Raids need to be the way more profitable

[Zenix.6198]

So according to Gw2 Efficiency, which is not the be-all-end-all of sources, but still the best we have available:

Not even 5% of registered users have actually killed Qadim "2" (in Wing 7).Dhuum has been done by ~7% of the playerbase and Qadim "1" (Wing 6) has been done by ~5.5%.

Obviously its only for registered users....but considering statistical projection (which Efficiency provides a good enough sample size for), It probably draws a pretty realistic picture for the entire playerbase.

Anyhow, the point to this is, that raids are played by a very, very small percentage of the community.Personally I think this can be "improved on" by making Raids ACTUALLY profitable. Like a genuinely good gold farm.Generally speaking, people in this game go absolutely mad on open world farms.Dragonfall, SW or old Istan are very popular when it comes to gold per hour farms. And people don't really do them, because they are particularly fun, but because its good gold with minimum effort. Like those farms award between 20 and 25 g per hour.

To be fair, Raids ARE better for g/h, but its very disproportionate to the amount of effort it involves.The general consensus from what I have seen, suggests that Raids award ~30ish g/h if you dont wipe and clear each boss/encounter in ~5ish minutes.And that actually is a pretty high standard for uninformed or non-hardcore players. (Not bashing on anybodies preferences here; this is a perfectly acceptable way to play the game).
Especially If you are not part of a raiding static or guild and have to do it in a "less optimized" environment (basically meaning PuGs).

Personally I have raided quite a bit in the past (>200 LIs) as well, but have stopped doing so shortly after wing 5's release.And thats mainly because the effort-input to reward-output ratio is simply not good enough.I still run daily T4s. And not because I think they are particularly fun, but because they are an enjoyable gold-farm.Personally, it comes down to a basic utility function to me.Therefor, Raids should be dramatically more profitable. The "hardest" content in the game should be the most profitable. Hands down. Even when pugging them.And that also means they should be more profitable even when you wipe a few times or encounters take longer.

If a player farms 20g/h for 2h a day for a week straight, they make about ~280 gold.And this might be radical, but personally I think, that raids should award double that. At least 40-50g per raidwing (which is about 1h even when going slow?).

If we are worried about gold inflation because of this, it's always possible to restrict it to some extend.Like "weekly" achievements (similar to dailies).Anet could just put 2 HoT + 2 PoF + the latest release in such a rotation.So we have 5 * 40-50 gold per week. And 200-250g for a 5 hour weekly (or even 7hours when going really slow) investment would certainly get me back to raiding.(As opposed to the 280 gold for 14 hours of investment).

[maddoctor.2738]

@"Zenix.6198" said:Not even 5% of registered users have actually killed Qadim "2" (in Wing 7).Dhuum has been done by ~7% of the playerbase and Qadim "1" (Wing 6) has been done by ~5.5%.

You can't compare the kill statistics of different Raid bosses because the total population of the game fluctuates.A way to see this is by using the episode completion achievements:

Daybreak: 49.230% / Hall of Chains: 7.225% or 14.67%A Star to Guide Us: 39.644% / Mythright Gambit: 5.632% or 14.2%War Eternal: 37.868% / The Key of Adhasim: 4.760% or 12.57%

As for the rewards, the old Heart of Thorns Raids are fine I think, in both participation and rewards. The problem with Path of Fire is the lack of incentive for their Raids. I've gone countless times to Spirit Vale to help newer guild members acquire their Legendary Armor, I see zero reason to get newer guild members to Hall of Chains. For a Ring? Why bother. I don't think there is a way to "save" Path of Fire raids at this point, even if you play with their rewards, but it would be a valuable lesson if they ever re-start Raids.

[Safandula.8723]

True, if u look at income of raids and ow farm, raids are just not worth it considering effort u need to put, compared to ow.

[HumanComplex.1648]

Obviously its only for registered users....but considering statistical projection (which Efficiency provides a good enough sample size for), It probably draws a pretty realistic picture for the entire playerbase.

