4/ the one drop you need which will double your dps/healing and somone else rolls on it because it will impove there dps by 0.01 dps
5/getting kicked from a raid group because your dps is too low(because of above)
6/belonging to guilds who helped tanks and healers get there starting equipment only for them to leave for bigger guilds
oh how much i love doing raids
Back in wow when there was 40 man raids, there really was no dps counter. It was just knowing the fights and being with a guild. I don't think there was pugs of 40 mans ever, it was always a guild thing.
That would be nice, but WOW actually did have DPS counter add-ons quite early on in the raiding game, back in Molten Core. And if you were a DPS class, you did watch it closely. At least this was true for most raiding guilds I saw back then.
For what zimboy69 said, all of that did happen, but to me the fun parts far outweighed the annoying parts. Back in vanilla you had ZG which was 20-men, and even that felt too small-scale to me, though some encounters were arguably better.
What I'm thinking with WildStar is, as long as raiding is not "the" endgame, as long as there are other viable options with good fun and good rewards, great! Let's have big raids as well! But if raiding becomes the main form of endgame for all, that's going to turn off a lot of players as it did in vanilla WOW.
I suppose with 17 ex-Blizzard employees on their team, it shouldn't be shocking that the game will have them.
In a recent interview with Curse, they asked Mike Donatelli (Wildstar Content Director) if they would include 40-man raids.
His answer, "Love em or hate them ... we love them and YES we have every intention of putting them in our game".
Is the return of 40 man raids a good thing or not?
I think, personally, that it helps guilds. It seems as raids have gotten smaller and smaller, guild have had an increasingly difficut time sticking together. I ran a 40 man guild and wouldn't mind seeing it comeback.
It depends on their definition of raiding. If you're talking about the 40 man cluster f*cks that I left behind in WoW then no. If you're talking about a raid of 40 split into squads of 10 storming like say a castle where the squads are tasked with bringing down their own mini boss in a wing of said castle to unlock a room for the final boss and then converging onto that final boss for the final showdown then that could be interesting. Especially if you make it dependent on how many players actually join the raid.
For instance 10 people enter the castle, then only the final boss and 1 mini boss generate. Twenty people enter, then the final boss and two mini bosses generate. The more people that enter the caslte then the more mini bosses that generate up to a max of four. And depending on the amount of players that actually finish the final battle it would move the raid to different loot tables.
Finish the final fight with 10-19 players in the raid and you get loot based off table D, finish with 20-29 move to table C, 30-39 table B and 40 table A. And like SWTOR everyone gets their own loot cache. Whether that's gear for their actual class, materials or tokens.
This way big guilds could continue to do their thing but it also gives smaller guilds and soloers a chance to experience raids. You know, actually promote socializing rather than elitism. You could have two guilds with 20 players each. Or 30 guildmates + a small 10 man guild. And you would see people inviting players from their friend's list or recruits since the final boss fight's difficulty would be adjusted for 10 people anyway. Only the loot table changes with the amount of raiders involved, thus making every person equally vital.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
being an old scholl mmo'er i was disgusted by what could pass for being a raid theese days,,, one team encounter? its a raid!! say the new school devs,,,
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I would not mind seeing 40 man or more size raiding back, so long as it is more like a pure end-game feature, such as that they are rare to be released, with alot of time actually needed to be spent in them to complete them (also meeaning that you have a much longer reset timer to make it much easier to complete it such as a one month reset). While using smaller scaled content as the primary play content that fills your time between resets of the content. Also though i prefer the idea of making play slower atleast in leveling, content compeletion, as the longer it takes for us as players to comeplete said content the longer the devs have for creasting, as well as fine tuning the newer content to come as well as deal with other issues. I honestly have always felt that the new pace that game s push out content, and how they seem to even make te content much easier, leads to this fact of content being chewed thru at a lightning pace, and so making the devs actually push out content that could have used more testing. Also the longer you have between content releases the more content can be made in ways too.
I hated 40 man raiding in WoW. It took forever to get everyone ready, to the dungeon, buffed up, directions told, then get moving for the few scraps of loot you'd get to try and roll on. Doing those raids over and over to get your full suits only to have them replaced soon after you finally got them all sucked.
I did raiding all throughout WoW, for me it was boring, and annoying. I'm glad they'll have them in WildStar for those that may want to do them, but more and more the game is looking like it's not the game for me to buy. Too bad, housing actually looked pretty neat.
