I eluded to this a tad in another thread but am so glad this thread was started. A guy I was chatting with on P99 last week in EC was telling me that on Kilsins FB he saw polls where people were asked if they would prefer 12,24,48 man raid instances. First off I am going to disregard the whole instance portion of our discussion because it has been made perfectly clear this won't exist. But as a prior raid leader on live and a raider for my entire Mmo career I wanted to post my thoughts on this subject. I don't think raids should be capped at all. I think there should be versatility among encounters that allow for all different sizes of guilds. Making raid caps like the 24 man or 36 man creates issues. It limits larger guilds to what they can accomplish together and forces them to either leave people out or try and simultaneously raid 2 targets. What about the mid size guilds who have lots of people left out but not enough to raid 2 targets simultaneously? It can even affect smaller guilds because you still end up with people getting left out. Guilds should be allowed to rally together, raid together, succeed or fail together, and most importantly grow together.
Raid mobs should be scaled for all types of raiders. Mobs who only take a smaller raid force, ones who require a decent size force, and of course the mobs that require the best of strategy and largest groups of players. The rewards from these encounters should be scaled accordingly as well. There should be clear differences in the amount of effort that is required to achieve the greatest rewards. The fact is that most of the smaller guilds are casual style players and most of the bigger guilds are more hardcore. There should be targets to accommodate all types of guilds but not limited to some sort of cap. I would much prefer resources spent on adding more content than coding in unnecessary encounters that change based on the number of players in zone. It's much easier to strengthen or weaken a mob than to do all of that. Let us the players figure out how many people it takes and let us provide feedback on the difficulty of encounters. Scale the loot according to how difficult the encounter ultimately becomes and give us all ranges of difficulty and all varieties of loot. I don't want to see days and weeks wasted on coding encounters. Instead I want days s and weeks spent adding more content. Is anyone in agreement here? Wouldn't you guys want more stuff to raid instead of them spending all that time making raid mobs do crazy things based on how many people get on its aggro list? EQ from classic to PoP (particularly thru Velious) is still the best raiding experience we all have experienced. Raid mobs didn't change based on how many people were there lol and there were raid targets for every style of guild to kill. I know this is supposed to be kinda a hybrid of old school meets new school and that's fine but there is no reason for spending all the time and resources on dynamic encounters that scale with the aggro list population when it's easy to just, in lamens terms, add or subtract toughness. Let us figure out the encounters on our own so that we can include all of our guildees. Give us a wide variety of raiding that can accommodate us all. I know people are going to bring up zerging here but it's been part of MMOs forever. There are plenty of ways to combat that but ultimately it's going to exist. More content should be the focus and scaling that content both in difficulty and reward is just so much easier and allows for our devs to keep moving forward instead of bogged down.
In the end I just want guilds to be able to bring all of their members and not have people left out. I don't want to only be able to take half my guild nor do I want even a single person to be left out. I want the option of being able to join a high end guild to get the best loot for my characters. I want the option of joining a more casual guild who still can raid somewhat high end targets but not as often. And I want the option of joining a smaller guild who raid to complete guildees quests, epic pieces, and some of the lower end raid mobs who still offer upgrades for most people. No reason not to go this route. It's the easiest to code. It's the easiest to tweak. It's the easiest to please everyone. And it's the easiest to keep the game moving forward. And most importantly it allows for us to do everything together as a guild. I went back to EQ and joined the P99 community because it is still the best raiding around and has the greatest bunch of people to game with. I can only pray that VR sticks to this style of raiding and doesn't cap raids. It just seems more logical to make raiding more up front and direct versus the alternative. I guess time will tell.
edited for quality assurance
I like the basis of your suggestions Xaleban but I have to disagree. Not limiting raid sizes means that people can just mass recruit and zerg down targets with little to no trouble. That takes every bit of skill out of the game. In order to provide quality raids there has to be a cap that the dev's can tune towards.
What I don't want to see is old school EQ raid mobs. If a raid boss can be taken down without a tank, it's a crappy raid. If you can run in with 80 people and drop a raid mob in under a minute, it's a crappy raid. I want there to be tactics and strategy involved. I want skill to be a deciding factor as to whether or not we kill a boss. And I don't want one massive zerg recruiting guild being able to drop everything they come accross simply because they bring double the required numbers.
Some games have tried scaling the fights to X number of people. Take wow's flex raiding for instance. It was a good theory and good for guilds that couldn't consistantly field the right numbers. However it quickly became about bringing the magic number of people for each fight in order to make it easier.
zewtastic said:So just thinking outside the (sand)box, why is there any group size restriction - other than max size, which I assume would be purely based on technical limitations?
