Getting more people into Raids

Been thinking about this topic a lot. What are some suggestions to get more people into the raiding game mode?

More groups and guilds that teach raid content with a patient and laid back atmosphere. Raids have a pretty bad reputation for being full of elitist and people raging over wipes.

Raids are difficult, but difficult content is fun if you have people that can roll with the punches.

Do you think rewards would drive more people into the content?

change the reset to weekends

As a non raider, the thing keeping me out is purely time. I'm up for a fun challenge, but dedicating any chunk of my day to other people on the internet isn't going to happen. Judging from the overwhelming poll spam on this subject, I think it may be an insurmountable challenge. I've had lots of people offer to teach me to raid after they see I'm competent in a random fractal or WvW duel or whatever, but I just am not going to put in the time to learn. It's a big commitment and a large portion of the game's population has kids or demanding jobs.

TLDR: Raids may have already attracted most of the people who can raid.

I’m curious about wing 7 as I assume wing 6 will have a collection for the gift of the ring. Potentially wing 7 may have no Legendary item associated to it.

As for your other response, how could Raids address the time aspect. This is the one area of Gw2 that find takes up a lot of my time, mainly waiting for other players to join etc. I still remember when gw2 came out, the developers advised that they knew that people’s time is important and that things can be done within an hour and progress can be made. I find raiding to be the opposite. I’ll spend 8 hours raiding with maybe a kill or 2 and left wondering where all my time went. I also find that I spend most of my time waiting to have fun then having fun. Don’t get me wrong, I love the raid bosses, I love the challenge and the mechanics, however even I’m wondering where all my time went and what I gained during that play session.

Fluffball basically already laid out a very big reason why the raid population may be at its peak, but I would like to add a litte bit to it.

The only way I see for a noticeable increase in raiders is to compromise in performance, build and failure tolerance. Exclusive rewards lead to some bandwaggoners but when they have the items they want, they are out. So static groups probably should not look for such bandwaggoners but instead for people who are really interested in raids.

Take a look around in this subsection and you will see that the most hardcore raiders almost all demand that someone has to keep up with them if they want to raid with them, asking for points 1 and 2 while having a rather low tolerance for point 3. But the number of people who can keep up on even ground with good raiders is clearly limited for a wide array of reasons.So instead of a 90% performance, you could be ok with a 85%(numbers taken out of thin air).There is a clear difference between optimal and viable. If raiders are able to accept viable instead of optimal on less important positions, the pool of applicants grows larger.You could counterargue that a good commander just asks from people what he can do on its own. As true as this may be, you will never get an acceptable team if your commander is supremely good and asks the same peak performance from its team members.While I was in the army my superior was a master seargant who was a supremely fast runner and had vast endurance while already slowly coming close to the age of 50. I seriously doubt that I could keep up with him even today, and I would still be running decades later if he had demanded that we should keep up with him. He asked from us that we performed at our peak, not his peak, and he knew our peaks pretty good. And that made him such a good leader.*Failure tolerance is not synonymous to carrying, and carrying is not all the same. If you understand your raiding squad as an elite squad you will see that special forces carry new guys all the time as beginners as training does not equal a combat situation. Even in the regular army you will always find a number of people that have to be carried from a certain point on as they simply can´t keep up anymore, either in marching, drill instruction or just standing around in the hottest hour of the day on a parade. Support is probably the best part of the comradrdy you feel while you are on duty.

sigh Performance requirements in GW2 raids (hardmodes excluded, can't judge them properly) are anything but high. Something like 50% peak performance coupled with very, very few mechanics you can't recover from if you fail is pretty faceroll.

@Tyson.5160 said:This is the one area of Gw2 that find takes up a lot of my time, mainly waiting for other players to join etc.This is a player mentality problem not anet's problem. To many players leave pug groups to easy, they see that the first pull was a disaster and they immediately think that the whole run will be like that, but the problem might have been that a player forgot to remove his open world gear with toughness or something, mistakes that can be easily fix. Then is the strictness of the comp/strategy, some commanders don't want/can't mix and match comps on the spot so they don't deviate for the most optimal comp.

I’m often surprised when a first pull ends in a success, usually the party has to marinate a little and find its footing before a victory occurs. As for time, not sure how a problem like that can be solved unless we get an overhaul to the lfg system for raiding, which has more customization. Any thoughts regarding arding future wings having no legendary collection? Good idea or bad idea?

