As many have pointed out in the various raid discussion threads, mechanics such as instancing or lockouts are essentially band-aid fixes to ensure that content doesn’t get monopolized by a single or small group of guilds. Instancing we know is off the table. It sounds like lockouts are still a possibility, but I wanted to start a thread for other ideas that might solve the same problems with less immersion-breaking mechanics, and maybe allow for a little competition as well. These are just some thoughts I’ve had based off of the recent raid discussions that have been taking place.
Inverse Acclimatization
Brad has already shared with us some of the details about the planned climate system in PRotF. By flipping the script on adaptation to climates a mechanic could be introduced that’s very similar to a raid lockout, but potentially more immersive. The general idea would be: The more time you spend in that specific climate, the more susceptible you become to the creatures that inhabit it. Here’s a potential implementation:
Corruption Environment
The idea here is that the more time you spend surrounded by corruption, the more likely you are to succumb to its’ effects. If your guild was raiding a Lich’s tomb, you’d slowly see your ‘corruption susceptibility’ rise within the tomb’s natural environment. Killing enemies, particularly raid bosses, could result in large jumps in your corruption susceptibility. Eventually, if the raid force hung out long enough in the area, they would become too weak versus its’ effects to continue killing there and would be forced to leave until their corruption susceptibility lowered to acceptable levels again. Here, depending on mob respawn timers, you can get a very similar effect to a lockout. A guild wouldn’t be able to monopolize all the mobs in a zone, though the fastest to organize would still have the first pick of what they took down. But since no guild would be capable of doing a full clear in a competitive environment, everyone would be forced to switch priorities from time to time if they wanted to see items off of all the different loot tables.
I have a few other ideas that I’ll post when I have time to write them up, but I thought I’d get the ball rolling on discussion.
This has been brought up to some extent in atleast one other thread: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/3810/raid-mobs-and-trash
It was brought up that in order for a guild to monopolize a raid mob, they A) had to know when it was supposed to be up and B) had to know when it was up. By making making spawn timers much less predictable and raid mob checks very difficult, you could limit the ease in which higher teir guilds monopolized content.
Example: Mob spawn time = 6 days +/- 4 days
Impossible to see if the mob is up without bringing in a raid force to check on it
Using these parameters, a guild would have to camp a mob for up to 8 days in order to guarantee they got it. After that they would get 2 days off, and then would have to camp again for up to 8 days straight. The camping would have to be in raid strength!
If a guild is willing to do that, and keep it up for months, I will willingly forfeit any claim I have to that mob. Especially if VR puts in many other such mobs for me to go after, as I expect they will.
One easy way to make certain that a raid force is required to check on the boss mob, is to make it appear only by slaying another mini-boss (raid style). After slaying the mini boss, only then will the main boss spawn, and only if the random timer is up. Otherwise, you have to wait an hour and slay the mini boss again to see if the timer is done.
That said, I have not seen your idea before. It is a good one and should be utilized in atleast a limited basis. IMO.
Thanks JDNight,
There have been a few other suggestions proposed as well. Someone brought up triggered spawns (Dullahan?), which work well too. I remember there being an undead dragon in the zone under the Lake of Ill Omen that required a bunch of group drops to trigger. I thought it was a fun encounter, and it was a fun group activity gathering all of the components to trigger it.
I was actually just thinking about this topic earlier today Elrandir! Your idea of a more lore-friendly soft lockout timer is in my opinion a huge improvement over /lockout -> 4days 3hours 21minutes. Hopefully they can just work it into the weather system as you suggested so they don't have to create new stats/resistances or anything.
I posted in another thread about having to align faction to one of X sides (e.g. elements), and only being able to kill your elemental opposite raid boss. In order to get your raid target to spawn, the other elemental versions had to be killed in order up to yours. So if you're water and want to kill fire, then you need to wait/encourage some other guild to kill earth, then water, then wind, etc. This would at least reduce the competition and foster some small amount of cooperation between guilds. Of course you can modify the lore on the model.