Why can't I have a group of 3, 7, 12, 18, 21, etc.?
It's very sandboxy and dynamic.
Obviously sharing xp between XX party members could get measly, but still, why not just have one set of code for grouping. Any size up to X.
All that would probably be required would be better grouping tools and loot sharing mechanics. Nothing monumental or groundshakingly new.
A group is a group, regardless if its 5 doing a dungeon crawl or 50 raiding on something.
I just had a weird visual of everyone in Lower Guk being in the same group at all their different camps. :)
That is a very interesting idea I like it a lot. So players themselves essentially decide optimal party sizes depending on the content, giving us more freedom. The more I think about it the more I like the idea, I think it would be perfect for this game. Even if players opted to zerg things down they would have their own internal guild struggles with regards to how drops are handled. Give players more control over this world!
Enitzu, you seem to think that every raid target would be zerg-able. I have faith in the devs that they can create encounters that wont allow for a zerg to just come in and numbers roll it. Plus if there are enough raid targets that are somewhat difficult to fight down to then there would only be so much that a guild could kill in a day... even with a zerg force. There are plenty of ways the devs can make mobs anti-zergable. My whole point was that there shouldnt be an exact number required to kill something. There should be raid targets that can be killed with 25-30 and there should be some that require 45-50+ and even some mini raid targets that 2 or 3 groups could take down. Just because a guild would be able to take their entire guild doesnt necessarily mean they will just easily zerg it down. I feel like you are looking at this 1 sided and have predetermined open world/dungeon raiding is nothing but a zergfest. EQ had so many mobs that werent zergable. Look at Tunare, Hoshkar, CT, Emp SSRA just to name a couple. None of these were really zergable and required some good strategy to beat. Take Hoshkar for instance... if you just ran a zerg force into Hoshkars lair you would have a massive corpse run to follow. Dont just assume non instanced raiding is all a zergfest.
I just feel like the entire concept of this game would be contradicting itself by capping raids. It is supposed to be about people coming together and forming strategies. Limiting guilds to how many are able to participate in these things causes feelings to be hurt and can ultimately lead to a guilds disbandment. What I was trying to say is that it would be much more efficient for encounters to be tweaked based on our feedback. This game is supposed to be all about /feedback. There is going to be a HUGE awakening of old EQ guilds (and VG too) who are going to come together. Those guilds all remember the good ole days of raiding. The satisfaction these people would get from Pantheon having complete open world raiding like the good ole days of EQ is going to light a fire in them that will spread across the MMO community. Remember that scene in GoT when Jon Snow and the wildlings are leaving shore and the Undead commander raises his arms and all the dead awaken? Well that is what you are going to get if raiding is done this way.
I do understand your concern and as I said in my post.. i knew the zerg topic would be brought up. But I have faith in our amazing developer team that they will come through on this and give us all what we have been wanting for so many years... EQ style raiding. I know I am just 1 voice but I can GUARANTEE you there are many many more who feel the exact same way as I do. VR.. let us assemble our own raid numbers and figure out on our own what it takes to beat these encounters. We will let you know if a mob is too easy or too hard and needs tweaking. Allow us to move as a guild, strategize as a guild, and succeed as a guild with no limitations. The response you will get would be something that could potentially take the game to heights noone could have ever expected.
My experience is that when possible, guilds become leaner, not larger. Zerging mobs means waiting months to get upgrades that you could be getting in a fraction of the time with a smaller guild. When you reduce the risk, you reduce the reward and too many hungry mouths leads to drama.
Ideally there would be some sort of scaling, but I can see it being hard to implement. Its something that could be abused or used to grief rival guilds.
Re: @Zewtastic
zewtastic said:Well that was partly my point, low xp distributed to many members would naturally motivate players to keep their groups to optimum size as they perecieve it for best xp and survivability. And no one does raids generally for the XP.
I think the decision of group size is best left to players, not hard coded. If players want to have a huge group and get a trickle of xp, that is up to them. Don't handcuff the player.
Enpower your players, set Pantheon free.
I agree, more freedom is better.
However, when the risk is reduced, so should be the reward. There has to be a diminishing return, so at some point mobs meant for 6 players should be worth nothing to a larger group. Like I said, mobs shouldn't stop dropping their items, but 2 groups should have no further incentive to kill content designed for 1. They should be seeking more appropriate content that also provides a more substantial reward fit for a larger, more coordinated force.
