I'd invite you to go read about the ovens and other Ikkinz trials. Afterlife and other top end guilds blamed the difficulty of those raids as the reason why they quit en mass. The entire gates of discord expansion is what killed old eq. No one actually wants that back. If you want challenge, don't play beta. Go into your raids cold. You are waxing on about other games where the players didn't know anything about the raids they went into. You spend a month practicing this raid in beta. Why are you surprised something you practiced was easy?
Never did I complain about eq being easy. But the claim that wow was easymode raiding is just wrong. Wow leveling can be called easy, but raiding never was.
I think it would be awesome for the OP to be allowed to design a raid in EQ, where OP has complete control of everything that is scripted and happens in the raid. I also think it would be awesome, after that raid has been completed by OP and tested by players, that there is a thread created on these forums where every raider that participates in the raid is allowed to post feedback. That might become the greatest thread on these boards.
Whats too easy is pretty much everyone beats it, day 1. Cmon now T1 that easy, thats disgustingly easy. Now its a month, everyone is done. ugh. No new stuff for another month. ugh, this lockout timer for this easy thing to do, ugh. Could beat all T2 right now, but gotta wait a month, ugh. When people are just waiting to beat stuff they already know its gonna beaten day 1. Thats too easy. 27 guilds ALL done. day 1. No challenge at all. Group game. Hows the group game, did everyone groupers casuals beat all the group game, beat all T1 T2 day 1? No. Why I say If your on live, and you don't raid, your doing it wrong, you gotta be raiding, its freebee gear. All the gear is going to boxes and alts at this rate. Look at NoS, tons of people boxes full raid gear highest tier. Not just T1, highest tier raid, full on their boxes. Meanwhile group game, challenging, can't do squat. Nameds undergeared people can't do em. The people that actually need gear bad. It's just overgeared people selling gear, they'll clear the nameds they'll watch you get whooped and clear em and get the gear. LFG system broke, no one uses it. The way to go about raiding the best way possible is AGILE way. Start off difficult. No one beats it, you plan on no beating it at least. Not everyone and their buddies beating it. You make it easier. Make easier. T1 gets to dirt easy. T2 stops difficult T3 stops at hard, you get 1 or 2 things to make easier and thats that. Give a challenge day 1, don't just everyone roflstomp day 1. Let people know it gets a lot easier next week. Deal with challenge for a week, if you don't like challenge wait till next week. T1 raids is over. T2 now. Make it so you plan no beating it day 1. You be surprised who beats it. Thats that for a week. Tough, wait a week if you think its impossible. Simple. You like beta, like continuing beta raids. Make the beta where people beat it like how it is. Thats your how easy it gets. The toughness you don't know, no one knows. But wait a week a week a week, now its exactly how it was in beta, easily beaten figured out. easy peasy. T2 raids, put in the butcher, put in a firebreather instant 1 rounders, put in stuff makes random people float all the way to the top, put in a lot of mobs but they super low hp, gotta AE them all down, they just clutter, enemy pet swarm, put in a bullcharger that deal 90% damage to whoever didn't crouch. Put in the exploding corpses. Put in floor is lava stuff. Simple easily make it challenging. You can't handle the heat, wait a week. Simple. Mechanics, not just has more hp. Don't make raids 27+ guilds beat day 1. Thats sad. Even if its T1, thats sad. Day 1???? Day 1??? Toooooo easy. Never before this easy. 27 guilds everything beaten day 1.
Its easy make the raids do either 10% more damage and/or have 10% more hp each time its beaten per guild. I'll be a tractor pull for all the uber guilds!
It's fine. It's Tier 1 and it's fine. Sad would be if only Realm of Insanity, SR, RA beats those raids and the rest was just wasting their Saturday.