But the idea I thought of today was to simply have a formula paired with a lockout timer system. This would be to create a controllable "loot output rate" formula for raid targets. Let's say you have an open world raid target on a 1hr timer that you (as a dev) want to be killed X times per week in order to promote good loot distribution without oversaturation. Every time the boss is killed it gains +Y% stats across the board. Then simply make the raid boss lose -Y% stats X times per week. This will cause the raid target to self-adjust to the abilities of the community (it even counters stat inflation). If it is killed X+5 times one week, it will be 5*Y% stronger. Once the steady state has been reached, it will be killed approximately X times per week, because the more they kill it, the stronger it gets. Combine this with a week long lockout and you need X guilds to kill it before its stats start to increase. The worse guilds won't ever be able to down it because of its difficulty, but this doesn't prevent them from trying.
Great idea Ainadak. :)
Another idea: Guardian boss mob
Example: In an orc zone there is a guardian boss mob that shows up when intruders attack, but only after there has been considerable damage or a long period has gone by. So every 10 minutes, the game calculate the number of 'intruders' (players) are in the zone. It keeps a running tally. It then adds the number of orc mobs that have been slain. This is compared to another number that is based on a timer that starts when the boss mob was last slain. As the timer counts, the target number continues to drop at a slight exponential rate (power of 1.3) such that having players present and slaying orcs will speed up the process of spawning the mob, but over time the mob will eventually spawn anyway. Because a strange exponential curve is used, and almost no one will know how many orcs have been slain since the last spawn, no one will be able to figure out when the boss will spawn. However, it will be obvious that slaying orcs and staying in the zone speeds up the boss mobs spawn. For added variety, you could even include orcs slain in the surrounding zones.
Target number drops each hour by subracting a quantity that increases by a power of 1.3 each hour.
Sorry for all of the math.
Elrandir said:As many have pointed out in the various raid discussion threads, mechanics such as instancing or lockouts are essentially band-aid fixes to ensure that content doesn’t get monopolized by a single or small group of guilds. Instancing we know is off the table. It sounds like lockouts are still a possibility, but I wanted to start a thread for other ideas that might solve the same problems with less immersion-breaking mechanics, and maybe allow for a little competition as well. These are just some thoughts I’ve had based off of the recent raid discussions that have been taking place.
Inverse Acclimatization
Brad has already shared with us some of the details about the planned climate system in PRotF. By flipping the script on adaptation to climates a mechanic could be introduced that’s very similar to a raid lockout, but potentially more immersive. The general idea would be: The more time you spend in that specific climate, the more susceptible you become to the creatures that inhabit it. Here’s a potential implementation:
Corruption Environment
The idea here is that the more time you spend surrounded by corruption, the more likely you are to succumb to its’ effects. If your guild was raiding a Lich’s tomb, you’d slowly see your ‘corruption susceptibility’ rise within the tomb’s natural environment. Killing enemies, particularly raid bosses, could result in large jumps in your corruption susceptibility. Eventually, if the raid force hung out long enough in the area, they would become too weak versus its’ effects to continue killing there and would be forced to leave until their corruption susceptibility lowered to acceptable levels again. Here, depending on mob respawn timers, you can get a very similar effect to a lockout. A guild wouldn’t be able to monopolize all the mobs in a zone, though the fastest to organize would still have the first pick of what they took down. But since no guild would be capable of doing a full clear in a competitive environment, everyone would be forced to switch priorities from time to time if they wanted to see items off of all the different loot tables.
I have a few other ideas that I’ll post when I have time to write them up, but I thought I’d get the ball rolling on discussion.
Basically you want game mechanics to fix what you are personally incapable of achieving yourself either through lack of will, laziness or other circumstances, that being having enough friends around to beat someone else to the content that you want to experience. But because you can't get what you want right when you want it, you want the game to punish those who can consistently get enough people together to take on content when it is first available.
You want access to content? Make friends..lots of friends...friends everywhere. Be really likeable, be really damn good at your class, make a name for yourself so that when opportunities arise (and they do) to join guilds to go and experience that content they will remember your name.
If you can't do that, then just relax and know that eventually those ahead of you will move on and you'll then get to monopolize the content to your hearts content while those people who are worse than you complain about how you're hogging all the content.
