Guild Wars 2

I recently bumped into a video on youtube where someone stated that raids are actually bad for any MMO (including WoW). At first I was quite surprised, but then I got his point.

For the majority of people the actual fun when playing an MMO doesn’t come from end-game. It’s about progression, diving into a world where there is always something new to explore and meaningful things to do. It’s about the journey and not the destination.

Guild Wars 2 got this very right at launch but instead of improving the actual MMO (VR) aspect they listened to a minority of (very vocal) people and went to destroy what they have created.

Imagine for a moment we had an instant level 80 raid lobby (similar to HotM) where you would start out in fully ascended gear with whatever stat combination you desire and start your raid progression. Why don’t we have this? Because it would be too obvious how little content raids actually add to the game.

This game does not need end-game content that forces you to replay old content over and over again to gear up for a specific role in a raid. It needs new content that we are happy to explore without having a particular destination in mind.

Let the journey continue!

I have no problem with raids (long as they never required or become the only new PvE content) its only bad imo if it becomes the main/only way to progress.

Why not both? Some like them, some are indifferent, others are annoyed that they don’t have the opportunity to atleast get into the raid, probably down to a few factors like their guild or ridiculous lfrg requirements that people post.
The difference with games like WoW is that raids and maybe Arenas are the determined end game with the gear grind that comes with it.

With GW2 the raid isn’t necessary to play any content of the game, since the best gear is not exclusive to it. However, I think it’s a bad move to hold off on Living Story and world events for so long. At the moment, there’s not a lot of new content for casual players right now and people are getting bored. Yes we can play in the 4 new areas still, can go through the HoT story again. Can do fractals, but because there is no treadmill like in WoW, 4 months since HoT release is a long time Without any filler content. Wows treadmill gives their players something to do. I do not want this for gw2, I want the non raiders to have something to do.
Currently I’ve been back into PvP, first time of being in HoTM permanently for over a year, for the league since there’s not much in PvE that I want to do/get right now.

“Destroy what they created” ? No way. You farmed the pve environment for people who wanted to go higher in fractals, you farmed pve for crafting a legendary, you farmed dungeons for the gear collection. And I am sorry but you get your progression by discovering hot maps and by running the events that take part in these zones. Short answer : Anet has always provided end game content that incentivized you to replay old content and this even more true with precursor crafting. In the end I think you just don’t like that it became “challenging”. And you are not forced to replay content, to gear up, so that you become viable in raids.

The video is by Fevir, right?

Are raids bad for a game?

Mostly yes.
*Yes because I find the concept of herding 9 other people into a fixed schedule as if they were a sports club ridiculous for a computer game where not everyone wants to play the same sport.
*Yes because they are designed for a minority. Does not make much sense in my eyes.
*Yes because they divide people into raiders and non raiders.
*Yes because they turn into farm areas over time and people buy their way in, making any bragging rights invalid despite not having a gear treadmill in games like GW2.
*Yes because it encourages people to accept only the build that is in instead of a viable one that is not.

And a little bit of no.
No because there are people liking them.
No because a game can allow itself the luxury to be a little harder here and there.

Raids themselves are fine, it really just depends if they are forced on you.
Coming from FF14 and sitting there forever or changing your real-life shedules just to meet the guys to do some raid/dungeon for the 192x time in order to progress a little is a terrible idea.

In GW2 however I sometimes log on for 30 minutes. Not because the game is bad and I want to leave ASAP or for the boni you get from loggin in, but just for the sake of being there and soak up some weird chat of my guild.

So, if they are there as an option, why would you think they could be bad? If they are forced on you, they still would not be “bad” per se, but a junk of the community might be left out – the solo players.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The video is by Fevir, right?

It was actually https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MNFWhCw8dg
But the message is very similar.

flog.3485:

“Destroy what they created” ? No way. You farmed the pve environment for people who wanted to go higher in fractals, you farmed pve for crafting a legendary, you farmed dungeons for the gear collection. And I am sorry but you get your progression by discovering hot maps and by running the events that take part in these zones. Short answer : Anet has always provided end game content that incentivized you to replay old content and this even more true with precursor crafting. In the end I think you just don’t like that it became “challenging”. And you are not forced to replay content, to gear up, so that you become viable in raids.

• I never farmed for a legendary and never will. I find farming to be boring and no fun. I prefer to have fun in my spare time.
• I never farmed dungeons. I did all dungeon stories to unlock the reward tracks in PvP. and I’m doing the PvP dailies which grant decent progress in the reward track so I get my hands on gear/skins that I like. I still have to do a lot dungeon paths and I’m looking forward to it, because they are actually fun.
• HoT has only 4 (actually only 3 that are freely explorable) maps
• I took a break from GW2 when I got bored at some point and played something else. I returned shortly before HoT in expectation of a lot of new explorable content.
• I have characters of all professions at 80 and in exotic gear, though I suck at most classes apart from probably Necromancer, Guardian and Ranger
• I like challenges. Especially when it means that I have to learn something new.

