Chris, raiding is a social activity.
Social dynamics will determine whether your mechanics “work.” If you choose mechanics that do not support a broad social dynamic, raiding in GW2 will fail for the population at large.
You’ve stated that GW2 raiding should “fit” with the overall philosophy of the game. I agree. But you’ve put the cart before the horse IMO.
We need to decide what the social aspects of raiding are before designing mechanics.
Quite the opposite I would say.
I don’t know how you’re supposed to properly design the social aspects of ANYTHING if you haven’t given form to the thing in question first.
Modifying it based on social needs, sure. But you need a base to work with first.
“Let’s have a convention!”
“What kind of convention”
“It doesn’t matter, let’s just invite a bunch of people and figure it out later!”
That, my good sir, is what I would consider “putting the cart before the horse”.
I’m confused by the second suggestion? You already can’t waypoint if any of your group is in combat. If you mean the practice of the party dropping out of combat as a whole for a few seconds then re-engaging before the health regens.
Maybe consider a mystical barrier preventing re-entry until either everyone is dead or the boss is killed (I believe this is the counter used by FFXIV in all boss fights.)?The last suggestion I’ve mixed feelings about, on the plus side if you get re-engaged in combat before you’ve had a chance for cooldowns to end it adds extra risk. On the negative side, if you’ve just cleared the room it’s just an exercise in frustration waiting for your cooldowns to end so everyone can heal up.
Yea, that’s what I meant. I’ve been in situations where me or a group member will drop combat against a boss for a few seconds so that the rest of the party can waypoint to rez. Typically this happens when all but one or two people are dead. Alternatively, an individual in the group will drop combat so that they can go rez a single dead ally faster.
With regards to healing, that’s a risk I was thinking of as well. If in practice disabling out-of-combat healing just makes you stop and wait constantly to heal between fights, then it’s nothing more then a nuisance.
My hope is that it would make healing skills (particularly group healing) more valuable, and add an element of attrition to the over all experience.
I’ll be honest, as selfish as it is , I’d like there to be nothing new for a farmer or gem traders in Raids. They’re already the two most rewarded (over rewarded) groups due to the shear amount of tradeable items. Plus removing them from the equation on this content puts top players back on track for feeling their time is valued without them having to compete against those two groups for shear number of unlocks.
So my ideal situation would be only T6’s, Ectos, Unids, giants eyes , or other typical high value standard items as the currency generation from raids.
I’ll compromise on some raid mats being tradeable as long as (as you suggested) There is a clear set of items obtained purely and solely by raiding (the vendor at the end which is achievement locked and can only be interacted with if you personally have killed every boss in the raid).
I agree, and it diminishes the prestige if you can just buy everything.
A set of tradeable rare-drop items, in addition to player bound rewards, would be okay.
I was wondering what people think of the idea of Group Combat State
Basically, while you’re in the raid, you’re whole group is put “in combat” as soon as any one member gets in combat. This could be raid wide, or just party wide.
This would increase the value of healing by getting rid of questionable practices such as dropping combat to heal, and things like dead allies waypoint without fully reseting the boss.
I’ll also put forth the idea of turning off out-of-combat auto healing while inside the raid instance.
Has it been established that the 5-person party system will still be used even within the raid group?
This is pretty important because of the AoE cap and how boons are dispersed. We’ll need to be able to organize ourselves so that we can properly distribute boons after all. This can come into play in some pretty major ways depending on the raid fight mechanics. For example: being able to have a spike team that stacks offensive buffs, and a defense team that stacks regen/prot/stability.
edit: I realize it’s not that difficult to stack all boons with high uptime, but there are still trade-offs to be had, and not all groups will be that meticulously put together.
(edited by Arewn.2368)
17 pages of Settling Down… WOW I can’t. how do you. reeaadd it all? New-found respect, Chris. New-found respect.
No kidding eh.
Even participating in the thread, I end up skimming over a bunch of it.
I think a mix of mobs/bosses is best. Mobile enemies would be nice for encouraging cc and more mobile friendly play (ranged). Structural enemies/bosses defeat the purpose of precision and ferocity. Slow chunkers can be easily stacked up on and taken down. As long as there’s variety, it’s more interesting. I guess nobody liked them, but I really liked the toxic mobs. Downed states may be another interesting thing. Not that I’d love being finished by a monster, but what if certain enemies could resurrect others? Interrupt the rez?!
Good point on downed state.
I think it would be really annoying if every mob in the raid entered downstate, but if they add a few here and there i think it can really add to the experience.
Maybe something to the effect of a “commander mob” that is present in most packs of mobs, and it enters a downstate and can potentially be rez’d by the other mobs.I did suggest in one of my earlier mechanic posts that mobs be given the ability to
-dodge
-downed state
-finish us
In raids to add an extra level of tension to the fights, it means you have to be that bit more careful.
They’d have to be careful with giving enemies the ability to stomp us. A mob taking the time to stomp a player is almost akin to the mob being CC’ed, since it can’t take other actions for the duration. For that reason, I feel like it could be exploited.
Aside from that though, it would help mix things up if some mobs stomped instead of attacking downed players.
I think a mix of mobs/bosses is best. Mobile enemies would be nice for encouraging cc and more mobile friendly play (ranged). Structural enemies/bosses defeat the purpose of precision and ferocity. Slow chunkers can be easily stacked up on and taken down. As long as there’s variety, it’s more interesting. I guess nobody liked them, but I really liked the toxic mobs. Downed states may be another interesting thing. Not that I’d love being finished by a monster, but what if certain enemies could resurrect others? Interrupt the rez?!
Good point on downed state.
I think it would be really annoying if every mob in the raid entered downstate, but if they add a few here and there i think it can really add to the experience.
Maybe something to the effect of a “commander mob” that is present in most packs of mobs, and it enters a downstate and can potentially be rez’d by the other mobs.
[b]Proposal:
Create more demands in dungeons/raid. Let Mob groups can do everything to create demand.[b]Goal of Proposal
Encourage more build diversity and a little bit more gear choice.
