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Bobby Stein (dev) comment on Raid


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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"Asum.4960" said:It seems early Raids were completed by more people than LW at this point is. The drastic decrease in player population came with Wing 4, which was when content production first slow down to taking double the time, while at the same time being disappointingly easy to many, not warranting such wait times.

I think the major disappointment of Wing 4 was the lack of good rewards, the fact that it was the Underworld from GW1 but was really small (it should've been 3 Raid wings), 2 bosses and some in-between events. Other than that I believe W4 was more difficult than it should be for the first Raid in a new line, something that was made worse when players realized they had to beat the hardest content first before moving to the next parts of the legendary collection which is in every way or form completely backwards. Finally the promise of "faster releases" that led to the slowest release cadence for Raids was the final nail in the coffin of this content.

Don't you mean w5?

W4 was bastiont

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@yann.1946 said:Don't you mean w5?

W4 was bastiont

@Asum.4960 said:I believe you are referring to W5, which yes, took even longer along with a myriad of other issues, leading to drastic further decline.

woops. Yes I was talking about W5 not W4. I don't think W4 release was bad and although it took them long enough to release W5, there was a full expansion between them so I don't see that as such a big issue

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@yann.1946 said:Don't you mean w5?

W4 was bastiont

@Asum.4960 said:I believe you are referring to W5, which yes, took even longer along with a myriad of other issues, leading to drastic further decline.

woops. Yes I was talking about W5 not W4. I don't think W4 release was bad and although it took them long enough to release W5, there was a full expansion between them so I don't see that as such a big issue

I'm not saying Wing 4 was bad either, just that people expected more than the easiest Wing to date (at least bosses 1-3) cleared in a night after 8 months of wait, when previous Wings were 3-4 Months apart and more engaging.

It gave people both the impression that Raids would now take twice the time to come out as well as being dumped down in difficulty to increase accessability, which only caused many of the people already interested in Raids in the first place to leave, not sticking around another 9 months to wait for W5.Wing 4 was essentially the asked for easy mode for Raids, after double the waiting time, with the decent fights being the one time rewarded CM's.

Then they kind of overcompensated for W4's lack of difficulty with W5, and it all just became a mess of mixed signals.Releasing some really easy Raids like W4 and some really challenging ones like W5 would have been fine with a ~3 month cadence. They wouldn't have to need to cater to everyone, be it super hardcore or more casual raiders, with every release.Being let down after 9 months of waiting, with another chance for maybe more suitable content in another 9 months is bound to fail to retain a healthy and diverse playerbase though.

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@Asum.4960 said:

@yann.1946 said:Don't you mean w5?

W4 was bastiont

@Asum.4960 said:I believe you are referring to W5, which yes, took even longer along with a myriad of other issues, leading to drastic further decline.

woops. Yes I was talking about W5 not W4. I don't think W4 release was bad and although it took them long enough to release W5, there was a full expansion between them so I don't see that as such a big issue

I'm not saying Wing 4 was bad either, just that people expected more than the easiest Wing to date (at least bosses 1-3) cleared in a night after 8 months of wait, when previous Wings were 3-4 Months apart and more engaging.Then the problem was that they released the previous wings 3-4 months apart. Remember, that w4 was the first wing that ran its full development cycle in the clear. W1, W2 and W3 had parts of them done during HoT development. When W1 released, W2 and w3 were already partway done. That is the only reason the time between their releases was that short.And the difficulty case is not so clearcut as you make it to be. Truth is, the raiders were never in full agreement about what their wanted out of raids. For some, w5 was he desired difficulty, but many others preferred w1-3, and there were some that liked w4 the most.

It gave people both the impression that Raids would now take twice the time to come out as well as being dumped down in difficulty to increase accessability, which only caused many of the people already interested in Raids in the first place to leave, not sticking around another 9 months to wait for W5.Wing 4 was essentially the asked for easy mode for Raids, after double the waiting time, with the decent fights being the one time rewarded CM's.The visible drop in W5 popularity was not because people left. It happened, because many raiders that were still there simply refused to move on to w5, due to vastly increased difficulty. There were a lot of groups that were sticking to w1-w4 only. Some never moved on, some did the wing once but didn't try to include it in their weekly clears... the vote the raid community did silently, with their feet, was completely different than the loud opinions some of raiders were pushing on forums and reddit.