Raids are a mixed bag. What people who don’t like them may not realize is raids themselves are a form of progression for people who like to raid.

I don’t personally like raids and though my guild started raiding a couple of weeks ago, I suspect we’ll never get past the Vale Guardian. I don’t like banging my head against a wall for hours on end, because I don’t generally find it fun.

My biggest objection is when specific loot or story is locked behind raids and the only way to experience them is to invest time and energy that I’d rather invest elsewhere.

And yes, I know the argument if you want the loot, do the time. But if the loot is something I want, and the time isn’t worth the loot, then I see a bunch of things I won’t have fun attaining after hours of play. Sure I want them, but I also want to have fun playing the game.

So I either get them and don’t have fun for hours on end, or I don’t get them and eventually there’ll be enough of them where I’ll think it’s not worth playing anymore, because there’s too much stuff out of my reach.

Neither option particularly appeals to me.

Raids currently employ 6 of the 300 devs at Anet, or 2% of their work force. They are one of the best investments in the game right now. If you want to talk about waste and bad for the game look at esports or WvW, which consume huge amounts of resources and generate almost nothing in return but wastes of money.

Overall I think they are a good thing, but it often depends on the game or how they are implemented. I was uncertain they were needed with GW2 since it does the mass open world style so well, that instanced raids seem to constrict it. However, open world rarely gives the same sense of challenging mechanics to test skills against and so far, the devs have done really well to keep them unobtrusive to the rest of the game.

Lotro had spectacular raids in the early days before it all rolled off the hill. Alrhough it gated your gear progression, it had a mature and welcoming community and undeniably fun and well designed raids.

Then you look at funcom mmo raids and see how it can all go wrong and it encourages a communal split between so called elites vs casuals. TSW will never now recover from this, despite their admirable attempts to universalise currencies, so that all content can gain gear, with raids giving the best chance.

GW1 showed that this kind of content can be beneficial to the game, by being rewarding, challenging, yet never essential. GW2s raids have done a pretty decent job of emulating this approach. The community chasm at the moment is a bit concerning, but not damaging at least. As long as things like dps meters and inspections are kept out the game, at least officially, things will likely be fine I think.

Raids are bad for Games/Guild Wars 2:

1) When other content gets completely destroyed for them like here Dungeons out of the excuse, that theres no team for that content to work on them, when its content, that the Fractal/Raid Teams easily could take over together as one bigger End Content Team.

2) When the Raid Content is so badly designed that only specific classes are allowed to participate in them due to stupid pointless DPS Race Mechanics that force people to go with only the meta, that is the most effective for DPS, rather than what is the most fun and rewarding for everyone

3) When they are by their design absolutely nothing else, than the content that has been extra destroyed for them to implement them.
In example: Just slay a few bosses on your path to its end. Loot your rewards, rinse and repeat, just with the difference you have in Raids a time gate …

4) When they are the only content of the game to receive certain useful quality of Life items – in this case legendary armors. Raids absolutely shouldnt be the only way to get Legendary Armors, as logn as that stays, will be Raids bad content…
They should provide unique legendary armor skins, but absolutely not be the only way to obtain legendary armors. There needs to be at least 1 other way to obtain them in a different way, be it through Achievement Points or other ways, like say getting to 50k AP and receive as reward a legendary armor set with its own unique design, because that is certainly for sure an amount of AP worth it to get rewarded something like that, because it takes a hell alot of time and commitment to this game to ever reach so much AP ….
In fact I think the radiant/hell stuff from the Ap shouldnt be just skins, they should be redesigned and reworked as equipment set, that grows with your AP progression, that once you have a set complet, you can receive a full ascended set of it to start a collection to turn these armor setse into legendary forms.
It isnt about liking the skins, but more of the mechanic of havign an alternative way to get the legendary mechanic of gettign equipment where you can exchange stats out as you like out of conmbat, which is the massive quality of life thing, that shouldn’t be barricaded behind Raids only …

5) When they provide relevant story tidbits thats gated behind Raids.
In my opinion the worst decision as long there isn’t also in the near future some kind of “Raid Practice Mode” implemented, for those people, that want to make Raids just only for the Achievements/Story/Fun and to get a way, where you can just learn first as raid newbie the basics, before you go for the real harder normal dungeon version that can have then if it must be that DPS race, but better woudl be some kind of Speed Clear Mode for that aside for just those peopel, that like the challenge and want to compete with others on leaderboard, who can do the raids as the fastest group to get at the end of the day/month maybe some kind of extra reward.

6) When they lock out map exploration space and huge parts of the world maps are only designed for them.
Raids are better off being like Dungeons Instances, that you enter.
That way would be world map space saved up for actually more useful open world persistent maps, that can be part of the living story.
If thats not possible now anymore, then it would be nice of Anet if they could add to the raid maps for normal players also some kind of “Exploration Version” or integrate these maps maybe somehow into the upcoming personal/living story content, so that we can visit these places also, even if not playing Raids… and maybe get this way also some parts of the story as side notes or somehow else, as if we would have played raids, for those that dislike raids so much, that they never would play them, but also dont want to miss out the story parts in these areas.