[b]Proposal Functionality
Dungeons have very little demands. What do I mean by demands? Well, dungeons do not demand cripple, boon removal, CC because they don’t need it in dungeons.
-snip for space-
I like a lot of your ideas here, so I’d like to add to your proposal:
Significantly increase overall mob mobility. Give as many enemies as possible a repositioning tool that they will use with decent frequency. Give them abilities similar to flanking strike, whirlwind attack, shadowstep, bulls rush, phase retreat, etc.
Basically, anything to make the mobs move around more. This will encourage, but not demand, players to use more cripple/chill/CC to lock down mobs, as well as make player mobility more important to keep up with the mobs, and will help alleviate the stacking situation in some places.
Gameplay in GW2 is very mobile, this should be taken advantage of in designing encounters.
Im very aware, which is why I advocate the two raid sizes of 8 and 12 as a viable model. As long as you have eight people, you would only ever need to find, at most, 3 people to make multiple raid groups possible during a raiding session.
There is big difference between having to find 3 additional people and having to find 14 additional people (even without the trinity) to make raiding viable during a session.
And we really shouldnt care what the pinnacle of normalcy is in raiding. The point is to get away from those preconceptions and look at what GW2 offers. Traditionally, in large groups, GW2 uses scaling. Im past advocating for scaling, but I still think the issue deserves a solution. That is why I want to have the discussion.
My point about normalcy is that people are both accustomed to and fully capable of dealing with it.
5 friends, only 4 can play L4D. 11 friends, only 10 can play League of Legends. 3 friends, only 2 can play Portal2.
You’re making a mountain out of a molehill on something we can discuss LATER, and it’s derailing the thread.
They were upset (reasonably so) because they logged on during a raid night expecting to get to raid with friends and werent able to because of logistics. They suspended their real lives thinking they would be part of the group and, because of numbers, were not.
And this wasnt an uncommon occurrence. It got to the point where we would have to roll to see who got to go and who did not.
Is that something we really want to see happening in GW2?
I don’t mean to drag out this off-topic discussion, but do remember that GW2 is not WoW. You won’t have to sit in chat for 2 hours looking for a healer in GW2.
The problem you bring up is no where near as big of an issue as you make it out to be. Split your group, pug the empty slots. Rigid group size is the pinnacle of normalcy in the genre, it’s something people have been able to easily deal with for well over a decade.
I feel splitting up the raid is a fundamentally bad idea, here’s why:
The idea of the raid is to have a cooperative experience with a medium-size group. If the first thing you do is split that group into different paths, then you stop playing together and start playing beside each other.
The raid needs to find a method of engaging the 15 member group together in a meaningful way.
Remember Marionette? fun fight. But failing because lane 4 couldn’t beat the mini-boss, and there was nothing you could do to interact with the lane 4 players or influence the outcome? not so fun.
I want to actually play with the 14 other members of the raid, not have 10 of them separate from me doing their own thing in a different place that happens to be working to the same objective.
Sub-objectives within an encounter that divide the group are good, but all the members have to still be in the same encounter and able to interact with the other sub-groups.
15 people jumping on the same mob is going to be a meaningless cluster, that’s definitely the case and there needs to be a solution to that. But sending them their separate ways is not a solution I think we should be satisfied with.
15 people jumping on the same mob, but that mobs has different body parts that need to be engaged in different ways and that require interactivity between them. That can be meaningful combat.
15 people in the same room for one encounter, but there’s some heavy hitting high health mobs that need to be locked down by a CC/tanky team, while other members burn adds, and the main group kills the boss. That can be meaningful.
Which raises the issue of accessibility (an area where GW2 has always set itself apart) and essentially limiting people out of raiding for pure math and logistical reason – which I’ve explained in detail in this thread.
The solution doesn’t have to be scaling, but the alternative of a single set number causes logistics issues that plague raiding in other games, especially for guilds (its the reason WoW implemented flex raiding).
Again, the discussion around that point – and finding an alternative (or the insistence that there isn’t one) – is a necessary part of the raid conversation.
If scaling limits development, what can we do to solve both issues – making challenging raids accessible to everyone (logistically) without tearing guilds and communities apart or limiting your development capabilities.
Ive tried to compromise on this perspective, even offering a potential solution (the 8-12-16 or just 8-12 sized raids). Im just asking that something people care about not be dismissed out of hand – that it be part of the actual discussion.
I think Chris has clearly indicated that he’s open to downscaling the raid for less numbers at this point.
He’s trying to get the conversation focused on more pressing issues though, namely how raids are going to work at a gameplay level. How are we going to make challenging instanced group content, for a group size of about 15 players, using GW2’s unique mechanics of play.
I’m sure the discussion will come back around to scaling later. The CDI threads are progressive in nature, they grow over time to cover different facets of the topic.
If you want to stick with physical utilities, I would suggest taking Stomp instead of Kick or Throw Bollas. That way you at least have a stunbreak. It’s also a blast finisher (useful for WvW zergs), can be used to get people off of you in 1vx situations, and can clear points in spvp.
I’ve seen greatsword/hammer builds work to reasonable effect too. Longbow is meta and quite good, but I wouldn’t let that discourage you from trying hammer.
If you do take hammer, then get Throw Bollas over Kick, since the hammer gives you plenty of CC and the Bollas will help you set up combos or bait dodges.
Ideally, I’d like to see Vengeance modified and rebalanced in the following way:
The core skill works the same, you get up and fight normally for a time. Two changes need to be made though.
First, return to down state when vengeance expires. Dying while in vengeance will still result in your complete defeate.
Second, killing an opponent does not give you a chance to rally. Instead, when you return to down state you get 1 stack of a buff per enemy slain while in vengeance. Each stack will heal you for X% of your downed health, potentially rallying you if you killed enough.
The ‘Sweet Vengeance’ trait will instead increase the amount of health you gain per stack.
Time you’re rallied for and health returned are subject to rebalancing. I would expect them to nerf how long you’re standing for to compensate.
These changes would remove the RNG, and stop vengeance from being a killyourself button.
EDIT: We need some way to prevent “speed runs”, which ruined 5-man dungeons for alot of people. Moving quickly an efficiently is great; racing through content driven by rewards is no fun for many.