In the end, W4 was significantly more popular than w5. And w5 singlehandedly killed the popularity of all the wings that came after it.

Then they kind of overcompensated for W4's lack of difficulty with W5, and it all just became a mess of mixed signals.Yep, that was definitely bad. It was that difficulty jump that scared a lot of people away. But that only underscores the fact that it was w5, not w4, that was a problem.Releasing some really easy Raids like W4 and some really challenging ones like W5 would have been fine with a ~3 month cadence. They wouldn't have to need to cater to everyone, be it super hardcore or more casual raiders, with every release.They never had resources for 3 month cadence. That would have required 3 or 4 raid teams working in parallel. They had only one team.

That's the issue - for the whole time of existence of raids, raiders expected Anet to dedicate to them way more resources than the content population warranted. The only way Anet could have fulfilled those overblown expectations was if they were to switch to a game model centered around raids. But that would have cost them most of their casual playerbase, and that was way too much of a cost to satisfy what was only a minor part of the game community.

In the end, they probably would have been better off if they never started raids in the first place. They could have then introduced a bit of other types of more challenging content, but without the expectations that the name of "raids" carried with them.

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@"Astralporing.1957" said:

They never had resources for 3 month cadence. That would have required 3 or 4 raid teams working in parallel. They had only one team.

I, too, always suspected that this was the case. I think for how rich GW2 is as a player experience, there's a really small number of people at ANet wearing a large number of hats to make that happen. Interesting instanced content always takes quite a bit of design work as far as I can tell, and that would only be intensified when going for top-tier challenges like raids.

That's the issue - for the whole time of existence of raids, raiders expected Anet to dedicate to them way more resources than the content population warranted. The only way Anet could have fulfilled those overblown expectations was if they were to switch to a game model centered around raids. But that would have cost them most of their casual playerbase, and that was way too much of a cost to satisfy what was only a minor part of the game community.

In the end, they probably would have been better off if they never started raids in the first place. They could have then introduced a bit of other types of more challenging content, but without the expectations that the name of "raids" carried with them.

I also agree with this. Calling them 'raids' basically sentences that content to carrying similar expectations borne by 'raids' we've seen everywhere else. IMO, the only possible escape ANet could have used, after introducing them as 'raids', would be to demonstrate a radically unique design that somehow allowed raids to be cleared without some semblance of the trinity. I personally think that's almost impossible without making every single fight into the equivalent of an open-world boss: dodge mechanics for yourself, heal yourself when needed, try to poop out some boons for those closest to you when you can, but mostly just personal survival and personal dps rotation. Not really the team-play encounters raiders are looking for.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:They never had resources for 3 month cadence. That would have required 3 or 4 raid teams working in parallel. They had only one team.

They had at least 2 Raid teams during the initial development (or was it 3?). They could've released Raids faster, not every 3 months but a lot faster than the release cadence they ended up with, but the Raid team started releasing Fractals too. Not only did they cut the team size, but they gave the same team extra responsibility. I guess Fractals wasn't good enough to justify having their own team and they had to put them together.

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@voltaicbore.8012 said:

@"Astralporing.1957" said:

They never had resources for 3 month cadence. That would have required 3 or 4 raid teams working in parallel. They had only one team.

I, too, always suspected that this was the case. I think for how rich GW2 is as a player experience, there's a really small number of people at ANet wearing a large number of hats to make that happen. Interesting instanced content always takes quite a bit of design work as far as I can tell, and that would only be intensified when going for top-tier challenges like raids.

That's the issue - for the whole time of existence of raids, raiders expected Anet to dedicate to them way more resources than the content population warranted. The only way Anet could have fulfilled those overblown expectations was if they were to switch to a game model centered around raids. But that would have cost them most of their casual playerbase, and that was way too much of a cost to satisfy what was only a minor part of the game community.

In the end, they probably would have been better off if they never
started
raids in the first place. They could have then introduced a bit of other types of more challenging content, but without the expectations that the name of "raids" carried with them.

I also agree with this. Calling them 'raids' basically sentences that content to carrying similar expectations borne by 'raids' we've seen everywhere else. IMO, the only possible escape ANet could have used, after introducing them as 'raids', would be to demonstrate a radically unique design that somehow allowed raids to be cleared without some semblance of the trinity. I personally think that's almost impossible without making every single fight into the equivalent of an open-world boss: dodge mechanics for yourself, heal yourself when needed, try to poop out some boons for those closest to you when you can, but mostly just personal survival and personal dps rotation. Not really the team-play encounters raiders are looking for.