7) When they are so designed, that certain classes of the game play no role for them, because they provide absolutely nothing useful for the group for why you would want to take Class X with you.
Something, that could be solved with Class Specific Raid Masteries to give each class something nice and useful, for why you would want to take them with you, like for example Thieves making it possible for the Group that the Raid will be more rewarding, due to Thieves and their Raid Masteries becoming able to find on the way alot more hidden treasures, to circumvent deadly traps that would stop you otherwise from finding alot more treasures on the way and so on.

8.) When designing their content takes up a ton times more time/ressources and other efforts, than working actually on existing content like Fractals/Dungeons and other forms of game content, that was lackign since Game Release (WvW, PvP …)

If a Raid Design ever takes so much time and ressources, that you could have made in that same time like way more new Dungeons/Fractals for example, then this is bad.

Short answer: they are good, no, excellent, for MMOs

Unfortunately we live in a time where people want the rewards handed to them, without even learning to play their own characters. We live in a time where people find HoT mobs hard to deal with (LOL). We live in a time where people find anything that requires more than an auto-attack and anything that they can’t do while watching a series on their second monitor as bad.

Games need to improve, both for the devs and the players. And the only way to improve it to release more challenging content, challenging for both the developers and the players, otherwise games get stagnant and boring.

Raids are an excellent answer to the entitled generation as it’s usually content that is challenging enough to promote a game’s own mechanics. To make the entire game experience better. They are also instanced, so the players who want to do afk-content can go do that if they want and just ignore them, but players who want to use their brains when playing a game can do just that.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Raids currently employ 6 of the 300 devs at Anet, or 2% of their work force. They are one of the best investments in the game right now. If you want to talk about waste and bad for the game look at esports or WvW, which consume huge amounts of resources and generate almost nothing in return but wastes of money.

You are the first one in this thread using the word “waste”.
It’s actually a very clever use of resources on ANet’s part when the goal is to produce as much time spend in game with as little new content being added.

Hence I brought up the “raid lobby” idea to illustrates this.

Raids are the cancer of MMOs.

They are content created for a small minority that feels entitled to get always
better, more exclusive stuff than everyone else, just because they do raids.

And with every new raid the power creep between raiders and non raiders
gets bigger and bigger. (this point ofc is not directly related to GW2)

Also raids are soo much about drama. The drama of people trying to organize
raids and all the drama in our guild also mostly killed it.

Oh and yes .. seeing all the great stuff that raiders get and knowing you will never
ever get, makes some people frustrated after some time and makes them leave the
game. The announcement of legendary armor raid-only was already one of the
last nails in the coffin for me.

Generally speaking raids are bad for MMOs.

They oppose player choice and diversity for the most part. You will never see a Settler’s warrior in one not because it’s impractical (player-side) but because it’s impossible (developer-side) to complete.

I’m fine with raids myself. The biggest problem with raids in GW2 stems mostly from the fact that GW2 wasn’t built to handle raids. Having to get into squads to work around the party limit, no designated area or LFG system or Queue that would handle the difficulty of organizing a raid. For a loose and free player such as I, the inability to group together for a raid like that is quite problematic.

Second small issue is that certain ascended gear sets (viper) have their trinkets gated behind the raid.

I eventually watched the whole video. I suppose the biggest problem wasn’t that raids were bad for WoW, insomuch as it is that WoW was eventually made to be basically raiding and nothing else. As the game was expanded, raids kept being pushed further and further. Raids were the high level thing to do, so the game became much more focused on raiding content as a whole. The game was designed in such a way that raiding became as convenient as possible, constantly making everything in the game obsolete. This left the rest of the “World” of Warcraft barren and useless.

Having large member multiplayer content isn’t bad in any sense. It is bad when the entire game becomes just that. So long as Anet continues to expand the rest of the game, it shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

Since anything anyone can offer is simply their opinion on the matter, I will add mine.

I like raids. Not enough that I’d go out of my way to find an organized group and have to do them every week, but I know enough people in the game to have been offered a spot and we do that every week now.

For me the fun comes from playing as a group, overcoming a challenge together, where everything makes and breaks with everyone’s participation. Fails aren’t even an issue as long as I get the impression everybody gave their best (it only becomes an issue when people obviously don’t care or want to improve on the mistakes). Added with some form of progression (as little as it may be in GW2).

Most of the game doesn’t offer that. Dungeons can/could be soloed or duoed unless the mechanics specifically forced you to bring more people, Fractals can be done with party members dead on the floor, they just take longer, open world events are on a scope at which I cannot influence who is playing besides me and making the event fail because all they do is click their auto once and then go AFK.

Raids offer instanced content with a certain difficulty that makes the group come together and (hopefully) improve in the long run. I know that our group has improved significantly over the last 2 months, both in terms of learning the content (obviously) but also in terms of learning their class properly.