Speed runs are not only fine, they’re actually quite a good thing to have. They add re-playability to the content, and can foster healthy inter-community competition. Ontop of that, they push people to improve themselves and dig deep into how GW2 works. Speedruns give rise to some of our most dedicated GW2 players.
If anything (and I’m not one to tell people what they’re allowed to enjoy in a game), what needs looking at is the so-called “zerker meta” that is anchored in speed-runs. In other words, we need to look at the cause, not the symptom, and improve gameplay in such a way that other roles are valuable at high levels of play.
I’m not the one who makes decisions on gear tiers, but it’s very unlikely raids will have a new gear tier with new stats. We would attempt to find other avenues to reward players, and create a sense of progression within the raids instead.
You mention a “raid-focused progression track”. What do you think that might look like?
Look to Fractals!
Agony effectively bound players to progression within a closed system, without affecting gear requirements outside of that system.
You essentially want to keep the current gear system you have: the power plateau is set in stone, but players might still change gear in order to min-max their build.
Taking this idea into raids:
Instead of enemies getting stronger and requiring higher stats to defeat, upon entering a new dungeon/raid tier’s content you would get a debuff that reduces your effective power in some way (lower damage mitigation, lower damage, lower healing output, etc). Bosses will drop infusions which, when applied to your character, will reduce the effectiveness of the debuff.
The infusion could be put into a new infusion slot on gear, or you could simply add a new character gear slot altogether that is intended for equiping raid infusions.
This way, you’re not making people replace gear, and you’re not faced with the power-creep that comes with new gear tiers, but you enforce a form of stat-related progression in your raids.
Each new raid could require a new type of infusion that is specific to it, OR, you could make harsher debuffs with each new tier that require higher values of infusion.
A player gaining incredibly high values of infusion would have no ill effect on this system, because once the debuff is negated, a higher infusion value is useless for that raid.
I appreciate that we’ve been asked to consider a ‘Raid Group’ to be up to 15 players, but I wanted to make some suggestions and pointers regarding this aspect.
I think that designing a raid based on group size, is going to be a limiting factor in what can be created as a raid. It would be better IMO, to not have a specific group size that is always the same for every raid. Instead you set the group size later in the process, based on the specifics of what the raid requires.
Take the Marionette for example, there is no real way that fight would work in a group of 15 people, but it’s probably the content that would be voted the best boss fight that’s been developed so far.
After a bit of practice this fight was generally done with 15-20 people per lane, and I think given more time for us to master it, it would have been doable with as little as 10 per lane (I suspect it probably ‘was’ done with 10 per lane at one point). You could bring this fight back as a 50 player raid (10 per lane), you might even be able to bring it back as a super hard 25 man raid (5 per lane), but not as a 15 player raid, 3 players per lane is just unrealistically small to be completed.
Therefore limiting raids to a very specific player size is also limiting the creative scope of the development team. I Marionette was being designed now, with the intent of being a raid, it just never would have happened.
From a technical point of view, I am guessing that the reason for a 15 man limit is based on the theoretical maximum size for a party. Any more than 15 players would – I assume – mean that there is not enough screen space to include the health bar of all party members.
Could there not instead be a way of connecting two parties together into ‘companies’ (squad is already in use)? The primary purpose would be to allow groups to ensure that they end up in the raid with others that they want to play with, and not randomly get grouped with another party that happened to start at the same time.
The parties might not be able to see the health bars of the players outside of their own party, but they could chat with each other using /team and the system would essentially enable you to design any raid you want.
Do you see the flaw in what you’ve brought up though? The “best boss fight to date” was the one where they broke the group up into as many smaller groups as they could. The implication here being that you can’t have good gameplay in huge groups.
You have to realize that the Marionette fight’s mechanics were a solution to the problem that you cant (or at the very least it’s incredibly difficult to) make encounters with good gameplay with large groups. You have to split the group into smaller groups if you want fulfilling gameplay.
The biggest flaw with this whole “big group broken into smaller groups” idea is that you stop playing together with the other groups and start literally playing beside each other.
The individual groups are basically playing alone, but with a random chance to fail based on people who are essentially playing separately from them.
So be careful with this idea. Realize that the Marionette was fun because we were split into small groups, and realize that that was fun because the only time we get fulfilling gameplay is when we are in reasonably sized groups.
This idea is essentially proposing that we create a design problem just so that we can fix it. It strikes me as being a much better idea to simply not make problematic designs in the first place.
(edited by Arewn.2368)
I cant get past the 15 player set group restriction you’re trying to set, which basically shuts down the scaling option. Some of us have real issue with that and its potential effect on the community – that we have communicated very clearly – and making that assumption going in (after I and many others have clearly made valid points on this topic) means that I, unfortunately, dont feel welcome in this conversation.
Im sorry this comes across caustic, but this is a very disheartening issue for me. Ive been playing alongside groups averaging between 30-45 players (every one of which is qualified to raid, imo) for almost 2 years that I refuse to leave behind in set number raids because we cant divide them up by 15 reliably every time.
I was forced to do that for years in other games – Guild Wars 2 was supposed to be different. The devs were supposed to care about things like this and keep that exclusionary stuff out of the game.
I would love to join the conversation about mechanics, but not if the end result is something that will potentially fracture the group of players I care so much about in this game.
You’re perfectly welcome in the conversation even if you disagree, that’s been the case in all of the CDI threads, you just have to be flexible enough to discuss under the given parameters. I don’t claim to know what the devs think, but as someone in stark opposition to your thoughts on scaling (despite apparently having similar gaming background) here’s what I have to say to your post:
Constraints are necessary for cohesiveness. While it’s true that every one gets to play the world bosses regardless of group size, it’s equally true that the world bosses are very lackluster from the perspective of player gameplay. World bosses have their place: they keeps the open world alive, they’re exciting and visually stunning, they foster community interaction. But they have limits and are lackluster in other areas, such as gameplay, as a result of what they are.
If the goal of raids is to be cooperative challenging group content, certain constraints will have to be put in place to meet that goal. The devs are asking us to be mindful of those constraints as we discuss.
