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Modern Raids
UsualSuspect
Member UncommonPosts: 1,243
Hey all,
So I was reading a news story on IGN about Rift's new patch and came across this little snippet:
"The main focus of the patch is the introduction of Rift's first "Sliver" -- a tear between planes that players can actually enter. This one, located in Shimmersand, will bring players to an alternate version of Telara (Rift's setting) which has been overrun by dudes from the Plane of Earth. It's a raid instance built for 10 players.".
And that's where I face-palmed. A raid of 10 players? Surely 10 players is just a slightly bigger group? What's next? Group content that's tailored for 2 players? Seriously, when did raids become little more than a slightly harder version of group content requiring one or two more people? Hell, I bet most full groups could do a 10 man raid.
I really think the developers are losing the plot on what the hell MMO's are about, most of them should really just go back to making single player games.
Comments
WoW's been doing 5 mans for awhile. I don't mind it, only if they have large scale raids too. Sometimes it's nice to log in and just get 10 people together for a raid, rather than the 40 or so like the older ones.
Playing - EVE, Wurm
Retired - Final Fantasy XI, Anarchy Online, Mabinogi
Waiting - ArcheAge, Salem
Anything bigger than 10 man group in an instanced setting is completely retarded and unnecessary.
I've never actually set foot in a raid, only watched them. So you'll have to explain a little better how this is a terrible thing. Seems to me that as more people get involved, the level of coordination among the group becomes far more important than individual player skill or gear, which ought to be the measure of the group's strength. It's inevitable because a larger group is going to be more random than a smaller group; you can't set the bar too high and you can't add too much complexity or else properly geared and properly prepared groups will fail due to uncontrollable randomness.
Basically, gigantic raids necessarily boil down to simpler strategy. This is due to the fact that there are only so many important roles that can be played which leaves everyone else in the "zerg" role. If someone made a 40-man raid where there truly were 40 different important roles to play, sheer randomness would cause way too many wipes even among groups of the correct makeup and preparedness.
Why do feel that way; besides you thinking that it is unnecessary
40man raids back in WoW were cool, if the playerbase wasn't so unsocial and so based on epic characters than it would work. But because you need to be awesome to do stuff, its a pain to have to boot all those normal players from the raid and replace them with l33t players, right?
Make raids that aren't based on stat numbers and gear and you won't have such a problem finding players willing to participate in a 40man raid; therefore allowing the devs to make a dungeon that takes 40 players to do fun things, not just some monster with too much health that we all just sit there and play with our twinkies pressing 12345 at.
This is the problem with modern MMORPGs, back when EQ really brought MMORPG to the lime light, with its (then) new style 3rd graphics and contol and style of game play from UO 2D style of play it had REAL raids. Some took over 70 people to do a boss, several guilds working as one.................THAT was how u built a community in the game, meet and talked with fellow players NOT just using some DUNGEN TOOL to get instant gratification.
....Being Banned from MMORPG's forums since 2010, for Trolling the Trolls!!!
I've got a homework assignment for you. Find 40 people on this forum who have the same exact idea of what makes a dungeon quote-"fun"-unquote. Failing that, design a raid that appeals to all 40 of those people with their different opinions.
Then, realize that only a tiny percent of the MMO population share the same opinion as those 40 people. We've come a long way from raid bosses that are just normal enemies with 10000x the health, and where we're settled right now is a compromise between hundreds of different preferences. Devs have it harder than you think.
While it's true that initial end bosses in EQ1 required a lot of people, they were also very shallow fights. Even a basic tank-n-spank raid boss in a modern MMO—or heck, even in WoW—is more complex and requires more coordination. Players today have an expectation of some complexity; they won't tolerate a slab of meat with a billion HP that requires 100 people just for the sake of requiring 100 people.
Um guess you didnt play EQ.......3rd explansion required 50 peep to take down a raid boss rathe council.....took 4 groups or 10 each doing there part to get to last boss......then required that to be killed. Might want to check up on your facts before your ideas of a "just tank and spank quote."
....Being Banned from MMORPG's forums since 2010, for Trolling the Trolls!!!
Not that I like raiding anymore, but I figure if you're going to do it you should go big or go home.
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Why people think you need massive numbers to create a quality raid experience is beyond me. It just isn't practical to schedule for 40+ people to be in the same place on the same night. Anyone who think we need to return to 40+ scenarios has obviously never been a raid leader. Being a raid leader even for 20-25 people is a shortcut to burnout.
If you end up just flagging for people, expect a couple hours before you even set foot in the raid, expect 20% of them to be worthless - and as far as "building community," you'll walk away with 1-2 people you actually care to see again - if you're lucky.