I dunno...on Xegony back in the day large guilds sat on epic weapon content (all the spawns that required a raid) for literally months on end. So the rest of us are supposed to wait til their Lordships become bored and move on...or til the next expac looms on the horizon? When did their money become more valuable than our money? :) We all pay to gain entrance to this game..I think the idea of putting some limits on how long and often a guild or raiding team can raid that one particular spot..should even things out for the rest of the server. Sitting on content for months and months..IS hogging content. Plain and simple. :)
Vandraad said:Basically you want game mechanics to fix what you are personally incapable of achieving yourself either through lack of will, laziness or other circumstances, that being having enough friends around to beat someone else to the content that you want to experience. But because you can't get what you want right when you want it, you want the game to punish those who can consistently get enough people together to take on content when it is first available.
You want access to content? Make friends..lots of friends...friends everywhere. Be really likeable, be really damn good at your class, make a name for yourself so that when opportunities arise (and they do) to join guilds to go and experience that content they will remember your name.
If you can't do that, then just relax and know that eventually those ahead of you will move on and you'll then get to monopolize the content to your hearts content while those people who are worse than you complain about how you're hogging all the content.
You actually couldn't be any further off-base with this. I am a firm believer in RvR and earning achievements. I spent years raiding in one of the 2 end-game guilds on my server in Everquest and have no trouble 'making friends' or 'accessing content.' I also think that if Pantheon is anything like early EQ, it will probably be years before we would need mechanics like what I'm proposing here. That said, if the game does become top-heavy then things like this probably will need to be implemented. It doesn't hurt to discuss them now. This thread was created for sharing ideas about possible mechanics that are less immersion-breaking than ones we typically see employed. If you don't like them or would rather that the game never incorporated any such mechanics, that's PERFECTLY ACCEPTAPLE and it's fine that you're sharing that opinion.
Hey Elrandir,
I had mentioned something similar to this idea in the "My only raid concern" thread:
"I agree about not incorporating artificial time locks. What if a guild physically couldn't continually camping a raid boss due to some toxic exposure or something. The best guilds could last the longest (deservedly so), but eventually they'd have to leave and lick their wounds. I think the environmental system they are going to be implementing will force a continual flux of fresh bodies, especially at the raid level."
Great minds my friend, great minds... :D
Thanks Syntro, yeah I'm sure my thought process was heavily influenced by your post.
Here's another idea:
Overpowered Content
This one is about more than raid mob accessibility. In early EQ there was almost always something lurking around in the environment that made you keep your eyes peeled. In the early levels it was roaming griffons, or cyclopes or hill giants. With Kunark came the presence of overworld dragons that wandered around certain zones. After Kunark however, we saw very little of that. After that, high level toons didn’t experience much in the way of danger unless they went into a dungeon somewhere.
I’d like to see some content that was designed to be 5-10 levels above whatever the current max level is. When I say content, I don’t mean an entire zone full of these mobs, or anything like that. I’m thinking more like the random roamer here or there, an occasional bonfire surrounded by 4 or 5 high-level giants, a dragon that patrols a zone... that sort of thing. These would be ordinary mobs that kept the world dangerous, even for groups of max level toons. But some of them could also be place-holder mobs for high-level named enemies. The normal mobs would take atleast 2-3 groups of max level toons to take down, and the named would essentially be raid-bosses, although like normal named, they would only have a single drop on them.
To create more exclusive content, you could combine this with other mechanics mentioned before, like the triggered spawns. Say it took, on average, ~2 hours for a raid force to camp one of these high-level named and collect a quest item from it. And say it took 4 such drops from different locations to gather all the drops needed to trigger the ‘real’ raid boss. You now have an event that takes (on average) eight hours of raid time just to gather the components to trigger. If the main event takes ~2 hours to clear to and beat, then that’s ~10 hours of time commitment total, which is about a week’s worth of raiding for many casual guilds.
Two things I like about this are that:
Since the named and place-holders follow the same mechanics as any normal group content, they will remain present in the environment at all times so that there is always danger lurking around the bend.
Like group content, you have the balance between time-investment and reward. Guilds that could spend more time farming PH’s will get more drops and be able to trigger more bosses.