Nah. Its just 1 week. Who cares if some other guild has a 1 week advantage on you. In terms wasting your time. You camp a named all day, the don't spawn. You wasted your time. You watch your NFL/NBA team play. They lose in the playoffs. Wasted your time. You don't always win. And yall say your from the tough era. Walked uphill bothways back forth. The era of no cellphones. You are at the meetup spot, the other person didn't show, you wasted your time. You get better at game. You play FPS game, you lose all your matches. Wasted your time. Yet you still watch the games, you still friends, still play the games. Get beat magic tiger all day. Yet still come back for more. The only difference is it gets easier in EQ every week. That team that lost are gone, those loses in FPS game, your a worse rank now. Next week is just getting back to your previous rank. EQ you don't lose, you just try again, then next week they make it easier. Depending on the tier. If everyone is raid gear, does raid gear mean anything? Think about it. Meh that T3 raid is nothing my boxes even have a full set. Intended, is this the vision? That the raid guilds and everyone in them even boxes full gear high tier? Raids are participation trophy nowadays. 26 guilds day 1. Already on farm mode. Stuff gonna be deleted very 1 to 3 weeks every improvement to make it easier each week doesn't hurt, gives you challenge feeling of accomplishment if you beat it early. Could be per raid too, T1 raid 1 gets easier week for 3 weeks, then T1 raid 2 gets easier each week for 3 weeks. Then in Beta, you test the easiest possible version, thats how it will be when it becomes the easiest it will be. If your an easy quitter, your not as good as those others you mention. Skip the challenge weeks, wait till its easy as its supposed to be. Simple. Just wait it out if you already gave up on the challenge. It's just 3 weeks, not a big deal. You have 10 months left. All your boxes are gonna get full raid gear before the 10 months, you're just 3 weeks behind the best, big deal. It can be simple challenges too. Like week 1 has the butcher, has the firebreathing instant death, has the bullchargers, has the floor is lava, has the magic spinning instant death fields, has the exploding on death mobs, has the enemies that do pet swarms. Think about Diablo4 Nightmare Dungeons. Simple mechanics on every raid. After 3 weeks they go away. Honestly pretty much every MMORPG out there, has normal version and hard version and even harder version. FFXIV, Normal Extreme Savage EQ, nothing. Just beat em all day 1. Insert excuses for people. Meanwhile FFXIV those people don't have issues or excuses, they just do it and have fun. Those players have kids too, they don't make excuses. Savage raids should be beaten by 80% of the guilds day 1. WRONG Its again, T1, on normal or on extreme or on savage. Not only T3 are savage, no its every single thing. They don't make excuses. Those raids, pretty much have everything I said, its chaotic. EQ raids as of late, are pretty basic compared to other MMORPG raids.
You type a lot of words of criticism, but never seem to present any solutions. My wife is the same way- she complains about what I make our daughter for breakfast. But when I ask her for some options and choices, she never provides any. Again- tell us how you would design a raid. Lay out the mechanics. State what you would do. Provide a solution as to what you feel is challenging. Or you can do what you normally do, and just type 10,000 words with an imbedded You Tube clip.
He can't. Hes in a raid guild that fills the raids with a full force, doing 50+ Million dmg and ignores the fact that these raids have to be beaten also by guilds that can't do that, If he only want them to be beaten by the top 10 guilds then he should say it.. but that would show that he only cares about his .
I had a friend drag me into WoW for about a year. The raids I went on were a LOT easier then EQ raids at the time. - The emotes were VISUAL in nature. Avoid the "lava" stand in the "heal", etc. - This made the emotes a LOT easier to do. EQ's emote visuals are often decals that are clipped by the geometry. often there are NO visual components, or they are overlapped to the point you can't tell them apart. It also really depends on your POV and which expansion you are comparing.
Let's just have 8-9x raids each year, then have the raids in tier 1 start at mearatas level difficulty with little to no hotfixes and increase difficulty from there.