It will be interesting to see if they found a new way to approach the 40-man raid or if they are just going to repeat mistakes of the past. After all, there's reasons why raids have gone from 40 to 25 to 10 to 4-6.
The only reason they went away in WoW was greed. The game was wildy popular in vanilla, but they were able to add to their already staggering sub numbers by allowing more people to expierence raids. They carebeared their to hell for money, not because the 40 man raid didn't work.
No, the reason they went away was because people weren't doing them. They went away because people who wanted to do them couldn't get into them due to what was required to get 40 people at the same place at the same time on the same server. The rare drops, DKP and elitist pricks in raiding guilds didn't help either.
So, if a dev makes their content more accessible to the people that want to play it, that's greed? Between the 'greed' and and the 'carebeared to hell for money' thing, it's obvious you're passionate about your beliefs here, so I won't waste much time explaining this.
It may have possibly worked for MMO gamers in 2000. It didn't work for most MMO gamers in 2003. It certainly didn't work for most MMO gamers in 2007, and it definitely won't work for most MMO gamers in 2012 unless they take a new approach to it. Better dungeonfinder, cross-server teaming, NPCs to fill empty slots, distributed drops, guaranteed rewards... there's a lot of ways to fix it, but the old system was not only broken, but does not fit the way most people play MMOs these days.
That's why not just WOW but almost every MMO has reduced the number of players necessary for raids over the past ten years.
Now that you say that, I think you are right. WoW wasn't popular at all in Vanilla. Hell, they were barely hanging on....
Dude, they had millions of subscribers when basically the ONLY thing to do endgame was raid or try for High Warlord. Both of those things were very time consuming.
I will be the first to admit that I was an "elitist prick," but hell if I didn't deserve to be. I played the game a lot, and I played it well. There was an art to being effective in a raid back then. It took 40 people working together flawlessly to kill C'thun, and the feeling of accomplishment at seeing him die is unmatched in gaming for me. I ran around in full T3, and was the only hunter on my server to do so.
With that being said, I had no problem recruiting hunters who had skill and desire, but not gear. I would take them to Ony or something, and see if they were worth my time. Almos all officers/class leaders I spoke to in my guild and others felt the same way. That meant that anyone with a drive to raid, COULD.
There is this great illusion that only a select few could raid back then. I found that most people that didn't raid, chose not to. There were very few that applied to all raiding guilds and were consistantly denied. Those few were truly talentless, or complete asshats. In either case, why should a game shift so drastically to accomodate the unskilled masses? It is obvious; money.
They dumb down the raids, start handing out wellfare epics, remove the pvp grind and all of the sudden they get another couple million 12 year olds and soccer moms to start playing. Large scale raids work just fine if you are not tryinfg to be a wow killer. It will absoultely alienate a section of the population that wants everythng easy mode. They are the gamers that always say " I play games to have fun, not wipe for 4 hours." That is code for "I suck dunkey nuts, and I want to be carried to my epics."
Its simple. Make 40 man raids difficult and rewarding, and make 5-10 man dungeons simple and less rewarding. It makes sense that the more work you put in, the more rewards you get out.
Backlash incoming. Remember how they wanted to do anything but WoW? and before the inevitable "wow copied it from eq!", EQ didn't have 40/25/20/15/10 mans...it was open world and open structured.
just another example though. pick on whoever you want on this site, but big talk is almost always just that, and does not hold up for long.
It will be interesting to see if they found a new way to approach the 40-man raid or if they are just going to repeat mistakes of the past. After all, there's reasons why raids have gone from 40 to 25 to 10 to 4-6.
The only reason they went away in WoW was greed. The game was wildy popular in vanilla, but they were able to add to their already staggering sub numbers by allowing more people to expierence raids. They carebeared their to hell for money, not because the 40 man raid didn't work.
No, the reason they went away was because people weren't doing them. They went away because people who wanted to do them couldn't get into them due to what was required to get 40 people at the same place at the same time on the same server. The rare drops, DKP and elitist pricks in raiding guilds didn't help either.
So, if a dev makes their content more accessible to the people that want to play it, that's greed? Between the 'greed' and and the 'carebeared to hell for money' thing, it's obvious you're passionate about your beliefs here, so I won't waste much time explaining this.