The drama that ensues around the raids is player or rather personmade, that has nothing to do with raids (but it can show you which people need some coaching on social interactions).

All that being said, the rewards in GW2 raids are abysmal. The shard cap is so low that it takes forever to get rewards (most of which are trash and weirdly adjusted, why would I raid for 3 weeks to buy one Mini? But I could also raid 3 weeks and get an ascended weapon instead :O ), at the same time it’s so high that a clear of the wing doesn’t even get you there (read: boss kills need to give more, or just add a bunch for killing Sabetha i.e. clearing). Some events like the ghosts past the VG just drag on forever for no real reason other than stretching game time, which seems to be in line with ANet’s philosophy of ‘have a great idea, implement it poorly’.

But overall I like raids in GW2.

it is subjective
it really all depends on the overall game design

SkyShroud.2865:

it is subjective
it really all depends on the overall game design

In what game design are raids good for games? Curious.

Raids are probably bad for GW2. Everything about them reminds me of Arah, that one dungeon relatively few players could beat successfully and even fewer actually enjoyed. Consistent gear and achievement checks (remember when groups only took people who had the ‘Dungeon Master’ title and Arah gear), and or course all the belligerence, frustration and impatience that comes bundled with challenging encounters.

I don’t think this content was worth creating an entirely new game mode for, especially since the implementation was a bit half-kittened. Would much rather have had this as the very top tier of fractals.

DGraves.3720:

SkyShroud.2865:

it is subjective
it really all depends on the overall game design

In what game design are raids good for games? Curious.

In games like Wildstar maybe where everybody knows from the start that
the game is all about raids

On the other hand .. how can raiders show off their stuff if everyone else
is also a raider and has maybe the same .. so … no .. even that isn’t really good.

DGraves.3720:

SkyShroud.2865:

it is subjective
it really all depends on the overall game design

In what game design are raids good for games? Curious.

In any game design that want to have interesting mechanics and encounters.

maddoctor.2738:

DGraves.3720:

SkyShroud.2865:

it is subjective
it really all depends on the overall game design

In what game design are raids good for games? Curious.

In any game design that want to have interesting mechanics and encounters.

Aye. A lot of people actually enjoy the challenge of raids and are sick of “casual” content.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Raids currently employ 6 of the 300 devs at Anet, or 2% of their work force.

I think it’s not correct, there is the devs who works on next raid expac2, and the graphics designer who do the decoration and design of the creatures in the raid and the server devs who instantiate the raid ect ect, i think the 6 you mentionned are only in charge of mechanics and bug fixes.
I think raid is bad for gw2 because is too much time consuming for both players and devs and this work is for a minority of elitist players. And don’t forget guild wars 2 can be named fashion wars 2, and locking skin behind raid will certainly make lose interest of some players in the game which claimed to be casual.

Op has written a good summary of what i think and i’m not certainly the only one thinking it:

xlion.3065:

Guild Wars 2 got this very right at launch but instead of improving the actual MMO (VR) aspect they listened to a minority of (very vocal) people and went to destroy what they have created.

!

I came from Wow, start gw2 like 3 months after the release and i left because of the raids which were too much time consumming, and to do it you have to join military guilds but before prove you are worth to join the guild like a job interview and actually in guild wars 2 lot of people ask you to have 20+ legendary insight to do the content which make it hard for the first timers .

I do not think it is a coincidence that raiding and the end of regular content drops came at roughly the same time in GW2. The devs switched their end game philosophy to the same one they have seen sustain other MMOs, most notably WOW.

The problem is, this game isn’t WOW. In fact, a lot of the early players came here to get away from that kind of end game environment.

Do I think raids themselves are bad for a game? Not in a vacuum, no I do not. However, the accompanying change in game design/end game philosophy that invariably comes with them (and we are seeing first hand right now) is VERY BAD for the game and something I hope they turn away from sooner rather than later.

I’m mainly playing WvW and that game mode relays on PvE gear. Out of that perspective I think it is bad for my game play because it will lock gear behind a game mode I’m not doing.
Raids always start the gear tread mill and that is simply bad for any MMO.

Yes raids are bad if the MMO in case is not WoW.

Raids are done only a small percentage of the population, and even they get bored of them after a while.

They also eat a lot of resources to develope which is away from other parts of the game that are actually played by more people. We are seeing that happening already. Just new raid bosses and wings coming and other parts of the game have not reecived pretty much anything.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The video is by Fevir, right?

That was an awful video by that guy lol. " Im going to put aside made up numbers and facts and instead tell you stories that you can relate too" great way to explain why raids were bad by aiming for a like mind bias XDDDD

Raids are great for mmos ( coming from a player thats never played wow).

They provide instanced difficulty for players that wish for harder content- I don’t know about thest rest of you but I enjoy playing game on hard/extreme difficulty on first playthrough…..its a total waste of a game to play on very easy mode.

