MauvaisOeil said:It's equally clear that MMO developers don't always know what's best for the game either. Take Barbarians in DAoC for example. Or WoW:TBC Tanks and Healers and Elemental Shaman.
What was the problem with thoses in TCB? They were all viable at this time of the game, and often complementary. More worried about Retpal and mana issues or spell damage scaling Crusader strike back then.
Can't speak for DAoC however, weren't they "berserkers" ? I heard left hand skill was OP for some time.
You're correct, they were Berserkers, a dual-wielding melee class. There were problems with the balance of that class but only at the upper extreme of gear. Mythic repeatedly nerfed the class as a whole to correct the issue which only served to turn them into declawed gerbils. All this despite the reams and reams of data provided by the community to show where the problem was.
Ele shaman in TBC (and after) are a similar story. They were overpowered in Vanilla and nerfed super hard for TBC. The nerfs just kept coming, largely for the same top-end-gearing scaling problems as Berserkers. The community provided, again, reams of data to demonstrate where the problems were and Blizzard completely ignored them for a very long time. The result was either the players quit or moved to some other class or spec. The game was largely devoid of ele shaman for quite a while.
The healer/tank issue was actually in response to the community rather than ignoring them. They made both able to solo much better, to the point that any healer or tank could keep up with a pure dps class as well as retaining their healing or tanking abilities. There were raids composed primarily of healers and tanks just to show it was now possible. They eventually knocked healers back quite a bit in the dps department but tanks mostly kept their high dps.
There's no easy answer for the game company. Of course they have to plot and stay a course for the development of the game. But they also have to figure out what to listen to and what to ignore. I've yet to see any company get this right, though I may not have played the game that did, if there was one. We're all just people, some of us players and others producers.
@Akilae
I really don't think the healer/tank problem was TBC based. Probably later expansions, TLK or Cataclysm with the implementation of "vengeance" which turned the tanks into DPS machines as long as they were attacked and damaged. The uniformisation of gear with crit giving parry and such, also made tanks well more powerfull than they used to be to accord with scaling gear issues. Only the druid tank at early TBC was dealing far too much damage but it got partially fixed at least. I however have never seen problems with Ele shamans in TBC, they were dealing the right amount of DPS for the whole expansion (lower than pure DPS but in the good adverage considering the buffs they offered), and could reach good thresholds of MP/5 for their longevity of DPS over long or medium fights.
In most games now, tanks are usually solo machines compared to damage dealers as they have far more resilience than they loose in damage, in response to "I can't kill anything alone" that was a norm for some time.
Akilae said:philo said:Just in general, and in a topic that is greater than this thread which is combat focused, I also hope they don't listen to players and stick to their vision.
It has become abundantly clear over the last 20 years of mmorpgs that players don't know what is best for a game.
It's equally clear that MMO developers don't always know what's best for the game either. Take Barbarians in DAoC for example. Or WoW:TBC Tanks and Healers and Elemental Shaman.
Balance is hard but sometimes the players do know best. VR has the unenviable task of trying to find the right balance between their vision of the game and what the players will actually pay to play. Those two things are not always aligned and, worse, every player is at least a little different from the next in terms of preferences in a game.
I assume from your statement that the majority in the thread mentioned disagree with your own viewpoint which more closely aligns with the current thinking around VR's stance on the topic. Naturally you'll wish VR's current viewpoint to win because it overlaps with your own. But if the majority want something different it makes good business sense to switch directions even at risk of alienating a minority. This is known as triage and smart companies will exercise this tactic often.
Most of us here are thoroughly seasoned veterans of MMORPGs. We've seen first hand what works, what doesn't, and what happens when the game company listens to the players too much and too little. I wish VR all the luck in the world (for totally selfish reasons) but it's important not to take a hard-line stance either for or against implementing player feedback.
I'm not sure where you think my viewpoints align with VRs? Some do, some don't. We wouldn't be here if they didn't align somewhat.
My comment was more about the state of the genre as a whole. Many (most?) people offer viewpoints based on their personal, selfish desires and not necessarily what is best for the game as a whole. Listening to players is a slippery slope. Stick to the vision. I hope they don't get greedy like so many other games before them. We have all seen what happens.
