I would like to start a little discussion about the current flagging method for raids. I do like the person needing to be at the raid to receive the clickable flag and needing the decided amount to move to the next tier. There are a few problems with it that come to mind right off that in my "opinion" could be fixed easily. One issue is rather tough for guilds when deciding a flag line. Who is available 100% of the scheduled raid times? Who will share their info just in case they can't be here? Someone misses and you lose a flag. It makes the game almost more stress than fun it seems to me watching officers working the raid tool trying to shuffle people onto different toons because of a couple of no shows. I also know my guild was not the only guild to lose a few flags due to someone being dead or some other type of bug this year. This is uncontrollable and the whole guild pays the price. What if a couple of people retire or leave for any reason in the middle of progression? Everyone who has worked hard the whole time shouldn't have to pay the price for this. One other thing is you have to choose the right classes. Every guild is different and build raids unique to them. Your needs on a raid can vary from one event to the next. Why shouldn't we have the ability to adapt if needed? If you carry a flag line for a whole tier and find out late your make up could have been a little different it can be a very bad thing. To me the easiest thing that comes to mind is to change the ratio for flag weight. Just an idea but mainly would just like to see a discussion with some ideas.
That more or less your guild problem that cannot organize it properly, lack of guild management. I know if my guild we have an efficient management. Do not see a reason to start reinventing the wheel.
We have 91 active raiders, while for us flagging may take a little longer than some other guilds, so what we will never be in the running to be first to finish or even in the top 10, but we get there as a team without having anyone give their account details to anyone else. Currently we only have a handful of players not flagged for T2, which are our low RA members.For us 9 backflags in the T2 chests has helped a lot, of course would rather it was increased to be half a flag the same as ROs was but 2 does not go into 21 ! Personally I was disapointed to see the number of flags required to move up to the next tier increased from 18 to 21 this expansion and I hope it gets reduced back down again next expansion, but other than that it's not too much of a problem.
I am not quite sure how you read anything I posted and came to the conclusion of poor guild management. Could be a few things but more likely you are just simple. Which makes it difficult to know if I should be offended or not. I don't really want to get sucked into some keyboard karate so will just clarify what you read. Almost everything I posted was something "that could happen" to a guild and not something "a guild chooses to do" that effects it in a negative way. The only thing I posted that could be a choice is class set up. Do you think that in beta testing all raids are tested by the same style of guild with the exact same class set up? I can tell you they are not. So do you think its impossible that a guild could run into an event that their flag line is not set up perfectly for? All I am saying is there are unforeseen things that could happen that can effect any guild. What is wrong with a little extra cushion in the flag ratio? It could end up being your guild that needs it after all.
I would love to see key requirements removed entirely, and instead have content tiers gated by difficulty. But that's just me. I think the keying system in EQ is awful. I don't think its particularly rewarding for anyone when the gate between tiers is essentially "did everyone show up on time each week." I don't think anyone ever enters the next tier thinking "aw yeah, good job team, everyone showed up each week and we made it through with 48+ keys. great work beating EQ." Except maybe the raid leader/leadership, who are probably doing their best to not pull their hair out throughout the keying process when someone doesn't show up. Whole thing just seems like a pretty bland and monotonous way to gate raid content.
The current flagging system is obviously designed as a timesink to slow guilds down from crushing through an entire expansion's raid content in a single week. It just delays the inevitable of top guilds going into bored mode, while the rest of the guilds will take a normal time regardless. Personally, I think I liked the DoDh style of flagging. Require some group flagging to access upper tier zones, and then require killing the set of raids at least once to allow access to the final raid(s). The inclusion of a zonewide debuff that gets lessened by killing the previous raids (or a backflag) is a nice touch too. Of course, top guilds will still smash through all of that in no time, but there's really nothing going to stop that other than bugs.
This is proberbly the easiest most fesible suggestion, should the decide to change the flagging process.
I think flagging is achieving the desired results. If you have 54 highly dedicated raiders, you get to the next tier in record time. If your raid force is a bit less dedicated, you have to wait a few extra weeks. If your raid force isn't dedicated at all, you may never make it to T2. Personally, I would just release tiers later in the cycle. T2 3 months after expansion launch, and T3 3 months after that. It would give hard core raiders new content to look forward to mid year, reducing their tendency to stop paying for their account because they are bored. The drawback would only be for the uber elite guilds that want to be first, and take time off from work to beat the raids ASAP. My guess is they would retain more players longer if they staggered the release of tiers, than catering to the desires of the "first" guilds.
Raid flag requirements are implemented simply to slow down the progress of people through content designed to sustain people for a year. Personally I would favor gatekeeper style events. Events that are usually at the end of a tier that are usually harder events that must be beaten at least once to allow your guild to move on. Some examples of this: Emperor Ssraeshza, Rallos Zek (Tactics), Rathe Council, Ikkinz 4/Uqua, Zun’Muram Tkarish Zyk (Txevu), Sendai/Emperor Draygun, Daosheen, King Odeen, Zek Brothers (SoD), and basically half of the Underfoot Raids when current. A lot of these like the Txevu Zun, King Odeen or Uqua were events that were difficult in era that it took many guilds weeks or event months to beat them (I know Uqua was broken so not the best example), but defeating them opened up the next tier of raids and allowed you to move on. Each tier now a days should have one of these style events at the end and defeating it allows you to request the next tier of raids. The challenge should come from the raids themselves not the logistics of putting keys on people or having people show up to particular raids.
Seems you not played long. They had staggered releases during rof and the general feedback was that it was not a thing to be repeated.
