Do you want to see how long it took for an ideal raiding guild to beat this expansion? Look at Realm of Insanity on EGL. Apparently this flagging system caused them to take a month to go through everything. Anyway, trust me when I say that Arx 2-4 (especially Arx 4) will be far more of a road block than the flagging system.
The thread is buried in the archive now... It was determined that there is a direct correlation with extra (over 54) raiders and level of misery with flags and loot. The TL;DR version of the thread: wahh wahh wahh only 7 raids wtf, low number of loot per kill, low number of spells per kill (fixed), expensive raid vendor items. The achievements help by yielding x250 currency each (not repeatable).
It is a problem for the vast majority of guilds/raid groups out there. The thing is...... those guild have such a large proportion of what would be coined as casual raiders/players, that most don't infuse themselves into the forum demographic and have any kind of equal representation. Of the 2 raiding guilds I am in, I am by far the most active on these forums. The guild leader posts on occasion, otherwise the other 20 or so people I have seen post here for the 300+ members they have on active raiding are usually asking a question or seeking ideas, most often in the class forums. Between the 2 guilds they have had in excess of 400 people raid over the last year, with probably 100 or so making less than 10 events total. I believe there are ~10 guilds that have finished the expansion, and we're already half way through the expansion cycle. There are at least 40 more guilds with wins on Arx Mentis 1, and probably another 40 still working on CotF raids in some form. I am fine with them having stupid roadblocks at the start, but they need to be reduced over time. Elite raid forces are extraordinarily strong, but much more rare in a dwindling game. Current raids may or may not be more or less difficult relative to years past, but raids are definitely not "all inclusive," and I don't by definition have a problem with that, as long as there is sufficient content that is inclusive. There is a reason there are so few up and coming raid guilds. The learning/experience curve is huge. Modern raids are not designed to have a large buffer that allows for even 25% of the raid to leech/be dumb and still be successful. This is my way of saying, that raids are not designed to allow for a 50% below average raid force - aka the normal split of the definition of average. Trust me, there are way more liability players on raids than many top guilds realize, even if it is just a gear issue and not skill based. Adding time/flagging delays just aggravates the problem in my opinion since it doesn't allow people access to do things they may otherwise have been able to do. The lesson that most skilled raiders eventually learn, is that if you want the most effective use of your time, find the best guild that will accept you to join. RoI and other top end guilds get everything done in a day or two. It is easier to block out 1 day to win everything than 3+ days, and you'll get just as much relative dkp/merit as anyone else in the guild.
I would get on the person who forms / invites / determines who raids the target. The priority of raid spots should be going to those still in need of flagging. Yes, that does mean some of your mains and best people will have to sit, but those are likely the same people who want to move on anyway. They must understand the value of the raid spot and how their sacrifice of giving up the spot will ultimately help the raid move on to the next target. --To me, if getting those 32 people flags has been an issue of raid space, then it also seems to me you have a large amount of -me first or me only- people. If people are boxing for the flag and playing their mains for the currency/loot, that would be the first place to make room. My guild has a rule in place, if your asked to sit out of an event, your still able to bid on loot. With this rule in place, the only thing people are missing out on would be the currency. The percieved need to accumulate the currency may be great at the start, but the value on the raid spot is much more important. The second point I would say, is that if those 23 people at the bottom of your list have only been available for 1 or 2 attempts in 2 months, I would not wait for them before moving on. You have piggy space, some can attend via piggy (assuming this is still in place, my guild has not focused on TDS yet). For those who are piggy, your guild will continue to do the first event, so why not move on. Why not at least work at learning the 2nd event. Even if it means taking a smaller raid force in due to piggies. ---I'm in a 2 guild joint raiding guild. We have recently had our numbers swell to the mid 60s with mains on 2 of our 3 raid nights. Yes, we have had to backflag CoTF, but our raid teams gets those in need of the flag in for the wins. Sure, with 80+, your not going to get the full raid progressed in 4 wins, but there is no reason why to not have more then 55 flagged in 8 wins. This sounds more like an issue with the raid management and the players who lack the flag then an issue with the mechanic at this point.
Eight Arx1 wins will produce a maximum of 432 keys. Divide that by 89 raiders, that comes out to just under 5 keys per raider. Only four are required to access Arx2-4 raids. The problem is not the system in this situation. The problem is not ensuring everyone has four keys. A variety of reasons could attribute to this problem- people not logging in, raid leader not making best decisions with regards to whom to bench, people deleting their key and not clicking it, etc. And maybe I just have not been in a casual raid guild for a long time, but in my opinion... if a player only attends 2-3 of 8 Arx1 raids, then maybe they should not be considered a "raider". In which case the guild needs to decide if they want to add more "raiders" to the roster who will be present for 6-8 of the Arx1 raids or just accept the situation as is and not complain.
I am 2/4 wins on TDS #1 and with only one Try on Ghost your right their is not much to due but wait unless your planing to try the Plane of War raid was not on your list and it Drops COTH T2 coin. It is something to try while your waiting on that flaging. lol VOA 1st raid was 9 wins - with 8 wins sounds like you just need to make sure who your inviting from the bench and get the core raiders - flaged and your be flaged very soon. make sure that all that are on the bench 3/4 gets put into the raid if possible your next win.
