TBM Scaling Raids - Am I missing something?

I don't think that's right. You can't discount a person's viewpoint or opinion simply because they're more advantaged, especially if the system in question will affect them. You could get a character to 90 in a week (most vets could, whether they know it or not) so does that mean your opinion is less valid?

I'm a non-raider, for the most part. I can take modern raiding for short spurts but since I prefer the old days of contested raid spawns, spawn racing, and FFAing competing guilds into the ground, it grates on me over time. Oh and I'm not willing to go back to the days of walking 5 miles in the snow uphill both ways either. So my time has passed as far as raiding is concerned. However, I can't be called casual (as a telecommuter, I MMO while I work plus before and after) on the playtime side and my highest level characters are 100 (I skipped TDS). I have dozens of characters, most in the area between 65 and 95 (with no heroic characters). I see exactly what you're saying. I'm also agree with Corwyhn and might have alluded to his Field of Dreams idea in my first post. If the toughest thing for the devs to do is design raid content and this mechanic makes that easier, it's a win/win no matter what level it starts at. Content on demand with no interference has been a "thing" since Anarchy Online's disastrous launch so it only makes sense to extend that out to raid content. It's not like they're the first to attempt that.

Corwyhn, what you say was exactly my point. They know how many characters in what level ranges are active AND sitting on dormant accounts. They have to. You can't measure your playerbase (in size, average activity level, etc) without that information. So if word gets out that raiding below 105 is worth doing, they could draw some of those inactive accounts back. Sure it's pie in the sky, but so are most internet startups ("Peeple is all about positivity!!!" ). In the old days on some servers, there was an active open raiding community doing non-bleeding edge content. That kinda stuff engages people, even if it's only temporary or folks move up the ladder. If they can make that possible again without additional expense while at the same time making top end content generation easier/faster/less costly, where's the harm?

The harm is precisely going to hit that open raiding community. Let's say they made these raids the old way. They'd be level 105 now, and next year, and the year after that, and so on. As time goes on, they'd become easier and easier to beat. This is the tried & true method of open raids: old raids you know you can beat with a relatively small core group, so it's ok if you have a bunch of people who don't really know what they're doing and/or are undergeared. (Not so much when one person can blow the whole raid, which is probably part of the reason open raids are less common now.) Low level raid content exists right now in the form of older raids, and they're way more accessible when higher level players can help.

The scaling method kills the flexibility that an open raid needs to get off the ground. The new raids are max level now, and next year, and the year after that. They'll always be bleeding edge content. You're not going to beat that with a ragtag group of random new and returning players. This removes content from the players, because now you can't level up & beat it later, and higher level players can't help new and returning players beat raids. That's the harm.

You have a point, but I don't see that as reason to abandon the concept altogether. More refinement as time goes on could yield a more beneficial system. Perhaps they could work on scaling based on mean, median or mode level (math terms, look it up). Point is, they can see how it goes with pohate and pofear and work on improvements as time goes on.

You are 100% right in your statement here. In this case the scaling raids definitely are a bad thing.

Another reason for these scaling raids could be so that when they produce less raids in the future they figure people will keep doing the scaling ones as long as they scale the loot drops. I guess they figure people do gribbles over and over maybe they will do raid content over and over.

The more I think about it I think the fact the raids scale down as far as level 75 was just an afterthought added in with no real consideration as to whether it would be useful but just because it was easy to do. The real reason for scaling is likely just to keep the raid tuned to end game raiding though they will need to scale the drops to do that. But its the one reason that seems to make some sense even if it implies fewer raids may get produced in the future..

I think what they missed is it leaves a bad taste in the mouths of players when something gets added that some players can't effectively use. I would be happy to be proved wrong but I dont see level 75ish, level 80ish etc raids really happening much if at all. I know it sounded like a win win... lets scale it down to 75 because it won't take much effort but if players can't use it then it will be like dangling a carrot in front of them that they can never reach. But there is always the chance that something they haven't told us yet will make scaling raids at less then the end game point viable.

I was really into scaling raids suggesting it everywhere I could and missions revamping all old quests and raids and some hard encounters like taking orc hill and stuff like that but my meaning of scaling was to the average level not to the highest level because that just makes it impossible for the lower level players to be useful within the raids. So while I am excited that a raid of lvl 75 players could do an easier version I am disappointed it missed the mark these should of scaled to the average level of the raid.

Scaling items are the easiest part that's what recommended and required levels are for .

Say a raid scales from 1 - 105 make the item required level 1 recommended level 105 and there you have it an item that is good from lvl 1 - level 105 and they could also decide when the items effect works like say lvl 50

I agree completely.. even if they limited it to ranges say a max of 15 levels so 75-90 could be in a raid avergaed or 79 to 94 etc.... easier to maintain a difficulty level as an average level of 85 would let a 105 walk over a lot of stuff.

I am betting that these raids will always have the same max level difficulty; it is just that they scale downwards. If these Heroic raids scaled up as well, that would mean each future level increase they would have to add a whole new set of armor for the raids; that stuff is not automated for EQ.