Elrandir:
Since the named and place-holders follow the same mechanics as any normal group content, they will remain present in the environment at all times so that there is always danger lurking around the bend.
Like group content, you have the balance between time-investment and reward. Guilds that could spend more time farming PH’s will get more drops and be able to trigger more bosses.
(1) I love the idea of raid quality mobs roaming the environment. Scarey as hell, great to watch (from a good distance) and keeps the general gamer on their toes. Gimme!
(2) I would like to see a mechanism in place that restricts the guilds and characters from farming PHs at the expense of "lesser" raid guilds.
I would like to see a non droppable "token" of some sort be given to each charcter that took out a raid's PH. This token would serve two functions, while a character had the token (and for a time after it) that player would not be able to attack that PH again. It would give that character a key part in being able to enter a specific raid. Consuming the token (with other tokens) would make the raid's boss killable for that player/character's raid. The token's PH cool down timer would begin after the raid boss attempt had ended. Once this is expired, the player is free to attempt that PH again. Raid bosses would require tokens from multiple PHs before they are killable. Raid bosses could be attacked by anyone at any time (and would attack anyone getting too close), but only killable by a raid collecting the correct tokens.
When I talk about tokens I mean receiving something that makes the raid boss vunerable in some manner, not a coin. So killing a PH that would give the raiders part of a bane that was specific to the boss. Each place holder, providing another part of that bane. Once they were all collected and employed, then that raid boss becomes vulnerable by the raid. The token is anything that makes sense with the raid lore to make the boss killable.
If each PH spawned say an hour or two after being killed, this would allow other guilds their opportunity to get the elements needed before invoking the mechanism that allows the main boss to be taken out. This would help in stopping raids becoming the sole preserve of single "elite" (I would use the term "selfish" or "greedy") raiding guilds.
If a method such as this was employed though, I think it would be wise to create a nice number of raid areas so that a raiding guild was always able to pursue getting the next PH or raid boss. This method would also stop people from practicing a single specific raid to the point of it becoming routine as they would have to attempt multiple raid bosses (and their mechanics) to keep busy.
The only downside that I can see with this is that the boss kill is a one shot deal. To get around this, you could make the boss owned by the raid for (say) an hour or two, and the raid can make as many (unsuccessful) attempts in that hour as they see fit.
I love the idea of open world raids. I hate the idea of players assuming a part of the game belongs to them.
Vandraad said:Elrandir said:As many have pointed out in the various raid discussion threads, mechanics such as instancing or lockouts are essentially band-aid fixes to ensure that content doesn’t get monopolized by a single or small group of guilds. Instancing we know is off the table. It sounds like lockouts are still a possibility, but I wanted to start a thread for other ideas that might solve the same problems with less immersion-breaking mechanics, and maybe allow for a little competition as well. These are just some thoughts I’ve had based off of the recent raid discussions that have been taking place.
Inverse Acclimatization
Brad has already shared with us some of the details about the planned climate system in PRotF. By flipping the script on adaptation to climates a mechanic could be introduced that’s very similar to a raid lockout, but potentially more immersive. The general idea would be: The more time you spend in that specific climate, the more susceptible you become to the creatures that inhabit it. Here’s a potential implementation:
Corruption Environment
The idea here is that the more time you spend surrounded by corruption, the more likely you are to succumb to its’ effects. If your guild was raiding a Lich’s tomb, you’d slowly see your ‘corruption susceptibility’ rise within the tomb’s natural environment. Killing enemies, particularly raid bosses, could result in large jumps in your corruption susceptibility. Eventually, if the raid force hung out long enough in the area, they would become too weak versus its’ effects to continue killing there and would be forced to leave until their corruption susceptibility lowered to acceptable levels again. Here, depending on mob respawn timers, you can get a very similar effect to a lockout. A guild wouldn’t be able to monopolize all the mobs in a zone, though the fastest to organize would still have the first pick of what they took down. But since no guild would be capable of doing a full clear in a competitive environment, everyone would be forced to switch priorities from time to time if they wanted to see items off of all the different loot tables.
