No game will ever have 54 person PvE again. Here is why.

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Straps, Nov 1, 2017.

  1. Straps New Member

    When a guild has to organize to the tune of 54 players you've created a serious problem for the future of your game. As much as I love these massive events and have enjoyed them for almost two decades, I now know why no other game has tried to create 54 person PvE interactions.

    I use to think it was the process of creating the events that kept other developers from building PvE environments for 54+ players. These raids are often complicated and clearly take a lot of work to get right. (Some raids never work right) I have however come to an even deeper realization that its not the complexity of the events or the difficulty of tuning them for 54 players. Its the players themselves.

    A guild is a strong union, one that can and often does have influence over the group of developers that builds a game. I've seen this in other massive games, and its often an inside job, the influence of these massive player driven forces (54+) is so strong it often leads to a developer secretly giving an advantage to their clan before they leave the development team (or get kicked out) the effects of which are often impossible to undo. I happened in the very first expansion of EQ where a goblin banker in Runny Eye would exchange copper for gold. It happened in Eve when the goons got free unlimited blueprints (they still have today).

    Now these are extreme cases where the influence lead to almost criminal behavior, its not the case with EQ these days mostly because fewer people play it. However, the influence that these massive player organizations have over the development team remains true. Even if its not for personal gain, the social structure of EQ warrants this kind of behavior along with giving it the teeth to be effective. (No one wants to be on the wrong end of 54+ well organized voices)

    I would like to argue that there is a way out of this downward spiral. There may be a way but I don't see anyone embracing it. Players unions would have to stop being catered to by the development team and that would lead to backlash. Now that the game is pretty much only played by player unions, to defy them could really hurt the bottom line. That said, this routine we are in as players and developers feel like an abusive relationship with no happy ending in sight.

    Best case solution, EQ gets promoted as the real MMORPG and attacks other mmo's that are bigger. Get them to take the "pepsi challenge". Grow the community large enough that when you cut off communication with the big player unions it does not hurt the bottom line. Then build the game they don't know they want: Large overwhelming expansions. In-house raid development to promote real competition for the players. (instead of handing out keys to the player unions with the most influence.)

    There is a reason games like EQ don't die, its the players working together for a common goal, that fosters a sense of community. 54+ PvE is great at building that community, we just have to prevent those common goals from making the game we love, well ... common.

    Straps
  2. Gnomeland Augur

    So games will no longer have 54 player raids because when guilds get above a certain size, they start to cheat...? Nice argument, I would would not subscribe to your news letter.
  3. TitusMaximuss Lorekeeper

    Most other games have a younger player base. Typically younger players are less reliable and getting 54 players together at one time to fill certain roles can be very challenging. I agree with your assessment, but I fail to see how that applies to EQ. As much as I'd like to see smaller raids, it just isn't going to happen. There is still plenty of healthy guilds that reliably clear content on every server. Its kind of a staple of EQ to have large raids and the dev team has come out and said they tried it, and the player base hated it. So that's that, EQ will have 54 players till the end. When servers can't field that anymore, they will merge.

    The one thing I do see in the future is a combination of EQ servers to a Mega Server. With pick zones and new features that added in the past couple years this is where I think it's headed. Tons of players all on one server with the populated zones spawning multiple instances.
  4. Gnomereaper Augur

    There's also the other direction with Eve, where you have hundreds of people in giant warfare.

    Were 54 person raids a mistake? The number was too high for sustainability, that's why WoW tried for a smaller number and LDoN tried to hew down numbers as well. LDoN with EQ failed because LDoN came AFTER PoP which required heavy numbers.

    The magical number I feel for most raid games is about 36, unless if you can coordinate and breakdown a system into subcomponents like how Eve does. Eve also has only one server. World of Warcraft allows for cross server grouping.

    In essence, the hardware is there, but the lack of capacity to truly have one mega server with multiple components just isn't.
  5. shiftie Augur

    How many other games have 16 classes? Ask yourself that and then fully grasp the 54 man roster. That’s why other games allow multi class specs.
  6. Maedhros High King

    Go play those other games.
    One of the most incredible qualities of EQ is that it out the MASSIVE in MMO.

    I absolutely love trying to beat content with 54 people.
    All those other games with small group content hold no draw for me at all.
  7. Straps New Member

    Pardon me I did not mean to suggest that when a group gets large enough they will cheat. The point I was trying to make was that a 54 person team has some serious sway, enough to cause a developer to cheat for them.
    I am also a big fan of 54 person raids and would even like to see the full 72 man raid the tool allows for.
  8. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    If that was the case, then every guild would get special treatment, and I have never experienced that in any guild I have been in...:confused:

    For example: it took 6+ months of complaining from the combined forces of every player on AB, to even get a reaction from DBG about that chat-lag issue...
  9. Zhaunil_AB Augur

    I don't get this really.
    54 character raids are too large?
    You are aware that Before PoP raids were done with as many groups as it took,
    that PoP was raided with 72.

