Showing Posts For Khellendros.2851:
I hate traditional raiding with a passion. Having said that, everything in the open world as the potential to turn into a raid like massive encounter. Why do we need raid content when the entire game is already so scalable?
Well like I said its not the same thing. I’m all for making complex and difficult open world raid encounters, but I doubt many people would like that and I wouldn’t advocate Arenanet doing it for that reason. Its much better to put it in an instance and let the people who want that kind of content, do it.
If you have never done raids before and or don’t like them its hard to explain how they are different, but the best way I can explain it is to look at current explorable mode content, and tighten down executio
n even more and spread it out between more players.
Its worth mentioning also that while I am much in favor of raiding, I’m not much of a raider myself anymore. I do it from time to time in Rift, but I don’t have the time to invest in doing it hardcore like I used to back in the day. Yet I think raiding is a good thing to have. Alot of people like it, and GW2’s unique combat system I feel would add a whole new layer of complexity and uniqueness to raiding. Not everyone needs to like something for it to be a good idea. Alot of people don’t like pvp, yet pvp is a big part of this game.
(edited by Khellendros.2851)
Sure its different. With the traps there is nothing you can do to stop it. With the guy sitting behind the waterfall, you can kill him. One is pvp, the other is griefing. Big difference.
Bottom line, if the people can’t do anything about it within a reasonable amount of time, then it shouldn’t happen. Like you shouldn’t be able to just sit on the trap platform and just kill people without them having any chance to do anything about it. If there was a cooldown, then yea they can get you once with each trap, but you have enough time to get over to the platform and make them pay for it. Thats pvp.
I just think the problem with raids in this game will be the risk to reward ratio. Raids will either be much harder or they will be just an instanced zergfest on a slightly larger boss. Well you can already find DE to fill in for the latter. But if raids are much harder they will need to be rewarded better. Will anyone bother doing raids if bis can be crafted? If they reward raids better than you can make with crafting then you just made raids a requirement and created a gear progression. I just don’t see them doing this. some of the explorables are already close to ridiculously difficult. They are already riding the razor’s edge of that risk reward ratio. Add on top of that the logistics of getting larger numbers of people organized and the multiplication of difficulty factor in boss fights and coordinating combos. I just don’t see lots of people bothering with them without exotics dropping like crazy. Yet people will still want to see these raids so then you will have the call for a story mode raid that 20 randoms can get through. And if you have story mode raids then how do you reward them in relation to story mode dungeons? And if a story mode raid is easy enough for randoms to do then how is that different than zerging a world boss or a difficult DE?
Well the one that I linked to would probably fit in that challenging category, but I don’t think its insanely tough. Its just execution. Challenge is relative though.
As for rewards, let me address that and the post below yours:
Raids just aren’t part of the plan. They never have been. Even if you shoehorned them in, what would you do about drops? You’d skew the current gear distribution design. You’d have to overhaul the game. Why don’t you just go play a game that has raids?
Firstly they never said raids weren’t part of the plan, they never really said anything at all.
But to get back to loot, you don’t need to overhaul the game or screw up any existing design. The system is already there. You just have cosmetically interesting gear. The people at Arenanet are smart people who I’m pretty sure alot of them have been doing this for awhile. I’m fairly positive they can come up with a way to make raids desirable without breaking the horizontal progression of the game.
The question is why would you want people to play another game? I doubt arenanet really wants that. Though I am actually playing two MMO’s currently, that doesn’t mean I don’t think raids wouldn’t be cool in GW2
Found it! As promised:
Well apparently there is a rather restrictive post limit, so I couldn’t copy and paste it here. So here is the link to the exact post number with the encounter.
http://forum.gamebreaker.tv/viewtopic.php?pid=54934#p54934
Keep in mind that was designed for 10 man level 80. You could just as easily design something similar for more players or players of a different level.
But you can see from looking at the encounter how a raid encounter like that really differs from even explorable mode 5 mans, or open world raid bosses like Shatterer or Claw.
You are in a pvp map. So you should expect pvp.
This isn’t pvp that they are talking about. This is essentially trap griefing. It actually PREVENTS pvp.
What they should do is put a cooldown on those trap triggers so one server can only trigger the trap every x amount of time. Giving the trapped player(s) a chance to get over to the people from the other server and kill them.
Also absolutely no seige equipment should be able to be used in the puzzle grounds. Thats just silly.
I like the idea of the pvp puzzle, but if they want it to be pvp it should be actually pvp, not just one side griefing another group of players that quite literally can’t do anything about it.
Pretty sure arenanet will change this anyways.
I think they could but is it really necessary.
The explorables in GW2 are really pretty hard. Players have to coordinate combo attacks and really be on the ball. They really need to know how to play their class to its strengths. It take’s time. It takes skill. It takes practice. This is all that raids really are. The hardest content in a game that takes the most work to conquer.
In games that have a more static combat concept, the only way to make it much more complex is to require more people to step in. Have more phases in an encounter, that sort of thing. I am not sure GW2 really needs that given that the encounters are already pretty tough because of the nature of combat. Further, the more people you get the more harder it becomes to coordinate. That doesn’t so much challenge your playing skills as it does challenge your organizational skills.
So if explorables are one aspect of “endgame” which I think they are, just not limited to end game, then all they really need to so be the kind of hard that requires a team to step it up a noticeable notch. On the other hand, to quench the desire for something big, there are world bosses out there. Those are not limited by the number of people that would be allowed into an instance.