Actually you don't need the trinity to complete most raid encounters. The structure that's now used is mostly player generated.

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:They never had resources for 3 month cadence. That would have required 3 or 4 raid teams working in parallel. They had only one team.

They had at least 2 Raid teams during the initial development (or was it 3?).Did they? Was it revealed somehow relatively recently? Because up until PoF i heard people keep saying (based on several different dev quotes) that the initial dev team for raids had only
five people
. Until they got merged with fractal team anyway.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:They never had resources for 3 month cadence. That would have required 3 or 4 raid teams working in parallel. They had only one team.

They had at least 2 Raid teams during the initial development (or was it 3?).Did they? Was it revealed somehow relatively recently? Because up until PoF i heard people keep saying (based on several different dev quotes) that the initial dev team for raids had only
five people
. Until they got merged with fractal team anyway.

They had 5-6 people working on Salvation Pass and it took them about 4 months to release it

For Salvation Pass they only had 5-6 people working on it full time for 4 months, and they mostly worked on 2 raid releaseshttps://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/48zlyd/im_mike_obrien_here_with_gw2_dev_team_ama/d0nwad9/?context=10000

You can find the full Raids Team that worked on Forsaken Thicket (the first Raid) here:https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2_Raids_Teammakes sense to have multiple teams working on different wings at the same time, unless either the wiki or Crystal Reid were mistaken. Doesn't add up otherwise.Raid team introducing themselves:https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Raid-team-introductionsThere are 12 developers posting on that thread, clear confirmation there were 12 developers working on Raids, 5-6 worked on Salvation Pass. Do I need to go on?

But in the end it was always clear that 4 months are required for a Raid release (not 9) and something horrible happened along the way to more than double the release cadence.

edit: and checking the links of the developers that worked on Raids you can see what happened.Crystal Reid worked on Rising Flames and FlashpointJason Reynolds moved to the Living World team in 2018Tirzah Bauer worked on the maps of Path of FireOther developers of the team also provided a LOT of features to the game

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@Astralporing.1957 said:Then the problem was that they released the previous wings 3-4 months apart. Remember, that w4 was the first wing that ran its full development cycle in the clear. W1, W2 and W3 had parts of them done during HoT development. When W1 released, W2 and w3 were already partway done. That is the only reason the time between their releases was that short.And the difficulty case is not so clearcut as you make it to be. Truth is, the raiders were never in full agreement about what their wanted out of raids. For some, w5 was he desired difficulty, but many others preferred w1-3, and there were some that liked w4 the most.

The problem with a 9 month cadence being to slow to maintain a community was previous Wings being released at a more reasonable pace? I'm sorry but that makes less than no sense.

Of course not all players, raiders included, enjoy the same difficulty levels. That's why it's important to release content at a steady semi frequent pace.W5 too difficult for you? That's okay if in 3-6 months another Raid comes out. Waiting 9 months for something new every time to maybe get more suitable content isnt.

@Astralporing.1957 said:The visible drop in W5 popularity was not because people left. It happened, because many raiders that were still there simply refused to move on to w5, due to vastly increased difficulty. There were a lot of groups that were sticking to w1-w4 only. Some never moved on, some did the wing once but didn't try to include it in their weekly clears... the vote the raid community did silently, with their feet, was completely different than the loud opinions some of raiders were pushing on forums and reddit.

In the end, W4 was significantly more popular than w5. And w5 singlehandedly killed the popularity of all the wings that came after it.

Yes, some people left in the 8 months leading up to Wing 4, some with Wing 4, some left in the 9 months waiting time to W5, some left when Wing 5 was too hard for them, and some left due to the prospect of having to wait yet another 9 months for the next content drop.It wasn't just one thing.

Once again, releasing Wings catering to more casual audiences (Wing 4) or more hardcore audiences (Wing 5) is both fine, if is happens at a frequent enough pace that both audiences within that community still feel catered too. But that wasn't the case.

For the players who felt Wing 5 was too hard that meant 18 months of no new content. That's the issue. Not Wing 5's difficulty all on it's own.

@Astralporing.1957 said:Yep, that was definitely bad. It was that difficulty jump that scared a lot of people away. But that only underscores the fact that it was w5, not w4, that was a problem.

