduce the cost of goods, not increase it. If you have more supply, prices go down.
Enitzu said:Archaen said:Concerning instancing...
Please no... I loved seeing in the December stream when they were fighting that golem-type boss and another player shows up and helps them out a bit. Instancing turns the rest of the world into a dungeon-finder lobby. Anyone who never played pre-Luclin EQ knows how awesome a difficult/open dungeon is. The social interaction alone is worth the open design.
Additionally, the mention about dungeon levels should be a 5-10 level spread... early EQ dungeons were more like a 15-25 level spread, for a single dungeon. You could spend the entire last half of your levelling experience in Solusek's Eye and it was awesome. Having lots of dungeons with large level spreads is the way to go... no fast travel (outside of player ports and speed buffs), no quick 30 min run to the bottom, tough mobs with trains and corpse runs... love it! Thankfully, the December stream also showed this is most likely the way they are going.
No one is advocating for instancing. We are looking for ways to add things to the game going around it so that we all do have more content to work on for end game rather than the same old stale things over and over.
Of course you are... just cause other people are standing around watching you, if they can't interact then that's instanced content. You say you don't want "the same old stale things" but everything you're advocating for already exists... limitation and restriction.
One other thing of note... I probably sound a bit defensive in this reply and to some extent I am. You were quite patronizing of me and my ideas and didn't offer suggestions or alternatives. You dismissed most of what I said as "I haven't played as many games as you." If this is truly to be a discussion, then deal with my ideas and why they don't work or how they could be changed to work better. To me you seem set on having the game function a certain way and don't really understand that what you're asking for is what's been wrong with the MMO industry for the past decade and more.
My hope is this game end's up much more like EQ than most anything that followed it. Since these developers are the ones who created my favorite two MMOs, I feel we are in good hands. My post was mostly to add to the idea that a lot of the game design from the last 15 years is not to be emulated. And hopefully, these developers now have the experience and ability to find better ways to handle the more difficult tasks required of breaking the WoW mold.
moszis said:Maximis said:I think there needs to be more Coldain Shawl type quests. More three or four way faction quests. More farming for gems and patterns... (can you tell Velious was my favorite expansion?)
This is my dream as well. I have stated this many times before (in this and other threads). Although, to be fair the ring war quest line was better than shawl :P I'm guessing you played a caster in EQ, haha. Coldain quest lines were by far #1 best part in my lifes MMO experience. I would kill for any game that can bring something similar back. Same difficulty and time.. spanning through your characters life.
Unfortunately, at this point i'm not arguing for what I want. But trying to break this ingrained ideology that HURTS RAIDERS most of all.. The ideology that raiding must be implemented as the only source of endgames most difficult content and end game gear. This destroys raiding in modern games. It makes the devs forced to create raid content accessible to all and easy. Everyone has their play styles and and their playtimes are distributed differently. To make raiding so easy that anyone can do it, makes raiding not interesting to me and not immersive.
I too am all for this type of questing. Even simpler "epic" questing like the Iksar class quests would be great.
I have no problem with raiding being difficult and having it be part of these epic quests. I also would like there to be a way for me to acquire said item without raiding (similar to how I would acquire a crafted item without being a crafter). Raiding should not be an "elitist" thing, but something you do because you enjoy the challenge or want the experience of acquiring what the raid has to offer in that way. To me, it's not only raiding that has taken a hit in the trivial department... dungeon runs, overland content, questing, crafting... they're all quite trivial in modern MMOs.
moszis said:Of course I would be fully satisfied if we took it from a totally different angle. Lets say raiding is the only source of top tiered gear.. BUT, raid itself is a reward. To get in the raid zone, you need to be keyed. To get keyed, you need to do a looong epic quest line that involves exploration, crafting, diplomacy, solo/group challenges, etc.. You basically have to prove yourself that you are worthy of raiding through other disciplines. Making other disciplines just as valuable in end game as raiding.
