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Why invest resources in new 10 person content instead of difficulty settings?


Swagger.1459

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@Rednik.3809 said:Strikes will probably replace raids in further development process. And that is probably a good thing, because so far general GW2 raiding community mindset seems unsalvageable at this point. They are still living in a dream and not noticing a ruin around them.

I dont mind if strike replace raids if they will have same or higher dificulty as raids. Name is not that important to me

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@ButcherofMalakir.4067 said:

@Rednik.3809 said:Strikes will probably replace raids in further development process. And that is probably a good thing, because so far general GW2 raiding community mindset seems unsalvageable at this point. They are still living in a dream and not noticing a ruin around them.

I dont mind if strike replace raids if they will have same or higher dificulty as raids. Name is not that important to me

They will not, tho. I guess Anet, after reducing devs numbers, is no longer thinks that it is plausible to pour resources into content that only small minority is going to see.

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@Rednik.3809 said:

@Rednik.3809 said:Strikes will probably replace raids in further development process. And that is probably a good thing, because so far general GW2 raiding community mindset seems unsalvageable at this point. They are still living in a dream and not noticing a ruin around them.

I dont mind if strike replace raids if they will have same or higher dificulty as raids. Name is not that important to me

They will not, tho. I guess Anet, after reducing devs numbers, is no longer thinks that it is plausible to pour resources into content that only small minority is going to see.

Interesting fact. There is a poll about strike missions. In that poll 1/4 of players that want to play strike are raiders. If they remove raids then big part of tgat 1/4 will go away

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@Swagger.1459 said:

@Swagger.1459 said:Did you ever play an mmo that had difficulty settings for instanced content?

We're not talking about "an mmo;" we're talking about this MMO.

You asked a question. A couple of people have offered answers. I don't know what you're expecting to see that will justify to your satisfaction that ANet made a sensible choice. (I'm not arguing that they made the best choice or the right one; as I keep saying, we don't know anything at all about the actual implementation, so there's little to discuss.) There are good reasons to try something new, even though that is not your preference.

Your answer was “it’s a cheaper investment”, but is that really true? Or just your feeling off of what you envision difficulty setting to involve?

I mentioned this stuff long ago, but city of heroes allowed players to change the “level values”...

of the enemies within their instanced missions and “raids”.Notoriety in CoH did not affect raids at all. It only impacted 1-8 person content.Why are you trying to tell people otherwise?
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@Rednik.3809 said:They will not, tho. I guess Anet, after reducing devs numbers, is no longer thinks that it is plausible to pour resources into content that only small minority is going to see.

Not really convincing statement. It's more likely that 4 ls dev teams and the new invention of Strike missions are going to tackle the problem of lesser and lesser content we got in the past together with longer waiting times a.k.a. not meeting the 3 months release cycles for the LS.Let's be honest one story every 3 months isn't going to hold any long-term player in the game, be it raider or non-raider. The story content can be played on a single evening, let it be a week for players that only log in 1h every day. Afterwards you have the achievements of which most of them evolved more and more to a grind fiesta. Examples therefore are the 3 x 1k mob slaying in Dragonfall, the Skyscale mount (which should have rather had a casual acquirement journey) and Vision. Both of the latter were tweaked by heavily putting map currencies in follow-up events like Dragonbash, Boss-Rush and Festival of the Four Winds.

We have to face it: PvP is out-of-favor, WvW heavily slacks fresh innovation, challenging PvE-content is tuned down (8 months till last fractal release and nothing newly announced on the horizon, raids have their 9-xx months cadence as well). And not to forget: Guild content - what is that?What's left is exploring Tyria with your family/friends/guild mates and don't tell me it's not getting boring after several 100% map journeys and grinding gold for legendaries or shiny stuff due to repeating events/maps over and over again. Very innovative and very profitable sources for Anet. /s

Be serious and tell me is this the focus of GW2 that will keep the game alive? Even if there is a lot of community (left) in this game mentioned things can't and will not cover enough revenues to pay the costs for an upkeep of the game. Reasonable business tells us a different story and when I saw that clown of marketing on the stage I had a really queasy and uneasy feeling about the future.