I disagree with uncapping group/raid size. Doing this can and probably would trivialize content, something the game wants to avoid. For those who remember POTA from VG, its entrance mobs, trials, and Vault portions were all challenging 6 man content. Content that required skill, gear, level, and a willingness to die or fail many times. This made them fun and gave a sense of accomplishment along with the new toys. Uncapping the group size would have made most of POTA trivial. A group of 20+ even in substandard gear or lacking in skill would have an easy time.
Raids are the same way. I am finding it hard to think of too many raids that would not have been made easier with more tanks, more healing, and/or more DPS. The devs could scale content to match the size of the force, but as someone already pointed out it did not work well.
Feyshtey said: If you assume raid sizes can trivialize you assume no dynamics to encounters. What if every additional player on the hate lost for a raid encounter increased the significance of the alarm the boss raised, and with that the count of ads that would come to his aid? It also disregards the human element in that people want a decent shot at loot if they are going to invest hoirs on an encounter. People are rarely willong to participate if they have a 1 in 20 chance of an item they can use dropping coupled with a 1 in 100 chance of being the looter of it.
I think it can be overcome but it needs to be done in a very smart and careful way. There is social skill and immersion and then there is player skill and mechancis. I think both are important. And Im thinking we will get a good middle ground on both. But as I said we need a very smart and careful plan. Because of the 2 types of villain theory: 1. Greedy (which by your theory would be gone) and 2. They just want to watch the world burn. Its unfortunate but these people exist. Greifers, hackers, and general trolls that dont give 2 ***** about you or me or community. Now my hope is this is less of a problem in Pantheon due to the games very nature. But Im not as confident as some. And some seem to have the attitude of lets try it the old way and if it doesnt work we can fix it later (seen it time and time again). My counter would be most ventures have a solid plan. You dont decide to randomly build a skyscraper on a fault line and hope there are no earthquakes. First dont build on a faultline. But if for some reason you had to you would try to take measures in the event of an earthquake (Japan has those wierd rolling foundation designs). Point is you try to be smart about it and have a plan in place for the what if. And while its true we need to limit encroaching on immersion and the social dynamic of the game (I have no problem with that), we shouldnt do it at the expense of challenge and sound game mechanics. A good middle ground not too much one direction or another.
I wont write another essay on this lol. But I honestly feel like raiding can and will work without putting caps on how many players can attend. I have confidence in our dev team that they can recreate a great raiding experience that has reigned supreme for the past 17 almost 18 years.
Enitzu said:I like the basis of your suggestions Xaleban but I have to disagree. Not limiting raid sizes means that people can just mass recruit and zerg down targets with little to no trouble. That takes every bit of skill out of the game. In order to provide quality raids there has to be a cap that the dev's can tune towards.
What I don't want to see is old school EQ raid mobs. If a raid boss can be taken down without a tank, it's a crappy raid. If you can run in with 80 people and drop a raid mob in under a minute, it's a crappy raid. I want there to be tactics and strategy involved. I want skill to be a deciding factor as to whether or not we kill a boss. And I don't want one massive zerg recruiting guild being able to drop everything they come accross simply because they bring double the required numbers.
Some games have tried scaling the fights to X number of people. Take wow's flex raiding for instance. It was a good theory and good for guilds that couldn't consistantly field the right numbers. However it quickly became about bringing the magic number of people for each fight in order to make it easier.
To play devils advocate. What if raid mobs were tuned for 100 mid-geared, max level players. Is that unreasonable? Maybe 50 high level/geared players could take it down in a good fight.
Also, I question "what eq" you are referring to. When was an eq raid boss able to be taken down without a tank? Certainly not unless you are playing through old/out of date content. (Or was that a thing much later after EQ became, not "EQ"?)
In early Eq there were no raid mobs that you could take "80 people and drop a raid mob in under a minute".
Your post makes me wonder where your perspective is coming from?
Edit: also, 12-18 like moarcrits mentioned is not a raid. That's a joke. To put it in perspective raiders in EQ used to make fun of 40 man raids in wow...what was the other half to 2/3 of your online guild members supposed to do?
If I had a dollar for every person who complained that they are old now and don't have the time to play anymore Pantheon would be well funded.
Granted. It is a different day and age now. I don't expect there to be large scale raids in Pantheon...unfortunately. I do expect raids to be more than 2-3 group minibosses though hopefully. I would be content with 40 man raids these days, but at the time it was considered inadequate.
