Elite raids - should they release with an episode, or a week or two later?

I get what you are saying, but that sounds like monthly content all over again.

Interesting.. I mean I guess they'd have to literally block Elite gear on the vendor until all standard gear was purchased

1. via a feat - as long as you did it fully on one toon then you could fast track on alts once elite geat came out

or (to make 1. not doable)

2. Make it somehow that each toon must have completed the set (maybe a cheap token needs to be bought that only appears on vendor once your particular toon has bought all standard ?)

No worries! We both have a lot to say and its great that we can discuss this.

I do think elite raids should take much longer to go on test than the rest of the episode, so the developers working on them can do any necessary fine tuning beforehand. Too many rushed and bugged raids have hit test and then live in recent times, with the intention that players are spending their own money to play these. In turn, the elite raids would then need to release later than the rest of the episode so there is enough time for any testers to get on test.

Not much point having elite raids on test for less than a week either. Needs to be minimum 2 weeks, and that may mean going on test 1-2 weeks after the rest of the episode has hit test.

A week or two more would be more time for the devs to put in for hot fixes and any last minute fine tuning of the raid. The dev team is much smaller than it used to be - it would be more for the developer side than testers, but it would help both sides and ultimately the raid would be better off in the process.

This would be much better executed than monthly content.

Let's say for example: Episode X.

Episode X goes on test late on Friday July 23rd, 2021 (hypothetical). This includes the open world content, solo/duo, alert and normal versions of both raids.

Players would test this content and focus on any bug fixes where necessary here, report to the devs and those devs would then focus on those hot fixes in that week. The devs working on the raids would bare in mind changes to the normal raid and factor balancing in for the elite versions.

Friday July 30th 2021, elite versions of the content hit test (subject to change) The elite raids or one of them may take longer to hit test than this.

Players test elite content and report any necessary feedback. 1-3 hot fixes likely in the following week, one of these being feats for the episode X content.

Episode releases Thursday August 5th 2021, with GU downtime. This includes event and normal versions of all content in the episode, including the open world, solo/duo, alert and 2 raids. The elite content doesn't release on this date and stays on test for further updates, based on feedback of the normal content on live server and anyone on test server, and more time for devs to fine tune content. Live server testing normal versions of content could also be trialled here so the devs can bare these in mind for the elites.

Thursday August 12th 2021, any elite content that isn't the raids will release in a hot fix. Players can then start to slowly farm renown from running this content.

Thursday August 19th 2021, the elite raids will go live in either an overnight hot fix or GU downtime, with significant tuning, bug fixes and care by both testers and developers. Both sides will have enough time to make sure these are ready for release to live server. The raids will be balanced in mind of the fact that other episode content has been out for a while, and players will have geared accordingly. Alternatively, one of the elite raids could release on this day, while:

Thursday August 26th 2021, the second elite raid will go live in either an overnight hot fix or a short downtime.

Ideally nothing should be tested on live server, live server things are ready for sale. You wouldn't visit a bakery to buy a cake and then help put icing on the cake for the people working there, to make your cake nicer. You'd expect the person working there to do all of that.

Elite raids need a LOT more tender love and care then they have received for a very long time. Plus with the normal raids being live for a bit before the elites, players could get used to the mechanics in the normal versions before trying for the elite raids later.

I agree with this. Normal raids need to feel like a valuable upgrade from Event raids; they need to be much more distinguished from Event raids (deal more damage) and feel closer to Elite raids when playing them. For example, Normal raids could have a KO limit like 3 KO's when fighting the boss before getting taken out of the boss area until the mission is over and get no boss loot if that happens. I think that would help players get ready for Elite raids in the long run.

If Normal raids were changed in this way, I would not only play them more often, but also dip my toes into Elite raids more often, as I would feel more confident about participating and successfully completing them.

There are a few issues with this.
1) As the episode gets closer to launch, less players get on test, so the changes the devs will make are very limited, even if elite is delayed for a month.
2) Almost nobody will give feedback on elite after normal is live, after all they wont be able to play it.
3) There is no incentive for progression, beating elite with purple gear and yellow normal gear is pretty much the same thing, artifacts have a much much bigger weight on elite. So delaying elite to allow people to have a time window to farm vendor normal gear is almost meaningless, unless they take into account everyone playing elite should have 200 level meta artifacts.
4) This suggestion will only help with bug fixing, but again, pretty limited, it will be nothing different from having the episode on test for 1 additional week imo.