It may have possibly worked for MMO gamers in 2000. It didn't work for most MMO gamers in 2003. It certainly didn't work for most MMO gamers in 2007, and it definitely won't work for most MMO gamers in 2012 unless they take a new approach to it. Better dungeonfinder, cross-server teaming, NPCs to fill empty slots, distributed drops, guaranteed rewards... there's a lot of ways to fix it, but the old system was not only broken, but does not fit the way most people play MMOs these days.
That's why not just WOW but almost every MMO has reduced the number of players necessary for raids over the past ten years.
Now that you say that, I think you are right. WoW wasn't popular at all in Vanilla. Hell, they were barely hanging on....
Dude, they had millions of subscribers when basically the ONLY thing to do endgame was raid or try for High Warlord. Both of those things were very time consuming.
I will be the first to admit that I was an "elitist prick," but hell if I didn't deserve to be. I played the game a lot, and I played it well. There was an art to being effective in a raid back then. It took 40 people working together flawlessly to kill C'thun, and the feeling of accomplishment at seeing him die is unmatched in gaming for me. I ran around in full T3, and was the only hunter on my server to do so.
With that being said, I had no problem recruiting hunters who had skill and desire, but not gear. I would take them to Ony or something, and see if they were worth my time. Almos all officers/class leaders I spoke to in my guild and others felt the same way. That meant that anyone with a drive to raid, COULD.
There is this great illusion that only a select few could raid back then. I found that most people that didn't raid, chose not to. There were very few that applied to all raiding guilds and were consistantly denied. Those few were truly talentless, or complete asshats. In either case, why should a game shift so drastically to accomodate the unskilled masses? It is obvious; money.
They dumb down the raids, start handing out wellfare epics, remove the pvp grind and all of the sudden they get another couple million 12 year olds and soccer moms to start playing. Large scale raids work just fine if you are not tryinfg to be a wow killer. It will absoultely alienate a section of the population that wants everythng easy mode. They are the gamers that always say " I play games to have fun, not wipe for 4 hours." That is code for "I suck dunkey nuts, and I want to be carried to my epics."
Its simple. Make 40 man raids difficult and rewarding, and make 5-10 man dungeons simple and less rewarding. It makes sense that the more work you put in, the more rewards you get out.
You're seeing what you want to see and not reading what's there. Either that or I've slighted your beloved game/gameplay and you're too affected to discuss this rationally. Your unrelated rant about welfare epics and your claim that the low raid participation is 'an illusion' are testament to that.
Nowhere did I say WOW wasn't doing well or didn't do well. People simply weren't doing raids, though. Only a small percentage of the playerbase had even seen raid content, which is why in TBC they introduced 25 and 10-man raids. Even then, they saw much higher participation in 10-man than in 25-man, which is why they have been constantly adjusting requirments and rewards for both ever since.
40-man raids went away because people simply weren't doing them.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
It will be interesting to see if they found a new way to approach the 40-man raid or if they are just going to repeat mistakes of the past. After all, there's reasons why raids have gone from 40 to 25 to 10 to 4-6.
The only reason they went away in WoW was greed. The game was wildy popular in vanilla, but they were able to add to their already staggering sub numbers by allowing more people to expierence raids. They carebeared their to hell for money, not because the 40 man raid didn't work.
No, the reason they went away was because people weren't doing them. They went away because people who wanted to do them couldn't get into them due to what was required to get 40 people at the same place at the same time on the same server. The rare drops, DKP and elitist pricks in raiding guilds didn't help either.
So, if a dev makes their content more accessible to the people that want to play it, that's greed? Between the 'greed' and and the 'carebeared to hell for money' thing, it's obvious you're passionate about your beliefs here, so I won't waste much time explaining this.
It may have possibly worked for MMO gamers in 2000. It didn't work for most MMO gamers in 2003. It certainly didn't work for most MMO gamers in 2007, and it definitely won't work for most MMO gamers in 2012 unless they take a new approach to it. Better dungeonfinder, cross-server teaming, NPCs to fill empty slots, distributed drops, guaranteed rewards... there's a lot of ways to fix it, but the old system was not only broken, but does not fit the way most people play MMOs these days.
That's why not just WOW but almost every MMO has reduced the number of players necessary for raids over the past ten years.
Now that you say that, I think you are right. WoW wasn't popular at all in Vanilla. Hell, they were barely hanging on....
