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Raids for not so good players


Lilwil.6529

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@Cyninja.2954 said:So your saying you did not have fun for 2 months playing together with others?

Just think about this for a minute, unrelated to how hard or easy content might be, you are essentially complaining about having an activity to do with your guild on a daily basis for 2 months (not really complaining but giving as example I guess).I had activities to do with my guild on daily basis before raids were introduced. Raids practically killed that.And as for those months... let's just say that some players had more fun than others. And that i'm still not on speaking terms with some of the people i have started raiding with then.

Even IF raids are hard, wouldn't having that kind of group content be a good thing? You know for having people play the game long term?While i don't actually like how the raids were introduced in this game (and the consequences it had on everything else), i don't really mind raiders having a content for themselves and having fun in it. I'd just liked a version that was more tailored to my preferences.

I definitely would have liked another way to get those armors. While there were indeed some good memories in it (i will give you that), the overall amount of stress i got from it contributed massively to me practically dropping out of this game and now logging only shortly for LS. It also killed a lot of friendships i had in this game prior to raids. And contributed greatly to fractures in 3 different guilds i were in (the first one, the one i was the most invested in, got practically killed by this).

Overall, i'm not sure i have benefitted at all from the experience.

Which, by the way, was completely not the point of the post you responded to. The point was that counting on finding several vets that will not have a problem with carrying you through the content is not a good advice. It's not something you can depend on, and being that helpful it's definitely not something you should expect from others. All the story told by @mindcircus.1506 tells us is that he lucked out. Nothing more.

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@Fueki.4753 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:Even IF raids are hard, wouldn't having that kind of group content be a good thing? You know for having people play the game long term?

What the point of spending 10% to 15% of your resources on content less than 1% of the player will ever attempt?Those resources would better be spent on content that more people might play.

IF players who raid make up only 1% of the player base, which is debatable, that would make sense. So where is the magic line?

What about jumping puzzles? Do we cut those because not every player enjoys them? Going by completion achievements that would be something valid to cut.What about WvW? Do we cut those because not every player enjoys them? Going by completion achievements that would be something valid to cut.Dungeons? Was cutting this content a good idea? It would have made sense by amount of players playing the content?

If group content is played only by a fraction of the player base, but that player base belongs to the most dedicated players with guilds, communities, social interaction and basically breathing life into the game, I'd say that is more than valid to keep alive.

What you fail to seem to realize is: the current approach clearly indicates that the developers do NOT want to lose the dedicated crowd of players who enjoy challenging content. Unfortunately, the current approach leads to more issues than the previous one, aka introducing half-arsed challenge into mainstream content.

So we are left with 3 options:

  1. abandon all challenging content and lose the dedicated crowd. Which could work depending on how much benefit is provided to the game from those dedicated players.
  2. introduce a mix as we are seeing now, forcing players less interested in challenging content to have to deal with challenge they might not enjoy, while dedicated capable players are still bored to death and still leaving
  3. make niche content for niche groups leaving that niche content out of the main stream content.

Imagine if jumping puzzles were REQUIRED for each and all content, even jumping puzzles light. Think that would go over well with all players? Especially the ones who have difficulties with character movement? The same applies here.

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:So your saying you did not have fun for 2 months playing together with others?

Just think about this for a minute, unrelated to how hard or easy content might be, you are essentially complaining about having an activity to do with your guild on a daily basis for 2 months (not really complaining but giving as example I guess).I had activities to do with my guild on daily basis
before
raids were introduced. Raids practically
killed
that.And as for those months... let's just say i'm still not on speaking terms with some of the people i have started raiding with.

Even IF raids are hard, wouldn't having that kind of group content be a good thing? You know for having people play the game long term?While i don't actually like how the raids were introduced in this game (and the consequences it had on everything else), i don't really mind raiders having a content for themselves and having fun in it. I'd just liked a version that was more tailored to my preferences.

I
definitely
would have liked another way to get those armors. While there were indeed some good memories in it (i will give you that), the overall amount of stress i got from it contributed massively to me practically dropping out of this game and now logging only shortly for LS. It also killed a lot of friendships i had in this game prior to raids. And contributed greatly to fractures in 3 different guilds i were in (the first one, the one i was the most invested in, got practically killed by this).

