While there is an amusing element to it, I find it more somber, than anything else. It is a little bit disconcerting for such unabashed naivety to be shamelessly displayed. Fortunately, it appears the Devs had a good understanding of what they were doing when it came to how guilds can level up in the ToT levels of 101+.
Yes, "Raid or Die" seems to be the order of the day. Hopefully for the game's sake, it won't turn out to be the latter.
Unabashed, certainly, but naivety? No. Pure pragmatism. It doesn't matter how much 'work' the players do to 'earn' their rewards. As developers, you want to reward the largest segment of your game that is paying you the most money. Raiders are, at the best of times, a small minority. Blizzard released stats at one point showing how few players had even entered into the raid zones, let alone cleared tier 1, during one expansion when there was much outcry on the forums that "everyone" had cleared all the content. My honest guess, since I obviously don't have the hard numbers, is that the group Daybreak really doesn't want to tic off is the decorators. Right now EQ2 is the only game in town for them, and they are not afraid to drop money on nice household stuff from the DBC store to get just the right look. After them, I'd say it's the solo adventurers. There are probably more crafters than raiders, but I don't know how much money crafters spend other than subscriptions. Raiders may have the edge there.
Pretty accurate. Without actual data I'd say it breaks down something like this: 10% Raiders 10% Mixed playstyles (Crafting, Soloing, Raiding, Heroic Dungeons, Decorating) 10% Decorators* 20% Soloers 20% Crafters 30% Heroic Dungeon players *They could honestly be added to Crafters; a lot of decorators seem to do their own crafting if we use AB as an example. Also if you count the mixed playstyles people (Like myself who sorta decorate my house but mostly with loot lol) it comes closer to a 40% slice of the population - matching only Heroic content players.
Yes, they actually are. raiders usually at best make up like 10% of the population, and that's prolly being generous. alot is due to the time involved, or dealing with people you don't like , or people with super egos that use raid leadership roles as a personal power trip.
rainmare are u one of those ppl who like to equip items because of their appearance ? i guess so this discussion is about doing AS and beeing done with the expansion ... because raiding is piss easy and the heroic content even moar and not gettin anything from it compared to the effort u have to put in ... thats nothing to feel bad about its moar about to quit subscription ... thats all
It used to be players (back in 08ish)...used to go out to the overland areas and farm with the nubs. (I believe it was mostly due to the game being a little newer, and people actually having a reason to farm something in the wild). So what ya got, was guild halls, mercs and a huge reason to not even go out. (kind of like when you play this game). Then what ya got here the last couple expansions is a huge increase in SLR. This means... not only do you not have to go out and group/party/raid...you buy all your loot from some dude in a high end raid guild or has exploits out the ying/yang. So, what would ya rather do?: keep buying your raid gear from some exploiter/elitist or run through some dungeons and overland zones to get it? I VOTE- if no one is going to PUG anyway, get loot in the solo zones and overland zones vs making some old head elitist think he is almighty powerful and rich SLR.....
Any sort of break down when you try to pigeon hole players into one kind of play style is naïve. While there are a few players that only want to do one form of content, the vast majority spend time doing several of them. For instance there are very few raiders that refuse to do group content. Most crafters do it to support their adventuring efforts. Players that spend a lot of time in game do go between doing heroic and solo content. Saying that only 10% of the population mixes the different types of content seems so low that its absolutely absurd. Not that a player could come up with accurate stats, but these guesses are not even close to what I'd assume. If you were going to attempt to put meaningful statistics into player behavior you'd first need to come up with what a player in each category would have to do to qualify as part of that population, then you'd need to see what percentage of players are in it. Like "Raider". How often do they have to Raid? Once a week? Once a month? Last expansion? Ever? How about "Decorators"? Every week? Every month? Ever? Purchases furniture off the marketplace? Purchases houses from the marketplace? Ever won an award? Without having well defined standards and actual information gathering techniques statistics are meaningless.
