Congratulations... I think? I guess? Maybe?

I'm sorry. What is there to be bitter or jealous of? I'm bitter that I don't own a Bugatti. I'm jealous of my neighbors backyard (it's very nice). I just don't really see any accomplishment in something that was beaten on the day of it's release. There is no more accomplishment in EQ when beating content can be judged in how many minutes after server up, instead of how many months.

You commented on how bad it is for groupers / raiders to bank XP to have levels and AAs right at content release, but you don't see a problem with beating all of the raids available on the first day?

The expansion being done by 5:30 on release day is pretty insane. We didn't raid last night but with that many guilds beating it that fast I'm not even looking forward to it. What's the point?

I'd rather have a guild like RoI beat it 2 months before me and feel like its an accomplishment of some sort than just walk in and beat the same event within 1-24 hours of the first guild because it was a joke.

The loot is bad. I had hopes they might increase a *little* from beta. I mean, some of the stuff has the exact same AC for the same item "type". Weapons with just +1 damage. Why in the world make a whole new tier of gear from 2 events? Why not just have it drop selected items from T2? Like with how many classes want the tank items, have those two events drop 2 random items of the highly desired drops, and a guaranteed drop on the non-buyable stuff.

My guild has had ONE evolving helm and ONE twincast item drop. That's it the last 6 months. No shield, no other clickies, not the evolving ring, nothing else. That is lame and kind of ridiculous.

Is T4 going to be the same? Massively easy events and dropping gear with +1 ac and +30 hp?

I'd imagine the problem is less with being disgusted by the ease of the events and more with dismissing the work others did to finish it before others. *shrug*

Actually many of us do see it as a problem that we were able to beat all of the raids on the first day, we shouldn't have been able to steamroll through them like that. We beat plane of shadows on our first try - we didn't see it in beta. If any guild beats a raid on the first try, it's too easy.

And I think that is what I was trying to convey in my original post. Is it good for the game to be able to consume content within 24 hours of launch? I spent around 3-4 hours and am already 1/2 finished with Chelsith. I am concerned that in a week I am going to have Chelsith and Shadows finished, have my group 3.0 shawl, and close (if not finished) with both raids. And I am far from elite as far as amount of hours I play per week.

So if players are consuming this content in 2 weeks, or 1 week, or 24 hours... Is that good?

There is far too little content to last anyone any amount of time, unless you only log on 15 minutes a week.

but....

It's still better than what we got between expansions the past couple years. IE: Nothing.

Both sides of the argument are right. Kinda.

People expected this content to last more than a week?

It would have been nice, but it went exactly as most of us probably expected.

Maybe raids needs to be designed to not be beat in a linear fashion where even if you have a perfect roster of perfect classes with perfect gear, you still get crushed. Randomly timed zone wide DT which could go off 10 seconds into the script or 1 hour. You never know. Trash mobs dropping rare bane items with a chance to not even get a single one all the while fighting a battle of attrition. Honestly, the top end has EQ so completely down to a science that only random, illogical chance can defeat you. Is that something you would find enjoyment in or would you rather go back to shooting fish in a barrel?

I can't say how much enjoyment i would find farming an event like that, but i would sure like to try one like that.

Given the limits of the game engine and having to one up what came in the previous expac, I don't see how else it could be done. You can only have so much scripting, so many emotes, so many waves of trash, so much Simon says, so much belly casting AE rampage mobs hitting for a bazillion HP before you can't squeeze out too much more. Complex raids tend to break or get exploited due to so many variables being present. There is always some unforeseen permutation that gets overlooked.

So, yah..farming or not, there needs to be some unmanageable risk introduced. That is how life works. You could be on the way to the bank to cash your billion dollar lottery check and get hit by a semi truck that just happened to lose its brakes the second you entered an intersection. Maybe if you beat it, the chest drops an item that takes out the unmanageable risk or some flag is granted so that the event can productively be farmed. /shrug. Still, the event would still be tuned to be beaten by guilds of lesser caliber than the top 5 as far as scripting and skill goes. Some people at the ultra high end would still get bored if the risk was taken out, but other than the first win, what is left but the boring farming? Otherwise, everyone gets an equal chance to be decimated if the risk stays in and the event stays interesting.

