Not true at all. I do casual/open raids on Bristlebane. We have DKP casual and random casual. In both you encounter a lot of players that won't/don't improve their gameplay to win events, they let others "do the right things". They ride the wave because they still get gear in the end and call it good enough. Eventually some of those guys quit when enough people complain about their amount of effort/participation/dps/etc...but the rest suffer with failed events until something gets fixed
Agreed (and yes for bristle). While maybe you need a little bit of coordination to get it rolling (social stuff, talk to people) there is no reason any server cannot run their own open raids on modern or close to modern content. Many main raiders are often available on alts who know the events inside and out they just may not be playing their best geared class. (skill > gear/levels unless gear/levels is really that bad) Heck, many of them would love a chance to A: see how they do raiding on their alt. B: Get some gear for their alt.
Few things: 1) there is no gate keeping. Everyone has the same access to keys for mythic+ content. They can form their own groups and push their own progression. The only ones that claim gate keeping are those too lazy to form their own groups and/or want to be carried through content. 2) the score keeping is a fair representation of ones abilities. Sure it can be abused by someone buying content clears too boost their score. No different than anyone else buying raid gear or content clears in EQ. Just because it’s “completed” doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing. 3) The environment and mythic+ community isn’t that unfriendly nor is it toxic. Of the thousands if not tens of thousands of runs I’ve done since the release of m+, I’ve only ever come across a few people that I’d actually consider toxic. It’s usually that someone has one bad experience and then stereotypes the entire community. And it’s usually by those same people who fall into the “gate keeping” criteria. It does get boring after a bit but it had it’s used and it was fun to push limits and raise your score as high as you can. All in all though, I don’t think it’s a model that’ll fit well in EQ. Just my 2cp
You're trolling if you think this comment isn't as toxic, if not more toxic because you're taking a moral highground. M+ would be great for the game. I can't think of a single time in the last 2-3 expansions where I cared to use a CC ability or even pull. With infinitely scaling content, we might actually be able to use 100% of our toolkits without ticking off the noob players who can't even manage to click the DPS half of their toolkit right. They can chill in +5s while the good players chill in +20s, that's perfectly fine. M+ literally has content for everyone and will give the good players an opportunity to click more than their spam key for 99.999999% of fights.
Okay: Asking people to have adequate experience in the content you’re wanting doesn’t make it toxic. Taking the best applicant out of hundreds and you not being picked also doesn’t make it toxic. It’s no different than EQ raids taking specific classes, or holding trials for future raiders. No different than a company looking at 15’resumes and taking the top candidate. Those aren’t considered toxic. I don’t know how well it would work though. WoW had quite a bit of flex and differentiation between their gear tiers. So they were able to properly bracket rewards based on levels of difficulty. EQ has what? 4 I think? Rather than reworking or adding a new system, it would be easier to just make tanks not so invincible
You just described gate-keeping, again. MMOs rely on creating an environment, where people want to interact with each other. Jobs don't rely on creating a massive social space. Nobody in WoW wants to interact with anyone. It directly impacts the longevity of the game, when there is scoring metric used to filter groups. DPS might as well not even bother playing the game, because tanks and healers want absolutely nothing to do with M+ pickup groups. In summary, M+ amplifies the negativity as it creates resentment amongst community members and acts detrimental to the game's long term health.
He’s not entirely wrong. I didn’t fully insult the guy. He just didn’t comprehend what I was saying. “You proved my points with your post”. No, I gave credit where credit was due while giving examples of how your points are clearly wrong. 1) Gate Keeping - another player cannot stop you from creating your own group and running your choice of content. The only true gate keeping is the infinite scaling getting to a point where you get one shot by trash. No one is able to get to that point though due to keys dropping a level on a failed timer run. So no gate keeping 2) Scoring - sure it can be abused. Every system can be. To claim the entire system is faulty because of the actions of a few is not a plausible point for an argument. People buy items and gear and even entire accounts from 3rd parties. So are we to say that the whole of EQ is compromised because of those select few who do choose to do that and thus we should not play EQ any more? No that’s silly 3) Toxicity. Me disagreeing with your points and opinions doesn’t make me a toxic person. Even if it did, I do not represent an entire community. Nor do i represent even a fraction of that community. So again, using a few isolated incidents and stereotyping an entire community is also a no go for an argument. So again, him saying “thanks for proving my points” was a clear sign that he was unable to comprehend that while I gave credit where credit was due, my stance was still in clear opposition Thus my comment. Could it have been handled better? Sure. But I enjoyed the snarkiness and the EQ reference. Doesn’t make it wrong though, as I just explained.