In my opnion all they can do to make elite better is launching it overbuffed if random testers can finish it just fine. Both elites were beaten on test and the devs only buffed them a little (probably not considering live stats are much higher and average elite groups more organized)

I dont like the limited KOs idea, but yeah, normal can probably be beaten by randoms with 1 missing support role and this has been true for a while, its pretty much event without the unlimited spawn.

Yes, I was conscious of the perception of it coming across as monthly-esque content and I don't think anyone was particularly a fan of monthly content, but I think it could be achievable if managed correctly.

Part of the main problem with monthly content was the degradation of content quality, it felt like the contents quality itself was becoming inferior to what was otherwise normal because of the rush to ensure it was released on time.

I guess the difference with staggering release is that you would have to be careful about the timing so as to avoid dragging content out for the entire duration of a DLC but also ensuring it's staggered enough to allow for the more naturally feeling progression.

The other thing of course as well is you could treat it more similarly to Origin Crisis and Sons of Trigon, perhaps we increase the difficulty of raids but staggering the release of raids would keep those raids relevant for longer, the other way is that raids only ever come out every second DLC but you make them difficult enough so that the relevancy of the challenge remains present for longer, this would be far easier to achieve as well with a tiered difficulty setting where the upper levels could be near impossible without making reasonable progress.

I'm really just throwing the ideas out there on the fly here, so they're far from ideas I've given considerable thought, they're just general ideas. There's better ways to do this and it is currently anyway, that's for sure.

This would all come with the obvious caveat of needing to make raids engaging enough so that they lasted in terms of engagement and not boring like the most recent FF raid.

Sorry I'm just numbering a few things so as to keep the general ideas in order

• I appreciate what you're saying with regard to artifacts, it's a difficult topic to broach because it's a very delicate balance issue, it's also a very contentious issue due to the perceived p2w elements of it. This is also exacerbated by the fact that numerous artifacts are imbalanced and I say that because of the fact they present an inescapable meta that is less avoidable in elite content (or SM) than elsewhere in the game. The reality is there are certain artifacts players must use, while other artifacts can only be described as objectively worthless because the benefits received from them are so far from optimal no one would consider leveling them, one example that immediately springs to mind might be the likes of the Omegahedron, it's just so far from optimal it can't be given any serious consideration.

• Given how far some artifacts are from optimal wouldn't the logical conclusion be to delete them from the game entirely rather than leave it there to confuse a less experience player with an item they might errantly think is worth investing in and even worse invest actual time and real money in to, what's the point of it? Perhaps I digress lol, but since you've raised artifacts I've just really jumped in to the discussion a bit.

• I think I'll avoid discussing the extent to which the developers play the game, because delving into that topic tends to bring out less constructive people within the community (not you of course) who suddenly want to discuss the "skill level" of the developers and since this is at least at this stage quite a constructive discussion, I'll avoid attracting their attention lol - But I do note your points.

• I understand why you want to see the content on test longer, I just have doubts for reasons earlier raised as to what tangible benefit the extended testing duration would actually provide, other than I guess allowing engaged testers more time to iron things out. I'm not necessarily heavily opposed to it occurring, I guess just a little more pessimistic about any benefits arising from it.

• I did also give some thought to that very idea of having elite gear drop again, despite not being entirely against the idea I loathe to ever suggest and item we can currently get transparently ever be replaced with someone that relies on RNG. I agree as well that community members would likely be incredibly reluctant to embrace that for that very reason.

I guess the reason why I also suggested removing the "gear" element from elite was because it's a "balance" pressure point, when you put progress behind elite you create a pressure point to ensure that the difficulty of that content remains somewhere in the realms of what might be easier in order to allow a slightly more acceptable level of success that might otherwise not be required with the absence of that progress pressure point.

This whole pressure point often comes to a head when you see members of the community raise that classic old saying "git gud" "stay in your lane, if you can't handle elite, stay in event".

Despite any element of truth in those statements it's very easy for us as players to say that, it's another entirely for the developers to say that to 'paying customers' no matter how "casual" elite players perceive those players as being and how "un-entitled they are", the reality is it's a commercial pressure point.

If you take away the gear then you can make the content much more like SM than it currently is for example because you can diminish that pressure point by saying "well it is just cosmetic", notwithstanding the fact there's obviously some statistical progression within the exclusive feats.

There are of course as you've pointed out other things that could be looked at in terms of exclusive progression that isn't so visibly tangible, better elite affinities, perhaps even elite generator mods that are there but aren't as visible to the more casual players. I say that as well because part of that pressure point is obviously the casual players who want to "keep up with the jonses'" leading to that complaint you see from elite players saying "you're just asking for nerfs cause you want our elite gear".

