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Raids difficulty scaling.


Mukizo.1269

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Hello guys. Before strike missions got released I actually liked the idea of it. However, when it got released I quickly lost interest to it because of the rewards etc, it left me wondering "Why dont they just add scaling to raids?" Like in other mmorpgs there is scaling to raids, kinda like with fractals in gw2, t1, t2, t3, t4 and cms. Wouldnt it be cool with scaling in raids too? 5 lvls of difficulty with different tiers of rewards. This way everyone can get into raids and eventually raids will be much more populated.

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As a system to "ease" people into raiding, scaling would have made a lot more sense than strike missions. Despite what the more vocal members of this subforum would have you believe, that has been proven time and again in other games.

Unfortunately, it is a discussion that is almost impossible to have in a sane and logical manner on these subforums. Nothing brings the torches and pitchforks out faster than the word scaling does here.

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@"Blaeys.3102" said:As a system to "ease" people into raiding, scaling would have made a lot more sense than strike missions. Despite what the more vocal members of this subforum would have you believe, that has been proven time and again in other games.

Unfortunately, it is a discussion that is almost impossible to have in a sane and logical manner on these subforums. Nothing brings the torches and pitchforks out faster than the word scaling does here.

Not true. In the end every reasonable member of the past discussions couldn't care less about easy mode raids unless two conditions would be met:

  1. Proper balancing of rewards so that you don't gift too much raid rewards when focussing on the easy mode.
  2. Cutting resources from actual raid development in favor of creating the easy modes. This point could be disregarded by now as it seems that raids are kind of abandoned.

We were far beyond your infamous allegations as those you mentioned were only a handful of people that posted repetitively.

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@Vinceman.4572 said:

@"Blaeys.3102" said:As a system to "ease" people into raiding, scaling would have made a lot more sense than strike missions. Despite what the more vocal members of this subforum would have you believe, that has been proven time and again in other games.

Unfortunately, it is a discussion that is almost impossible to have in a sane and logical manner on these subforums. Nothing brings the torches and pitchforks out faster than the word scaling does here.

Not true. In the end every reasonable member of the past discussions couldn't care less about easy mode raids unless two conditions would be met:
  1. Proper balancing of rewards so that you don't gift too much raid rewards when focussing on the easy mode.
  2. Cutting resources from actual raid development in favor of creating the easy modes. This point could be disregarded by now as it seems that raids are kind of abandoned.

We were far beyond your infamous allegations as those you mentioned were only a handful of people that posted repetitively.

Raids don't have to be abandoned - or dead - but taking the limited resources available and using them on Strike Missions in the hope that they would create the bridge to raiding is very shortsighted. Those are the very resources that should have been used to create raid difficulty tiers, which in turn would bring more people into raids (or, alternatively, move the raid team to developing hard mode versions of the strike missions - which I think would be a much better path moving forward - hard core strikes seem more sustainable and could offer the hardcore content desired by many). Even if the people coming into easy modes never stepped foot into the harder versions, it would have created a larger audience for the mode, justifying continued investment.

I also agree with your point about lesser reward for easy mode - that is just common sense.

The point is, raids as they are now are unsustainable - and strike missions in their current form will do absolutely nothing to change that. They don't have the population to justify healthy development (they have more or less admitted this in the recent dev blog). Move the resources from strike missions to easy mode development (or, even better, vice versa) and you just might - even if people never advance past the easier mode. That is pretty much the only way you will ever get enough people into the game mode to justify real developer attention (whether it be on raids or on strikes - they should pick one and then focus there - using difficulty tiers to keep the population high enough to justify dev time).

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It's not the difficulty of raids that's the problem - it's the time spent doing it. As we all know, majority of GW2 players are the most casuals of casuals - who mostly only play for a few hours a week and thus would not have enough time to learn and be better playing the game. A player that wants to play a relaxing 2 hours of Guild Wars 2 would probably spend those hours doing their dailies, some world bosses, home instance gathering, and playing barbie with their characters.

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Right now I'll be more interested in some scaling for Strike Missions, the Grothmar one specifically is such a joke that puzzles me why it was added as a "bridge" to Raids, while at best it's a "bridge" for the first instance of Heart of Thorns. Or maybe a bridge for Ascalonian Catacombs.

