Guild Wars 2

Baseleader.4128:

Astralporing.1957:

And yet i have never ran into the problems you describe. And i mean literally never.

Then you’ve been very lucky.

No. i was either choosing the “all welcome” LFGs, or made my own with even better description (putting “no skipping” in LFG made wonders in filtering out any undesirable element). I never had any problems with finding a group.

(note: i am talking about the situation before the HoT: early days of fractals and the peak of dungeon wave. The times where rangers and necros were on the bottom of the pile, and when i was heavily pugging everything. Nowadays i mostly play with guild statics, and pug only rarely)

I know that elitists did exist, and that things you describe did take place. What i am saying though is that all of those things could be easily ignored without it having any impact on your success rate. You can’t do that in raids, because, unfortunately, a lot of the requirements are sensible (even if people often tend to overdo them, and/or not be polite about them as well)

Astralporing.1957:

You can’t do that in raids, because, unfortunately, a lot of the requirements are sensible (even if people often tend to overdo them, and/or not be polite about them as well)

Yeah, that’s why a guild like cmaj can kill Samarog, one of the easier but still not the easiest boss, without chronos or meta composition.

If you set your own hurdles too high of course you will fail.

Vinceman.4572:

Hmm, I don’t know what to say but I was playing dungeons and fractals only for more than over 2 years on a daily basis. Of course there were enough “welcome” lfgs but I doubt they were nearly as often as the ones with requirements, not even close to 50%. If that have been the case, Anet would never have cancelled dungeon development and they would be one of the main parts in the game.

O one of the reasons behind cancelled development was that their “metrics” have shown to them that players are not interested in new dungeons. Why? Because Aetherpath was not popular. And it was a new dungeon they’ve put a lot of effort into. I also remember something about some tension between management and some dungeon team devs that might have resulted in some of them leaving, but that’s just a rumour and i don’t really know how much truth was in it.
Also, from what we’ve heard, dungeon coding was (and still is) a real mess and noone wanted to touch it. Especially after the people that wrote it were gone.

Vinceman.4572:

Astralporing.1957:

You can’t do that in raids, because, unfortunately, a lot of the requirements are sensible (even if people often tend to overdo them, and/or not be polite about them as well)

Yeah, that’s why a guild like cmaj can kill Samarog, one of the easier but still not the easiest boss, without chronos or meta composition.

Higher personal skill level allows for more leeway in strats. You can’t really do that with any player, though – even on Samarog (which is indeed easy). Which is exactly why filtering pugs in raids is, unfortunately, sensible. Just having “level 80” as requirements won’t do.

Remember, that in raids, requirements are put not just because players demand perfection, but simply to increase the chance of success. Which is important, because (unlike in dungeons then), the base success chance with unfiltered crowd is close to zero.

Astralporing.1957:

Remember, that in raids, requirements are put not just because players demand perfection, but simply to increase the chance of success. Which is important, because (unlike in dungeons then), the base success chance with unfiltered crowd is close to zero.

You need to remember that dungeons were doable even by not-level 80 characters. I’m quite sure a group of fresh level 35 characters in masterwork and half-rare gear will have a hard time in Ascalonian Catacombs. Getting a proper build to do Raids is like getting to level 80 and then doing dungeons.

Astralporing.1957:

O one of the reasons behind cancelled development was that their “metrics” have shown to them that players are not interested in new dungeons. Why? Because Aetherpath was not popular. And it was a new dungeon they’ve put a lot of effort into. I also remember something about some tension between management and some dungeon team devs that might have resulted in some of them leaving, but that’s just a rumour and i don’t really know how much truth was in it.
Also, from what we’ve heard, dungeon coding was (and still is) a real mess and noone wanted to touch it. Especially after the people that wrote it were gone.

People were interested but Aetherpath was a disappointment due to various bad implementations:
First of all – an annoying & unnecessary puzzle that wasn’t intuitive. Almost all inexperienced groups disbanded at the oozes. If you were beyond that barrier the rest wasn’t as difficult as that.
The length has also been an issue because without HoT elite specs it took some time for non-meta groups to fight their way through.
The non-skippable cinematics which makes it frustrating to repeat on a daily basis.
And finally the reward in comparison to the length.
Nowadays this path fits way better although the puzzle is still the thing where pugs lose most of the time.