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@mindcircus.1506 said:

@Swagger.1459 said:Did you ever play an mmo that had difficulty settings for instanced content?

We're not talking about "an mmo;" we're talking about this MMO.

You asked a question. A couple of people have offered answers. I don't know what you're expecting to see that will justify to your satisfaction that ANet made a sensible choice. (I'm not arguing that they made the best choice or the right one; as I keep saying, we don't know anything at all about the actual implementation, so there's little to discuss.) There are good reasons to try something new, even though that is not your preference.

Your answer was “it’s a cheaper investment”, but is that really true? Or just your feeling off of what you envision difficulty setting to involve?

I mentioned this stuff long ago, but city of heroes allowed players to change the “level values”...

of the enemies within their instanced missions and “raids”.Notoriety in CoH did not affect raids at all. It only impacted 1-8 person content.Why are you trying to tell people otherwise?

These are the specifics...

https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Task_Force

“The team leader Notoriety level setting affected enemy spawns according to specific criteria. It also affected the completion reward at the end, with a same-level rare recipe (if chosen) on Heroic, +1 level on Rugged, and +2 level on Invincible.”

https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Strike_Force

“The team leader Notoriety level setting affected enemy spawns according to specific criteria. It also affected the completion reward at the end, with a same-level rare recipe (if chosen) on Villainous, +1 level on Vicious, and +2 level on Relentless.”

https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Trial

“Trials will spawn enemies at the team leader's level plus their notoriety”

https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Raid

These 2 were open world content and bosses that did not utilize Notoriety.

https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Incarnate_Trial

Made for 8-16 and 12-24 players depending on the I trial. Didn’t use Notoriety, but had dynamic scaling.

“Almost all Archvillains in Incarnate Trials have a power called "Scaling" which scales their health, damage and regeneration according to the number of players within the league participating ensuring they can pose a challenge and still be defeated regardless of the number of players.”

...Yes, Notoriety was also used for https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Mission and https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Mission_Architect

So Notoriety was a usable feature in the majority of the content, and Incarnate Trials were dynamically scaled according to number of players. Both were great QoL features that allowed players of all experience levels to enjoy content and challenge themselves more if they were looking for it. And regardless, GW2 doesn’t use difficulty settings at all for their instanced content, they only use dynamic scaling for bosses in open world... https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dynamic_event#Event_participation and utilize https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dynamic_level_adjustment for other content, which aren’t the same as what I brought up. But CoH had this too.. https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Sidekick and dynamic level scaling for some content.

And CoH had a customizable UI, great combat system, clearer visual effects, tons of roles to play, great balance, great character customization with both builds and aesthetics... All from a game launched back in 2004.

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@Swagger.1459 said:Did you ever play an mmo that had difficulty settings for instanced content?I did. In fact I even raided in that game at the top level. What I learned from that experience is:

  • to get decent encounters you can't just adjust the numbers (hitpoints, damage etc.) but need to hand-tune each difficulty level by itself, thus making creating difficulty levels almost as expensive as creating all new encounters
  • most people skip the lower difficulty levels as quickly as possible or even expect others to carry them on difficulties they aren't up to because they find the reduced rewards of lower difficulties beneath them
  • lower difficulty settings are more forgiving towards player errors (or they wouldn't be lower difficulty) and thus allow players to utilize strategies that power through the encounters that mostly don't work on higher difficulties, thus helping next to nothing when trying to learn how to do the encounter

In my experience from older games difficulty settings for challenging instanced content are wasted development potential that would be much better spent in creating new content that helps players gain the skill necessary to survive in a variety of more difficult content, with the added benefit of producing more varied content at the same time.