    That we have 54character raids only these days (and since a long long time now) is only due to the decline in population.
    Guilds left+right found it too difficult to keep their rosters up enough.
    (even though a guild these days almost needs to have 70 "active" members if they want a full raid each raid day, with a core of 30-40 90+RA people and the rest at 40-60RA mostly. "Happy" is the guild that has 50+ of their mains on each raid day...)

    The size of a raid has nothing to do with "influence" (players have next to none of that, unless they manage to play the money-card), but everything with overall game population.
  10. Straps New Member

    Okay yes long ago before "Daybreak" was a thing and EQ was the only game on the mmorpg block we had 72 player Time/PoP raids. The game was growing and fun, then EQ2 happened and split the population. This was the first of many bad decisions made by the development team. I do not beleive that EQ needed to lose players to their own game or an other that comes along after this.

    My argument is that large player unions were able to influence the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and other subsequent developer teams more then most other games and this influence has prevented the game from growing. Servers are now built for 250 players. 54-108 hardcore raiders and 150 people that don't have schedules that allow them to raid.
  11. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    This is way off, at least on AB(and thats one of the "low population"-servers), We have 4 active raiding guilds(afaik) on our server. I would guesstimate we have 200+ active raiders on our server alone, not to mention the non-raiders. 400-500 players for a low pop-server, seems more realistic.
  12. Jalelorf Augur

    Well written post. Incorrect on your facts and is merely speculation on your part.
  13. Jhenna_BB Proudly Prestigious Pointed Purveyor of Pincusions

    The OP is not wrong. 54 man runs end with Everquest. It'll be the same as other things we used to do in EQ that even we as players still in EQ would never do again. Things like staying up for 24 hours camping Zordak Ragefire. There's plenty of MMO titles out there that you can just hit a dungeon queue and find a group and progress through the game. The MMO market has completely moved on from big number raids. EQ has a minuscule player base in comparison to the top dawgs on the current MMO market - we are a but a tiny niche. We're just a damn loyal niche.
    Straps and eqgamer like this.
  14. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    Would help if we knew which post you're referring to.
  15. Straps New Member

    How many of the 200+ raiders on AB are playing characters in more then one guild? 200+ raiders translates to 100 players with characters in two or more guilds.

    My reasoning may be all wrong but I have only heard one other argument for why EQ is the only game with 54 man raids and its about the difficulty in tuning the events. I find this rational lacking.
  16. Scorrpio Augur

    Rationality is quite simple: open content. Every raid target in earlier EQ could be swamped by numbers cause there were no limiting mechanism aside from how many people could gather in same place before everyone started lagging like crazy. From my own experience, once you got past 70-80, playability dropped like a rock, and bringing more people would actually have negative impact. So most raids got tuned roughly to those numbers. Also, content being open meant guilds would race to targets, and top guilds would have this near-military setup where members needed to be able to drop everything and get in game and raid at the drop of a hat. Result: proliferation of large raid forces with very high turnout rates.

    Even when instancing became a thing and about any raid expedition could be requested without racing, and said expeditions could control how many people could enter, the nature of practically every existing raiding guild meant raids continued to be made on a massive scale. Typical chicken&egg.

    Later games started doing instances and limited-number encounters right off the bat.
  17. Thoxsel Djess' Pet Warrior

    I don’t know about everyone else but I would never consider ever playing in any other guild with one of my other characters. To make that happen you’d also be raiding during the same time periods and days. Are you really going to perform well raiding at the exact same time different events etc? Would keep you quite busy no doubt (and would maybe explain why some players suck as well haha) ... open raids on the other hand is a totally different thing.

    The previous AB statement made by Jumbur (I’m also on AB), would in my eyes be a correct assessment based on all the people I know from multiple guilds.
  18. Warpeace Augur



    They normally raid on different days or the time difference is enough that one guild is finished as the other is beginning.
  19. Rokkeb Journeyman

    Meh. FFOnline had large raids IIRC and in wow legion the intro to the expansion was player capped above 100 IIRC split between horde and alliance all on the same mission doing different objectives and fighting some of the same bosses.

    Gw2 has open world raids that aren't player capped and I've seen a lot of people at them. Also third servers handle larger PvP matches.

    But the reason huge required raid sizes went away is not because revolvers can't make them work it's because more players want easier to manage numbers than there are who want super massive organized raids.
  20. lancelove Augur

    Server mergers.