Guild Wars 2

MikaHR.1978:

So, content that pretty much all other MMOs are slowly but surely dropping, content that only 5% of the playerbase does….

How does one justify spending ANY money on that.

how do they justify it?

by looking at players like me cheering when they announce it. and then going psyco to gather the stuff i think i’ll need for it >=D

MikaHR.1978:

Doam.8305:

MikaHR.1978:

Doam.8305:

Dude just likes to spit in other peoples lemonade is all and there are indeed people like that in this world and in Gw2. Raid system benefits those people who like to raid and does absolutely nothing to those who dislike raiding as it’s not needed for anything since this game has multiple methods to unlock items as is and that won’t change for raids.

So because people simply don’t like raids full well knowing they can simply just ignore them they go about spitting in everyone elses glass of lemonade.

Wildstar all over again. SWTOR all over again. Rift all over again. TSW all over again.

Listing games that started with a Sub doesn’t actually prove your point at all. Wildstar, SWTOR, and Rift didn’t provide enough content to deserved there subs and people left and each one eventually had to go free to play. Wildstar is dropping its sub in the fall which is also owned by NCsoft as well which probably played into Gw2 going F2p. Games like WoW/FF14 prove without a doubt that casual/elitePve/elitePvp/Rpcrowd can all get along in an MMO just fine.

This game never started with a sub and with such low expectations adding a feature isn’t going to spell the end for this game at all people as I stated before just love to hate/troll on people when their happy and the people who want raids are happy right now If you don’t like raids then don’t do them. Gear in this game is all baseline to rarity anyway.

They all boasted raiding as retention mechanism. Just as ANet is doing now.

Anyway, result of this announcement is 2 refund request for HOT.

WoW lost 5 mil subs in 6 months.

FFXIV prooves that if you spend double the money on teh game because you epically screwed first release youll earn some goodwill. And never make your money back. They needed cash shop along sub just to be able to open euro servers.

Anyway you dont have to worry about me asking the right questions much more.

Thank god, sooner you leave the better.

last I checked, anet never said “we are going to focus on retaining players through raids only now”. Stop making up BS and making it sound as if Anet only cares about raids and there will be nothing else added into the game you ignoramus.

You aren’t asking any type of right question. its only the right question in YOUR tiny mind….

Dinks.2478:

Well dungeons and fractals are easy. If they weren’t easy we wouldn’t be able to run all zerker and never die.

No, that’s the problem that comes from bad combat engine design, which is in no way dependant on dungeon’s difficulty.

I really hope one day one developer will find a solution to make large group play so that every player can select the difficulty individually and still play together as a group.
That would be super awesome.
GW2’s inherent event scaling kinda has some tools in the box to work with that way.
Maybe not scale the mob but scale on the individual’s player’s end.
So like if it would be possible that you individually having selected “hardcore mode” will still be rotating your skill buttons for your life every second even though the other people are all just running on “let’s chill this mode”.
To you they would be just like other hardcore players just doing their job well, to them you would be just some guy that would be struggling on easy mode.
This would not do anything to the encounter or your personal challenge in it.

Yeah sure that would make all people in the “guild progression race”-faction cry because it would take away their game, true. Yet I really can’t care less about that, because the world first progress race is entertainment for just a couple of player groups, it is one time only and generally there are lots of games already on the market for that kind of competivity.
So dropping that in favor for something that gives lots of players that want to play harder game settings on an individual level would seem worth it.
Also please consider I wish to define this group as people that want the challenge, not the ones that ask for a scheme that will put them into a position of almost guaranteed bragging rights for bringning more “time and effort”.
You may have noticed “time”, “effort”, “skill” and “difficulty” have been given seperate words for a good reason.

Dinks.2478:

Astralporing.1957:

SkiTz.4590:

Unless you are hardcore WvW roamer and a constant build tweaker, its not that big of an advantage….

So, you’d agree that at least WvW players do have a need of it, and should have their own path to obtaining that gear?

They have a path to obtaining it, its called raiding. Do raids or don’t get the gear. They don’t “need” anything.

Well, they need it more than raiders at least. Which don’t need it at all.

As others said, the problem with raiding is the forced commitment. Raids and challenging content is great in an otherwise endgame-barren wasteland. This is one of the major things the game missed. It works here because of the open nature of the game. In most games with raiding, it’s the only thing you can do to progress forward. That’s not necessary here. It’s just another means of more unique stuff that doesn’t have a huge impact on your gameplay otherwise.

Simply put, it’s a high demand and finally done right for all types of players

Inverse.2967:

Yeah sure that would make all people in the “guild progression race”-faction cry because it would take away their game, true. Yet I really can’t care less about that, because the world first progress race is entertainment for just a couple of player groups, it is one time only and generally there are lots of games already on the market for that kind of competivity.

I guess I just don’t understand why the inclusion of a single raid, that we haven’t even seen anything from and designed by a developer known for being obsessed with making content accessible, makes everyone jump to the conclusion that GW2 is going to become a game that caters exclusively to hardcore raiders. It’s a massive jump to make.

Astralporing.1957:

No, that’s the problem that comes from bad combat engine design, which is in no way dependant on dungeon’s difficulty.

Completely false. Is there zerker meta in pvp/wvw?

But I guess it’s better to complain about “stacking in corners”, “pressing one” and “lack of trinity”.

Astralporing.1957:

SkiTz.4590:

Unless you are hardcore WvW roamer and a constant build tweaker, its not that big of an advantage….