Again, I didn't say Wing 4 was a problem. Wing 4 with a lead up time of 8 months since the last content, with another 9 months to the next piece of content was a problem though.

@Astralporing.1957 said:They never had resources for 3 month cadence. That would have required 3 or 4 raid teams working in parallel. They had only one team.

That's the issue - for the whole time of existence of raids, raiders expected Anet to dedicate to them way more resources than the content population warranted. The only way Anet could have fulfilled those overblown expectations was if they were to switch to a game model centered around raids. But that would have cost them most of their casual playerbase, and that was way too much of a cost to satisfy what was only a minor part of the game community.

In the end, they probably would have been better off if they never started raids in the first place. They could have then introduced a bit of other types of more challenging content, but without the expectations that the name of "raids" carried with them.

I can't speak about what resources Anet did and did not have available, although we do know that they were working at 3? games at some point (of which all got cancelled), which seems like it would have been enough to properly support continuous growth across GW2's gamemodes instead, leading to more income than the 0 the other projects yielded, but hindsight is 20/20.

I also don't think a 3 month cadence would have been necessary, but 9 months is way too long. A Raid every half a year though doesn't seem like too much to ask for.

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@"Asum.4960" said:I also don't think a 3 month cadence would have been necessary, but 9 months is way too long. A Raid every half a year though doesn't seem like too much to ask for.

4-5 months was perfectly doable when the Raid team was developing only Raids, as the developers clearly said so. When they moved them to create all those other features we see and use of course the release cadence suffered. Raid developers created a LOT for this game, so they weren't exactly "Raid developers" alone, Anet didn't spare 5-6 people out of a 200 person team to work on releasing 1 Raid every 4-5 months. Maybe because they were the most talented of their developers and were needed to make all those things we take for granted, like squad markers and checkpoints in instances.

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@Asum.4960 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:Then the problem was that they released the previous wings 3-4 months apart. Remember, that w4 was the first wing that ran its full development cycle in the clear. W1, W2 and W3 had parts of them done during HoT development. When W1 released, W2 and w3 were already partway done. That is the only reason the time between their releases was that short.And the difficulty case is not so clearcut as you make it to be. Truth is, the raiders were never in full agreement about what their wanted out of raids. For some, w5 was he desired difficulty, but many others preferred w1-3, and there were some that liked w4 the most.

The problem with a 9 month cadence being to slow to maintain a community was previous Wings being released at a more reasonable pace? I'm sorry but that makes less than no sense.Yes. The problem with the previous, unsustainable cadence was that it set the wrong expectations. Expectations Anet simply couldn't fulfill without dedicating way more resources to raids than they were prepared to do.There was simply no way raiders would get that faster initial cadence longterm. So, setting the expectations right from the beginning, instead of raising the hopes up and then not being able to follow up on it
would
have been better.

Of course not all players, raiders included, enjoy the same difficulty levels. That's why it's important to release content at a steady semi frequent pace.W5 too difficult for you? That's okay if in 3-6 months another Raid comes out. Waiting 9 months for something new every time to maybe get more suitable content isnt.To justify dedicating enough resources to be able to do that, raids would have had to be way more popular than they ended up being even at their height.

@Astralporing.1957 said:The visible drop in W5 popularity was not because people left. It happened, because many raiders that were still there simply refused to move on to w5, due to vastly increased difficulty. There were a lot of groups that were sticking to w1-w4 only. Some never moved on, some did the wing once but didn't try to include it in their weekly clears... the vote the raid community did silently, with their feet, was completely different than the loud opinions some of raiders were pushing on forums and reddit.

In the end, W4 was significantly more popular than w5. And w5 singlehandedly killed the popularity of all the wings that came after it.

Yes, some people left in the 8 months leading up to Wing 4, some with Wing 4, some left in the 9 months waiting time to W5, some left when Wing 5 was too hard for them, and some left due to the prospect of having to wait yet another 9 months for the next content drop.It wasn't just one thing.The drop in raiding community in the time leading up to wing 4 was really insignificant. The main reason why w5 had a much lower population levels was
not
because people left. The people were still there, they just
didn't want to run w5
.

Once again, releasing Wings catering to more casual audiences (Wing 4) or more hardcore audiences (Wing 5) is both fine,
if
is happens at a frequent enough pace that both audiences within that community still feel catered too. But that wasn't the case.