These are just observations I've picked up over the course of 10.5 years playing this game and moving in and out of circles of friends that sit within both ends of the skill level spectrum in this game, both elite and casual and even those that sit around the middle. They all hold very different views of the game.

I'm only saying this as well because I feel like this is a worthwhile discussion to have.

• In terms of elite content itself, I have no issue with making it way more difficult in fact the difficulty slider moving forward would provide ample room to do this, while keeping lower levels around where they currently are, but making the higher levels infinitely more dificult where difficulty is balanced around that progression expectation. If for example you expect people to progress before trying critical for example you would expect that it not be possible to complete that on the first day of a DLC because a player could not have reasonably progressed.

There's of course very little you can do to prevent a player or group of players from beating it on the first day through artificial replay badge progression, but that is simply a reality that needs to be treated as an outlier and not a scenario the developers balance content around avoiding i.e. Don't make content harder for example so as to make it impossible for fully leveled players to complete simply because you don't want people replaying day 1, beating your content, then complaining about how easy it was, that's on the players.

In terms of balancing the content around where you expect players to have ranked artifacts, it's a bit difficult, the same goes from augments and what bonuses you provide as well, on one hand you can't make it so difficult you expect a 200 artifact but on the other hand you'd also expect a player interested in elite to 'probably' have them.

Perhaps this is the advantage of having a difficulty slider as well, the upper levels balanced around a much stricter expectation of where artifacts should be for elite where as the lower rounds, not so much.

Errr, I'm not sure I agree with not getting boss loot lol.

But yes, in general normal does need to be increased in difficulty, the skill required in undertaking normal content as opposed to elite content is far too great and the gap between normal and event far too close.

Effectively the only difference often between event and normal is that in event you are never locked out of the fight and can return. This offers the players no favors, if we're going to have an expectation players strive to become better then presenting them with an event like experience in 'normal' content isn't really helping.

Again as alluded to in my earlier posts perhaps the the difficulty sliders will help with that, but then it raises the obvious question too, if the initial stage of "elite" is easy-ish, what's the actual point of "normal" content, is it even worth the resource time?

We should perhaps just be having one raid with a slider and normal is but the first level on that slider and the other instance is "event"? I don't know, just a thought.

Even if they let it on Test longer does it mean that they are going to adjust the difficulty better? I think having it longer on Test will fix the bugs etc but the devs also need to consider maybe adjusting Elite raids specificly with a different mindset for more replaybility but also longevity of the Episode since imo elite raids are what keeps a episode together the current episode just kinda showed to me again that raids are by far the most crucial piece of instance based content a top tier duo and alert in this episode wasnt enough and wont be enough to compensate for 2 Good raids with high longterm difficulty on Elite.

Interesting.

Normal raids are there to be more friendly to casual players, but I wouldn't mind personally seeing that change and having more challenging yet doable normal raids.

Would depend on the developer doing the raid and the mechanics though, as artifacts would still be an issue. The Clock Tower when it released comes to mind with last boss and the pools in normal.

Wasn't expecting that idea to be thrown out there on this thread to be honest. Surprised in a good way of course.

I disagree with the KO limit in normal and not getting boss loot though.

There needs to be more of a sense of progression in learning mechanics through an episode, I did discuss this in another thread recently and I even did a video on it as we had this somewhat in Wonderverse with the Temple solos.

I think they should do like ESO, release the DLC and in the meantime, release maybe 2 or 3 or more alerts spread out until the next DLC arrives, to make the DLC less long before the next one arrives.

There would also be delays to putting elite raids on test, kind of like we had in Wonderverse with FGSe. This would give devs more time behind the scenes to make any necessary adjustments before they go on test. Hopefully then we don't end up with a rushed raid to hit test, we have had this too often in recent years and we need this to change going forward. The elite raid would then go on test for 2-3 weeks after the initial week of it not being on test with the rest of the episode, but they wouldn't release when the episode goes live and with GU downtime. They would release maybe 2 or so weeks after the episode has gone live.

The dev team is much smaller than it used to be so more time for them to fine tune the elite raid would be a good thing in the long run.

I really hope the dev team will get more devs to help with these type of topics,i really cant imagine how much stress they face having to do all these things but what about EG7 are they not there to supply the devs with additional ressources/devs? It would be far easyier for them to apply our feedback if they or new devs had more time to work on raids.

• They'll never put in a recommended note in game suggesting people level up certain artifacts because they've attempted to create a system that gives a perception of extensive choice where that choice assists with the implementation of creating unique play styles. acknowledging that only 'some' artifacts are truly viable through directly saying it would destroy the perception they've attempted to build.