So, you’d agree that at least WvW players do have a need of it, and should have their own path to obtaining that gear?

lol, no they don’t need it…is it more convient? yes, if you constantly change build multiple times a day lol… which is ridiculous.
They already have ascended and its statiscally the same as legend armor…

if they want to try a different build now, all they do is stat change their ascended armor which is quick and easy….

Oh and if hardcore wvw roamers are changing stats for their build, chances are, they need runes changed, which legend armor isn’t doing…

If you are a hardcore WvW roamer…chances are, you aren’t going to do enough raiding to get the process of acquiring legend armor completed (unknown right now since we don’t know how much time/requirements are needed for this… but I assume its long as getting legendary weapon)

WvW players dont need this AT ALL.

Majority of the WvW players are running in exotics. Only ones that arent are hardcore WvW guilds that already have the statisical advantage with ascended…. a QOL advantage is absolutely NOT NEEDED to succeed in WvW…. its just a nice bonus, period. Not a requirement to success or do better than the opponent…..

MikaHR.1978:

How does one justify spending ANY money on that.

You can ask NCsoft on their next earnings call/conference why A-Net thinks, that raids are a good idea. Other than that a company does not need to justify its business decisions to outsiders about their development plans and we (players, forum users) do not have any insights in these plans.

I’m really confused as to why the OP is this mad about raids. This is another alternative for a game type to be played by others.

This is no different from them creating a new WvW map, doing PvP leagues, and adding new zones to the game.

From what they said, they’re going to be pushing out new zones in raids fairly frequent along with living story updates. So it’s probably relatively easy for them to do so if they built a modular raiding system.

Anet is no longer supporting dungeons so imagine they simply transfer their resources from dungeons to raids.

Secondly, gw2 raids will be nothing like a typical raid. There’s no locking system, no gear treadmill and no trinity.

Zok.4956:

Test.8734:

Mr Hrouda’s parting words are very sad. He mentions how he wanted to build something that would last… And instead his last assignment was a temporary dungeon.

Neither you nor me where there at A-Net at that time, so we do not know the real reasons why the decision was made to fire him.

Test.8734:

The game has failed, like any other MMORPG that found itself forced to go into free to play (like TOR, ESO, WildStar and so on).

In do not share your opinion. And GW2 ist not free to play like the other games you mentioned. If you want the latest and full game, you always have to buy it. So the latest version of the game (at the moment: HoT) you have to buy and only the older versions you can play for free (but not really free-to-play like most other games, but more in a free-to-trial fashion).

Yeah this is the point: “FTP old content, pay for the expansion!”

They’re not going to get any more vanilla sales, so why not make it free as marketing for HOT?

Molch.2078:

So, I am the only one who checked OP’s post history or why has this obvious troll thread 2 pages of replies?

No, but some people seem to go blind and let their fingers just go as soon as these topics come up.

ScribeTheMad.7614:

Gear checks are a cop-out to decent content, and are utterly meaningless in terms of “challenging” or “interesting”.

Oh look, we added a zero, go grind 400 hours to get that zero so you can do the new content which is exactly the same as the old content but with more zeros!!!!11oneone1one

That’s what gear checks are used to cover up. They don’t make it more fun, they don’t make it more interesting, they don’t make it more challenging.

Don’t chase the zeros!
Instead, push the devs to actually make interesting content. More complicated events, more interesting fight mechanics beyond “dodge this dudes massive one shot AoE every 5 seconds or wipe, got it? Good, now do that for 30 minutes”.

The VW champs are basic examples. South and North at least involve more than just zerg the boss. There are complications to the fight. Sure with a zerg it can only be so complicated before it just wont work. But in a controlled setting there could be all kinds of interesting things to have to do.

This game has no gear checks, so I don’t know what you’re talking about. What zeros are they making you chase after? They haven’t added a new tier of gear, they haven’t done anything that would make you think this was a vertical progression game. So what is your problem?

Unless you’re implying people should be able to do raids in greens and rare in which case, too godkitten bad.

Windsagio.1340:

You asked me for a source, then agreed with me?

There’s no question that they initially intended dungeons to be a core part of the gameplay, and then they abandoned supporting them after a certain point (nobody’s contesting this)

Above you said, it was unsupported: As a feature it was supported then abandoned, presumably for ROI reasons.

Anet thinks, or is willing to take a risk that this content will be different and will have a better ROI… but given the example of their past experience, it is by no means a sure thing.

Edit: The distinction I’m making there might be fine, but its important. We have to ask ourselves this question:

Why, given the initial development support for Dungeons, did Arenanet abandon them?

Sorry, I’m not native english speaker and 10+ tenses are way too complicated for me. By “dungeons not supported” I obviously meant that they were abandoned after few months, not they were not supported at all.

rotten.9753:

Astralporing.1957:

No, that’s the problem that comes from bad combat engine design, which is in no way dependant on dungeon’s difficulty.

Completely false. Is there zerker meta in pvp/wvw?

But I guess it’s better to complain about “stacking in corners”, “pressing one” and “lack of trinity”.

Those 2 are completely different game modes. You cannot compare that to pve…. its an entirely different animal.

Both PvP and WvW have REAL players controlling their characters, who are most likely, smarter than your average risen who LOVES to sit in your lava fonts/AOEs until they die.

Zalavaaris.5329:

What i REALLY think needs to happen is that bosses last longer than 40 seconds. These raids should not end up a question of how FAST can we clear it but if we can clear it at all. Bosses should take 6-7 minutes for a perfect run and should NOT be burstable like current “meta” speed clears.

I think this is generally a shared opinion by most people looking forward to this. Anywhere from 5-15 minutes feels right to me, obviously time being variable depending on different variables.

