Open portals for all raids and alerts.

1. You are incorrect. Allowing people to underman lower instances will not increase sales or usage of replay badges...not for the majority (any one replaying lower tier content probably doesn't know better).

2. Older content with portals were coded differently and by some people who have not been employed by this company for a long time. Nexus & Paradox Wave were the last raids that had walk-in portals, and the one for paradox caused so many crashes and issues that they disabled the portal and haven't brought it back because they have not figured out what caused the issue and how to fix it. If they still can't fix it to this day what makes you think they can go down that road again?

3. They would love to give us options, but they'd like to do so without causing bigger problems than the solutions might fix.

There are portals to every raid and quite a few alerts as well all the way up to Nexus, Paradox Wave was disabled because it was causing severe crashes. Since they couldn't solve the Paradox Wave glitches and bugs they decided to no longer make walk-in portals.

Best way to do this is make a teleporter mod that gives you access to any cr relevant content. Plus it would be the perfect fit for the 4th mod slot on your teleporter.

That too has been asked repeatedly for years, and the company's response has been.........................

The serious issue with allowing people to just underman instances via options like you mention is that at-level players would still have to deal with long (even longer) queue times because the high level players aren't there anymore. At-level players can't smash through the content, so the option to queue with less players becomes absolutely useless to them (and therefore a waste of developer resources). Not to mention that some group based feats require more than 4 players (some, not all).

for me, its for walk ins,id like to be able to walk in like you canon a few of the other raids, I was suggesting to open portals to all raids or alerts.

Not going to happen since it causes problems they can't fix. Time to move on to different solutions to the problems.

It seems like the least-problematic solution would, unfortunately, still require a considerable amount of people-hours to enact, and that would be to institute a system of all instances, or at least all instances up to, say, the most recent three or four or five or six Episodes, having the option to queue either for a stats-clamped/buffed version or by the current system where everyone who meets the minimum CR can join.

The reason this would require so much work is that they'd have to then manually adjust every single instance so it would be reasonably balanced while clamped, and going through every instance -- even if this system were implemented only on raids -- would obviously take a huge amount of effort and hours. Which is why I expect it likely will never happen, even though I think it's the answer that would likely satisfy the most people, since both sides, those who want clamped versions, and those who don't, able to have their cake.

But it's just a dream, I expect, alas.

I can only hope that I over-estimate how much work would be involved in constructing an option to play either mandatory-minimum-CR-only, or CR-clamped/buff version, depending on which you prefer. But I'm not optimistic.

I'd certainly be interested if Mepps or some dev could provide any insight into whether such a system must remain only a dream, or whether it could conceivably actually be hypothetically constructed at some hypothetical future point.

Still needs to be done somehow.

They've commented on this and according to them it does indeed take a lot of time.

It's a wonder we still have portals to older instances now. The devs removed a few because they were crashing people and they didn't know why, just that they did.

It's complex for them to put portals in for every instance, it would be great, but I think it would be better suited to ask for a low man amount of players queuing into an instance. Like have 3 players, can queue into an alert w/o having to use match making.

Also, it's been commented, this is not a high priority (if at all) because it does lengthen queue times for players that are leveling. With the introduction of Omnibus, as long as most players are randomly queueing with the Quickplay feature, you should be able to get into the instance you are specifically going for.

For a short time, it sounded like the ability to limited queue(AQS) was coming....I think we got the clamp instead. As most people who were wanting access to specific content for feats, I'm not sure how Omni+clamp would ever work out in their favor, but I guess checklists need to get knocked out too.

I still have hope at some point they will allow us to skip matchmaking, even if its still with some minimum (like 6 for raids, 3 for alerts) as many feats can be biffed by 1 random who simply WON'T listen to given instructions or is someone who maliciously likes to bomb out feat runs because 'I don't need it' or 'it takes too long'.

And as far as people saying they gave up on portals after Paradox, Trigon, the had them and the WV solo is a walkin as well. It's not the technology as a whole(hence why only Dox is closed...not all of them)...although I think having 120+ portals all over the place would be nutty and not maintainable. AQS would work better...just custom queue + a new checkbox to opt out of matchmaking, done.

Any portal above T4 is disabled.

WV solos say 'Hi'.

To be clear...I'm not for portals....not worth the work to create and maintain. Just saying, WV is T5 (or whatever the new 'tier' system is), was added a year ago, and works fine. You want to specify any 'raid' portals, ok, but 'any' is not accurate.

I'm trying to wrap my head around what is being asked for in this thread. (Hint I am a little blonde lol) But is it the premise that raids (all raids) should allow for anyone to willy-nilly walk-in? So an 8 person raid could end up with 12 or more people because of individuals just coming along and walking into an instance?

This doesn't seem like it would make the game very stable, plus wouldn't that defeat the purpose of the stats clamp by diminishing the experience of the new players?

I only play DCUO and Final Fantasy 14 so I don't have much experience with how other MMOs operate. Is this something other MMOs allow?

Pretty much everything takes a lot of time according to them, lol.

You believe that the devs are just making that up?

If not, what's the point of this comment?

In some cases, yes. I'm not saying it's not the case for certain things though.

Well, to end up in the same raid instance via walkin, you'd have to be in the group, and groups are limited to 8, so 12 is not an option. More accurate they are asking for portals like FOS1/2/3 have or Prime or Gates among a few others. That way you could walk in with less than 8, avoid randoms (and queue delay) in your group via queuing up. This was a much better request when content was not clamped as you could solo many raids and most could be done with just 3-5 easily. However, the devs have said there are issues with portals, they take time to create and (IMHO) would be a nightmare to organize. Imagine the WT/HOD/HOL with another 120+ portals to varying raids/alerts/duos on top of what's already there. To me, that's the biggest issue, even if technically it would be possible and easy to set up....it would be a PITA to navigate them.