Overall, i'm not sure i have benefitted at all from the experience.

Which, by the way, was completely
not
the point of the post you responded to. The point was that counting on finding several vets that will not have a problem with carrying you through the content is not a good advice. It's not something you can depend on, and being that helpful it's definitely not something you should expect from others. All the story told by @mindcircus.1506 tells us is that he lucked out. Nothing more.

Sure, I was well aware that the point of the post you responded to was subjective. That's why I intentionally questioned what would have been so bad about group content.

You might have had a ton of content to do with your guild, but I remember a very different situation where guilds and group content was left out to dry after the initial release of guild missions, to this day. Not sure you would have been running those same guild missions or same content for 5 years strait tbh.

As to fractures and issues, if friendships break over in-game content, then you were never friends to begin with. You were at best internet acquaintances and yes, those come and go depending on ones personality (though I will give you that a lot more drama happens in games and impersonal activities, likely a result of not physically interacting with the other party).

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@lare.5129 said:

@Lilwil.6529 said:Do you think there will be away for less talented players to experience the stories of the raids?do raids ONLY whit yours guild. It solve any problems for less talented players.

@vier.1327 said:Arenanet does not like it, so no more raids.You have wrong info. I have info that we will get one more wing nearest time.

But the truth is that Arenanet has abandoned raids as much as dungeons.from last 6 weeks I kill one raid boss, and from last 6 weeks I complete aprox 80 dungeons .. Content works, profitable, fun and very good.

@"Dante.1508" said:All these crazy ? requirements and elitist behaviour doesn't make for a fun system.make you own squad or raid inside guild. Don't look from side. This is not problem.

I cannot see Anet changing it now.. Even strikes became toxic fests.strike toxic if boneskiner included, but if it 3 strikes run (shiver, twins, ..) it is chill and not toxic.So same "if boneskiner included" I prefer do ONLY whit guild.

Yeah, I have the same info, that the next wing comes at the same time as WvW Alliances.

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@Fueki.4753 said:

@"Cyninja.2954" said:Even IF raids are hard, wouldn't having that kind of group content be a good thing? You know for having people play the game long term?

What the point of spending 10% to 15% of your resources on content less than 1% of the player will ever attempt?Those resources would better be spent on content that more people might play.

Except Raids were made by ~1% of the company, and had Efficiency completion rates as high as 30% early on when Raids where still properly supported with frequent releases and promised a future for players to get into that content. Which also happens to be a higher rate than what some later LW story completions had on Efficiency.

And sure, Raids dropped to <5% participation later on (which while still reasonable for high end content, especially one produced by just a handful people, isn't fantastic), but that's not really surprising with maybe one Raid Wing a year just not being enough to sustain that community.

Plus, if 2019 revenue and it's staggering record drops has shown us anything, it's that LW and Story, which they almost entirely focused on that year, is absolutely not what is carrying the game.

That's why designing by statistics is a sure way to fail at making games. Just because most people play something like LW, simply because hey it's there and it takes about nothing to do so, doesn't mean that it's what most people are actually there for.Just because something like Raids isn't played by the majority, because it does take "a lot" to do so, doesn't mean that it doesn't attract a great deal of players to the game and can serve as motivation for long term engagement for players to get to and experience some day.

So not only are your stats backwards, they are also largely useless or at the very least deceptive in how they more often than not go counter to good game design.

Sure you can have 0.01% of the company (one dev) make some really, really poor and unfun content that is incredibly rewarding and get absolutely fantastic engagement numbers of >80% as everybody wants the quick easy rewards, but if that's all you release then because stats tell you it's a great idea, you are going to kill your game quicker than you can blink with bored players who got everything and have nothing to do.Endgame content doesn't need to boast majority numbers to be healthy for a game, be it for advertisement, carrot/inspiration for existing players wishing to get there, or for trickle down of innovative and engaging design and tech to the more generic and basic content, at least adding some variety to that and keeping the rest of the game fresh as well, as we've seen with Raids in GW2 repeatedly.