Dude, they had millions of subscribers when basically the ONLY thing to do endgame was raid or try for High Warlord. Both of those things were very time consuming.
I will be the first to admit that I was an "elitist prick," but hell if I didn't deserve to be. I played the game a lot, and I played it well. There was an art to being effective in a raid back then. It took 40 people working together flawlessly to kill C'thun, and the feeling of accomplishment at seeing him die is unmatched in gaming for me. I ran around in full T3, and was the only hunter on my server to do so.
With that being said, I had no problem recruiting hunters who had skill and desire, but not gear. I would take them to Ony or something, and see if they were worth my time. Almos all officers/class leaders I spoke to in my guild and others felt the same way. That meant that anyone with a drive to raid, COULD.
There is this great illusion that only a select few could raid back then. I found that most people that didn't raid, chose not to. There were very few that applied to all raiding guilds and were consistantly denied. Those few were truly talentless, or complete asshats. In either case, why should a game shift so drastically to accomodate the unskilled masses? It is obvious; money.
They dumb down the raids, start handing out wellfare epics, remove the pvp grind and all of the sudden they get another couple million 12 year olds and soccer moms to start playing. Large scale raids work just fine if you are not tryinfg to be a wow killer. It will absoultely alienate a section of the population that wants everythng easy mode. They are the gamers that always say " I play games to have fun, not wipe for 4 hours." That is code for "I suck dunkey nuts, and I want to be carried to my epics."
Its simple. Make 40 man raids difficult and rewarding, and make 5-10 man dungeons simple and less rewarding. It makes sense that the more work you put in, the more rewards you get out.
You're seeing what you want to see and not reading what's there. Either that or I've slighted your beloved game/gameplay and you're too affected to discuss this rationally. Your unrelated rant about welfare epics and your claim that the low raid participation is 'an illusion' are testament to that.
Nowhere did I say WOW wasn't doing well or didn't do well. People simply weren't doing raids, though. Only a small percentage of the playerbase had even seen raid content, which is why in TBC they introduced 25 and 10-man raids. Even then, they saw much higher participation in 10-man than in 25-man, which is why they have been constantly adjusting requirments and rewards for both ever since.
40-man raids went away because people simply weren't doing them.
I agree that at the time that a very small percentage were doing raids (well, finishing them.)I'm not sure that dumbing them down was he answer. Players consume content much faster now and it's much easier to communicate strategies these days. Instead of making the challenge easier, I'm wondering if we all just needed to get better. I was so new back then. I, personally, am a much beter player now. Maybe it's time to give it another shot.
If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
It will be interesting to see if they found a new way to approach the 40-man raid or if they are just going to repeat mistakes of the past. After all, there's reasons why raids have gone from 40 to 25 to 10 to 4-6.
The only reason they went away in WoW was greed. The game was wildy popular in vanilla, but they were able to add to their already staggering sub numbers by allowing more people to expierence raids. They carebeared their to hell for money, not because the 40 man raid didn't work.
No, the reason they went away was because people weren't doing them. They went away because people who wanted to do them couldn't get into them due to what was required to get 40 people at the same place at the same time on the same server. The rare drops, DKP and elitist pricks in raiding guilds didn't help either.
So, if a dev makes their content more accessible to the people that want to play it, that's greed? Between the 'greed' and and the 'carebeared to hell for money' thing, it's obvious you're passionate about your beliefs here, so I won't waste much time explaining this.
It may have possibly worked for MMO gamers in 2000. It didn't work for most MMO gamers in 2003. It certainly didn't work for most MMO gamers in 2007, and it definitely won't work for most MMO gamers in 2012 unless they take a new approach to it. Better dungeonfinder, cross-server teaming, NPCs to fill empty slots, distributed drops, guaranteed rewards... there's a lot of ways to fix it, but the old system was not only broken, but does not fit the way most people play MMOs these days.
That's why not just WOW but almost every MMO has reduced the number of players necessary for raids over the past ten years.
Now that you say that, I think you are right. WoW wasn't popular at all in Vanilla. Hell, they were barely hanging on....
Dude, they had millions of subscribers when basically the ONLY thing to do endgame was raid or try for High Warlord. Both of those things were very time consuming.