I, also, think this method of flagging is not good. And, face it, you will never get sympathy from the high end raiding guilds. They have no problems getting members flagged. Once a guild beats an event, the entire guild should be able to move forward. If they can't beat the next event, then it's time to stagnate to gear up the members for beating what's ahead. Good luck to you and your guild.
Because others have chimed in I'll go ahead and respond to some issues. 1). We almost never have a waitlist. We DO have boxes that fill in when we are undermanned and then booted as the raid fills out. 2). We have had 0 people quit the game or leave the guild over this time period. 3). We have only had 3 applicants over this time period. We do NOT shout/ooc to recruit people. That said we HAVE had quite a few return from retirement recently. 4). We believe real life comes over raiding. A lot of our raiders have real life issues that prevent them from raiding consistently. Some work odd rotating schedules, some are in different time zones and can only raid certain days. Some travel on business a lot. Some have obligations with their children that make making 100% of the raids possible. We've also had a large number of deaths in the family and raiders needing personal time to recover from surgery recently...more than usual. 5). We have never had someone sitting on waitlist that needed the flag. We HAVE had people log in friends to get them the flag when they were unable to make a raid...including booting live people who had the flag to get them in while they AFK in the guild hall. Some people make some very solid points. Our definition of "we" is obviously not what the developers see it as. At this point rotating which day we do the target on is probably the best course of action. A 4 day lockout vs 5 day would REALLY help on this, as it would let us rotate the day each cycle (Sunday > Thursday > Tuesday > Sunday > repeat). That said...I'm guessing that would hinder us more than help us when we are trying to work on TDS4/5. The other option is to risk skipping doing the target a week by waiting for a day where more people who need it are on instead of doing it whenever its available to us. Sucks to risk losing out on loot though. As others have stated...its really just this one roadblock. Even if we are stuck farming tds2-4 for months to get flagged for td5...that's ONE RAID we won't have access to, and I'm 100% OK with that. Just sucks that BOTH TIMES they did this win raid X times to advance they did it upside down with access to very few raids until you get through the first one which then opens up a lot more. If they had designed it differently so that only 1 or 2 raids were locked behind the mechanic instead of only 1 or 2 raids NOT locked behind the mechanic, I wouldn't be posting here. ~MrGPAC
I agree with MrGPAC. Having the flagging mechanism like this only hurts the casual guilds who members having varying attendances. We raid 3 nights a week (Fri, Sat, Mon). So of course we do Arx #1 every Friday night. If you cannot make Fri then you are not getting flagged. So even if you are 100% raider on Sat/Mon, you wont get flagged. The problem is compounded exponentially further for guilds like ours when you require multiple events in order to be flagged. If it takes 4 arx #1 wins to get flagged and it takes mine and MrGPAC's guild 8 Arx#1 wins to get folks flagged, then we'd need about 32 T2 wins for us to get enough flags for Arx #5. The figures would get worse if after 8 wins T1 wins, folks were still having to be bannered in.
Looking at past expansions, there's a bunch of easy raid made just for newish guild... not every expansion cycle of course. CoTF T1 have some pretty simple mechanic and has been completed by tons of guilds. NToV , minus vulak, was fairly simple and an excellent beginner's ground. I guess Sarith + beast domain were the learning ground in VoA... pretty small ground, I agree. HoT and underfoot didn't had much for the new guilds, but SoD has been one of the easiest expansion, minus zek brothers. Point is, there's some learning ground every other expansion... obviously, the best solution would be to have more raid, a bunch of easy raid for the masses and a smaller amount for the elite... but with such small expansion that's just not possible; instead, we rotate between easy, medium and hard expansions. That being said, I do agree there's a big lack of a learning curve... going from group-content balanced around merc sustaining ~20k DPS, a healer merc who love HoT/delayed heal and stuff that's tankable by a wizard spamming his rune to trucks who can dish out over 200kdmg in a second, AoEs, interrupts, and quadrupling ( or more) the DPS requirement... it's not a curve, it's a cliff.
Our guild has a lot of players who play and it made it easy for us to flag the right number but a lot of people sacrificed by riding the bench while we ensured 46+ flagged each week 4 weeks in a row then again 12 for the next 3 raids. It balanced out in the end but a lot still had to sacrifice. Raiding on the same day can be good and bad both. I would rethink your Arx1 and forward 2,3,4 to your highest attendance day and raid that same day every week. Keep track of who has how many wins. You can manually do this through logs or use channels to invite people. I use the Guild MOTD to give proper channels for people to join in flagging. For instance, if we were on our 3rd attempt at ARX1, i would make the channels to join in addition to the bench when i started raid invites. Bench=cucumber, If you have 2 arx wins /join ihave2, if you have 1 arx win /join ihave1. The 0 wins join the bench and you make sure the other 2 channels made are in the raid over the regular bench with 2 wins first, 1 win 2nd and 0 wins 3rd. Speak to your members and tell them you need help with better attendance for a few weeks. This one hurdle opens 6 of the 7 raids and its been said before you will have a rough time beating arx3 and arx4. Some guilds, and im talking top 20 guilds, have beaten arx4 and still cant beat arx5. A lot of people put high end guilds down thinking they only have 54 people but that is not the case. Our attendance may be better but i can assure you that many sacrifice through bench time when flagging is a must. The sacrifice your guild needs to make is a little higher raid attendance...