Astralporing.1957:

Higher personal skill level allows for more leeway in strats. You can’t really do that with any player, though – even on Samarog (which is indeed easy). Which is exactly why filtering pugs in raids is, unfortunately, sensible. Just having “level 80” as requirements won’t do.

Remember, that in raids, requirements are put not just because players demand perfection, but simply to increase the chance of success. Which is important, because (unlike in dungeons then), the base success chance with unfiltered crowd is close to zero.

Ermm, you know that cmaj is a music guild, right? Their focus lies on making music with ingame instruments. No offense to them and I’m convinced that there are skillful players in this group like in every other guild around as well but as they have stated in the videos they are not professional raiders or approximately experienced. That’s why I have big respect for their attempts and that they are recording and presenting this to the community! They laugh over themselves, producing funny moments, using non-meta compositions as shown in the latest video and still, yeah albeit this, they still killed several bosses now.
So, if someone thinks he has to raid due to whatever reasons he has to reconsider strategies and maybe accept it with a little less of salt and overall stop pugging if it’s hurting too much. There are many friendly (casual) souls out there that meet for raiding purpose and do other stuff 5-6 evenings a week.

Blaeys.3102:

Sooloo.1364:

I never understood why developers create content just for small segments of the community instead of everyone. This always leads to elitism and exclusion.

It has had a fairly negative impact on the game’s community.

And, even more unfortunate, if you try to bring it up on these forums, all you tend to get is “you’re imagining it – get over it and stop talking” style responses, which only further alienates people from the game mode.

The current implementation of raiding in GW2 needs to change in some pretty basic ways, imo.

All pvp balance is based on about 50 elite players (high end estimate) Why are you complaining about something that low end has a couple thousand players doing regularly?

Vinceman.4572:

Sorry for the double post but I want to share with you the next chapter of elitism in raiding, a real masterpiece of toxicity, ppl blaming and playing against each other without having a single spark of fun:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/6vc2as/a_music_guild_tries_to_raid_part_3/

/s

They are a guild. Not a PuG.
You can easily say that there’s less toxic environment in fractals as well by posting that your guild group is never toxic. :P

It would be more accurate that elitism is everywhere than that raids are somehow less toxic then fractals.

Though entertaining the idea, I think raids are in general less toxic because people set much more solid requirements. Thus it is less likely to form groups where you don’t know that someone is not up to par with your group or rather, the not so good players basically never get to join and are heavily discouraged to join a group that is outside that.

Whereas in fractals anyone and their mother could have the right gear, the right agony and since there people define it alot more through more vague requirements where no one really is excluded, and leads to more mixed skill groups, which tends to lead to more clashes.

This has nothing to do whether players are more toxic in fractals or more toxic in raids. It’s just that the more skilled more toxic players tend to separate themselves with more ridiculous LI requirements, and toxicity only rises up when they think they can help lesser skilled players, for which they don’t have the skill. (You can be able to play the game but be a horrible teacher so to speak)

FrizzFreston.5290:

They are a guild. Not a PuG.

And? I haven’t said anything else and posted that for exact this reason.

It’s common sense that while pugging there is always a high(er) chance of experiencing toxic behaviour than within organized groups. We are debating about the raiding community and I’m just stating that there are ways to avoid elitism, toxic behaviour, selection and exclusion. The first step to achieve that is joining a guild.
If you are not able, not willing to or have other hurdles that hinder you from doing so you have to deal with the pug strat. Since most of these are strangers for us on the internet we know that some of them are bad apples.

My example of cmaj was just demonstrating that raiding hasn’t to do with elitism in the first place because they show it is possible to raid successfully without running meta strats, take too much too seriously and having a lot of fun. And I can tell from own experience with 2 guilds filled with casual players that this is the standard within a static group.

Vinceman.4572:

FrizzFreston.5290:

They are a guild. Not a PuG.

And? I haven’t said anything else and posted that for exact this reason.

It’s common sense that while pugging there is always a high(er) chance of experiencing toxic behaviour than within organized groups. We are debating about the raiding community and I’m just stating that there are ways to avoid elitism, toxic behaviour, selection and exclusion. The first step to achieve that is joining a guild.
If you are not able, not willing to or have other hurdles that hinder you from doing so you have to deal with the pug strat. Since most of these are strangers for us on the internet we know that some of them are bad apples.