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Before raids there was toxic dungeons. Raids failure is mainly due to most gw 2 players arent hard core or really bother that much in what gear they use they are there for open world and story and to relax. Gw 2 is a game wich does poor job of telling you where you failed in a fight hell i know alot of ppl who dont even know what theit skills do and picked them for their name or animation seemed cool. Raids has a high skill and mechanics you must fill so its not as open to play whatever so meta happend but meta was in dungeons aswell meta builds are not for new raiders as you need to understand how to use it but game dont really say much if you actually your job or not

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@"Asum.4960" said:Except Raids were made by ~1% of the company,Company had 220 devs at that time. And it took 5-6 dedicated devs (and an unknown, but significantly higher than zero number of devs working parttime on them) for a single wing (hint: they were working on more than one wing at that time). That's much more than just 1%.and had Efficiency completion rates as high as 30% early on when Raids where still properly supported with frequent releases and promised a future for players to get into that content.Meaning, around 29% of efficiency-registered (so, mostly more dedicated) players killed VG once. And not then, but during the whole time since the wing first released (at the time the efficiency numbers for kill achieves were around 20% at best for VG, and somewhere below 10% for Sabetha iirc - and remember, those numbers were most certainly overinflated compared to the whole community, due to how biased away from casuals Efficiency population is)

(although yes, it's still not 15% of resources to 1% of players. It was at best 10% of total resources, and significantly higher than 1% of players (possibly close to 10% or so, initially, although i am only guessing here, since we have no official data on this). Although it's also something we cannot compare so easily, because due to key specializations, some devs are "worth" more than others.

Which also happens to be a higher rate than what some later LW story completions had on Efficiency.Lower population in the game with each year means lower percentages of the total Efficiency population (because some efficiency players stop playing as well). You'd have to compare raid wings with LS completion from the same timeframe. That's also why you can't really compare further wings with earlier ones so easily.

And sure, Raids dropped to <5% participation later on (which while still reasonable for high end content, especially one produced by just a handful people, isn't fantastic), but that's not really surprising with maybe one Raid Wing a year just not being enough to sustain that community.I'd bet they adjusted resources meant for raids to the actual population. Which caused the population to go down more, of course, but it just means they probably had lower population per amount of devs assigned to it Anet was comfortable with even in the beginning.

Plus, if 2019 revenue and it's staggering record drops has shown us anything, it's that LW and Story, which they almost entirely focused on that year, is absolutely not what is carrying the game.It's far more likely that what caused those revenue drops was not raid abandonment, but the announced cancellation of the expansion. Notice, how those numbers suddenly got better after EoD was announced, even though by that time raids being completely abandoned (and strikes not really being able to take that place) was something well known by anyone and pretty much irreversible.

That's why designing by statistics is a sure way to fail at making games. Just because most people play something like LW, simply because hey it's there and it takes about nothing to do so, doesn't mean that it's what most people are actually there for.Just because something like Raids isn't played by the majority, because it does take "a lot" to do so, doesn't mean that it doesn't attract a great deal of players to the game and can serve as motivation for long term engagement for players to get to and experience some day.Indeed. That's why you can't be just speaking about "minority this, majority that", but constantly need to weight resources spent versus playerbases. It is indeed often worth spending a bit of resources on a minority project, if it keeps some part of the community happy. Problems start when you need to spend more resources than you feel comfortable for this gain, and/or that content starts, for one reason or another, make other parts of the community unhappy.Raids here, unfortunately for them, did eventually end up in that zone.

So not only are your stats backwards, they are also largely useless or at the very least deceptive in how they more often than not go counter to good game design.Yes, the percentage comparison was overblown. The answer here is not so clear, and generally needs to be decided on case-by-case basis. And of course things like mismanagement (which is something that definitely happened to raids - and not only to raids) can also heavily influence this.