As long as the mechanics of the encounter push the limits beyond what smaller groups can do, it's innovative and incedibly challenging, numbers don't matter to me. Don't just put a big boss with a billion hp who requires the same effort as a normal dungeon boss - make it something that must be practiced, studied, and perfected.
As someone who, while having played MMOs since UO, has never raided before Rift, I would like an example where a raid boss's mechanics are vastly different than a group boss's, other than more of the same with more health, perhaps more adds to worry about, just "more" in general. I've found with Rift the hardest thing about doing Greenscale is finding 20 people who aren't retarded and contribute nothing. Curious as to what other game's bigger raids were like
Luclin launched almost three full years after EQ was released. Far as I know, TheJoda is referring to the original EQ that "really brought MMORPG to the lime light", not its many expansions.
So Rift is copying Oblivion. Cool, I thought they should have done that from the start.
As far as Raid size is concerned, I don't see the issue here.
LOL ... what has the number of players in a group to do with how hard the counter is? Back in WOTLK, 10 man LK hard mode is much more difficult than many 25 man encounter .. noticeably gunship, which is EASIER than most 5-man content.
Oh, a 2-player dungeon will be great. I think some games have 3-players ones. What MMO is about .. nowadays .. is small group content. If you play F2P games, they are even CHEAPER than SP games.
A) Being a leader it is too stressful to manage huge teams
C) Everyone has a role and you don't feel like a part of a mass moving along.
D) Instances, by their very nature, are not very "MMO"-ish activities. Your group is the only entity inside.
E) "MMO"-ish activities can be enforced outside instances, with larger groups, larger communities and less developer control. This can also happen inside instances even if the scope is small.
After having played a game where content shifted from requiring 20-50 people to 3-15 and having led groups for both kind of contents, I can safely say that I'd take lowman content over anything else. It becomes even more fun when you can do more with less- say, content designed for 8 people cleared by 4 people. It's a small dream-team and it's awesome to be a valuable part of it when everything flows so smoothly. With 50 people I can't say I've ever felt that way, although clearing content designed for 30+ people with 15 can be mildly entertaining.
BS. I led 72 man raids in EQ for years and absolutely loved it. Some people like larger scale content. Some people don't. Sadly all the PvE focused MMOs today only create content for those who like group content relabeled raid.
Technically any group is a raid.
Raiding is boring for me. Standing around waiting for AFKs, waiting for healers, waiting for tanks, waiting for dps, waiting waiting waiting. Not fun at all.
I hate instances too though so there you go.
I feel bad for the younger generation of gamers who will never experiance what a truely GOOD raid is like. something that requires perfect coordination of 72 people where 1 person screwing up, or 1 misunderstood raid instruction means a complete wipe:D winning the raid carries its own intrensic reward of a job well done. sometimes the loot reward are "unimportant" and bragging rights of the raid was the main motivator for guilds the push forth.
this is why i feel bad for the newer generation of gamers:D they have no clue what a GOOD raid is about:D
let me see if I can explain this in simpler terms and easier to understand format.
look at it from the developers point of view. when you have a "raid" size of 10 people. there is only VERY limited resources that players can bring INTO the raid. so the raid DESIGNER can only stress that content to a very limited budge of resources that players can bring to the table. now, if you have a generous raid size where players can bring HUGE amount of resources with them, then the raid designer CAN bring out their inner sadist and truely abuse the players in content design:D
here is a simpler example, if you are given a budget of $100,000 to build a house, you can build a half way decent house. but if you are given a budget of $100,000,000 you can build a really nice castle. the budget is the number of people you can bring into the raid(resource). the content is the type of house you can build(raid difficulty).
the more budget you allow into a raid, the harder the raid is "allowed" to be built. what kind of "boss" mob can you design knowing there is only a 2 cleric budget in the raid reguardless of skill level?:D how hard can you design the boss mob to hit knowing that there is only enough budget for 2 tanks in the raid? we arent even talking about AE's or add's yet:D better yet, how many bosses/sub bosses on top of the trash add's can you put into a single raid script if you know there is only a budget of 10 people in the raid?:D
FACT is that the more people you ALLOW into a raid, the harder the raid is allowed to be designed. a 40 man raid will never be "as hard" as a 72 man raid CAN BE. with larger resources, comes much more complex strategy and tactics. and the designers are ALLOWED to exploit that and make the content THAT much harder. i'm not saying a raid is automatically harder as raid size increase. what i'm saying is a raid CAN be DESIGNED to be MUCH harder given more resources that can be brought to the raid. you can't put out a forest fire with 1 bucket of water... that is the cold hard FACT of game design.
Your FACTS are nothing but assumptions. Incorrect assumptions, actually.
