New World drops

As an end game raider, this won't affect my bottom line. I will continue to raid on my guild's schedule.

However, I certainly no longer have any intention of raiding any more non-current content outside of the official raid schedule with alts like I have been recently. Why spend the time when I can grind XP for them (my Cleric and Enchanter both still need about 6k AAs even after auto-grant) and possibly get my own personal raid drops?

Of course, since I took a lengthy break from EQ there is still some raid content that I haven't done before that will benefit me from an achievement standpoint, but raid ToV for the umpteenth time? No thanks, not any more!

I don't like how current the tier 3 drops are. I love the idea but they should of been tier 1-2 not tier 3-4.

I also would suggest to keep the trend going in future content. I always thought old raid gear should become easier to get even for groupers once that content is not current anymore. While ROF is current still because of the delayed expansion schedule if you go back to 1 big expansion release I could easily accept you adding 1-2 expansion old raid level gear drops to group content. Perfect example would be COTF Tier 2 can drop ROF Tier 2-3 and the next expansion can drop ROF Tier 4 or something in group content.

Maybe raiders with an ego complain, but they will complain about anything. To me this gives groupers who maybe don't raid something to get and you know what maybe they see that gear and want more so they decide they may just want to try and raid.

And theres a easy trick also to be able to plow through heroic adventures request them with the minimum 1 person lowest level available to request then give the task to the ones you want to which will make these items simple to farm all day.

I hope you all enjoy that trick so there is 50 of these dropping a day =P

Assinine? That's rich, given that you practically dodged the meat of my post.

You love raiding? Great. Go raid. Nobody is saying you ought to stop raiding... Except, of course, yourself, when you said that you rather kill 2,000+ trash mobs than raid because it takes less effort.

So, what? You don't love raiding after all? What you ACTUALLY care about is spending the smallest amount of effort to get phat lewts? Thought so.

Here's a challenge - refute this logic:

I raid because it's the only way to obtain raid gear. Were that not the case, I wouldn't raid.

I raid because I enjoy trying to be in the top 10 as a guild and most of the company within said guild . I do group content because I am forced to , to get augments. I also raid to have the best gear as the most gear dependent class (warrior) go figure.

I spend more time outside of raids than in them and like doing BOTH.

Given how much harder it is to organize many people if the same stuff was available without 50 others, most would go the quickest route. Groupers do this plenty too - people find the easiest HA and do it 235633 times for currency. You're acting like there is some hole in the logic that some like to raid and it's not true. People like/dislike it for various reasons and they're all welcome to their opinion.

The moment your logic becomes "get rid of raiding entirely" is when folks are going to object, and rightly so. The game is diverse for a reason.

And you must be confusing my posts with others, never said I wouldn't kill 2000 mobs for gear. I camped solb when it was going for toons I cared about. Wasnt my favorite type of "content" but was something I wanted to earn, so I did?

Makavien - doesnt work bud. If a lvl 70 task gets entered by 2 lvl 100s the mobs go red to the 70 instantly. Found that out helping a lvl 70 friend who didn't have enough dps to finish the HA. We joined task and zoned in and the mobs went from DB->Red instantly

edit: I think he was 70, may have been 85. Was one of the bixie HAs.

So I tested my trick out I can request a heroic adventure on a level 85 toon and have a chance at the 2nd best raid gear available today..

I could be missing something, but this doesn't make sense to me.

Also comparing the rare raid drops to the group raid drops is a bit like apples to oranges some guilds still have not even seen most of the rares drop after 6 months.

And some groupers won't see these items drop either. So no... it's not that different. The only big difference is that the raid rares (usually) offer an extremely unique effect or mega-stats relative to the tier of gear.

To what Ax said earlier- I completely agree that T4 ROF quality is completely insane, even for a chase item. The copy/paste job reeks of laziness and the caliber of stats demonstrates craziness IMO. Given they mentioned this idea a few months ago, you'd think they'd put a little more time and effort into the implementation.

Well that's the same thing I think is the problem not that they exist I think they are too close to current.
Considering a lvl 85 can request the heroic adventures and let a level 100 plow through them (right now a rain on my mage almost kills the npc in this heroic in one cast)

So you finally admit the obvious - that what ultimately matters to the bulk of people in the game isn’t the fun and the challenge, but the phat lewts. Fun and challenge are just bonuses; getting that piece of 3k HME gear through the lowest effort available is what counts.

Heh.

I don’t remotely hate raiding. What I do hate, however, is people who refuse to see how stupid it is to have such a large divide within the player base just for the sake of having it. The current state of the MMORPG industry is the result of a tradition born in EQ, and not even one that was destined by the Vision. Raiding, the way it’s developed, was an accident: a side product of the great experiment that EQ underwent. The devs who were in charge at the time never had the foresight to ask why it is that they were designing ever larger raids. From the 20-30 Nag and Vox, to the 30-40 Veeshan’s Peak, to the 40-50 NTOV and Vex Thal, to the 70-100 in PoP. They were caught in the moment, and by the time they woke up from the stupor, every MMO thereafter had been touched by their fever.

