That is a description of the latest expansion content. Last night, a "family, casual guild" beat the final 3 events of this expansion - on the first try. That leaves about 9 months of no new content to address. Apparently, DBG made the decision to reduce the difficulty of all events in this expansion so that nearly everyone, given just a little bit of effort, could experience all the latest. Then, in an obvious effort to keep people playing EQ despite nothing new, they significantly reduced the meaningful rewards (ore drops) to a fraction of the previous expansion. Yet DBG missed one issue in that thinking. That is, with content so easy, what exactly is the reason to spend time acquiring some of the rare rewards when you have already beaten everything that is out there? I guess I wonder why a lot of people are not asking this question. Maybe they are. I know at least one guildie agrees with me when she made the statement after our last win. She said "sad".
I see the OP's point, but just want to add, "family, casual" doesn't necessarily = bad. When every family, casual guild beats it, then you have a point. But a sample size of 1 is fairly meaningless. The content may be too easy (I have no opinion on that, I don't raid), but the real issue is, there isn't enough of it.
I certainly did NOT SAY nor mean to say that casual guilds were "bad". My meaning was that we are not a guild that spends 2-4 months raiding in beta with a militant type of mindset and honing all strats to be ready to beat the expansion event an hour after it is released. My point was to say that without that, we still beat all of the 8 events on, mostly, the first try. Yes, we had a raid leader (and a few others) who was amazingly well-schooled in strats having watched or partook in beta raids or just research and devotion. And they were skilled enough to lead a group of casual "family members" to a win in the first attempt with very little deaths or blips. Yes, that is sad for whatever the reason it happened, but NOT due to us at all. This is solely a decision by DBG to dumb down raid content to reward pretty much anyone who wants to be at endgame enough to spend some time and energy getting there with little difficulty. And that ignores the needs of the few people who are hard-core devotees of the game to see some reward for their efforts.
Forcing people to farm events for months to get everyone geared up because they artificially keep the drop rate low IS content...that's dev logic and has been for quite some time.
Why would you be surprised. It has the same mechanics as the group mission, just more adds. As long as you have 4 people with a pulse that can run away from the raid, its a totally easy win.
Also sad that they delete posts that are not at all against any rules on the forums and without even commenting to the poster, but because it makes them look bad.
Its more that alot of guilds spent beta learning and practicing the raids. So that there was pre-made strats before the raid was already released. Everyone practiced and knew exactly what to do. Honestly, its not a big deal to beat it right away, it should be embarrassing if you can't beat it after having all the practice and strats for it.
I only get failure when agents go missing in quest but lately it get it like on one my accounts every other day. Its not automatic failure as i got many to succeed even though its a low % just annoying though. Do they even know why agents just go missing?
The game, community, even the MMO genre has been dumbed down to the point where we don't really want to spend an entire year getting the things we aspire to. We'd rather get them really quick and then spend the rest of the year complaining about it. We're being drip-fed the content at regular intervals to keep us thinking we're improving but when you look at the bigger picture, we're just going through the motions.
The attitude these days is if your not in the top 2 finishing guilds, your are a trash player. That's fine, only the people that have played with me would know if that was true anyways. There are a lot of good players out there that didn't "move" to these big guilds, for a lot of reasons. Playing with people you know means something, pride in the guild your in, means something, wanting to win with who you brought, means something. This attitude of all the good players are in certain guilds is plain stupid. On Luclin we have a Council of Guilds that raid and beat this stuff on day one. I know a lot of them, they are great players. I am not shocked one bit they beat this stuff.
Because whether your aware of it or not... This is the content you all have been asking for. It's always "rush, rush, rush." "Win, win, win" "full BiS, camp for 6 months for the next expansion." This is why they stagger the raids so it's not on farm status 2 weeks into an expansions release. On the other side. One week into the release there were 2 posts about F.F. and Heroes are forged group missions that were 50 pages left by of "it's toooo hard" because they weren't being farmed by everyone 5 days intense the expansion.
FF wasn't hard, Forge was awful. Group players need to do more beta testing and raise their concerns for missions.
They have always been complete (-ish) by the end of Beta since the new model took over in ToV. There are minor tweaks, but part of the reason the top guilds' runs are so fast is the practice they've had. They just don't want all raid content done on the first day. That's why the stagger.
Prevent what? Every raid that opens being completed on the same day? This has happened since the new system has been in place. The only real hiccup was when T3 of ToV opened a month late and then there was an issue with the Velks raid which some raid forces gave up for the day before it was fixed (a number just finished the next day or their next scheduled raid day). That Velks raid had probably the most functional changes post Beta of any raid in the new system. The only way you are not going to have a number of guilds complete raids on opening day is to limit information in Beta. The top n guilds in EQ are very motivated to get content done and are very good at the main factor in today's game - namely dps. And pretty much all have mastered the art of AE healing which means that unless you tune up the AEs to single shot non-warriors, guilds can just heal through just about anything (or ... they can actually follow emotes consistently). Even with limited information, LS T3 raids would be a known commodity since the group missions so closely follow the raids. For any guild who hadn't touched beta, two of the three T3 raids were just known because by now their members have beaten the missions into the ground. We're pretty much at the limit of the current system, given the state of player dps and AE healing. If you want changes in the speed of raid completion rates, you're going to have to take a hard look at the additive and in some cases multiplicative power of adps abilities on player dps and how much AE healing a raid force can pump out. OR Live with developers not tuning raids in Beta.
What I'm getting at is that it's time to make some changes so that they are able to make challenging content again. Even if we still have stuff dying day 1, we could at least make it more challenging so that it's not completely trivial like things are right now.
