I was thinking earlier that there isnt really one true solution and after reading a bit of this necro’d thread i had some clarity. Situational Evaluation. This kindof happened in EQ1 with early instancing experimentation. Basically speaking, as bosses or raids become contested the devs evaluate and decide how to implement things on specific servers. If there is a server that can not play nice: implement specific lockout timers. If there is a server that plays nice let them figure out a guild rotation or other self regulated content sharing. If nobody plays nice implement lockout timers and anyone that even damages the mob gets a lockout. There can be Situational Evaluation on simple random mobs all the way up to end game raid. If something is being abused institute a lockout. I dont see why we need instancing if devs can abuse a situational lockout?
The biggest thing about raiding is having scale/scope of a zone. As was mentioned earlier in thread having MASSIVE zones and/or triggered spawns you will have many guilds raiding, but the content is spread out enough to allow for kills without interference.
Another thread of thought is abundance. Have many many many massive zones so that casuals and mainstream raiders have the ability to do seperate content without issue.
The last thread of thought is frequency. If bosses spawn more often there is a reduced need to keep content locked down as there will just be too much work for any one guild to accomplish
There should be a main raid zone for each race. The abundance and scale/scope of raid zones should help eliminate guilds keeping content on lockdown. And if there is an increased frequency of bosses than the only determining factor would be rareness of items dropped. Sometimes bosses are literally going to drop 1 crafting piece and a common acclimation item. Other times they drop that +8 STR item. If a guild is farming STR items than another guild can farm a comperable STA item.
Just some thoughts i had recently.
Porygon said:It will never cease to amaze me that you can have 9 pages of discussion about casual guilds wanting to experience content.. not be blocked by other players... and ultimately want to be able to take their time and progress at their own speed... but the mere mention of instances for raids sends everyone's panties in a bunch.
Stop avoiding the inevitable!
IMO a mixture of mechanics will work best. If there are 10 raid mobs in the game. Make 3 or 4 of them available in instances (at varying difficulty levels). Make a few of them open world multiple day lockouts with shorter respawns time. And make a few longer respawn MDD no lockouts.
The highly competitive guilds will most likely kill 10 bosses a week. The less competitive ones 6 or 7. And the casual guilds will have their chance at 1-4 or so depending on their skill levels.
I generally agree with this. What I would do is make about 50% of the raid content world bosses designed for massive raids. Then have the other half be instanced for a specific number of players (48'ish).
Make the world bosses as exclusive as you want. Hell, make them only spawn once a month, and have them be controlled by GM's.
Porygon said:It will never cease to amaze me that you can have 9 pages of discussion about casual guilds wanting to experience content.. not be blocked by other players... and ultimately want to be able to take their time and progress at their own speed... but the mere mention of instances for raids sends everyone's panties in a bunch.
Stop avoiding the inevitable!
IMO a mixture of mechanics will work best. If there are 10 raid mobs in the game. Make 3 or 4 of them available in instances (at varying difficulty levels). Make a few of them open world multiple day lockouts with shorter respawns time. And make a few longer respawn MDD no lockouts.
The highly competitive guilds will most likely kill 10 bosses a week. The less competitive ones 6 or 7. And the casual guilds will have their chance at 1-4 or so depending on their skill levels.
I am up for 10 raids a week. What I don't want to see is no limiting mechanic at all that allows guilds who can log in at 10am control it all. Just a level playing field. I'm sure they'll solve for it.
I agree that instancing has a definite benefit it can bring to Pantheon as long as it is used for a small percentage of the content and only with a good reason. A handful of story instances and a few raids for example. Not the top raids giving the top gear and well under half, but something to let "casuals" do some raiding and gear up a bit for the more competitive content.
I am a member of a online gaming family. We've been around almost 10 years and have played several MMOs (P99, EQ TLP, etc...). Because we have high standards for the type of person in our guild, we are medium sized in the games that we play. We consider ourselves highly skilled though and try to do more with less. Some people have a lot of play time, but some can only commit to two or three 3-hour blocks per week on a regular basis.
A minimum requirement would be available raid content. If there is nothing for us to do on our 3 scheduled raid times, that would really hurt our experience. Something should be up somewhere, most of the time.