I will be the first to admit that I was an "elitist prick," but hell if I didn't deserve to be. I played the game a lot, and I played it well. There was an art to being effective in a raid back then. It took 40 people working together flawlessly to kill C'thun, and the feeling of accomplishment at seeing him die is unmatched in gaming for me. I ran around in full T3, and was the only hunter on my server to do so.
With that being said, I had no problem recruiting hunters who had skill and desire, but not gear. I would take them to Ony or something, and see if they were worth my time. Almos all officers/class leaders I spoke to in my guild and others felt the same way. That meant that anyone with a drive to raid, COULD.
There is this great illusion that only a select few could raid back then. I found that most people that didn't raid, chose not to. There were very few that applied to all raiding guilds and were consistantly denied. Those few were truly talentless, or complete asshats. In either case, why should a game shift so drastically to accomodate the unskilled masses? It is obvious; money.
They dumb down the raids, start handing out wellfare epics, remove the pvp grind and all of the sudden they get another couple million 12 year olds and soccer moms to start playing. Large scale raids work just fine if you are not tryinfg to be a wow killer. It will absoultely alienate a section of the population that wants everythng easy mode. They are the gamers that always say " I play games to have fun, not wipe for 4 hours." That is code for "I suck dunkey nuts, and I want to be carried to my epics."
Its simple. Make 40 man raids difficult and rewarding, and make 5-10 man dungeons simple and less rewarding. It makes sense that the more work you put in, the more rewards you get out.
You're seeing what you want to see and not reading what's there. Either that or I've slighted your beloved game/gameplay and you're too affected to discuss this rationally. Your unrelated rant about welfare epics and your claim that the low raid participation is 'an illusion' are testament to that.
Nowhere did I say WOW wasn't doing well or didn't do well. People simply weren't doing raids, though. Only a small percentage of the playerbase had even seen raid content, which is why in TBC they introduced 25 and 10-man raids. Even then, they saw much higher participation in 10-man than in 25-man, which is why they have been constantly adjusting requirments and rewards for both ever since.
40-man raids went away because people simply weren't doing them.
I agree that at the time that a very small percentage were doing raids (well, finishing them.)I'm not sure that dumbing them down was he answer. Players consume content much faster now and it's much easier to communicate strategies these days. Instead of making the challenge easier, I'm wondering if we all just needed to get better. I was so new back then. I, personally, am a much beter player now. Maybe it's time to give it another shot.
We're talking about the size not ease of content. 'Dumbing down' a raid is actually immaterial, though, as that is the inevitable path of all raid content if by nothing else other than the gear-based progression pushed forward through raiding itself.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Backlash incoming. Remember how they wanted to do anything but WoW? and before the inevitable "wow copied it from eq!", EQ didn't have 40/25/20/15/10 mans...it was open world and open structured.
prior to WOW,
EQ did limit their raids to max size of 72 with planes of power (2002)
The pinnacle of my WoW experience was Molten Core. Once they released Burning Crusade, my interest in WoW dropped immensely. The smaller raid groups turned the game into an elitest raiding game. You had to grind for weeks/months just to get into a decent raid group. I decided it was time to find a game that was more fun than work.
Cool more power to em, still looking forward to this game but I have no desire to do PvE raids anymore. They should be there if people have enough interest in them though!
Currently Playing: ESO and FFXIV Have played: You name it If you mention rose tinted glasses, you better be referring to Mitch Hedberg.
I hated 40 man raiding in WoW. Get everyone together, finally, dealing with afk's, dealing with disconnects, spending half an hour explaining fights to those that haven't done it before and to refresh others memories, dealing with doling out the few loot scraps among 40 people, listening to the whining among those that didn't get anything the whole night. It wasn't fun, took forever to get geared up, only to have to do it all again once you did finally get geared up. To me I felt like what was the point? I didn't feel like I was playing in a game world while 40 man raiding, it felt like a second job. I mean it wasn't fun, ever. It always felt like a grind, no thanks, not again, won't do it.
As long as it doesn't affect player housing for things you can obtain (Aside from trophies of raid bosses slain). I don't mind that there is raiding in game.
It will be interesting to see if they found a new way to approach the 40-man raid or if they are just going to repeat mistakes of the past. After all, there's reasons why raids have gone from 40 to 25 to 10 to 4-6.
The only reason they went away in WoW was greed. The game was wildy popular in vanilla, but they were able to add to their already staggering sub numbers by allowing more people to expierence raids. They carebeared their to hell for money, not because the 40 man raid didn't work.