• for the purposes of this discussion let's assume the difficulty slider remains in place.

• I would agree that the upper levels of elite content within that slider need to be significantly increased in terms of their difficulty, the lower ends probably not so much. The complaints that have come from this DLC stem largely from the difficulty present in top ends of the slider, had that not been so easy then I'm confident there would also have been less complaints.

• We have to also remember members of the community including those that profess to be 'super elite' cheated that system by glitching the difficulty and certainly did so to obtain feats and the like, we're not here to accuse anyone of course, but, we both know it isn't just the "casuals"

• I agree with balancing content, or more so, certainly the upper ends of the slider to account for the benefits of level 200 artifacts, as pointed out in my previous post, the lower levels of the slider, not so much. Balance considerations also have to be given to exactly what impact the "current" meta has on the likelihood of success and what impact, stepping outside of the meta has even if the artifacts possessed are 200's.

• If you don't do that, then you may as well delete all the redundant artifacts, now I know that's not likely to happen because of "reasons" but it is for those 'very same reasons' players shouldn't be penalised because they've invested in "alternate artifacts' thus making the content far more difficult than it otherwise would've been had they made a different decision. That's why generally speaking artifacts probably have to be the worst aspect of this game when it comes to creating balanced content and unfortunately when introduced were seemingly not extensively considered because the goal wasn't necessarily to preserve balance but rather to make the developers money.

• In terms of your developer discussions, certainly you raise some valid points and I agree the better their understanding not only of the game but also how the players sometimes, for lack of a better word, twist the game at times in ways not originally intended' can help with achieving better balance. That's all I'll say

• I'm not sure it matters when the content goes on test, the elite could go on at the same time as everything else and stay on longer before release. my concerns still remain though, there's also a balance I guess between having something on 'test' too long when its not released it could just entirely ruin the "hype" and "build up to somethings release". Just on another point too not necessarily raised by you, but I did raise it earlier, we need to remember players are not professional testers, there shouldn't be a culture that 'players are extensively developing the game, we're here to pay to play it, not spend our own time also developing it.

• People run those instances (ZooE etc.) for in game money, that's what it's all about, there will be certainly some people feat hunting, but the majority of players are looking for that ultra rare sell and I agree, having them in there is important.

• My general gut feel, even after having thrown it around in here casually is that re-inserting elite gear as drops, would be a bad idea. that's why it crossed my mind, but I mentioned it in passing because I wanted to acknowledge at least that the thought crossed my mind. I do not think it would lead to a more positive experience, for every player that enjoys logging in each day to try their luck another leaves forever in frustration, it's simply not worth it.

• That is also exactly what I mean about taking away the elite gear by the way. In terms of the grind, perhaps the gear could be removed by a number of exclusive styles remain, priced at a point where you grind it out, perhaps even locked behind renown in the same way as SM, perhaps even locked behind slider difficulty headlines, I don't know, again I'm throwing ideas out there. taking away the gear doesn't necessarily have to mean the grind is removed because it can be replaced with a cosmetic goal, removing that pressure point I was discussing.

• I know some elite players want those extra stats and I appreciate that, but at the same time numerous other elite players just care about the "prestige" attached with being the best, an exclusive cosmetic would achieve that.

• In terms again, of the content itself, yes, make the upper ends of the difficulty slider much more difficult, people need to progress and people need to practice in order to beat it, that's what, at least some people want, isn't it? and yes, why not make incredibly difficult feats? I think they should, the game built around infinite progression, so making incredibly difficult feats is entirely justifiable when for the less skilled they can simply come back to them later when much stronger and the more skilled actually have something worth attempting to keep them logging in longer.

• I do agree that they need better guidance in game, I just don't think they'll ever push deliberately players in a certain direction, because as I said above it undermines other aspects of their vision in terms of what they're trying to present to the player. I would say they need to certainly highlight to the player though that they need to carefully consider their artifact choices and ensure they read the benefits etc.

• I actually think we should have 5 boss raids and alerts again, perhaps the slider could even lock/unlock additional bosses, perhaps that's tempting for elite players as well, more loot, more drops, more marks the harder you go, I mean again that's just throwing an idea around, I've not given it extensive thought

• I do agree with making it 'easier' to get rank 200 artifacts but at the same time we don't want to undermine the effort put in and we also need to remember there will dev reluctance to change a system that must be bringing them in extensive revenue. Even to the point where changing that meta constantly is preferable to them because it sells more Nth Metal and seals, with that being the case as well, as long as artifacts continue to revolve entirely around the developers making money, power creep with artifacts and balance will likely continue to be an ever present issue.