Retrospectively speaking, the trend towards larger and larger raids in EQ was a bubble, a mistake that was eventually mitigated when the devs put a cap on raids. Yet, just the fact that such large guilds were founded during PoP made pulling back difficult. The devs were forced by the raiders of the time to keep the size of raids large – because those raiders had already created guilds of 72+ people, and scaling down equated to breaking down the social communities that they had developed. SoE didn’t want to touch those communities, and so they accommodated them.

The split between groupers and raiders became rigid due to this accommodation. No trickle down system was viable when your content was divided between 6 people content and 54 people content. Expansions, upgrades, and gear had to be split because of the vastly different logistics involved. Thus was born the great grouper-raider divide, the headache of every EQ developer from that time on.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it matters - especially now that the EQ team is smaller than ever. Creating content for both raiders and groupers is doubling up on the work. The time you spend designing an awesome 54 man raid is time not spent designing an awesome 6 man dungeon. The devs tried to filter raid mechanics down into group content in VoA, but that failed terribly because the complexity of the mechanics made managing them in 6 man difficult, and because by that time the bulk of the grouping game was comprised of boxers who were incapable of dealing with the complexity in the first place.

This issue is compounded by the gear gap. When raiders are 50-100% > groupers in raw stats, creating content that challenges both is mathematically impractical. Make a mob hit for 20k after shielding, and raiders laugh it off. But make a mob hit for 30k after shielding, and groupers start getting one rounded. The current set up of group content being trivial for raiders is the best compromise they’ve been able to come up with, yet it ends up being a poor compromise for both sides: raiders complain about having no group content that is rewarding/challenging, and groupers complain about it being too difficult for small groups.

The bottom line? Having an artificial divide in the player base sucks. It’s not about elite vs. casual – because elites are capable of existing in every game, in every play style – but the 6 man vs. 54 man gap, which precludes the existence of a middle ground between raiding and grouping, and which separates the player base – and therefore the content – into two.

To fix this issue, they have to bridge the divide. They have to phase out 54 man raiding. Not all raiding, just 54 man raiding, because there is too great of a difference between 54 people and 6 people, a difference that manifests itself in all the other differences that must therefore exist: in logistics, in gear, in time commitment, in class balance, and ultimately, in the content devs have to develop to satisfy both groups.


But is there sufficient time to do so before EQN comes along? Personally, I don’t think so, and the latest move to me is simply an experiment – a social experiment to see how the player base is going to respond to raid gear being available on group content. They want to know what effect such a change has on the social community, which in turn gives them data for designing an improved system of grouping and raiding in EQN. That, I think, is what ultimately motivated the change.

I'm still trying to get my head around the fact that someone said they raid 6 days a week. Is there that much still to be done?

Gnomeland, Great post. Most of my off the cuff comments have been from a stance quite similar to what you have demonstrated very rationally here. I have different opinions, but I see the evolution of EQ in much the same manner as you have outlined here.

I think that the current handful of devs, however, can make a large difference if they wish. It's more a matter of are the vocal players the minority or majority or a good cross section? If they were to make some awesome change that was only liked by 10% of the remaining population, it would be a waste of man power. We as a community have to come together and help them to understand the needs we ALL have as a whole so that they can judge the best use of resources going forward.

Everquest invented raiding the playerbase did not to take it away now would be a 15 year step back in time the only reason eq is alive is because of raiders that 90% pay for 3 accounts while groups do group content for a month then want ftp silver accounts for the rest of the year. And how I know this is because the only groups i see is raiders helping a friend or silver account groupers in old content over the last 3 years (not silver before that came out but yeah)

I don't claim to know where their design intent is, but destroying a huge piece of the fun puzzle to many (regardless of the reasoning) doesn't seem like a good idea to me, unless as you hypothesized, they're experimenting.

I'm aware I'm the extreme of one end. Doesn't mean I think that everyone should have to raid and no more group content ever be designed, though. It seems lieu most of the objections to "old" raid gear dropping outside of raids is more the level of gear they chose, not as much the principle. I said during mm/solb it should have been rof t1-2 quality, and now these new ones should be at most t3 rof. Not all raiders have full sets of max tier raid gears. I'm still wearing half a dozen t3-4 rof pieces myself.

Raiders generally do twice the work if not more then a group player . They are doing things like 20 + Rof class weapons , 2 years of doing pillars missions for the tear to be maxed , Farming augments and hardcore heritage drops for guildies and friends, turning thier guild raid strat area into their own personal blog with all the information of the raids ,and doing 2 - 5 jobs on any given raid 4 days a week for a year. You have no idea the patience and challenges that it takes to raid in today's game. If you have a hardtime with group mission (water downed mechanics ) you wouldn't last a month raiding.

all this whining makes me wish the cloth caps would still drop

If the guild moves slow and doesnt beat the events fast and still wipes here and there, sure.
Some guilds will call raids really early to extend the raiding week too.