Guild Wars 2

Yesterday my guild attempted the raid. We had 15 players turn up at the time we had decided to run it. Leading to the decision that nobody liked: Deciding which guild members would be taken on the raid and which 5 people had to stand aside and wait for someone to drop and free up a spot for them. Worst case would be 19 people showing up and 9 having to wait.

Asking some of the people who were on the raid to go again later in the week so that everyone gets to do the raid isn’t viable, especially if we have a night where only 11 people turn up for the raid. Not without killing one of the other things we do as a guild (eg guild missions). The only nights we don’t have something planned are nights when we don’t have many people playing GW2.

Expecting the people who have to sit out to PUG the raid isn’t an option. PUGs can be bad when everyone knows the content, they only get worse when some people don’t know what they are doing. I’ve yet to see a PUG capable of explaining things anywhere near the detail that raids require. I’m putting myself in the group of people who don’t know what we are doing in raids due to inexperience.
A raid LFG system won’t change that.

But that does lead into a question. Is there any reason why raid groups all have to be exactly x players ?
Is there anything wrong with raids designed to scale between x and 2x-1 players ?

For example, lets use x=10. Is there anything that would stop ANET designing raids to work with 10-19 (inclusive) players in the group ?

Because if raids were designed to do that then, as long as we have at least x players turning up for raid night, we will be able to get everybody into a raid group. If we have x players we run a single minimum size group. If we get anything up to and including 2x-1, we run a larger raid group. If we get 2x, we split into two raid groups.

I know that some people question the quality of the algorithms that GW2 uses to scale open world content. This suggestion doesn’t require ANET to automatically scale the content. ANET could build a raid for 10 people then manually tweak it for groups of 11, 12, etc all the way up to 19.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Is there any reason why raid groups all have to be exactly x players ?
Is there anything wrong with raids designed to scale between x and 2x-1 players ?

For balance purposes. We’ve all seen how balanced events and bosses are when they are scaled either up or down. One particular raid size would be the easiest (Let’s say 23 players) and therefore all PUG raid groups would fill to that size and nothing else.

Nokaru.7831:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Is there any reason why raid groups all have to be exactly x players ?
Is there anything wrong with raids designed to scale between x and 2x-1 players ?

For balance purposes. We’ve all seen how balanced events and bosses are when they are scaled either up or down. One particular raid size would be the easiest (Let’s say 23 players) and therefore all PUG raid groups would fill to that size and nothing else.

I’ve seen how badly they scale when there are huge differences in the number of players.

But how well do they scale when it’s only a difference between 10 and 19 players ?

More importantly, do you prefer excluding guild members or that scaling problem ?

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

But how well do they scale when it’s only a difference between 10 and 19 players ?

More importantly, do you prefer excluding guild members or that scaling problem ?

From your example, that means that there are many more players that can potentially revive one another. That alone would significantly impact balance. This is because the maximum amount of players to revive is a fixed amount. This is just one of many logistical issues that would come up with a scaling raid.

I don’t think it is fair to say that pug groups can’t beat this honestly. I beat VG with a Pug group (only two people knew each other, the rest were all LFG). Admittedly we didn’t have time to start into Gor because people had to leave, but I think the whole thing can be pugged eventually. The problem is that this content isn’t even a week old, so there are a lot of people that don’t know the fights. That’s true of an new “hard” content that is added. Eventually people learn the mechanics, and finding a good pug group gets easier and easier. Those that aren’t really finding raids to be their cup of tea will stop playing them, and only those that want to get better will be left (for better or for worse). Personally I like people’s idea of having difficulty levels (easy, medium, hard) which have the same rewards, but with vastly different rates of awarding them (i.e you get 8 shards on win for easy, get 30 for a win on hard). That way casuals can still enjoy the content they are just going to have to invest a lot more time in order to get the same rewards as those that are actually very skilled players.