Test.8734:

Robert Hrouda was fired.

It’s interesting because it shows ArenaNet’s though process very well. “Hey Robert, a lot of people are playing in the Ascalon Catacombs to farm it, we need you to fix it!”. So Robert went there, changed how the encounters in that dungeon work, made it less farmeable but also harder and more interesting. The result: “Hey Robert, people are playing Ascalon Catacombs a lot less now” (obviously, because they weren’t farming it anymore) “So your new design sucks. Bye!”.

Mr Hrouda’s parting words are very sad. He mentions how he wanted to build something that would last… And instead his last assignment was a temporary dungeon.

Yes, indeed. But he was laid off few months after being transferred to the Live Team.

rotten.9753:

Windsagio.1340:

You asked me for a source, then agreed with me?

There’s no question that they initially intended dungeons to be a core part of the gameplay, and then they abandoned supporting them after a certain point (nobody’s contesting this)

Above you said, it was unsupported: As a feature it was supported then abandoned, presumably for ROI reasons.

Anet thinks, or is willing to take a risk that this content will be different and will have a better ROI… but given the example of their past experience, it is by no means a sure thing.

Edit: The distinction I’m making there might be fine, but its important. We have to ask ourselves this question:

Why, given the initial development support for Dungeons, did Arenanet abandon them?

Sorry, I’m not native english speaker and 10+ tenses are way too complicated for me. By “dungeons not supported” I obviously meant that they were abandoned after few months, not they were not supported at all.

Let’s blame the internet, we had a misunderstanding

Agent Noun.7350:

Inverse.2967:

Yeah sure that would make all people in the “guild progression race”-faction cry because it would take away their game, true. Yet I really can’t care less about that, because the world first progress race is entertainment for just a couple of player groups, it is one time only and generally there are lots of games already on the market for that kind of competivity.

I guess I just don’t understand why the inclusion of a single raid, that we haven’t even seen anything from and designed by a developer known for being obsessed with making content accessible, makes everyone jump to the conclusion that GW2 is going to become a game that caters exclusively to hardcore raiders. It’s a massive jump to make.

I didn’t say that at all.
I just said no matter how optional the stuff is, it is always a cool idea to put accessibility to it. More player attraction, more money, more content for everyone.
My point was, if you can make it accessible make it, for real challenge you don’t need to place any “effort”-check machnic of any sort to keep it “difficult”.
If you don’t have a difficulty selection function in you game, then it must just be difficult to be relevant, thus will cost some player attraction.
But if you can make a difficulty selection and even make it mixed mode that would maximize player attraction thus more happily paying peeps more money to make more raids and also other stuff.
If you can design things to be accessible make it, people completing an easy mode does not take away anything from people playing on a hard setting, except their game of being able to talk down onto other people and present their exclusivity, which pretty much may turn off the ones being talked down on, which in a situation where real exclusivity was forced then the people on the short on end of the stick would be by definition a vast majority (otherwise there would be no exclusivity)
So designing a thing not around being hard or not but around it creating an exclusive club by design instead of being limited by the number of people that actually care to play a really hard encounter setting might just be counter productive for monetization.

See if people choose not to join an exclusive club becaus they don’t enjoy spastically pushing their skill buttons for their life, that’s their choice and won’t feel put off. They just play or not play parts of the game they enjoy or not. Like PvP for instance.
Look at the rise of “LFR” at competing products: This was the result that people actually wanted to play that stuff but not on a min/max-scheme with monthly raid schedule and DKP-extortion.
And so it was made “LFR” since devs chose to not use a different solution than just setting als scalar values in that content to walk-over-easy levels.
Works but kinda a lame solution.
That’s what my point was about: If you can find a better way than straightly seperated “LFR”-dumb-down, please do it, I wanna play it – on hard mode, together with other peeps that play on whatever mode they like.

phokus.8934:

I’m really confused as to why the OP is this mad about raids. This is another alternative for a game type to be played by others.

This is no different from them creating a new WvW map, doing PvP leagues, and adding new zones to the game.

From what they said, they’re going to be pushing out new zones in raids fairly frequent along with living story updates. So it’s probably relatively easy for them to do so if they built a modular raiding system.

He’s mad because anet didn’t add enough easy stuff he likes doing such as silverwastes and champ trains. In his eyes, they wasted resources on raids because he knows he can’t do them and doesn’t want to, so now, for whatever reason, he thinks theres nothing else in this game at all besides raids that anet will work on….hence he quit.

Fine logic by OP.

MikaHR.1978:

So, content that pretty much all other MMOs are slowly but surely dropping, content that only 5% of the playerbase does….

How does one justify spending ANY money on that.

Please this 5% myth needs to stop (it was 2% some time ago).

The most recent I could find about WoW raiding:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3984-armory-stats-siege-of-orgrimmar-progression-blue-tweets-dlc-439

And some analysis from a forum thread on the subject because I’m no expert on WoW raiding:

Roughly 70% of players participate in LFR, with 50% completing it. 40% tried Flex, with under 20% finishing it. Normal was between 25-13%, and Heroic was 10-1%. Note that Siege lasted longer than any other raid tier, so it’s participation is significantly higher than others. If you look at WoWprogress numbers, at most 10% of players have downed Kargath on Heroic (30604 × 30 = 918,120, slightly under 10% of the 10 million subs). Mythic is easier to pin down, being on a fixed raid size: 8815 × 20 = 176,300 Mythic raiders, which is under 2% of the playerbase.

