Just going to say it, you are killing the game.

Not saying make T1 raids easy. Just more forgiving and able to be beat by more different raid make ups. So easier, not per se easy.

Ruven

I have no investment in the raid game outside of the fact that I want to see the game continue for many years and believe raiders subs and expansion purchases are important. With that said I also think the tier system is a good system when it was introduced but by todays standards its a little outdated considering the lack of overall content. 6 zones worth of content with three tiers means casual raid guilds will get two zones worth of raids to keep them engaged realistically for a year, Mid level raid guilds will have 4 zones worth of raid content to keep them engaged for an entire year and the high end guilds will have 2 zones worth of challenging content to keep them engaged for an entire year until the bottom two tiers of raid guilds bring out their torches and pitchforks and ask for things to be tuned down so they can beat the next tier of raids.

I am just spit balling ideas that I think might actually work because as things currently are I cant recall seeing any posts or complaints about to many players, to many raid applicants, or to many raids for people to do in an expansion cycle. What I have seen is players quit over the years, struggling players ask for things to get tuned down, hardcore players ask for things to get tuned up and if you think about it at the end of the day the same problem exists for all of these players. They are not being engaged long enough with a sense of accomplishment for the lifespan of an expansion. If the developers can figure out how to do this I think most of our problems as players disappear and on their end they will see more revenue and player retention.

TBM was a nice “casual raider” experience. Hate and Fear has a few chests, with the lowest tier raid gear, 0 coin or flags and random drops from basepop.

Future targets could do something similar, perhaps like GMM, released a few months into an expansion. These “starter” raids would require 0 progression to request and drop 1/2? The loot table of a typical T1 raid. So what is that, 1 visible, 1 non-visible, 2 spells? No need to revamp or rework gear, I don’t care if “casuals” farm an easy raid or 4 that aren’t progression linked that drop the SAME raid pieces as the progression raids. My rationale is two-fold, save dev time by not creating a whole sub-tier for loot and the loot table would be a half chest.

Side note...those complaining that TBL TS/T2 and GMM are better than last expansion....ever stop to think why?
Could it be that the DEV team was tired of the “we can’t catch up, we’re under-geared” argument? The downside is that with equitable gear, you’re realizing that targets from last year still aren’t beatable and now we have to find what if not gear could be the issue....

Blame the Devs...they’re killing the game right?

I said right in the post how much I've cut my prices down too. I cycle about 250 different items in the bazaar that are tradeskill involved. Specifics past that will just clutter this thread. I sell collects and hero's forge as well. I'm not trying to sound rude, but I assure you I have a pretty accurate assessment on the BB bazaar. I've been doing this for years.

Yet again, nothing is good enough. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

If you think you have it all figured out, log out and go start your own gaming franchise. I ASSURE YOU. You do NOT have it all figured out.

Log in and enjoy yourself or log out and cancel. It doesn't matter. It never did. DBG is making the game they want to make. And that's where we're at.

They put in 3 raid /achs per raid.

They should make future raids easier by default. but to get the /achs for a raid means you do things that make it harder much harder (like how they are now which is too much for some guilds).

But the point being that getting all three /ach's should unlock raid-chase items.

This way guilds could beat a nerfed raid, but uber guilds could go the extra mile for the good stuff. Picture a mearatas without mephitis or something, but you have to beat it like it is now to get the /ach to unlock the best items.

There is precedent for this. The bi-fold unlocks on the vender after doing achievements in RoF...then you just need to farm coin.

A rational man looks at the world around him, and conforms himself to that world. An irrational man looks at the world around him, and expects the world to conform to him. Therefore, all change in the world is made by irrational men.

(disclaimer: the use of the word Man is referring to the species, not the gender)

Sub fees - there isn’t enough raids.

It's interesting you mentioned this, I've noticed the same thing on AB after coming back after a 4 year break. I don't even bother logging in my trader now. I had attributed it to a general decrease in population, but your ideas make more sense to me

This.

An interesting thing to consider is mid tier guilds are the "farm teams" for the more elite guilds. Without mediocre players in these guilds to make them mid tier guilds we would essentially have nothing but elite raid guilds. While this sounds great in theory if everyone was an elite player who raided it would be very difficult to replace players when they retire, take a break or for what ever reason stop playing. Just like in sports you have your pros, minor leagues, college game and so forth down the line. The bottom needs to learn and progress with hopes of making to the next level. By default it only makes sense that you are going to have players who will hold back these mid tier guilds because they are competing against the same opponent or in this case content as the pros not some lesser version tuned to their skill level.