Another minimum requirement would be the opportunity to experience all raid content during era. We don't have to kill it once per week. We don't have to actually KILL it at all. We just want a chance to try. The first time you try a hard mob, you take your time (uber hardcore guilds included). You get set up and double check your assignments etc... The biggest or most hard-core guilds down the content first and know the encounter very early on. Even if we win the competitive race to the mob, they can swoop in just behind us and engage the mob while we are getting set up.
I want to be clear - I don't want a hand-out. I don't want free pixels. I just want the opportunity to try (and hopefully down) hard content. Figure out the fight, what we did right, what we did wrong, how we should proceed next attempt, if we get one. There is no better feeling than struggling with a tough mob and then eventually downing it with your guild. You know the moment I'm talking about - when your entire guild is yelling and shouting in voice chat as the mob dies for the first time. There is no better rush in gaming and I want the opportunity to experience that.
On places like p99 and some original EQ servers, these opportunities are/were not possible. On other servers they were for various reasons. On whatever Pantheon server we're on, we might have benevolent guilds that allow us to attempt a hard boss if we arrive first. We might not. Relying on the RNG of the guilds on our server is the worst case scenario in my mind. I'm not sure what the right system is, I just hope it accommodates my minimum requirements.
spryler said:I'm not sure what the right system is, I just hope it accommodates my minimum requirements.
Sounds like the hyper/ghost raiding system would appeal to you Spryler. I have stressed the exact same values that you are mentioning here as to why it would be so beneficial to offer such a system. Please see my posts on this page to understand how the system would work:
Read on to page 7 and you'll see me preaching a bunch of the same language. I don't know if your minimum requirements would be perfectly satisfied but I think it's a good compromise that would appeal to the majority of players.
That's a great idea oneADseven. I think everybody wins in this scenario. The medium-sized or slower-leveling guilds get to experience all the raid content. The hardcore guilds get to compete for the open world version that is slightly more difficult and has slightly better loot (maybe?). In fact, from a hardcore guild perspective it would increase competition since other guilds would be more likely to try the open world version.
The only real losers are people whose primary goal is to deny other guilds every open-world spawn and then use the "competitive race" argument as an excuse. I think those people are very rare though. On this very thread people have said they felt bad about such practices, even when they were in a guild that participated in them. JUST TO BE CLEAR - I 100% believe there is a large population of people that like the "competitive race" and do NOT use it as an excuse - I don't want to offend anyone or imply that you don't have a right to enjoy the game on your terms. Your style of play is completely valid and should be accommodated as much as anyone else's.
I'm not saying this is THE solution, but it certainly addressed the vast majority of concerns I've read here.
spryler said:That's a great idea oneADseven. I think everybody wins in this scenario. The medium-sized or slower-leveling guilds get to experience all the raid content. The hardcore guilds get to compete for the open world version that is slightly more difficult and has slightly better loot (maybe?). In fact, from a hardcore guild perspective it would increase competition since other guilds would be more likely to try the open world version.
The only real losers are people whose primary goal is to deny other guilds every open-world spawn and then use the "competitive race" argument as an excuse. I think those people are very rare though. On this very thread people have said they felt bad about such practices, even when they were in a guild that participated in them. JUST TO BE CLEAR - I 100% believe there is a large population of people that like the "competitive race" and do NOT use it as an excuse - I don't want to offend anyone or imply that you don't have a right to enjoy the game on your terms. Your style of play is completely valid and should be accommodated as much as anyone else's.
I'm not saying this is THE solution, but it certainly addressed the vast majority of concerns I've read here.
Our guild managed to assemble for racing much of the time, but not always. There were many instances where we were literally racing side-by-side with another guild through a zone to try and reach a boss first. After 2 or 3 years of battling the raid contestation, a server council of all the major raid guilds formed and started creating boss rotations each week, allowing each guild from the council a turn at specific bosses. Occasionally a guild would somehow betray the pact and drama would ensue, but overall it worked out well :p If a guild didn't respect other guilds claims, then the remaining guilds would often make it very difficult for the offending guild to progress.
Either way, a competitive spirit can be maintained, while eliminating the racing that occured back then. It wasn't very fun, as most guilds just wanted to do the content, not necessarily race other guilds to do it. Even with as successful as we were, most of us didn't really find a lot of joy in either crapping on others, or being crapped on ourselves. I would say this was true for the majority, hence the creation of a council.