@Blaeys.3102 said:Move the resources from strike missions to easy mode development

Right, so spend resources and time creating content that very few will actually play. Strike Missions, if nothing else, prove how many players will be interested in an easier mode for Raids. The easier strikes of course, not the Boneskinner. A player that still doesn't play the Grothmar Strike will never get into an easy Raid, that's like the bottom of the barrel, and the maximum number of players that will join instanced content.

At the very least the later Strikes are more exciting content, maybe not a true replacement for Raids, but at least it's content that has some sound mechanics and is not boring to play. Now I'd agree with you, if all Strikes were like the Grothmar one, then yes they'd better spend their time creating an easy mode for Raids instead. But Strikes have improved and changed considerably which gives hope for their future.

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@Vinceman.4572 said:

@"Blaeys.3102" said:As a system to "ease" people into raiding, scaling would have made a lot more sense than strike missions. Despite what the more vocal members of this subforum would have you believe, that has been proven time and again in other games.

Unfortunately, it is a discussion that is almost impossible to have in a sane and logical manner on these subforums. Nothing brings the torches and pitchforks out faster than the word scaling does here.

Not true. In the end every reasonable member of the past discussions couldn't care less about easy mode raids unless two conditions would be met:
  1. Proper balancing of rewards so that you don't gift too much raid rewards when focussing on the easy mode.
  2. Cutting resources from actual raid development in favor of creating the easy modes. This point could be disregarded by now as it seems that raids are kind of abandoned.

We were far beyond your infamous allegations as those you mentioned were only a handful of people that posted repetitively.Actually, he does have a point, as the "proper balancing of rewards" was something both sides of the discussion never could agree upon. It practically always funnily ended up as raiders making sure easy mode won't be rewarding enough to make people interested in it, or make it stand on its own. In fact, it was quite common to mention that "easy mode is okay, as long as there will be
no
rewards". Which obviously had a tendency of killing any sort of
reasonable
discussion on the issue.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"Blaeys.3102" said:As a system to "ease" people into raiding, scaling would have made a lot more sense than strike missions. Despite what the more vocal members of this subforum would have you believe, that has been proven time and again in other games.

Unfortunately, it is a discussion that is almost impossible to have in a sane and logical manner on these subforums. Nothing brings the torches and pitchforks out faster than the word scaling does here.

Not true. In the end every reasonable member of the past discussions couldn't care less about easy mode raids unless two conditions would be met:
  1. Proper balancing of rewards so that you don't gift too much raid rewards when focussing on the easy mode.
  2. Cutting resources from actual raid development in favor of creating the easy modes. This point could be disregarded by now as it seems that raids are kind of abandoned.

We were far beyond your infamous allegations as those you mentioned were only a handful of people that posted repetitively.Actually, he does have a point, as the "proper balancing of rewards" was something both sides of the discussion never could agree upon. It practically always funnily ended up as raiders making sure easy mode won't be rewarding enough to make people interested in it, or make it stand on its own. In fact, it was quite common to mention that "easy mode is okay, as long as there will be
no
rewards". Which obviously had a tendency of killing any sort of
reasonable
discussion on the issue.

Yes because the alternative of "Give the same rewards only have them take longer to acquire" was so much better and was a good basis for any sort of reasonable discussion.

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"Blaeys.3102" said:As a system to "ease" people into raiding, scaling would have made a lot more sense than strike missions. Despite what the more vocal members of this subforum would have you believe, that has been proven time and again in other games.

Unfortunately, it is a discussion that is almost impossible to have in a sane and logical manner on these subforums. Nothing brings the torches and pitchforks out faster than the word scaling does here.

Not true. In the end every reasonable member of the past discussions couldn't care less about easy mode raids unless two conditions would be met:
  1. Proper balancing of rewards so that you don't gift too much raid rewards when focussing on the easy mode.
  2. Cutting resources from actual raid development in favor of creating the easy modes. This point could be disregarded by now as it seems that raids are kind of abandoned.

We were far beyond your infamous allegations as those you mentioned were only a handful of people that posted repetitively.Actually, he does have a point, as the "proper balancing of rewards" was something both sides of the discussion never could agree upon. It practically always funnily ended up as raiders making sure easy mode won't be rewarding enough to make people interested in it, or make it stand on its own. In fact, it was quite common to mention that "easy mode is okay, as long as there will be
no
rewards". Which obviously had a tendency of killing any sort of
reasonable
discussion on the issue.