Sure you can have 0.01% of the company (one dev) make some really, really poor and unfun content that is incredibly rewarding and get absolutely fantastic engagement numbers of >80% as everybody wants the quick easy rewards, but if that's all you release then because stats tell you it's a great idea, you are going to kill your game quicker than you can blink with bored players who got everything and have nothing to do.Agreed, doing content only for 50+% parts of the population ie very shortsighted.

Endgame content doesn't need to boast majority numbers to be healthy for a game, be it for advertisement, carrot/inspiration for existing players wishing to get there, or for trickle down of innovative and engaging design and tech to the more generic and basic content, at least adding some variety to that and keeping the rest of the game fresh as well, as we've seen with Raids in GW2 repeatedly.Raids did not "keep the rest of the game fresh". It may have seem that way to raiders, because they were raiding (and that kept the game fresh for them), but in more than one way, the influence of raids on other content was often not so positive, and not so well-liked. Of, quite often, simply non-existent.Just to name one thing, Raids were one of the main reasons why devs finally decided to deal the final blow to dungeons, and push the players out of them

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Asum.4960 said:Except Raids were made by ~1% of the company,Company had 220 devs at that time. And it took 5-6 dedicated devs (and an unknown, but significantly higher than zero number of devs working parttime on them) for a single wing (hint: they were working on more than one wing at that time). That's much more than just 1%.

As far as I'm aware the company peaked at around 300-400 at HoT times, but I could be wrong there. Still, my point stands that the narrative about Raids being this massive undertaking taking significant company resources is wrong, when really it was just one small team of a handful devs, which frequently were called away to other projects such as LW or Expansion work, and ofc also some people from other teams contributing there as well as was happening with across all teams.But it's absolutely incredible what that small team of talented devs accomplished for the game in terms of quality repeatable content, even more so in comparison to the almost 10 times amount of devs and resources that LW takes (who still do great work ofc, but are just drastically limited by the nature of the content they are working with).

@Astralporing.1957 said:

and had Efficiency completion rates as high as 30% early on when Raids where still properly supported with frequent releases and promised a future for players to get into that content.Meaning, around 29% of efficiency-registered (so, mostly more dedicated) players killed VG
once
. And not then, but during the whole time since the wing first released (at the time the efficiency numbers for kill achieves were around 20% at best for VG, and somewhere below 10% for Sabetha iirc - and remember, those numbers were most certainly overinflated compared to the whole community, due to how biased away from casuals Efficiency population is)

(although yes, it's still not 15% of resources to 1% of players. It was at best 10% of total resources, and significantly higher than 1% of players (possibly close to 10% or so, initially, although i am only guessing here, since we have no official data on this). Although it's also something we cannot compare so easily, because due to key specializations, some devs are "worth" more than others.

Of course those numbers are all to be taken with a grain of salt due to all the variables and lenses that we get them from and through, but exactly, it's far from the narrative that it's content no one played while taking massive resources.

@Astralporing.1957 said:

Which also happens to be a higher rate than what some later LW story completions had on Efficiency.Lower population in the game with each year means lower percentages of the total Efficiency population (because some efficiency players stop playing as well). You'd have to compare raid wings with LS completion from the same timeframe. That's also why you can't really compare further wings with earlier ones so easily.

And sure, Raids dropped to <5% participation later on (which while still reasonable for high end content, especially one produced by just a handful people, isn't fantastic), but that's not really surprising with maybe one Raid Wing a year just not being enough to sustain that community.I'd bet they adjusted resources meant for raids to the actual population. Which caused the population to go down more, of course, but it just means they probably had lower population
per amount of devs assigned to it
Anet was comfortable with even in the beginning.

Absolutely, yea. Completion numbers dropped drastically across the board as the active population of the game was dropping off rapidly over the last few years, be it for Raids, Story or everything else. Plus ofc just more people getting to old content in total overt time.But it is important to note that over the time when Raids was abandoned for, as people like to claim, dropping populations, LW participation, from the numbers we do have, dropped almost just as much, even though Anet pretty much put all their resources into just that.