Becuase its instanced it does not force the rest of the population to do the content – don’t want to do it…..then don’t do it ( plenty of players who have never pvp/wvw). You can run around silverwaste farming your hearts out.

Anet has carebeared too much for the casual players in order to prevent hurting of their feels. Any time this community meets ANY sort of resistance at least 90% of the players will fold and fall out look at marionette, tirple trouble, even teq after its update and before strategy was devised by specific guilds.

Biggest complaints against raids:

time consuming – because many players are spending 4+ hours mindlessly farming 30 mins setup is unacceptable >_>

Gear focused content – unrealistic fear that future content will require raid gear …..regular pve content has still yet to reach ascended gear requirement for starters, and two rewards are mostly going to be comsetic if you are new to the gw scene aka 0 effect on stats

maddoctor.2738:

DGraves.3720:

SkyShroud.2865:

it is subjective
it really all depends on the overall game design

In what game design are raids good for games? Curious.

In any game design that want to have interesting mechanics and encounters.

Why should that be specifically for raids though? I don’t disagree with you, just curious why raids need to be the things to bring this to the table.

I am thinking world bosses would be better for that.

I’ve come to the realisation I’m more of a sandbox MMO fan rather than a themepark.

I think raids are fine to have in MMOs. The problem is when they become the sole focus of playing the game. An MMO should have a good variety of things to do to keep players busy, entertained and having fun. But players should never feel forced to complete any content within a specified time constraint.

In other words, game developers should remember that variety is the spice of life and it’s not a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket.

Bad. Very, very bad.

xlion.3065:

I recently bumped into a video on youtube where someone stated that raids are actually bad for any MMO (including WoW). At first I was quite surprised, but then I got his point.

For the majority of people the actual fun when playing an MMO doesn’t come from end-game. It’s about progression, diving into a world where there is always something new to explore and meaningful things to do. It’s about the journey and not the destination.

Guild Wars 2 got this very right at launch but instead of improving the actual MMO (VR) aspect they listened to a minority of (very vocal) people and went to destroy what they have created.

Imagine for a moment we had an instant level 80 raid lobby (similar to HotM) where you would start out in fully ascended gear with whatever stat combination you desire and start your raid progression. Why don’t we have this? Because it would be too obvious how little content raids actually add to the game.

This game does not need end-game content that forces you to replay old content over and over again to gear up for a specific role in a raid. It needs new content that we are happy to explore without having a particular destination in mind.

Let the journey continue!

Raids, if done right, can be very good. A positive goal for the playerbase. However, in my 19 years of playing MMORPGs (started in 1997) I have yet to find a single one of them that has done raids right.

The closest ones I have come across were Darkness Falls in DAOC and the most recent Incursions in Eve Online.

The things that GW2 has done right with its raids are the rewards, unique gear progression but without statistical power creep. Another words, you don’t get anything better then ascended stats gear, and there are other ways to acquire the said gear in the game outside of raids. So from this perspective, and its a HUGE thing done right vs other MMORPGs, these raids are good.

The bad here on the other hand is something that other MMORPGs do much better then this game. That is create raids to be reliant on a far wider variety of builds and strategies instead of just DPS. This is where this game fails and what causes player exclusion here.

I would describe myself as a mid range (average skill) all around player. I have multiple gear sets and like to switch them up and play different playstyles. Playing a single focused role, makes the content very boring for me, it becomes a “grind like” chore instead of being fun, consequently, causing me to quit raids. And I am not the only one, there are plenty others like myself.

And then you have the people who don’t like DPS roles at all, but prefer playing support, tanks, etc. Due to the minimal need for that in GW2 raids, that segment of playerbase is basically completely excluded from the content. This is what causes the biggest problems here.

If a player is casual in GW2, then he / she may take 6 or 9 or 12 months to be ready for raids (at least half ascended, foods, masteries, etc.) but still get there. However, if that player is support or bunker and the 1 supportish or tankish role in a raid is filled, then he or she is completely locked out of the content and no amount of preparing or getting ready will help him or her in joining the raid.

This, is the fail of GW2 raids. They simply exclude too many of those people, while leaving others already bored.

What is left is indeed a super vocal, really low DPS based, often very elitist minority, which is what you see currently in the LFG tool in the game and which becomes apparent once you join a group.

echo.2053:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The video is by Fevir, right?

That was an awful video by that guy lol. " Im going to put aside made up numbers and facts and instead tell you stories that you can relate too" great way to explain why raids were bad by aiming for a like mind bias XDDDD

Raids are great for mmos ( coming from a player thats never played wow).

They provide instanced difficulty for players that wish for harder content- I don’t know about thest rest of you but I enjoy playing game on hard/extreme difficulty on first playthrough…..its a total waste of a game to play on very easy mode.

Becuase its instanced it does not force the rest of the population to do the content – don’t want to do it…..then don’t do it ( plenty of players who have never pvp/wvw). You can run around silverwaste farming your hearts out.