Incorrect again. You have the tools and materials to push forward and do exactly what you want. You’re just choosing not to and expecting someone else to do it for you. That guy created his own group to allow him to choose whoever he wants. Guess what. You can do the exact same thing. You’re just choosing not to use all. That’s not gate keeping. And M+ has the highest activity and participation count out of all the content in game. The replay-ability of it is actually a saving grace for the longevity of the game. People will resent people regardless of the type of content. It’s the “I have the tools to do what everyone is doing, but I’m going to ignore that and complain that someone won’t do it for me” group that claims toxicity snd negativity. I started my own group, you can start yours. Your own inability or lack of desire to put in the work yourself is the only thing that holds people back (outside of general skill levels but that’s another discussion)
M+ key design isn't conducive to exclusively running your own keys as you can't control your next key. Shadowlands saw a loot reduction, so in order to gear up for higher keys the players are funneled into joining other player's keys. This is where the gate keeping comes into play, in order to meet the requirements you have to already have the requirements. I don't disagree with choosing your own group. It's good for the individual but bad for the overall community. I'm pointing out that in a game fundamentally designed around creating social interactions that M+ actively discourages that aspect. As opposed to FF14 that provides more rewards for grouping with new players. They tied player progression into M+. If gear progression stopped at M0, then M+ would see drastically reduced participation (see participation metrics for S1 PVP compared S2 PVP). See WoW versus EQ1 2004 or WoW versus FF14 2021. Games that require too much work get abandoned by the casual audience.
In order to gear up, you just had to run higher keys. Every dungeon had gear for every class/role. Higher key, higher reward. You could gear up entirely on your own keys. It requires 4 other players to run. How is that discouraging social interaction? You need other people to do that content. Them making it so you could solo it would discourage social interaction. Take EQ live vs Truebox servers. Which ones see more grouping of different people? The one where you can’t do it by yourself. You can progress 3 ways. Pvp (which was most popular upon release), M+ which is currently the most popular because it doesn’t have a weekly lockout like the other two, and then raiding. It’s not just m+. It’s the replay ability, the ability to spam it over and over that makes it so popular. It’s not hard to make a group…and you know that. It’s people being lazy about it. The only time it becomes difficult is if you get slapped with a bad dungeon on a hell weeks worth of affixes.
I think it would take a significant amount of development to make EQ fit this model. We have expansions with limited content. Getting the base expansions out AND adding something like this just seems so far beyond the scope of what we've seen the developers able to deliver on. Even if they did manage to add and tune it perfectly, odds are with in a year or two it would be left to die just like the LDoN leader boards or end up having to get updated (badly) every expansion like the old heroic adventures until its broken. If you guys are looking for a challenge and a way to flex your EQ stick, maybe setup a site to record / post speed runs for various missions ranked by difficulty. Example: Time to complete Crusaders with any group. Example: Time to complete Crusaders with four group members while getting Shared Pain achievement. That lets you get creative with whatever 'hard' mode challenge you like. That DOES however shift the burden to create and maintain the leaderboards to the community you want to build instead of on the EQ developers.
I think yall underestimate how hardcore WoW players have got on classic. All the teenagers who played WoW vanilla grew up and learned to play games and raid. They have more parsers and raid aids going on than most hardcore EQ players I have raided with. A lot of people will straight up call people out for not dpsing or healing and replace them. A lot of raid leaders also only give GDKP to the people who at least parse in the top 20 percentile, or heal in the top 20 percentile, which is fair considering 1/3-1/2 of the raid is "carries" or people who arent overly geared and skilled for the content. I think the DKP system on pickup raids is a fail because it locks people into that raid system to see rewards and players wanting to do pickup raids who are already in guilds dont want to have to commit another set amount of hours a week to their guild raid hours. GDKP is much better because you can auction raid loot off in kronos and plat and pay off the top healer, tanks, and dpsers with the krono and plat collected. You have the raid leaders and good players monitor parses to make sure people are playing.
As far as a solution I think the 2 option scaling is still one of the best. You make a hardcore version and a normal version. Hardcore version offers better loot, but normal version still offers way better than group loot/previous expansion raid loot and is just slightly worse than hardcore loot. That way everyone can be happy with their epeen still being bigger than everyone else, and if the Open raid teams get geared enough from the normal raids, they can start doing some hardcore versions. This also offers guilds more enjoyment in the game getting to raid content on nights when 35-40 people log on. Plus from the GDKP standpoint, think of the upcharge in bidding on hardcore open raids than normal open raids. I don't see how most people wont either benefit from increased raid experience, raid loot, and free kronos to pay for all your box accounts and buying ultra rare loot for boxes. Live servers are just dead, there needs to be some life pumped into this game to keep it going and I see this as a golden opportunity. Not only will this incentivize people to raid but I guarantee a bunch of people will come back and level up, get aas and people will make more alts/boxes they want to gear up, so thus increasing the grouping element of the game as well. Its not a good look when for 9 months of the year a guild is just farming loot for alts and only logging on for raid times. Think of the applicants you can pick from in higher guilds too. You get applicants with current raid experience, current raid gear, and tons more classes to pick from.
