Raid sizes and going forward

I think that in order to preserve the integrity of the game, max engage(pc) should be set for mobs. While raids of 72 are common, Perhaps a max engage of say maybe 42? That way you won't have guilds like Faceless mass recruiting and actually challenge people to play the game, and challenge themselves rather than steam roll everything.

What do you mean? Starting with GoD raid sizes become 54 I believe. Unless you are talking about open world targets then it would either be impossible to code or impossible to enforce. Have 90 people to kill something? Two raids of 45.

Sorry to disappoint you, but you are still steamrolling everything with 42 people.

Better solution would be to actually balance the raids back to their original difficulty, but that isn't happening either. It does get harder--a little--just not in the expansions that Agnarr will reach.

But hey, we warned you.

Why do you care if another guild wants to play the game easier?

You clearly don't get it.

To make the old content challenging via raid size restrictions you'd probably have to set the raid size to something like 24 characters. Then all sorts of people would be unsuccessful in era beating the agent of change instances, and would have to take 2 (or even 3) 24-person raid forces to the open-world versions. Not sure this is a sell to the wider population, and would make open-world contested hassles a big theme again.

Note I am not against raid sizes being reduced, just not sure it has the intended effect in a high-population scenario if the goal is "harder content"

Retuning individual encounters to be hard in the intended era is a better way to go I think. It's easier to justify doing if the dev team does scaling revamps.

For example: adjust Lady Vox for original era, put a Luclin-era revamp in, again for DoN, maybe once more in the traditional progression pop drop eras of 70+ (maybe TSS) and finally a level 110 version. Note that only the original version might look original, and that the later ones could be based on the 110 version graphics/zone layout if changes were made. Sort of the Splitpaw precedent. Anyways, you'd make the raid hard but worthwhile at each revamp point.

Why? There are already plenty of Luclin era raids, DoN era raids, TSS, etc. Why do we need to keep doing Lady Vox in perpetuity?

No thanks, let the devs spend time on something else.

There ya go

Fair point. Though many aspects of the game are the same thing in perpetuity. Vox was used as the simple example (3-letter named raid!)

If the work was done to make an encounter like Vox selectable as "hard" for various eras with appropriate rewards then I think people would do it. Basically their modern heroic adventure thing only versions would be locked-out by era. This approach makes all the game (done this way) scalable to current live and beyond. Making it useful to live+ means the devs could arguably justify doing it in a way that gives progression servers at least one taste of it along the way. [Even if all you got was a difficult in DoN era Vox raid that gave you a nice in DoN era version of a couple of traditional Vox loots that is still something new but appropriately tuned to do].

Elsewhere and other times I have posted of my belief that 95% of the pre-85 game should be revamped on live servers to make the progression nostalgia factor a greater sell, while giving live servers more stuff to do where their playerbase is focused. I say this as someone that likes both servers (though I've taken a break from live).

They seem to be already doing this a ton, ever since SoD. Heck, we have two live expansions of revamped Kunark in a row now. Old Man Mckenzie missions, revamped level 100 NToV raids, revamped fear/hate raids, revamped solb/mistmoore/blackburrow/etc during anniversaries, and on and on. Even West Karana got the revamp treatment, and that's got to be a finalist in the competition for most boring zone ever. It seems the devs are on the same page as you here.

This type of talk is how we got the Mighty buff ... It did not make the content hard at all, it just made it long and drawn out. Even in era, AoW was not a 30 min kill, thats and for "small guilds 20 - 30" that is closer to an hour +. Mighty buffs or any variation of them does not make this game or content more challenging. If anything Mighty Buffs should be removed, They are not on live, they server no real purpose on a TLP. Fights just take longer, they are not harder.

Partly... several times they have kept original versions active with the revamp which I don't agree with (no longer on live = perk of progression). I'd also like to see the anniversary revamps made permanent and every anniversary is the launch of something new (doesn't have to always be a zone) rather than reactivating a whole bunch temporary things that become less useful a couple of expacs later.

Temporary works better when it is things like quests or the pre-PoR undead invasion or the War event when there was giant skeletons all over Faydwer. Things a progression server will get to see once (or not at all, some of them have never been put back in).

Reusing of zones in new expacs appears to mean 7-8 "new" endgame areas to play vs. maybe 3 if they weren't reusing. IF the new raid content was made scalable from the get-go (not necessarily unlocked right away) to have hard, normal and eventually group level versions more mileage would be gotten out of it.
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Retuning old encounters to be hard would be taking the time to tune it elegantly. MoTM is more of a sledgehammer fix (not that I blame them for doing it that way) to other issues mostly around pets rather than refining the challenge of the encounters.

A better fix would be to go back to the old spawn timers. FE can't feed the 120+ zergball on once a week OW ToV.

As big as WK is, I always wondered why they never put a large, extremely dangerous mob roaming that place.

I remember zoning out to West Karana from Qeynos Hills waaay back with my first character (Human Wizard with all points in Strength!) lv 7, ran around for a bit then got stomped by a werewolf. I didn't dare to venture outside Qeynos Hills for days after that. So don't come and say there isn't extremely dangerous mobs roaming that zone! ;-)

First mistake was going out at night.

Trust me, all 10,000 active raiders in FE agree with you.

I'll take "Things the Devs shouldn't spend even 30 seconds on" for 1000 Alex.

this won't challenge, it will just make raids drag on longer. If you crave low numbers challenge, do it yourself. You can do that without dev changes. This is a horrible idea.

Nothing says you cannot try to low man instanced raids; but you don’t need to force that approach down the throats of every guild that wants to play this game.