@Astralporing.1957 said:

Plus, if 2019 revenue and it's staggering record drops has shown us anything, it's that LW and Story, which they almost entirely focused on that year, is absolutely not what is carrying the game.It's far more likely that what caused those revenue drops was not raid abandonment, but the announced cancellation of the
expansion
. Notice, how those numbers suddenly got better after EoD was announced, even though by that time raids being completely abandoned (and strikes not really being able to take that place) was something well known by anyone and pretty much irreversible.

There wasn't really a cancellation though, was there? It seemed to me Anet just thought their LW concept with it's participation numbers was strong enough to single handedly carry the game, or at least keep revenue flowing on the back end as maintenance mode of sorts as they were focusing on their other (since cancelled) projects.And I'm not saying it was just Raids of course, absolutely not. A variety of factors caused those record drops, which imo was just a general feeling of the game not having a future with Anet just doing their LW releases and nothing else - which at least to me, always just were filler between things like Expansions, Raids, Fractals and major system updates, be it Guild Missions, Alliances etc.

Once Anet realised that a significant amount of players participating in LW just did so because that's all Anet offered while they were waiting for "proper" content, rather than being the mainstay Anet and many in the community thought it was, and revenue almost freefalling, that's when Anet course corrected with at least a (very early) Expansion announcement in a desperate attempt to quell the player exodus.But it's not just the Expansion announcement itself that accomplished some quelling of the exodus, but also the (likely) misguided hopes of many that an Expansion could shift the focus of the game in a different direction again akin to HoT, rather than being another PoF, with maybe seeing a return of more MMO content such as Alliances, Raids and more community building repeatable content in general.People just needed a hope for the future of the game again, and LW just wasn't doing that. But yea, Raids alone ofc won't fix that either, and the lack of them wasn't by far the sole reason of that feeling being lost in the first place.

@Astralporing.1957 said:

That's why designing by statistics is a sure way to fail at making games. Just because most people play something like LW, simply because hey it's there and it takes about nothing to do so, doesn't mean that it's what most people are actually there for.Just because something like Raids isn't played by the majority, because it does take "a lot" to do so, doesn't mean that it doesn't attract a great deal of players to the game and can serve as motivation for long term engagement for players to get to and experience some day.Indeed. That's why you can't be just speaking about "minority this, majority that", but constantly need to weight resources spent versus playerbases. It is indeed often worth spending a bit of resources on a minority project, if it keeps some part of the community happy. Problems start when you need to spend more resources than you feel comfortable for this gain, and/or that content starts, for one reason or another, make
other
parts of the community unhappy.Raids here, unfortunately for them, did eventually end up in that zone.

Sure, I'm just not convinced that it wasn't a major miscalculation on Anet's part based on a very vocal minority in the game. It's entirely anecdotal ofc, but I barely know or over the years knew a single player who wasn't deeply unhappy and unsatisfied, or at the very least "meh" about Anet's focus on LW and mostly non repeatable short story content, along with desperate economy breaking OW farms to hold on to player engagement, without actually producing much quality content in terms of gameplay, or driving the game forward and really evolving it's systems.Content like Expansions, Raids, or the promised Alliances drive innovation, both technically and in terms of design, and pave a future for the game, LW, by nature, just doesn't.Yet Anet was more than happy with putting all their eggs into that basket, even with player population and revenue in near freefall likely largely because of it. So I'm not sure if Raid numbers dropping, after not being properly supported anymore, as well as some parts of the community not being happy with them existing, largely for imagined reasons of them being super hard and toxic, holds all that much weight, considering, again, LW dropping all the same and a significant part of the community being largely indifferent or unhappy with it as well, just less vocally so.