@CptAurellian.9537 said:sigh Performance requirements in GW2 raids (hardmodes excluded, can't judge them properly) are anything but high. Something like 50% peak performance coupled with very, very few mechanics you can't recover from if you fail is pretty faceroll.

And I tried to explain that you can not just declare that it is easy as easy is relative. I also said that the numbers are taken out of thin air.And even if you were correct, there must be one or multiple reasons that raids are not played by 50% or even 40% of all people if 50% performance are enough. Either it is unsocial, boring, too hard, not rewarding enough, repetive, too easy or takes too long to do. Maybe people suck as much in memorizing rotations as the sucked in school memorizing a poem? I don´t know, pick one of more if you want.

The reason is simple, but I'll gladly repeat it: Not everyone is interested in everything. And that's fine. Like everything else in this game with the exception of open world content, raids are niche content designed for a certain demographic. For that group, they look pretty successful. Other niches like sPvP or PvD have virtually no barrier to entry at all and yet the available statistics don't look as if even a third of the playerbase participates regularly.

@CptAurellian.9537 said:sigh Performance requirements in GW2 raids (hardmodes excluded, can't judge them properly) are anything but high. Something like 50% peak performance coupled with very, very few mechanics you can't recover from if you fail is pretty faceroll.

Well that depends on where you are and what server you play on. I am in Europe and playing on the EU server I get 30-50 consistent ping. However, the guild I raid with is made up of people from Australia playing on the NA server, and they get 200-250 ping. That is a huge difference in performance and it completely changes how you do the fights.

@CptAurellian.9537 said:The reason is simple, but I'll gladly repeat it: Not everyone is interested in everything. And that's fine. Like everything else in this game with the exception of open world content, raids are niche content designed for a certain demographic. For that group, they look pretty successful. Other niches like sPvP or PvD have virtually no barrier to entry at all and yet the available statistics don't look as if even a third of the playerbase participates regularly.

I’m very interested in the content and love the fights, it just not fun with all the waiting. Generally it’s not the actually fights that take up the time but the down time in between and people leaving.

@Wandering Mist.2973 said:

@CptAurellian.9537 said:

sigh

Performance requirements in GW2 raids (hardmodes excluded, can't judge them properly) are anything but high. Something like 50% peak performance coupled with very, very few mechanics you can't recover from if you fail is pretty faceroll.

@Tyson: That waiting thing sounds like the need for a proper guild.

@CptAurellian.9537 said:

@Wandering Mist.2973 said:

@CptAurellian.9537 said:

sigh

Performance requirements in GW2 raids (hardmodes excluded, can't judge them properly) are anything but high. Something like 50% peak performance coupled with very, very few mechanics you can't recover from if you fail is pretty faceroll.

Yeah, I’ve looked into finding a raid guild, however I play during non peak hours and most guilds raid in the evenings and weekends while I’m at work.

What @"Fluffball.8307" said works in another way too, often, groups on the LFG are also formed by players with limited time, therefore they cannot afford to teach other people how to Raid, they cannot afford endless wipes and playing with players with terrible build choices. Yes, you might beat the Raids with sub-optimal builds, that's proven more than once, however, time is a very important factor. That's why posts on the LFG ask for experienced players, including LI, kill proofs and so on. You can't fix, nor change that, and any attempt towards that goal is either open to abuse and exploit or simply won't fix anything. Time is the limiting factor for many players who want to play Raids but can't, but it is equally important to the regular raiders too.

The proposal we read all the time on "How can I start raiding?" question is nearly always the same: "Join a training guild." or "Join a guild" in general. Why not make the answer to that question simpler and put it inside the game? A way to get more people into Raids is an in-game guild browser. Making it easier to find Raid training guilds while INSIDE the game, without spamming map chat, and without waiting for a map chat comment. It's the first step towards making the entire game better and more social, not only Raids, but it's one small step towards making Raids more accessible. Sub-forums and reddit posts don't work as well, because not everyone is interested in those, however, an in-game tool will be visible by everyone.

Depending on your role and build, Raids range from easy to hard, in some fights certain people can really be mediocre at playing the game and still win, provided the other members of the group are capable of pulling off their respective roles. The first boss of Hall of Chains is a great such example, the 2 tanks have an important job to do, along with the guys responsible for the exploding golems (1 or 2 people). The rest of the group really don't have much to do regarding raid-wide mechanics and the fight is of the same difficulty as fighting Balthazar at the end of Path of Fire, avoid orange area of effect, move with the group, damage damage damage. If you can beat Balthazar solo without getting killed then you can fulfill most of those "easy" roles without a problem.