I have a few other ideas that I’ll post when I have time to write them up, but I thought I’d get the ball rolling on discussion.
Basically you want game mechanics to fix what you are personally incapable of achieving yourself either through lack of will, laziness or other circumstances, that being having enough friends around to beat someone else to the content that you want to experience. But because you can't get what you want right when you want it, you want the game to punish those who can consistently get enough people together to take on content when it is first available.
You want access to content? Make friends..lots of friends...friends everywhere. Be really likeable, be really damn good at your class, make a name for yourself so that when opportunities arise (and they do) to join guilds to go and experience that content they will remember your name.
If you can't do that, then just relax and know that eventually those ahead of you will move on and you'll then get to monopolize the content to your hearts content while those people who are worse than you complain about how you're hogging all the content.
Actually Vandraad i like this idea, and it isn't a bad one maybe not of most of the raid content. but for a few raid encounters i could see this being interesting and fun, and make it to where like once you kill a target protecting his master. and on his dying words he cuases a curse on the land from where you stand all the way to his master, and it a time trial after this and you have to beat the clock to kill his master or be lost to the corruption and he kills everyone, obv you can rez and everything but dragging corpses back to a safe spot and everything, but it adds a mechanic to a target that adds another challenge, hence it isn't something your suppose to actually like that would beat the point of it being a challenge.
Just as Kilsin pointed out in the other raid thread, there are two different issues being inappropriately mashed here: 1) Vandraad's concerns of entitlement and 2) Elrandir's solutions to player derived content blocking. For the entitlement discussion (1), I think the other thread I linked is much further developed with some great posts and discussion exploring equality vs. equity. To avoid derailing and to keep this thread distinct from the other, we should probably just address (2).
Here are a couple suggestions off the top of my head:
Mana Climate Depletion:
Let the mana climate within a raid have a finite quantity. Assuming that the higher level spells, those necessary to raid succesfully, will require various combinations of colored mana, we could allow the climate to be depleted such that eventually players would start losing access to their more potent spells. As a consequence, they will forced to either rely on mana stored in relics (limited quantity as well) or back out and wait for the climate to recharge.
Adaptive Resistance:
Lets allow the raid bosses to gain specific resistances after each raid encounter. If the wizard brigade use primarily fire spells, the next time the raid boss spawns he gets a temporary boost to fire immunity. This way, if a guild wanted to continue camping a raid boss, they would have to employ a strategy which cycles through spell types/weapon types to continue to be effective. Eventually, they would run out of viable combinations and would have to escape to let the acquired resistances normalize again.
chenzeme said:(2) I would like to see a mechanism in place that restricts the guilds and characters from farming PHs at the expense of "lesser" raid guilds.
I love the idea of open world raids. I hate the idea of players assuming a part of the game belongs to them.
Do you not see how your own example puts forth the assumption that you deserve access to content when you want it, thus it should belong to you when you want it to? You're being hypocritical. If you want access to content, get the number of people necessary and get there first. You do that and content is yours. Oh, but Vandraad, what if a guild leapfrogs us? Yeah, it can happen so you prepare for it next time. Learn what those top guilds are doing to get to that content and apply the same methods to your approach. Stop trying to make the game give you what you are clearly cannot earn yourself without the game holding your hand.
Vandraad said:Do you not see how your own example puts forth the assumption that you deserve access to content when you want it, thus it should belong to you when you want it to? You're being hypocritical. If you want access to content, get the number of people necessary and get there first. You do that and content is yours. Oh, but Vandraad, what if a guild leapfrogs us? Yeah, it can happen so you prepare for it next time. Learn what those top guilds are doing to get to that content and apply the same methods to your approach. Stop trying to make the game give you what you are clearly cannot earn yourself without the game holding your hand.
Everything you're saying seems to presuppose that a race to spawns is not only a good form of competition, but that it's the only one we should consider. Taking away the race does NOT mean taking away the challenge. We know from the devs comments that they're planning on using lockouts, since they believe that worked well in VG. What Elrandir suggested in the original post is a mechanism for making lockouts more immersive, dynamic, and creative than a simple timer. How can it be bad to suggest improvements to a system that will likely be put in place?