being in a guild which was in much the same spot when TDS went live we let everyone have about a month to go though the grp content and level up. From there we started on arx 1 while doing the COTFT1a/b and T2. in COTF T1 we went for the achievements to allow people to buy the FSS and stone tower items with currency, which at 1200 a pop is ~80 raids which is ~ 3 months of raiding to get the chase item they want. Not very fast, but well worth it. For Arx it took use ~3 weeks to get the strat down. and ~2 months to get nuff people flagged to start gimping people into arx2-4. Now we have a general 'Core' that varies from 40-50 people that always shows up so that helped. We also switch the nights that we do Arx raids on (basically when ever there available/force on now) I'd recommend that you switch out the night you do arx 1 for 2-3 weeks while trying arx 2-4 with the 36 some odd you can feild in there just to get the strat down, heck try vitio, with that number. if its as you say and none really leaves your guild then they should understand. you can even go back to ROF and do the achievements there for some of the wonderful clickys that exist form there (grelith seal, bifold focus, etc)
Does TDS #2 drop a back flag KEY for #1 I don't know since I am still 2/4 flagged on TDS #1. older raids - your guild leaders in the past had to get everybody flagged T1 in order to due T2/T3/T4 raids. peeps who only play one day a week in a mult-day raid guild are just part time raiders- you either flagged them or keep them g/i/m/p.
The problem isn't the flagging system, its that the expansion is too small. My guild has the expansion on farm and even with that we only have one night of raids really to do. We still do some cotf2 just so we don't get bored and to keep people involved with a 2nd raiding night. Also to gear some apps. We have no more raids to do than your guild since cotf2 serves little purpose to us, as cotf1 serves little purpose for your guild. Seven new raids for an entire expansion is just not enough. Imagine if they doubled the amount as they should have, you would have twice as many raids, and would be moving to the next flagged tier in half the time as you would have an extra raid to flag people with.
Regarding keying, I think the "simple" solution would be to require some total amount of keys raid-wide and not on an individual basis. Let's say 4 keys times 54 people= 216 keys distributed any possible way (but everyone needs at least 1). That way high-playtime characters like officers and such could loot 12 keys and count as 12 of 216. For top-tier guilds this would change nothing, except they would likely have to do earlier raids less to get boxes/alts/sitters into higher tiers. While for mid-tier it would let them maintain relevancy with their core.
The raid flagging is just fine as it is. I was fine with it when you had to beat a huge number of group tasks but SOE/Daybreak apparently felt some raiders couldn't handle something like that. On nearly every server there are guilds who are more dedicated, organized, and/or skillful than others. They are absolutely entitled to, after sufficient demonstration of those properties, earlier access to higher level raids and gear. With current content no longer pandering to 10% of all raid guilds and the rest up to years behind in the progression and a great deal of the necessary strategy known before guilds ever see the raids on production servers the traits that distinguish one guild from another are primarily fielding a team that has practiced and refined their strategy while overcoming progression obstacles. Getting 40ish individuals 10 wins vs a raid mission is a perfectly legitimate progression obstacle (as was doing that huge number of group events which was dropped). Sure, 200 member family guilds would like it if there was no downside to fielding 54 players with 10% attendance. Heck, they'd probably like it if they could /ooc in PoK "Come raid with us at 8PM to 9PM no commitment necessary." But that's not progression raiding. That's family raiding in progression raid guild costume. 52/85 guilds beat at least one event in CoTF and 41/85 beat them all? Not at the 4 month mark they didn't. 41/85 have beaten event 1 and 30/85 event 2 in TDS. Looks to me like we're on schedule. Looks to me like those (still) willing to beat expansions before the next one is released will do it again. And those not (or no longer) willing won't. Ah successful raiding is for people who have no lives? Ummm my guess is the 10 guilds who've beaten TDS aren't raiding nearly as much as many guilds who have not. You wanna be a progression raider be one. If it takes 10 keys then you make 10 raids. It's a lot friendlier to require beating something 10 times than beating something once that's 10 times harder or only giving out 6 no drop keys per win. OR you can be satisfied with being one of the reasons your guild is progressing and gearing up more slowly. The consequence of not performing well in a perfectly legitimate trait used to distinguish one guild from another is less and/or later reward.
I lead pickup/open raids. I'm not looking forward to the flagging in arx when we're allowed to do it for those due to rotating roster. I also raid with a regular guild raid force, and other than a minor bit of pain early on to keep as much of the same people as we could in every night it wasn't too bad. Once you get enough flags for a few events on farm, all the keys count, so it could be worse.