The point is, if Anet’s raid is like a mythic WoW raid (or even Heroic) it will fail badly, especially since their raid has only one difficulty level. If it’s more like LFR difficulty it will be FINE, those 70% of the population participating (and 50% completing it) is a very very good number for “Challenging” group content and people can stop with the 5% silly arguments.

In WoW 70% of the population is actually raiding (who knew?) that’s not a minority of the population of the game with the largest player base. Stop thinking that raids in GW2 will be Mythic difficulty that only 2% of the WoW population does.

Lotro, SWTOR, Wildstar raids failed for a simple reason. They didn’t have multiple difficulties for their raids, the hardcore players found them too easy and the casuals too hard. Having multiple difficulty levels is what made WoW a good raiding game and the only game that actually survives with raids.

There’ll always be a number of people claiming existing content is easy, which is not true. Some of it yes, some of it is still challenging. You have to define what challenging is, really. Hammer fractal is challenging, for a pug. I still go into lfg groups that fail it so I rage quit because no matter how many times I explain how to do it, it doesn’t happen.

Other groups I join are steady groups of friends who race through the fractal => they will say it’s easy.
When you say something is easy or challenging you have to keep in mind which group of people you are talking about.

With raids, they can’t make them so challenging that only 1% of people complete them => only the steady groups. Then the rest of the people will simply not do the raids at all, because they don’t have time to dedicate to them or don’t have people to constantly practice them with.

So if raids are so utterly challenging that they can’t be completed by a half -pug, and if rewards are RNGed so I will see 1 reward in a year => yeah that’ll ruin the game for me and I’ll quit, like I quit other mmo’s because of raiding. 6h of standing around trying the boss and at the end no guaranteed reward for months? No thx.

There’s a balance Anet have to strike between challenging and too challenging. They are trying for engaging combat that feels risky and challenging and yet it mustn’t be impossible to do, I guess we’ll see how it will be.

Constant claims however that everything current is easy I’m sick of. No one does Arah p4 because it’s challenging. All Arah paths are in fact challenging. Some people will tell you it’s easy and the only reason they don’t do it is that it takes a long time. True. But taking X amount of time is part of definition of challenge for some.

It’s not a trivial topic and too many people trivialize it. Everything becomes easy after you’ve done it a 100 times. THat doesn’t mean it has to be made so hard that only you can do it. That means it’s time to move on to the next challenge, and if Anet pushes out raids regularly, there shouldn’t be a problem.

maddoctor.2738:

MikaHR.1978:

So, content that pretty much all other MMOs are slowly but surely dropping, content that only 5% of the playerbase does….

How does one justify spending ANY money on that.

Please this 5% myth needs to stop (it was 2% some time ago).

The most recent I could find about WoW raiding:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3984-armory-stats-siege-of-orgrimmar-progression-blue-tweets-dlc-439

And some analysis from a forum thread on the subject because I’m no expert on WoW raiding:

Roughly 70% of players participate in LFR, with 50% completing it. 40% tried Flex, with under 20% finishing it. Normal was between 25-13%, and Heroic was 10-1%. Note that Siege lasted longer than any other raid tier, so it’s participation is significantly higher than others. If you look at WoWprogress numbers, at most 10% of players have downed Kargath on Heroic (30604 × 30 = 918,120, slightly under 10% of the 10 million subs). Mythic is easier to pin down, being on a fixed raid size: 8815 × 20 = 176,300 Mythic raiders, which is under 2% of the playerbase.

The point is, if Anet’s raid is like a mythic WoW raid (or even Heroic) it will fail badly, especially since their raid has only one difficulty level. If it’s more like LFR difficulty it will be FINE, those 70% of the population participating (and 50% completing it) is a very very good number for “Challenging” group content and people can stop with the 5% silly arguments.

In WoW 70% of the population is actually raiding (who knew?) that’s not a minority of the population of the game with the largest player base. Stop thinking that raids in GW2 will be Mythic difficulty that only 2% of the WoW population does.

Lotro, SWTOR, Wildstar raids failed for a simple reason. They didn’t have multiple difficulties for their raids, the hardcore players found them too easy and the casuals too hard. Having multiple difficulty levels is what made WoW a good raiding game and the only game that actually survives with raids.

LOTRO had 2 difficulties, since Mirkwood expansion.

SWTOR had 3 (story-hard-nightmare) and 8 or 16 man versions of EACH since LAUNCH. They are dropping nightmare mode, and no new raids in new expansion. New raids – TBA still except “if we do new raid no nighmare mode for sure”. And they made their flashpoints (dungeons) SOLOABLE with “jesus droid”.

http://www.engadget.com/2014/07/03/turbine-raiders-make-up-the-smallest-player-group-in-lotro/

Your knowledge in the matter is severly lacking.

Someone doing LFR once or twice is not raider and would be satisfied with another type of content. Another jormag would suffice.

So pretty much 2-10% in a THE RAIDING game.

Gimli.9461:

There’s a balance Anet have to strike between challenging and too challenging. They are trying for engaging combat that feels risky and challenging and yet it mustn’t be impossible to do, I guess we’ll see how it will be.

Hopefully they also keep in mind that all professions would like to be viable, let’s not see this turn into 2 Guards, 2 Warriors, Mesmer and 5 Ele’s.

Astralporing.1957:

Dinks.2478:

Astralporing.1957:

SkiTz.4590:

Unless you are hardcore WvW roamer and a constant build tweaker, its not that big of an advantage….

So, you’d agree that at least WvW players do have a need of it, and should have their own path to obtaining that gear?

They have a path to obtaining it, its called raiding. Do raids or don’t get the gear. They don’t “need” anything.

Well, they need it more than raiders at least. Which don’t need it at all.

