Get Rid of Beta Raiding

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Wudanar, Jan 3, 2022.

  1. Wudanar Journeyman

    I personally miss the days when the challenge for becoming top guild was to see who could figure out how to beat a raid event first was the winner, rather than learning the raid on beta and having a race on who can kill it the fastest in a day. The excite of beating an event for the first time is lost due to this. I would like to suggest that EQ/Daybreak look into creating simulated raiders to test raid events rather than live raiders.
    Windance, Andarriel and Fenthen like this.
  2. Hekaton Augur

    Simulated raiders? Mercs don’t even work right

    Also I can see it now. Spends whole year of development on a beta tool to test raids on an expansion they would have zero time to make

    It’s 2022 eq. It is what it is at this point
  3. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    I don't raid, so have no dog in this hunt. However, what's the flip-side?

    No bugs found in raids, so when the expac goes live, everything sucks til they finally get it fixed.

    Oh, and what's the "fix" process? Change the code, and have players test it. Which is what we're doing already with Beta!

    And the "simulated raiders" idea is pie in the sky. That alone would be a multi-year, multi-million dollar venture.
    Nennius likes this.
  4. Skrab East Cabilis #1 Realtor

    Cut it down to 4 raids and boost group content.
    Sobmre and Andarriel like this.
  5. Soulbanshee Augur

    There were always beta raiders, just now there's more guilds participating since beta isn't exclusive (invite only) like the old days, and anyone can get their guild to pre-order to run the events during beta.
  6. Riou EQResource

    Other games that run a Beta usually it's basically just the hardest tier that no player sees until it is live

    EQ could prob do something like that too if it made base raids then added 1 or 2 mechanics on top and pumped a few numbers up (and/or change the %'s and orders of the event around) to make Hard mode stuff

    They already do it for the group missions (copy the raid version and delete mechanics and down grade abilities)
    Andarriel likes this.
  7. Sancus Augur

    This is largely a function of T3 raids being insufficiently challenging in ToV/CoV/ToL, rather than a product of Beta testing. Raids that took most/all guilds multiple days to defeat in prior years (e.g. Mearatas) were available to beta test in prior years.

    This year is a bit of an exception because Beta has remained up to allow more time to test the 64-bit client, giving an unusually long period to work on the raids. That said, even with a much shorter (or no) Beta period, ToL's raids would not have presented a multi-day challenge on live unless they get changed further.
  8. Gorg00 Augur

    To some extent I actually agree with this, I think it would be a more interesting race if part of it was a function of how quickly you can learn and adapt on the fly rather than who can spend the most time practicing on the beta. I don't think that for most of these events it would mean that they'd not be beaten on the first day, but I do think it would make the top of the field more interesting.

    The problem is that agreement is predicated on the idea that DPG has the resources to properly QA the raids prior to launch, and nothing that we've seen suggests that they do. In absence of that, it's very important that they do enable beta testing, so that the raids can go live with something like functional mechanics.
    Duder, Ssdar, Windance and 2 others like this.
  9. Svann2 The Magnificent

    The only real race in recent eq was Mearatas.
    Ssdar and Allayna like this.
  10. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    A lot of things would get missed if it raids were not tested by multi guilds.

    Players are always finding ways to do events in unintended ways. We did things while testing raids Absor didn't like so events got changed. Ever wondered why fling abilities are now limited....flusterbold and move mountains at the same time throws the mob the other end of the zone....don't to it in front of Prathun!

    In my early days of raid testing we were told "here is the raid, now break it". That is the attitude our guild goes into beta testing with. While we look for ways to beat it, we also look for ways to break it, leashing, pathing. The big one we discovered this year was falling through the floor during the final named in BoA.

    Unless you have 54+ QA testers not following a script of how the raid works, things will be missed and likely raids will either be broken or too easy when the players get their hands on them.
    tanith, Elyssanda and Svann2 like this.
  11. Barbwarrior Augur

    the raids already way to easy could win t1 way about 40 players maybe less
    Ssdar likes this.
  12. Tucoh Augur

    Bingo.