For the players who felt Wing 5 was too hard that meant 18 months of no new content. That's the issue. Not Wing 5's difficulty all on it's own.Sure, but you're seeing it from the wrong side. If the difficulty of w5 was so high that a lot of players would have had to wait 18 months for new content (notice by the way, that w6, for those that preferred the w4 level of difficulty, was also a bit too high up there), then the solution would be to not introduce a wing of such difficulty at all. And limit appealing to the top players among the raiders to CMs only.

@Astralporing.1957 said:Yep, that was definitely bad. It was that difficulty jump that scared a lot of people away. But that only underscores the fact that it was w5, not w4, that was a problem.

Again, I didn't say Wing 4 was a problem. Wing 4 with a lead up time of 8 months since the last content, with another 9 months to the next piece of content was a problem though.Again, that was the result of how much resources Anet was willing to assign to raids. If Anet were to use more resources, they would have made sure to target raids to a much wider audience. Which would result in a much easier wings overall.

So, basically, you could get this level of difficulty every 9-10 months, or much easier wings faster. I would prefer the latter, but i am sure that a lot of raider community would get angry if that was the choice Anet made.

I know that there are raiders that fully expected to eat their cookie and stilll have it, but that was never truly an option.

I can't speak about what resources Anet did and did not have available, although we do know that they were working at 3? games at some point (of which all got cancelled), which seems like it would have been enough to properly support continuous growth across GW2's gamemodes instead, leading to more income than the 0 the other projects yielded, but hindsight is 20/20.Obviously we don't know anything specific, but from what we can intuit, it seems it wasn't the raid team that got raided for resources. It was the expansion team. So, no, even if Anet did not sink a lot of resources into projects that didn't pay out, it wouldn't have been the raids that would have profitted from it. We'd just have seen a third expansion year ago, instead of having to wait for it for another year or two from now. Which, obviously, would have made the overall game situatuion much better than it is now, but would not have changed anything for raids specifically.

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@yann.1946 said:It might just be more effecient to get raiders back into raids then it is to get non raiders into it.It depends on what exactly the goal is. Getting raiders back is indeed more efficient than trying to get new people into the current raids but if the goal is to get as many people as possible to play raids (or raid like content) then focusing on getting new players into it is a better way to achieve this goal than focusing on a miniscule part of the player base.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:Yes. The problem with the previous, unsustainable cadence was that it set the wrong expectations. Expectations Anet simply couldn't fulfill without dedicating way more resources to raids than they were prepared to do.There was simply no way raiders would get that faster initial cadence longterm. So, setting the expectations right from the beginning, instead of raising the hopes up and then not being able to follow up on it would have been better.

I personally started Raiding after W1-3 had already been released and due to having never Raided in a game before and thinking that content just wasn't for me had not at all payed attention to it or it's release cadence - so when I started to try out Raiding it was with zero expectations other than probably hating it due to being insanely difficult and full of "toxic elitists" and all those scary things I had heard from the fellow casual community to ward me away.I really just wanted to clear a single boss to unlock the masteries so I could earn Spirit Shards in HoT again and complete that part of the game just before PoF came out, as they were locked at that time.

While I did almost instantly fell in love with the friendly and welcoming Training Guild I found, as well as the content and actually way more interesting gameplay, what over time became very apparent though was that the content wasn't well supported and that 9 months of waiting times was very harsh on that part of the community overall (as well as my patience), both in terms of people just quitting due to lack of content, as well as due to large parts of the remainders becoming more and more elitist in their mastery of the little content they had available, with clearing that little content more and more efficiently with higher and higher requirements to do so being their only solace/way to keep the content fresh and engaging, rather than receiving a constant influx of new content serving as new jump in points for people to keep the community diverse and healthy - which made at least pugging a worse and worse experience, further serving to detract new players not knowing to search for guilds and trainings.

So no, the later release cadence was an issue even irregardless of any possible expectations and earlier set schedules.

If Raids had been 9 months apart from the get go, their playerbase would have simply dwindled and becoming more set in their restrictive ways way faster.

@Astralporing.1957 said:To justify dedicating enough resources to be able to do that, raids would have had to be way more popular than they ended up being even at their height.

Expecting more than 20-30% of the playerbase to clear hardcore endgame content such as Raids is beyond unreasonable though, that's a pretty incredible number.If Raids had debuted with <5% interest maybe I would buy that argument, but not being able to dedicate more than ~5-10 people out of a 250+ people company at the time to hardcore content that caught the interest of such a large part of the player base is silly.

