TLNGR- Does the community want to change how future "launch day races" are ranked, and if so what should it be changed to? It has been over a week since the T3 raid "race" happened. While there was lots of congratulatory comments for the victors, there were also some questioning the parameters that are used to determine the "winner" and formulate the ranking. Then was not the time to discuss that, and maybe a better time would be when the next expansion launches- although many will be too busy on their characters to worry about it until it is too late. The current system, while very easy to determine (via a time stamp), also introduces uncontrollable variables (time an instance is available, zone times due to servers being bogged down, lag during raids) and non traditional methods to try and shave off seconds which may or may not be frowned upon by the community. I always felt how powerful a guild was (and hence their ranking) should be determined by how well they do the event- not by how fast they zone, or being on the right server on the right day to get an instance 1-4 minutes earlier than others, or how many were giving up a Saturday afternoon with family/friends/work to play a game, etc. I have an idea that requires a little bit more work, but I believe will give a truer measurement as to how well a guild performs compared to its fellow competing guilds. Let's assume the same things for releasing raids are similar- three launch days for each of the times, first Saturday of the month starting January. Here is what I feel (note- nothing is etched in stone) 1. Once the raids are released, each guild has one week to complete their attempt. If you want to make it five days because of lockout timers, cool. This allows all guilds to participate in the race and have a chance at number one, as opposed to a guild that only raids Mon- Wed and when they start Monday raids the best they can do is 17th. 2. Each guild leader (or raid leader of the guild) joins a private channel either in game, on Discord, whatever. Point is everyone else can see what you write, and no one can fabricate or make up a number- anything that can provide a time stamp 3. Right before the raid force engages, the guild leader makes a comment in the channel (ROI starting Unkempt) and does their screenshot of the start of event. 4. Raid/guild wins event, takes time stamp of the kill. 5. Time on event is generated. So if ROI starts a raid at 1:05:10 and finishes in 1:11:47, they took 6:37. This is where making that comment in private channel/discord is necessary- to prevent Billy Bob's Band from starting at 1:05, wiping three times, finishing at 2:14 but they fabricate a screenshot that says they started at 2:09, we all know that is wrong- they started at 1:05 and it took them one hour 4 minutes to complete the raid. 6. All time stamps used to determine the math will come from in game logs/screenshots in the event. The private channel message is only to compare to the in game start time to make sure guilds that wipe are counting their wipes as time before victory. 7. At the end of five/seven days, times are ranked with the fastest finishing first, and so on. To me, this represents how effective a guild is in completing the raid. Guilds don't feel like they have to drop instances, zone alts into the next DZ, skip chest loot, all that stuff. When they are ready, they do the raid quickly and to the best of their ability, and submit time accordingly. Any thoughts or comments on what parameters you would have, or what you think of this proposal, is accepted. Or if you think the current system is fine as is, so be it. I don't know if it would affect the top 3, but it could affect all other spots. Maybe there is that Mon-Wed guild that never raids on Saturday, under the current system can only finish 17th... but maybe they finish 8th. I dunno.
Make your own ranking website and convince all the guild leaders to submit their info to you. Nothing stopping you if you don't like the current site.
Thats not a race lol. The floodgates open and its game on. This isn't the first year that servers let another in a minute or two faster, this is just the first year RoI lost it and SR took the crown. The Devs just need to focus on making some quality t3 raids that aren't beaten immediately.
T3 raids need to be longer, so it isn't all down to a burn and ignore everything else. No real strat to it.
I had sort of a similar thought, but I suggest a slightly simpler way to level out the playing field for the race while not put any extra work effort on Beimeith and keep EGL working the same using the Conqueror time stamp. As raiders we cannot control how hard or easy that DBG makes the events, if they make the events linear, or if the events can be done in parallel. But there are a few simple things things that can be done to try to make sure that each guild faces similar/same challenges as the rest and not win the race primarily due to a server lottery and which one opens 'first': 1. All guilds agree that only 54 characters can participate in a single raid event event - If this is not agreed to by all the participate in the race, the latest 'strategy' that was used by can/will eventually lead to multiple raid forces to do the three T3 events at once. I for one don't want to see the race turned into the winner being determined the guild that can field 162 toons (go go [Unmentioned 3rd Party Software]) people which is not sustainable year round. 2. Use a common cross server channel to communicate the and start of the 'T3 race' via that channel say 5 minutes after the last server goes live with the events (Three Two One ZONE!!!!!) - this means that all guilds experience the same zone lag server loads entering their first instance and do not benefit from being one of the early servers that go 'live'. 3. All participating guilds have to either agree or disagree that guilds can pre-get instances or not, using characters outside of the 54 raid force - these characters can do nothing more than spin up the instance to confirm that they did not get a zone box from lag hell, they cannot start events early, they cannot place banners, campfires, pre-clear mobs, start scripts etc. . The point of the race is to see who can do the scripts of al T3 raids as fast as possible. 4. Competing Raid Leaders have to either agree or disagree if it only take single character from the raid getting the Conqueror achievement, or if the entire raid force is required to get the achievement. 5. Any guild deciding to compete must stream their win to demonstrate that they followed the rules.