The only hard part in 40 man vwow raids was getting 40 people together, and keeping them there for an hour. Vanilla raid bosses were some of the easiest and simplist raid bosses ever created. The most complicated raid mechanic in valina wow 40 man raiding was making sure healers dispelled certain debuffs. Now a days, a 5 man dungeon is considered easy if it doesnt require a dispell. If you think otherwise, compare vanilla rags with heroic cata rags, your mind will explode.
There is no doubt that blizzard added additonal easier difffaculties of raids to get more people into them, but moving from 40man to 25/10man was strictly a quality of life thing. The raids themselves are harder than they have ever been. Your logic on why they abandoned 40 mans is highly flawed.
If a guild can find 40 people I say great. I once did my taxes and knitted my socks in a 40 man molten core raid. it was epic for sure, but you know i would maybe make them scale just encase you can't find 40 people, which was the problem with the guild had when I was in Wow.
If not scaling based difficulty upon group size, make sure you can fall back to the other group sizes 25/15/10 have 40 optional but don't make it the only size. you never design yourself in a corner.
"By all means, reach for the stars but you need to build the spaceship first"
I enjoyed the epic feel of those 40 man raids, but they were such a pain. You had to adhere to a schedule. Sometimes people were late or didn't show up. If certain critical members weren't present we couldn't even raid. It was fairly difficult to see who was doing it wrong if we wiped during an encounter. On top of that you'd have to compete with so many people for a small amount of gear. Raiding was pretty much a job. Sometimes I wonder how some folks can enjoy them. Anyways, ideally I'd prefer raids that scale difficultly and loot drops based on the number of people, and maybe with a set minimum/maximum like 10/40 party members. You want to go in there with 40 people, have at it. Only got 12 people? Still good to go. Raid locked? No problem, can still go in there and help your comrades while still getting some gold out of it.
"For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed: And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!" ~Lord George Gordon Byron
5-10 person content feels the best to me, it's a good balance between getting people together and still enjoying the content.
When I used to do 40+ person raids they were nothing short of immersion breaking piles of boredom. As others have said, waiting time due to people doing whatever just skyrockets as you add players. 10 man group - one person needs to hit the restroom or get the door, they'll be back in 5 minutes. 40 person group? Raiding is only 20 minutes of your time, the other 3 hours are spent waiting for people and listening to the 2-3 people on vent talk about how they're drunk because they've had a whopping 1 beer. Oh and the one kid who always has to let everyone know that he's currently smoking pot! Wheeee, raiding!
I haven't written large scale raiding off completely, but we'll see.
Originally posted by doragon86 I enjoyed the epic feel of those 40 man raids, but they were such a pain. You had to adhere to a schedule. Sometimes people were late or didn't show up. If certain critical members weren't present we couldn't even raid. It was fairly difficult to see who was doing it wrong if we wiped during an encounter. On top of that you'd have to compete with so many people for a small amount of gear. Raiding was pretty much a job. Sometimes I wonder how some folks can enjoy them. Anyways, ideally I'd prefer raids that scale difficultly and loot drops based on the number of people, and maybe with a set minimum/maximum like 10/40 party members. You want to go in there with 40 people, have at it. Only got 12 people? Still good to go. Raid locked? No problem, can still go in there and help your comrades while still getting some gold out of it.
Raiding requires scheduling, regardless of the #.
The only complaints I have ever seen about 40 man raiding is always due to a lack of leadership!
The gear drops in vanilla WoW aren't relevant! There isn't a rule that dictates more people, equals less loot per person.
There is no way to balance a raid for absolutely any # of players? Hell, look at WoW, they struggle to balance 10 & 25 mans.
Comments
That would be nice, but WOW actually did have DPS counter add-ons quite early on in the raiding game, back in Molten Core. And if you were a DPS class, you did watch it closely. At least this was true for most raiding guilds I saw back then.
For what zimboy69 said, all of that did happen, but to me the fun parts far outweighed the annoying parts. Back in vanilla you had ZG which was 20-men, and even that felt too small-scale to me, though some encounters were arguably better.
What I'm thinking with WildStar is, as long as raiding is not "the" endgame, as long as there are other viable options with good fun and good rewards, great! Let's have big raids as well! But if raiding becomes the main form of endgame for all, that's going to turn off a lot of players as it did in vanilla WOW.