There are three ways that I could see this working, and both would require the use of an average level for the raid at any point; for the purposes of this post let's say that our raid has 5 level 75s; 12 level 80s, 15 level 85s, 13 level 90s, 5 level 95s, 3 level 100s, and 1 level 105. In all cases the first thing done would be for the raid's average level to be determined; for our raid that average is 86 (86.296296...).
In my first method, you would use this raid average and for every X people above that average you increase the raid difficulty by 1 level; so if X = 2 our new raid difficulty would be level 98, and if X = 3 it would be 94.
The second method would take the average level of the raid plus the level of the highest person in the raid and divide that by two; in the case of our raid that would result in 96, (86+105)/2 = 95.5.
The third method would offer multiple choices of difficulty for the requester, between the level range that is above the average level of the raid and the max level difficulty available; in the case of our raid that would be 90, 95, 100, or 105.
For all methods the gear rewarded would be balanced around the raid rewards which were available when that level was the max.

I like your ideas but I still think they would make the raid too easy. The level 105 would always be a tank for one thing.

Scaling the raids upwards and adding new loot tables for those upscaled raids is just the only thing I can see that would make any sense out of having the raid scaling.

If the purpose of doing it was simply because "they an" they just wasted valuable dev time on sillinesss. Hopefully no one asks them if they are able to run player made cartoons as the log in process runs or we may get that too. And my biggest hope of all is they come out with info that makese some sense out of this scaling raid stuff. I really really want to believe there was a reason for doing it other then it could be done.

No one even knows if these will scale past 105 , no one knows if the item's dropped will be recommended lvl of the highest person in the raid or averaged out. I for one am excited that I get to experience plane of hate and plane of fear again with an entire new group of people a lot of which haven't ever done these raids while they were current. People are over analyzing a perfectly good thing that allows us to re experience popular old raids at our current level without using some shroud or some old man mckenzie junk character or restarting on some server controlled by a handful of people using a 3rd party program to do stuff that is truly impossible without it ..

That's what I thought would happen with the CotF HAs. It does make sense. What actually happened, though, is that the levels scaled up and the loot didn't. I fully expect the same thing to happen with the new raids, since they're using the HA system for it.

You realize these are new raids, right? They didn't apply scaling to the old raids; they made new raids and then applied the scaling to go down. You'd be experiencing the same raid at your level whether or not they apply the scaling.

How do you know they will scale past the expansion's target raid lvl ?

Sounds to me, like your crying .. about something you have no clue about literally ..

None of us do, but the fact that your crying about something that has not even been launched yet shows what state of the game REALLY .. is now days ..

/sadface..

Ummm no one is over analyzing we are just trying to figure out why they bothered doing this

Except the only useful thing they could get out of these scaling raids is scale the loot upwards. The only raids likely to be done on these will still be end game levels.. currently 100-105. They won't be done by lower levels for the reasons stated in the thread...scale up the difficulty with the next level increase with no scale up of loot and you lose the only reason I can think of so far to have them scale at all. With the exception that maybe they think large numbers of free to play players will get created to raid at below the end game levels.

the "simple" option once scaling is implemented is simply to lock in the level on request and let the requester choose the level, level 105s can faceroll the level 85 raid but the best level 85 gear currently in the game is from argath and they can faceroll that too

any concept of what level of raid the players "should" get ignores that fun and player retention are extremely important concepts in content design. taking arx and applying scaling, shared lockouts can only do one version per 4.5 days:

level 105, no change, only level that progresses the achievements that reward 250 arx crystals
level 100, dropped items are CotF T2, CotF and RoF spell runes both drop and 10 arx crystals are rewarded so once a month players can get a TDS item
level 95, dropped items are RoF T1, RoF and VoA spell runes both drop and 5 arx crystals are rewarded so once every 2 months players can get a TDS item

level 90, dropped items are VoA T2, VoA and HoT spell runes both drop and 3 arx crystals per event, that's 106-125 event wins per item and require being locked out of doing the raids at any other level
level 85, dropped items are VoA T1, VoA and HoT spell runes both drop and 2 arx crystals per event
level 80, dropped items are HoT T1, HoT and UF spell runes both drop and 1 arx crystal per event
level 75, dropped items are Paragon, UF and SoD spell runes both drop and 1 arx crystal per event

dropping high end spells relative to the raids is most useful, once a raid force is organized they can hit up lower non-scaling raids in older expansions to get lower level spells

some hedge against people wiping out the level 75 raid for 378 arx crystals (54 toons, 7 events) would be needed for fv as someone shouldn't be able to clear a level 75 or even 80 raid zone for an arx raid item but after 46 lockout cycles the player has invested enough time to get a single arx raid item

1533 arx crystals for clearing the level 90 version every 5 days for a year or 5 items during an entire expansion and then they can start working on the new expansion gear

Um... because they said they were trying to see if they could implement the code to do so? And they were able to...? So they did...?

In case people missed the memo they've been doing an epic effort lately to overhaul the spaghetti monster EQ code so that it is actually malleable 16 years later and makes a bit more sense.

Given the fact that the main target is a Lv 105 raid force and there are still additional raids that exceed the number from TDS with this expansion... I'm not sure why people are going crazy and complaining.

