I just read, in its entirety, the massive thread on instancing vs non-instancing.
The part that got me thinking the most was discussion about how guilds would effectively "lock down" raid bosses, keeping others from advancing.
I put on my "outside the box" thinking cap again, and came up with an idea.
To me it seems the principal issue here is incentive.
Everyone knows the incentive to hurry and kill a boss.
Phat lewts and all that jazz.
This leads to what was described above. That and the calls for instancing, which at least half (probably more) of the potential player base hates, and VR has done everything but pinky-swearing that it will not be a major part of PROTF.
Has anyone thought of incentivizing NOT KILLING the raid boss?
Here's what I mean.
If the boss, when it spawns, has 3 pieces of loot on it, but every 2 hours, gains another item, it will continue to do so up to some pre-determined max. Then guilds may want to delay their attack. This would give other guilds a chance to move in, and the guild who just plain wants/needs it more, will settle for less loot.
This is a "free market" sort of approach to raid bosses. It rewards being fast to the punch, but also careful consideration and forethought.
In similar fashion, the loot tables can be designed so that if more than 24, 36, 72, etc. people engage it, then certain items simply do not drop. This is sort of a built-in "mythic" approach, which is totally transparent.
And it also makes sense for flagging-type situations, that if you can burn a 36-member raid level mob down with 72+ solid players, then your guild has made that encounter essentially trivial, and flagging should be easy. But, you still won't be gearing those alts up with the "mythic" level gear drops.
The only flaw (as I see it HAHA, I'm sure others will find some of their own) is in how to determine how many people are engaging it. If a 24-man raid is fighting it because they want the best loot, what would stop a griefer from a competing guild running in and shooting it with an arrow to spoil their results. In this case, maybe a lock-out for the fight is warranted, but at least it prevents instancing.
Thoughts?
I recon there is definitely good theory behind it! Dunno if it would stop a guild who's intention it is to lock down though.. You would at best end up with a bit of a gun slinger standoff the first time though, as soon as another guild enters who would be able to let the opportunity pass them to wait to engage. Which i know is the point in a way but it seems like it would end up being that the first time it is stolen by another guild would also be the last time you would ever wait and the mechanic would be forever ignored. Definite merit to it though man and it is a great way to start thinking about the issue from outside the box like you said!
Regarding too many players for the mob, i think they said they would be coming up with some creative ways to deal with this, like mobs summoning adds to deal with raiding parties of too greater numbers or just mobs retreating out of the zone if they were stupendously overwhelmed to try and stop people from trying content like that the second time around.
But with that said changing the loot table depending on the raid size is also a pretty good idea to discourage that, with the issue you pointed out in mind.
I'd rather kill a raid boss asap to deprive other guilds of access than wait and potentially lose it to another guild. I even bet that in the long term you'd secure more loot due to not losing the mob to another guild. I'm pretty sure any raid leader would agree.
Also, decreasing loot quality with more players just means that no one will be silly enough to engage it with a larger force.
I personally don't think mechanics like these are worth pursuing because of how easily circumvented they are. To me, locking encounters to a raid and having a hard coded maximum raid size is more than enough. The cool part about hard coded maximum raid sizes too is that you don't have to worry about artificially rewarding people with low numbers. Instead, a clear benefit is already provided by having less potential players competing against you for a given item that drops.
There have been studies done into money/wages and generally people are happier if they have more wealth in comparison to their peers, rather than just straight up more wealth. I highly doubt any guild would let someone else get a kill even if it means they only get 1/10th of the loot. It's still better than risking zero.
This is a general statement, due to this topic being drawn out across multiple threads.
Main Thread: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/1348/instanced-versus-non-instanced-areas/view/post_id/39665
I am going to close this because a lot of the boss fights and loot was discussed in that thread (and others) as it pertained directly to instancing, so I cannot see this thread bringing anything more to the - already exhausted - discussion, there is no need to break off into micro discussions about what is essentially the same thing in different forms, the instance v non-instance thread covered a lot of this and this idea could have been posted in that thread.
This is really something we need to wait and test so you can experience it first hand with developers present, it is not ideal to recreate other games' problems for Pantheon when they don't actually exist in Pantheon yet, and this goes for a number of topics lately, as not everything can be easily related to Pantheon from other games, so by discussing mechanics and problems in other games, without actually being able to directly experience them in Pantheon and not knowing what we have planned for them, you are essentially creating non-existent problems just to argue over opinions of your experience in other games, and I am sure you can all see the problem that it creates.
I appreciate some of the posts trying to give mostly well thought out feedback and ideas but we need to be careful not to jump the gun and get ahead of ourselves when the instancing topic has been addressed multiple times and raiding hasn't had a lot of work put into it yet, as we are concentrating on the level 1-50 game while we get it ready for our first testing phase, pre-alpha, raiding will come much later and as we have already stated, won't be a dominant part of our game.
If you have any questions, feel free to PM me but I would appreciate this topic remaining in one place (link above) as it has already hit 13 pages and covered most of the potential pros/cons.