TL,DR: S happens. Only S doesn't happen in EQ. There is always a direct solution that eliminates whatever risk might be in the game and as long as you follow it, things are cake. They will continue to be cake as long as there is always a standard formula to victory.

I guess it is good then SoE waited to release this content. If they had gone live with this when RoF went live, a lot of us would have been completely done months ago.

Sure you beat all the content but if you want a bigger challenge you can take a page from Principal Skinner. Make a game of it. See how many raids you can get done in an hour and then tomorrow try to break that record.1

1. The Simpsons: Episode 304 "Bart the Murderer"

I think part of the problem is beta. So much information is available at beta that upon release some guilds already have beaten the raids and everyone has access to named, partisan, mercenary information and zone maps thanks to the likes of EQResource.

I purposefully eschewed beta this time to avoid advance information , though I did download maps.

Beta is necessary and I do not have a solution to this problem.

I don't think beta is the issue when guilds that never saw an event one shot it.

Having a totally random mechanic that you have no control at all over with no warning would not be fun at all. And they DID make some tough raids in VoA, but a lot of people complained that they were too hard.... Doubt anyone can come up with anything that will satisfy everyone. There are going to be people complaining it's way too easy, or others saying it's way too hard. I'm still having fun in this game, and started doing high end type raiding a year ago. For many many years all I did was group stuff. Nice thing about this game is there are a lot of different kinds of people who can enjoy it.

OK, go do Trial of Creation or Miragul and have someone with no knowledge of the event do the combines until you win. That's the kind of mechanic it takes to slow down progression, have a Dev only raid to make sure the combines work and have players test the mobs before and after the combines to tune the non-random chance part of event.

At which point it will take either a very large number of brute force attempts or bribing Dev_03 for a guild to beat the event and if there are enough possible combinations and Devs can keep quiet it would take weeks for the first guild to win.

After a few guilds have beat the event patch in some flavor text that includes some strong clues on which combines to make and which order to use the clicks.

Can also do bizarre mechanics like 6 adds which all hit as hard as a raid boss after they have been alive for 1min and no forms of CC work on them die if 5 straight spells that land on them are all poison based. Until brute force trial and error, l33t infoz or a fluke followed by analyzing logs the raid would wipe over and over. Once a few guilds beat the event patch in the flavor text hint of how to kill those adds.

Anything in terms of tanking, healing, CC, DPS, balancing, curing, following emotes or whatever isn't going to defeat a high end guild for an entire night of attempts even if they knew nothing about the event before they started it.

Been there, done that............. That's one type of mechanic, it's not the only one.

Your tone is bitter and jealous and dismissive of something that others have done and you haven't. Please spare me the 'I could care less even if I wanted to do that' talk. In fact, as I said, there was no great achievement to have the raids unlocked by the normal raid time. You tried to insinuate that the 5 guilds who beat these raids last night had everybody take a day off work or something like that.

And I do have a problem with the raids tuned so EasyMode that they are beaten by multiple guilds on the very first night. Unfortunately, SOE's strategy with raid tuning has changed. They no longer care if the content is too easy for the top 10 guilds. As they correctly noted, 540 players is only a tiny fraction of the playerbase. They are now tuning content to satisfy a much larger part of it.

But this has nothing to do with you dissing the top guilds.

Poker would be no fun either if all you ever had was a royal flush every time you got dealt a hand. The top raid guilds pretty much have that scenario. That doesn't happen however in poker. If it did, people would stop playing poker with you after a while. You might even get beat up! There is some strategy to poker but there is still a good element of random chance too. The combination of the two is what makes poker compelling and why it is still around after all these centuries. I would agree that the odds should get stacked more in a raid forces favor over time for farming purposes. Maybe someone gets to loot a charm from the chest that mitigates, but does not eliminate the random failure mechanic and the effect is cumulative if more players also get this charm or item. Farm enough and the effect goes away.

I liked demi-plane of blood mechanic, with needing to do the events many times the get everyone the flags to resist the zonewide effects.

Anyway, I think people are forgetting that 'SoF' is just T3 of the current expansion, and everyone had plenty of time to gear up in T2, even the gear is tiny upgrades from what I hear.

I fully expect the next expansion to not have a level increase, and just add T5-T8 or so, like Underfoot.