15 players sounds like a good amount. Too big, and the role of the individual gets watered down. Too small, and it just becomes a glorified dungeon party.
Chris has told us to work with 15, but there was flexibility in what he said, and that flexibility makes this discussion very inclusive to your desires. He said “with the ability to do encounters with less.”.
Making 15 players the dev’s point of balance, but allowing the instance to roughly downscale for smaller group sizes, would allow you to comfortably fit in your varying group of 30 to 45 people. Split 30 into 3 groups of 10 or 2 groups of 15, split 45 into 3 groups of 15, and everything in-between works as well.
Once again, you must work within constraints if you want good content though. In this case, up to 45 player varying sized raids doesn’t work, it’s not what this content is aiming to be. It’s not an instanced world boss. So they’ve constrained it to a smaller number for the sake of cohesiveness and good encounter design.
What’s more, even if they do go with rigid group sizes, it’s not the end of the line for you in this discussion. Think of ways, tools, features, that can aid you in managing your group so that everyone gets to play. Pugging is a powerful tool. In WoW, it’s how I managed to keep my small guild going, and it’s how the GM of a larger guild I was in managed to get everyone raiding when he split us into groups.
Controversal Topics that I see around this thread.
- Scaling- Should Raids be rigid to make balancing easier or, should Raids be very flexible so that all guilds can be more inclusive to their members?
- Difficulty- Should Raids be easy enough for casual players, or should raids be difficult so it requires skill on the risk of excluding casual player.
- Stacking- What steps should be taken to remove stacking or should it even be removed at all?
- AI- What AI should be in place?
- Rewards- How rewarding should Raids be?
- Punishment- How punishing should failing a raid be? How punishing should dying be?
These are all really excellent questions! I would love to see some drilling down into these specifics with your proposals.
Scaling – Raids should be of pre-determined, rigid size. Not only do we have in-game experience with the pit-falls of scaling, we now have dev confirmation that this does indeed cause design problems. In order to have a cohesive, challenging experience, rigid raid size will be necessary. Players can and will make do with the inconvenience of having to conform to a group size, as they do now with dungeons, and as they have across other MMOs for the past decade. Understandably, GW2 is a game that is very casual friendly, but being casual DOES NOT mean being bad at the game. Nurture player skill and cater to the needs of the casual gamer by including features that support their needs rather then by dumbing things down. For example, by allowing you to save raid progress and pick up where you left off at a later time.
If scaling is a must, I would recommend a split: have a “Normal Mode” that has a rigid group size and is properly and precisely tuned and balanced, and then have an “Easy Mode” that has flexible group sizes so that communities can have their group tours, and so that players of lesser skill can more accessibly get a taste of the content.
Difficulty – raids don’t have to be the pinnacle of gaming challenge, but they should be a cohesive challenge none the less. Inclusion of a separate “easy mode” could be a good way to ease new players into raiding, and would stand as a way for casuals(or more to the point, less skilled players) to get to experience the content.
If opting for a single difficulty I would suggest that the raids be easier in so far as completion goes, but that there be additional objectives that naturally increase difficulty that the group can chose to go after. The additional objectives can range from being outright side-bosses that are more challenging but not required to clear the raid, to being natural optional difficulty enhancers such as defeating an encounter under certain circumstances, or opening a gate that let’s out more enemies during the fight or doing something during the fight to trigger additional more difficult mechanics.
Stacking -stacking isn’t inherently bad, it’s bad when it becomes the standard thing you do for the entire duration of the fight. Fight mechanics that discourage stacking (AoE, powerful bouncing attacks, condition spreading when too near to an infected ally, etc), and/or enhanced AI (see below) should be put in place.
AI – Not an area I have too many ideas for, but making mobs move around more, and giving them skills that reposition them, can contribute to diminishing stacking-play.
Rewards – stick to GW2’s base philosophy, don’t add gear tiers and gear grinds. Some form of token system similar to dungeons, which guarantee that players can chose what they want and get something for their time, would be good. Additionally, having rare drops that come from specific encounters within the raid would give great incentive to participation and would integrate the raids into the market. Rewards can range from skins, to tonics, to specialty items with quirky (but for the most part cosmetic) functionality, to recipes, to gear (exotics/ascended). This, on top of regular “trash drops” of the usual variety.
A FotM style solution can be used if gear-related progression is desired. By this I mean a non-combat stat that you can add to your character that facilitates progression through the raid (agony in the case of FotM). Not sure if such progression is generally desired for GW2 raids though.
Punishment – I don’t feel punishment needs to be anything special, groups should be allowed to try and re-try until they get it right. Individual encounters in the raid should fully reset after a failed attempt. Players should not be able to re-spawn (waypoint) while their group is in combat. The usual dungeon rules for the most part.
(edited by Arewn.2368)
I hate to belabor it, but I strongly believe strict numbers for raids are just as much of a blight as gear requirements and treadmills.
If they cant do large scale content in a way that lets us play with all of our friends, I would rather it not be in the game at all. Many of us came to this game to get away from those kinds of things.
I still think raiding could be something much different without sacrificing fun. They may not be as complex and challenging as those found in other MMOs, but that doesnt mean they would be pushover content either.
Something like the Marionette or Breachmaker with scaling from 8 to as high as 30 would be something my guild, and many others, would enjoy immensely.
I also still believe the best use of raids would be to keep large scale Living Story events (like Marionette, Breachmaker, Ancient Karka, Tower of Nightmares) alive after they leave the living story. That is content Anet has proven they can do well (with the exception of Ancient Karka, but I do believe it would be fun without the lag from the first one) and that would make some really fun large group instanced content.
Scaling, if used at all, needs to be very limited in scope. I understand perfectly well the desire for flexibility, but sometimes you need to limit yourself if you want something cohesive. I’m not interested in a guided tour the way Great Jungle Wurm, Tequatl, Marionette, etc are, and that’s what scaling can easily results in: Imprecise tuning of encounters and sloppy mechanics that try too hard to work for too wide a range of variables.