It depends on their definition of raiding. If you're talking about the 40 man cluster f*cks that I left behind in WoW then no. If you're talking about a raid of 40 split into squads of 10 storming like say a castle where the squads are tasked with bringing down their own mini boss in a wing of said castle to unlock a room for the final boss and then converging onto that final boss for the final showdown then that could be interesting. Especially if you make it dependent on how many players actually join the raid.
For instance 10 people enter the castle, then only the final boss and 1 mini boss generate. Twenty people enter, then the final boss and two mini bosses generate. The more people that enter the caslte then the more mini bosses that generate up to a max of four. And depending on the amount of players that actually finish the final battle it would move the raid to different loot tables.
Finish the final fight with 10-19 players in the raid and you get loot based off table D, finish with 20-29 move to table C, 30-39 table B and 40 table A. And like SWTOR everyone gets their own loot cache. Whether that's gear for their actual class, materials or tokens.
This way big guilds could continue to do their thing but it also gives smaller guilds and soloers a chance to experience raids. You know, actually promote socializing rather than elitism. You could have two guilds with 20 players each. Or 30 guildmates + a small 10 man guild. And you would see people inviting players from their friend's list or recruits since the final boss fight's difficulty would be adjusted for 10 people anyway. Only the loot table changes with the amount of raiders involved, thus making every person equally vital.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
Waggle that phat cane with some mad menace, yo.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I hated 40 man raiding in WoW. It took forever to get everyone ready, to the dungeon, buffed up, directions told, then get moving for the few scraps of loot you'd get to try and roll on. Doing those raids over and over to get your full suits only to have them replaced soon after you finally got them all sucked.
I did raiding all throughout WoW, for me it was boring, and annoying. I'm glad they'll have them in WildStar for those that may want to do them, but more and more the game is looking like it's not the game for me to buy. Too bad, housing actually looked pretty neat.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
Now that you say that, I think you are right. WoW wasn't popular at all in Vanilla. Hell, they were barely hanging on....
Dude, they had millions of subscribers when basically the ONLY thing to do endgame was raid or try for High Warlord. Both of those things were very time consuming.
I will be the first to admit that I was an "elitist prick," but hell if I didn't deserve to be. I played the game a lot, and I played it well. There was an art to being effective in a raid back then. It took 40 people working together flawlessly to kill C'thun, and the feeling of accomplishment at seeing him die is unmatched in gaming for me. I ran around in full T3, and was the only hunter on my server to do so.
With that being said, I had no problem recruiting hunters who had skill and desire, but not gear. I would take them to Ony or something, and see if they were worth my time. Almos all officers/class leaders I spoke to in my guild and others felt the same way. That meant that anyone with a drive to raid, COULD.
There is this great illusion that only a select few could raid back then. I found that most people that didn't raid, chose not to. There were very few that applied to all raiding guilds and were consistantly denied. Those few were truly talentless, or complete asshats. In either case, why should a game shift so drastically to accomodate the unskilled masses? It is obvious; money.
They dumb down the raids, start handing out wellfare epics, remove the pvp grind and all of the sudden they get another couple million 12 year olds and soccer moms to start playing. Large scale raids work just fine if you are not tryinfg to be a wow killer. It will absoultely alienate a section of the population that wants everythng easy mode. They are the gamers that always say " I play games to have fun, not wipe for 4 hours." That is code for "I suck dunkey nuts, and I want to be carried to my epics."
Its simple. Make 40 man raids difficult and rewarding, and make 5-10 man dungeons simple and less rewarding. It makes sense that the more work you put in, the more rewards you get out.
Backlash incoming. Remember how they wanted to do anything but WoW? and before the inevitable "wow copied it from eq!", EQ didn't have 40/25/20/15/10 mans...it was open world and open structured.
just another example though. pick on whoever you want on this site, but big talk is almost always just that, and does not hold up for long.
You're seeing what you want to see and not reading what's there. Either that or I've slighted your beloved game/gameplay and you're too affected to discuss this rationally. Your unrelated rant about welfare epics and your claim that the low raid participation is 'an illusion' are testament to that.
Nowhere did I say WOW wasn't doing well or didn't do well. People simply weren't doing raids, though. Only a small percentage of the playerbase had even seen raid content, which is why in TBC they introduced 25 and 10-man raids. Even then, they saw much higher participation in 10-man than in 25-man, which is why they have been constantly adjusting requirments and rewards for both ever since.