Also, if you have 10 or 20 person dungeons where do you put them? arena has already said they don’t want the game to change dramatically at 80. Would you want to have a 20 man lvl 40 instance? That would be interesting but the problem would be again getting 20 people together to do it. Yes it could be done but to what goal over the 5 mans? better loot? This game doesn’t have loot progression. More complex? as mentioned above there are other ways to do that. Ways that probably better test peoples skills anyway.
I just don’t see raids happening. I think the world bosses in GW2 are meant to fill the big group desire gap.
In short yes.
Raids are different. Because of the fact that they are larger groups they utilize different types of mechanics that you simply can’t cover in 5 mans.
World bosses such as Claw and Shatterer are raids but because they are open world you can’t really design them the same way. You COULD but it would lead to a lot of frustration.
As I said before. Its really more a matter of why not. Alot of players like raids for the challenge. And 5 mans and open world raids are not the same as instanced raiding, no matter what some may feel. Its just not.
As for the question you had about low level raids. I say yes! As far as I know raids have always been for max level players and I always wondered why. I mean a good encounter designer should be able to make an encounter for 10 level 40 players just as easy at 10 level 80 players. Or 20 players, or 15. Whatever Areanet would decide to go with.
GW2 is a game that really appeals to almost every player, within its own system. I just don’t see a reason to exclude raiders, especially when it can work within GW2’s own horizontal progression system. Most people think tiered raiding is the only way to go, but honestly tiered raiding didn’t exist until WoW, or if you want to get technical EQ: Planes of Power. But prior to that EQ and DAOC had tough, zoned raids that didn’t have progression tiers.
I am gonna post that encounter (just need to find it) to illustrate how a instanced raid encounter differs from a world boss raid or a 5 man explorable mode dungeon.
Yes, raids could work. After BWE 3 (I think) there was a big argument on the GBTV forums about wether this would even be possible and I was convinced that it was. Having some game design background myself I actually wrote up a full raid encounter using the GW2 combat and game mechanics. No one was able to shoot it down.
The big question becomes wether Arenanet would be interested in doing such a thing, and should they. Well obviously no one can know the answer to the first. But yes I think they should. As long as they approach it in the same way raids were approached in say DAOC. The key to avoid is making Raids feel like “endgame” which is pretty much against the whole point of Guild Wars 2. But raids are a content alot of people love, not because they are endgame but because people like the challenge. The mistake that raid forward games like RIFT and WoW make is that raids are almost required to see the conclusion to the main parts of the lore and to get the best gear. As long as A-Net avoids those two problems and designs the raids solely to be content for people who like raiding (and alot of people do) then I can’t see any viable reason why they shouldn’t do it. And from a personal standpoint I think they will eventually add raids. I have faith that they will do it right.
If anyone is interested in seeing that raid encounter I can probably find it, but its longish and I didn’t want to go looking for it if no one cared to see it.
Long time DAOC player here. No doubt many of you know that WvsW shares alot of core design tenants with RvR. While WvsW does some things better and some things worse (as you would expect), I definitely see some things both short term and long term that need addressing if WvsW is to achieve its status as the best large scale pvp in the MMO space.
Short Term:
Map Size/Movement: The WvsW maps are huge. Personally I think thats a very good thing. And if I’m going to draw comparisons to DAOC, then it needs to be mentioned that DAOC also had huge maps. However the biggest I am seeing is that because of the difficulty in making waypoints at keeps, map movement is extremely difficult. This is also leading to a over reliance on zerging because players can’t easily get to places where they need to defend or attack, so they just follow the zerg around. It needs to be easier for players to move from keep to keep. And its especially important for a guild to be able to easily defend THEIR keep. So if you have claimed a keep there should be a way to quickly access it.
Lack of communication and focus: This is because of a couple issues. Foremost that you have no way of knowing when your guild claimed keep is under attack. In DAOC not only did you see when your guild keep was under attack, you saw how many players were attacking it. And you also saw if any keep from any guild in your alliance was under attack. Alliances are something I would love to see in this game. Allowing guilds to ally together just makes tons of sense. And letting guilds see guard spam (if they want to) just sounds like the logical thing to do. I could have sworn I remembered Arenanet talking in the betas about doing this, but I’ve seen nothing since. Maybe its still planned? I don’t know. But if it isn’t it should be.
Costs to players: This is a bit of a barrier to entry and honestly its a bit puzzling. Seige costs need to be looked at. Most are to high (though some are fine). To go along with this items are damaged at the same rate as in PVE and honestly thats just silly. It can easily keep a low level player out of WvsW. I’d suggest that kills resulting from pvp do 50 to 25% less durability damage than a PVE kill. Why punish players who want to get in on the action?
Long Term:
Incentive: Alot of people have said that WvsW has low incentives and that it will hurt its longevity down the road. While I dunno that I agree, I think anyone who has played DAOC would agree with me that some sort of PVP dungeon that is accessible to the controlling server would be a hugely successful addition. Who didn’t love Darkness Falls? Obviously this isn’t something I’d expect to see anytime soon, but I definitely think its something Arenanet should strongly consider.
Beyond these issues I’ve mentioned WvsW is about as good as it gets for large scale open world pvp. This doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement, but I’m fairly happy with things right now. My biggest source of frustration is the difficulty in staying with a guild or small group. Because of speed variances, and a lack of ways to move around the map more than anything else.
Keep up the good work!
(edited by Khellendros.2851)