As it stands raiding is simply not difficult. Its very difficult to be fully immersed in raiding when it has nothing to do with MMORPG but more of real life logistics and organizing. I simply want to start feeling some RPG in MMORPG again. Even if I raid multiple times per week, I would be happy if on other days I can follow other paths and enjoy the game, knowing that I’m still improving my character within the endgame context.
Not sure what games you have raided in, but to suggest that raids simply aren't difficult makes me assume that you didn't play EQOA, FFXI, or EQ2. All of those games had extremely difficult raid encounters. Djinn Master's Prism in EQ2 was overly difficult. It was T6 content that was only beaten by a single guild during the entire t6 expansion. They used an exploit in the game that allowed them to root the mob in a way that wasn't supposed to be possible based on encounter design, and even then, they beat it about a week before the T7 expansion came out.
I remember checking an EQOA stat site that showed what NPC had the most player kills on a given day. I remember seeing Avatar of Fear with more than 20k kills in a single day at one point. I remember trying to kill the Matron or Venril Sathir in EQ2. If a SINGLE player didn't play 100% perfect for the entire duration of the fight, the whole raid would wipe. It took hundreds and hundreds of pulls on these fights before our guild was finally able to down them. Some content would literally takes MONTHS of perfecting before they could be killed.
I have never experienced a level of "group" difficulty that was even remotely close to the difficulty of the hardest raid encounters. In fact, I was able to to fairly easily clear the overwhelming majority of 6 man content in most games with a 4 player group after being fully stacked with raid gear. There are obviously exceptions to this as I have definitely seen some pretty challenging group content, and there are some encounter designs that are impossible without x amount of players. More often than not though, the majority of group content in MMO's is a walk in the park compared to the potential challenges or difficulty that can be achieved through a well designed raid encounter.
More people = more encounter variables = more things that can go wrong. It's much easier to find 6 people that can consistently perform at a high level and have near-perfect attention to detail than it is to find 24.
You say you want to feel RPG in MMORPG again ... you ever play Final Fantasy 3 on SNES? If so, do you remember the end of the game where you had to form 3 separate groups and utilize all of them to make it to the final boss? That was essentially a raid in one of the best RPG's of all time. Instead of using your best 6 characters to blow through the area like you could in the rest of the game, you had to form 3 separate groups and balance them so each group was capable of beating a mini boss. It required the combined effort of ALL of your characters in order to progress through that part of the game.
Personally, I have found it logistically harder at times to get a good XP group going than it was to organize a raid. Leading raids isn't all that complicated logistic wise. We would always start at a designated time. More people showed up than we could fit in the raid. My job was to make the best possible raid composition relative to the players available to raid. It wasn't difficult at all. All of our guild members were dedicated to nightly raiding and demonstrated dependable raid attendance, and we raided into the late hours of the night very consistently. Getting an XP group on the other had ... if it's not a premade group with your guild members, it can be a difficult task just to find people that can stick together for more than an hour. You can end up spending more time organizing a group or moving back and forth between destinations to pick up replacement players than you actually spend working on content in the game. There can be extremes in both cases but my point is that generally speaking, there is nothing innately "difficult" when it comes to logistics or organizing a raid. If it's an unscheduled pick up raid then yeah, sure, I could see that being difficult. But scheduling raids in a raiding guild? Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
oneADSeven Not sure how to reply to your post since you seem to both disagree and agree to exactly the same statement in my post. No I didn't play EQOA or FFXI.. I did play EQ2 though because of the EQ in the name, falsely believing that it would be the next generation of EQ. I played for several years, including all the end game raiding up to that point. I'm sorry, in my opinion EQ2 raiding was not difficult. I have raided in EQ as MT for many years (1999+) and in my opinion there is no game where raiding is more difficult. In comparison EQ2 raids were just routine. Just my personal opinion, don’t take it personally.