This remains to be seen. For all we know each raid path will have encounters that require different stat setups. Heck maybe even within the first raid path there will be different bosses that require different stat setups to complete. In these scenarios, raiders would need to be able to swap gear stats far more than anyone else in the game.

MikaHR.1978:

maddoctor.2738:

MikaHR.1978:

So, content that pretty much all other MMOs are slowly but surely dropping, content that only 5% of the playerbase does….

How does one justify spending ANY money on that.

Please this 5% myth needs to stop (it was 2% some time ago).

The most recent I could find about WoW raiding:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3984-armory-stats-siege-of-orgrimmar-progression-blue-tweets-dlc-439

And some analysis from a forum thread on the subject because I’m no expert on WoW raiding:

Roughly 70% of players participate in LFR, with 50% completing it. 40% tried Flex, with under 20% finishing it. Normal was between 25-13%, and Heroic was 10-1%. Note that Siege lasted longer than any other raid tier, so it’s participation is significantly higher than others. If you look at WoWprogress numbers, at most 10% of players have downed Kargath on Heroic (30604 × 30 = 918,120, slightly under 10% of the 10 million subs). Mythic is easier to pin down, being on a fixed raid size: 8815 × 20 = 176,300 Mythic raiders, which is under 2% of the playerbase.

The point is, if Anet’s raid is like a mythic WoW raid (or even Heroic) it will fail badly, especially since their raid has only one difficulty level. If it’s more like LFR difficulty it will be FINE, those 70% of the population participating (and 50% completing it) is a very very good number for “Challenging” group content and people can stop with the 5% silly arguments.

In WoW 70% of the population is actually raiding (who knew?) that’s not a minority of the population of the game with the largest player base. Stop thinking that raids in GW2 will be Mythic difficulty that only 2% of the WoW population does.

Lotro, SWTOR, Wildstar raids failed for a simple reason. They didn’t have multiple difficulties for their raids, the hardcore players found them too easy and the casuals too hard. Having multiple difficulty levels is what made WoW a good raiding game and the only game that actually survives with raids.

LOTRO had 2 difficulties, since Mirkwood expansion, SWTOR had 3 (story-hard-nightmare) and 8 or 16 man.

http://www.engadget.com/2014/07/03/turbine-raiders-make-up-the-smallest-player-group-in-lotro/

Your knowledge in the matter is severly lacking.

So is yours since all your knowledge is opinion based on this matter for GW2 raid

Why you still here? You said you were quitting weren’t you?

MikaHR.1978:

maddoctor.2738:

MikaHR.1978:

So, content that pretty much all other MMOs are slowly but surely dropping, content that only 5% of the playerbase does….

How does one justify spending ANY money on that.

Please this 5% myth needs to stop (it was 2% some time ago).

The most recent I could find about WoW raiding:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3984-armory-stats-siege-of-orgrimmar-progression-blue-tweets-dlc-439

And some analysis from a forum thread on the subject because I’m no expert on WoW raiding:

Roughly 70% of players participate in LFR, with 50% completing it. 40% tried Flex, with under 20% finishing it. Normal was between 25-13%, and Heroic was 10-1%. Note that Siege lasted longer than any other raid tier, so it’s participation is significantly higher than others. If you look at WoWprogress numbers, at most 10% of players have downed Kargath on Heroic (30604 × 30 = 918,120, slightly under 10% of the 10 million subs). Mythic is easier to pin down, being on a fixed raid size: 8815 × 20 = 176,300 Mythic raiders, which is under 2% of the playerbase.

The point is, if Anet’s raid is like a mythic WoW raid (or even Heroic) it will fail badly, especially since their raid has only one difficulty level. If it’s more like LFR difficulty it will be FINE, those 70% of the population participating (and 50% completing it) is a very very good number for “Challenging” group content and people can stop with the 5% silly arguments.

In WoW 70% of the population is actually raiding (who knew?) that’s not a minority of the population of the game with the largest player base. Stop thinking that raids in GW2 will be Mythic difficulty that only 2% of the WoW population does.

Lotro, SWTOR, Wildstar raids failed for a simple reason. They didn’t have multiple difficulties for their raids, the hardcore players found them too easy and the casuals too hard. Having multiple difficulty levels is what made WoW a good raiding game and the only game that actually survives with raids.

LOTRO had 2 difficulties, since Mirkwood expansion, SWTOR had 3 (story-hard-nightmare) and 8 or 16 man.

http://www.engadget.com/2014/07/03/turbine-raiders-make-up-the-smallest-player-group-in-lotro/

Your knowledge in the matter is severly lacking.

2 difficulties is still too little. Turbine raids weren’t even good designed to begin with so that post proves nothing. Did you check the actual data of a game that actually survives on raids?

It’s ironic how the anti-raiding community is proving to be more elitist than the actual raiders.

“YOU can’t have this mode because I don’t LIKE IT! ME ME ME!”

MikaHR.1978:

Someone doing LFR once or twice is not raider and would be satisfed wiht another type of content.

So pretty much 2-10% in a THE RAIDING game.

Source for that 2-10%?

Gimli.9461:

There’ll always be a number of people claiming existing content is easy, which is not true. Some of it yes, some of it is still challenging. You have to define what challenging is, really. Hammer fractal is challenging, for a pug. I still go into lfg groups that fail it so I rage quit because no matter how many times I explain how to do it, it doesn’t happen.

Other groups I join are steady groups of friends who race through the fractal => they will say it’s easy.
When you say something is easy or challenging you have to keep in mind which group of people you are talking about.