Yes because the alternative of "Give the same rewards only have them take longer to acquire" was so much better and was a good basis for any sort of
reasonable
discussion.Well, yeah, it
is
way better than intentionally setting up a mode to fail by making sure noone playing it will get rewarded enough to even think about playing it more than once.
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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"Blaeys.3102" said:As a system to "ease" people into raiding, scaling would have made a lot more sense than strike missions. Despite what the more vocal members of this subforum would have you believe, that has been proven time and again in other games.

Unfortunately, it is a discussion that is almost impossible to have in a sane and logical manner on these subforums. Nothing brings the torches and pitchforks out faster than the word scaling does here.

Not true. In the end every reasonable member of the past discussions couldn't care less about easy mode raids unless two conditions would be met:
  1. Proper balancing of rewards so that you don't gift too much raid rewards when focussing on the easy mode.
  2. Cutting resources from actual raid development in favor of creating the easy modes. This point could be disregarded by now as it seems that raids are kind of abandoned.

We were far beyond your infamous allegations as those you mentioned were only a handful of people that posted repetitively.Actually, he does have a point, as the "proper balancing of rewards" was something both sides of the discussion never could agree upon. It practically always funnily ended up as raiders making sure easy mode won't be rewarding enough to make people interested in it, or make it stand on its own. In fact, it was quite common to mention that "easy mode is okay, as long as there will be
no
rewards". Which obviously had a tendency of killing any sort of
reasonable
discussion on the issue.

Yes because the alternative of "Give the same rewards only have them take longer to acquire" was so much better and was a good basis for any sort of
reasonable
discussion.Well, yeah, it
is
way better than intentionally setting up a mode to fail by making sure noone playing it will get rewarded enough to even think about playing it more than once.

Tbh there were enough valid and well-thought reward ideas from both sides but while there were only few hardcore voices that blubbered "no, you can't have any access at all" the majority of the casual side was almost never satisfied with any suggestions and most often turned out to just have an easier access to raid rewards and that would totally foil normal mode reward balance.I don't want to go back to the discussion, it's pointless anyways, but the actual reward of a common raid boss is mediocre at best so easy mode rewards have to be way below that.Atm. I would prefer them developing easy modes because that would mean they stop designing those terrible strikes which not only miss to achieve the verbalized goal but are also cheap side content to please the remaining crowd that plays instanced content. All those bosses could have been interesting raid bosses, in a wing, with a lore and easy, normal + cm mode. The current situation is garbage at best.

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It looks like there are definitely points most of us agree on. The "zero reward" for easy mode argument we saw in previous threads was obviously a non-starter and trollish, but so were the arguments that all modes should reward the same. Obviously, extra effort deserves extra reward.

The most cogent argument against easy mode was the lack of developer resources - which is - at least partially - a moot point now that we have strike missions.

They need to pick one or the other - either raids or strikes - and abandon the other in favor of multiple difficulty modes. My vote would be for strikes simply because I think they would be able to get them out at a faster pace - and, if they dedicated current raiding resources to them, should look more like proper raid fights than what we have now. That said, I can see an argument for raids instead. They are more detailed.

As an aside - taking this path would allow them to integrate the hardcore experience better with the story and the rest of the game - possibly to the point where they might eventually extend hard mode development (again, with enhanced reward) to the actual story steps themselves. Scaleable content isn't just about making things easier - it should enrich almost every aspect of the game for everyone - bringing both more accessible AND more difficult content to the game at a faster pace. That is the goal here.

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@Linken.6345 said:OP you say the strikes rewards were a reason you dont do them, if you think easy mode raids would have better rewards think again.In that case this is simply not going to work longterm, and ultimately we will be left with neither easy mode/easy strikes, nor raids/harder strikes at all. I'm sure that will be a satisfying solution to everyone [/sarcasm]

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"Linken.6345" said:OP you say the strikes rewards were a reason you dont do them, if you think easy mode raids would have better rewards think again.In that case this is simply not going to work longterm, and ultimately we will be left with neither easy mode/easy strikes, nor raids/harder strikes at all. I'm sure that will be a satisfying solution to everyone [/sarcasm]

As a matter of fact, from a game health perspective when factoring for rewards and longevity, that might be better.

If you started handing out raid reward level rewards, and let's be clear, raid rewards are "poor" for raiders since they reward mostly ascended gear, which most veteran raiders have tons of and which can not be turned into gold/resources at an effective rate.