Your argument is so flawed and is one of the things that is dumbing the game industry down. If you don't want a challenge and the sense of accomplishment that comes with beating difficult game content, why are you playing the game? You might as well just watch a twitch stream of someone else playing it. That's not a jest either, it's been a thing for a very long time in EQ that half the raid is watching a movie while raiding. You say that people that want a challenge can just do a raid with smaller numbers. That is a completely back-handed response. With good game design, it's not the players that make the challenges, it's the people who make the game. Your "just do it with less" argument is directly comparable to these clueless people who shrug off how young adults are struggling to make ends meet due to inflation and housing costs by quipping "Just stop going to starbucks and skip the avocado toast". Not to mention that player composition, and in many cases game mechanics can prevent that or make it really annoying. It's like you are completely oblivious to the struggle that guilds have had over the years when the raid sizes changed, just from a logistical perspective. (for example, all of the shenanigans that occur in the expansions where beating a raid results in fewer flags than those who participated in it) Your thinking is the same as all of these people mad at certain games because they whine that "I bought the game, but I can't play all of it because it is too hard". Twelve, yes twelve guilds "beat" LS within the same 10 minute time period. I mean no disrespect to those guilds on this point, but when that many guilds clear content in such a similar timeframe the reason why is obvious. It is because the only boss live guilds have seen in recent years has been server lag and crashes. Being real for a moment, the people who play MMO's who have always whined about raids being too hard are not doing it for good reasons. It is just pure jealousy and their failure to look at themselves and improve their play. In a game that is well known for lengthy time-sinks, they are not willing to take the time to try to be better or to be better organized.
What do you say to all the players who quit during the Gates of Discord era due to raid difficulty? The game industry targets difficulty at the level that players want to play. The problem with games like Everquest is that with the large raid size of 54 players the higher the difficulty the more easily a single player can ruin the enjoyment of the other 53 players by messing up and causing them to fail. There is a big difference in a difficult single player game where the fault of failure is only on the person playing and a large multiplayer game where the fault of failure for 54 players can easily be the result of a single player and it might not even be in their control.
Lets consider really difficult raids in modern mmos. Look at FFXIV - the current leader. There are 2 components: 1. DPS checks. Either you can do it or you fail. However eq is the most complex game for adps out there. No other game makes you manage like 50 different buffs and clicks with different timers at once. 2. Don't stand in the bad. Savage raids are literally impossbile until everyone learns the dance steps. At which time the raid couldn't be easier because no one takes any damage anymore. For number one, no game beats everquest. For number two, it only works because everyone doesn't know the patterns when raids are released. EVERY guild that beat the t1 raids right away played beta and had the entire raid memorized. Its incredibly unfair to compare that situation to other games. ITs like complaining that savage raids in ffxiv are easy after you have learned them. Thats LITERALLY the same thing. Now the small quantity of raids in eq? Thats a valid topic (much less group content after leveling). I do agree with Uberkingkong that the group game is the hardest verson of eq. Play with zero raid gear/t3 spells and not having pre-learned all the missions on toons with raid gear. Its WAY harder than any raid is. On raids you have 45 other friends to pick up the slack if your having a bad night, and getting carried is easy.
There's no reason to use GoD as an example for anything. It was just broken at release. That's not the same as difficult and it was 20 years ago. Raid design has changed so much since then. You don't need to make every player mistake/failure lead to an automatic raid wipe. They can simply have consequences for the player themselves. The main problem with EQ is the lag makes it difficult to do anything interesting.
Raids are almost always beaten first try in beta as well. The only reason we spend time testing them is to find faster ways to beat them and get players used to not making dumb mistakes.
You are comparing how long the live "race" took with how easy or hard the raids are with out adding in anything about the amount of prep work that was done prior to the event going live. How about adding some factor in to account for: - Having access to the general "how the raid works" from the dev beta notes. - Having done the raids multiple times during beta, actually seeing the events, and getting their GINA triggers worked out. So what? Having done the prep work, all of that prep work, all the guilds SHOULD complete the raids with in the same 10 minute time period. If you want to have something meaningful, race to be the first one to beat it during Beta, first ones to get all the cheese, etc.
Well, i assuming that the Heroes Forge mission is overtuned and someone forgot to adjust the spells to the group version of it. Other than that, the mission is easy tank wise und required dps isn't that high. Okay, you can't go in and think your lousy heal merc can outheal all.
