MMOs - A Raid Bench.

[xmod2]

+1 for the job system.

Personally I'd rather be able to recruit 25-30 skilled PLAYERS rather than having to take some scrub because he chose the right class at character creation. It sucks having to take Joe Blow the shaman while we have skilled members on who could fill that spot. All because our main shaman has midterms or some stupid shit.

[Zerai]

Raids tuned for 25 man. Instance allows 40. Done.

Scrub guild does it with 40. Good guilds do it with 25.

Talent stable is also wtb. I like tanking, why do they have to kick you in the nuts when you want to do it?

[Twobit Whore]

Originally Posted by Zerai

Raids tuned for 25 man. Instance allows 40. Done.

Scrub guild does it with 40. Good guilds do it with 25.

Everyone would just bring 40 until it was on farm. They can't produce content fast enough to keep up with how fast it would be cleared.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Brutallis with 40, man, that would be over so fast. Would need a 2 minute enrage timer.

[Zerai]

Originally Posted by Twobit Whore

Everyone would just bring 40 until it was on farm. They can't produce content fast enough to keep up with how fast it would be cleared.

Who cares?

[The Ancient]

People who enjoy well-tuned encounters.

[Twobit Whore]

And people who like having content that isn't consumed in a month then have to wait 6 months for more.

[Senen]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

I think far too many of you are the retards that were being carried along and then got sat once TBC hit and are now bitter about it.

Only explanation for some of these terrible idea's. If you're not in the raid, who honestly gives a fuck? Go farm some herbs or something.

This goes back to the old EQ days when LDoN came out remember how many people would show up for raids and then get cut on the spot. Then remember how quickly people started cancelling subs, no one wants to be that sit out guy even if its on a rotation people pay to play its that simple. And by playing I don't mean playing Johnny gather whore thats never been fun. Maybe when you first made your char 3 years ago and were skilling up to get to that next tier ya..

[Zerai]

Originally Posted by The Ancient

People who enjoy well-tuned encounters.

They would be. You could just bring more. If your guild wants to zerg, join a guild that doesn't.

[Horse]

Originally Posted by Suineg

Having a "large" raid compared to a medium 25 man gives you more options to be creative. It's simple math. The more people you have the more diverse you can be.

This isn't true at all, it is completely based on the encounter - unless by "you" you mean game developers.


If you consider 40 versus 25 (or really, more versus less) based on the core encounter in any mmo, tank and spank, you'll find that you *need* the same amount of people to accomplish the task. At its base if everyone were to die except for these essential people, the essentially people in the 25 or the 40 man are the same.

Where it gets jumbled up is when you tack on all of the enrage timers, multiple mobs that require multiple tanks, healing styles, dps styles... all of that shit. The "more diversity" comes from the game's end, you can do more if you have more players in the raid.

Problem then becomes one of requiring certain abilities as a roadblock to casual raiding.

The reason why 40 man raiding worked, for the most part, is that nothing in the game required 40 people to win. So there was that breathing room. It isn't diversity, it's "doesn't fucking matter who is in those slots." As soon as you require diversity, 40 man sucks.

The flipside is, 25 man puts more emphasis on each person so you are more rigid in who you can bring because the encounters.

Is it? Is it really? I'd love to get a poll of guild leaders/officers who had extensive experience pre- and post-BC that could pick easier, harder, or nearly the same. The overall management of systems is nearly identical across raid sizes, the difficulty in it comes from creating them, implementing them, and then keeping them up to date as required. The more people added into that system simply lessens individual accountability, it does NOT inherently increase management difficulty. The one true difficulty of raid/guild management, cliques, is just as rampant in a 25 man raid as it is in a 40 man raid, and equally damaging if not mitigated. More people does not mean less social cohesion, more people simply means more people.


The bottom line is that the reduction in raid size is supposed to make forming and managing a guild easier. The reality is it doesn't. The difficulties in creating a guild of like minded people are just as present today as they were in the 40 man days, and I would submit that giving up the avenues of development that the extra 15 people in a raid nets you is not worth the reduction in size at all.

Ehhhh it's bullshit both ways if you're with people who attend 50-75% of the time. Easier? Who knows. Different problems.

40 man = having 10 of every class and dicking around with rotations, who raids and who doesn't, loot headaches, and the massive letdown when in spite of having the planets align and having a good turnout the ONE or TWO people needed to win aren't there. Nobody wants to practice, guildwide costs of wipes and maintaining 40 people worth of consumables (back when it wasn't ezmode consumable vendor style shit)...

25 man = having too many of one class and not enough of the other, where the game seems to ignore that problem (hi there shaman = raid gods = don't stay in shitty casual guilds long). It's also very easy for someone to saturate faster and loot'n'scoot versus a 40 man where loot probably comes at a slower pace. There is a bench in

Not to mention the really fucking awkward number that 25 man is when you have 10 man raiding ramp-ups.



All that said, 25 man is FAR easier to manage for a high-end, well oiled machine "everyone at 100% attendance" guild, where people understand they might sit out or on a bench so that the guild progresses.