If you started handing out ascended gear to every player who simply stepped inside an "easy raid", the entire games balance and economy goes out the window. So yes, from that angle, it might be better to not have any of both. That's also the reason why Strikes have such "poor" loot. Imagine if the current strike missions had the same chance to hand out ascended to the entire player base as raids. You'd bomb the entire economy.

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@Cyninja.2954 said:

@"Linken.6345" said:OP you say the strikes rewards were a reason you dont do them, if you think easy mode raids would have better rewards think again.In that case this is simply not going to work longterm, and ultimately we will be left with neither easy mode/easy strikes, nor raids/harder strikes at all. I'm sure that will be a satisfying solution to everyone [/sarcasm]

As a matter of fact, from a game health perspective when factoring for rewards and longevity, that might be better.

If you started handing out raid reward level rewards, and let's be clear, raid rewards are "poor" for raiders since they reward mostly ascended gear, which most veteran raiders have tons of and which can not be turned into gold/resources at an effective rate.

If you started handing out ascended gear to every player who simply stepped inside an "easy raid", the entire games balance and economy goes out the window. So yes, from that angle, it might be better to not have any of both. That's also the reason why Strikes have such "poor" loot. Imagine if the current strike missions had the same chance to hand out ascended to the entire player base as raids. You'd bomb the entire economy.

You bring up a good point here.

As it pertains to rewards, here are my thoughts

  • first, the unique skins (weapons, minis and legendary armor) and titles from raid bosses should always be locked behind the harder modes of those fights. That is non-negotiable as far as Im concerned.

  • Likewise, the likelihood of ascended drops should always be higher in harder modes. The chances in easier modes should be in line with what we see from open world bosses.

  • As for magnetite shards, I think an argument can be made to have them drop (at a severely reduced rate - think 1/10th of what we see with the regular mode raids) from easy mode - but, again, they cannot be used to buy the unique skins if you haven't unlocked that skin in the harder modes - only the generic ascended gear. This retains the benefit of the harder mode, but gives people doing the easier modes another way to (very slowly) gain more ascended gear, letting them gear more characters for the harder modes themselves.

  • At the same time, it is probably worth enhancing the rewards from the hardest modes (which would be harder than what we have now - scaling needs to go both ways) - the goal being to retain the prestige of mastering the fights while addressing the population/impetus for dev support through stepping stone easy mode levels.

Again - this has to be about enhancing the game for everyone, even those hardcore players. The goal is to justify more resources for harder content, even if that means pairing it with lower difficulty modes to pump up the numbers.

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@Cyninja.2954 said:

@"Linken.6345" said:OP you say the strikes rewards were a reason you dont do them, if you think easy mode raids would have better rewards think again.In that case this is simply not going to work longterm, and ultimately we will be left with neither easy mode/easy strikes, nor raids/harder strikes at all. I'm sure that will be a satisfying solution to everyone [/sarcasm]

As a matter of fact, from a game health perspective when factoring for rewards and longevity, that might be better.

If you started handing out raid reward level rewards, and let's be clear, raid rewards are "poor" for raiders since they reward mostly ascended gear, which most veteran raiders have tons of and which can not be turned into gold/resources at an effective rate.

If you started handing out ascended gear to every player who simply stepped inside an "easy raid", the entire games balance and economy goes out the window. So yes, from that angle, it might be better to not have any of both. That's also the reason why Strikes have such "poor" loot. Imagine if the current strike missions had the same chance to hand out ascended to the entire player base as raids. You'd bomb the entire economy.If it's not possible to make a mode feel rewarding without "bombing the entire economy", then we have a deeper problem, with said economy.
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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"Linken.6345" said:OP you say the strikes rewards were a reason you dont do them, if you think easy mode raids would have better rewards think again.In that case this is simply not going to work longterm, and ultimately we will be left with neither easy mode/easy strikes, nor raids/harder strikes at all. I'm sure that will be a satisfying solution to everyone [/sarcasm]

As a matter of fact, from a game health perspective when factoring for rewards and longevity, that might be better.

If you started handing out raid reward level rewards, and let's be clear, raid rewards are "poor" for raiders since they reward mostly ascended gear, which most veteran raiders have tons of and which can not be turned into gold/resources at an effective rate.

