A few things need to change and none of it falls in the players hands. There is no reason for the servers to have different unlock times for the raids. We had a few times where a dev was able to simply push a button and the content was rolled out to all servers at the same time. At 2pm of launch day, that button should be pressed every single Saturday if they cannot figure out how to set their program up properly. T1 raids should be like ToL T1, all 3 events in the same zone and you can do them in whatever order you like. T2 should be linear in the same zone. T3 should be linear in the same zone with the final event posing somewhat of a challenge. This removes zone times, and this removes potential pre-starting or 'shenanigans'. This will also allow some type of skill gap to actually be relevant. The devs had a good start with adjusting event boxes, but they simply need to do better with the content. Saying these raids were easy is an understatement. 'You guys had months of practice in Beta' most of these events were 1 shot in Beta also. When the hardest part of doing the raids is figuring out how to get the right zone box, what char models need to be used to zone better, how many boxes can be used to pre-start an event-that is a very big issue when the content is like the 5th or 6th thing you think about when going into a launch day. They are doing a great job if their intention is to lose the players that actually are trying to make their game better.
I actually think all these are perfectly fine. If someone wants to sweat that hard, go for it. I also think if the devs arent going to lock t3, you should absolutely be allowed to clear all 3 raids. The top guilds and devs making weird rules of what they feel like doing. No dumb lines in the sand. Edit: Also, a lot of these problems fade away if the devs actually fixed the dysfunctional aspects of the game.
Krono's are just plat in bigger chunks, think of it like playing on FV (read you can buy gear, if you want to) but with new things to do every few months instead of getting disappointed after 2 weeks once a year. But thats not what this threads about. So imma shut up now.
Agree with everything except the quoted part. The raids are easy, I agree. Tbey should be more difficult, I agree. But when you say they were so easy they were one shot in Beta, while that is true everyone already had the event strat and write up from Absor or whomever before they even did the raid. It is pretty easy when you know what is going to happen, when it happens, and just have to go out and execute and fine tune strategies. What would be impressive is for no raid strats to be given out, no spell data from Lucy or whatever beforehand, and see guilds one shot all eight raids. If you are a guild that can do that, now that is impressive and worth of the winner of "the race"
your idea's themselves (to rank) are ok and would produce a demonstrably better ranking system than the one in use.. however is it practical or something 50 guild leaders are going to be willing to do? No and no. You're proposing something that would have to come from the dev and be built into the game and raid system if it was going to work (no human input). There's no reason for them to spend resources to do all of that. By the way (speaking for my circle), people generally only care about who got #1 they'll say cool grats gj ttyl and forget about it until the next year. Am in one of those guilds you mention that will not raid on Saturday's. Our t3 clear time this year was an hour faster than the next fastest guild on our server and would have been 2 hours+ had not a significant amount of our people had geometry issues etc with the UK raid. Is that going to show up on EGL to reflect that or 2 of the past 3 years also? Nope because like you said its timestamp only. Our raidforce know's where we stand we dont need silly outdated metrics to sleep at night. Take it for what it is, a novelty at this point, the guy who runs it has a disclaimer on the main page telling you that. don't waste your time.. not worth the trouble
we need to have a moderator/judge panel verification based approach more than just a bunch of rules though being the standard. it is difficult to have an unbiased judge panel that can throw out runs as records or not, but it is something we are going to have to agree to, to have an actual competitive raiding culture (based on time/dps). Game bugs and other things could pop up as well which allow completing an event in 1 second aka that one day of Empyr in TBL where several guilds got free wins. Obviously any such raid should be thrown out for scoring purposes of any kind. We don't want to have to have any Jace Hall incidents where scores get removed after the fact. but any later discoveries of cheating should be grounds for it.
I have avoided the rush for plat. in the past. Given a fair bit of it away to guildies and friends. I play for fun and if I let myself get hung up on the currency too much it tends to seem more like a job than a game. Working on older achievements and taking my time. A cute little foster daughter like the sounds and that helps to make it worthwhile for me. She giggled once when I died and I took that as a sign from above that she belongs here.