Zyellinia said: How, exactly, did the follow on guilds get better gear if the server-firsts were hogging all the spawns? Your theory really doesn't hold water...
First off this all starts with the 'non-raid' gearing. Most of the top raid guilds will start with the Raid bosses as soon as they hit max level. This does not leave them a lot of time to get fully Best in Slot for non-raid gear from just normal dungeons. So even with the very first Raid boss, they are limited in their gear level.
Then we start with RaidBossA. (This could represent an entire Raid Zone, but for simplicty sake we will assume this is just 1 individual boss)
GuildA gets the first ever world kill on RaidBossA. They then farm BossA for the next 3-4 weeks getting a limited number of Loot from this boss. In order to get the world first kill on RaidBossB they need to start trying to kill him as soon as they can so they don't waste much more time on RaidBossA. Once they succeed killing BossB they then kill BossB for 3-4 weeks getting 8-10 items of loot from this boss. They then rush on to RaidBossC in order to get world first kill... then they do limited farming of BossC until they can start killing RaidBossD... etc...
Guilds B-G all follow this same formula. Fighting amongst themselves to get through BossA, B and C. Each of these guilds keep pushing forward to get to the next boss as quickly as they are able. Somtimes they will win, but sometimes they need to go back and get a few more items from the previous boss. But they will always be pushing the limits of their gear.
Eventually all those guilds have moved on and RaidBossA becomes available for GuildH. This guild is a casual guild, and they have all been max level for several months before they are able to get their first crack at RaidBossA. This means they have had lots of time to go farm all the non-raid dungeon named and get fully geared up with BIS for non-raid tier gear.
So then they go kill RaidBossA and find that he wasn't really all that hard, since they had all this non-raid top end gear. So the boss very quickly becomes easy for them to farm for loot.
Since RaidBossB is still being 'Hogged' by Guilds B-G they are able to farm BossA for loot for several months before BossB starts becoming available for them. So GuildH actually is able to Farm BossA for several extra months getting perhaps 40-50 items of loot from this boss. So by the time they move onto BossB, they have a TON more gear level across their entire raid force when they make their attempts at BossB. So for them, BossB will seem a hell of a lot easier to kill than it was for GuildA, who fought that boss after only getting a limited number of items of loot from BossA.
This continues all the way up the spectrum. Since they have more time farming the previous bosses, the casual guilds will almost always have much more loot from previous content than the Hardcore Top 5-7 guilds do when trying a new boss.
There may even be trickle down as other guilds get duplicate loot from higher end bosses that they can't use and they sell to the more casual players/guilds. So some of those casual raiders will actually already have loot from the bosses they are attempting to kill for the first time.
Zyellinia said:How, exactly, did the follow on guilds get better gear if the server-firsts were hogging all the spawns? Your theory really doesn't hold water...
Depends on the game but generally speaking (in early EQ) the guilds that weren't one of the top 2-3 guilds just didn't get a chance until an expansion or two later. While the hyper competitive server first guilds did the newest stuff it never stopped them from continuing to dominate the older raid content as it allowed them to continue gearing up while also gave them the benefit of denying other guilds a chance to learn raids or otherwise catch up to them. It was not enjoyable.
Naunet said: So in essence, the only people who really get to experience challenge in this system are those in the top few guilds. IMO, that should not be the goal of Pantheon's design.
This is why there has been so many threads about this issue talking about ways to prevent guilds from monopolizing the raid bosses. Games like WoW just made things instanced and let everyone have a shot at each boss every week. We know that Pantheon is not using instances, but there are lots of idea's that would not involve instances. I won't rehash all of the ideas here, but I too think that there should be some system(s) in place that allows everyone to have a shot at content each week.
Naunet said:So in essence, the only people who really get to experience challenge in this system are those in the top few guilds.
IMO, that should not be the goal of Pantheon's design.
Challenge isn't definitive in that it is either/or. That being said, of course there are things that effect how challenging an encounter is.