With raids, they can’t make them so challenging that only 1% of people complete them => only the steady groups. Then the rest of the people will simply not do the raids at all, because they don’t have time to dedicate to them or don’t have people to constantly practice them with.

So if raids are so utterly challenging that they can’t be completed by a half -pug, and if rewards are RNGed so I will see 1 reward in a year => yeah that’ll ruin the game for me and I’ll quit, like I quit other mmo’s because of raiding. 6h of standing around trying the boss and at the end no guaranteed reward for months? No thx.

There’s a balance Anet have to strike between challenging and too challenging. They are trying for engaging combat that feels risky and challenging and yet it mustn’t be impossible to do, I guess we’ll see how it will be.

Constant claims however that everything current is easy I’m sick of. No one does Arah p4 because it’s challenging. All Arah paths are in fact challenging. Some people will tell you it’s easy and the only reason they don’t do it is that it takes a long time. True. But taking X amount of time is part of definition of challenge for some.

It’s not a trivial topic and too many people trivialize it. Everything becomes easy after you’ve done it a 100 times. THat doesn’t mean it has to be made so hard that only you can do it. That means it’s time to move on to the next challenge, and if Anet pushes out raids regularly, there shouldn’t be a problem.

The current content IS easy. The only reason the zerker meta exists is because you don’t need defensive stats. You just need to invest a little bit of time to learn the mechanics because they are simple, predictable, and mostly a joke. People who fail fractals and dungeons do so because they don’t understand the mechanics and don’t want to understand the mechanics. You said it yourself “because no matter how many times I explain how to do it, it doesn’t happen.” Some people just don’t want to learn. Just because people who wish to remain ignorant can still fail something does not make it challenging.

maddoctor.2738:

MikaHR.1978:

Someone doing LFR once or twice is not raider and would be satisfed wiht another type of content.

So pretty much 2-10% in a THE RAIDING game.

Source for that 2-10%?

Just like the rest of this theory , its all numbers pulled out of his rear that have absolutely no factual basis. He’s just trolling at this point and needs to leave.

This thread will be locked sooner or later.

By the way the data cited from MMO-Champ earlier is based off of only
“The data used today is a sample made up of 7.3 million characters from 2.3 million accounts, with at least one character active after March 15. The sample is slightly biased, as players who are not in a guild are much less likely to appear in our sample.
"
So this picture is only a subset, we have no idea how representative this subset is for the overall population at that time of the product, only Blizz knows.
The hard fact that was given by Blizz was after the original Vanilla Naxxramas, where they stated just a very very tiny fraction of customers had ever seen that stuff from the inside at that time and the investment was a waste from a budgetary point of view.
Which is pretty much the reason why it re-appeared in Wrath later on to make something of that dev time spent.

I’ve always loved that the game offers me the chance to see almost everything without grouping up, the game is a solo experience to me and I have no friends who actually play it, I know a few who did play it but have stopped and I am not interested in getting into a guild. So after three years I suppose I can live with some content that I will likely never see, I’m not fussed.

@maddoctor
You gave, at least in my opinion, a pretty accurate listing or raid participation in Wow in some other thread, and 2% was your starting point too before significant changes were made on raids there. Another person also showed the number of turbine, where it was shown that raiders were really the smallest group of people with LotR.

Kormeg.2469:

Ronah Lynda.2496:

Kormeg.2469:

Ronah Lynda.2496:

Lux Dominatoris.3941:

myself.2143:

I almost never see anyone looking to do dungeons or fractals. After a month or two, I wonder if anyone will even care about raids anymore.

Ayyy lmao bad troll attempt, very bad.

The guy is right. If you are a casual you rarely get to do a dungeon or fractal unless it is a daily. So if its hard to find 5 random people to do a dungeon, how easy will it be to find 10 especially if it is a lfg and not a free join

I consider myself casual. When I was playing regularly i did dungeons all the time.

What is your definition of causal anyway? And why do you think you can just have a blanketed term for hundreds of thousands of players?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hNGi1PTkZA

That really didn’t tell me anything more than casuals comprise the largest portion of the playerbase, which funnily hurts your point as then it’s more difficult to try and categorize player interests in that big a group.

I like to play dungeons, I play maybe 6-8 hours a week. Some other dude hates anything harder than open world bosses, he plays 20 hours a week. I consider us both causal.

But apparently I can’t decide that for myself

My point is that LFG is empty most of the time and it is hard to find 5 people to do a dungeon without gear reqs, profession reqs, leave outs and all this BS.
But you got offended because you call yourself a casual while probably feeling excluded from “my definition” or casuals. Fine, who cares about definitions while the fact remains. ten people raids with no hot join button will be fail for most of “my” casuals

Astralporing.1957:

SkiTz.4590:

Unless you are hardcore WvW roamer and a constant build tweaker, its not that big of an advantage….

So, you’d agree that at least WvW players do have a need of it, and should have their own path to obtaining that gear?

I can totally get behind that as long as it’s a different skin. I honestly don’t see much value in “Legendary” PVE armor unless I’m going to take it into WvW. I would have been fine with Skins or Ascended with new skins as rewards for raids but if they want to make legendary /shrug cool purples a fun color.

Conclusion of this topic: Raiding only benefits people that want to raid.
What a shocker. Let’s take dungeons, fractals, wvw and pvp out of the game because that only benefits people who want to do those things. Let’s take silverwastes out of the game cause that only benefits people who like that.

Of course raiding only benefits raiders. But there is enough to do in the expansion, do something else if you don’t like it.