There is room for lots of different skill levels in Raids, which is why in training runs, the experienced players play the more demanding roles, so the newer players can get a taste of Raiding without the need to be at the highest skill/experience level. Maybe a question would be how to exploit this and allow players that have experience in the demanding roles join other groups to allow them to beat bosses.

@Tyson.5160 said:I’m often surprised when a first pull ends in a success, usually the party has to marinate a little and find its footing before a victory occurs. As for time, not sure how a problem like that can be solved unless we get an overhaul to the lfg system for raiding, which has more customization. Any thoughts regarding arding future wings having no legendary collection? Good idea or bad idea?

With more experience you'll see that you can literally oneshot all bosses in W1-4 very easily, W5 till Dhuum is also not very hard with a group of 10 players knowing the content by heart. You don't have to be very highly skilled for that, you're just not used to raiding that long so you haven't played together with experienced people or maybe not all of them were experienced.Also, there are sometimes these bosses where you hop into a pug group, join the raiding instance, take your food, ready check, kill the boss and gg ty + bye bye - all in all 5-15 minutes like good old dungeon runs.

@Tyson.5160 said:Yeah, I’ve looked into finding a raid guild, however I play during non peak hours and most guilds raid in the evenings and weekends while I’m at work.

See, and that is still your own issue. Sorry for that but during the usual peak time there is not much waiting for a raid group. I rarely have to wait more than 5 minutes to find a squad if I pug and with my static it's a non issue to find single players as well within minutes.I doubt that a high increase of new players will make it easier to find a squad for you. It's instanced content and even during dungeon peak time it hasn't been easy to find appropriate or good groups at night, during early morning or forenoon. And those are 5 man content, same goes for fractals.

again double post sry. wish to delete posts like in the old forum.... T_T

@Dahkeus.8243 said:More groups and guilds that teach raid content with a patient and laid back atmosphere. Raids have a pretty bad reputation for being full of elitist and people raging over wipes.

Raids are difficult, but difficult content is fun if you have people that can roll with the punches.

This is a huge issue. It's really about finding your Tribe. and if the people that do this content are not your tribe, then there is a good chance that regardless of your skill, time, or whatever, it's simply not going to be attractive content for you.

@Fluffball.8307 said:As a non raider, the thing keeping me out is purely time. I'm up for a fun challenge, but dedicating any chunk of my day to other people on the internet isn't going to happen. Judging from the overwhelming poll spam on this subject, I think it may be an insurmountable challenge. I've had lots of people offer to teach me to raid after they see I'm competent in a random fractal or WvW duel or whatever, but I just am not going to put in the time to learn. It's a big commitment and a large portion of the game's population has kids or demanding jobs.

TLDR: Raids may have already attracted most of the people who can raid.

This is very true. At two years in.. most people who have been playing for a while have made a decision if they are ever going to bother. While, I am sure if there was a rise of more accepting, more friendly 'raid' guilds, even jaded vets would give it a try.. right now, it's a community issue, so unless their is a shift on who raids and how they treat raids, nothing is going to change as far as the population goes.

Raid content should have the least possible playerbase, to keep the "feel" of the content and its "rewards" "unique" and "elite".

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:Raid content should have the least possible playerbase, to keep the "feel" of the content and its "rewards" "unique" and "elite".

It can have a lot of people or few people, doesn't really matter. Groups and group dynamics are something players themselves define. ANET just releases the content.

@Lunateric.3708 said:

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:Raid content should have the least possible playerbase, to keep the "feel" of the content and its "rewards" "unique" and "elite".

That's not true on multiple levels.

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:

@Lunateric.3708 said:

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:Raid content should have the least possible playerbase, to keep the "feel" of the content and its "rewards" "unique" and "elite".

I'm sure you have your own truth, but having niche content doesn't mean "least possible playerbase". If you don't understand that or don't wish to understand it it's fine.

@Lunateric.3708 said:

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:

@Lunateric.3708 said:

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:Raid content should have the least possible playerbase, to keep the "feel" of the content and its "rewards" "unique" and "elite".

That's not what is wrong with your previous comment.