Gear/levels is a major one. If someone sees a strategy or guide to the encounter online that effects the challenge. Add ons and meters effect the challenge. Outside factors like lag/hardware/software etc. can effect the challenge.
It's not that the only group who experiences challenge is the first guild to rush to beat it. But they do not have access to many things that can lessen the challenge...like time to gear everyone up or access to strategy guides.
My old EQ server only had 3 or 4 guilds who could handle the main raid stuff at the time ( Nagafen, Fear, Hate, Air maybe? ). We had gone with the guild council approach to raid targets rather then everything fall into total anarchy and attempts to wipe each other and the likes. I don't remember the rotations or anything but I definately remember certain weeks/days were our turn at x raids, shared amongst a few others. We were one of the "good guy" guilds. When another of the major guilds wiped while trying to break into Fear, we rallied up and came to help them, got their bodies back and helped break the initial spawns, and then bid them good luck. It felt good to help others and was nice to be in a guild that others respected because of friendly actions on our parts.
Alas, todays MMO community and market are not the same as it was 20-something years ago. It used to be a much smaller and close knit community, with usually more mature ( mentality wise, not age necessarily ). So I doubt such a thing will happen on most servers but I can dream.
Talk about missing the boat. Several posters here are so obsessed with raiding it makes me wonder why they are following this particular title. Last I checked Pantheon is a group focused game not a raid focused game. The challenge should not begin at the raid level or in my opinion the devs failed in their mission. The challenge should begin in the dungeons...in the group content. It is at the raid level that the vast majority of the problems develop with content blocking and the demands for instancing. VR needs to consider the raid side of things carefully, focus too heavily on raiding and your game will likely be crushed underfoot by WoW/FF14. Keep with the non instanced group focused design! If Pantheon moves away from that philosophy it won't make it.
Ziegfried said:Talk about missing the boat. Several posters here are so obsessed with raiding it makes me wonder why they are following this particular title. Last I checked Pantheon is a group focused game not a raid focused game. The challenge should not begin at the raid level or in my opinion the devs failed in their mission. The challenge should begin in the dungeons...in the group content. It is at the raid level that the vast majority of the problems develop with content blocking and the demands for instancing. VR needs to consider the raid side of things carefully, focus too heavily on raiding and your game will likely be crushed underfoot by WoW/FF14. Keep with the non instanced group focused design! If Pantheon moves away from that philosophy it won't make it.
It's unlikely that any of the people concerned about a properly configured raid game believe that the game should be trivial up to that point, haha, you're using a false dichotomy. VR has already resolved to deliver a challenging group-focussed game, we all know this, and this is one of the reasons many of us are on board. One thing that's a little less certain however is exactly how the raiding side of things will be put together. This uncertainty is what has led to so much discussion on the subject, most of it directed at attempting to contribute to viable options/solutions.
Tethys said:Ziegfried said:Talk about missing the boat. Several posters here are so obsessed with raiding it makes me wonder why they are following this particular title. Last I checked Pantheon is a group focused game not a raid focused game. The challenge should not begin at the raid level or in my opinion the devs failed in their mission. The challenge should begin in the dungeons...in the group content. It is at the raid level that the vast majority of the problems develop with content blocking and the demands for instancing. VR needs to consider the raid side of things carefully, focus too heavily on raiding and your game will likely be crushed underfoot by WoW/FF14. Keep with the non instanced group focused design! If Pantheon moves away from that philosophy it won't make it.
It's unlikely that any of the people concerned about a properly configured raid game believe that the game should be trivial up to that point, haha, you're using a false dichotomy. VR has already resolved to deliver a challenging group-focussed game, we all know this, and this is one of the reasons many of us are on board. One thing that's a little less certain however is exactly how the raiding side of things will be put together. This uncertainty is what has led to so much discussion on the subject, most of it directed at attempting to contribute to viable options/solutions.
I think you missed his point.
@Zeigfried
The challenge should definitely begin with grouping...and even before that actually. The challenge begins with the general systems the game is based on like the leveling curve and death penalty and con system etc., but that is all tied together anyway.