The fact that these guilds are in competition with the same content as the pros and when slots become available in the pros their best players get called up to the A team only makes it more difficult for these guilds to stay competitive as they are the ones that have to continually take on the most green raid players, train them, and hope they can retain them long enough to be beneficial to the team before they eventually get their number called. While I am sure some of the elite guilds might take some walk on (people who have never raided as applicants) I am sure they see significantly less of this than the mid tier guilds do. To further add to the problem as I see it the group game players who might be potential applicants to the more casual or mid tier raid guilds in the future are not coming in droves. This further complicates the whole system as there is less funneling of players up the ranks to feed the top. This is just my personal opinion and I could be dead wrong but it makes sense to me in a competitive environment like this.

To be fair, on TLPs you can have the best gear if you just buy enough Krono or raid gear up fully with 20 people, so, this argument isn't exactly true in all cases.

There's nothing wrong with maximally challenging content, and there's no reason not to have maximally challenging content, but if every bit of your content is maximally challenging, you end up with a lot of people losing the incentive to engage it in the first place.

If you want more robust expansions, you need people buying the expansions, else the development resources aren't worth the return. The money seems to be in the TLPs right now and maybe it's worth questioning why so many people seem to prefer playing the 20 year old version of the game instead of the newest content.

Whoever has been in charge of this game since its inception has always catered to the extremely vocal ultra minority. The cheeto stained malcontents who burn through content like their life depends on it drive poorly created and rushed content as well as the decision to make content far harder and far too complex than it should be.

Actually i would not mind a tier 0 with 2 raids in rather pure and simple fights without emotes.
Rewards 2 spells and 1 item. And when you won each you flagged for T1 this month, you have to repeat this in 28 days. So over a year you do these 2 raids 12-13 times.
The item is a bit like final tier last expansion.

First raid 1 mob, second raid balancing down 2 mobs.

Spells are first level in that expansion example ros = 106. And those 2 raids are the only ones where that level spells come from.

I think it's fair to say most people who stuck with this game after 2004 did so because they welcomed the challenge despite the flaws. By the time this really became a problem (in my mind, Seeds of Destruction is about when power bloat and catering to the hardest core started to overwhelm game design), I think it is also fair to say nobody had ever expected a game to survive 10+ years of continual development and probably did not have a plan in place for how to deal with that.

We're now 10 years past that point and it is clear the options are to continue on into the sunset or to philosophically change the design aspect of new content.

I don't know which is the right answer, or if the latter is even a reasonable request.

It's funny in the sense that the worst I can say about the devs is that every so often they listen to the toxic part of the high end playerbase. I should emphasize that basically still the problem originates with the players. When you distill it down the devs aren't killing anything. It's all with some players who compromise things. And those players will tell you that "I don't care" because they are are at ease, I guess, with their antisocial abrasiveness.

This thread is about or should be about groups of players vs. other groups of players.

I am so confused by this statement as its the exact opposite of SoD. The devs listened to the vocal low tier and mid tier guilds and the most vocal casual players and gave them such a soft expansion that anyone pretty much regardless of circumstances was able to complete current content when it was current. Everyone was swimming in current gear that negated pretty much anything prior. By the end of the year guilds that were often 3 years behind typically suddenly had completed SoD or at least most of it which then made anything prior useless to them.

Many people warned that this was in fact a bad thing as you are now on a razor edge tuning wise and it in fact stripped people of content as you were then limited to only what you could handle in current content even if that was only 1 or a few raids now. No longer did your casual, relaxed, low playtime, short staffed raid force have 3 years worth of options to farm for upgrades they might only now have 1 raid that worked for them and that was that. And this was what came to be with Fippy in UF and many a guild folded and this model has slowly chipped away options and playerbase since.

Not embracing old content, complete gear resets and such are the opposite of what they should have done or be doing. You leave as many options for as many playstyles on the table as you can as its impossible to tune current content or now have enough content for them all in one expansion. You should have embraced epics, you embrace 5+ year old content still having value as a good thing. Instead stuff like this is often nerfed 10 years later or devs call them mistakes to be avoided, and make old content useless immediately in many cases as soon as the next step appears.

I think I meant Secrets of Faydwer.

It's been a long time.

Not rude at all. I guess I'm just dismayed at your assessment and hoping your conclusion doesn't come true. :-/

I should have been more specific, I was actually referring to shinies. I'm astonished at the inflation compared with four years ago. The flip side, of course, is that I'm able to sell mine for mind-blowing prices too. But I still can't afford to buy the rares.