Tower of Rot Raid

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Deillusional, May 25, 2014.

  1. Repthor Augur

    if ppl stop showing up cuz things are as u put it painfull(challengeing whould be the word i use here). yes theres some stuff in PoW raid thats stupid like chain healing Preists thats DAed wile they are healing so u cant kill them BUT its still doable RoI just did it with the new rog changes and the new OP sk debuff to do a combind raid parse of 6 mil DPS . but this has not reflection on things like the current Tower of Rot raid. if your players stop showing up cuz they are dieing or lack motivation then thats not the raids fult that is their lack of intrest and motivation maybe raiding at that lvl isent anythign for them

    dont justify raid nerfing by the fact that your ppl dont show up
  2. Battleaxe Augur

    EQ can't be enough of an ordeal that large numbers of people don't show up. When guilds have to continuously recruit because of content difficulty, there's a problem. As John Smedley once commented - GoD was SOE's worst mistake in its first five years. Whatever population reduction happened as a result pales compared to EQ moving from genre definer to an also ran behind WoW.

    GoD2 didn't have as dramatic effect, but several long time endgame guilds lost gobs of players (our friends left the game and that can be painful for some of us) and one or two folded completely. Maybe people who've raided for 5+ years aren't good enough to raid??

    EQ - Let Us Prove [most of] You Shouldn't Be Playing

    Doesn't sound like good product strategy to me. Especially when other competing products make an effort to prove its subscribers should be playing, progressing, and having fun. IMO devs need to walk a fine line where the game is challenging yet most players are doing well in it and smiling more than they are gritting their teeth.

    SOE absolutely should consult Guild Raid Progression, Guild turnover, overall population, and amount of time people are spending playing the game when deciding if content needs to be fixed (making needed repairs is not nerfing).
    Uxtalzon and CaptAmazing like this.
  3. Sirene_Fippy Okayest Bard

  4. Kunon Augur

    The problem with the ToR raid as I see it was horrific timing. There is always a summer lull and it has been getting worse every year. With the staggered release a lot of guilds blew through content immediately and had spent 6 months mindlessly farming the same few events with most of the gear going to alts. That no doubt further increased the attendance drop off for a lot of guilds.

    Then we get T2A, all of one zone and a much harder raid with horrific lag. That was more than enough for many of the people that had been on the fence about taking a break/leaving to do so. From what I have seen and heard from others a lot of guilds are seriously short handed now. They are unable to field full raid forces even with boxes and that causing even more people to go inactive. This loop of farming inconsequential content for over half a year and the inability to field/maintain a raid force to beat new content is burning through rosters faster than the wildfires in Cali could.

    It is a problem effecting top guilds and mid tier guilds. Mid tier much more so since not only are they losing people to not logging in but just as many to upper tier guilds trying to maintain their rosters. I'm aware of a several mid tier guilds that have already collapsed and others that are no longer raiding in any capacity. That is only going to magnify the problem as the summer continues as the pool of raiders continues to try up even for the more serious guilds. The top tier needs a healthy and vibrant mid tier raiding population to keep the food chain going. It will be interesting to see how many of the 40 guilds that cleared T1B will still be functional in September. A lot of potential returning raiders may not have guilds to return to.
  5. Battleaxe Augur

    Having been in several raid guilds and having played for a very long time, people leave because:

    external circumstances - job, school, living situation and EQ is terrifically time consuming <- VAST majority

    overtuned content - not progressing or raids are unpleasant white knuckle affairs even when you've already beaten them once.

    I got mine/too bad for my guildmates.

    Yeah there's stuff to do but I've gotten most of the adrenaline rush out of this expansion and it's time to play one of the OTHER 6 games I play. It's amazing the number of people who "don't have time for EQ" and two months later are telling you how good 4 other games are. Perhaps they should be playing those other games where team mates don't depend on them displaying loyalty.

    I've known 3, maybe 4 players who did it all and quit because there was nothing to do (there was, but they aren't into helping others). I've been three guilds that collapsed (and one that had to rebuild) because content was too exclusive.

    Mr. Smedley said GoD was SOE's worst mistake in its first five years. I don't recall him saying SoD (for example) ravaged the player population.