I would really like to see the focus of MMOs shift away from the "RAID" as the end all be all. I would love to see more epic quest lines, epic crafting recipes, epic group content. I would like to see a shift away from the elitist raid guilds and focus more on the group of friends. You need to find good people that would band together with you to help finish class or race specific quests. To require these groups to work hard over long periods of time (weeks to months) to perform tasks and be rewarded handsomely. Not everyone can adhere to a scheduled raid. IT would be quiet awesome for smaller groups of friends to be able to progress, even if it was at a slower pace, as a player who can be at the bat phone 24/7. I could see raids as still being the quickest way to top tier gear, but I believe there should be other avenues as well.
Archaen said:One other thing of note... I probably sound a bit defensive in this reply and to some extent I am. You were quite patronizing of me and my ideas and didn't offer suggestions or alternatives. You dismissed most of what I said as "I haven't played as many games as you." If this is truly to be a discussion, then deal with my ideas and why they don't work or how they could be changed to work better. To me you seem set on having the game function a certain way and don't really understand that what you're asking for is what's been wrong with the MMO industry for the past decade and more.
My hope is this game end's up much more like EQ than most anything that followed it. Since these developers are the ones who created my favorite two MMOs, I feel we are in good hands. My post was mostly to add to the idea that a lot of the game design from the last 15 years is not to be emulated. And hopefully, these developers now have the experience and ability to find better ways to handle the more difficult tasks required of breaking the WoW mold.
Cut the rest for space but I get what you are saying. Apologies for sounding patronizing as that wasn't my intent. My point behind most of what I was trying to say is that while EQ was the pinnacle of gaming for a lot of us, ignoring the advances that the genre has developed and basically making a copy of EQ doesn't mean it will be better or even as good. Putting in raid with no cap will simply make the raids the same as they were in vanilla EQ which anyone who has recently gone back to play can tell you, are incredibly easy and for the most part boring. I have literally watched raid mobs killed by 12 mage pets. They were unimaginitive and had next to no mechanics. The 'difficulty' from them came simply from racing other guilds to get to them and do more dps. That's not a challenge. At all. With us asking for caps on the raid size it means that they can actually make them challenging. So yes, asking for their to be no cap and to go back to that state I will argue against it every day all day. That isn't helping the game, it's hurting it.
I get that you don't want the wow mold and neither do I. To a point anyway. What I don't want are easy raids, or dungeons for that matter. What I don't want is for a "zerg" to ever be a real thing again. I want a challenge. I want to be able to schedule raid nights without having to poop sock raid spawns or call and wake people up at 2 am. None of that was 'fun'. It was required so we did what we had to do.
Moszis, I am not sure why you thought I agreed with anything you said. You suggested that raiding content simply wasn't difficult, rather the logistics and organization of raids was the difficult part. I believe the opposite is true. The logistic and organization aspects are NOT difficult. It's as simple as planning a raid schedule and following it. Mastering encounters and actually beating the raiding content is the hard part. You claim to have experienced all eq2 content for several years and that it wasn't difficult.
So basically you're saying that you have experienced Brutal Acts of War, Spirits of the Lost, Nagalik, Darathar, Terrorantula, DMP, God King Anuk, Twin Pedestals, Tarinax, Mutagenic Outcast, Three Princes, Hurricanus, Harla Dar, T7 Venekor, Lyceum of Abhorrence, Matron, Cheldrak, Mistmoore Castle, all Gods/Avatars ... and that's just scratching the surface. And between all of these encounters, you're saying you never experienced difficult raid content? Seriously?
Enitzu said:Putting in raid with no cap will simply make the raids the same as they were in vanilla EQ which anyone who has recently gone back to play can tell you, are incredibly easy and for the most part boring. I have literally watched raid mobs killed by 12 mage pets. They were unimaginitive and had next to mechanics. The 'difficulty' from them came simply from racing other guilds to get to them and do more dps. That's not a challenge. At all. With us asking for caps on the raid size it means that they can actually make them challenging.