A raid for 40 or for 5 people is still made for an entire GAME POPULATION, so they can be ALLOWED the same resources.
BS. Your experience is totally irrelevant to most MMO players. Few percentage of WOW players EVER raid 40 man, or even Sunwell 25 man.
Very few people want larger scale raid (40+), and that is why it is not being done anymore. It is called progress. I am sure all the horse carriage companies are "sad" too when the automobile came along.
Multi-coop is the next MMO. That is called progress. Very few wants to deal with the headache of coordinating large groups. Very few wants to make it a job. Jump in and have fun .. that is the motto of modern games.
Fourth expansion, (kunark, velious, luclin, PoP) and moreover the fight was pretty simple. Post nerf (when all the guilds except AL, who did it the night previous beat it) you simply had to weaken them to ~ 15% and leave a tank and a cleric on each one, once all weakened they needed to be downed simultaneously (which you could just split the dps) This fight wasn't hard--it just required on the order of 12 clerics, which was fucking ridiculous. Design has come a long way, and while I did enjoy EQ, the lact of any real scripting until PoP really hurt the encounters.
EQ was about getting people to show up and to keep your cleric numbers high. CLR burnout was hard (hitting one spell every ~ 20 seconds or so on a CH rotation for hours at a stretch could do that to you in velious or higher content). Healing wasn't really rectified until GoD where CH was nerfed to 7500, health pools rose, and tank damage became so spikey that divine lights / remedies were required.
Until PoTime (late fourth expac) EQ raiding was about zerging and about waiting for shit to spawn. Post PoTime (GoD, OOW, with some instanced encounters limiting numbers) It became what is basically raiding today, GoD offering some of the hardest at-level content in any game (bar FF11 :P). The population plummeted in GoD for other reasons, though (like requiring previous expansion raid gear to do group based content). But even in raiding circles things shut down almost completely for guilds who weren't top notch.
In the end, people are fucking -terrible- at games on the whole, especially in mmo's. Lotta people enjoyed the uncompetitive aspect of EQ raiding, like sitting in kael / ToV farming armor for turnins, where just being present entailed rewards. The low barrier to entry which brought them into the genre is suddenly taken away at most endgames now and it's absolutely strangling the genre.
sigh... if you actually did any kind of end game raiding in EQ you would understand....
the tactics you can use and strategies you can design with 5 people as opposed to 40 people is COMPLETELY different:D if you cant see that, then you really shouldn't even be in this discussion:D if you have 40 people, the designers CAN design the boss to 1 hit kill the MAIN TANK and the raid continues. if you only have 5 people, after the main tank is 1 shotted, who's actually tough enough to take over tanking? the cleric?:D
and no, you cant build the golden gate bridge on a budget of 10 people with current technology reguardless how skilled the workers are... resources you are able to bring into a raid directly affect how hard an encounter CAN be designed. I used to be a warrior in a raiding guild. I can NAME the positions we NEEDED for some raids. Main tank, secondary tank, tertiary tank, assist tank, 2x CC tank and thats just on a "simple" tank and spank type raid:D imagine the amount of support that is required to keep those tanks alive....
how hard were the bosses? a single max hit from the boss can take up to 85% of the health of the best dressed tank on the server... a successful quad/flurry hit will kill ANY tank reguardless of how well dressed/skilled/AA'ed or the amount of support behind the tank. a room wide AE that will kill all your guild recruits that wasnt fully geared up in rot gear.(well sometimes even the fully dressed squishys die too) once again, this is just a "simple" tank and spank type fight:D on the main tank. we usually have 3 clerics on a CH rotation, and maybe 2 to 3 spam healers and 1 healer type to cure some nasty DoT or effect off the main tank JUST to keep the MT alive... when the MT dies. EVERY SINGLE healer has to switch to the 2ndary tank within 5 seconds or less or the 2ndary tank is dead also. tertiary tank is usually a "younger" tank that may not have all the gear/AA's that is required to survive even AFTER the healers switched to him/her. OR, the tertiary tank simply doesnt have all his disc's up at the time the fight started.
where EQ sets itself apart from other games is majority of their raids when done as "current expansion" are insanely hard. often taking up to 3 months just to figure out the raid script and design strategies/tactics and the "perfect" raid makeup to counter the raid. it's not uncommon that guilds have to "recruit" certin classes just for 1 progression raid. people had to sit out of raids or do some raids over and over simply because the classes required for some raids are VERY specific. as one of the tank crew, I had to show up pretty much every raid so we can get everyone flagged/keyed for progression so alot of repeat raids for me.
it's sad to think that most current gamers dont realize pretty much ALL MMO raid type strategy/lingo originated from those who lead the way in EQ1 because EQ1 was the only real "raid" game that started the MMO genre