If you started handing out ascended gear to every player who simply stepped inside an "easy raid", the entire games balance and economy goes out the window. So yes, from that angle, it might be better to not have any of both. That's also the reason why Strikes have such "poor" loot. Imagine if the current strike missions had the same chance to hand out ascended to the entire player base as raids. You'd bomb the entire economy.If it's not possible to make a mode feel rewarding without "bombing the entire economy", then we have a deeper problem, with said economy.

Yes we do, it's called no gear progression and no inflation for 8 years. Which is a boon and detriment in different areas. Reward scaling is in the detriment pile.

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@Blaeys.3102 said:

@"Linken.6345" said:OP you say the strikes rewards were a reason you dont do them, if you think easy mode raids would have better rewards think again.In that case this is simply not going to work longterm, and ultimately we will be left with neither easy mode/easy strikes, nor raids/harder strikes at all. I'm sure that will be a satisfying solution to everyone [/sarcasm]

As a matter of fact, from a game health perspective when factoring for rewards and longevity, that might be better.

If you started handing out raid reward level rewards, and let's be clear, raid rewards are "poor" for raiders since they reward mostly ascended gear, which most veteran raiders have tons of and which can not be turned into gold/resources at an effective rate.

If you started handing out ascended gear to every player who simply stepped inside an "easy raid", the entire games balance and economy goes out the window. So yes, from that angle, it might be better to not have any of both. That's also the reason why Strikes have such "poor" loot. Imagine if the current strike missions had the same chance to hand out ascended to the entire player base as raids. You'd bomb the entire economy.

You bring up a good point here.

As it pertains to rewards, here are my thoughts
  • first, the unique skins (weapons, minis and legendary armor) and titles from raid bosses should always be locked behind the harder modes of those fights. That is non-negotiable as far as Im concerned.
  • Likewise, the likelihood of ascended drops should always be higher in harder modes. The chances in easier modes should be in line with what we see from open world bosses.
  • As for magnetite shards, I think an argument can be made to have them drop (at a severely reduced rate - think 1/10th of what we see with the regular mode raids) from easy mode - but, again, they cannot be used to buy the unique skins if you haven't unlocked that skin in the harder modes - only the generic ascended gear. This retains the benefit of the harder mode, but gives people doing the easier modes another way to (very slowly) gain more ascended gear, letting them gear more characters for the harder modes themselves.
  • At the same time, it is probably worth enhancing the rewards from the hardest modes (which would be harder than what we have now - scaling needs to go both ways) - the goal being to retain the prestige of mastering the fights while addressing the population/impetus for dev support through stepping stone easy mode levels.

Again - this has to be about enhancing the game for everyone, even those hardcore players. The goal is to justify more resources for harder content, even if that means pairing it with lower difficulty modes to pump up the numbers.

Sure that could have worked, and given the knowledge we have now, versus 3 years ago, it might have made more sense to implement easy mode raids versus strikes. Might have, since strikes have their benefits over raids:

  • they are more closer story related
  • they are the "new" instanced content
  • the approach with strikes is radically different than with raids, aka auto grouping, less role heavy, shorter in fight and content (single boss)

From a design point it also made sense to try strikes. Similar how fractals took over from dungeons, with some success for some players and to the detriment of others.

One of the key arguments against easy mode raids back then was: the already low amount of resources would need to get split between easy mode and normal mode raids. Which is pretty much proven with the current status of strikes versus raids. The only thing in development, as far as we know as players, are strikes and no more raids. As such, replacing strikes with easy mode raids would have had the same effect: no new raids, rework of old content. Which is exactly what raiders where against.

All of that was before the big exodus with wing 5. Before the implementation of legendary armor via spvp and wvw (and also reward reworks). Before there was no new lure to do the new raid wings (let's face it, who cares about LD really?). Before the more heavy focus on monetization and gem store content via open world and living world story.

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@Cyninja.2954 said:One of the key arguments against easy mode raids back then was: the already low amount of resources would need to get split between easy mode and normal mode raids. Which is pretty much proven with the current status of strikes versus raids. The only thing in development, as far as we know as players, are strikes and no more raids. As such, replacing strikes with easy mode raids would have had the same effect: no new raids, rework of old content. Which is exactly what raiders where against.Actually, doing two difficulty versions of the same content is much less resource intensive than doing two different types of content. Anet being able to do raids and strikes together is far less probable than doing two parallel difficulty tiers of either strikes or raids.