    I don't raid so my only "skin" in this game is the uhh, "enrichment" of the game that comes from the existence of content that can challenge the strongest players in the community working together. This coalesces the raiding communities into a core that the non-raiders like me kind of enjoy seeing. It adds motivation for raiders to push to perfect their characters by farming missions for T5 augs, completing the chase items, finishing the challenger achievements, completing their augs etc, which means there is a dedicating raiding force spear-heading the non-raiding content. When an expansion's raids can be handily beaten by a raiding force without them even farming new raid gear, this effect is muted.

    The goofy thing is that it's not even that difficult to make a raid more difficult without changing the mechanics after testing them in beta. Increase the HP/AC/resists of adds you must kill before getting overwhelmed, decrease the window on failure mechanics a tick and increase mob damage and you can turn an mechanically interesting but trivial raid into a real kicker.

    If they also added true "hard modes" to raiding (and group missions), this would be made easier because instead of trying to balance between a playerbase whose lethality is bimodally distributed, you can instead cater to the casual raiding forces and the hardcore raiding forces.
  13. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    It would have been hilarious, if every guild could one-shot the RoS cactus event, for a whole month before it got fixed...:p

    I kinda like that the events are tested beforehand, it makes for a better raiding experience for all of us who don't care about the race. :)
    Yinla likes this.
  14. Elyssanda Bardbrain

    Yep, we were told the same. We tested anything and everything, and since it was the first week of Beta, it had its own issues on top of what we did to it. There is no way a "scripted autobot raider" can even think of things that real people can unless you reach the point of true AI. They can't make the system NOT do something if they don't know what that bad thing is.
    Coagagin likes this.
  15. Axxius Augur

    Mearatas (the accessible version) was broken during the entire TBL beta, remember? And in dev testing it was partially disabled. I believe no guild experienced it in full on beta. That's why it ended up so incredibly challenging. Pretty sure that with a proper amount of testing it would have been tuned a whole lot easier.

    The most challenging raids in the past were usually the results of bugs or mis-tuning.
    Wulfhere and Elyssanda like this.
  16. Fenthen aka Rath

    Same with Tower of Rot, if any RoI - MS recall that debacle. ;)
    It took us two days to beat it!
  17. Elyssanda Bardbrain

    Yep, last day of Beta you could only get like 2 or 3 minutes, if that, into the raid before it bugged out and stopped.
  18. Sancus Augur

    It was not broken for the entirety of TBL Beta. There were posts about it being broken earlier in Beta, but we did all of our beta testing for TBL (apart from dev raids; we did not do Mearatas on a dev raid) in the two weeks preceding launch, and it definitely did work then.

    The version on Beta had high enough HP regen that if you didn't melee while in the rock form at the 85% -> 70% phase, with our guild full burning it would regen to 100%. Meleeing in the Earth elemental form, we at least got to the 50% -> 25% phase, though I don't remember if we made it to the 25% intermission. We didn't spend a lot of time on it because we had seen the mechanics and assumed it would change more before launch.
    That's possible, but that's a different thing than raids being easy because people have time to practice strats on Beta. Had the launch version of Mearatas been available the entirety of Beta, the result on live would have been materially similar in the absence of the raid getting tuned down because people complained.
  19. sieger Augur

    This was the first year my guild did beta and we enjoyed it, but I kind of agree with the original post in theory, it does take away some of the magic of doing new content. I don't see how with the current reality you eliminate beta without causing problems though, the team just isn't THAT big, even though they have been scaling up. Absor isn't going to catch every problem in a raid on his own, so if no beta, each tier of raid will likely launch with significant "troubles", which I think is bad for the game. Most likely the high end guilds find ways through them, but the majority of the 40ish active raid guilds end up having to wait a month+ for patches to resolve things.

    I never did the beta raiding in WoW but my understanding is in modern WoW most of the raid content is tested on the PTRs, but often like the patch's main boss fight will either not be available or only a limited version of it etc.
  20. Andarriel Everquest player since 2000

    how bout we just get rid of raiding! haha ;P
    Dre. likes this.