@Astralporing.1957 said:

Endgame content doesn't need to boast majority numbers to be healthy for a game, be it for advertisement, carrot/inspiration for existing players wishing to get there, or for trickle down of innovative and engaging design and tech to the more generic and basic content, at least adding some variety to that and keeping the rest of the game fresh as well, as we've seen with Raids in GW2 repeatedly.Raids did
not
"keep the rest of the game fresh". It may have seem that way to raiders, because
they were raiding
(and
that
kept the game fresh for them), but in more than one way, the influence of raids on other content was often not so positive, and not so well-liked. Of, quite often, simply non-existent.Just to name one thing, Raids were one of the main reasons why devs finally decided to deal the final blow to dungeons, and push the players out of them

Dungeons hadn't seen additions since launch (excluding a TA path replacement) and updates for well over a year before HoT and Raids if I remember correctly, so I don't think it's fair to make that content responsible for the death of them, especially since most Raiders I know are very keen on Fractals and Dungeons and such as well and would have loved to see more of them. Anet just in general has major problems with game direction and management, constantly abandoning especially any forms of group content. Be it Guild Missions, Dungeons, Fractals, Raids, Strikes and on and on, I don't think any of those failed as content itself, or directly caused the death of another. It's just Anet not committing enough resources to the MMO part of their MMO altogether to actually make anything work longterm.

As for what impact Raids had on the rest of the game, both positively and negatively, I find largely misrepresented as well, since the blinding light shows everywhere in OW that people are complaining about coming as influence of Raids weren't really, that's actually what I liked about Raids and dislike about OW content. In my experience it was more the other way around, where the OW meta event clusterf lightshows started invading instanced content like later Fractals and Raids, rather than originating there and coming to the rest of the game.

As for all the neat little things from Raids which did actually come to OW, like VG and it's greens mechanic being reused for an OW boss in Bloodstone Fen or whole new mechanical additions like the Special Action skill for example, most non Raiders probably didn't realise how that was Raid development being reused or contributing to OW and Story.

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@"Asum.4960" said:As far as I'm aware the company peaked at around 300-400 at HoT times, but I could be wrong there.First, your numbers are later, in the time around PoF release. Mine are from around half a year after HoT launched, and when Raids were at their highest. Second, you are comparing devs to all Anet employees. (also, the ~400 employees time was also probably the time when they started repurposing a lot of devs to non-gw2 projects)

Still, my point stands that the narrative about Raids being this massive undertaking taking significant company resources is wrong, when really it was just one small team of a handful devs, which frequently were called away to other projects such as LW or Expansion work, and ofc also some people from other teams contributing there as well as was happening with across all teams.And my point from the very beginning since we have learned more about raid team and work required on raids is that the resources used for them are massively underestimated. From what i can remember about the dungeon team from the times Anet still had one, it was smaller. Fractal "team" for a long while consisted of only one person, i think.And, by the way, the point at which Raid devs started to multitask and help out in other projects (instead of the devs from other projects helping them) was somewhere between w4 and w5 - which incidentally is considered by many raiders as the point where the release schedule went straight to kitten.

Of course those numbers are all to be taken with a grain of salt due to all the variables and lenses that we get them from and through, but exactly, it's far from the narrative that it's content no one played while taking massive resources.Yes. That still doesn't mean it didn't require too much resources to keep running on a level that would be satisfying to Raid community.

Absolutely, yea. Completion numbers dropped drastically across the board as the active population of the game was dropping off rapidly over the last few years, be it for Raids, Story or everything else. Plus ofc just more people getting to old content in total overt time.But it is important to note that over the time when Raids was abandoned for, as people like to claim, dropping populations, LW participation, from the numbers we do have, dropped almost just as much, even though Anet pretty much put all their resources into just that.Well, as they found out (for the second time, but it seems they have fogotten the original lesson - or they really were intending to wind the game down), LS alone is not enough to retain game population longterm. You need expansions for that. And Anet went and cancelled the one that should have been released after LS4.

There wasn't really a cancellation though, was there? It seemed to me Anet just thought their LW concept with it's participation numbers was strong enough to single handedly carry the game, or at least keep revenue flowing on the back end as maintenance mode of sorts as they were focusing on their other (since cancelled) projects.It was not the cancellation in the meaning that they probably didn't even start working on Ex3. They were however talking earlier about future expansions in general, and at some point they apparently changed their mind. Which also might be called a cancellation. Not of work on expansion, but of the idea of an expansion.