We already have world bosses and guild missions, were 8-30 people can go on a guided tour of boss attacks. We need raids to be something that provides challenging play, not more encounters where the biggest challenge is organizing your group.
We just need better AI. If the mobs tried to scatter when they took X damage per second within Y proximity of each other it partially solves the problem of trash mobs turning into just a LOS and stand there situation. If the mobs attempt to stay apart you put it on the players to keep them together using more control skills, which every class has access to. The mistake would be to have the mobs use knockback skills or something similar, all that would do is create yet another reliance on stability to burst.
Better AI would definitely help, an I like this idea in particular for anti-stacking play. Some stacking is fine, but by and large it should be a tactic you put into play at key moments in an encounter, not something you stand around doing through the entire encounters duration.
I have a very strong opinion regarding scaling.
I understand your points, but I also know from experience (leading 25 man hardcore progression raids for 6+ years in WoW) that the most toxic part of a raid is the hard set numbers. What happens when 11/12/13/14 people are interested in raiding? Decisions have to be made to leave friends behind – and that leads to nastiness I personally never want to see in a game again.
To me, scaling is what can set raiding apart in Gw2, even if it does affect the difficulty a little (and I still believe you can design fights that require some coordination even with flexible sized groups).
This issue doesnt exist to the same degree in dungeons because if you have 12 people, you just need to find 3 more to form 3 groups, versus finding another 7 to form 2 ten man groups.
Please, I beg you guys, think really hard about the atmosphere rigid sized groups would create in the game. This is the number one reason I stopped raiding in WoW and that I was so excited for GW2 – not having to make decisions about leaving friends out of large scale activities. Please dont make me go back to that in GW2.
And to clarify, Im not against harder content, just rigid numbers in raids. It is the number one reason people find raiding such a toxic environment. You can do better than that.
Addendum: reading some of the other posts, Ive seen the idea of raid scaling floating between two numbers. If they could make the math right, I could get behind that – say scaling from 8-16 people (meaning that 11 person group would be fine. it would unlikely you would need to leave anyone out of a raid night)
GW2 already suffers greatly in many places because of scaling. Scaling is a great thing, and I really love it and wish more games would do it, but it also makes tuning the encounters inherently imprecise, sloppy. I also raided in WoW for many years, raid leading for a time as a GM, and had to deal with the numbers game. Despite that, my willingness to give up quality for the sake of number flexibility is incredibly limited, and I wouldn’t go any farther then +-1 (e.g. a 10person raid will scale for as few as 9 people, and as many as 11 people). Even that’s questionable though.
Here you go:
‘…instanced co-operative group based ‘challenging’ content…’
Chris
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. That’s an incredibly satisfying definition, thank goodness.
It is instanced. It is cooperative group based. It is challenging.
No additional baggage, those are the core principles to work on and branch out from, it’s perfect.
I don’t have a cohesive proposal on how raids should be, but I do have a few things I feel they should abide by:
Static group size – since it’s challenging content, it needs to be carefully tuned. A variable group size unnecessarily complicates that. This is not to the exclusion of multiple static group sizes (for example, a 15person version of the raid & a 30 person version).
No barriers to entry – pugging (for those who wish to brave it) should be readily available, the raids shouldn’t be locked behind guild upgrades and the like. Something like a short “story lead-in” attunement that is account wide would be acceptable though.
No progressive gear tiers – sticking with GW2’s core philosophy, we shouldn’t be grinding it out for stronger gear with each new raid. It causes stat-creep and renders old content irrelevant when new content comes out. A FotM style solution (either with raid levels, or with something akin to the agony infusion system[non-combat stat that’s require for progress within the specific format) would be good in the case that some form of progression is desired. Ascended should remain the highest gear tier, and we shouldn’t be made to replace it because of raids.
Consider multiple difficulties – I’m not convinced that multiple difficulties is the best way to go, but an “easy” and “hard” mode could be a good way to keep everyone involved while still offering greater depth and challenge to those who desire it. Alternatively, fractals style (but more limited, like 5 or 10 levels at most, so that tuning can be more carefully done) level progression could work.
Edit:
Consider progress saving – These raids are supposed to be challenging, which can inherently be time consuming (not a bad thing), but will they be long? a part of raiding for many people is a feeling of group progression, but we don’t all have the time of day to kill multiple bosses in a single night. Consider giving players the tools they need to stop, leave, and later come back and resume from where they left off.
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Abaddon is long long dead. He won’t be returning – though lore on him may. But for all we know, this could be as simple as the Temple of the Forgotten God’s lore on Abaddon (where we first saw that kind of statue).
I don’t think that’s an old ruin – looks too new, to be honest. Unless it’s well kept. Which I find hard to believe.
Potential Abaddon fractal?
Was kind of annoyed that the first 80% of the trailer was just old stuff we’ve already played, but the end bit was great.
Abandon fractal inc? :P
Also, looks like we’ll be going deeper into Dry Top, pretty sure there was some new landscape in that vid.
IMO rampage needs to replace utility skills instead of weapon skills. Perhaps replace the heal skill, 3 utility, and elite skills with different items on the bar. The skills would have to be reworded as to not make them overpowered.
I have tried rampage and I always feel severely kitten when i used it because it takes away my weapon sets and provide little in return. Basically I feel like I just turned myself into a giant moa bird.
I agree. That’s what Rampage should have done, replace our ulitility skills not our weapons skills.
I really like this idea too. Would take some reworking/rebalancing, but it would be functional and unique.
This would be a particularly nasty problem against Sword Guardians and D/P Thieves, since you could pretty much cleanse blinds at a pace where the conversion would give you permanent Fury.
No you couldn’t. Cooldowns exist, and the warhorn has two abilities. At most, you can get 6 seconds of fury by using both abilities.
edit: bit of a kitten on my part, you’re saying IF it gave 9sec of fury, you’d easily get 100% uptime. My bad.
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Cool, that was fun. Should do this again.
Too bad the skin looks so bad lol. Looks like a rusty sickle you found in a heap of scrap.
Ok.. so karka for sure. He’s definitely fighting karka.
