I think DBG should introduce a non-beatable april-fools raid, and claim it was not tested. First phase: an easy raidmob, that can be burned down in 5 mins. Second phase: a chest(maybe even make it an aggressive mimic! ) with infinite high regen that can't be lockpicked or opened, and a non-targetable Avatar of Bristlebane laughing at you...
You can't get rid of beta testing of raids. so the time trial for raid wins will always exist. A better solution would be for the community to embrace the fact that beating the raid portion of expansion entails 2 things, not 1. Conquerer - Determined by the current time trial style of raid racing Vanquisher - The definitive completion of raid associated content. Daybreak can help ensure that both carry weight, and perhaps vanquisher can become the more meaningful completion standard if it continues to provide rewards for the completion of the content. Items like ToV Luminous Restless Ice, and ToL Master's Curio do this. Ornaments do not. Rhetorical question for ya: Who wins the Tour de France? The cyclist who wins all the time trials, or the cyclist who completes all the stages and does it first in totality? It can be the same person, but it doesn't have to be. I think the same conditions apply to EQ: If 1 guild wins all the time trials through the tiers (and specifically on T3), but another guild completes Vanquisher first. Who beat the expansion first? To me its the guild with all the boxes checked......just saying.
I guarantee you if they hadnt had guilds beta testing you would be screaming "why dont they test this s**t"!!!!
September 2020: 66,000 gold MAUs January 2022: 33 guilds finished beat 1 event in ToL Let's do a high estimate with each guild having 70 active members per guild and each member owns 3 accounts, that's only 6930 account. Live raid guilds make up ~10.5% of the player base. DPG is over-emphasizing raid content. Game needs to dramatically increase it's small group content as 89.5% only gets 4 missions to repeat.
Toss in rumors of amazing loot and it would be great fun to watch. Free krono maybe and watch the lemmings line up.
Groupers have always been in the majority. Raiders get more attention from devs. because (in part) they aren't FTP. Also, raiding can be fun. I don't raid anymore, but that doesn't mean it wasn't fun back in the day for me. The folks who play on the treadmill servers (TLP) get lots of attention too. Revenue drives things.
That is 33 guilds who have reported wins in the week that the events have been open for and there is evidence that there are guilds with wins who either do not report it or are not tracked. Evidence if this is from the post about beating events on Zek which is not listed on the elite gamers tracker. This is also not tracking guilds who are still working on older content and have yet to attempt the new content. Sure raiders may not be the majority of the population but it would still be a major hit to the game if they left due to a lack of raids.
Note, I didn’t say 0 raids. I said to bring it down to 4, which still makes for a night of raiding. The proportions are out drastically out of whack.
And there are already guilds complaining about a lack of raiding due to so few targets and guilds who are clearing everything in a single night. Cutting down from 9 to 4 raids would be devastating to the raiding community as people will end up leaving for games with more raid content that is available to experience.
Well, the 90% of the game complains about lack of content. There’s more money in small group content than large raid content.
Sure but that doesn't mean that they should cut even more content from one part of the game. Even if they do cut raids as you suggested there is nothing to suggest that we would get enough group content to make up for it.
Considering the raid content is just the group content tuned for more people, it doesn't feel like getting rid of raid content would really allow for enough additional group content to make up for the loss of the raiders.
Pulling the designers off who make raids isn't going to give anywhere near the amount of group content people want. EQ is a small game now even though we have more people working on it than we've had in a long time. It takes more revenue coming in to hire more designers to make more content.