Keep in mind, later LW episodes, being on a rapid decline as the game doesn't offer anything else since a year, have similar completion rates and are supported by what, 3-5 whole teams? Require much more effort and resources in writing, voice acting, map design etc., while staying relevant content much shorter.

Now one could argue that LW/that part of the community generates the vast majority of the revenue and that endgame content was insignificant, but looking at the revenue trend since hardcore was abandoned in favour of of LW, dropping by >25% in 2019 as more and more people got tired of waiting for other content, that doesn't seem to be true either.

@Astralporing.1957 said:Obviously we don't know anything specific, but from what we can intuit, it seems it wasn't the raid team that got raided for resources. It was the expansion team. So, no, even if Anet did not sink a lot of resources into projects that didn't pay out, it wouldn't have been the raids that would have profitted from it. We'd just have seen a third expansion year ago, instead of having to wait for it for another year or two from now. Which, obviously, would have made the overall game situatuion much better than it is now, but would not have changed anything for raids specifically.

Besides the raid team being eventually reallocated to replace other positions/being laid off, other teams like competitive and raids could have been bolstered instead while not working on an expansion.Also Fractals and Raids probably should have been part of any further expansion efforts like PoF and beyond.

Did OW expansion content like Serpent's Ire really contribute more to the expansion and longterm revenue than launching the expansion with endgame content like a Fractal and/or a Raid Wing (or at least some work done on a Raid Wing for a speedier release) included instead?

It can't possible take such a tremendous amount of effort to create such small and linear maps and 2-3 boss models as well as coming up with some mechanics for a Fractal/Raid, contributing hundreds of hours of repeatable content for years to some players, as opposed to the massive workload of something like a LW episode.The argument/excuse that Anet couldn't even spare the resources of ~5-10 people to cater to that entire audience just doesn't add up to me.It seems to me that Anet miscalculated/misread the statistics of most people playing LW and some of them just also enjoying Raids/Fractals etc., but those not being too important to retain them as players, while looking at 2019's revenue reports, as well as dwindling LW completion rates as people are leaving, seem to indicate that for a at least sizeable part of the community it was the other way around.Many just also happened to play LW while waiting for more substantial releases (Expansion, Fractal, Raid, Competitive/balance), while not caring much for the former, and that Anet shouldn't have put all their eggs into the one basket - even if it was possibly the best one to put at least some in.

I personally can't imagine the game being in a worse state, both population wise and finacially, if LW would have been ~4 Months apart instead of 3, with 2 Fractals in 2019 instead of 1, and another Fractal and Raid early to mid 2020 instead of none, by sparing a handful of people across those teams.

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@Tails.9372 said:

@yann.1946 said:It might just be more effecient to get raiders back into raids then it is to get non raiders into it.It depends on what exactly the goal is. Getting raiders back is indeed more efficient than trying to get new people into the current raids but if the goal is to get as many people as possible to play raids (or raid like content) then focusing on getting new players into it is a better way to achieve this goal than focusing on a miniscule part of the player base.

If HOT Raids proved us anything is that the population that likes Raids is not tiny by any means. So asking Raiders, those that enjoy the content and made the old ones a success, what they want to bring back that success, is a very good idea.

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@Tails.9372 said:

@yann.1946 said:It might just be more effecient to get raiders back into raids then it is to get non raiders into it.It depends on what exactly the goal is. Getting raiders back is indeed more efficient than trying to get new people into the current raids but if the goal is to get as many people as possible to play raids (or raid like content) then focusing on getting new players into it is a better way to achieve this goal than focusing on a miniscule part of the player base.

We'll the goal shouldn't nessecarily be to get people into the content. But to get the content to people who would enjoy it.

As gets pointed out we know that the original amount of people who raided where higher then expected so their was enough interest in the content type.

Honestly their is value in catering to specific niches.

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I still hope that we will have future raids. There is still much to squeez out of it. With the new Xpac there should be new opportunities to tell raid stories and maybe even beyond that. I still hope that we can one day get back to the fissure of woe, even if it is more like a tunnel as underworld gw2 compared to underworld gw1 was.There was also Urgoz and Kanaxai - which both are dead now obviously, however I still think there should be new enemies or events that could lead us into raids.