It would only be representative of the type of player that would even have a registered account, which is probably a more serious player. So it may very well be less than 5%.I don't know, but I think there's a massive difference between has-completed and regularly-completes.

The money sinks for the raid demographic is legendary armor/trinkets. I think these aren't really gated by gold but by time and raid currency. Sure you need gold but that's not what's holding you back by the time you have the other stuff to craft it

Casuals are more attracted by gold because they don't have any yet and need it to progress faster, i.e buying resources off tp to level up crafting and crafting armor/weaps.

Once you start doing daily fractals, I personally think gold loses its sheen, sure you get gold from it but the real reason you do it is for gearing alts for raids/whatever.

Raid people that quit aren't going to come back if you throw more gold at them.

[Zenix.6198]

@HumanComplex.1648 said:

Obviously its only for registered users....but considering statistical projection (which Efficiency provides a good enough sample size for), It probably draws a pretty realistic picture for the entire playerbase.

It would only be representative of the type of player that would even have a registered account, which is probably a more serious player. So it may very well be less than 5%.I don't know, but I think there's a massive difference between has-completed and regularly-completes.

The money sinks for the raid demographic is legendary armor/trinkets. I think these aren't really gated by gold but by time and raid currency. Sure you need gold but that's not what's holding you back by the time you have the other stuff to craft it

Casuals are more attracted by gold because they don't have any yet and need it to progress faster, i.e buying resources off tp to level up crafting and crafting armor/weaps.

Once you start doing daily fractals, I personally think gold loses its sheen, sure you get gold from it but the real reason you do it is for gearing alts for raids/whatever.

Raid people that quit aren't going to come back if you throw more gold at them.

Sure, Gold doesnt matter that much to veterans. I can agree on that.But I don't think its just account progression why gold is so much more appealing to a broader mass of the game's population.Lots of them do it to craft legendaries or convert it to gems to buy new gemstore skins...which is a legitimate way to go about it when you dont want to spend real money.

So the goal of this idea is not to get old raiders to come back to the game necessarily.But make them more appealing to a broader mass of players and get NEW blood into the scene.If a casual player farms 20g / h in silverwastes (for whatever skin they want to unlock with it) and they hear, that raids are MORE efficient, even if they fail at it multiple times, I think that might spark a serious consideration.

Something like:Do i farm silverwastes for 5h to make 100g?Or do I clear 2 Raidwings for the same amount?And lets be honest, a 5h window to clear 2 wings is a more than generous time-investment to break even with the SW farm method.....Even with your average Pug-grp.

Cause if raids only are profitable (or at least beat other farms) in an optimized setting, were people have to invest heavily into it (time, ressources, social coordination etc.etc.) it's simply not appealing and they will stick with their guaranteed 20g / h farm.

[HumanComplex.1648]

more appealing to a broader mass of players and get NEW blood into the scene.

I think player attitudes towards gold shifts as they go through the content. Like when you are far away from raids and see the gold reward it might be enticing (and puts raids on your radar which is good and does its job). However, by the time you get there you're primary concern is how long it takes to find 9 other people in lfg and is that wait time worth the content on the other side of it. Not talking about vets of course.

I would say most people that want to do raids die on this hill. It's quite miserable forming your first pugs and (can be) miserable learning the content. I'm confident a difficulty scaling like fractals would solve both of these issues. If not, massively help raids have a fighting chance at a reasonable population. Raids are a step function in difficulty AND knowledge of the mechanics. Raids aren't bad once you learn them. The all-at-once nature of early raiding is what kills raids.

I personally think the man count also contributes to the weak numbers in raids since its harder to form a group, and makes the content more sensitive to population count and if it starts to die, makes it much harder to get off the ground again.

Like if there are 10k players peak across the game (I think steam reports 20k peak for eso which i think is much more popular than gw2?) and 1 percent peak that want to do raids, and the man count is 10 you can have a max of 10 groups running at peak. It would be less than this since you need the right mix of builds. If you double it, it's still only 20, at peak. The only option is to have a static and/or be toxic.

