Dhampir said:Easy solution without instances.
Option #1.
Guild 1 Defeats a boss. The boss respawns 30 minutes to several hours later in a holographic state to anyone who has beaten him in the past week. Holographic state means they can't be aggroed or hit by anyone who has previously beat him in the last week.
Option #2.
Guild 1 defeats a boss. The boss respawns 30 minutes to several hours later. If anyone from Guild 1 touches the boss, they are instantly teleported to the zones entrance. (A la Nagafen)
Option #3.
Guild 1 defeats a boss. The boss respawns 30 minutes to several hours later, but is invisible to anyone who previously killed him in the last week.
It isn't really hard to come up with solutions.
Option 3 is what I mentioned up above. I think it would tone down the in-game experience of an obvious "lock out" because you would simply not know it is there.
Dhampir said:Option #3.
Guild 1 defeats a boss. The boss respawns 30 minutes to several hours later, but is invisible to anyone who previously killed him in the last week.
I can't wait to see someone's timer run out right when they were running past a boss they couldn't see :)
In all seriousness though, I prefer solutions like these:
Gnog said:1. Prevent ShowEQ functionality and implement other mechanics that make it hard to determine whether a raid target is up. Make raid bosses see through invisible and FD. Make raid bosses untrackable or trackable only within a small radius.
2. Limit call of the hero, dramatically. Prohibit it in certain areas. Or dramatically increase the cool down on call of the hero. If a guild can't coth quickly in large numbers, it can't batphone nearly as effectively.
3. Protect most raid targets better, with quickly re spawning guardians. It's hard to steal a raid kill when you need to clear fast spawning guardians to get there. If another guild gets a head start, there's no point to batphoning.
4. Random respawn locations and timers. Simultaneous spawns of multiple similarly difficult raid encounters. A guild can't be everywhere at once.
5. For most raid encounters (excepting a few truly open world targets a la gorenaire), require a long trash clear (with fast respawns). If it takes, say, two hours to clear to a raid encounter (and only limited coths are available) then a guild takes itself out of the open world competition for other targets whenever it commits to one.
6. Make it harder to grief on raid content. Guardians that see through invis, see through FD, and summon at 100% health would go a long way to preventing griefing of another guild that's progressing toward a target.
I'm sure there are other ways to make open world raiding competitive but not monopolized, without resorting to lockouts.
I believe they offer the best resolution, and I'm sure other could be come up with as well.
I think another idea would be to increase their spawn rate altogether. It's a pretty bad sting when you watch a once per week raid boss get killed in front of you without ever having a chance to engage. I think a 2.5-3x per week spawn rate would be both more rewarding and less penalizing. Another idea, rather than having the spawn timers completely random ... allow guilds to have a better idea of when they will spawn. FFXI did this. When Behemoth was ready to spawn, you would see 5-6 guilds in the area spamming their abilities to tag it. It wasn't 100% predictable, rather, it could spawn in 30 minute increments over a 4 hour span. If it was defeated at exactly noon, it could spawn at noon, 12:30, 1:00, 1:30, 2:00, etc X amount of days later. This would allow guilds to make a concentrated effort to be at the right place at the right time. There would be no need for batphones. If you know when it's going to spawn, you can plan ahead to be there or opt out because of raid availability. I remember doing plenty of 3 AM batphone raids ... and we won almost all of them. I felt horrible for the competing guilds who had 15 members log on which just wasn't enough to get the job done. They always tried their best to put a force together but couldn't muster quite enough people because of the timing. If a guild knows that something is going to spawn at 3 AM, they can gauge their raid availability a day or 2 in advance. Rather than waking up 15 people for no reason, they would know ahead of time that they wouldn't be able to pull it off and give their members a better quality of life outside of the game by enjoying their sleep.
We actually have several topics that already discuss all of these things, you can find them by using the search function prior to creating a new thread, that way it saves duplicate posts and helps consolidate the information to make it easier for me to find, gather and pass on to the dev team, for that reason I will need to close this.
Please use the search function prior to creating a new thread, just typing in a few keywords will usually result in multiple hits on the topic and save forum bloat.
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/1759/pre-level-cap-raiding
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/2086/the-point-to-raiding
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/2905/non-linear-raiding-is-crucial
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/5098/end-game-discussion-raiding-and-alternatives
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/5098/end-game-discussion-raiding-and-alternatives
Also, you will find a lot of you questions answered in our FAQ, Stream, podcasts, interviews etc.
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/game/faqs/