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Raids difficulty scaling.


Mukizo.1269

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"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.

Fair points. I wasn't around back then so it is hard for me to respond to. All i can say is we can look at other games, say for example wow how they made different difficulties to engage a larger fraction of the population. And i can speak for my own person, and say that what i mentioned would make me interested, I just don't enjoy that serious committed performance environment like i used to.

Maybe at raid launch it was a lot of goodwill towards raids, and the people who played them were large fractions of the community so the elitism hadn't crystalized yet, but now that is has found its truer form in equilibrium we can see who is left.

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..., say for example wow how they made different difficulties to engage a larger fraction of the population.That was the intention. But the result was beyond their imagination. Speculations and warnings was ignored after announcement, since it was already decided and in motion. LFR was launched Dec/2009 :skull:. Population took a dive shortly after, face first.

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@Cyninja.2954 said: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.Now yes, although you should remember that the first suggestions for easy modes appeared before even the first wing was out. If they have done it after wings 1-3 (when they still had some raid population and resources, and only 3 wings to rework), we might have been now in a completely different situation. But no, that was obviously a bad idea then, even if the end result is exactly what some of us were saying would happen.

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.Yes, I do agree, that now is way too late to salvage anything out of raids. Too much time got wasted on putting heads in the sand then and trying to deny reality.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said: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.Now yes, although you should remember that the first suggestions for easy modes appeared before even the first wing was out. If they have done it after wings 1-3 (when they still had some raid population and resources, and only 3 wings to rework), we might have been now in a completely different situation. But no, that was
obviously
a bad idea then, even if the end result is exactly what some of us were saying would happen.

It made even less sense then. Raids have struggled with a long time frame for releases and were always manged by a small team. Extending release times for raids in the past could have very well caused the current issues earlier.

You can't just go:Oh we should have spent resources, which are not available, earlier. If raid developement had been delayed in the time frame you suggested, we would now be seeing wing 6 release with wing 7 being far off in the future.

But it's always nice to play the: I told you so, card on complex issues.

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said: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.Yes, I do agree, that
now
is way too late to salvage anything out of raids. Too much time got wasted on putting heads in the sand then and trying to deny reality.

Or it was to late 1 year ago when the decision was made to not release any further challenging content and thus drying out the hardcore player base and allowing them to leave for other games.

Denying reality is arguing that resources, which were never available, should have been spent on content. There was quite a few people arguing: sure, take resources from other parts of the game, like open world, if you want easy mode raids. The displeasure with that idea was rather huge too.

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@"Astralporing.1957" said:Yes, I do agree, that now is way too late to salvage anything out of raids. Too much time got wasted on putting heads in the sand then and trying to deny reality.

Raids used to be successful though as the developers themselves claimed.Maybe, the reason Raids aren't as popular has something to do with the game as a whole not being as popular? Maybe, I'm not so sure, that the game as a whole is losing players and participation is very low? Shouldn't that extend to Raids that have such a slow release pace? I mean the clues are all out there that the game isn't doing very hot, and hasn't been in some time, it was just obscured by the mount sales that inflated revenue results, so isn't it a consideration that Raids lost of a lot of players not because of Raids themselves but because the game as a whole is on a downwards spiral?When content takes so long to be released, it's up to the rest of the game to keep those players occupied. So I'm not really sure the "Failure of Raids" is the result of Raids alone.

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Raids are about as good as they always were. That part hasn't changed. Most of us accepted the fact that we can't expect all releases to equal the difficulty of Dhuum CM. There should be variety and all that. However, easier bosses require far less time to get all achievements done which in turn makes you crave new content almost instantly. It is a double-edged sword in the end. There need to be at least two wing releases per year to keep people busy. The most hardcore groups might prefer an even faster rate.

No amount of possible new raiders will ever make up for the those who already left due to a lack of new content and those who are going to leave soon.The lack of content is the real community killer. Something that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone since we have seen this happen multiple times already. Strikes will do about as much to save raids as Fractals did to save dungeons if they slow development even further in favour of Strikes.

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@Cyninja.2954 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said: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.Now yes, although you should remember that the first suggestions for easy modes appeared before even the first wing was out. If they have done it after wings 1-3 (when they still had some raid population and resources, and only 3 wings to rework), we might have been now in a completely different situation. But no, that was
obviously
a bad idea then, even if the end result is exactly what some of us were saying would happen.