I hope you understand the difference between real EQ raids and coming back after 16 years of level cap raises and dumming down of difficulty to maintain the player base and going after the content that was meant for lvl 50s with 1/50th quality of gear. EQ raids were incredibly hard and no game will ever surpass its difficulty. EQ raids were not created as "content" today. They were created as something that was not intended to be beaten by any guild for a LONG time after release. It took months of failures by top guilds to succeed the first time. It took years to succeed by average guild. Its really not possible to explain how incredibly difficult EQ raids were.. They simply were not intended to be beanten by 99% of players until the next expansion. EQ today is not real EQ. Its maintained as nostalgia.
I really hope there are some other original eq players that can shed some light on this.
[Edit] Oh and you cant forget the lag.. the epic lag we all had (100 people in the zone intended for 20) while having to beat a boss that can one hit the MT. Having to keep rotations of tanks, that can only take one hit a time.. Reload back to the zone and come back in time to take their place in rotation (and get the agro).. for one hit. Unless a cleric is lucky enough to somehow land a CH right as hit lands.. which allows you to survive for another hit.
Oh and of course you have to consider penalties. Every time you die, you lose days of exp grind. Yes, in EQ there was real exp loss. And if you are at max level, most likely you lose a level when you die.. Even if you get all your corpses rezed, the deaths may accumulate to week worth of exp loss. This is for a raid that you failed on and got no rewards.. and will fail on for another month+
oneADseven said: Moszis, I am not sure why you thought I agreed with anything you said. You suggested that raiding content simply wasn't difficult, rather the logistics and organization of raids was the difficult part. I believe the opposite is true. The logistic and organization aspects are NOT difficult. It's as simple as planning a raid schedule and following it. Beating the raiding content is the hard part. You claim to have experienced all eq2 content for several years and that it wasn't difficult. I challenge that statement to its core. If you raided all content for several years, you would have experienced Brutal Acts of War, Spirits of the Lost, Nagalik, Darathar, Terrorantula, DMP, God King Anuk, Twin Pedestals, Tarinax, Mutagenic Outcast, Three Princes, Hurricanus, Harla Dar, T7 Venekor, Lyceum of Abhorrence, Matron, Cheldrak, Mistmoore Castle, all Gods/Avatars ... and that isn't even all of the content, there was plenty more. There isn't a human being on this planet that can claim to have experienced all of that content and find that it wasn't very hard. Suggesting something like that removes all credibility when it comes to assessing the difficulty of raid encounters. EQ2 had plenty of very difficult content in the game for all 5 expansions that I played.
oneADseven. Word "difficult" is relative. We all define it relative to something else. Like with all things in life, what one defines as difficult may not be defined as difficult by another due to his/her experiences. But more importantly "difficult" is defined relative to its reward. In this context "difficult" is used to say that its the only thing worth top tier rewards. I dont agree with that and hence do not believe that raiding these days is difficult (or difficult enough) to deserve ALL top tiered gear.
moszis said:oneADseven said: Moszis, I am not sure why you thought I agreed with anything you said. You suggested that raiding content simply wasn't difficult, rather the logistics and organization of raids was the difficult part. I believe the opposite is true. The logistic and organization aspects are NOT difficult. It's as simple as planning a raid schedule and following it. Beating the raiding content is the hard part. You claim to have experienced all eq2 content for several years and that it wasn't difficult. I challenge that statement to its core. If you raided all content for several years, you would have experienced Brutal Acts of War, Spirits of the Lost, Nagalik, Darathar, Terrorantula, DMP, God King Anuk, Twin Pedestals, Tarinax, Mutagenic Outcast, Three Princes, Hurricanus, Harla Dar, T7 Venekor, Lyceum of Abhorrence, Matron, Cheldrak, Mistmoore Castle, all Gods/Avatars ... and that isn't even all of the content, there was plenty more. There isn't a human being on this planet that can claim to have experienced all of that content and find that it wasn't very hard. Suggesting something like that removes all credibility when it comes to assessing the difficulty of raid encounters. EQ2 had plenty of very difficult content in the game for all 5 expansions that I played.
oneADseven. Word "difficult" is relative. We all define it relative to something else. Like with all things in life, what one defines as difficult may not be defined as difficult by another due to his/her experiences. But more importantly "difficult" is defined relative to its reward. In this context "difficult" is used to say that its the only thing worth top tier rewards. I dont agree with that and hence do not believe that raiding these days is difficult (or difficult enough) to deserve ALL top tiered gear.