Of course, this led to other issues of exclusion with smaller guilds, because they weren't usually included in the weekly rotations until they could demonstrate an ability to actually do it, which was somewhat paradoxical. They often had to wait for the 4 or 5 large guilds to move on from content before they could get a chance at it. The major guilds didn't want to let days go by to allow smaller guilds an opportunity to "possibly" down a boss. A few guilds managed to claw their way up and get invited to the raid council, but it was not very often. The feeling of exclusion was always a problem for smaller, less organized guilds. It was very tough to grow and compete with the large established guilds, who were always looking for quality, high playtime players. Smaller guilds became stepping stones to the more prestiguous guilds and they had difficulties with member retention.
I think either instancing, or lockout timers, or some combination of the suggestions that have been put forth would really alleviate these issues.
Also, Spryler, I'm not sure how big your guild is, but if Pantheon turns out to be anything like EQ, there could very well be raid sizes of 30+ people.
A lot of good stuff in here.
Sadly I doubt much of it will matter.
Open world Raids will become toxic. No matter how hard we try to believe that pantheon players will be better, they won't.
Basically, I see zero chance of anything but instancing having a chance of working. Instantiate the raids, let the solo and group content be open world. Even just doing it like progression servers on EQ would likely lead to drama (All bosses are open world AND instanced. Big guilds still train each other to get double loot tho).
I honestly hate instancing, but I don't see a single idea that could work, outside of wishful thinking. The gamer demographic changed too much.
Guess I have just experienced too much drama, in too many MMOs. Each and every great idea failed. Instancing works. /sadface
I don't hate instancing. I think it is by far the best solution to handling raids and lockouts. I also think contrary to popular belief you can have a thriving open world even with raid only instancing.
It also puts everyone on the same page. Everyone gets to try the content and only those good enough will win.
The problem with instancing only "some" content, is that over time... regardless of what anyone thinks.. the people that aren't killing the open world content will begin to get that entitlement creeping up... "I pay my sub fees I should be able to do x y and z"
This is what happened with WoW. WoW was essentially completely instanced... with the instances ranging in degree of difficulty... the casuals who couldnt experience naxx40 and sunwell complained that it was taking away from their lore based experience. They weren't able to get to and kill all the bosses on order to experience everything...
Blizzard offered 10 mans with "hardmodes". People still complained it was too difficult. Even tho they had an equal chance in a completely instanced game... they complained.
That's what you will see in pantheon regardless of what method you choose. The people unable to do what they want to do will lobby and complain
Hopefully VR doesnt give in.
Hello all
First off let me say that i have been following this game for some time now and really really really lookiing forward to it.. I have now just recently decided to help the cause out by supporting it. Now that that has been said i would like to dive into the raid discusion.
First my experience, over 10 years in MMO mostly in the EQ2 scene and everything from casual player to hard core raider.
Im a big advocate of raid instances and heres why.
when you get 24 plus/min players to log in to raid they are there for a certain time frame wether its a couple hours or a few hours and time and needs to be utilized as best as possible. Now the raid leader needs to figure what classes they have available and what toons need to be switched out for raid alts or start spaming for more players to properly field the raid. then the travel time then the set up time. If all raid mobs are open world contested wethere its lock out or not casual guilds that want to raid will always lose out to more hard core guilds that have there **** in perfect harmony, and there will be a few guilds that can do this on ever server. once those guilds have all the stratas figured out and in sync they will always have the advantage over other casual guilds.
Having Raid instances gives all guilds that want to raid the opportunity to experience that, sure have some open world bosses as well but please put in raid instances!
Some of the most fun i had raiding was spedning time getting to a name then spending hours, days, weeks and even months figuiring out starts and the workings of raid mobs and was some of the most challenging game play i had. 24 players all putting the heads together trying to figure out what CA/spells to us where to stand and communicating togethere was just amazing.i can only imagine how some guilds are going to feel pulling a contested world boss to wipe and then having another guild pull it and win and not learn enough from the wipe cause they cant get more chances at it.