You can play chess and you can play chess with a timer. They're both fun games and work on the same general rules, but one requires speed. Both styles are accepted by the majority as challenging pastimes, but there are surely purists entrenched on either side.
We are talking about ways to make a no-race mmo (untimed chess) more fun, but you are being a purist and saying that no holds barred race-mmos (timed chess) is the only way to go. If you would like to, then please join us in a constructive discussion of how we can branch away from the race and maintain a challenge for guilds (we're not arguing for everyone to win).
If that top guild is sitting on that particular content for months to a year...how does one access Vandraad? One can't. You "might' wangle an invite, but there's no guarantee the items needed will drop or that someone from that top guild won't ninja the drop when it happens. The "entitlement" also happens on the other side of the fence. Content blocking...seen it happen, experienced it. So "entitlement" works both ways. Let's allow at least some chance of others accessing that content EVEN IF THEY FAIL...rather than the top guild acting like a brooding hen, and disallowing anyone but themselves on that content...that's what we've been talking about here..and that's what you don't seem to be understanding.
Another avenue would be to incentivize guild/guild cooperation. If a powerful guild is sitting comfortably at a particular raid encounter and a new guild wants in, there should be some mechanism which rewards or benefits the top guild after they cooperatively concede their position. If this mechanism were inticing enough, there might not need to be artificial or organic timelocking. Also, the benefit should scale with the occupation time of the raid so that the longer a powerful guild sits at the raid, eventually the benefit of conceding that position outweighs the cost of maintaining their raid. There could be a number of ways to do this but here a couple of ideas.
Faction Boosts/Diplomatic Status:
When a guild successfully agrees on the terms of concession, the conceding guild could be rewarded with a large boost of a difficult to aquire faction. Let's say that there is a God's realm that is inaccessible unless a high level of a faction for a collection of players is obtained. This faction could only be raised by conceding a raid encounter to another guild. If the guild members wants access to new content or quest lines they would be rewarded as such. I know this suggestion fails ad infinitum (there is a limited amount of content), but I'll throw it down as an idea generator.
Cooperativity as a Metric of Shard Progression:
What if the game doesn't just reward guild's members who are able to successfully complete the hardest raids? What if the game at its core rewarded a higher level of cooperativity? Each time a guild concedes their position diplomatically with another guild, let the server record that event. Eventually, a more refined formula which calculates the overall cooperativity of the inhabitants of Terminus could surpass a threshold and the shard could trigger a new world event or even expansion. Cooperativity could be the metric of shard progression to avoid the inevitable rich-gets-richer phenomenon.
CanadinaXegony said:I dunno...on Xegony back in the day large guilds sat on epic weapon content (all the spawns that required a raid) for literally months on end. So the rest of us are supposed to wait til their Lordships become bored and move on...or til the next expac looms on the horizon? When did their money become more valuable than our money? :) We all pay to gain entrance to this game..I think the idea of putting some limits on how long and often a guild or raiding team can raid that one particular spot..should even things out for the rest of the server. Sitting on content for months and months..IS hogging content. Plain and simple. :)
The large guilds on Xegony sat on Ragefire for YEARS. I spent 2 years of being blocked from Ragefire by them. I eventually decided that being blocked was no fun and I wasn't going to give any more subscription dollars to Sony. There is no logical reason one group of people should be able to block someone from content. It may be "competition" to them but it's frustrating to the blocked person and will eventually cost subscription dollars.
Vandraad said:chenzeme said:(2) I would like to see a mechanism in place that restricts the guilds and characters from farming PHs at the expense of "lesser" raid guilds.
I love the idea of open world raids. I hate the idea of players assuming a part of the game belongs to them.
Do you not see how your own example puts forth the assumption that you deserve access to content when you want it, thus it should belong to you when you want it to? You're being hypocritical. If you want access to content, get the number of people necessary and get there first. You do that and content is yours. Oh, but Vandraad, what if a guild leapfrogs us? Yeah, it can happen so you prepare for it next time. Learn what those top guilds are doing to get to that content and apply the same methods to your approach. Stop trying to make the game give you what you are clearly cannot earn yourself without the game holding your hand.