I don't see anybody arguing that raiding should be the "only" way to earn top tier rewards. I do however believe that raiding should yield the majority of top tier rewards, and that the "end game" should be moreso centered around raiding than other aspects such as grouping or questing. The main reason I say this is because in my opinion, the hardest raid content has been consistently harder than the hardest group or quest content in my favorite MMO's. When it comes to questing, the hardest quests (raid zone flagging, epic quests, etc) are usually tied into raiding and that reinforces my position even further.
If the idea is to provide an equal amount of challenge across all 3 of those platforms, I would be fine with that. The problem is that it has very rarely ever been done. FFXI is probably the only game that managed to pull this off successfully. In this context, "challenge" is being used to describe the likelihood of me being able to successfully complete a task. Creating progression barriers through artificial time-locked requirements (Must kill Mob X 7 times, and it spawns once per week) does not qualify as challenging in my book.
I want the challenge to come from requiring my entire raid force to successfully joust multiple AE's, manage random mem-wipes or forced aggro mechanics, deal with various types of adds that can only be killed by specific archetypes, avoid death as much as possible because each death heals the raid boss and also spawns additional adds, force players to properly align and time their temporary buffs to help mitigate periods of spike damage, maintain a perfect rotation of all important debuffs, all while simultaneously making CC relevant to the encounter by utilizing well timed mezz, stun, stifle, fear, charm, or daze. Combine all of that with a strong emphasis on min/maxing through stats, gear, resistance, acclimation, spell mastery, upward/outward advancement, and group/raid composition and now we're talking challenge.
And I'm sorry but saying that "difficult" is a relative term is just a cop out in my book. Unless of course you think the game should be fine tuned to meet the standard of what's relatively difficult to you as an individual, which is just preposterous. A blind person could say that driving is more relatively difficult to them than eating but the world would just agree that they probably shouldn't be driving in the first place. A better example would be a player saying that it's relatively harder for them to solo on their cleric compared to their ranger. Does that mean content should tweaked to accomodate the viability of a cleric being able to solo? Raid difficulty shouldn't be designed in a relative fashion, instead, it should be designed in a way so that it's inherently difficult for everybody. That's when player ingenunity can shine the brightest.
So I think this topic got derailed pretty hard into a pissing contest about raid difficulty, but I'd like to dovetail that into what I think the prevailing sentiment is:
As a result, it stands to reason that with a hard maximum and a soft minimum, the devs are freed from making everything hard for "precisely x number of people" all the time, and can instead create a variety of encounters more easily.
edit: OneADSeven, I'd like to know what you think of my example from FFXI. It's the last post on the previous page, I don't want to paste it here for spam concerns.
One of the things that bothers me the most about raid design is precisely the paradigm you're describing; that is, that all of your impressions of difficulty are in the context of fighting a raid boss. Forgive me for saying so, but I think this is a narrow form of raiding that has been done to death over the course of a decade and a half. I would prefer that at least some of the endgame not consist entirely of going after raid bosses. Frankly if FFXI had only had contested overworld bosses I think it would have been an absolutely terrible game, just like I think FFXIV's raiding game (only 4 bosses per tier) is atrocious. Note that what I describe in that post is technically a raid, but is designed such that the average monster is generally more difficult than trash monsters and whether you kill the boss or not is not the only reason to be there. I think such designs (when used in conjunction with, not in lieu of boss rush raids) would benefit endgame.