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@Rasimir.6239 said:

@Swagger.1459 said:Did you ever play an mmo that had difficulty settings for instanced content?I did. In fact I even raided in that game at the top level. What I learned from that experience is:
  • to get decent encounters you can't just adjust the numbers (hitpoints, damage etc.) but need to hand-tune each difficulty level by itself, thus making creating difficulty levels almost as expensive as creating all new encounters
  • most people skip the lower difficulty levels as quickly as possible or even expect others to carry them on difficulties they aren't up to because they find the reduced rewards of lower difficulties beneath them
  • lower difficulty settings are more forgiving towards player errors (or they wouldn't be lower difficulty) and thus allow players to utilize strategies that power through the encounters that mostly don't work on higher difficulties, thus helping next to nothing when trying to learn how to do the encounter

In my experience from older games difficulty settings for challenging instanced content are wasted development potential that would be much better spent in creating new content that helps players gain the skill necessary to survive in a variety of more difficult content, with the added benefit of producing more varied content at the same time.

You just killed your argument. You’re saying that players running a scaled down version of current raids won’t help to develop the skills necessary to run harder mode raids... But you think that easier-difficulty-than raids (aka Strikes) will somehow prepare players better for actual raids?

It’s like taking a player who only zergs in wvw and dropping them on a competitive spvp team... That’s also like saying someone should practice the guitar so they can do better at the piano.

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@gateless gate.8406 said:I really have no idea.

Please, please tell me how killing an unrelated boss, with different mechanics, in a different setting/instance, will help a player learn the existing raid bosses? Or help PUG commanders find 10-man quickness/alacrity faster?

It'll help players get better working in a group and performing mechanics. When they get used to strikes, raids will be easier for them.

That being said, Strikes might not be intended as a learning environment to get into raids. They might be intended to replace raids altogether as the game's 10-man content. That's my guess, personally.

They specifically stated that it was intended to be a stepping stone into raids; not their replacement.

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@Swagger.1459 said:You just killed your argument. You’re saying that players running a scaled down version of current raids won’t help to develop the skills necessary to run harder mode raids... But you think that easier-difficulty-than raids (aka Strikes) will somehow prepare players better for actual raids?

It’s like taking a player who only zergs in wvw and dropping them on a competitive spvp team... That’s also like saying someone should practice the guitar so they can do better at the piano.No. It's learning the basics of how to work as a team or how to recognise and react to mechanics. It's polishing the basic skills you need in all raid encounters rather than just learning a complex choreography without knowing why it was designed that way.

It's the difference between learning your trade or just learning to mimick somebody's workflow without understanding why they are doing it that way.

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@Rasimir.6239 said:

@Swagger.1459 said:You just killed your argument. You’re saying that players running a scaled down version of current raids won’t help to develop the skills necessary to run harder mode raids... But you think that easier-difficulty-than raids (aka Strikes) will somehow prepare players better for actual raids?

It’s like taking a player who only zergs in wvw and dropping them on a competitive spvp team... That’s also like saying someone should practice the guitar so they can do better at the piano.No. It's learning the basics of how to work as a team or how to recognise and react to mechanics. It's polishing the basic skills you need in all raid encounters rather than just learning a complex choreography without knowing why it was designed that way.

It's the difference between learning your trade or just learning to mimick somebody's workflow without understanding why they are doing it that way.

First you say...

“lower difficulty settings are more forgiving towards player errors (or they wouldn't be lower difficulty) and thus allow players to utilize strategies that power through the encounters that mostly don't work on higher difficulties, thus helping next to nothing when trying to learn how to do the encounter”

But then you are saying those lower difficulty Strikes (because they will not be as tough as raids) will...

“It's learning the basics of how to work as a team or how to recognise and react to mechanics. It's polishing the basic skills you need in all raid encounters rather than just learning a complex choreography without knowing why it was designed that way.”