I don't actually know how proof is submitted right now, but everything mentioned here is easily falsifiable, so it would essentially just be the honor system. If you want to do some kind of standardized race, you'd need to take part of Braxan's suggestion and require any attempts to be fully live streamed from beginning to end. My 2c though: the fact that zone spin up time / zoning time / etc. are not standardized is just part of the game. World first is world first and if that means Monday guilds are out of the running, well, them's the breaks. (I also agree that the best solution would be having T3 raids that most guilds can't actually beat on their first night, but that's largely out of our control.)
I know Cicelee as a mage whom I was in Scarlet Vengeance with on rathe (apparently on Cazic now), who insisted that mages should melee in every raid and that it increased DPS- to which I would say you can't DPS when you die and the healer has to keep healing you more than everyone else. Then many times, Cicelee would suddenly die
It is currently the honor system. Guild leadership of each guild has a login to EGL and submit their timestamps. That's how FU accidentally posted a timestamp a month before the unlock. The current system is fine, it wasn't a problem up until the #1 slot was upset by a new victor. Look how convoluted all of the above suggestions are. I can think of several ways to cheese each system.
Someone has a problem with it every year. Last year it was someone freaking out about the way the #1 guild got to the next event faster. The race posts will fade away until next year and someone will have a problem with it yet again.
so a method like suggested by OP is probably fine for anyone who is not going to be ranking in the top 5 to 10 or so. but to take the top spots you should need a higher burden of proof such as parses and videos or streams of the event(s). this is exactly how it is in speed running in other games. if any speed runner says they placed relatively high on the leaderboard they have to provide proof and said proof is going to be validated for inconsistency. but if you post a time in the mid 50th place you can practically have used game genie and no one will ever check. there needs to be a rule set so the meta doesn't become we will just field 54 times X people for our raid roster so we can finish all 3 events at the same time. or other similar dumb ideas, because that is where it is going in the current system. a set of rules need to be established around proof and removing variables. something like the timestamp of the first hit and final hit on the mob should probably be used as timing as it removed the most variables. and the reason you need both a parse and video is to validate that the times reflected from a parse match the video times. if 90 seconds into your parse you don't have the emotes that were called out 90 seconds into the video, then something is going to be a miss. other rules need to be established such as no swapping out members, banner burning, etc
The current system is fine. Its a race after all, so first to complete should always be the deciding metric. The tricks guilds take to squeeze time out is also part of the race. The one thing I don't like is that the winner is solely defined by who beats the last event first. This worked when raid progression was determined by flagging. It doesn't work in the current relay race format. As a result, total time for all 3 tiers should be summed and the winner declared from that. The results from all the Tiers need to matter. SR won T1 and T3, but they got crushed in T2. If EQ used the accounting methods or any other relay race format (i.e. Swimming, track, cycling, puzzle solving), they come in second. The way I see it, RoI still won this year (and I'm completely neutral to issue as my guild doesn't race).
I have no dog in this fight, as I don't play live anymore, and never raced when I did. But it seems to me "racing" on content you've already beaten and practiced and stressing over server unlock times is just silly. If your that concerned with the race, race on test, broken mechanics and all, make that your competition. Once you've all run it and practiced it, it's not a test of skill, it's just farm mode.
I am sure some people fall into this category, but for me and others that have been discussing this it is just a coincidence, and not the reason why. And it kind of sucks because I do not want to rain on anyone's parade, but also feel its important to address as a community. In LS, by hour 1: 4 guilds had beat all 3 tier 3 raids. By the end of hour 2, another 8 guilds had all 3 down. By the end of day 1, 22 guilds had beat tier 3. By end of day 2 (many guilds 1st official raid day), another 6 had tier 3 down. So in 2 hours 12 guilds had all 3 raids beat. It is just....i dont know....kind of lame. Its like the difference between who can draw the most perfect circle, vs who can paint the mona lisa. It isnt a comment on the guild that won, but the metric (beating the raid content) is so easy it makes the race less compelling. Beating TBL inspired all EQ raiders on all servers. Everyone celebrated. Considering all this, yeah no wonder the raid TS drops are few and far between. It is the only way they are going to keep people online.
The difficulty is completely gone from the game. The most fun out of the year is from this artificial player made race.
LAST raid of an expansion should be a real challenge , something hard that only a few could beat at the start , then reduce the difficulty of that one after 3 months, so the best guilds could race for the 1st place . actually any of the top ten can win the race imo, just having a bug , or mob reset to full hp , ect. we just don't need a raid blocker for tier one raids tho.... anyway the difficulty should be : tier 1 easy . tier 2 medium tier 3 medium / hard and last one of tier 3 * the real * challenge. and could be tuned down after 3 months +. *** the problem with us raiding is the numbers , a dps check raid could hurt us more than a guild having their 54 players raiding.