'Oh, so sorry we made content for people NOT max level!... we'll try and only cater to the top end from here on out!'... yeah, cus that never went in a bad direction before

I suggest everyone invest in tin foil stocks - at least until beta actually launches and we actually see what it's like. I would agree that it would make sense to scale more to an average level or a lopsided level instead of -oh you have *one* 105 and 53 85s so this is a Lv 105 raid!'... but that seems like a downstream issue since that doesn't seem to be the point of this.

It seems like people are completely ignoring the fact that they said this was a trial and error test in translating scaling coding to a raid environment. I'd say that it detracted from developing other content and raids from this new xpac except that we're getting almost double the amount of raids and similar amount of zone content as the last expansion and on top of that they were able to alter code to accommodate raid scaling! /gasp. I feel so cheated

dropping the arx crystals is extremely important, without those instead of doing the level 75 version of the scaling raids you would just help someone do SoD group progression for paragon gear or library/kurn/fos t3 SoD raids for eon armor and scraping up some non-vis if fabled PoTime isn't active

it's the motivation for the higher levels to help, getting an actual reward beyond the warm fuzzy feelings and also a big part of the motivation for the lower levels since outside of pvp or someone choosing to stop at a fairly low level the gear is pretty irrelevant. showing up weekly for level 80 arx raids for tick tock raid gear seems neat but in the end outside of fv it's just tribute fodder before long as grandiose gear from alaris or with marks of valor is generally better gear at level 95 so those month(s) of raiding arx at 80 means you were somewhat better geared to gain your next 15 levels and if instead of doing the raids with you the high levels pl'ed you, you would be 95 with better than tick tock gear before long

"real raiding guilds" might choose not to beat the level 100 version to learn the mechanics, 10 arx crystals and get some t2 cotf gear for the newer members or alts but with scaling implemented any "real raiding guild" with some basic time management skills would complete in zone flagging even if that meant dropping all the way down to level 75 after the last level 105 attempt of the night ran pretty late. also provides an option for guilds to prioritize targets if they raid few hours per week, beat arx 1-4 at level 75 for 4 arx crystals per person total and then spend the rest of the night/week on arx 5.

options are a good thing for fun and customer retention. yes, it might cost some customers who don't see the point in doing level 105 raids if joe the boxer gets 1 piece of arx raid gear every 2-3 months but such is life. if someone spends months for em23 that's great, they are showing a large degree of interest to invest a few hours each week for a long while and now have to pay a monthly fee because os avus is prestige and it would be really silly to spend all that time at 7/14/21+ arx per weekly clear to be silver with that sitting in your bag

if there end up being a bunch of guilds who do the "easy" level 100 raids, have to carefully choose their arx slots as they only get them with currency and vitio and have to settle for rank 2 arx spells that's great for dgb because once again that's prestige gear so it means you're mainly going to have people staying gold to wear the gear they farmed

since arx is just being used for the sake of an example and it's actually broken mirror raids there is plenty of time to implement the achievements to ensure that e-genitalia is preserved by having an ach that indents:

Defeated Cazic Thule
-- level 105
-- level 100
-- level 95
...

then in the long term either by going back to scale arx or earlier raids or from future content if there is high demand or abandoning scaling raids if few guilds do them at other than 105 you end up being able to offer up dozens of relevant raids that players can choose the level of challenge they desire while not being forced to be level locked under the current scaled to the highest level system

And yet the time could still have been better employed on other things BASED ON WHAT WE KNOW ATM. Pretty sure in a lot of my posts I talk about it being based on what we know at the moment. And based on what we know at the moment it seems to be a waste of dev time. Not like it is knew for people to discuss things that have been mentioned even if we MAY NOT have all the information yet.

The use of caps in this response helped me understand your point 110% better.

You said people were wondering why they did it. They already answered that in the stream. I'm not exactly sure why you're continuing to speculate but you're doing a great job!

I knew the caps would help . I am speculating on the usefulness of it as I find it hard to believe they just did it because they could whether it had any value or not. That is something you don't put out in a released product you just try it and leave it alone. I keep speculating because I feel it is incredibly dumb to do it just because you can and am hoping there is more to it then then that.
"Hey guys I have an idea for a feature in Everquest that will be completely useless but I think it will work. What do you think?" Response "Yeah yeah lets do it!" Just saying that seems dumb to me. So I will continue to speculate on how the feature could actually be useful in some way. *shrugs*. Feel free to keep telling us we don't need to do that. Sort of think we already know we don't need to but you keep up with your tinfoil sock comments

I am all for supporting Daybreak when I see criticism that is unfounded but this seems pretty founded so far based on what we know It is daybreaks choice to release any information they want and how much information they release. Then it is our choice whether we want to discuss it or not.

Discussing this feature based on what we know isn't hurting anyone and if Daybreak did not want it to be discussed they would never have mentioned it. *shrugs*

I think Darkark's post says it all. It is content that people can enjoy. Specifically, it could be used as a family type raid on off nights for established raid guilds or another no strings attached raid for casual raiding guilds/alliances.

Rykard

P.S. Loot details would probably help align the scaling raid in terms of use.