    One might like highly challenging/exclusive content, but it's my belief low population games aren't capable of funding the creation of a whole lot of high quality well polished content. I know raiders who loved GoD and ignore the fact that it was a trainwreck.
    Perplexed likes this.
  6. Axxius Augur

    Bingo! For us the summer lull was a much bigger issue than the lag. We kept struggling with missing tanks, healers, cc, dps in all possible combinations week after week, and eventually beat it while still lacking a couple of classes. If T2a was released before May, I'm sure we'd take at least 2 weeks less to beat it than we did. Whoever decided that summer is a good time to release new raids needs a reality check.
    Imrahil and Iila like this.
  7. Cisco Elder

    Kunon pretty much hit the nail on the head. Challenging raids are great, everyone likes (or one would think) a challenging event. The timing for a new content release was pretty bad though. Guilds are folding at exceptionally fast rates these days. Servers that aren't hosting top 10 guilds seem to take the biggest hit, since the raiding population simply isn't there. The pool of *quality* players definitely diminishes on mid tier servers. Summer time hits, player numbers drop, new recruits are brought in that aren't nearly what you could have... But it's better than raiding a group or 2 short (I guess). Then the end result is banging your head on a wall due to a lack of not winning. Then the cycle repeats on late loggers, early nite loggers, and people just not showing up. The fact that there are a ton of people playing this game that don't even have a basic understanding of the class that they play, is kind of upsetting.
  8. Zahrym Augur

    It's like culling the masses. You find out who has determination and loyalty and who doesn't. You weed out your weekend warriors when it takes 4-5 days a week to figure out and finish a fight.

    Problem is this game is almost all weekend warriors now. There's maybe 2 guilds that could field a raid force at server up if it was before lunch and even then probably wouldn't have full raids. If they DON'T tune down ToR and don't introduce other raids you will continue to see guilds falling waste-side.

    Personally I think it's the natural order though, one guild dies...feeds 40+ people into various other guilds, they succeed because of it. The cycle of life and death continues.

    Also, it is Summer...not sure why they're releasing the hardest content in 30 months during summer, but apparently they are.
  9. Fenthen aka Rath

    FWO --> MS
    It's a win-win for both, I believe.
  10. Battleaxe Augur

    When the herd isn't that big to begin with I'm not convinced that decimating culling it makes it healthy. How many fewer players or guilds does one suppose EQ needs to be "healthy"??? Lol.

    Aye, Summer. And then it's the Fall and there're problems with attendance - school is starting up. And then Winter with the whole holiday thingie, shopping, recitals, and concerts. Oh yeah, mustn't forget Spring and people wanting to get out of the house and do things.

    There's always turnover (most guilds have 10x more retirees plus alumni than current members). It'd be nice if SOE focused on things like when they release and player success rate (fun and challenge are not exact synonyms - see GoD) with what they release to minimize it.
  11. Zahrym Augur


    Triality into ROI, MS, Triton etc.
  12. Vlerg Augur

    Agree with Kunon. CoTF timing was awful... extremly lacking in content, spells and AAs... then you release one single raid, lag-ridden for the first few weeks. While plane of war names have interesting mechanics, there's not much point in farming them for a raiding guild, and the casual grouper can'T field 10-12 player to do them ( casual grouper, not highly organized and skilled guy 6 manning them).

    ToR may be a little overtuned but not that much. for the moment i'd rather see a save point after minis ( or the mini being the first raid, bayle the second raid, like some suggested.. but it's likely too late for that)
  13. Zahrym Augur


    The entire point of the raid (as stated by development in beta threads) was resource management. Giving a save point would nullify the raid.
  14. OldTime New Member

    EQ is a Video Game !
    Video Game = Pleasant Time
    Video Game = Fun, Smile on the face
    No Fun = No log in to play
    Determination & Loyalty means I am getting paid Cash money
    There is not enough Cash money for banging head on the wall
    'Cause No one is getting paid Dollars to log in, It better be fun time
    Choose - Log into EQ or go to the beach ?
    Perplexed, Elricvonclief and Grelthur like this.
  15. Edrick Augur

    I think some of those learned people call this a haiku, and it put a tear in my eye...
    Bahdah and Stubar like this.
  16. Grelthur Elder

    Well, not to get nit-picky, but haiku is a specific form. This would be better classified as free verse, I think. I'm not an expert so I might be wrong on that. However, I 100% agree with the sentiment.

    If it's not fun or you don't get a sense of enjoyment or accomplishment, why even bother.
    Elricvonclief and Zahrym like this.
  17. Vlerg Augur

    except after the mini dies, you can offtank bayle for as long as you need in order to regen, wait for CDs and etc. if you can't add a save point because you need to manage ressources, then add an enrage timer so you can't meztank for 10 minutes.
  18. Pwnography Augur

    Down by Descendents tonight, 6/24. Congrats guys! 49 players, great run.
    Bahdah and Crystilla like this.
  19. Elricvonclief Augur

  20. Zunnoab Augur

    Firstly congratulations to Descendents and those others who beat it.

    I'll summarize my opinion on the event quickly since this post is way too large, before rambling on more. The way this event is set up, with eight mobs that must be offtanked/cc'd in combination with high HP timed adds that are also % based is absolutely over the top overkill and is clearly only designed for a small portion of the raid player base. It's great to see something more challenging, but it absolutely should not indefinitely be left to pretty much fly in the face of the "we need to design for most of the players" stance about raid tuning that I thought was the direction the raid game was continuing. I have a feeling even if you could kill off the dark blue royals at 25% the fallen mobs would still overwhelm a great many of the raid guilds, but I can't be sure of that. I do like seeing people in my guild happy to see a challenge, but I also do not want to see this kind of design drive off countless more raiders as always happens when things are kept like this, pretty much making it a "be a strong raid guild or don't even bother" type of game.