I would guess that Anet is probably not be keen on fiddling with the gold rewards of content because it's probably quite difficult to predict it will affect the economy (even if it is for a small portion of dedicated players). And the health of the economy mostly affects new/causal players, the ones you are trying to keep around long enough to play your end game content.

[Cyninja.2954]

@HumanComplex.1648 said:Like if there are 10k players peak across the game (I think steam reports 20k peak for eso which i think is much more popular than gw2?)

It's not, and never was.

There is raid discord servers with between 1k and 4k players on at a time. That's only raid players and also only players who actually make use of that server at the point in time (or at all).

Also steam only shows numbers for clients which are run through the steam client.

TL;DR:The steam numbers for ESO are meaningless, both for ESO activity as well as for GW2 activity.

[ParadoX.3124]

They should add a repeatable achievement like dungeons : three bosses killed : 10g or something

[Shadowmoon.7986]

Personally, I would prefer more raid exclusive rewards instead of more raw gold. Another legendary ring, or imo the best, raid exclusive mount skins that cost gold like the new warclaw mount skin. Even if it cost 800g per mount skin + a ton of LD and LI, I would feel more satisfied than currently of just swiping a credit card or getting lucking with my weekly lootbox.

[zealex.9410]

I would remove the cap on how many times you can do them for shit like their currencies (abjustments would need to he made for some items) so ppl can grind the raids for the cosmetic rewards but keep the gold and li on a weekly lock but increase said gold you make.

[Astralporing.1957]

@Zenix.6198 said:So the goal of this idea is not to get old raiders to come back to the game necessarily.But make them more appealing to a broader mass of players and get NEW blood into the scene.The problem with that idea is that raids are simply not appealing for a broader mass of players. Not because they are not rewarding enough, but because those players simply do not like this type of content.

Yes, you can get around it by offering those players that dislike raids rewards they would like, but i don;t think it's a good idea. You won't make those players like the content that way. You can at best make them do the content, while still disliking it (and probably not feeling all that good about the whole situation).

Notice, btw, that if a lot of players that don't like this type of content joined it for other reasons, and if they ended up significantly outnumbering the players the content was originally designed on, Anet would eventually start adjusting that content for those more numerous players (like it happened a few times already in SPvP and WvW). Not sure if that's the result you want.

[maxwelgm.4315]

To complement on other ideas posted here, I'd say that some of the appeal of gold/hour rewards in open world farms (and even fractals) is that the rewards are distributed continuously rather than only once. For example, you can log on for 30 mins only and do a couple events on your favorite meta map and still come out with something earned, and for each fractal you complete you gain a set of chests in case you have to leave.

In raids this would hardly work at all unless you gave disproportionate rewards for not doing anything (i.e the boss still not being dead). The content is much more flat in how rewards can be distributed which is of course because it's reminescent of content in older games. Nowadays diluted rewards across a longer time period are much more appealing than dropping fat coin on your head after great concentrated effort, and I would even argue that this is somewhat independent of how much more worthy that single fat coin is in comparison to your potential hours of diluted gain.

In short, giving players more gold/hour is not the only aspect of the psychology of gaming rewards, because MMO populations have a tendency to want value in their localized effort in taking small steps as much, if not even more than greater efforts that go unrewarded for long time spans. We already have real life for that I guess, hehe.

[Crackmonster.2790]

WIth the requirements of meta builds, almost no room for errors, in order words they are unforgiving and hard - needs practice, group of people and with it comes elitism, exclusive attitudes, attacking and criticizing others. Because of that, even if it were 2-3times as good a gold farm as whatever else, i'd still not set foot inside - it doesn't give me warm feelings of joy. Quite the opposite. This is not because i am a nub i'm raider for many years in mmo's, but i just no longer wanna bother with it i don't get much fun for it unless it's forgiving enough to enjoy the content and laugh at your mistakes. The Main reason people subject themselves to that is normally it's tied to the best items in game and thereby pseudo-forced, and only a small percentage of people genuinely raid because they like that hard challenging group content. Most people just wanna farm arpg style, keep plowing and plowing, and stay in the balanced zone where things still take effort and enough stuff happens to keep the mind occupied and optimizing, but things aren't overly hard and punishing either.