We don't deserve the right to have a raid encounter but we also don't deserve to be told not to simply because a few guilds decides it's not to be, that's why we think of situations or conditions to prevent this from happening. Granted some might not be liked, and some will. Like i said above i liked what some people said aboutt he whole corruption thing not because i like the mechanic in itself but becuase it another way of making a few raids difficult in knowing that not only will the fight be tuff, but to know that i only have a matter of time to do it, which means making hasty resting points and faster pulls to clear to the raid encounter and hope you have enough time to kill him, and also have enough time to rest before you can even attempt it. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just going to be a pain to do it, which is the whole point of it being a raid to begin with.
The way i see it from reading the multiple threads is 3 options.
This relates to end game content for an example.
1. all raid content fully contested and hope that 1-5 guilds per server dont lock everything down so no one else has a chance.
2. make all raid content Instanced zone in kill raid mob get a timer come back in 3 days rinse repeat.
3. best of both worlds all content is contested once you kill a raid mob you get a Mob dead effect that if you engage said mob all stats lowered by 75% lasts 3 days if you wipe to said mob you get a can not re-engage for 15 mins means another guild can take a shot at mob while you wait. along with this a select few fully contested mobs people can fight/have fun/glote and try to beat the top guilds.
i have been on both ends of fully contested raids locking down all raid mobs and it creates multiple issues.
Fully Contested
1. angry/jealus people sending not so polite PMs along with trains of mobs and so on.
2. some decent people just give up completely and quit the game as if they cant raid they go find another game they can.
3. people getting banned/suspended when they loose out to a mob and go of the rails.
4. the amount of petitions the CS teams recieve from people that loose out.
5. full interaction with people new friends and such.
Instanced
1. raid guilds can still compete via what they have killed and how fast they killed it IE tracked via VR or 3rd party site with a list of what and when.
2. no worries of people rushing in and stealing/training/and angry PMs from people that are watching.
3. lockout timers forcing you not to raid due to clearing all content too fast.
4. less CS petitions due to less aggro from other guilds.
5. no interaction with other guilds as your in the zone with just your guild.
Best of Both
1. you can compete/race for the contested mobs and lock them down if you want to.
2. if you dont feel like competeing with other guilds go do a contested with an effect on death might mean waiting an hour or 2 before you can attempt it but means you can atempt it atleast.
3. be extra hardcore and try take down a raid mob with the 75% mob debuff.
4. CS will get some petitions but not as many as fully contested.
5. can interact with people waiting/competing against you make new friends.
i see Best of both as the best option for all you get abit of everything.
Dullahan said:Pantheon raid accessibility options: try harder.
A little ironic, coming from someone who doesn't want to see the bar on skill getting raised too high:
Dullahan said:by raising the bar too high on player skill, you actually alienate a comparable portion of your playerbase
That said, I actually agree with the bulk of what you've posted:
Dullahan said:Those who play the most should be rewarded for doing so or the incentive they have to continue playing is destroyed.
I agree 100%.
Raidan posted:
Raidan said:Time may not always equate to skill, but it does equate to investment. And if more time invested doesn't equal more rewards, then everyone will be max level, with the best gear, bored and will be complaining about a lack of content.
Which is true, to a degree, but oversimplified. The implication here is that rewards (R) should come in some proportion (C) to investment (or time investment, t):
R = C x t
However, Risk(r) is also a factor. I think most would agree that someone who spends most of their time soloing lower level content should not be presented with the same rewards as someone who groups together to take on tougher enemies. So throwing that in, we have:
R = C x t x r
The problem with this is that there's still a missing factor, opportunity (O):
R = C x t x r x O
The oportunity factor is a lot more complex that the other factors here. As an example, West Coast guilds tended to lag behind East Coast guilds. Why? They may have spent the same amount of time on-line (t), and the same amount of time raiding (r), but East Coast guilds were starting their raids at a time after a lull in server activity (more time for bosses to have spawned) whereas West Coasters were often left with what was still up, or what just happened to spawn in that small window. So they were presented with a different value of (O). Likewise, if a guild self-selects for players who are capable of raiding at any given hour (the infamous "bat-call"), then they don't actually have to devote any more time than other players, they just have to sign on and kill a raid boss when it's up, and then they're free to go back about their business. They can choose to play at times of maximum opportunity, but aren't really required to make any larger overall time investment than anyone else. This is the biggest flaw with raid bosses on long respawn timers. The (O) factor is actually a complex function that takes into acount a partitioning of server-activity and other influences, and doesn't stay the same at all times throughout the day. It introduces biases that some people may be able to account for, but the vast majority of players likely cannot. It's also a flaw that's not easily fixed; randomizing raid spawns, for instance, actually only has a marginal impact on it.