The problems start and end with the developers. If they make the raids go live at the same time and make events more challenging than the run itself, there is no need for setting up artificial rules (that will never fully be agreed upon). If the dev's apparently don't have the time to properly tweak and tune raids, a flat hitpoint and damage increase would be an ugly but somewhat effective way of handling it. As a guildmate suggested, tie the achievements to that instead of the random ones we get now. It shouldn't take them any longer to code. We've had "hard" 36 man raids in seeds of destruction, and hard/normal ldons, so the precedent is already there. Devs make "easy" base raid for the masses. Devs copy base raid and make achievement A raid with 25% more hp on everything (and one extra loot?). Devs copy base raid and make achievement B raid with 25% more damage output on everything (and one extra loot?). Devs copy base raid and make achievement C raid with 25% more hp and damage output on everything and two extra loots?). Auto release the hardest achievement C raid. One week(or month etc.) later, auto release the options to request achievement A and B raids. One week(or month etc.) later, auto release the option for the easiest base raid. If they are willing to put more time and effort into it, they could go back to making raids without full writeups and holding back some mechanics till live, or add in banes and mob strengths/weaknesses so that every single raid isn't the same cookie cutter tank and burn, etc.
I mean, there's already a system in place to award FTK for people per game...per server built into EQ. They just no longer use it...unless you play on TLP.
A lot of the issues from LS raid races stem from a few things. 1) Fights being housed in different DZs - and certain techniques the top two guilds use to leverage this. 2) DZs opening at different times on different servers 3) The DZ script bugging and not working at all. Would rather those be addressed before we burn the whole thing down.
I don't agree with raids going back to being linear just for the sake of a day 1 race. This hurts the guilds that aren't bothered with the race. If those who race want to change their own rules fine. But it should not effect those who don't care about who wins. Personally I think t1 & t2 results should have some effect on when guilds should be able to start t3. Maybe they could unlocked raids based on the prevous tier wins. After all the race should be over 8-9 raids not just the final 3.
Why do some members of the community only now strongly feel the need to change how the "race" is won?
Does anyone actually care about the race anymore? All raids from each tier can be beaten within 60-120 minutes. When your needed time of completion is that low, the race becomes nothing but luck of the draw, who showed up on a random Saturday afternoon, and whether or not people need to hit the toilet mid raid. With the crazy class imbalance, caster heavy guilds will be at a huge advantage as well.
FWIW I have always felt that how "the race" rankings were determined were flawed and somewhat silly. At the same time, I also honestly don't care about "the race" per se. It has been important, to me, to be in a guild that has good people, good server interaction, fit my time schedule w/family and raids, and can complete events in a timely manner. Obviously would try my best and maximize and such on "race day" to help the guild I was in, but wasn't going to to bed crying that night if we had finished sixth instead of fourth. But I do understand how important not "the race" is to many, but how important the guild ranking is. Because when you have someone talented who is looking for a guild, and (given all other things equal) their choice is the guild that finished ninth or the guild that finishes third... I think we all know who that talent picks. There is an implied stigma, a belief that the guild that finished third must be better than the one in ninth. So if that is the case, your ranking system should be more about the strength of the guild and their ability to defeat an event, and not doing "unusual" things on "race day". I like to have discussions, conversations, debates, solve problems, etc. People have been complaining for years about a variety of things on "race day"- ten days ago just the latest day. Since it was still semi fresh in everyone's mind, I thought it would be interesting to get different perspectives on the matter. You know, discuss it. And some people think the system is fine, some don't. Just a conversation, but you never know when a conversation may lead to something unless you start it.
One place I seem to disagree with many of the posters here: World first raid races shouldn't really be about a straight DPS race. That's boring. They should be about figuring out mechanics of the encounter and the game. The stuff about raids opening on different servers at different times is unfortunate, but use of existing mechanics is fair game. If a guild is winning because they understand the instance spawning mechanics better, and use that to their advantage to get in zone faster? That is working exactly as intended. That is the whole point. Figure out how the game works and use it to your advantage.
We would have broken raids, or no raids at all, until like August. The reason the strategies are provided by Absor is so that we can test to ensure the implied and intentional mechanics are working as intended. We report when they are not, and continue going about our day to improve strategies. It's not intended that you can skip the goblins in Final Fugue, but since the script isn't technically broken there was no change to it. Ogna shouldn't be able to go active before the final wave of orcs has spawned, but that's the way Absor wanted it, I guess. Otherwise he would make a change to that raid. My opinion is that there should be a teleport NPC once the orcs have died to bring everyone up to the plateau, but here we are.
And I agree 100% with all that. Just saying to make the comment that it was one shot in Beta because it easy doesn't necessarily make the raid easy if you the script already known beforehand. If a guild with zero knowledge does a raid and one shots it, yeah that either means guild is way too good, or raid is way too easy. And yes it would be nice for 54 devs not affiliated with any of the top 20 guilds in game to do internal testing without Beta guilds having to do the testing. That would, at least make for a more realistic ranking system and show the true test of a guild. Alas, none of that is ever going to happen.