I think even if you make it as good a gold farm as anywhere else, it won't change much. People will choose a relaxed place to farm that gold, where they don't have to deal with elitist idiots.

[reddie.5861]

@"Zenix.6198" said:So according to Gw2 Efficiency, which is not the be-all-end-all of sources, but still the best we have available:

Not even 5% of registered users have actually killed Qadim "2" (in Wing 7).Dhuum has been done by ~7% of the playerbase and Qadim "1" (Wing 6) has been done by ~5.5%.

Obviously its only for registered users....but considering statistical projection (which Efficiency provides a good enough sample size for), It probably draws a pretty realistic picture for the entire playerbase.

Anyhow, the point to this is, that raids are played by a very, very small percentage of the community.Personally I think this can be "improved on" by making Raids ACTUALLY profitable. Like a genuinely good gold farm.Generally speaking, people in this game go absolutely mad on open world farms.Dragonfall, SW or old Istan are very popular when it comes to gold per hour farms. And people don't really do them, because they are particularly fun, but because its good gold with minimum effort. Like those farms award between 20 and 25 g per hour.

To be fair, Raids ARE better for g/h, but its very disproportionate to the amount of effort it involves.The general consensus from what I have seen, suggests that Raids award ~30ish g/h if you dont wipe and clear each boss/encounter in ~5ish minutes.And that actually is a pretty high standard for uninformed or non-hardcore players. (Not bashing on anybodies preferences here; this is a perfectly acceptable way to play the game).

Especially If you are not part of a raiding static or guild and have to do it in a "less optimized" environment (basically meaning PuGs).

Personally I have raided quite a bit in the past (>200 LIs) as well, but have stopped doing so shortly after wing 5's release.And thats mainly because the effort-input to reward-output ratio is simply not good enough.I still run daily T4s. And not because I think they are particularly fun, but because they are an enjoyable gold-farm.Personally, it comes down to a basic utility function to me.Therefor, Raids should be dramatically more profitable. The "hardest" content in the game should be the most profitable. Hands down. Even when pugging them.And that also means they should be more profitable even when you wipe a few times or encounters take longer.

If a player farms 20g/h for 2h a day for a week straight, they make about ~280 gold.And this might be radical, but personally I think, that raids should award double that. At least 40-50g per raidwing (which is about 1h even when going slow?).

If we are worried about gold inflation because of this, it's always possible to restrict it to some extend.Like "weekly" achievements (similar to dailies).Anet could just put 2 HoT + 2 PoF + the latest release in such a rotation.So we have 5 * 40-50 gold per week. And 200-250g for a 5 hour weekly (or even 7hours when going really slow) investment would certainly get me back to raiding.(As opposed to the 280 gold for 14 hours of investment).

are you out of ur mind?i dont even make 280g in 6 months time. why would raids not be profitable? maybe people are just not interested into HP punch bag?you guys need to realise when ur completely into PvE no game will ever please youre needs..

PvE is simply to simple no matter how u you put it its gonna be to simple.u need to add PvP to mix of PvE in order to make it interesting or just completely drop PvE and do PvP like gw2 splits it completely (not great but w/e)i never done any raid and my fractal lvl is like 14 or something but hey even if PvP or WvW would reward me 1000g a week or 0g a week i would still play it like i did before.

see u guys dont play cus u enjoy it u play to finish something, like a single player game u wanna end the game and get done with it that just doesnt work in a MMO.. but as far i can see in gw2 forums most pve people just play this game like a single player game they release 1 dungeon people run tru it and say MOAAAAAR CONTENT!!u dont need gold u dont need more content u need to find something u enjoy if u dont enjoy banging a HP punch bag dont do raids gold isnt a issue in gw2 u never need any gold ones u got exotics, ascended gear is just a plus and legendary is a ++ but needed? not really (well in pve yes i just realised fractals need resistance but w/e).

.<