As someone who never was into raiding due to its difficulty in other games, I loved how I was easily able to get into it in GW2. So for me it would mean a lot to return to it. (I have unlocked 100% everything from the current raids instances, skins, minis, legendary armour and all achievemnts.)

Btw, since I never mentioned it: The maps of W5, 6 and 7 were absolutely goergous, let the mappers know that pls.

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@Tails.9372 said:

@yann.1946 said:It might just be more effecient to get raiders back into raids then it is to get non raiders into it.It depends on what exactly the goal is. Getting raiders back is indeed more efficient than trying to get new people into the current raids but if the goal is to get as many people as possible to play raids (or raid like content) then focusing on getting new players into it is a better way to achieve this goal than focusing on a miniscule part of the player base.

The most efficient path (value for the dev buck) is to reuse the existing raid content, copy then adapt it so it will appeal to the other 90% of the player base.

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@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@yann.1946 said:It might just be more effecient to get raiders back into raids then it is to get non raiders into it.It depends on what exactly the goal is. Getting raiders back is indeed more efficient than trying to get new people into the current raids but if the goal is to get as many people as possible to play raids (or raid like content) then focusing on getting new players into it is a better way to achieve this goal than focusing on a miniscule part of the player base.

The most efficient path (value for the dev buck) is to reuse the existing raid content, copy then adapt it so it will appeal to the other 90% of the player base.

Judging by Strike Missions performance, your assumption that they can make existing Raid content appeal to 90% of the player base is wrong.

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@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@yann.1946 said:It might just be more effecient to get raiders back into raids then it is to get non raiders into it.It depends on what exactly the goal is. Getting raiders back is indeed more efficient than trying to get new people into the current raids but if the goal is to get as many people as possible to play raids (or raid like content) then focusing on getting new players into it is a better way to achieve this goal than focusing on a miniscule part of the player base.

The most efficient path (value for the dev buck) is to reuse the existing raid content, copy then adapt it so it will appeal to the other 90% of the player base.

We'll only if they plan to do this for pvp, dungeons,... Etc. Otherwise you set a precedent. On top of that how would you even do that, theirs a percentage who don't like instanced group content. And if you make it solo content you're better of just making completely new things

Or do you mean like the sloth in ember bay for example?

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@yann.1946 said:It might just be more effecient to get raiders back into raids then it is to get non raiders into it.It depends on what exactly the goal is. Getting raiders back is indeed more efficient than trying to get new people into the current raids but if the goal is to get as many people as possible to play raids (or raid like content) then focusing on getting new players into it is a better way to achieve this goal than focusing on a miniscule part of the player base.

If HOT Raids proved us anything is that the population that likes Raids is not tiny by any means. So asking Raiders, those that enjoy the content and made the old ones a success, what they want to bring back that success, is a very good idea.It may not have been tiny, but still was small enough that Anet didn't think it rated more than one dev team and better than 9 months-long release schedule. Which apparently was nowhere close to what this content needed to not get abandoned. And, of course, remember that a lot of players were in there only for the legendary armor and dropped out of content as soon as they've obtained it. Because they
didn't
actually like raids.
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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"yann.1946" said:It might just be more effecient to get raiders back into raids then it is to get non raiders into it.It depends on what exactly the goal is. Getting raiders back is indeed more efficient than trying to get new people into the current raids but if the goal is to get as many people as possible to play raids (or raid like content) then focusing on getting new players into it is a better way to achieve this goal than focusing on a miniscule part of the player base.

If HOT Raids proved us anything is that the population that likes Raids is not tiny by any means. So asking Raiders, those that enjoy the content and made the old ones a success, what they want to bring back that success, is a very good idea.It may not have been tiny, but still was small enough that Anet didn't think it rated more than one dev team and better than 9 months-long release schedule. Which apparently was nowhere close to what this content needed to not get abandoned. And, of course, remember that a lot of players were in there only for the legendary armor and dropped out of content as soon as they've obtained it. Because they
didn't
actually like raids.

Or they simply required more manpower to release Season 3 at the fast pace they did, and it's why they "raided" Raid team developers to work on it and the expansion instead of letting them release more Raids. Maybe it wasn't because the content wasn't doing well, but because they needed more developers for the rest of the game. After all they only needed 5 full time developers to release a Raid wing every 4 months, but they didn't even allocate that. Remember a lot of the things we take for granted now from checkpoints in instances or squad markers/commands, to LW episodes, like Rising Flames and Flashpoint, to maps in Path of Fire, were developed using talent from the so called "Raid team", because in reality that "team" existed only for the first Raid (3 wings), then they were dragged to work on the LW and the expansion.