I think part of the reason why people tend to gravitate toward talking about raiding when challenge or difficulty level is brought up (besides for the precedence that has been set with raids usually being the highest lvl most difficult encounters...they don't have to be) is that a single group encounter has to be much more difficult than a raid encounter simply for them to present an equal challenge for the players.
All things being equal, a larger number of players simply makes an encounter more difficult. It is more difficult to mobilize quickly, more difficult to give directions/communicate, more difficult to coordinate and have proper timing where everyone is in sync etc.
Larger group encounters simply offer extra challenges that aren't as much of an issue in single group, or a low number if groups, content so people tend to think of those situations first when difficulty is being discussed. I know I do.
Iksar said:Zyellinia said:How, exactly, did the follow on guilds get better gear if the server-firsts were hogging all the spawns? Your theory really doesn't hold water...
Depends on the game but generally speaking (in early EQ) the guilds that weren't one of the top 2-3 guilds just didn't get a chance until an expansion or two later. While the hyper competitive server first guilds did the newest stuff it never stopped them from continuing to dominate the older raid content as it allowed them to continue gearing up while also gave them the benefit of denying other guilds a chance to learn raids or otherwise catch up to them. It was not enjoyable.
That's what I thought was the case but that isn't what the post I questioned said. It indicated that those follow-on guilds would somehow have better gear than the first guilds to down the bosses when the first guilds eventually tired of farming those bosses.
The whole issue of content denial is one of my bigger concerns with what I've seen of the game to be honest.
(partial quote):philo said:
Just in general, and in a topic that is greater than this thread which is combat focused, I also hope they don't listen to players and stick to their vision.
It has become abundantly clear over the last 20 years of mmorpgs that players don't know what is best for a game.
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- I don't believe the VR staff to be amateurs. It would be as foolish for them to not listen to players as it would be for me to not listen to my employees.
---My opinions are not humble, they are just my opinions---
msk12 said:(partial quote):philo said:
Just in general, and in a topic that is greater than this thread which is combat focused, I also hope they don't listen to players and stick to their vision.
It has become abundantly clear over the last 20 years of mmorpgs that players don't know what is best for a game.
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- I don't believe the VR staff to be amateurs. It would be as foolish for them to not listen to players as it would be for me to not listen to my employees.
---My opinions are not humble, they are just my opinions---
Well we aren't employees here, we have little to no experience in videogames outside of playing them, but I would like to precise a picture :
Taking ideas submitted by players is a good thing if they seem fitting and fill a gap you had with the team's ideas.
Doing what players seems like asking, downgrading the game in the process, is not good at all.
The humor here is that the game, as mentioned, is supposed to be group content focused, not a raid game.
Yet like 90% of the guild posts are "we are more elite than the other people saying they are elite and we will own the endgame raid scene over these other scrubs" (paraphrasing). The game will not support this number of crazy uber die hard raid guilds, content wise, while staying true to its stated vision, yet every month there's about 3 more want to be raid guilds posting a recruitment message. And that's not counting all the "progression raid" guilds....there won't be any old raids to work thru for awhile hence they are just more want to be end game owners.
I can see enough raid content around launch to keep 3, maybe 5, raid guilds worth calling themselves raid guilds per server, tops. Players arent as green as they were back in those days of rose colored glasses, guaranteed some of these guilds already began mapping fastest xp routes starting in PA and will know by end of alpha how to max crafting to gear for it as fast as they can so they can skip a lot of content to stick to the best xp. The other 700 "raid guilds" will 1) fold as their players leave the game for other raid options (because raid is all there is for them) or 2) become filthy casuals.
This raid focus in the vocal minority of the community is why I'm pretty sure the game will loose a quarter to half it's starting population within 6 months as the slower to race raid crews leave in frustration, then servers will stabalize and the game will run smoothly...a small handful of raid guilds doing their thing and the rest of the population not caring about them...like its 2 separate games. If I'm right or if I'm wrong, I dont really care, I'm playing until the servers close regardless (and I'm hoping for atleast a decade on that) because I'm looking for what the stated vision says this game is about, returning to challenging GROUP focused gameplay and a removal of easy button instant win antisocial cross server anonymous modern crap....not a thousand and one raid targets to play leapfrog to.