And i don't think that Anet is unaware of this. Which makes their decision of going for strikes instead of easy mode raids not seem very optimistic for any further raid development.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:One of the key arguments against easy mode raids back then was: the already low amount of resources would need to get split between easy mode and normal mode raids. Which is pretty much proven with the current status of strikes versus raids. The only thing in development, as far as we know as players, are strikes and no more raids. As such, replacing strikes with easy mode raids would have had the same effect: no new raids, rework of old content. Which is exactly what raiders where against.Actually, doing two difficulty versions of the same content is much less resource intensive than doing two different types of content. Anet being able to do raids and strikes together is far less probable than doing two parallel difficulty tiers of
either
strikes
or
raids.

And i don't think that Anet is unaware of this. Which makes their decision of going for strikes instead of easy mode raids not seem very optimistic for any further raid development.

Oh absolutely, I doubt we will see any future raids at this point in time. That does not change the fact that the resources devoted to strikes are the same resources which would/could have been devoted to easy raids, without much room for normal raid development.

Now pair the fact that strikes share a lot of assets with living world content, and the resources for unique raid content, as all raids have been thus far, diminishes even further. Which basically proves what raiders were saying: there is not enough resources for both, easy and normal raids.

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@Cyninja.2954 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:One of the key arguments against easy mode raids back then was: the already low amount of resources would need to get split between easy mode and normal mode raids. Which is pretty much proven with the current status of strikes versus raids. The only thing in development, as far as we know as players, are strikes and no more raids. As such, replacing strikes with easy mode raids would have had the same effect: no new raids, rework of old content. Which is exactly what raiders where against.Actually, doing two difficulty versions of the same content is much less resource intensive than doing two different types of content. Anet being able to do raids and strikes together is far less probable than doing two parallel difficulty tiers of
either
strikes
or
raids.

And i don't think that Anet is unaware of this. Which makes their decision of going for strikes instead of easy mode raids not seem very optimistic for any further raid development.

Oh absolutely, I doubt we will see any future raids at this point in time. That does not change the fact that the resources devoted to strikes are the same resources which would/could have been devoted to easy raids, without much room for normal raid development.

Now pair the fact that strikes share a lot of assets with living world content, and the resources for unique raid content, as all raids have been thus far, diminishes even further. Which basically proves what raiders were saying: there is not enough resources for both, easy and normal raids.That's a bit more complicated. Remember, that easy mode would have shared practically all assets with normal raids. The difference would have been in scripting, and the fact it would have required separate balancing design. So, basically, instead of 9 months per raid wing, doing both modes together might have taken maybe 11 months.

I understand, that raiders thought that 9 months was already way too much, and extending it further would be unacceptable, but the end result was that instead of slightly lower raid release rates we'll now have no new raid wings whatsoever.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:One of the key arguments against easy mode raids back then was: the already low amount of resources would need to get split between easy mode and normal mode raids. Which is pretty much proven with the current status of strikes versus raids. The only thing in development, as far as we know as players, are strikes and no more raids. As such, replacing strikes with easy mode raids would have had the same effect: no new raids, rework of old content. Which is exactly what raiders where against.Actually, doing two difficulty versions of the same content is much less resource intensive than doing two different types of content. Anet being able to do raids and strikes together is far less probable than doing two parallel difficulty tiers of
either
strikes
or
raids.

And i don't think that Anet is unaware of this. Which makes their decision of going for strikes instead of easy mode raids not seem very optimistic for any further raid development.

Oh absolutely, I doubt we will see any future raids at this point in time. That does not change the fact that the resources devoted to strikes are the same resources which would/could have been devoted to easy raids, without much room for normal raid development.

Now pair the fact that strikes share a lot of assets with living world content, and the resources for unique raid content, as all raids have been thus far, diminishes even further. Which basically proves what raiders were saying: there is not enough resources for both, easy and normal raids.That's a bit more complicated. Remember, that easy mode would have shared practically all assets with normal raids. The difference would have been in scripting, and the fact it would have required separate balancing design. So, basically, instead of 9 months per raid wing, doing both modes together might have taken maybe 11 months.

I understand, that raiders thought that 9 months was already way too much, and extending it further would be unacceptable, but the end result was that instead of slightly lower raid release rates we'll now have
no
new raid wings whatsoever.