Torolan.5816:

@maddoctor
You gave, at least in my opinion, a pretty accurate listing or raid participation in Wow in some other thread, and 2% was your starting point too before significant changes were made on raids there. Another person also showed the number of turbine, where it was shown that raiders were really the smallest group of people with LotR.

Its same in every game, you should have seen Wildstars pre launch forums, if you said anythingc connected to raiding that was not pure praise and leet speek you were trolled to center of the galaxy and back.

Look where WS is today.

Thats skitz dude is prime example.

And same recycled exuses that pop up every time.

Inverse.2967:

By the way the data cited from MMO-Champ earlier is based off of only
“The data used today is a sample made up of 7.3 million characters from 2.3 million accounts, with at least one character active after March 15. The sample is slightly biased, as players who are not in a guild are much less likely to appear in our sample.
"
So this picture is only a subset, we have no idea how representative this subset is for the overall population at that time of the product, only Blizz knows.
The hard fact that was given by Blizz was after the original Vanilla Naxxramas, where they stated just a very very tiny fraction of customers had ever seen that stuff from the inside at that time and the investment was a waste from a budgetary point of view.
Which is pretty much the reason why it re-appeared in Wrath later on to make something of that dev time spent.

2.3 million accounts out of 10 million accounts is a very good sample slightly biased or not. I never said the data is completely accurate but it’s not the 5% that other players are saying. Maybe it’s not 70% but it is a very high and actually significant percentage of the population.

70% of the 2.3 mil sample is 1610000 accounts raiding. Even if those are the ONLY raiders (which is false) it’s still a 16.1% of the total population. Even that 16% is no insignificant number

Torolan.5816:

@maddoctor
You gave, at least in my opinion, a pretty accurate listing or raid participation in Wow in some other thread, and 2% was your starting point too before significant changes were made on raids there. Another person also showed the number of turbine, where it was shown that raiders were really the smallest group of people with LotR.

Yes I’ve seen that post about raiders being the smallest group in LotR multiple times but it doesn’t prove anything, except for Lotr raids being ineffective. There was a comment by Blizzard that before WotLK only 2% of the population did raids, and if you check the data only a 2% is actually winning the latest/highest difficulty Mythic Boss.

That’s why I’m saying Anet’s raids should never ever be Mythic quality (or even Heroic-difficulty) because it’s proven that kind of difficulty is bad for a game. However, lower difficulty raids tend to attract a LOT of people (~70% at least trying them), which means it’s an huge untapped potential for Anet.

So to answer the OP question, “How does Anet justify raids?” it’s simple, there is a lot of potential with that, a significant percentage of the population is raiding in other MMORPGs and it’s time for Anet to capitalize on that percentage by giving them what they want.

Now if their raids prove to be “Mythic-difficulty” ones that only 2% of the population can do then by all means, I’ll join up with the voices of those who don’t like raids.

Ronah Lynda.2496:

My point is that LFG is empty most of the time and it is hard to find 5 people to do a dungeon without gear reqs, profession reqs, leave outs and all this BS.
But you got offended because you call yourself a casual while probably feeling excluded from “my definition” or casuals. Fine, who cares about definitions while the fact remains. ten people raids with no hot join button will be fail for most of “my” casuals

There’s a TON of non-meta players who like to join groups, but far fewer willing to take the initiative and start one. So when those groups ARE started, they fill up (and thus get removed from the queue) very quickly.

maddoctor.2738:

Inverse.2967:

By the way the data cited from MMO-Champ earlier is based off of only
“The data used today is a sample made up of 7.3 million characters from 2.3 million accounts, with at least one character active after March 15. The sample is slightly biased, as players who are not in a guild are much less likely to appear in our sample.
"
So this picture is only a subset, we have no idea how representative this subset is for the overall population at that time of the product, only Blizz knows.
The hard fact that was given by Blizz was after the original Vanilla Naxxramas, where they stated just a very very tiny fraction of customers had ever seen that stuff from the inside at that time and the investment was a waste from a budgetary point of view.
Which is pretty much the reason why it re-appeared in Wrath later on to make something of that dev time spent.

2.3 million accounts out of 10 million accounts is a very good sample slightly biased or not. I never said the data is completely accurate but it’s not the 5% that other players are saying. Maybe it’s not 70% but it is a very high and actually significant percentage of the population.

70% of the 2.3 mil sample is 1610000 accounts raiding. Even if those are the ONLY raiders (which is false) it’s still a 16.1% of the total population. Even that 16% is no insignificant number

Its not good since its not representative, its selected.

And GW2 already has LFR – meta events. before select revamps. Or heck, ANY “zerg” event

ANet is NOT speaking about LFR, on contrary the made sure to get messge out that its CHALLENGING.

SO what was that nuber, 10% out of 2,3m = 230000 =

ta-da 2,3% out of 10m.

Add those who are not accounted, and, lets just be generous and increase your 2,3% by 100% and you get 4,6%. Might as well round it to 5%.

Same that Blizzard said about vanilla, same that Turbine said, and that were games that actually relied on raiding so you naturally expect MORE raiders in those games than in GW2.

Uhm, I am not that good with mathematics and statistics, but does that not just show that this is the number of people that at least once raided?
Of course you could also turn that around for any open world content(like 90% of people did the karaka queen once), but does not harder availability automatically mean lower, continuous participation?

