Contested Need to Go

Gaige wrote:

It's kind of like if you're a professional basketball team, or hell, lets call it curling. Suddenly thrust into a situation where there are no other professional teams. You still want to compete against other teams. How does it happen? You enter competitions with less proficient teams and the other teams in the competition are given a handicap. The difference here is that if you win, you actually get a better prize than they get if they win.
Now I know you're going to say it's you against the mob, but, well, you and your ilk are the ones who insist on there being contested mobs. This mechanic gives the devs a way to give you contest, and possibly the mobs at all. I've almost no doubt that if they continued to try to cater contesteds to only the best of the best, they would already be gone because it's not worth the development costs.

Contested would be a joke even without the easy/hardmode bs, thats what pisses me off right now. 2 mobs and 0 loot that wow's anyone
If you plan on doing this for next xpac please dont, just get rid of them altogether so we can just let everyone who wants that type of gameplay to look elsewhere for their entertainment.

Atan@Unrest wrote:

You didn't say that, you were talking specifically about HM itemization while saying no one can kill HM but one or two guilds per server.
So you were saying that the mechanic needs to stay because no one can kill HM and then saying it REALLY needs to stay if HM loot is better?
...

Leovinus wrote:

Actually no, my guildleader started this thread and its called "contested need to go". We'd be fine with no contested tbh, hence the thread.
Leovinus wrote:

That applies to tons of aspects of this game's gameplay. If you want to start removing things we can, but if they only keep things that are worth the development cost its going to be a pretty boring game.

Leovinus wrote:

This is almost appropriate, but needs a minor alteration.
Using curling, you are in a league of 20 teams. Due to some savvy recruiting, good leadership and outright dogged dedication, however, your team emerges as the frontrunner by a mile.
Because of this, the organisers of the league give every other team a handicap, instead of encouraging them to get better.

They would have been far better off with separate contested from the start. EM/HM is good for instances, but it fails in practice for contested mobs.

Pervis wrote:

Perhaps, though I'd argue that the HM having substantially better loot would be that encouragement. I also think there'd be some more contestation if the lag was eliminated, I highly doubt that the HM encounters were truly designed for only the best of the best, but ended up that way simply because the 2nd tier guilds can't generate at least 50% more dps in no lag situations than is required for the HMs (my guess at the approximate translation, though my guild trying to do Klak normal got a whopping 100k or so when we can normally generate 4-5 times that. This is primetime with the top server guild doing everything they could to lag us out).
In the league analogy you also have to take into consideration that there's a constant flow of talent upward toward your team. Since there's nowhere else to go after that, you get the best of the best, and don't hemorrhage talent to other guilds (as much).
Anyway, I'd be happy enough to see the contested's go away. In my experience this tier, it's nothing but a big headache trying to kill it in the open world, dealing with everything that comes with the contested experience. My guild likes to do it whenever possible, so I go along.

Leovinus wrote:

To bad most HM contested loot is terrible.

Gaige wrote:

Eh, I never said it was necessarily good, I said it was better, heh.

For a guild that can not already kill HM encounters, the loot from them is definatly not good enough to warrent the effort required to be able to kill them.

Leovinus wrote:

Um, than what? Armor is same as instanced mobs and Klaak has one good item and I think Ox has maybe 3 good cloaks.

Gaige wrote:

Um, better than easy. Which is exactly what I was getting at. The whole idea is that the loot from HM is better than easy, which is the devs' method of encouraging guilds to get better to kill HM, speaking to Pervis' response to my post above.

Course, then pervis said it's not worth it to try to get better to be able to kill these, which, if they split the encouters up would leave them entirely uncontested. The goalposts seem to be shifting wildly here.

From a game design perspective, I still see these contesteds as an issue of weighting vs actual competition of the spawn.
Given how the status quot is panning out, if I had to solve the problem, this is what I would do:
1) Take the current loot on them and spread it out over other HM encounters.
2) Split the HM and easy into seperate spawns / encounters.
3) HM Contesteds will then drop a random piece of gear from a global HM loot table (restricted from specific drops).
It turns the contested mob into just a 'bonus loot', thus making it not weighted differently, and doesn't force the need to attempt to manufacture a race for it on servers where no contention exists.
Now, a dev can come in and tell me the changes to contested this expansion wasn't to solve the contention vs weighting issue, and throw this solution right out, but I imagine thats exactly the heart of the decision.
I doubt this solution would be wildly popular, but from a design perspective I think it comes closer to resolving the perceived issue.

I would rather they just get rid of contested epic mobs altogether so the players who seek that content can look elsewhere.

Atan@Unrest wrote:

They'd be totally worthless then, imo. No point dealing with the lag just to get an item you can already get from the farming you do weekly anyway.

Gaige wrote:

Doh - the basic difference is - one is private - one is public. As for the model - they are basically the same. Is that so difficult to comprehend?
And your persistence of calling guilds 'scrubs' is quite funny since there are no 'scrub' guilds except in your mind. I did fix your sentence.
And YES, guilds can choose the difficulty in a contested encounter, just as guilds choose difficulty in a private encounter. As for a race against you? Thanks for the laugh. However, it ain't about you, Gaige. Of course, I know you might find that difficult to believe.
"The needs of the many outweigh the neeeds of the few or the one." Captain Spock from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

Crismorn wrote:

I guess the loot is the big thing. It's prolly part of the reason why the Avatars' loot of T-8 was nerfed. When you have loot of contested encounters so "uber" then you have guilds wanting to sit on top of the encounter just as it was done with the avatars.
My guess is the developers want to open up contested encounters to more than just a few or the one.......

Crismorn wrote:

Since most of the complaints about the T-9 contested encounters are by those guilds who raid regularly several times a week and prefer only raiding current tier, why even bother with making contested encounters for this type of guild?
I suggest SoE devs focus on having contested epics similar to the Dominus series of T-8. That way the guilds who regularly raid current tier can go ahead and kill the epic - get it out of their system - brag - they were the first to kill on the server or w/e, then go back into their private raid zones and focus on their attempts to clear all raid zones before the next xpac is released.
Then, the contested encounter would be left for those guilds who want to try their hand at a raid - type mob of the current tier without having to go into a raid zone. These contested encounters could be designed to be harder than the group instance zones, but not quite identical to the raid zone bosses. This would be a great incentive for guilds who raid on occasion and/or are working to build up a raiding team. It could also provide "practice" for guilds learning about raid type mobs.
As for the loot - somewhere between legendary and the lower end of the raid fableds would be incentive for those guilds.
Guilds who already focus solely on raiding current tier, don't need contested encounters. Their private raid encounters give them not only plenty of challenges but also the gear they want to have. For these guilds, contested encounters have brought nothing but complaints from this group of guilds from the T-8 avatar/dominus/tangrin series to the T-9 series.

Pervis wrote:

Kinda like golf?

Leovinus wrote:

They did that with Avatars of T-9 and you saw the results of that - right?

Alvane@Unrest wrote:

I think you missed my point, as I'm generally arguing from the same side as you. I meant that the HM having substantially better loot than EM/normal (however you want to label it) should provide the incentive for a guild to get better enough to kill HM. Like I said later, I'd be happy if the top end contested concept disappeared from the game entirely, as it never really made much sense to me.