MMOs - A Raid Bench.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Then you need to make all spec's equally viable in every aspect of the game. Good luck!

[Twobit Whore]

It's actually getting pretty close with the glaring exception of tanking wars/paladins who are craptacular in PvP.

[fanaskin]

rank 1-14 as protection war, wsg flag runner. ab smith guardian, av is basically 1/2 pve so thats an easy fit.

doesn't fly in arena's though

[Zerai]

Originally Posted by Twobit Whore

As unpopular as it would be, I think they should restrict respeccing instead of making it easier. It should be limited to a few points a week or month instead of total respeccing. You need to allow enough that someone can correct a misplaced point but not enough that a feral druid can go full resto for 5g. If you want people to be unique then make them unique, not just a current spec that can be changed on a whim.

The problem with that is, you lock people out of 50% of the game. Want to tank? Have fun in PVE. You're useless in PVP. You can...guard flags. Woo.

Holy priest? same deal. You're like a free hk in pvp.

The problem is, as people said, you get restricted too much by your choices. For some classes you are pvp, pve, or some gimp hybrid. Your spec sucks for anything else.

They need more multidimensional talents. Like MS could be a healing debuff on a player, but an agro buff on a npc.

Talents that reduce threat should increase protection from player attacks.

Things like that. PVE and PVP shouldn't be a choice in your talents. Only how you play. Use different types of attacks and so on.

[FoghornDeadhorn]

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.

Chalk me up for "I would never go back to 40 man raids."

Regarding the original post, my opinion is that the ability to summon people into instances is as much solving as this problem needs. If you can't get people motivated enough to log on despite the fact that they might be benched, you either need new leadership or new membership. The fact that people can now freely take their mains elsewhere as long as a warlock is in the raid to summon them in when needed is a massive shot in the arm towards the bench being a reasonable place to be.

[xmod2]

Originally Posted by Twobit Whore

As unpopular as it would be, I think they should restrict respeccing instead of making it easier. It should be limited to a few points a week or month instead of total respeccing. You need to allow enough that someone can correct a misplaced point but not enough that a feral druid can go full resto for 5g. If you want people to be unique then make them unique, not just a current spec that can be changed on a whim.

Personally, I like letting our tanks go Fury/Ret rather than sitting out. We need one tank for Leo and then 4 for Fathom Lord. I don't want to have to recruit more dps who have to sit out during tank heavy nights so that they can sub and let the tanks sit out during light tanking nights.

[Horse]

Originally Posted by FoghornDeadhorn

If you can't get people motivated enough to log on despite the fact that they might be benched, you either need new leadership or new membership.

Right - issue being that not every guild should require some deviant who gets his rocks off by diddling with SQL, member rosters, fun with "systems and software" in order to solve the problem of parsing out average attendances, class percentage, utility of classes, etc. Don't confuse that with claiming leadership is hard bawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww, but that there are certain people with certain lifestyles who would play WoW if there was more flexibility. Those people who want to play once or twice a week for a few hours and *gasp* actually raid without relying on some GRAND WIZARD to orchestrate it all are the new frontier right? Cause all the catasses and "I barely play but kick it around once in a while" are subscribers for good at this point.

So go ahead and explain how people who essentially want to raid but don't have much time for it actually are retained by any mmorpg company. Spoiler: it isn't via daily quests and badge rewards. Seems like we've got this nice duality of hardcore as people who raid AND do all that bullshit versus non-hardcore as those who only do the bullshit.


I was there and leading and doing all that, and it was entertaining to a point. Then it became obnoxious when hitting that brick wall where more gear, experience and our average attendances put us on completing content after stupid amounts of hours were thrown at it. Why am I putting in 100% attendance and managing all this shit as a stepping stone for the guilds that will gear you up and burn you out in short order? Why put in all the time so that someone can play once a week and get a thrill out of WoW? Because apparently that's fun to some people, maintaining that mediocrity. Hmm, OK.

So scratch a group of people who were willing2lead at 100% attendance because everyone who would raid at 90%+ were happy in the higher guilds? Amazing concept! We need new members! That solves it all!


So there goes about 80-100 people who couldn't be bothered to handle shit on their own, and saw raiding as a chore that conflicted with what they felt was a normal schedule of playing every once in a while.

Those that were 100% and such went on to their well-oiled machine guilds and beat the content. Now the hardcore is such a large window due to the time-lock on the bosses who gives a shit at all? Continued catering to this small chunk of the subscription planet has only seen slow and steady crapping on. I don't hear too many people drawling on proudly about how they farmed consumables for naxx. More embarassing than anything else, eh?

The content would NOT necessarily need to be beaten if you bring 40 to an encounter tuned for 25. That's where the previously mentioned dynamics could be introduced or you simply don't win. Anybody could beat the shit with 40 people. But "really beating it" is with 25, and that can easily be established as a normal game mechanic. Like, "OK, FUCK YOU YOUR DUNGEON COOLDOWN IS INCREASED BY THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN RAID" etc. Why I remember in the good ol' days of EQ when we hardly could be bothered to pay attention to where everyone on other servers were because our own server had enough to worry about. It was fun to see the extreme top end but was also obvious that given everyone spending the same amount of time, the progress moved forward lockstep. The hours and hours for 2 items.

And now people's vaginas hurt because the dynamic of racing against guilds across the world let alone different servers? Surely you can't be so delusional to think that the breakneck pace doesn't demotivate more than anything else regarding raiding or the endgame...


Claiming "a company wants integrity" is a bullshit response to the central idea that not everyone wants to play and be in a guild as a pretend military secretary in order to grab a bunch of people who are on and make do.