My example of cmaj was just demonstrating that raiding hasn’t to do with elitism in the first place because they show it is possible to raid successfully without running meta strats, take too much too seriously and having a lot of fun. And I can tell from own experience with 2 guilds filled with casual players that this is the standard within a static group.

It was more of a tongue-in-cheek remark than some sort of thought out counter argument. Hence the smiley, if you only fully quoted it….

I wouldn’t base your anecdotal situation as the standard though. There are also alot of more exclusinary “elitist” groups as well. But yeah, pointing out that there are many groups who aren’t as such is also a good idea.

And on the other hand I haven’t met that much toxic behaviour within PuG groups myself. Just by avoiding those that have too much LI requirement than makes sense. In fact with some groups when you’re honest about your LI even if you don’t meet the requirement the reaction usually is, “Ah it doesn’t matter that much” as well.

Vinceman.4572:

People were interested but Aetherpath was a disappointment due to various bad implementations:

Yes, we know that. Anet didn’t. If before the whole Aetherpath debacle i had any doubt about Anet’s ability to interpret their “metrics” correctly, they were dispelled then. This explanation, and explanation behind it replacing forward up path (“we removed it because noone was running it”: which was true, almost noone did the path, because Anet left the final encounter hopelessly bugged for over half a year) have been really eye-opening.
At the time they were really disappointed in the community, that asked for dungeons but didn’t want to run their great and wonderful new shiny creation. And they really thought that it means making new dungeons is useless, because noone is going to appreciate them.

Vinceman.4572:

Ermm, you know that cmaj is a music guild, right?

True. They are still a group of game veterans whose individual skill is probably above average. Moreover, they are a guild of good friends that seem to trust each other, know each other’s skill levels, play with each other often, are on a voice chat, and are using tools like damage meters. What’s more, they are seemingly perfectly okay with failing. It’s completely different situation compared to pugs.

Vinceman.4572:

My example of cmaj was just demonstrating that raiding hasn’t to do with elitism in the first place because they show it is possible to raid successfully without running meta strats, take too much too seriously and having a lot of fun.

Many of the pug groups would likely be able to do so, if they were okay with failing countless times first. Which they aren’t.

FrizzFreston.5290:

There are also alot of more exclusinary “elitist” groups as well.

Of course, nobody denied that but as non-toxic player you won’t even get access to such static groups most likely by failing to meet their requirements at first.

FrizzFreston.5290:

And on the other hand I haven’t met that much toxic behaviour within PuG groups myself. Just by avoiding those that have too much LI requirement than makes sense. In fact with some groups when you’re honest about your LI even if you don’t meet the requirement the reaction usually is, “Ah it doesn’t matter that much” as well.

Tell that to Astralporing and others, not to me. I’m not pretending the LFG is a dark pool of elitists. I personally have made some really good experience with it, only a few annyoing ones but as somebody with healthy self-confidence you wish such individuals a nice day and move on a.k.a. leave the group and look for another one.

Astralporing.1957:

True. They are still a group of game veterans whose individual skill is probably above average. Moreover, they are a guild of good friends that seem to trust each other, know each other’s skill levels, play with each other often, are on a voice chat, and are using tools like damage meters. What’s more, they are seemingly perfectly okay with failing. It’s completely different situation compared to pugs.

It seems you don’t have much clue about dmg meters or you haven’t watched the videos completely.
And what is thing about to be a veteran? It’s just an advantage like you have in every game around that exist in the world compared to a beginner. Except some gambling stuff.
As a non-veteran you are still not excluded from joining a raiding guild but I think everyone agrees that it’s not very useful to get into the game and start raiding immediately. The same goes for dungeons, fractals or even running around on lvl 80 maps, especially the HoT maps.
Nothing of the above mentioned things are inaccessible or hard to achieve if you have some fundamental social skills.
The recommendation for new players playing GW2 on reddit and in these forums is to join a guild. I don’t see why that should be different to raids, especially for raids because they are endgame content

Astralporing.1957:

Many of the pug groups would likely be able to do so, if they were okay with failing countless times first. Which they aren’t.

And that’s why you don’t join pugs that explicitly state that they are training or that one should bring patience and not leave after some fails.