How are you keeping raiders engaged

I never backtracked. Ive been a huge proponent all along that the upgrades need to be bigger per tier than they are now. Even in Beta I pointed it out between T1 and T2.

If they insist on this staggered content, they should make them equal in size and with the same level of power increase in each. Split the levels, spells, AA's, zones, raids etc across the staggered content.

T4 has no reason for max AA/max level raid toons to go out and exp, even the weapon idea won't keep players busy for long and they better have some awesome effects on them or players won't bother. I did T3 in a week and that wasn't even trying, I don't see T4 keeping me out of mischief for any longer than that.

With this staggered content they could make something truly challenging for a raider and for a grouper. Think "the impossible" type enemies in borderlands. The enemy would be extremely hard, have no bearing on progression and drop insane loot. Think a necro epic with next expansion stats or an Overlord Mata Muram/Quarm illusion clicky on a ring. The boss could drop one loot yet still be worth while for the brag value of the uber rare ultra prestigious item. It would be nice if the boss was not instanced or if the instanced only locked once the loot was looted. SOE would prob end up selling it in the marketplace

Not really going to read through this entire thread, but at this point in the game's life, with the current resources at Sony's disposal, it is impossible to please everyone. Nothing they ever do will be considered perfect, or fun for everyone. I don't think it's up to each guild to keep people engaged. At this point I think it's a guild's responsibility to not burn their players out moreso than it is to keep them entertained. It's not your guilds job to make the game fun for you, you have to do it for yourself.

As far as flagging and content releases go, I don't care if they stagger it or not, because a lot of guilds, including mine will blow through the content and farm it within weeks either way. It's no different for me if I'm farming t4 for an entire year, or each tier for a few months out of the year. Both options get stale within a couple weeks of the content, but that's been the story of this game for years now. I don't stick around for the content, I stick around because I have a great group of people that I play the game with, and the good times we have/create for ourselves far outweighs any amount of fun the actual game itself can provide.

The reality is that you could defeat all of RoF with an average level of 96 to 97 at its release, in the prior expansions gear, or worse, with 40 to 45 people. You could further defeat SoF with 35 to 40 people, with multiple people in expansions-old gear, within hours of its release. The content is simply different today to such an extent that even having current gear on tanks is not required anymore.

I'm not passing judgement on the merits of such a system. I'm just saying that the gear dynamic has been turned on its head. This is why quite a few people in high-end guilds let so many of the drops go to alts and friends in lower tier guilds, instead of looting it themselves. You don't need gear anymore. It's now a luxury, not a requirement.

^Pretty much.

To answer the OP: we have cut down to 2 days of raiding and don't even clear out T2 completely anymore, that way there may be at least some items in T2 still looted by mains in 2 months when hopefully T4 arrives.
If T4 resembles T3 though (in the little number of raids and their lack of challenge) I suspect the summer to be "dark and full or terrors".

I myself have always been of the opinion that it is better to farm 2 zones for 4 months each than 1 zone for 8 (so I disagree with kelefane on that). That only works though if BOTH zones have enough content by themselves. That is the mistake with T3 as that tier is so small that people still have to raid T2, thus it stays on the menu and tastes boring.

Pretty sure our average raid level for the Xorbb1 kill was 97 or 98, with our only 100s being headshotters afair, and was +1 for the Xorbb3 kill thanks to the extra weekend of free time we had due to Xorbb2 not spawning in a fresh DZ. So yeah, almost our whole raid was in T4 VoA gear and not even able to equip T2 RoF gear. But we definitely had full raids for the progression kills. I'm pretty sure we could do them now while being down a group or three with the same level spread, since we know the events a bit better than we did in the first week.

And straight up, any raid that was tuned to require us in max gear and levels would be at least as bad of a roadblock as Pillars and Rubak were, if not much worse. RoI is not going to get challenged by raids again because those raids literally kill lower tier guilds.

What it SOE decided to require Savior of xxxx achievement as a mandatory requirement for a player to enter into the raid version? Doing that should delay some guilds from defeating all raid content in a single night. If that is viewed as an issue, that is...

RoI needs to be kept interested for what reasons again? Guess you guys and gals are special.

It's not about RoI being kept interested, people just always refer to us in these situations for whatever reason. It's about everyone being kept interested to keep the game going. Some people enjoy playing the game, and that's fine, but for a lot of people the social interaction and friends they've made play a much larger part in why they stick around than the content/game itself. Bleeding edge raids that only the top 1% can beat would be fun until they were beaten, then it'd be a boring farm just like raids that are trivial the first time. There's really no point in providing that type of content unless they want to kill off the majority of guilds still left raiding.

Ok. So when you all have these trash talking sessions, well, its like being on the New York Mets...or any major league team (pick your home town team, even if they are not that good) and going off to the local bar to celebrate beating the local little league club. You know.....the baseball team with 10 year-olds playing.