40-man raids went away because people simply weren't doing them.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I agree that at the time that a very small percentage were doing raids (well, finishing them.)I'm not sure that dumbing them down was he answer. Players consume content much faster now and it's much easier to communicate strategies these days. Instead of making the challenge easier, I'm wondering if we all just needed to get better. I was so new back then. I, personally, am a much beter player now. Maybe it's time to give it another shot.
If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
We're talking about the size not ease of content. 'Dumbing down' a raid is actually immaterial, though, as that is the inevitable path of all raid content if by nothing else other than the gear-based progression pushed forward through raiding itself.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
prior to WOW,
EQ did limit their raids to max size of 72 with planes of power (2002)
http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/07/23/everquest-slashing-raid-size-in-new-expansion/
will post more in a new topic
EQ2 fan sites
Currently Playing: ESO and FFXIV
Have played: You name it
If you mention rose tinted glasses, you better be referring to Mitch Hedberg.
Fine, we'll compromise. I'll get my way & you'll find a way to be okay with that.
I hated 40 man raiding in WoW. Get everyone together, finally, dealing with afk's, dealing with disconnects, spending half an hour explaining fights to those that haven't done it before and to refresh others memories, dealing with doling out the few loot scraps among 40 people, listening to the whining among those that didn't get anything the whole night. It wasn't fun, took forever to get geared up, only to have to do it all again once you did finally get geared up. To me I felt like what was the point? I didn't feel like I was playing in a game world while 40 man raiding, it felt like a second job. I mean it wasn't fun, ever. It always felt like a grind, no thanks, not again, won't do it.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
I give it a month b4 the players are whining that they can't fill the big raids......big raids is so 2000.
The reason wow has smaller raids now is because you can't get 40 ready and organized in half an hour.
smaller raids ftw imho. (20 max should do i think)
-Azure Prower
http://www.youtube.com/AzurePrower
40 mans raid sucked as tank .....and we were like 50+ wanting to raid and having to rotate every other boss was lame.
The only hard part in 40 man vwow raids was getting 40 people together, and keeping them there for an hour. Vanilla raid bosses were some of the easiest and simplist raid bosses ever created. The most complicated raid mechanic in valina wow 40 man raiding was making sure healers dispelled certain debuffs. Now a days, a 5 man dungeon is considered easy if it doesnt require a dispell. If you think otherwise, compare vanilla rags with heroic cata rags, your mind will explode.
There is no doubt that blizzard added additonal easier difffaculties of raids to get more people into them, but moving from 40man to 25/10man was strictly a quality of life thing. The raids themselves are harder than they have ever been. Your logic on why they abandoned 40 mans is highly flawed.
If a guild can find 40 people I say great. I once did my taxes and knitted my socks in a 40 man molten core raid. it was epic for sure, but you know i would maybe make them scale just encase you can't find 40 people, which was the problem with the guild had when I was in Wow.
If not scaling based difficulty upon group size, make sure you can fall back to the other group sizes 25/15/10 have 40 optional but don't make it the only size. you never design yourself in a corner.
"By all means, reach for the stars but you need to build the spaceship first"
"For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed:
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!"
~Lord George Gordon Byron
5-10 person content feels the best to me, it's a good balance between getting people together and still enjoying the content.
When I used to do 40+ person raids they were nothing short of immersion breaking piles of boredom. As others have said, waiting time due to people doing whatever just skyrockets as you add players. 10 man group - one person needs to hit the restroom or get the door, they'll be back in 5 minutes. 40 person group? Raiding is only 20 minutes of your time, the other 3 hours are spent waiting for people and listening to the 2-3 people on vent talk about how they're drunk because they've had a whopping 1 beer. Oh and the one kid who always has to let everyone know that he's currently smoking pot! Wheeee, raiding!
I haven't written large scale raiding off completely, but we'll see.
Raiding requires scheduling, regardless of the #.
The only complaints I have ever seen about 40 man raiding is always due to a lack of leadership!
The gear drops in vanilla WoW aren't relevant! There isn't a rule that dictates more people, equals less loot per person.
There is no way to balance a raid for absolutely any # of players? Hell, look at WoW, they struggle to balance 10 & 25 mans.