All this said, I'm actually no fan of instancing. I dislike lockouts in an open world environment only slightly less. The point of this thread was only to try to come up with other mechanics that might be more palatable than those, if (and this is a big if--we won't know if any mechanics are needed at all for a long time most likely) at some point people find that they're presented with no opportunities for advancement because of a lack of content availability.
With that in mind, can we leave this thread as a place to deposit ideas and leave the discussion of fears in one of the already existing threads for raids:
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/2943/my-only-raid-concern
Porky said:The way i see it from reading the multiple threads is 3 options.
This relates to end game content for an example.
1. all raid content fully contested and hope that 1-5 guilds per server dont lock everything down so no one else has a chance.
2. make all raid content Instanced zone in kill raid mob get a timer come back in 3 days rinse repeat.
3. best of both worlds all content is contested once you kill a raid mob you get a Mob dead effect that if you engage said mob all stats lowered by 75% lasts 3 days if you wipe to said mob you get a can not re-engage for 15 mins means another guild can take a shot at mob while you wait. along with this a select few fully contested mobs people can fight/have fun/glote and try to beat the top guilds.
i have been on both ends of fully contested raids locking down all raid mobs and it creates multiple issues.
Fully Contested
1. angry/jealus people sending not so polite PMs along with trains of mobs and so on.
2. some decent people just give up completely and quit the game as if they cant raid they go find another game they can.
3. people getting banned/suspended when they loose out to a mob and go of the rails.
4. the amount of petitions the CS teams recieve from people that loose out.
5. full interaction with people new friends and such.
Instanced
1. raid guilds can still compete via what they have killed and how fast they killed it IE tracked via VR or 3rd party site with a list of what and when.
2. no worries of people rushing in and stealing/training/and angry PMs from people that are watching.
3. lockout timers forcing you not to raid due to clearing all content too fast.
4. less CS petitions due to less aggro from other guilds.
5. no interaction with other guilds as your in the zone with just your guild.
Best of Both
1. you can compete/race for the contested mobs and lock them down if you want to.
2. if you dont feel like competeing with other guilds go do a contested with an effect on death might mean waiting an hour or 2 before you can attempt it but means you can atempt it atleast.
3. be extra hardcore and try take down a raid mob with the 75% mob debuff.
4. CS will get some petitions but not as many as fully contested.
5. can interact with people waiting/competing against you make new friends.
i see Best of both as the best option for all you get abit of everything.
Most of this formula is alrdy taken care of if VR goes to their mechanic of raid target spawns they did in VG. It might not be the best way in peoples eyes, but I'm just glad they have came out with something for as long as it works. Now for Accessibility, I'd say I hope it different for a lot of the Raid Targets, rather it be A quest for some, an Item, hidden passage way, Kill a guardian that spawns him, i don't mind how it is for as long it's not all the same for all of them. I mean you can go to like the 3rd easiest zone in your beginning area and run into one (Yikes). There is too many possibilities of how to find/trigger Raids Mobs. Hopefully there's something like a Quest where your in a zone that full of undead and you see a tortured soul and your prespective skill triggers a response and you find a note on the ground. and this note explains what has happened before his end and tells you who he wrote it to. You go find this preson which so happens to be taken Captive by a Dreadlord or so it seems and once you Kill the Dreadlord you give the note to the lady you realize you've becomed tricked and Spawn a Necromancer that you have to kill. granted this probably really be used as a raid component now thinking of it cuase people would probably try to spawn him multiple times and such or somethign but i could see this being used as at least as a groupable event.