TBM Scaling Raids - Am I missing something?

You aren't missing anything its another waste of resources to bring an idea that 95% of the player base will never use. Well cause how many guilds do you know of that are lower then the top level of 105 currently, that raid. Maybe less than 5 serverwide?

This idea is as dumb as adding the the bandaid fix of the Nobles currency. What % of the player base uses that? Less than 0.001%

The idea I think is that it's an option for them to put out there "hey, we are appealing to lvl 75 players" but in earnest they know it prolly wont be used by those people. The appeal about these revamps to me, is the idea of more customization towards the items. Based on what beta reveals, I am wondering if a base raid item will drop and you will be able to modify it via augs etc from task currencies. I think it presents possibilities of more content with less work if done correctly. I am just wondering if doing these customizations etc will be pointless if the items aren't equivalent if not better than progressive raid loots.

*nods* Its almost like they are trying to give people not end game a reason to buy the expansion but the problem is once you think it out its useless to them.

They really needed to think of some better way to do it. Now if they could scale a raid to an appropriate difficulty level for a raid of mixed levels that would be something to be proud of... maybe reduce the maximum allowed in the raid the more higher level toons are in it or something. At least then I could see casual guilds or very low end raid guilds having something that would be useful.

Useful hotzones, with good experience, for level 60-90. There's a concept we can use!

Majority of the player base on live servers is 105. So having new hot zones that cater to the 60-90 crowd is not a concept we can use, as it pertains to the majority.

And with all due respect, if someone has been playing for over 5-10-15 years and their main character today is between lvl 60-90 then they are a very very tiny demographic of the Everquest player base and should not be consulted as to what the game needs. Sorry.

Devs had said time and time again 'majority of the player base on live servers' are not the top level.

Now I agree these may have some limited use, however I can easily think of 3 guilds on my server (who are social guilds so few 105's, most are around level 95-100 or lower) who I believe will really like this feature. My server can't be the only server with social/light raiding guilds.

There are servers with 'heroic character' guilds as well.

Besides, the fact that they scale down to 75 doesn't mean they aren't useful because you know us '105's' will certainly use the content. The fact that they scale is a bonus, not a detriment.

Maybe, the stuff that drops in these raids will be like the claim able merc armor from I THINK RoF or COTF where you click a button and it lvls up...maybe

The social guilds lack the coordination to pull these types of events off, unless these are zerg the mob raids. Like I said, this feature effects maybe 1-5 guilds serverwide, which was a total waste of resource time. The devs knew it based on the statistics they have of raids being done by lower level guilds, but they wanted to put in another band aid fix for marketing the expansion with this idiotic feature.

The social/light raiding guilds on my server did open CToV raids and early HoT raids, the first VoA raid, the first few CoF raids and actually one of them helped my guild win Arx 1 as part of a short term partnership.

I don't mean the truly social guilds whose biggest raid is epics; there's more social guilds who do casual raiding nowadays and that's who I mean. Like I said I can name a few guilds on my server that fit that category here and this would be perfect for them.

The only way I see myself and others that I group and raid with is if we planned in advance and decided to raid with specific level toons. Like say we have some lower level alts and get them leveled to 80 and stop there with the intent of doing this raid. Seems like a fun idea to change it up, raid with a different class sorta thing. Otherwise I see no real purpose for this.

Actually, you're flat out wrong. But that's only because you're thinking of RIGHT NOW and I think this feature is designed for the future. Depending on how they do loot, this could mean that the encounters chosen to have this feature will never be obsolete. That means you could potentially be doing Two Gods at level 110. The way they describe the items' modular bent means the base loot will always be useful. So you might decide to do a raid just for augs (to upgrade existing items) rather than specifically for armor/weapon items themselves as is currently the case. This would seem to make generating content easier and allow for the re-purposing of existing (currently obsolete) content. Think of a Plane of Time or Vex Thal or Anguish or VP (dwagons!) tuned to current raid specs. That would be a lot of "new" (more like 'refurbished' ) content, no?

Now, I agree that 75 seems a bit low. I would've started at 85 with the idea of feeding heroic character sales. But maybe that low mark was meant to make it appealing to the (existing & future) TLP crowd.

But think about the possible future applications of this tech. I could be totally off here but I'd think that making edits to an existing raid would be easier than building the thing from scratch (and writing the lore and quests and such leading up to the raid). Performer, for example, would probably take quite a few manhours to create today. But it could probably be scaled a lot easier because it's already done and just needs to be scaled. And if the script doesn't work in today's game, you just pick another encounter that works better. Not like EQ has a shortage of raids people no longer bother doing. This just seems like an attempt to make it easier on the devs to produce content that people will want to do.

I've had a dev-crush on John Capozzi for years. If you're unfamiliar, his dev (and player, since he was in beta) name was Kendrick and he was responsible for giving evade to rogues as well as revamping Chardok, Velketor's Labyrinth, and Acrylia Caverns (I'm sure I'm missing a few). Anyway, his forte was taking zones that sucked and making them better. At one time, post-revamp, Velks was the most popular zone in EQ for the 50s because it made sense from a player perspective. This could make it easier for the same things to happen for EQ's old raid content.

So don't think of it as a waste but as an investment into future content creation.

The thing is, those "few 105s" make it a level 105 raid. IME even casual guilds will have at least some people at max level, especially when there's no level increase after a year. It really doesn't help the level 95s when even a single level 105 player turns it into a max level raid. You could, of course, exclude the 105s, but that's the same problem as excluding the 95s; it's just shifting the exclusion to other people.