Like players won’t be “learning the basics of how to work as a team or how to recognise and react to mechanics. It's polishing the basic skills you need” by doing the actual raids at a lower setting, and thus get more comfortable, confident and feel better at higher difficulty... No-no, only the lower difficulty and lower demanding “easier-mode-pseudo-raid” Strikes will accomplish that...

You’re really not making any sense or helping your argument here.

Edit- And I’m going to reiterate...

Strikes are a “stepping stone” to raids. They will essentially be just like an “easier mode” raid. But somehow mentally you feel that doing the actual raid, and learning every element and boss about those current raids, on a easier setting, which will be comparable to doing Strikes, will not be beneficial... However, Strikes, that will be comparable to easier mode raids, but not the actual raids, will magically be beneficial...

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@"Swagger.1459" said:However, Strikes, that will be comparable to easier mode raids, but not the actual raids, will magically be beneficial...

That's you assuming. You have absolutely no idea how strikes will get implemented. Not to mention that starting from scratch allows for a lot more freedom in developing and creating content with certain goals in mind.

Fractals were originally meant to introduce players to more challenging content. Now go take a look how similar fractals and raids are, especially lower tier fractals.

That's pretty much the amount of distance you can assume between raids and strikes. So no, strikes and "easy" mode raids could be miles appart design and implementation wise. Since we don't know at this point, everything else is pure speculation.

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Well, from the gameplay that they shown on the stream during the announcment I seen a big ice thing being bashed by some players and red circles appearing randomly(?) in the area so it can KINDA resemble a raid boss like MO or something, so basically bosses what you need to hit till it dies, but I doubt the difficulty of it will come near any raid because in raids mechanics are somewhat important too, and each boss has unique mechanics so, we still get back to the thing that this will be just a worldboss kind of thing for 10 man, or that snowy mini dungeon from last year.

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@Swagger.1459 said:Why invest resources in new 10 person content instead of putting that time and money into difficulty settings for current raids?

Not like players haven't been asking for years, and it would certainly help fight some of the toxic culture that raid designs have fostered against newer raiders and those not as “twitch” inclined.... Confused as to this decision, and the team is certainly not doing “right” for the player base here.

Edit- To put this into perspective, Raids were introduced in 2015 and the team hasn’t done anything that makes Raids more inclusive to more players. And I’m not personally saying this, but I can guarantee that players are still thinking “The devs don’t care or listen to our feedback.”

And yes, I have my full set of medium legendary raid armor already.

I have 100% interest in strikes, and still near like 0% interest in raids. I mean maybe this would change overtime, I did the first few wings but they really aren't that entertaining in the overall scheme. So Im glad we have a new mode, they murdered dungeons for fractals and hardly give any cadence to fractals it feels like while raids having been the new kid on the block has at least development going into it. (My main man WvW is suffer'n, events are nice and all but it only is good when they are actually going. Currently they are not so its not really bringing anything to the mode.)

Im fine with raiders staying in their corner, I really don't have much interest in them growing or gaining momentum. But who knows strikes might give you way more raiders as that is their intended purpose. To get people used to mechanics, playstyles and ect (Probs won't work but we shall see.)

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@"gateless gate.8406" said:I really have no idea.

Please, please tell me how killing an unrelated boss, with different mechanics, in a different setting/instance, will help a player learn the existing raid bosses? Or help PUG commanders find 10-man quickness/alacrity faster?

It'll help players get better working in a group and performing mechanics. When they get used to strikes, raids will be easier for them.

That being said, Strikes might not be intended as a learning environment to get into raids. They might be intended to replace raids altogether as the game's 10-man content. That's my guess, personally.

They specifically stated that it was intended to be a stepping stone into raids; not their replacement.

Raid participation isn't low simply because raids are not easy enough/the playerbase is not skillful enough. Most of the current raids are already very easy (usually only the final bosses of each raid wing are difficult/require significant group coordination), so there is something else standing in the way.