“If he had to, he would wipe this entire species off the face of the planet” seems to imply it’s specifically them he’s after too, not just a matter of fighting them because they’re in the way.
Edit: though “his intrusion” might point to the Karka nest. Is there anything special in there he could be searching for?
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3rd item
– Clues of the third item MAY start here / (because of the referrence by John that the previous posts were about 2 items only)
– Lots of a crafting component, where he spent a lot of time crafting / “he thought for the thousandth time. He was exhausted, bloody and sore” (of crafting)
– Reference to a crafting station in LA / “Lemark sat back against the rocky wall, brackish water rained down from one geyser or another” (geysers might also be a referrence to a craft of a weapon)
– the component is a blade and needs to be crafted/refined / “he starred at yet another dulled blade”
– Rare component / ““One of these alien curs is going to kill me before I’m done with this””
There are literal geysers in southsun cove. Brackish waters also fit this zone. Additionally, Karka are deep-sea creatures that look quite alien to Tyrian natives (I think they’ve even been explicitly described in such a way before). Karka permeate the island and have incredibly tough shells, something blades would dull and break against. Even if he’s not directly seeking out the Karka, it’s highly likely he would be forced into encounters and fight with them while on the island
Might be looking too deep into this, but a thread https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Zommoros-told-me-a-secret-Spoiler-free-link/first#post4503998
was made by John as a spoiler-free edition of this thread.
What’s interesting about it though is that it’s the only place I can find where he talks about edit #2 (unless I’m simply missing it, though I’ve looked through this thread and haven’t found it). This is all he said about edit 2:
“edit 2 is referencing this thread existing.”
Additionally, at the beginning of this new, spoiler free thread he writes:
“In case anyone wants to try to find the item without spoilers and just hints I’ll be keep a locked copy of the thread here where I’ll post the hints:”
Perhaps “locked copy” is related to the item we’re looking for? One of our hints mentions “no more copies”, so are we looking for an vendor item that’s “locked” in some way? either the item itself or the process of “unlocking” the vendor who sells the item?
“He was positive this time, no more fakes, no more copies, forgeries or lies, this was it.”\
This line could simply be supplementary information reinforcing the idea that it’s a vendor-only item by saying it is not a craftable item.
I would also think that the “spent every copper” line would indicate that it is a vendor that sells things for coin, not karma or candycorn. But then John said the copper line “isn’t additional information”… which is a bit confusing and might throw that idea out the window.
Yay holidays. Holidays are good, and no change is no surprise. They’ve said from the beginning that these would be re-usable things (disappointing they didn’t do so for Dragon Bash though).
1 and 2 are also points I care about.
Chris
Beware the trap that is convenience. If guild halls aren’t convenient enough (offer enough services), once the novelty wears off people will stop using them.
If they are too convenient, prepare to have very empty cities, because people will spend all their time in their halls.
I hope any “services” you can buy for your hall are all choices, I feel that’s very important.
Want crafting stations in the hall? Okay, which ones? but you can only pick two of the eight that are available.
Do you want basic merchants OR banks OR trading post attendant?
Do you want specialty merchants(for example, merchant offering a particular food you can otherwise only get from a renown heart)? okay, which ONE?
Want an asuran gate to a city? okay, which ONE city gate do you want?
Always a choice, you can’t have everything because there needs to still be reason to go to the open world hubs.
Devastatingly disappointing.
I’m a huge fan of wind-themed “stuff”, and there’s a distinct lack thereof in GW2. I was very excited when I saw “tempest weapons”, but seeing them turned that around quickly.
These skins are of the usual high quality, very well made. They are also quite “inspired” in an artistic sense, so I have no criticism for them on that ground either.
What’s disappointing is that they aren’t weapons. They’re ornaments, fancy curtain poles, art gallery pieces, and wall designs. But weapons, they are not.
This has nothing to do with “realism” as I had no expectation that an element-themed weapon would be “realistic” in the first place. It’s just that, looking at them without being told “that’s an axe”, I have trouble even identifying what I see as a weapon.
I realize wind can be a difficult theme to work with due to being invisible and formless, and I applaud the “wind activates when you take out the weapon” element of the design. I’m also impressed they didn’t simply fall to the “oh wind… guess we’ll put feathers everywhere” crutch. It’s just very difficult to identify these shapes as “weapons” (leaving aside the magic weapons, since those are generally ornamental looking by nature), which I find ultimately makes them unusable and, painful as it is to say, garbage.
Supply and demand.
They look terrible, so no body wants them, so the price isn’t that high.
I mean… qualitatively, they are of the usual high standard. Artistically they are clearly quite… inspired.
But as a weapon? forget it, those things look more like fancy coat hangers and table ornaments then they do weapons. Who ever made them clearly forgot that they were supposed to be designing something for fighting with, not something to put in an art gallery.
Incredibly disappointing as someone who’s a big fan of wind-themed stuff.
1copper raise (or undercut on the flip side) isn’t an issue. It’s good if anything. Imagine how quickly prices would inflate/deflate if you had to make a several silver difference every time.
The only issue is bots, which aren’t allowed in the first place.
I’m also a fan of the “central room connecting individual guild halls in an alliance” idea. Seems like an easy and effective solution. Everyone has their own stuff, so splitting is easy, but everyone is still connected and able to intermingle and benefit from each others hall.
With regards to Guild Hall customization, could we get some indication of what the scope we can expect is? I don’t imagine we’ll be able to build every wall “The Sims” style since GW2 doesn’t strike me as being built with that kind of thing in mind.
So to what degree do you foresee being able to customize our halls (in a broad sense, no promises expected). Are we looking at a selection of static presets that will get linear upgrades with pre-determined positioning? or on the other end of the (expected) spectrum, something like skyrim where you can piece together a building using a selection of pre-made parts, choice of location, and then have some reasonably flexible interior decoration options?
I think it is important for Guilds to be able to show of their prowess in each of the core pillars of the game and Guild Halls would be a great place in terms of a nexus to reward guild members with ways to show of the pride they have for their guild.
Does this answer your question Arewn?