. I just love how you put "elitists" and exploiters in the same category. First off, just cause someone is decent and you're a scrub does not make them an "ellitist" if they choose not to group with you. Should you be offended of Tom Brady doesn't want to join your ragtag flag football game on the corner lot? Absolutely not. Regarding selling of loot rights...get over it. It's a dead horse that's been revived and beaten again ad nauseam. People are gonna do it as long as its allowed. Super nice items from mission rewards and crates are no-trade tossed right in your inventory and they're actually good. Keys are another positive step. Oh ya, there's tons of groups and people running around, not just sitting in their guildhalls watching the /auction channel for loot rights.
Hey Mermut, AFAIK, the reason ToT Handcrafted gear are tagged Mastercrafted Legendary is so they can be Reforged without making all previous tiers reforgeable. Kinda confusing though because Mastercrafted gear has the same tag as Handcrafted, instead of being tagged Mastercrafted Fabled or having a new tag for Handcrafted Legendary so that previous MC Fabled are not reforgeable. The Mastercrafted armor has higher Mit but kinda sad you have to use Refined rares and Experiment to Visionnary to get something slightly better then Advanced solo gear (not all pieces are better IIRC).
They could have tagged it handcrafted legendary, if they just wanted it reforgable, since the legendary part is what is needed. Unfortunately, the non-crafter doesn't know that they're actually handcrafted so quite a few (in my opinion) unscrupulous people are charging mastercrafted prices for the handcrafted gear.
Value os determined by what people are willing to pay. If someone is willing to pay 1k for for a handcrafted item than that's their prerogative. And if they're not smart enough to research the mats for an item, that's also their fault
They're willing to pay that because they think it's made from rares. If people knew it was made from commons, they wouldn't pay as much. It's like when they came out with the trichromatic dislodger recipes sold in Steamfont for 20g.. some people were buying them and putting them on the broker for 200p+ and people thought they were the prismatic dislodgers and bought them. In my opinion, that type of behavior (in game or in real life) is intentionally setting out to rip people off.
I'd say it actually starts going down thus far. There are quite a few BiS items that seem exclusive to heroic content without even a cheap knock off version available to anyone else. Meanwhile the entirety of raid gears has some version available to heroics or soloers. It takes minimal effort to copy/paste that item, boost it up slightly and put it on raid mobs. They definitely got the copy/paste part down, now they just need to 'paste' it on to raid loot tables. Why do I keep seeing this idea the sole reason people raid is to just do content with more people? This is silly. Anyone who truly thinks this is clearly out of the loop. Raiding comes with inherent higher difficulties and hurdles just by its very nature that is by definition impossible to duplicate in group or solo scenarios. Therefore rewards should at least MATCH if not exceed those of heroic and solo content. Currently it only does in the most generic, uninteresting ways possible (green and blue stats, effects are all the same from solo to raid) and not by much. In the case of war runes and class cloaks, not at all (so far). They could improve raid drops dramatically by simply taking heroic fabled drops and putting them on even T3 raid mob loot tables, replacing them even, without even boosting/changing their stats. That's how bad it is. I would also submit the lack of growth and power difference in items is what ultimately resulted in raid content being burned up so quick. When you make solo and heroic gear so incredibly close (or better) than raid gear there isn't a lot of room to increase difficulty while making it possible to kill them with the best gear available. Solo, heroic and raid gear power is so close to each other you can be 'raid capable' and in the higher end of stats with a few heroic and solo runs/quests.
And you are Tom Brady....? Looks like you have not gotten over the fact that you could not even make little league? Anyway, you are wrong....there are hardly any groups annnnd way more SLR. If you are too ignorant to understand how this will kill the game...you MIGHT just be one of those "scrubs" LOL! If you judge people by how well they push buttons in a game and you think it even takes talent...you have a looooong road ahead...(and BTW SLR will continue to be beaten ...just like you would on the football field....LOL!
I do heroic groups every day and there are plenty of them...way more than SLR. You have to actually take the initiative to start a group sometimes instead of sitting around waiting to see someone looking for another in chat. (Even in that case there is plenty of that also.) If you do heroics enough and are good at them then you develop a group of people / friends that you run heroics with every day and you're not always looking for random PUGs. I hate to say this but a lot of you guys would never have made it in Vanillia EQ1-Kunark-Velious...that was real raiding and grouping (Sebilis-Trakanon-Velious), not what we have here. ...and the only other thing I have to say is..grammar guys...grammar.
