Lack of Progression of Mid Teir Guilds

Unrelated: Hi Frootie!

Related: The big thing is that the playing field changes almost daily. Two years ago, we could barely outift 30 people to raid, a year ago we had 40 or so in the downtime of summer, and today we have enough. These events are tough, mostly because the margin of error is small, however I can say that with the proper strategy it makes a huge difference between too difficult and accomplish-able.

I could swing to either side of the argument. I do feel like everyone should be able to raid and enjoy the endgame content. When you aren't pounding your head against the wall trying to pull a win, it can be fun goofing with your teammates and joking around and earning loot. I also feel like raiding is something which should be reserved for those who strive to play their best and do the work to succeed.

So possibly, maybe the best solution is to have those different level(s) of difficulty. Instead of "tiers" where better loot drops at the end, they could perhaps just make Easy/Normal/Hard versions of raids in which the items are of different %'s of value.

Good example would be a raid done on easy providing 4500 HP, Normal 4700 HP, and hard 5000 HP (making stuff up). Then people could learn the events at their own pace and continuously work to improve until they rock out the best gear they are capable of earning. They already do the buffs to the NPC's for progression servers, they could do something similar for Live servers using a similar buff system for appropriate level of difficulty.

Food for thought.

Never mind. I need to think this through more.

I always thought that the new levels helped lower raid guides get past raids they are stuck on. Since the new leveling would effect the entire raid faster then any other change. I do think that the one thing missing from TBM that would of helped TBM progression would be putting Rk3 Spells in the raid Vender. I know that my guild won V and V then could not field enough for it later that summer so we did Hate and Fear to gear up.

This is a bunch of nonsense. First you contradict yourself saying a number doesn't matter then tiering guilds by completely arbitrary numbers, then you go on to say a guild that hasn't killed any encounter in EOK still is a raid guild. Less drugs please, so you can hold a thought at least long enough to finish a post.

/Wave, hope you and yours are doing good Rin/Xor and the kids too.

Anyway, I think them designing yet more gear would be a bad idea. They've never shown they can do that (my god the names alone let alone focus!) Just make it the same raid gear with like a 24-30 person raid. Maybe 1 non vis slot, 1 vis slot (wrist or arms maybe) and a spell as a bonus. That's it. 2 maybe 3 pieces for a win for a smaller raid. How many items drop for a full raid chest? 7? more with spells? (I don't know EoK honestly)

1) Don't make the loot suck, keep it the same.
2) Smaller raids helps the longevity of the game with a dwindling population.
3) More fun if you can't field full raids on off nights or something to do.

But hey, these aren't my battles anymore, they're all everyone that still plays. I still loved my time here and it's near and dear to me but from a game philosophy prospective it doesn't seem like much has changed. Take care. Off to play Witcher 2.

You didn't understand. I said using numbers without looking the progression dates was wrong. Like saying 1-10 top tier, when the 11th guild has beaten the expansion 2 days after the 10th.
24 guilds have beaten Atrebe Vault, this is where I put the mid tier raiding guild cursor.
You are completly free to disagree with it, but being rude and insulting is not something to do.
Now i warn you, I answered you in a nicely way when I read the last sentence that you wrote. I strongly suggest you not to do it again, because I won't be nice next time.

#1, no you didn't say anything like that.


#2, lol

Yes he did (but it was easy to overlook):

The problem for mid and lower tier raid guilds/organizations is two fold in my opinion. 1. Insufficient numbers, 2. Insufficient skill.

They tend to tie back into each other and have impacts on what compromises leadership is willing to do to meet raid and social requirements or perceived requirements. Things like tenure, and outside raid contributions and a desire to seem "fair" even when fair doesn't bring in the skill needed to win raids have detracting impacts on the raid groups.

To be honest, I think I am approaching a stage where I think allowing mercenaries into raids would be good for mid tier guilds. It has helped grouping stay alive and kicking for people who play at odd times, or have social issues etc etc. It has been a less than ideal stop gap. But it has served the function of filling in needs in imbalanced groups with poor group composition and sets a very low minimum bar for skill. Currently basically all group content can be won with mercs in tow. They kill slower and are inferior to a decent player in nearly every way, with 1 good player being able to replace 3 or more mercs quite easily.

Learning raid events with some of the horrible AI they can have would still be a feat, even if mercs are excepted from targeted AE and similar mechanics making them more frequent per player character because of it having fewer available targets. It could be balanced by reducing raid drops based on the % of the raid that is mercs, and adding some kind of reduced raid flagging feature for mercs.

Point being is it would help raids by having a minimum skill level, and the ability to make up for the random attendance issues and number problems that are so common. Again not ideal, and forging alliances and recruiting good players and leadership making the hard calls and training people would still be better options. But it would also mean they are not "forced" to take on leagues of players who do not and will not learn to play at a minimum standard.