Anet has carebeared too much for the casual players in order to prevent hurting of their feels. Any time this community meets ANY sort of resistance at least 90% of the players will fold and fall out look at marionette, tirple trouble, even teq after its update and before strategy was devised by specific guilds.

Biggest complaints against raids:

time consuming – because many players are spending 4+ hours mindlessly farming 30 mins setup is unacceptable >_>

Gear focused content – unrealistic fear that future content will require raid gear …..regular pve content has still yet to reach ascended gear requirement for starters, and two rewards are mostly going to be comsetic if you are new to the gw scene aka 0 effect on stats

You forgot WvW game mode and players. We do require PvE gear.

Avarice.2791:

Challenging yourself in a PvE environment is bad? Pushing your class to its maximum potential? Can’t we just have one non-casual aspect in this game? Raiding isn’t even that hard in this game. It’s definately not as punishing as mythic WoW raiding. I’m sure old content will be nerfed to the floor giving people who really don’t put a lot of thought into this game a chance to see all the content. Are we talking legendary armor here? Is this why people are freaking out? Well, if legendary armor has the same weight as legendary weapons then there is really no advantage…grab some ascended sets. Those are too out of reach? Go farm SW for a few hours.

Soo tired of these “1” spammers and open world heroes complaining.

How exactly does one measure the “maximum potential” of a class? Is it in damage numbers alone? The issue with things comparing this game to other games is the distinct lack of a direct implementation of holy trinity; other games have the white mage, the bruiser, and the support specialist so when we measure their potential we measure it based on their role but their role is predetermined.

In this game that is not true.

So what exactly is truly measureable? Theoretically you should be able to run a raid with 10 elementalists just as you would with 10 warriors just with division of labor on managing the aspects of combat. That would not be true in other games where you need all three parts in all separate predetermined classes.

You ask an interesting question I will ponder on myself. “What is the max potential of a class?”

Aezyr.5304:

echo.2053:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The video is by Fevir, right?

That was an awful video by that guy lol. " Im going to put aside made up numbers and facts and instead tell you stories that you can relate too" great way to explain why raids were bad by aiming for a like mind bias XDDDD

Raids are great for mmos ( coming from a player thats never played wow).

They provide instanced difficulty for players that wish for harder content- I don’t know about thest rest of you but I enjoy playing game on hard/extreme difficulty on first playthrough…..its a total waste of a game to play on very easy mode.

Becuase its instanced it does not force the rest of the population to do the content – don’t want to do it…..then don’t do it ( plenty of players who have never pvp/wvw). You can run around silverwaste farming your hearts out.

Anet has carebeared too much for the casual players in order to prevent hurting of their feels. Any time this community meets ANY sort of resistance at least 90% of the players will fold and fall out look at marionette, tirple trouble, even teq after its update and before strategy was devised by specific guilds.

Biggest complaints against raids:

time consuming – because many players are spending 4+ hours mindlessly farming 30 mins setup is unacceptable >_>

Gear focused content – unrealistic fear that future content will require raid gear …..regular pve content has still yet to reach ascended gear requirement for starters, and two rewards are mostly going to be comsetic if you are new to the gw scene aka 0 effect on stats

You forgot WvW game mode and players. We do require PvE gear.

Everyone has forgotten about that mode since that unnecessary update for starters, for the majority of players in wvw they moment they became separated from their zerg- gear became irrelevant, lastly in a manner much like infusions but unlike fractals have actual time spent improving mechanics

actually forgot a complaint:

Resources will be taken away from regular maps….. – just rehash silverwaste and they’ll be good for another 8+ months

DGraves.3720:

maddoctor.2738:

DGraves.3720:

SkyShroud.2865:

it is subjective
it really all depends on the overall game design

In what game design are raids good for games? Curious.

In any game design that want to have interesting mechanics and encounters.

Why should that be specifically for raids though? I don’t disagree with you, just curious why raids need to be the things to bring this to the table.

I am thinking world bosses would be better for that.

I’m not saying only raids specifically can have good mechanics and encounters. They could even make open world maps with more interesting mechanics and mobs but then see what happened with HoT. There are players who find HoT mobs challenging and hard… Can’t even kill a Mordrem Sniper or a Smokescale and ask for nerfs.

We can only imagine what kind of nerfs are coming in the near future of HoT, fortunately I had my fun in HoT open world and once their “nerfs” come and if they are bad enough I’ll stop playing in the open world and just play Raids and Fractals. And now some people want even those nerfed, or taken away…

Raids are “needed” to have interesting mechanics and encounters that won’t be nerfed as easily as any other type of content. Now if they start nerfing even Raids to make them “accessible” then there is no point in having Raids at all.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Raids currently employ 6 of the 300 devs at Anet, or 2% of their work force. They are one of the best investments in the game right now. If you want to talk about waste and bad for the game look at esports or WvW, which consume huge amounts of resources and generate almost nothing in return but wastes of money.