Chris
Yes thank you. In which case my suggestion is as follows:
Assuming Guild Halls are instanced, and assuming the guild hall instance consists of not only the interior of the hall, but also an exterior with surrounding landscape:
You could perhaps make a guild hall browser (something along the lines of the pvp match browser, though I don’t know what technical implication this would have on your servers/cost), wherein all guild halls are listed. Guilds could then set their guild hall to private, public, or public/open.
Private – would of course mean only guild members may enter.
Public – would allow anyone to enter, but would impose limits on where the visitors can go (for example, they can only wander around the outside landscape).
Public/open – would allow anyone to enter, and the “front gates” or “door” to the interior of your guild hall would also be open, granting visitors full access. This could be achieved by something as simple as a button that opens/closes the hall’s door, which guild members with appropriate permissions can press.
Under such a system, you could implement events in the guild hall instance, and limit (some of) the event to the “exterior” part. In this way, visitors could come in, see your guild’s progress/prowess, socialize with the members, and participate in an event or two. The events would act as a small incentive for outsiders to come in and take a look, and completing the events could, in some way, contribute to your guild. But the visitors wouldn’t necessarily gain access to the “inner sanctum” of the guild, which the GM could decide to keep exclusive to the members of the guild.
The shortcoming of this system is that it would be on the player’s initiative to go explore other guild’s halls, and guilds would have no intrinsic way to attract people other then chat advertisements.
Something similar to the WvW guild claiming of Keeps could be added to key locations in the PvE world. Some form of PvE scoreboard/leader-boards could be implemented to determine which guild gets the right to claim a particular location (for X period of time), and outsiders could access the guild’s hall by interacting with something (a portal?) at these claimed locations.
I was just thinking about this and then i read your post. This might not be a popular driving function (and I apologize Devata this is nothing personal and I really appreciate your input in the CDI’s) but I would like us (for the sake of focusing the discussion) to move away from Open World Guild Hall discussion.
Put simply I am removing the proposal of open world Guild Halls specifically from our brain storm.
I do however want us to continue to talk about some of the benefits open world brings. For example how could we still keep some of the cool Guild ‘Beacon’ mechanics etc (And by Beacon I mean ways for the guild to express their personality and progression)
Chris
What’s your stance on player real-estate? ‘Guild Beacons’ (as you call it) would be a great inclusion, but if they are to be displayed in the open world in any way, you’ll inevitably run into the issue of ‘real-estate’ (limited space, and who gets the right to occupy that space).
Are you okay with limiting who can display their stuff, or are you looking towards a solution where everyone can show their ‘beacon’, even if to a lesser capacity?
This would be great, was actually thinking the same thing when outfits came out in their current iteration.
Basically, let us use transmute stones to “apply” skins to some sort of a dummy set of gear that you can use as an outfit.
I could make different sets of “looks only” armor that way and apply them as I move through the world. Desert set, a winter set, a jungle set, a pvp set, a “i got this super rare stuff and want to show it off without destroying my carefully arranged regular armor” set.
I did and I did check out Landmark as well. And sure is had some hurdles to overcome but it also has some big pro’s. Seeing homes / buildings pop up, seeing people building them, getting resources there, seeing that complete build process does make the world feel much more alive and it also gives those people much more of a goal to work towards.
However you are correct that is at the same time has possible negative effects and looking at those I do think the sky-map approach would solve most of them in a pretty easy way.
But even if you would not go for something like sky-maps, the negatives like a guy builds something next to you that you do not like is also exactly what makes it feel that bid more alive. Then you can move to another plot and so the world keeps changing.
Also in AA people can just build from a selected few models, they can not really build the homes them-self. They can do that a little more with the guild-castles but it’s still very limited. I think Anet could take that a step further really letting you build your guild-hall yourself where there are models for walls and so on that you can place together to build your own guild-hall.
Not as far as Landmark btw what is almost like a 3D design game.
I haven’t played Landmark, but I’ll continue to share what insight I’ve gleamed from my experiences in Archeage. The last paragraph about house design is unrelated to “instance vs open world”, so I’ll leave it aside.
I see two (broad) categories of open world housing(or in this case, guild halls): In-zone housing and housing-zones.
In-zone housing provides housing in actual game zones, it is intrinsically the most immersive as it resides in the native game world, but has very hefty real-estate issues. This limiting of space, I feel, makes it incompatible with GW2. There’s already worry about the accessibility of guild halls to smaller guilds, adding further limits to the number of players who can access the content through space restrictions isn’t going to be conductive with community desires.
Housing (guild hall) zones, on the other hand, provide large expanses of space dedicated to housing, outside(or beside) the native game zones. For example, a “guild hall zone” in the Mists, or an “airship zone” above the skybox. This for the most part circumvents the limited-space problem, but you’re now dealing with clustered hog-podges of halls that don’t serve much purpose. This makes it difficult for Anet to actually implement any content around the houses because they have such little control over the surrounding landscape. No GvG, no dynamic events, no living story integration. They essentially become home-instance 2.0, the only difference being that your neighbor can see you, and you customized/built it yourself. That’s nice… I guess? But it’s not aiming very high for a new, dev resource-intensive to make, feature. I’ll go play The Sims if that’s all it’s going to be. I want my guild halls to supplement my immersion in the guild wars experience, not be some place I build, say “it’s pretty yay” and then only occasionally stop by to use vendors or as a loading-screen short-cut.
What I’m interested in is what “positive” things being in the open world uniquely provides, and if “I can see strangers” is as far as it goes, then I don’t feel it’s worth.
Airship halls above zones strikes me as useless. From the ground, the ships would be indistinguishable from the airships floating above Orr. That is to say there would be no difference whether it was an actual player’s ship or some random NPC that floats by. From the ships, the ground would be indistinguishable from a backdrop that matches the zone it’s supposed to be over. All this does is limited the “type” of guild hall you can make to being variations of Airships, instead of Castles/Airships/Lodges/etc that you could otherwise have available. Edit: just saw your post on this matter, your suggestion makes the whole “it’s above the zone” idea even more pointless, it would be completely and utterly indistinguishable from the ground. It might as well just be a sky instance with a backdrop that looks like “insert zone here”.
