Get Rid of Beta Raiding

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

  1. Dre. Altoholic

    Seems to me that some time long ago EQ became a metagame between the devs and top players about just how much convoluted nonsense some players are willing to suffer when they know there's loot at the end.

    It's really more of an experiment in psychology than an attempt to entertain people. The only way to 'win' is to quit.
  2. Sancus Augur

    This is not a very reasonable analysis. Your comparison is bad, but beyond that, the vast majority of EQ's resources are allocated to neither missions nor raid content.

    EQ has nine designers, seven programmers, and seven artists (four of whom are shared with EQ2). The raid specific content in an expansion takes about 3/4ths (nine months) of one design year. Prathun stated in RoS Beta that each raid takes a month of design time and the raid copy missions take about a week of design time. Absor did 8/9 raids and 3/4 missions in ToL, and we know he started working on that content in March (with it finished, including testing, by the end of November). That lines up very neatly with Prathun's estimates.

    What that means is we can reasonably estimate 3/4ths of a design year, 8.3% of the design time available, or 3.6% of total developer resources, was dedicated to raid content. You're correct that missions were likely allocated very little design time, but you're incorrectly assuming that raid content is allocated a large portion of overall design time (or even content design time). Most of the remaining design time is spent on group content (zone populations, quest writing/implementation, rare creatures, etc.), systems design (spells, AAs, items, tradeskills, achievements, etc.), and whatever they do for TLP servers.

    More than half of the employees don't work on design at all. They instead (in the case of art) create new zones and models or (in the case of engineering) work on the code behind the game. Some code changes are raid-specific, but most have nothing to do with raiding or are general changes that affect raiders and groupers alike.

    Beyond that, your user count comparisons don't make much sense. Those MAUs include TLP players, which Holly estimated accounted for a third and later half of revenue. Jchan walked that back (because it depends on how you count TLP and live players), and revenue is not the same thing as player count, but it's pretty obvious however you slice it that a sizable portion of MAUs don't play on live at all. Counting them as part of live group players is silly.

    As far as the number of raid guilds, there are a handful not tracked on EGL and a handful that will complete ToL content but haven't in the single week since ToL T1 release. A lot of lower tier guilds and open raids have well over a hundred different discrete raiders across the course of the expansion, just with those raiders often maintaining much lower RA. As such, I'd argue a notably wider set of players interact with raid content than you're accounting for.

    Putting all of that together, while not egregious, I think your numerator (the # of active raid accounts) was too low and your denominator was far too high. While they are still the minority, the number of raiders absolutely warrant the resources dedicated to raid content, and there is a minimum amount of raid content (not much lower than we have) needed to keep that population healthy. If you're looking to reallocate resources to get more missions, look pretty much anywhere else.
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  3. Skrab East Cabilis #1 Realtor


    I get you don't like how the numbers show the raiding too be a very small sliver of the game, but facts are facts. You can only go off what is reported, and make an educated guess.
  4. Triconix Augur

    He just made an educated guess that raids only take up < 5% of total dev time in a year and your take away was "I'm still right, regardless of the numbers you present to me"? Considering how raiders make up roughly 25% of live population, one can make an argument that too little time is being allocated to raids.
    Ssdar, Celephane and Sancus like this.
  5. Skrab East Cabilis #1 Realtor


    Lol, where did you pull this number from?
  6. Triconix Augur

    You gave 66k subs. You can say about 30k of those are TLP-based. That leaves 36k subs and there's probably about 8-9k raiders. Even if we use your holy grail 7k number, you're looking at about 20% of the population. Regardless, a good argument can be made that 5% of dev resources for 20% of the population is too little.

    Or does that still not fit your agenda?
    Ssdar, Celephane and Sancus like this.
  7. Skrab East Cabilis #1 Realtor

    If your TLP number was accurate, then it would just make a stronger case to shift away from 9 raids to 4 raids. So, more development time could be shifted to meet 45.5% of the user base.

    Nice attempt, but you just support my argument.
  8. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    Those servers are designed to revisit old content and not see new content which posts seem to indicate they do not like.
  9. Triconix Augur

    That assumes that zero TLPers are raiders. Considering Aradune at it's height had something like 30 raiding guilds of probably close to 100 members each on average (some of the super guilds pump those up as they had 300-500 members each), you're still looking at the roughly the same numbers for TLP as well, if not more in favor of the raiders.

    Again, what's your argument? If it's not more dev time to raiding content it's starting to look like the wrong one.
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  10. Sancus Augur

    [IMG]

    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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  11. Triconix Augur

    [IMG]
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  12. Skrab East Cabilis #1 Realtor


    Except, PVP is a different animal this is just taking what exists in a development pipeline and tuning it for smaller groups.

    TBL somehow managed to pump out a ton of small group content and raid content, plus anniversary GMM. There's more Smoke trials than dedicated missions at that this point.

    Genuine question, what's the difference in team size between TBL and ToV?
  13. Scornfire The Nimbus Prince

    Design time allocation is (and has been, and will continue to be) determined by what makes the most financial sense for them.

    Shocking
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  14. Skrab East Cabilis #1 Realtor

    Well that’s not true. Raiding has always been the minority, hence the massive exodus to WoW. History, points towards the opposite. They emphasized the wrong demographic and it cost them.

    From interviews the dev team back then was very addicted to their own game, and I can’t fault them for designing what they thought was the fun.
  15. Scornfire The Nimbus Prince

    What on earth are you even talking about

    The exodus had nothing to do with too much raid content vs group content lmao, people were dissatisfied with the game after they designed GoD with a level increase in mind and it was launched hastily without said level increase, then doubled down with OoW. WoW launched shortly after omens of war dropped, and most of the EQ community was more than eager to jump at a new game
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  16. Act of Valor The Newest Member

    You are just making things up at this point.
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  17. Skrab East Cabilis #1 Realtor

    PoP did more damage than GoD.

    You’re making an argument EQ studios have always made the optimum decision based off revenue generation. This is verifiably false.
  18. Skrab East Cabilis #1 Realtor

    You really believe that raid guilds make up the majority of the population? We’re not talking forums where it’s an overwhelming amount.
  19. Fintank Augur

  20. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    The design team is larger now, but they lost a lot of knowledge and have 3 or 4 new designers learning the ropes.