Corporations say many, many things. Not even close to all of them are true. Many are intended as "masking" statements that sound plausible enough (strikes could indeed be intended or meant as a stepping stone -- it's not a totally absurd statement, just mostly absurd), but in truth skirt around or distract from the more upsetting truth/plan.

See the recent "a future expansion isn't off the table" comment. Yes, it isn't off the table, just as almost anything isn't off the table. But it's more than likely not in development. If the company stated as such, that would likely have a negative effect on player happiness/game marketability, so instead they respond with an answer that sounds better yet isn't truly a lie. This is how the vast majority of corporations strategize their public statements. It's not recommended to take them as plainly true.

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@Swagger.1459 said:

@Swagger.1459 said:You just killed your argument. You’re saying that players running a scaled down version of current raids won’t help to develop the skills necessary to run harder mode raids... But you think that easier-difficulty-than raids (aka Strikes) will somehow prepare players better for actual raids?

It’s like taking a player who only zergs in wvw and dropping them on a competitive spvp team... That’s also like saying someone should practice the guitar so they can do better at the piano.No. It's learning the basics of how to work as a team or how to recognise and react to mechanics. It's polishing the basic skills you need in all raid encounters rather than just learning a complex choreography without knowing why it was designed that way.

It's the difference between learning your trade or just learning to mimick somebody's workflow without understanding why they are doing it that way.

First you say...

“lower difficulty settings are more forgiving towards player errors (or they wouldn't be lower difficulty) and thus allow players to utilize strategies that power through the encounters that mostly don't work on higher difficulties, thus helping next to nothing when trying to learn how to do the encounter”

But then you are saying those lower difficulty Strikes (because they will not be as tough as raids) will...

“It's learning the basics of how to work as a team or how to recognise and react to mechanics. It's polishing the basic skills you need in all raid encounters rather than just learning a complex choreography without knowing why it was designed that way.”

Like players won’t be “learning the basics of how to work as a team or how to recognise and react to mechanics. It's polishing the basic skills you need” by doing the actual raids at a lower setting, and thus get more comfortable, confident and feel better at higher difficulty... No-no, only the lower difficulty and lower demanding “easier-mode-pseudo-raid” Strikes will accomplish that...

You’re really not making any sense or helping your argument here.

Edit- And I’m going to reiterate...

Strikes are a “stepping stone” to raids. They will essentially be just like an “easier mode” raid. But somehow mentally you feel that doing the actual raid, and learning every element and boss about those current raids, on a easier setting, which will be comparable to doing Strikes, will not be beneficial... However, Strikes, that will be comparable to easier mode raids, but not the actual raids, will magically be beneficial...

Let me us your own analogy with the guitar. In order to play the guitar, we are going to say you need the following skills:

  1. Know how to tune the guitar
  2. Know how read sheet music
  3. Know how to play a chord

Handing someone who has never played guitar before the sheet music for "Mary had a little lamb" is not going to help them learn "through the fire and the flames" because they're going to be just as clueless. It doesnt matter if it's easier. The average gw2 player does not know the elementary basics of instanced content. In other words mary had a little lamb is still too complicated because it assumes you know the fundamentals. Sure they can make it so that if you are able to play 2 random notes on the guitar you have "played" Mary had a little lamb but that does not teach people how to get into raids. Players still wouldnt know:

  1. What their traits do
  2. How to stack
  3. What the defiance bar is
  4. How to dodge efficiently

Yes, we are making an assumption that strikes will teach people these things in isolation with an encounter specifically built to do so. It's likely wishful thinking since anets track record about teaching players their game has been god awful but that is what "stepping stone into raids" means to me. A specific encounter that tells you, "this boss has a mechanic called the break bar. these highlighted skills will deplete the break bar. The boss will wipe the group if the break bar is not broken. If you break it, deal massive bonus damage to the boss." Sure you can take vg, remove every mechanic and only keep the break bar. Is that really vg anymore?

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