Having now been in both top end and mid tier guilds, the differences between the two is huge! The training and knowledge of trainers is much better in top guilds, the ability to recruit talent from lower guilds, and to kick people for almost trivial reasons is kind of awesome in top guilds. But really people in top guilds seem to forget how genuinely terrible an average off the block player really is in this game. It is like trying to win the current raids with a 60% handicap.

Making semi passable mercs would require less effort and balancing requirements than designing raids for different skill levels or numbers, and puts a much more effective bottom level for raid groups because it would effectively deal with 2 of the biggest issues in the game, numbers and skill.

we just need more content and raids. EoK made TBM completely obsolete. The only thing worth getting from it is the augs from last raid otherwise the group gear is easier, and in many instances, better than the TBM raid gear. So just take into account what mid tier guild players have to play for. If they are only doing Lcea, droga, and prince, thats not many upgrades people are seeing every week and im sure by now they have run out of mains who need most of the items. Yes its awesome and all that raids are difficult and challenging and it makes people who raid in top guilds feel better that they have accomplished the raid and have full end game raid gear, but the overall customer base who has something to look forward to while playing is dropping tremendously right now with the lack of raid content worth doing. I think at a point and in situations like this it is beneficial to DBG and to the majority of players in the game to scale down the raids so people have something to play for. It doesnt effect top end guilds in the slightest beyond their pride and feelings being hurt they had to do things "the hard way", but they still had the advantage of having end game gear first and probably having alts now in mostly EoK raid armor. So for me I see scaling down the more difficult raids with some slight nerfs as a win-win-win.

I did, read what Zhaunil said
But anyway, go on being angry because you are frustrated to not beat raids, I don't give a rat about it. Maybe less drugs and play better ?
You're welcomed.

One thing that hasnt been brought up is the wealth of experience that the mid tier guilds have at their finger tips.
There are quite a few of the top tier guilds that are posting links to their twitches, and the ability to reach out to players from the top guilds for advice on strategies is very abundant to the mid tier guilds months after the top guilds have beaten the expansion and the race is over.

The simple factor that prevents raid leaders and guild leadership from reaching out and gaining this information is effort.

If your raid team or guild is struggling, hold your raid leaders and guild leadership accountable.
Ask them what they have done to research the raids.
Have they watched twitch feeds?
Have they reached out to raid leaders or knowledgeable people from top guilds?
If not, you have to push them to do so. If they refuse because of pride or laziness, or cowardice, then you need to ask yourself if it is worth sticking around, or if it would better suit you to move on.

I am aware that not every guild can pull off a strategy that ROI uses. However any knowledgeable player or raid leader should be able to ask some basic questions about the make up of your raid team, and some of their strengths and weaknesses and come up with some solid advice.
I will be happy to offer some tips to anyone who is in a position that they cannot make progress on a particular event during this time of year. Dont ask in December though!

@Maedhros, the big difference between mid tier and top tier guilds is not strategy but execution. A mid tier guild will have say 70% of raiders paying attention, having the correct GINA/AT's set up, learn events quickly, and know how to play their class, whilst 30 % are geared, grandfathered in, but watch tv/watch their kids/dont take raids seriously/ninja afk/slack on healing/too lazy to have GINA updated or pay attention to AT's and you end up with deaths, bad healing/tanking, slow dps, and more classes picking up the slack and wasting time/mana on the slackers. A top tier guild runs like a well oiled machine with probably 95-100% of members playing the same day in day out, parsing consistently on heals/dps, and tanks knowing how to play their class and position/tank events.

So when DBG makes events very emote and AT intensive and needing healers/tanks on point, you end up all over the mid tier guilds because of those players, and they arent hardcore end game guilds so no officer is going to create drama and kick them out unless its something obvious but most of the time it isnt.

I think what you fail to consider is that a good raid leader and good leadership can exist in a mid tier guild and that simply saying it comes down to poor execution is not a complete analysis.
Good strategy is not simply stating the order of events that transpire on a given raid and what tactics will be used to overcome those obstacles.
My guild is not even 2 and a half years old yet. While we do have some server transferred members that came from some of the other top guilds, the bulk of my members came from lower end guilds that were struggling to beat TDS or even COTF raids at that time when I started ROTE. Though TDS was out for 5 months and 11 guilds had already beat it when I started ROTE, by instilling the proper raid environment and breaking some bad habits, we still managed to beat TDS 16th gamewide at only 2 months of existing as a guild. We beat TBM 10th and EOK 7th, so it's pretty safe to say I know exactly what it takes to mold a top tier guild out of what this thread would classify as the members of lower tier struggling guilds.
As you say, there are some players that are dead weight in a guild that fail emotes and are paying more attention to Murder She Wrote or Magnum PI on the tv than to the raid.
It comes down to what is the goal of the guild. If a guild wants to beat an expansion while it's current, there has to be the right environment and the leaders need to have a gut check and do what it takes to fix the bad behavior.