You can still thump chests and be hardcore in your hardcore guild, but that doesn't mean every guild that raids needs to be the same way.


And really, what's this of "sunwell would have been cleared immediately" nonsense? To the casual world who doesn't masturbate the F5 key on elite mmorpg gamer websites the shit WAS cleared immediately. And rather than have fun or try it out, they fumble around with dick in hand because in their oh-so-pathetic world the wrong people logged on that night to raid.

You have to be vast magnitudes of dense if you don't think, at this point, that the babyproofing of the game is only going to increase.

And of course we all know better, but there is also the perception that those who actually do raid according to a set schedule with 100% attendance 5-7 days a week are "fucking retarded" and does not a good social environment make. I'm sure there's 0 validity to that claim...

[Zehn - Vhex]

tl;dr

[Vorph]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Go play on an emu server. Rickshaw this piece of shit.

...is even more appropriate in light of the new wall of text. I made the mistake of actually trying to read and glean some sort of logical argument out of that shit, and now my head hurts and I need a stiff drink.

[Zarcath]

Job system or bust.

[Northerner]

Originally Posted by Zarcath

Job system or bust.

I tend to agree.

I've got alts all over the map and frankly, I hate it. If I could have one main character capable (with a visit to town or whatever) of performing several jobs then I'd be much happier and we'd certainly get more off-night groups rolling to do whatever.

Don't want to have a lot of jobs? That's fine. Then you are Bob the Healer or Jimmy the Tank/DPS or whatever else. If I'm willing to put a lot more time in though, what's the harm in letting my main character be Cel the Nuker/Tank/Healer though (never at the same time of course) rather than making me log in an alt with shitty reputations and likely asstastic gear compared to my main? It sure as hell would beat the /gu spam of who wants to log a healing alt to do X or an A-role alt to do Y.

[Elsebet]

Originally Posted by Zarcath

Job system or bust.

Yes please.

Also, games need to stop making inventory management a tedious play-by-mail mini-game that must be trudged through every day. If an ancient game like AO can have a gigantic bank where each slot can have its own bag I'm sure the new shiny games can find a way. I don't remember ever running out of inventory or bank space in AO and I played for years.

[Ogun Nagoura]

I feel what you're saying OP but honestly I think the real problem is that you have a game with what? 5,000,000 subscribers? And how many of them are hardcore raiders? 5000 counting all servers? Who in the Blizz dev dept is actually going to care all that much when the majority of employees in development are working on either non-raid projects (Litch expansion) or more likely been allocated to bring out Starcraft 3? I see you guys bitching about this stuff ad infinitiem and I don't see it getting corrected anywhere near what you want for about two or more years.

Damn you guys have a high tolerance for abuse. WoW did it for me and MMO's forever. Long live FPS.

[Horse]

Paragraph 1: Raid guilds essentially require fucking douchebag losers to organize them. There are only so many of those to go around. We all love and respect them but every guild cannot have the smelliest of the shitbreaths grunting over vent about "benches and rotations."

Paragraph 2: Please explain why raiding ought to only include the small percentage that it currently does while excluding people who'd have no problems with it if it wasn't as exclusive as it was.

Paragraph 3: I lead a guild and it became a headache to hold the balls of "normal people" who don't catass for days a week in order to play the game they'd sunk months and months of their lives playing w/o raiding.

Paragraph 4+5+6: So you lose those normal people eventually. Getting "new members" is pretending there is an endless supply of people willing to put in what is currently required to successfully raid. They trickle upwards to guilds with aforementioned catasses in the helm.

Paragraph 7: As much as your massively throbbing epeens protest, stating "suck less if u don't liek teh raids" has been said at every point of this and previous games where raiding has only gone from masochistic to less masochistic. Drop the "I'm a fucking stooge who likes wasting my life and that's a good thing" routine. Raids are not going to get harder to manage.

Paragraph 8: The impression that some guild of welfare cases is already bored with content YOU CAN'T EVEN GET ACCESS TO does not help a MMORPG, it causes disinterest. How many more SSC+TK nerfs will it take for certain people to give any fuck at all about SSC and TK? Sorry, but the VIP private GM run dungeons for Guild of Diaperwearers isn't panning out, unless you think the wowjutsu numbers are indicative of success (or the million billion dollars).

Paragraph 9+10: The integrity of the MMO company is horseshit. Oh no, 1% of the players will think ur not hardcore!

Paragraph 11+12: Sunwell has been cleared immediately according to plenty of people. It'd be cleared even faster? Oh gosh, relevant to so many people. Hang on, my RSS feed of the latest bosskills is updating... mmmmmmmmmm.

Paragraph 13: While many think it's a wondrous thing to require advanced DPS parsings, theorycrafting excel spreadsheets to see the highest dps, micromanage players and relying on a cabinet to organize your warparty there are plenty who have OGRE in them that yells "nurrrrrrrrrrrrrds" and never quite make it that far. I realize that folks have a chubby because their hobby has made it mainstream and are sad in the pants when what made it their hobby gets edited out because noone else, relatively, gives a fuck as in the long run that shit will only limit subscriptions.



Sorry, can't condense the issue of a raid bench into a one-liner, but here, I'll give my impression:

"Smoke some more pole fart-knockers you suck and need to be better if you have a problem!"

The audacity of brevity is not a replacement for wisdom or wit.

[FoghornDeadhorn]

I read your summary, Horse, but not the post in question. Sorry, but replying to two sentences of mine with seventeen paragraphs is...oh hell I'll admit it's amazing. This post has three sentences so I can experience the rush again, only at a slightly higher level.