MauvaisOeil said:I think you missed his point.
I don't think they did and I agree with Tethys. Sure there will be challenge to be had in smaller group content, but there will also be content for larger groups (raids). Many of us disagree with the idea of players being able to content-block other players - especially for months and months on end. If one wants to experience the challenge of raid-level bosses, your options shouldn't be "join the top guild" or "wait a year or two". That's not an enjoyable design paradigm.
@Xil:
Xilshale said:The humor here is that the game, as mentioned, is supposed to be group content focused, not a raid game.
Most content will be tuned toward a single group of course but to say it is "not a raid game" is inaccurate. There will be raid content.
I can see enough raid content around launch to keep 3, maybe 5, raid guilds worth calling themselves raid guilds per server, tops.
There will be 3 full high end raid zones on release. Not encounters...full zones with multiple raid targets of varying difficulties. This is a little bit of speculation, but with the amount of raid content that we know will be included on release I think your 3-5 raid guild number per server is to low.
Though, as a sidenote, depending on server populations and raid size, even 3-5 guilds could be a fairly large percentage of all of the high end players. The point is it won't be as restricted as you seem to think. This is where we have to have faith in VR to balance the population numbers.
This raid focus in the vocal minority of the community is why I'm pretty sure the game will loose a quarter to half it's starting population within 6 months as the slower to race raid crews leave in frustration, then servers will stabalize and the game will run smoothly...a small handful of raid guilds doing their thing and the rest of the population not caring about them...like its 2 separate games.
I agree with this ^ statement on a number of levels. The raid focus is the vocal minority though everyone likes to get good loot, so some of the voices plan on raiding eventually, even if they aren't daily "raiders" and it might take them longer to access that content. I do agree we will likely "lose" a large portion of the player base after a few months but I don't think the main reason will pertain to raiding. Most players won't even reach max lvl before they move on (though there will be lower lvl raids but I don't think that is wha you are referencing.)
That is just the way of things these days. Players try a game and then move on to the next new thing. Especially with Pantheon, many players will have never played a game with a harsh death penalty or a steep exp curve simply because they didn't play a 1st gen mmo and the genre changed after 2004ish so those type of games aren't readily available for people to experience. Some players won't understand what they are getting into and will try it and move on. That will happen obviously. It's fine and can't be avoided.
The other thing that may drive players away is that VR is putting a lot of weight in making reputation matter. It won't matter at first if players haven't had time to become known and build a reputation. It seems likely there will be more griefing and ksing and general shananegens shortly after launch from players who aren't familiar with open world games and some of the more old school "courtesies" that aren't prevalent in the current mmo landscape. If players aren't sticking around long term then reputation truely doesn't matter. This could cause issues and drive some people away.
I don't think that the raid scene is what will drive people away. Most people won't even get to that point.
The number of competive raid guilds will be directly linked to the max allowable size of a raid.
Example if a max raid size is 24 then expect most hardcore guilds to be around 30 -32 players.
If the size is larger , expect less raiding guilds because those guilds will be able to field more players.
No one wants to join a raiding guild and never raid.
Philo said : There will be 3 full high end raid zones on release. Not encounters...full zones with multiple raid targets of varying difficulties. This is a little bit of speculation, but with the amount of raid content that we know will be included on release I think your 3-5 raid guild number per server is to low.
Though, as a sidenote, depending on server populations and raid size, even 3-5 guilds could be a fairly large percentage of all of the high end players. The point is it won't be as restricted as you seem to think. This is where we have to have faith in VR to balance the population numbers.
I don't know the specific source for that, but I remember they also said "There will be raids in medium level range", which means that in thoses 3 raid zones, at least one of them will be way before level cap, if not two of them.
Will the "top end raiding guilds" bear to have one raid zone level 50 with the others spread between 20 and 40, ensuring lower level loots ?
What I meant by :
MauvaisOeil said:I think you missed his point.
The point is not that raids will or will not be challenging / contested. The point is : it will be a minor part of the game, not in the sense in has no importance, but it's not meant to be the goal of the game like EQ Kunark/velious/Pop were, Wow at his time, or Wildstar or whatever game you had between wow and nowadays.