Except 0 guilds beat GoD before OoW was beaten much less before it even came out because GoD was explicitly tuned for level 70, as a 5 level cap increase was originally going to be given to everyone for free during the Anniversary event but it took longer than planned to implement so it was rolled into OoW instead; after it was retuned to 65 it was able to be beaten before OoW was opened (in the original progression servers that was a requirement to get to OoW).

Also, you really cannot compare today with TBS-HoT eras just because the game's dynamic was decidedly different then than today. Ignoring the fact that in the in the pre-F2P era everyone was spending money to play the game and as such were making a point of playing more; what you call a mid-tier (raid) guild today would be an end game guild back then (with today's high end guilds being cutting or bleeding edge guilds back then).

Back in pre-SoF era, low end raiders were 5-7 expansions behind, mid tier raiders were 2-4 expansions behind, high end raiders were either in the current expansion or 1 behind it; with the cutting and bleeding edge guilds starting on raid content almost immediately (or as soon as most in guild were at a new level cap). Today, all guilds are pretty much doing 'current' content; stuff within the last 2-3 years. You don't see any (non-specialty) guild raiding GoD, OoW, DoDh, DoN, SoF, SoD, UF, HoT, or VoA so that they can start raiding the next expansion up the chain.

As other's have said, it is not a matter of event difficulty that is the problem. It is a lack of focus and drive in the mid and low tier guilds to do what is needed to beat the content.

The gear resets were not a bad idea in theory, but the implementation was done in too small of a range; it would have been more reasonable (and greatly reduced gear inflation) had they set group gear about 3-4 expansions back instead of just 1. That way you would have room for true mid and low tier guilds to exist rather than everyone effectively being end game raiders, just at different points in the progression.

I think the reason why the numbers of overall raids in expansions has decidedly dropped over the years to the point where they are today can be summed up in two reasons. First, in the TSS thru RoF years there was a marked design decision to make fewer and fewer raid targets in static zones, while evening out the number of instanced raid encounters. Second, there was another design decision to revert back to fewer level cap increases; in the last 5 expansions we have only had 2 level cap increase, and they were RoF and TDS. Because of the level stagnation, the Dev's don't want to flood the game with raid mobs and as such flood the game with so much accessible raid gear for a single level range; so they add some moderately better gear with fewer targets.

Then there is the whole reduction of staff that had been going on in the TBM and EoK development timeframes. I am hoping that the next expansion will provide an increase in content while keeping quality, as we've seen the return of some of the Dev's and such which we had previously lost to other game projects.

I've seen better fiction and conspiracy writing.

GoD wasn't beaten in-content, for the sole reason that some stuff(particularly tacvi) was broken on release. Sony Online Entertainment had a history of using high-end guilds as essentially beta testers for untuned content, in order to push it out the door quicker. AoW Broken. Rathe Council Broken. Plane of Time Broken. Uqua Broken. Tacvi Broken.

This led to the guild summit and essentially a fair amount of guilds(including the top two in Everquest at the time) giving SoE the double bird and heading to WoW rather than having to work as uinpaid beta testers. It also led to changes in the testing procedures, prior to pushing it live, that persist to this day.

The funny part is you still have people that try to defend those days with spurious claims about 'level 70 content', because they just don't want to admit they were playing a broken game at the time and being used as unpaid labor by SoE.

Umm... Yeah the game's producers and the Devs who designed the content at that time and were in charge just lied to us all about it for no reason. The guild summit was actually where we were told that GoD was designed for level 70. It was not something people just made up, here are a few examples:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040610003520/http://www.graffe.com:80/forums/showthread.php?t=18413
http://web.archive.org/web/20040623...nter.com:80/article.jsp?articleid=-1863105531
http://web.archive.org/web/20040610...eelwarrior.org:80/forum/showthread.php?t=7457

This, http://web.archive.org/web/20040612183816/http://eq.crgaming.com:80/ , links to a number of other Summit reviews; all of which state that GoD was originally intended to be level 70 content. Some of the people vary on whether those levels were originally planned to be added when GoD launched or as part of the 5th Anniversary events varies somewhat; but it is not unreasonable to think that both were true; with upping the cap to 70 at GoD's launch but having to push it back to Anniversary time, before deciding that they could not add the levels properly in the limited time available as well as do what was needed for OoW.

It was something that we were informed of by those who ran and designed EQ at the time.

you are way underselling your guild to make your point. I have watched RotE since it started because I used to play on Cazic and I know who the members were when it was created as I knew over half of them and I know RotE has had very strict requirements and judgement of players abilities for recruitment. I think the fact that it is a newer guild is more promising because a lot of the older guilds that have been around for a decade have a great deal of complacent players who run on autopilot and, like I said, are grandfathered in and do what they want without repercussion.

Older guilds not holding their older members accountable for slacking is on them