MMO raiders are not in anyway the majority of players but they do make up a small popualtion of a MMO and this topic needs to be evaluated on what all type of raiders of a this MMO need. In my past when i had a large amount of my time availble to play i would be in a hard core raid guild that would be top world wide and not have an issue with contesting world bosses by i dont have that luxury anymore and my game play now will be limited and i know there are alot of players that are in the same situation as myself. i dont want to spend my time wasted waiting and watching others kill something. Im all for contested dugeons as there are usualy lots of bosses for groups to go find and kill put raids need to be instanced and tied into whats going on in the world.
ps my grammer is crap please dont be offended by it lol
lets say for exaample pantheon starts with around 20 servers which im sure wont be enough to handel all the players they will be getting :) but lets just say for example that every server will most likely have around 70 guilds that raid on some sort of level from casual all the way up to hard core how many world bosses will there be? most raid guilds raid from 2 -5 days week from X time to Y time if its open world contested i would guess there would not be even close to enough raid bosses to go around and alot of guilds will lose out on raiding and or wasting game time waiting around for the chance. Even if you lock one guild out of that mob for x amount of days you still have a bunch of other ones waiting in line. The only way i truly see raiding work in any MMO is instances. Myabe im wrong and VR has some raid code that can be cracked that allows all guilds to take a crack and kill contested raid bosses only time will only tell.
also just beacuse you have raid instances doesnt mean you take away from the social aspect of it. i think it adds to the social aspect as now you have time in a instance to start planning, talking and working as a team to defeat said boss. this game is all about working as a team wether its questing, lvling, grouping for dungeon crawls or raiding. VR just needs to figure out to work each part of the game.
Porygon said:It will never cease to amaze me that you can have 9 pages of discussion about casual guilds wanting to experience content.. not be blocked by other players... and ultimately want to be able to take their time and progress at their own speed... but the mere mention of instances for raids sends everyone's panties in a bunch.
Stop avoiding the inevitable!
IMO a mixture of mechanics will work best. If there are 10 raid mobs in the game. Make 3 or 4 of them available in instances (at varying difficulty levels). Make a few of them open world multiple day lockouts with shorter respawns time. And make a few longer respawn MDD no lockouts.
The highly competitive guilds will most likely kill 10 bosses a week. The less competitive ones 6 or 7. And the casual guilds will have their chance at 1-4 or so depending on their skill levels.
I have ZERO issue with instances. And I completely support Porygon's idea.
I kind of liked raiding in public zones where other people were present. I like the lockout timer idea, where you cannot kill the boss again for x number of hours/days as a good compromise. I would say that if the mob isn't damaged for x hours / days after it respawns, then it should reset all lockout timers.
I liked Vanguard's approach to Ancient Port Warehouse, there were 4 instances of the dungeon to raid in but only 4. So there would be multiple groups in each instance. It made sure that when a guild went to raid it was pretty much garunteed that what they wanted to raid was available but that there was also some competition. The raid leader would pop into an instance and do a wing check to see if the wings on the evening's schedule was already being raided and if it was they would check the other instances.
It was also nice that the instancing was only for that dungeon and there were still overland raid mobs that were not instanced.
My only major beef with raiding and older content is the new spells do not stick very well. If it says 1000 damage spell it resists or unknown to the mob type. Load up an older version and wham it lands fine.
I believe it applies to coding and the devs at that point, not adding the spell lines to stack or stick.
So if i am lvl 100 going back to kill a boss mob thats lvl 50, my spells do not land right. I am all mighty now, but weak.
Crazzie said:My only major beef with raiding and older content is the new spells do not stick very well. If it says 1000 damage spell it resists or unknown to the mob type. Load up an older version and wham it lands fine.
I believe it applies to coding and the devs at that point, not adding the spell lines to stack or stick.
So if i am lvl 100 going back to kill a boss mob thats lvl 50, my spells do not land right. I am all mighty now, but weak.
Well before I say anything I want to mention this has nothing to do with the thread, and now to tackle this I want to point out that this lvl 50 raid mob took like 72 people to kill him and now you can solo him, and what took 15 minutes you can kill in 5 seconds. So huh why don't you like almighty again?
Riahuf22 said:Crazzie said:My only major beef with raiding and older content is the new spells do not stick very well. If it says 1000 damage spell it resists or unknown to the mob type. Load up an older version and wham it lands fine.
I believe it applies to coding and the devs at that point, not adding the spell lines to stack or stick.
So if i am lvl 100 going back to kill a boss mob thats lvl 50, my spells do not land right. I am all mighty now, but weak.