Now, I'd be all for this if you could choose the difficulty. Like say you have your casual guild with people of various level between 95-105, so you choose the level 95 version which offers lower quality loot, but you have a more realistic chance of beating. That's not the way it works though.

Agree there - I 100% do NOT like the 'goes to max level' rule that is in place for these. It really should be to the average level or 'mode' level, etc.

I have a bunch of bazaar mules and alts I never play that are from level 1 up to level 80 or so. I sure hope they aren't counting them.

"Majority of the player base" should be toons that are actually played, not sitting in the bazaar or guild lobby. And, since if the toons are actually played, then most of them would kind of be level 105, unless they are deliberately deleveling themselves (or haven't purchased The Darkened Sea, which would make them level 100). Kind of a self correcting problem there, in that if they do play, they will level up quickly.

I'm sure there are players that are lower levels that are taking their time working their way up. And I have no problem with that. I have no problem with creating content for them. Not hurrying and enjoying the trip through Norrath is a great thing.

But the idea that the "majority of the player base" are playing toons under 105 is something I find hard to believe. That sounds like very casual players who should have plenty of content already. There are hundreds of zones that have content for players under level 105. Are there really a "majority" of players under 105 who lack content?

P.S. Oh, and how many alts are created because people are bored with their 105 toon because there is no new content for them?

It'd be cool if it also scaled to how many people are in the raid. It'd be nice to do a 1 to 2 group raid with gear reward better than group(1) gear.

Give me the numbers of 95-100s in these social guilds. I run the only large social/casu guild on xegony and we have no where even close to the numbers needed to run one of these raids. At least not enough over a small level range that would make it viable. Happy to be proved wrong but I don't expect other servers to be that much different. UNLESS some are mini raids requiring 24 toons or something. I can get 80 toons online in Lions and still not get anything close to 54 toons over the range of just a few levels to make a raid viable.

If there are guilds on other servers with 54 heroic toons in them or 54 of any small level range of toons except those at max level range 100-105 then other servers must be much more healthier then Xegony. Seeing as how most of them have similar population levels my assumption was the casual guild situation can't be a lot better on other servers. In over sixteen years of EQ the only time I have seen non raid guilds with so many toons close enough in levels was in the very early days of EQ when levelling was super slow.

I guess I need to visit some of these servers with guilds that can field forces for scaling raids short of raid guilds requiring everyone to have alts of a certain level. What servers have these super healthy casual populations?

You know what the problem with that would be. It would pop into the game fully formed as soon as the feature was released, akin to Athena popping out of Zeus. People would play with the raid composition until it gave them the mode or mean they wanted. I think that's why they probably said 'forget it' (or some other f word) and went with the absolute.

Unless EQ's datamining tech is stuck somewhere in Sega Genesis time period, they can tell exactly who is active and who is a mule. They may not be able to drill down as far as some modern games (i.e telling you how many players were in X zone at Y time on Z day and what mobs they killed) but I don't think they'd really need that. Even developers of The Realm Online could pull up mined data (and how long ago was that?). Demographics play a role in development plans (which is why we'll probably never see a Kunark/Luclin/TSS type expansion ever again) so I'd think they'd know those.

As to your first paragraph yeah players work to minimize risk and use game mechanics to the best effect. Scaling raids to average levels would also require them to scale the maximum number of players to maintain difficulty levels and I think that would be too complex.

As for data reports on levels and who are mules and not I don't think that applies here. First off, noting to say mules can't be used for raids if needed and second I don't think scaling raids were based off of any data reports on the current populations because I simply don't see how anyone, but raid guilds who simply order their members to create toons at various levels, will field forces in a narrow level range for these raids unless they are mini raids.

This COULD BE a case of BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME though. That's is about the only thing that makes sense to me unless the casual player populations are far different from the server I play on. They may figure that these raids will cause large guilds of FTP peeps to form and do raids... assuming the raids difficultuy levels would support FTP geared folks. Or maybe a mix of FTP and All Access folks who start to build guilds to do this content. Raiders who aren't willing to pay all access or farm the plat for it. Maybe this is an attempt at Daybreak to bring in more players.

For the scaling to work its difficulty levels have to be lower that what a regular raid difficulty level would be. The mix of players are much more likely to be more casual and less hard core. At present I don't see a large enough population of raider skilled players at lower levels. Casual guilds have extreme level ranges and even if most are concentrated in the 80-105 range they are still too spread out for raid scaled simply to level of the highest toon.

And they would also need to order their people to not level those characters. Experience gain is so fast any more, that those capable (and desiring to raid) would not stay at the set level for very long. While you might get a decent sized group one week in an acceptable level range, by the time the lockout timer was off, the level range will be spread out all over again. People might get 1-2 pieces of raid gear that will be obsolete after two weeks of playing/leveling.

Relevant to this and the level 85 HA thread: Most characters aren't max level. There are two types of of players in that group -

1.Returning players who get stuck around 65.
2. We non-raiders (not casual since we play 8 hrs a day,) who have made alts so we CAN group with those returning players. Shrouds are not suitable for this purpose. We know that returning players who have to solo all the time are not going to stick around. It's to our best interest to have someone to play with them and someplace to play. Some of us used to keep alts at each decade of age so we'd always be able to say, "Sure, I have a ranger that level. I'll come play with you." (Headshot nerf stopped me from doing that.)

Heroic characters and those people who are going to say they can get to level 90 in a week have no place in this discussion.