It made even less sense then. Raids have struggled with a long time frame for releases and were always manged by a small team. Extending release times for raids in the past could have very well caused the current issues earlier.Possibly. Still, if there was a chance to fix the problem, it was then. Delaying it hoping it would fix itself on its own didn't make the issue go away. It just decreased the chances of it ever getting a fix.Frankly, if the situation was unfixable from the very beginning, then it would have been better for the devs to learn it earlier, and stop wasting resources on doomed content. And if it was fixable, then, again, it should have been done right away, without waiting for the situation to decay beyond the point of no return.

You can't just go:Oh we should have spent resources, which are not available, earlier. If raid developement had been delayed in the time frame you suggested, we would now be seeing wing 6 release with wing 7 being far off in the future.Again, possibly. And it's true that we don't know if making those changes would have resulted in having a chance of wing 8 even later on. We
do
know however that not doing anything caused the present situation, and raid abandonment.

But it's always nice to play the: I told you so, card on complex issues.Nope. In situation like that, when you have seen the train approaching from miles away, but noone was interested in listening, eventually watching it crash and burn is
not
satisfying. It's sad and depressing.

@Cyninja.2954 said: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.Yes, I do agree, that
now
is way too late to salvage anything out of raids. Too much time got wasted on putting heads in the sand then and trying to deny reality.

Or it was to late 1 year ago when the decision was made to not release any further challenging content and thus drying out the hardcore player base and allowing them to leave for other games.Yes, probably 1 year ago it was also already too late to do anything. They were already winding down on everything (like expansion), so with no solution prepared beforehand the chances of them actually being able to make any impactful changes were likely close to nil.

Denying reality is arguing that resources, which were never available, should have been spent on content. There was quite a few people arguing: sure, take resources from other parts of the game, like open world, if you want easy mode raids. The displeasure with that idea was rather huge too.Perhaps the resources to save raids should have been taken from raids. Or perhaps the whole idea should have been scrapped much earlier and those resources should have been dedicated to projects that had better future. Who knows. All we know is that, apparently, the resource investment they
did
didn't pay off.
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@Blaeys.3102 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).

What if the issue isn't just the difficulty?

Even with tiers, the whole concept of raids seem huge.The casual community is intimidated by these big boss after boss chains with their own stories, etc.

Strikes took bosses they already fought and told them to fight them again for some more loot and they all went "hey, we did that already, we can do it again!"

And then when you get raiders coming to the Strikes and then you have the Devs saying "Oh Strikes are nearly as hard raids now, the gaps really small" suddenly it is a confidence boost for the casuals.

Would raid tiers have done that? Sure.In theory fractals should do the same.But they don't because the casual players fear those game modes because they seem too challenging.

Strikes make sense in this scenario because it's goal is using the player's comfort zone to gradually challenge them until they are suddenly revealed to be ready for the stuff they were always worried about.

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@"maddoctor.2738" said: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.

Each Strike is supposed to be harder than the last, it's the illusion for players who are intimidated by fractals and raids to grow.

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I think most players in favor this idea that easy mode raids should have been introduced earlier, or now, or at the expense of other content should entertain 1 thought:

What if: a main part of the revenue of the game was/is coming from the hardcore dedicated fraction of the player base?

Not saying this is or was the case, though I have stated that I personally believe that players that are more invested are more likely to spend money (and no, I'm not saying only hardcore players can be invested), but what if losing the hardcore crowd actually has a significant impact on this games financial performance? What if aiming all resources at only casual players results in a far worse financial performance, leading into even less resources being available for the game? How would this assumption change past resource allocation desires and if true, what if challenging content had been slowed years earlier to potentially attract more players (many of which might not even be inclined to raid, no matter the difficulty)?

Obviously, in the current situation the game is in, we can only hope and pray that is not the case since new challenging content is all but dead at the moment (please don't bring up the promised fractal, that's hardly long term challenging content worth mentioning, also given the last few fractals, hopes are low this one will be any fun).

Overall the game has experienced a loss of players, and this is obviously felt the most in all more niche game modes, see pvp and wvw for example. This does not necessarily have to do with only the content. As a matter of fact, the content could have been perfectly fine, but due to the decline of players, might not warrant the same amount of attention as in the past.

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:All we know is that, apparently, the resource investment they
did
didn't pay off.

Like the investment in the Icebrood Saga for example? Now that we only have the open world and all other parts of the game are scrapped, we should've seen better results, no?Obviously, no. Expacs clearly are necessary - LS alone just can't carry this game. Which is why i still can't really understand Anet's decision to stop making them.

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