The core team that works on raids is 5-6 people, with support as required. Think about all the components in the raid: art, sound, story/lore, animation, encounter design, reward system, programming, testing, etc etc. I know you are just one of many who are currenly and will likely continue to misquote the reddit ama, but its far from 6 people = raid. There most certainly was numerous hours of input from various extended team members to create the raid.

IMO raids wings are some pretty polished content, and a sign that Anet is learning from what worked and what didn’t in past content. My issue with raids, primarily stems from the fact is that its raids or nothing and it has been for months. The feeling of nothing to do has been cranked to 11 for a lot of veteran players as we all waited for nearly one year with zero content to get to HoT release only to find that is was very light on content.

From a sustainable and persistent game perspective I don’t think raids are the way to go. Out of the box they are gonna be polarizing as they are challenging content, but its more to it than just that. They are going to be inaccessible to a good portion of players because they need to get a ‘good and dedicated group’ to be able to do them. For example in one of my guilds there isn’t enough dedicated players to quite make two 10 man raid groups, so what happens is and has happened is a pretty consistent set of 10 players do the raid and then the other 6-7 are stuck trying to get some of the 10-group to re-run it to fill the slots OR trying to join or pickup pugs. So to me raid wings containing story related to the next LS season, and being the path to acquire legendary armor doesn’t sit well. Raid specific skins, and titles? That’s fine IMO. Blocking players from BiS gear and story content (as sparse as it is), not fine. That said Anet has to keep those filth F2P players segregated until they pay-up, which only leaves game space to deliver the ‘new’ stuff in a couple of new silverwaste maps and a raid wing – so I guess this isn’t something that’ll change anytime soon

maddoctor.2738:

DGraves.3720:

maddoctor.2738:

DGraves.3720:

SkyShroud.2865:

it is subjective
it really all depends on the overall game design

In what game design are raids good for games? Curious.

In any game design that want to have interesting mechanics and encounters.

Why should that be specifically for raids though? I don’t disagree with you, just curious why raids need to be the things to bring this to the table.

I am thinking world bosses would be better for that.

I’m not saying only raids specifically can have good mechanics and encounters. They could even make open world maps with more interesting mechanics and mobs but then see what happened with HoT. There are players who find HoT mobs challenging and hard… Can’t even kill a Mordrem Sniper or a Smokescale and ask for nerfs.

We can only imagine what kind of nerfs are coming in the near future of HoT, fortunately I had my fun in HoT open world and once their “nerfs” come and if they are bad enough I’ll stop playing in the open world and just play Raids and Fractals. And now some people want even those nerfed, or taken away…

Raids are “needed” to have interesting mechanics and encounters that won’t be nerfed as easily as any other type of content. Now if they start nerfing even Raids to make them “accessible” then there is no point in having Raids at all.

Please stop derailing the topic and make it a discussion about “HoT ist too hard” and “players are entitled and want everything on a silver platter”

maddoctor.2738:

I’m not saying only raids specifically can have good mechanics and encounters. They could even make open world maps with more interesting mechanics and mobs but then see what happened with HoT. There are players who find HoT mobs challenging and hard… Can’t even kill a Mordrem Sniper or a Smokescale and ask for nerfs.

I disagree with some of this. Sure Anet could go and give the existing content additional passes and polish, but its unlikely not because encounters become to hard, but that it’s not going to bring in more revenue. The core game is pretty good as is, and further polish is largely only going to benefit F2P players. For example if Anet made your favourite dungeon path mobs more challenging, with better AI or even new attacks/mechanics you are still going to skip all the mandatory encounters and stack+dps to melt the bosses in seconds.

The second and more general design criteria is that the expac content has to be strictly superior to the core because F2P (and existing by to play players) need to be herded towards purchasing the expansion. So the core will largely sty as is in terms of polish and fixes and nerfed rewards because it is a safer business route than gambling entirely on that players will upgrade because the new expansion is fun.

xlion.3065:

maddoctor.2738:

DGraves.3720:

maddoctor.2738:

DGraves.3720:

SkyShroud.2865:

it is subjective
it really all depends on the overall game design

In what game design are raids good for games? Curious.

In any game design that want to have interesting mechanics and encounters.

Why should that be specifically for raids though? I don’t disagree with you, just curious why raids need to be the things to bring this to the table.

I am thinking world bosses would be better for that.

I’m not saying only raids specifically can have good mechanics and encounters. They could even make open world maps with more interesting mechanics and mobs but then see what happened with HoT. There are players who find HoT mobs challenging and hard… Can’t even kill a Mordrem Sniper or a Smokescale and ask for nerfs.

We can only imagine what kind of nerfs are coming in the near future of HoT, fortunately I had my fun in HoT open world and once their “nerfs” come and if they are bad enough I’ll stop playing in the open world and just play Raids and Fractals. And now some people want even those nerfed, or taken away…

Raids are “needed” to have interesting mechanics and encounters that won’t be nerfed as easily as any other type of content. Now if they start nerfing even Raids to make them “accessible” then there is no point in having Raids at all.