That's without factoring for the rework of the 7 raid wings present right? Which by your metric would have meant 14 months, you used 2 additional months per raid wing, of no new content. Even strikes to some extent keep some players entertained now. I know my raid static does them at least 1nce per week, as do the more casual raid guilds I am in.

Yes, had the decision been:No new content but we will devote all resources to easy raid wings and MAYBE add new raids 2 years down the road if enough players remain. The arguments for easy mode raids would have been potentially sound, and that remains a big multiple IFs.

But even here, strikes offer some vast advantages over easy mode raids.

We can debate the details as much as we want, and assume and calculate. The simple fact which remains is: there is not enough resources for normal raid development paired with an additional difficulty aimed at challenging instanced content (be it easy mode, strikes, ultra hard mode, or even fractals). That's quite evident by now and arguing with the power of hindsight will not change that.

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@Vinceman.4572 said:

@"Blaeys.3102" said:As a system to "ease" people into raiding, scaling would have made a lot more sense than strike missions. Despite what the more vocal members of this subforum would have you believe, that has been proven time and again in other games.

Unfortunately, it is a discussion that is almost impossible to have in a sane and logical manner on these subforums. Nothing brings the torches and pitchforks out faster than the word scaling does here.

Not true. In the end every reasonable member of the past discussions couldn't care less about easy mode raids unless two conditions would be met:
  1. Proper balancing of rewards so that you don't gift too much raid rewards when focussing on the easy mode.
  2. Cutting resources from actual raid development in favor of creating the easy modes. This point could be disregarded by now as it seems that raids are kind of abandoned.

We were far beyond your infamous allegations as those you mentioned were only a handful of people that posted repetitively.

Rewards should be less, maybe bosses drop 1 thing where 3 of those can be turned into 1 legendary insight.

Also, the best argument for splitting raids into easymode and hardmode, and the reason it is win-win for everyone, is that raids currently lack audience enough to fund their development. Splitting raids allows for the main body of gw2 players to enjoy them(they don't currently), as well as allows those who prefer harder raids to have their content better balanced for their enjoyment instead of striving for some medium by trying to fit 2 opposite crowds under the same umbrella.

As i said in another thread:

If they really wanted to make their core audience expand into raids, while also conserving the challenging content for those who would get bored out of their mind if there was no challenge, what they need to do is split raids into 2 modes. Casual and harder. This is the only way to ever have both audiences. And it may be the only way to secure the interest from the majority that will afford expanded raid content, which could be exactly what the elitists want more of. So it might ultimately be a win win scenario. If raids were easy enough that you could form lfg groups for it and not die too much unless you got a really kitten group, i guarantee you people would farm them, including myself. Rewards could be half of what current raids awards are, but i implore them to not change the rewards to weaker ones and make a mistake like wow did, just make it slower to get things in casual raids, and give titles and other rewards for those doing the real hard raids, but without a split they will never engage their core gw2 audience in the elitism infested endgame. They cannot cater to both audiences at the same time, and the whole game is engineering to attract relaxed/casual/friendly people so they will never get a large elitist community. Fashion wars 2.

TLDR;

It is nonsense that there is not resources for developing easy modes, developing easy modes might be the only way to secure enough players to fund development of not only easy mode but more raid content. There simply aren't enough players for raid content now to expand it that much.

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@"Crackmonster.2790" said:It is nonsense that there is not resources for developing easy modes, developing easy modes might be the only way to secure enough players to fund development of not only easy mode but more raid content. There simply aren't enough players for raid content now to expand it that much.

You can say it's the other way around too though. There aren't enough players for raid content because it's abandoned content. The thing is, when Raids were new and shinny they had a good population. And by good I mean Arenanet themselves said that they were surprised at how popular Raids were. Now, after Path of Fire they switched their arguments and instead of "we are surprised at how good Raid participation is!" it became "not enough players are raiding to support it". This means that the Path of Fire raids weren't good, their rewards, their difficulty, their content release pace were all bad, leading to less players enjoying them.

We have developer confirmation that Raids were doing fine during Heart of Thorns, so saying that there weren't enough players interested in Raids in GW2 is actually false. There was a very good audience for them, when the rewards were good, when the release cadence was fine, when the difficulty wasn't all over place. Slower and slower releases, boring end rewards, seriously fluctuating difficulty in bosses were the downfall of Raids.

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