Well before I say anything I want to mention this has nothing to do with the thread, and now to tackle this I want to point out that this lvl 50 raid mob took like 72 people to kill him and now you can solo him, and what took 15 minutes you can kill in 5 seconds. So huh why don't you like almighty again?
Being sarcastic doesnt do you justice. If it still takes 50 players that is fine, but the spell caps, or not additional spells landing in future expansions is a good point.
I think one of the big fears people have is the situation where 1 or 2 big guilds continually kill bosses that they don't need just to prevent other guilds from killing them so they can't get geared up.
Basically the idea is: You need gear from BossA in order to attempt BossB, you need gear from BossB to attempt BossC, etc...
So if Guild1 is killing BossC trying to gear up for BossD, they want to make sure it's always available every week for them. So they deliberately go back and kill BossA and BossB to prevent other guilds from getting the gear to start killing BossC as well, and locking them out for the week. As long as they keep those bosses on lockdown they will always have access to BossC on their own until they are ready to move on to BossD.
Kilsin said this earlier in the thread:
Basically, if your guild kills a mob, you are locked out from killing it again for 7 days, it respawns either instantly or within an hour and then the next guild can kill it, this way, multiple guilds can work out schedules to kill the boss without interfering with each others raiding schedule and it stops mobs from being over camped for their gear, removing the overcrowding issue between guilds, having multiple raiding mobs on these lockout timers allows guilds to communicate with each other and assign certain days/raids to kill specific mobs, once you get the first week or two down it becomes a normal raiding schedule with little to no interference from other guilds and solves many problems.
This form of lockout as Kilsin describes totally solves this problem all together because it resolves both issues.
First: Guild1 couldn't possibly lock down BossA or BossB because it respawns right away and they are locked out from killing it. Even if it only locked you out from the loot and they could kill it again, they would need to sit there all night long killing the Boss over and over and they would never have time to go try BossC.
Second: It also removes the entire reason for Guild1 to want to prevent other guilds from getting to the point to try BossC. Since BossC re-spawns shortly after dying, many guilds can kill it in the same night, thus they have no real need to prevent other guilds from getting to the point where they can kill it.
This also makes the 'race to world first kill' on a boss much more fair, and when you ARE the first it means it's much more of an accomplishment since you can't cheat by artificially preventing other guilds from competing.
Kilson said: The lockout timer applies to the character, not the guild, so it doesn't matter if you are in a guild, group or PUG, if you are part of the kill and are eligible for loot, you get the lockout timer, if you want to raid the same mob again, switch to an alt ;)
While I don't have a major problem with this type of lockout, I do feel that this prevents players from helping friends in other guilds with content. Back in WoW they had some world bosses that had this kind of lockout, but it was only your eligibility for loot that was locked out. You could still go fight the boss, but when he died you couldn't get any loot. I often went to help other friends outside my guild with Bosses I had already killed that week. I knew I wasn't getting any loot, but I could still participate and help them out.
Another scenario is back in EQ I would tag along with friends in a higher end guild where I could experience the boss fight and learn how the fight worked, then go back to my own guild and help teach them what I'd learned, making our attempts better.
Obviously if Pantheon wants a full lockout I will be ok with it, but I do hope that it's only a loot lockout so that I can help out on boss kills with others outside my guild.
I am curious how they are going to enforce the lockout though if they want a full prevention of fighting a boss again before the lockout expires. Does the boss emit some sort of aura that prevents players who are locked out from using abilities within a certain distance from the boss? I only ask because healers could potentially still help out on fights because as long as they don't engage the boss but only heal people who are fighting the boss. Although since Pantheon seems to be using an 'in combat' flag, they could make it so that if you trigger 'in combat' with the boss and you are locked out, it could teleport you to the entrance of the zone. Then make it so healing a player who's 'in combat' with the boss triggers you to go 'in combat' with the boss. So you might get 1 heal off, but then your booted. So you could watch, but you couldn't help out.
GoofyWarriorGuy said:I think one of the big fears people have is the situation where 1 or 2 big guilds continually kill bosses that they don't need just to prevent other guilds from killing them so they can't get geared up.
Basically the idea is: You need gear from BossA in order to attempt BossB, you need gear from BossB to attempt BossC, etc...
So if Guild1 is killing BossC trying to gear up for BossD, they want to make sure it's always available every week for them. So they deliberately go back and kill BossA and BossB to prevent other guilds from getting the gear to start killing BossC as well, and locking them out for the week. As long as they keep those bosses on lockdown they will always have access to BossC on their own until they are ready to move on to BossD.