Please stop derailing the topic and make it a discussion about “HoT ist too hard” and “players are entitled and want everything on a silver platter”

I’m not derailing anything. I’m saying why Raids should exist which is the topic of the thread. You don’t want an explanation but just a “yes or no”?

Main problem with raids is that it takes so much dev resources to create, yet it’s usually played by the smallest percentage of the actual player population. For a game like WoW, they don’t need to worry about this because Blizzard has unlimited resources with how much money they’re making with the game. But for a game like GW2, resources are very much limited, we see the results of Anet allocating large amount of resources to raids, and the things they have to sacrifice due to it. By resources I mean both manpower and money, Anet has continuously cited the lack of resources as a reason for how things are.

Living world getting pushed back because they want to release more raids first as an example. Lack of a true WvW dev team has all but killed this game mode. Lack of resources to separate PvE, PvP, and WvW class balance, so they do it the lazy way of trying to mash them all together and hope they could balance classes with a single stroke. Dungeons being left behind because again, by their admission recently, they don’t even have a team for dungeons. Lack of programming resources is cited as the reason they can’t bring Alpine maps back for WvW, because their programming resources are tied to creating new raid mechanics.

Raids are resource killers, but yet raids are not played by the large majority of the players. Large majority of the players are still out in the open world, they prefer open world bosses and zone meta’s. While many have tried raids initially due to the hype, many aren’t bothering with it now. So yes, raids belong in a MMO, they’ve always been in MMO’s since Everquest created this genre. But they’ve always sucked dev resources dry and made companies sacrifice certain aspects of their games just to create raids. And raids are traditionally always played by the smallest percentage of playerbase, this was the case in EQ, it’s likely the case today in GW2.

Good or bad, the real question is, what are you willing to give up to have raids. Because right now we’re giving up a lot just so GW2 could see more raid content. Also as a side note, raids tend to be exclusive in nature. Where as Guild Wars 2 have always been a more inclusive game. For good or bad, raids did change the attitude of the game and its players a bit.

This is not WoW. Raids are just a tiny part of a huge game.

Raids are the best addition to Guild Wars 2 we have had in ages. I’d have certainly quit the game by now if it wasn’t for the raids.
Got to meet great players and take on some challenges. Even something like keeping a team together and setting up a schedule when people are so busy already can be fun. Not just joining the anonymity of yet another Open World zerg for a change.

It was also the first time in years that I felt like I actually accomplished anything even remotely hard in this game when we finished the full raid for the first time.
Those who think raids are played for the rewards are just kidding themselves. It is only when you get to the point where you breeze through the raid in an hour that the rewards are anywhere close to what you can get in the new HoT content or SW in the same amount of time.

Honestly, I am surprised how much people seem to be bothered by the idea that some players will be able to get rewards they might not be able to reach themselves.
The only thing exclusive to the raid rewards are the trinkets with the new stats like viper or sinister. They are hidden behind very low RNG even for the raiders themselves. Legendary armor has not been added yet and I highly doubt raids will be the only way to get those. We are playing Guild Wars 2 after all. The game that makes everything available to the majority no matter of how casual or skilled they are.

Sometimes wonder at what point the idea to work hard and improve to achieve your goals died in gaming. All of that hatred towards raids is just beyond me.

maddoctor.2738:

DGraves.3720:

maddoctor.2738:

DGraves.3720:

SkyShroud.2865:

it is subjective
it really all depends on the overall game design

In what game design are raids good for games? Curious.

In any game design that want to have interesting mechanics and encounters.

Why should that be specifically for raids though? I don’t disagree with you, just curious why raids need to be the things to bring this to the table.

I am thinking world bosses would be better for that.

I’m not saying only raids specifically can have good mechanics and encounters. They could even make open world maps with more interesting mechanics and mobs but then see what happened with HoT. There are players who find HoT mobs challenging and hard… Can’t even kill a Mordrem Sniper or a Smokescale and ask for nerfs.

We can only imagine what kind of nerfs are coming in the near future of HoT, fortunately I had my fun in HoT open world and once their “nerfs” come and if they are bad enough I’ll stop playing in the open world and just play Raids and Fractals. And now some people want even those nerfed, or taken away…

Raids are “needed” to have interesting mechanics and encounters that won’t be nerfed as easily as any other type of content. Now if they start nerfing even Raids to make them “accessible” then there is no point in having Raids at all.

I can see that being true and agree with you. I suppose I’ll be more open-minded about the idea now since you make sense.

Are there stats they can see, of how many people do, and finish a raid? what % of the player population do them? if it’s only 2%… I got to ask, why? why put so much time into something that only 2% of the gaming population is every going to do or see.

I tried at first, but quickly gave up when finding a team got too hard, and they always failed anyway.

Solo content is all I do now, anything else is just stress and can be a huge waste of time. If I can’t do it solo, guess I’m just not doing it.

I’m still yet to find 9 players to start a raid with.

How many Charrs does it take to fix a forum?

sephiroth.4217:

How many Charrs does it take to fix a forum?

Fifteen!