Almost every raid you listed required the RL or some designate to loot an item from the raid to request the the next raid. Sort of like I suggested above. Love it or hate it I liked the voa book clicks, if you happed to be in a higher tier raid than you had already gotten to on your book it gained much more xox sort of like a back flag for everyone without handing out back flags in limited quantities.
No, no, no and no. We had this with EOK/RoS and many guilds didn't get past them. T2 should be harder than T1, and T3 should be harder than T2. There are not enough events now per expansion to allow for a gate keeper events on any tier. We lost some great guilds last year, with only 17 or 18 guilds actually completing the expansion as they got extremely frustrated at not being able to get past Gatekeeper events. From what I have seen of TBL, they seem to have got the tiers worked out for raids quite nicely.
Txevu Zun is the only one that required the raid leader to loot something to request the next tier raid. Emperor dropped a key piece, PoP flags were hails for entire raid, Ikkinz/Uqua dropped one piece for everyone in the raid to complete their key, Sendai/Draygun were AA flags that everyone got, Daosheen and King Odeen flagged entire raids after a hail and Zek Brothers flagged for requesting the next raid for everyone in attendance (though this wasn’t required for final zone flagging). But I suppose there are two different issues here: 1. The initial flagging process. 2. The backflagging process. For the initial flagging process I would favor a system like GoD where you have some group tasks to do upfront before a handful of gate keeper raids culminating in Txevu Zun which many guilds only did 1-2 times to be able to access Tacvi because the event was rough for many. Every raid dropped 54 flag pieces and allowed your entire raid to move on. Backflag options were available through moderately difficult quests. If you had a large number of backflag needing people you could run a backflag circuit. However I do understand the view of wanting backflags to occur naturally never forcing a repeating of past tier content if you’ve since moved on. My thought though is I’d rather only do those early raids once or twice on the initial progression grind and then go back to them as needed for backflags rather than being forced to continually repeat early tier raids upfront due to needing to farm keys or book progression. VoA books were extremely dumb. You needed 3 Argath wins, 9 Sarith/Valley wins, 13 Beast/Resplendent/Rubeka wins. So that’s 3 cycles in T1, 5 cycles in T2, 5 cycles in T3. If you were a regular guild this meant 13 weeks of raiding bare minimum before the final tier (which comprised 8 of the 14 raids that expansion) was open. I know you don’t give 2 Halflings about TLP servers but that flagging system makes it impossible for any of the current ones to even see the final tier or half the raid content in era before RoF releases and all the foci and gear are trivialized from that tier. TLP servers aside, It also set you back whenever one person missed a single raid. They could’ve made 4 Sarith/Valleys in a row but if you missed the next set you weren’t flagged for T3. Yes, the backflag system accelerated the EXP progress for these people but they would always be behind the top progression within the guild delaying you further as those individual misses would add up across a 3 month progression crawl. I know we had a few people fall behind because of his and we ended up being short the 45 flagged people for a few of our first T3 and T4 Raids. That was even with a lot of missing people getting boxed on nights they weren’t there. Edit: Yea it’s possible there aren’t enough raids being developed to warrant gatekeeper style raids. Personally though, those are the only events I really fondly remember beating other than Underfoot which felt like almost every event was that difficult. But at the very least there should be one very challenging raid within the expansion cycle. The end event is a decent location for it but it’s difficulty shouldn’t only be present for the first handful of guilds to defeat it before it gets neutered by a patch. Which has occurred to many end of expansion events over the years.
Loved the book to what we have now, get extremely frustrated getting items I can't click and have to destroy! Just wish you didn't get them once you have completed the achivement or make them tradeable that you could pass on. Would also be nice if they had a link to the achievment they were for. Doesn't help the flagging frustrations of the lower tiers though unfortunatly.
My idea would be to make raid flag account wide. In truth most of the time the back flags are used to get alts flag or new guild members. Even then a lot of time they are wasted. Having the flagging be account wide would enable you to flag many toons at once. This would Then give people who play different classes the option to raid with the "needed" class and not be limited because Toon X is flagged but toon Y is not. Another option would be to have the Raid vendors sale an item that would back flag toons. Have the item unlock once you completed an event in the next tier. For example You go in and beat a T2 event it unlock the T1 back flag clicky for 10 coin. This would then speed up the process of back flagging. The last option I would offer would be to remove the flagging requirement all together. Have it so you have to have X raid done to request the next raid just like with progression quest. If you don't want people to crush it in a few days of release then simply add a time release. When you beat X raid then Raid Y will open in 3 weeks. After all that what the flagging system is doing the only difference would be that you wouldn't have to back flag X amount of people. The coding could be simple the event would simply look at your /ach date and if it been 3 weeks then you can request it.
Change the ratio for flag weight from 85/15 (8 non flagged) to 75/25 (13 non flagged). Anything over 2 full groups being able to be gimped into a raid would be over kill. This way everything else in the process they created wouldn't need to be changed.
This is exactly what I was thinking would be easiest. It doesn't involve changing the current system which I understand why it exist. It does however give every guild the flexibility to adapt to different raids. I know we lost a few flags due to circumstances not in our control "meaning people being there but not receiving their writs" and if I was informed correctly this also happened to RoI. I would guess it also happened to other guilds as well. Just another reason to increase it in my opinion. In a perfect world it could be done to where it flags the whole guild. This would also allow people that end up riding the bench for the flag lines the opportunity to be rotated in for some of the fun but I think asking that is a bit of a reach.