I am a bit worried it ends up being lesser than that and it blurs the line to what is actually a raid mob and just a few group boss fight.
@ Philo
Thats never been an issue to me. Then again I like the more broad terminology of "endgame content" as opposed to raid. And a distinction between group content and multiple group content. If its more than one group in my book it qualifies. I think the more important thing is the level of difficulty and gear check and skill required for high end content. Size of the group required is less important to me. That said I would like there to be larger group content as well. But I would be fully satisfied with 3-4 groups of 6. Though I admit I am more comfortable with smaller guilds as well. I like a guild (PvE anyway) to feel like a family not an army. I find large guilds to have too much of a "stricly business" attitude most times and have a greater tendency to develop cliques. Your milage may vary.
A lot of what your saying is nothing new to the mmo genre now, large scale raids is a very very rare thing these days in any mmo. But please don't use the "I don't have time" excuse to justify your stance. I'm of the same mindframe with not having time to live in a mmo like I did when I was a teenager, but that doesn't change the fact that I'd like there to be some events that I'd likely will never take part of. It further enhances the feeling of the world being alive, since the world will not revolve around what I want to do.
Moarcrits said: You've completely missed my point. I can easily make time to be in a large raiding guild, I don't want to, I want to be in a guild that's really close and tight knit, not log on raid log off. I have no issue with there being content for big guilds to down. I don't expect my guild to kill kerafrym, but I would like the opportunity to down content and it not require 20+ people. My stance has nothing to do with "I don't have time". My stance is other people don't have the freedom to sit down for 6 hours to raid. I can make time. Not everyone else can.
And if the game is all contested content, most people will never see 2-3 group raid content because people who can make time like you will park on that content 24/7. So the end result is essentially the same.
Moarcrits said: That's a very good point. We can't really say until we know how raiding will work. All contested or instanced raiding.
We already know that instances will be used very sparingly, if at all. And then only in cases that require storytelling, or some kind of personal solo quest.
I'm pretty sure this is one of the things we can have a pretty high degree of confidence in. It all revolves around the core tenent in this game's design of community and social interaction. As soon as you start instancing, you start inherently dividing the community and dimishing social interaction. Yes, you are still doing those things with your guild or your raid, but at a core level you are detracting from the variables of the greater community. Not to mention that it's been said the competition from the content is in itself a factor in why conquering that content is that much more gratifying.
I believe a mix of both contested/instance will in theory be the best of both worlds. Thinking back to VG, you can say APW was instanced to a degree and alot of the contested content...well alot of it was shut out to alot of guilds for some time until faster respawns were introduced.
For cap vs uncap, I do not believe the extra burden in balancing is necessary for the content/raid developers. If you were to ask me say 10+ years ago I would be uncap all the way, but I've found that capping it to a certain number of players allows for alot tighter tuning of the encounter to provide a better experience. Yes shifting in and out players from your guild sucks at times, but you have to make the call on that.
5-6man groups doen't matter really. Depends what you've been used to all this time.
I think folks need to remember that unless the game supports dynamic difficulty leveling that the larger the group size is (ie if they made the max 8) then "group" content would need to be balanced for that... and this would be a major mistake. Those of us who remember how difficult it was to consistently fill groups can, I hope, relate.
We don't want a game that is designed in such a way that when player populations drop it becomes more and more difficult to do anything due to a lack of players/classes. Six is a good number for balance I think.
I've stated before I wish for 6 man groups and 4-5 group raids. I thought VG was perfectly fine with their 24 man raids.
People are saying that we should have uncapped raids and the devs can just design the bosses so that if players try to bring too many people and zerg the boss then it will create elements to thwart this. ie. if a raid brings too many people then the boss produces extra adds or does extra aoes or whatever else it can do to defend itself from a zerg.
First I don't understand why people are so adamant about having uncapped raids. Why does uncapped raids ensure more fun than capped raids?? Pretty much every MMO since EQ has used capped raids and for good measure. And I don't feel like I was missing out on anything because the raid size was fixed.
If you are asking the devs to create a boss who is meant to have 30 people fight it and if the raid brings 40 people it starts to produce extra adds and extra aoes then why not just cap the raid at 30 people?? This way they can create the bosses intended strategy without putting in any other nonsense. You are asking the devs to create each and every boss to have two strategies; the first is the actual strategy for the boss and the second is the extra strategy required if a raid brings too many people. This doesn't seem efficient to me.