Joe Casual? The issue there is that if they log on 1 time every 2 weeks, that 1time they log on they want to raid, even if that puts them at 10 attendance. You can't kick them out, oh no, because the overweight female priest and druid coalition are their IRL BFF...

Micromanaging the attendance habits of people in your guild in order to determine who gets to raid fucking sucks and is blatantly ignored by literally zero in-game mediation or tools. There are things the game itself could do like sort out number of kills, time spent in dungeons, in game DKP systems. The lack of the game imposing a system on those FEW who can easily manage themselves seriously fucks those who can't.

Think of it like the in-game voice system issue applied to guild management.

I only think they should put these tools in because otherwise you're going to end up with watered down or "de-ubered content" after a few months as has been the very intentional pattern so far.

[Horse]

PS > Zerging should always be an option. Simply make the encounter harder to zerg. Good luck doing archimonde with 60 people if he dynamically changes based on people in zone.


Zerg is sloppy by definition.

Stop pretending that there aren't ways of making raids work if there is no raid cap. There are plenty:

1) worse loot for every person over the raid cap
2) less loot for every person over the raid cap
3) less faction...
4) dampened skills...
5) more boss hp...
6) more frequent boss specials...
7) additional adds/multi-bosses...
8) other debuffs applied to raid...

There are plenty of ways to make it work or at least more viable.

I feel comfy asserting that there are far more guilds that DON'T EXIST right now due specifically to how raiding is handled, 25 or 40 man, than there would be if it was softened a bit.

And again if you're framing all of this in wow in regards to the uber guilds? Boo hoo they'll run out of content even faster! And realize that if raids were capped at 100 people these guilds would have the most efficient number anyway, plugging away at it... be it 25 or 100.

[Kreugen]

Get it right sir, it was Hunters I couldn't kill. Paladins I could at least run away from.

I'm both too casual and too common a class to raid - yet I'm full T6 minus swords, which flat out don't fucking drop ever.

If I was smart I guess I'd take my mage to bt/hyjal and sit him on the handful of mobs that will have loot for my rogue. But I never claimed to be smart! Maybe if you could swap talent specs with ease I could stand the class.

And "tuning for 25 but allowing 40" is fucking retarded. Hi, remember bringing multiple groups to scholomance etc? There's a reason they capped that shit in TBC.

[Jait]

I didn't read the whole thread, and I don't doubt others are using this system too, but it really worked well for us in EQ2. I think the mechanics for raids should allow guilds to use the systems they want to use. I'm not sure if WoW allows folks to swap mid-raid.


Everyone earns DKP. Everyone's raid attendence is always kept, whether they're part of the raid or not. The folks in their class with the highest % of attendence get first priority.

Reserves If you're on-time, and online through the entire raid even if you're not a part of it (you may get called in though to replace someone) you get the base 1.0 dkp for "on time". Each boss killed nets everyone roughly (depending on loot) 1.0 dkp.

Raiders The actual people on the raid gain the same DKP as the reserves, and also 2-3x more per boss, again depending on loot.

We rotate folks even if their % is high. In other words after doing X raids 6 times someone may want to go xp or farm rather than raid and allow the person with a lower attendence to take their spot. But here's the kicker.

Everyone is eligible for loot
If you have 50 dkp and you're in the reserves, and another person on the raid has 45dkp, the reservist can spend and loot the item. Our players aren't newbs, and they can get to the zone within 5 minutes of a loot call so it doesn't inconvience anyone. If it takes longer the raid continues, and we have a bruiser or mage hang back with the corpse. One person on the raid logs out, the reservist enters, gets CoH'd or other method. Loots and Gates.

This system worked great imo. It's not 0 inflation, but we do use dkp adjustments. It can be improved upon, but it allows guilds to have much larger rosters than normal without pissing off core-players, or "bench" players. I love being able to take a night off any time I want and not having to worry about losing my regular spot on the raids or my special piece of loot should it drop the one night I want to play elsewhere.

[Goliath]

Originally Posted by Zerai

I kinda just miss EQ style. They can say "this raid is balanced for 25 people". Shitty guilds will bring 50, good, 20-25. Sure lots of people zerged shit, but they ended up getting fucked because the loot was distributed too far and they all ended up with partially geared raids and sucked anyway.

Bad for a WoW environment where there are plenty of people to go around. You won't have 8 zerg guilds like you did on Veeshan or Tunare, you'll have 25.

Although, they can add the mechanics that EQ did later in its life where mobs got progressively harder with more people.

[Goliath]

Originally Posted by Kreugen

And "tuning for 25 but allowing 40" is fucking retarded. Hi, remember bringing multiple groups to scholomance etc? There's a reason they capped that shit in TBC.

Our guild didn't know that you could bring 2 groups to scholo. We were a small guild and we'd just set up an amazing group to do it. It had 2 paladins, 1 druid, 1 priest and 1 warlock. Oh wait, there's that stacking thing everyone's talking about huh?

Seems like either way you will have to stack, or bring more players. Doesn't matter how good you are (to a degree), unless you're those crazy Japanese sons of bitches on Veeshan that would do Aary in ToV with like 18 at 2am in Velious.