MikaHR.1978:

maddoctor.2738:

Inverse.2967:

By the way the data cited from MMO-Champ earlier is based off of only
“The data used today is a sample made up of 7.3 million characters from 2.3 million accounts, with at least one character active after March 15. The sample is slightly biased, as players who are not in a guild are much less likely to appear in our sample.
"
So this picture is only a subset, we have no idea how representative this subset is for the overall population at that time of the product, only Blizz knows.
The hard fact that was given by Blizz was after the original Vanilla Naxxramas, where they stated just a very very tiny fraction of customers had ever seen that stuff from the inside at that time and the investment was a waste from a budgetary point of view.
Which is pretty much the reason why it re-appeared in Wrath later on to make something of that dev time spent.

2.3 million accounts out of 10 million accounts is a very good sample slightly biased or not. I never said the data is completely accurate but it’s not the 5% that other players are saying. Maybe it’s not 70% but it is a very high and actually significant percentage of the population.

70% of the 2.3 mil sample is 1610000 accounts raiding. Even if those are the ONLY raiders (which is false) it’s still a 16.1% of the total population. Even that 16% is no insignificant number

Its not good since its not representative, its selected.

And GW2 already has LFR – meta events. before select revamps. Or heck, ANY “zerg” event

ANet is NOT speaking about LFR, on contrary the made sure to get messge out that its CHALLENGING

I’m not a WoW veteran but I thought LFR are instanced and not “come when you want, leave when you want, afk in the middle, spam auto attacks and still get max rewards” kind of content like the meta events.

MikaHR.1978:

Kaiden Valor.7163:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/cdi/CDI-Guilds-Raiding

What other MMOs are doing doesn’t really matter, GW2 players (not all, but enough for it to be worth it) wanted raiding or something similar. It also helps them market to players from other MMOs who like raiding.

I don’t really see what needs justifying here…

Ooooh, ill just point you to Wildstars “players” that insisted on hardcore raiding.

Guess where Wildstar is now. Learning on other people mistakes is wise. OTOH just repeating other peoples mistakes because….reasons….

Sure, if you want to make less people play, you can just make raids.

I didnt hear more about more zones coming, more story coming, more PvP goodies coming nope.

I just heard that living story will move to raids. Which means SERIOUS money investment for miniscule part of population.

Wildstar’s problem was the only content they had was raiding. I don’t think GW2 is anywhere close to that.

You’re not changing the trunk on the tree, you’re adding another branch.

maddoctor.2738:

Inverse.2967:

By the way the data cited from MMO-Champ earlier is based off of only
“The data used today is a sample made up of 7.3 million characters from 2.3 million accounts, with at least one character active after March 15. The sample is slightly biased, as players who are not in a guild are much less likely to appear in our sample.
"
So this picture is only a subset, we have no idea how representative this subset is for the overall population at that time of the product, only Blizz knows.
The hard fact that was given by Blizz was after the original Vanilla Naxxramas, where they stated just a very very tiny fraction of customers had ever seen that stuff from the inside at that time and the investment was a waste from a budgetary point of view.
Which is pretty much the reason why it re-appeared in Wrath later on to make something of that dev time spent.

2.3 million accounts out of 10 million accounts is a very good sample slightly biased or not. I never said the data is completely accurate but it’s not the 5% that other players are saying. Maybe it’s not 70% but it is a very high and actually significant percentage of the population.

70% of the 2.3 mil sample is 1610000 accounts raiding. Even if those are the ONLY raiders (which is false) it’s still a 16.1% of the total population. Even that 16% is no insignificant number

Yes your point is totally legit content for at least 16% customers would be more than viable, if you spent about that amount of your budget on it.
Its not really a question of how elusive things added to the game might be, it is more a question of how well to allocate from the overall budget so all your customers will feel they got what they paid for and not feel like they paid mostly for sponsoring something they do not want or worse that will make others belittle them.

Also combining your citation and my point about the earlier Naxx statements just illustrates that making sure content accessiblity must always be in balance with dev resource spent on them to make sure your product can go on an generate the most future profit so you can spent even more resource on the next big thing.

Right now it seems ANet has presented Raids to be a really big thing that they put a substantial effort into, and Colin expressedly stated they want it to be hard but access to trying it not to be artificially hindered. At least is what I take from his “bring the class you want statement”.
So I’m pretty sure they will get their balance right without making that stuff a gogo quick skip skip dungeon run later down the line.

Torolan.5816:

Uhm, I am not that good with mathematics and statistics, but does that not just show that this is the number of people that at least once raided?
Of course you could also turn that around for any open world content(like 90% of people did the karaka queen once), but does not harder availability automatically mean lower, continuous participation?

It’s the only data we have and use a good sized sample. Even if players did them only once there is enough justification to add them to the game, like how they added LS2 achievements, no reason repeating those, but I bet if they had some exclusive rewards (repeatable not like the once-only achievements) they would have much higher repeat value. Or beating Liadri for example.

It all depends on what kind of raids they will be since there are raids and there are raids. People are scared because they put all kinds of raids on the same position, at least if they DO want to add something so impossibly challenging, they should add easier versions of it too.

Wow… there are a lot of… less intelligent… people here still, after all of these years…

You know LITERALLY nothing about what they are adding in besides that it is a 10 man group content and that it is called “raid”. How about waiting and learning more before complaining about something that will NOT be changing. Did you think that they were going to read your post and think to themselves “You know, that person is right. Let’s trash all of this raid that we have and call it quits.”?

Btw, all of those MMOs that you mentioned are still alive and kicking. I suppose by “dying” you mean that they went f2p (which some haven’t) because you have zero access to metrics for those games. It should be noted that GW2 just went f2p so I guess it’s non-raid focused model didn’t work either and it is now “dying”. In fact, this case is even worse because GW2 was never even a sub based game. A b2p game going f2p is REALLY scary… especially when the price to entry has been $10 or less on many occasions.