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@"maddoctor.2738" said:Or they simply required more manpower to release Season 3 at the fast pace they did, and it's why they "raided" Raid team developers to work on it and the expansion instead of letting them release more Raids. Maybe it wasn't because the content wasn't doing well, but because they needed more developers for the rest of the game. After all they only needed 5 full time developers to release a Raid wing every 4 months, but they didn't even allocate that. Remember a lot of the things we take for granted now from checkpoints in instances or squad markers/commands, to LW episodes, like Rising Flames and Flashpoint, to maps in Path of Fire, were developed using talent from the so called "Raid team", because in reality that "team" existed only for the first Raid (3 wings), then they were dragged to work on the LW and the expansion.Well, they did not have any LS team at all initially. They started repurposing LS2 team as soon as the work on HoT started, and used it completely for expansion work as soon as the last LS2 episode was finished. Any work on LS content started again only after HoT already launched, and by that time most of the work on W1, and a lot of work on W2 and W3 was already done.

In a way, it's not like the "raid team" was dragged to work on LW and expansion. While it is indeed true, it is also true that a lot of those devs were first dragged off from other content to do raids. You might as well say, that a lot of stuff for w1-3 was done using hands of core devs that were only temporarily assigned to raids for that short while, and then had to go back to do other stuff they were needed for.

So, yes, i agree with you that if they decided to give up on either LS or future expansion content, they could have kept up a schedule raiders would have considered reasonable. I'm not quite sure if the rest of the playerbase would have considered such resouce distribution to be reasonable at all.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"maddoctor.2738" said:Or they simply required more manpower to release Season 3 at the fast pace they did, and it's why they "raided" Raid team developers to work on it and the expansion instead of letting them release more Raids. Maybe it wasn't because the content wasn't doing well, but because they needed more developers for the rest of the game. After all they only needed 5 full time developers to release a Raid wing every 4 months, but they didn't even allocate that. Remember a lot of the things we take for granted now from checkpoints in instances or squad markers/commands, to LW episodes, like Rising Flames and Flashpoint, to maps in Path of Fire, were developed using talent from the so called "Raid team", because in reality that "team" existed only for the first Raid (3 wings), then they were dragged to work on the LW and the expansion.Well, they did not have any LS team
at all
initially. They started repurposing LS2 team as soon as the work on HoT started, and used it completely for expansion work as soon as the last LS2 episode was finished. Any work on LS content started again only after HoT already launched, and by that time most of the work on W1, and a lot of work on W2 and W3 was already done.

So, yes, i agree with you that if they decided to give up on either LS or future expansion content, they could have kept up a schedule raiders would consider reasonable. I'm not quite sure if the
rest
of the playerbase would have considered such resouce distribution to be reasonable at all.

You are saying that allocating 5 developers out of 220 to work on Raids and release them every 4 months would mean "Giving up" on LS or future expansion? I don't find your argument reasonable or even possible. The schedule Raiders would consider reasonable was rather easy to achieve, with a very small number of developers, they just chose not to continue with that schedule because the rest of the game was lagging behind a lot and they needed the extra help. Which leads to the question why so many very important parts of the game were developed by the 12 members of the "raid team", what were the rest 180 developers doing at that time. But I guess we'll never know

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@yann.1946 said:It might just be more effecient to get raiders back into raids then it is to get non raiders into it.It depends on what exactly the goal is. Getting raiders back is indeed more efficient than trying to get new people into the current raids but if the goal is to get as many people as possible to play raids (or raid like content) then focusing on getting new players into it is a better way to achieve this goal than focusing on a miniscule part of the player base.

The most efficient path (value for the dev buck) is to reuse the existing raid content, copy then adapt it so it will appeal to the other 90% of the player base.

Judging by Strike Missions performance, your assumption that they can make existing Raid content appeal to 90% of the player base is wrong.

90% seems not possible, its way too high. But otherwise I agree. It seems Anet is not skilled (or willing) enough to make content that gets much more non-raiders into raiding. Strike Missions do not work well as a substitute for a tutorial or easy-mode raids.

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