When you are beating content in mere hours and open up the rest of the year for farming, while complaining it is so easy while still maintaining this air of "WE ARE AWESOME!"...well, are you really that awesome? Candy theft from infants is not awesome. Going fishing with dynamite...ok that semi- awesome but was it fishing or just blowing S up?

You guys need to find a new game.

No, they need to keep Beta testing on live servers so they are the only guild that encounters most raid bugs. Consider RoI to be the quality assurance department, don't feel badly if the QA team beats raids weeks or even months before you do.

Only guild to deal with Xorbb2 not spawning, thanks RoI.

You're welcome.

Whether they add flagging or not doesn't really matter to me. If ROI and Machin Shin and whomever else wants to rush through content that is up to them. It really has no bearing on my enjoyment of the game. This expansion as a whole was easy. Whether that is good or bad remains to be seen. You have people complain when it's too hard and you have people complain when it's too easy. there is no feasible way to please everyone.

You have in this thread people wanting flagging and people who don't want flagging. Regardless of the direction SOE goes in the future you can only guarantee one thing.......someone somewhere will be unhappy about it.

Kudos ROI and Machin Shin on beating it so fast. To make it fair the only feasible thing for you to do is to give me all your loots (For those with zero sense of humor this is what we call a joke.)

Personally, I'd prefer if SOE stopped this mudflated, episodal nonsense they've been doing since SoF in a pointless bid to compete with WoW (pointless because plenty of people they initially lost to WoW now just play both, or ping-pong back and forth, regardless), and returned to a model where more than one expansion was relevant at a time.

I'd wager that if more than one expansion at a time had content worth doing for something other than giggles, raiders would have more to do between content releases.

I wouldn't count on SOE stopping this mudflated episodal nonsense.

Years ago I posted the best argument I could muster in favor of multi-expansion seamless progression raiding with beachhead content providing landing spots where guilds could catch up thanks to increased number of drops and the elimination of flagging requirements - PoTime, Anguish, Demi, Solteris, ...

The facts of the matter is that it's relatively easy to level up way past the content you are capable of doing having any value compared to group content drops. What you end up with is "honor raiding" - guilds doing it so they can say they did it not because is advances them. It's pretty tough to recruit for a let's raid and get nothing to show for it guild. And you end up with over leveled guilds spread out from PoTime to Solteris. It was ugly.

Naturally those who preferred winning by as large a margin as possible (which requires others losing by as wide a margin as possible) weren't fans of single expansion raiding either. It's here, it's been here, time to adjust.

Another comment no one responded to was something like "I guess a huge chunk of stuff to do for raiders is group content now." Yep. Want augs, group. Raid flags, group, Those new very uber weapons for each class with a raid component - do all the group achievements. I'm not crazy happy about it but there is more to being #1-10 than what order you finish raids. Guild X, Y, and Z might /flex "We were 1, 2, or 3" but #18, 19, and 20 might say "We got better stuffs - lots better."

Looking at the gear of some of the posters in this thread it's clear they know it hasn't been 2 days a week. They just neglected to say so.

Most of those "needing to be engaged" probably already have the group content all completed. This group probably is also a minority in their guild. Regardless of this thread, probably even in the top 5, most are perfectly A-OK with logging in 2-3 days a week for farming and being offline the rest of the time as most get the class defining AA's and augs early on and don't revisit group content that much past that.

I certainly believe you, but...

LDoN tank armor
Demi acquired Lastblood augs combined with TS armor created years later used in Solteris along with some Anguish acessories
Deathknell and other expansions dropping very little worthwhile
Guilds getting through content farming as little as possible and lucking out when SoD got them current

That's off the top of my head. The fact is guilds have been able to advance without diligently farming previous content roughly as much as getting geared up has been required. That's what happens when an expansion only gives you a couple of hundred more AC or enough mana to cast one extra spell.

However, what's the point of adventuring if you never bring the swag home - if your guildmates look pretty much the same as that up and coming mid-tier guild that's only 1/2 of an expansion behind you for 5 years straight. Not much point IMO.

Besides, I've been under geared in content where it mattered. Not very pleasant. Heck, I've been well-geared and had DI notification spam just about freeze my machine. (Your Epic > my Epic. Your Epic > Chuck Norris's Epic).

All this being the case I'll take T3 gear matters both from a personal and guild pride standpoint (we are not ragamuffins) and from an every little bit helps standpoint.

BTW Ron, yer clothes....that's last season's threads. Yer usually more stylish. (Not that my stuff isn't a little ratty too but we're trailing a little - gotta shop a Salvation Army - $1 shirts).

I would say people running out of useful AA to acquire is whats causes the summertime drop in RA for most guilds. Gear saturation never really shows up as a issue for most guilds.