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And yes I am aware I said instance. This is purely because I am a fan of instance over open world (-:
But why?
That is a much more important question. It’s Anet who talks about a living and breeding world. Open world guild-halls (and housing) that people can build them-self will be able to do that. Even more so then dynamic events and the living world.
An instance makes is less interesting and more put away, in addition it’s out of the game in a way, or better said it’s out of the game-world.
I very strongly urge you to actually go try Archeage, which has open world housing as a primary feature.
tldr; it can be an absolute nightmare, and in practice the only real benefit is “oh look, I can see some random guy’s house/some random guy can see my house”, and “haha I ganked you on your farm” (in Archeage’s case, it’s an open world pvp game).
Unless Anet can guarantee a plot per player, it’s going to cause some pretty ugly situations and some very jaded players. And they’d likely have to do so without introducing vast expanses of open space, or cluttering the normal maps’ skies with airships that people have to render, if they want it to look any kind of reasonable.
When you’ve spent a week looking for a plot, any plot, to build on to no avail, or when your beautiful house gets neighbors that block out your nice view or build something that aesthetically looks like trash to you and clashes with your house, you get a lot less enthusiastic about the “open world” part of housing.
Instanced housing/guild halls that can have some sort of interaction with outside forces (gvg being a popular one, but it could include other things like the ability to make the hall open to the public and having events within) would, I feel, be far more conductive to community interaction while circumventing the real estate issues entirely.
I’ll say it again for anyone on the side of “open world housing”. Go try Archeage and see what Open World Housing is actually like in practice. I’m not saying it’s entirely bad, but a reality check on what it actually entails in practice is always a good thing.
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It’s incredibly fast, which I’m not entirely opposed to, but it’s way too hard to build adrenaline in situations such as the open world or dungeons(outside of boss fights) because it rapidly depletes as soon as the mob dies.
There needs to be some sort of delay between exiting combat, and adrenaline depletion starting.
Perhaps start off slowly but lose adrenaline faster over time, like some sort of exponential curve to adrenaline decay.
That’s debatable. It can just as easily be argued that time-gated reward systems are in place to keep people playing the game (which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with monthly subs and everything to do with having a large, active playerbase).
An MMO has to incentivize players to keep returning, period. Some examples in GW2 and it isn’t even a sub game: Daily reward chests from world bosses, time-gated crafting materials for ascended items.
The main drawback of the sub model is the sheer number of people who simply can’t afford to pay $15 a month, or don’t want to. And the fact that when people with lots of money want to throw money at the company, they more or less can’t.
You may find points of contention for my individual examples, but the fundamental assertion is not “debatable”, it’s a reality.
Business models have varying effects on the development of the game. Devs of various titles have brought this up, and you can (as I just did) evaluate it for yourself on a game per game basis.
You mentioned the time gated and daily stuff from GW2, but this is very different from WoW’s setup. In GW2 these are optional time sinks that are unnecessary to your ability to participate in and complete content, but in WoW they are a progression requirements that will literally stop you from seeing content passed a certain point based on you/your groups item level (this being more so the case in the past then now, but is still present)
I would also argue against your assertion that people being unable to afford 15/month sub fee is “the main drawback”. It falls much more into the category of “don’t want to”. It’s all about value. Why pay 15/month for a game when something else is offering just as much without the forced expenditure.
It’s true that all MMOs have to get people to keep returning, but how they do it, and for what reasons, and around what schedule, will vary based on a number of factors which include business model.
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Not really. The difference with sub games is that (excepting for 1 or 2 expansions in the whole lifetime of a game) as long as you are paying the sub fee, you get access to everything, no question about it.
In F2P games (not necessarily talking about GW2 specifically), you can range from paying as little as nothing and eventually getting access to everything, to paying hundreds of dollars just to keep up.
Yes really. For arguments sake, we’ll pretend that sub fee games afford you full access to everything while paying the sub (even though that’s not really the case anymore. Many sub games now have cash shops and payed services on top of the sub, and xpacs on top of sub have always been common). But that doesn’t mean the sub fee doesn’t affect development.
A game with a sub fee has to incentives players to return and pay each month. Take WoW as an example. What do you see in that game’s content? a large list of daily quests/daily quest hubs that take several weeks of repetition and slow unlocking to get through and that have many rewards centered around them, main currency(s) with extended time barriers, and lockouts of dungeons and raids that restrict not only how fast you can get rewards, but also by extent how fast you can progress through them(raids). These are mechanisms put in place to keep people on a fast track to paying next month’s sub fee. Flight paths vs fast travel systems is another good example, but most aspects of the game will have to take into consideration the chosen business model to varying degrees. Things like leveling speeds, crafting, gear acquisition, etc.
Business model, especially in a genre such as MMOs which have ongoing development through their entire lifespan, will always affect the game’s content. Consumers simply have to “pick their poison” so to speak.
Nothing, but my point was that the Gem Store has contaminated the reward system.
Monthly subscription fees contaminate the reward system of games that they are included in as well.
So… what’s your point with that point?
That the chosen business model will have an impact on the deliverance of content? Pretty sure most people understand that already, or at least I would hope they do.
Also, there’s another active thread where someone listed the rewards that have been added to the game, but aren’t in the gem store. There seems to be a lack of armor skins, but the list is pretty big over all. So not everything is put in the gem store. “Too much is put in the gem store” is pretty subjective, so… okay I guess? I won’t argue with more free stuff.
You guys move more slowly than Blizzard does.
You do know you have to pay the price of GW2 to Blizzard every 3 months to play, plus the price of GW2 for each expansion, right?
Even leaving that aside, they still move faster then Blizzard.
WoW’s been in a 1+ year content drought, and outside of that drought only gets content patches (which aren’t even that big) two or so times a year.
People need to learn what “additive” means. Yes, they haven’t had an expansion. No, that doesn’t mean they’ve put out less content then an expansion would have in the same time span. GW2 puts out a comparative (even high compared to some) amount of content to other MMOs, it’s just spread out into frequent bite sized bits.