If raids are completely optional would it be due to loots, limited avaliability, or simply less entertaining than dungeon crawling, most of thoses problems will not even be problems at all. You never have competition for "Mitigated attractive content", raids were competed and scored because it made players enter a loop of boss kill, loot, boss kill (bigger), loot, rinse and repeat. If raids target are just "an other end game, with loots not better than some other activities", the raid scene will be less crowded, less agressive, and might lead to a different state of mind for players.
In the end, I fear that a lot of EQ hardcore players, including big guilds founded of the principle of raiding and taking the raid scene, will be really disappointed because there won't be enough fuel to work their engine and their players might feel in the wrong game, not having multiple raid tiers to farm for fame, loot and progression.
MauvaisOeil said:Philo said : There will be 3 full high end raid zones on release. Not encounters...full zones with multiple raid targets of varying difficulties. This is a little bit of speculation, but with the amount of raid content that we know will be included on release I think your 3-5 raid guild number per server is to low.
Though, as a sidenote, depending on server populations and raid size, even 3-5 guilds could be a fairly large percentage of all of the high end players. The point is it won't be as restricted as you seem to think. This is where we have to have faith in VR to balance the population numbers.
I don't know the specific source for that, but I remember they also said "There will be raids in medium level range", which means that in thoses 3 raid zones, at least one of them will be way before level cap, if not two of them.
Will the "top end raiding guilds" bear to have one raid zone level 50 with the others spread between 20 and 40, ensuring lower level loots ?
They have stated there will be low/mid lvl raids. The question asked about raids was directly related to high end/max lvl content. You may be right that there might be some lower lvl stuff in the 3 planned raid zones. I definitely expect there to be raid encounters that are stepping stones that vary as far as difficulty but, the way I decipher the answer to the question is that Joppa is responding directly about "max lvl" because of the way it was worded.
Here is a response about what raid zones are planned from very recently...Aug 2018:
https://youtu.be/5BhUKChiOPI?t=784
Naunet said:MauvaisOeil said:I think you missed his point.I don't think they did and I agree with Tethys. Sure there will be challenge to be had in smaller group content, but there will also be content for larger groups (raids). Many of us disagree with the idea of players being able to content-block other players - especially for months and months on end. If one wants to experience the challenge of raid-level bosses, your options shouldn't be "join the top guild" or "wait a year or two". That's not an enjoyable design paradigm.
This. If my group can't beat a boss because we aren't geared or good enough that's one thing, if we can't because it is killed on respawn by some other guild that raced to max level and is now camping it that's quite another...
Zyellinia said:
This. If my group can't beat a boss because we aren't geared or good enough that's one thing, if we can't because it is killed on respawn by some other guild that raced to max level and is now camping it that's quite another...
I can't disagree with this more. There is so much more to beating a boss in an open world game with contested raid mobs than combat skill or gear.
A story from early EQ:
My guild kept losing out on raid mobs. We were slow to mobilize or didn't have the spawns timed well to know when they would be up.
We decided to do something about it. We kept much closer tabs on when raid bosses died...even when other guilds killed them. Our trackers got much more efficient at verifying spawns.
We also practiced mobilizing as a group and were timed. Randomly the guild leader would call "fake" raids as practice. Everyone was expected to drop what they were doing and mobilize to the raid area as fast as possible as a group. Druids and wizards porting, full communication. Mobilizing well as a guild is a skill.
We got to the point where 50-100 people at any given time could all be in the same spot in the world in 5-10 mins. Sure there were times that 10 mins still wasn't fast enough if another guild timed the spawn better but we missed far fewer raid mobs once everyone was on the same page and learned how to mobilize well.
I found mobilizing to a target, communicating with your guild and all working together as quickly as possible to get to a location, quite fun once we were good at it.
You'd be 2 zones away and see guild members port in or run by or hit you with a sow knowing everyone had 1 goal in mind. Social interaction with all your in game friends at its finest imho.
Efficiency and skill starts well before the combat.