Kilsin said this earlier in the thread:
Basically, if your guild kills a mob, you are locked out from killing it again for 7 days, it respawns either instantly or within an hour and then the next guild can kill it, this way, multiple guilds can work out schedules to kill the boss without interfering with each others raiding schedule and it stops mobs from being over camped for their gear, removing the overcrowding issue between guilds, having multiple raiding mobs on these lockout timers allows guilds to communicate with each other and assign certain days/raids to kill specific mobs, once you get the first week or two down it becomes a normal raiding schedule with little to no interference from other guilds and solves many problems.
This form of lockout as Kilsin describes totally solves this problem all together because it resolves both issues.
First: Guild1 couldn't possibly lock down BossA or BossB because it respawns right away and they are locked out from killing it. Even if it only locked you out from the loot and they could kill it again, they would need to sit there all night long killing the Boss over and over and they would never have time to go try BossC.
Second: It also removes the entire reason for Guild1 to want to prevent other guilds from getting to the point to try BossC. Since BossC re-spawns shortly after dying, many guilds can kill it in the same night, thus they have no real need to prevent other guilds from getting to the point where they can kill it.
This also makes the 'race to world first kill' on a boss much more fair, and when you ARE the first it means it's much more of an accomplishment since you can't cheat by artificially preventing other guilds from competing.
Kilson said: The lockout timer applies to the character, not the guild, so it doesn't matter if you are in a guild, group or PUG, if you are part of the kill and are eligible for loot, you get the lockout timer, if you want to raid the same mob again, switch to an alt ;)
While I don't have a major problem with this type of lockout, I do feel that this prevents players from helping friends in other guilds with content. Back in WoW they had some world bosses that had this kind of lockout, but it was only your eligibility for loot that was locked out. You could still go fight the boss, but when he died you couldn't get any loot. I often went to help other friends outside my guild with Bosses I had already killed that week. I knew I wasn't getting any loot, but I could still participate and help them out.
Another scenario is back in EQ I would tag along with friends in a higher end guild where I could experience the boss fight and learn how the fight worked, then go back to my own guild and help teach them what I'd learned, making our attempts better.
Obviously if Pantheon wants a full lockout I will be ok with it, but I do hope that it's only a loot lockout so that I can help out on boss kills with others outside my guild.
I am curious how they are going to enforce the lockout though if they want a full prevention of fighting a boss again before the lockout expires. Does the boss emit some sort of aura that prevents players who are locked out from using abilities within a certain distance from the boss? I only ask because healers could potentially still help out on fights because as long as they don't engage the boss but only heal people who are fighting the boss. Although since Pantheon seems to be using an 'in combat' flag, they could make it so that if you trigger 'in combat' with the boss and you are locked out, it could teleport you to the entrance of the zone. Then make it so healing a player who's 'in combat' with the boss triggers you to go 'in combat' with the boss. So you might get 1 heal off, but then your booted. So you could watch, but you couldn't help out.
If it's only a loot lockout, then it won't fully solve the problem of blocking other guilds. Guilds might kill it anyway just to keep other guilds from clearing it. Now if it respawns right away, then you are probably right that it will at least reduce content blocking, because guilds probably won't choose to sit and kill it over and over. My guess is they will choose progression over blocking (i.e. spend their time elsewhere on content that will actually progress them). Even if they do choose to farm it for days, how long could any guild really sustain that and to what end other than to grief? Unless their guild is so large they can run multiple concurrent raids, most will probably choose to go for mobs that actually help them progress.
With that said, maybe another solution is a threshold or something. Something like if > 10% of players in vicinity of boss are already flagged, banish them, else let them fight. Obviously 10% is just an arbitrary number I'm throwing out there, maybe it could just be a static number, like 5 or 6 that the raid can't go over. Either way, this would ensure that the majority of players cannot be lock flagged, but a raid could bring a few friends. On the other hand, this just complicates it for the raid and going over the threshold might be a pita to try and manage. I don't know.
Another thing I'm hoping to see is not a hard cap on raid size. I liked the flexibility of having no raid size cap. Sure, some guilds would zerg content, but most guilds still managed their guild / raid size to ensure all members got gear at a reasonable pace.