    I'll start with the event itself. The mechanics seem to suggest that killing royals is meant to be done in balance with crowd control, and perhaps for very high dps forces that is viable, but in the end the only result seems to be that anything other than offtanking or long duration charm is severely punished to the point of near uselessness, largely due to the fact that killing royal repops would be suicide to any force without extreme dps while being bombarded with fallen mobs. It's funny seeing all the nuances to it after the "we've learned not to make things complicated for the sake of being complicated" comment I recall semi-recently, because the CC mechanics seem to be exactly that, especially when they add up to making most of those CC methods pretty much risky to the point of uselessness anyway.

    Frequent timed adds disproportionately reward high dps. Percent based adds still reward high dps but do not disproportionately punish lower dps. Combining them, at least when the timed ones are frequent, is just plain over the top. Furthermore the concept of a resource management raid is interesting but by design will be a chore to work on since it relies on the event going a long time, and for guilds that can even barely make it to 25% this event must be an absolute unfun morale killer. I'm glad at the least my guild has had the turnout to make some progress, and grateful for our members for continuing to stick to it, even if we have a way to go still. If we didn't have the turnout we have, which is far stronger than what I was used to raiding with my first six or so years of raiding, I can't imagine how much of a brick wall this would be.

    In response to someone a few posts ago, enrage timers are cheap and annoying and I'm glad they are very rarely used. If it specifically relates to the event I can see, but I don't think they should exist for the sake of "punishing" lower dps, and I think they should be the exception not the rule.

    As I said, I'm glad people enjoy the challenge, however there is no way this event is anywhere even close to tuned for most of the raiders. What baffles me is the continuous cycle of hard content that drives away players/kills guilds, reasonably tuned content that is a challenge for a large portion of the game but then is boring for the upper portion of the guilds, and then a return to insane tuning once again. It goes something like:
    1.) There is moderately tuned content. Some are disappointed that it's "too easy" and are very vocal about it.
    2.) Content is made that completely excludes a very large portion of the raider player base or tailors to one very specific kind of raid roster. Some celebrate that it's how it "should be," while guilds die, people get frustrated, etc.
    3.) There are dev announcements that acknowledge they need to design for most players.
    4.) Repeat the cycle.

    You can throw in suddenly completely omitting backflag mechanics every few expansions in there too, needlessly killing off a few more guilds or making doing older content not worth the reflag effort for others. I mean no insult to the dev team, but I really do not understand the constant fight necessary to have backflag mechanics in the game that repeats over and over again every few expansions, with the same exact arguments repeated time after time again. Personally I think VoA had an awesome flagging system since it incorporated backflagging due to the way it worked. I could go on much more about backflagging but that's going off on a tangent, but it goes right along with the "cycle of tuning."

    There was actually this big post about the dev team announcing how it just does not work trying to tune for people fully geared in the previous tier and such. I could almost swear there was a post like that after Underfoot. Now I am told that exact same line of thought has come back to justify this tuning, that content is designed for people fully geared in the previous tier and with most/all of the AA. That's why I call it a cycle. It seems to spiral around and around overtuned, sometimes undertuned but it's hard to say since moderately tuned always gets drowned out by "too easy" feedback (because moderate difficulty will always quite plainly be too easy to the strong). Note there is far more to "strong" than gear and AA, and if the raid game excluded all but the very best players it wouldn't surprise me if it simply wouldn't have the numbers left to justify its dev time in short order. Of course a "moderately" skilled player to the average raid guild would probably be "horrible" to the top, and that is no insult. It's just how things are.

    I don't envy the dev team. This is once again why I think "normal" aka "easy for some" and "hard" modes are the only true solution, because there is no such thing as a middle ground. Reasonable for the strongest will always be overwhelmingly difficult for the medium/weaker forces, and vice versa. It is funny seeing something like Saving Jacyll called "too easy," and I think that underlines the divide quite clearly.

    I am not saying I think the devs should take an axe to this event right away. I'm sure more would absolutely love to beat it in its current form. But I'm also quite confident in saying I believe this kind of design/tuning quite simply flies in the face of the "design for most of the raiders" stance I heard the development of the game is taking. It's great seeing people appreciate a challenge and have great fun with it. It's not so great if it ends up driving off dozens/hundreds of players in the process as well. Heck, keep the current version as hard mode even. It would make a heck of a lot more sense than the "keep your tank/healer core and sit extra DPS" 'hard mode' of SoD.

    The fact that there is only a single raid in T2 CotF only amplifies the issue. I hope I do not sound more critical than I intend to. I'm merely providing my feedback. Now if it stays like this for a very long time, my tune might change, but not now.