But it's not just the Expansion announcement itself that accomplished some quelling of the exodus, but also the (likely) misguided hopes of many that an Expansion could shift the focus of the game in a different direction again akin to HoT, rather than being another PoF, with maybe seeing a return of more MMO content such as Alliances, Raids and more community building repeatable content in general.More like expansion announcement was a hope that this game will have a future. Basically, any direction was good as long as it was a direction forward (and not directly straight at a wall or off the cliff). Remember, at this point a lot of players were genuinely thinking it was the end of the road. Expansion news gave them hope that no, it wasn't.People just needed a hope for the future of the game again, and LW just wasn't doing that.This.

Sure, I'm just not convinced that it wasn't a major miscalculation on Anet's part based on a very vocal minority in the game. It's entirely anecdotal ofc, but I barely know or over the years knew a single player who wasn't deeply unhappy and unsatisfied, or at the very least "meh" about Anet's focus on LW and mostly non repeatable short story content, along with desperate economy breaking OW farms to hold on to player engagement, without actually producing much quality content in terms of gameplay, or driving the game forward and really evolving it's systems.As anecdotal evidence, i could say the same about lot of people i know and their negative opinions of Raids and their impact on the game... I guess we just associate with different people.

Apart from echo chamber, it is also the same principle that results in two people blasting the same balance patchnotes - one being disappointed that Anet again ignored PvP players for the sake of dealing with some unimportant stuff in PvE, and the other crying about another case of PvP-directed balance team mindset leading PvE to ruin. Everyone sees only part of the picture, and they interprete that based on their own beliefs and desires.

@"Astralporing.1957" said:Raids did
not
"keep the rest of the game fresh". It may have seem that way to raiders, because
they were raiding
(and
that
kept the game fresh for them), but in more than one way, the influence of raids on other content was often not so positive, and not so well-liked. Of, quite often, simply non-existent.Just to name one thing, Raids were one of the main reasons why devs finally decided to deal the final blow to dungeons, and push the players out of them

Dungeons hadn't seen additions since launch (excluding a TA path replacement) and updates for well over a year before HoT and Raids if I remember correctly, so I don't think it's fair to make that content responsible for the death of them, especially since most Raiders I know are very keen on Fractals and Dungeons and such as well and would have loved to see more of them.Anet flat out said they nerfed the dungeon rewards because they wanted dungeon players to move to raids. That was what dealt the killing blow. Partially reverting that nerf later on didn't help - by that point everyone already got the message and left. Up to this point however, even after being abandoned, dungeons were doing fine.So, yeah, while devs had other reasons for not wanting to touch dungeons, they
killed
them because of raids.

As for what impact Raids had on the rest of the game, both positively and negatively, I find largely misrepresented as well, since the blinding light shows everywhere in OW that people are complaining about coming as influence of Raids weren't really, that's actually what I liked about Raids and dislike about OW content. In my experience it was more the other way around, where the OW meta event clusterf lightshows started invading instanced content like later Fractals and Raids, rather than originating there and coming to the rest of the game.It's not about the lightshows. It's about trying to "educate" the players so they could "graduate" to raids. The whole "stairway to raids" idea affected the whole game, including many, many people that didn't want to have anything to do with raids or anything connected to them. And yeah, the first year of raids was basically devs telling everyone that all roads lead to raids, and you should start walking fast if you don't want to remain a second category citizen.Or at least large number of players read it that way.

As for all the neat little things from Raids which did actually come to OW, like VG and it's greens mechanic being reused for an OW boss in Bloodstone Fen or whole new mechanical additions like the Special Action skill for example, most non Raiders probably didn't realise how that was Raid development being reused or contributing to OW and Story.That's probably most of those players didn't
care
about those "improvements". A lot of players i know actively dislikes when Anet tries to do something new and "inventive" to circumvent normal, old style combat engine., and learned to associate any new mechanics with getting a new annoyance they won't like. A number of my friends stopped doing fractals (which they were very actively doing before) as a direct response to bullet hell mechanic on Nightmare. That's how well they thought of that neat new mechanic.I understand that raiders will consider those "neat little things" to be positive, but you need to understand as well that not everyone saw them that way.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:And, by the way, the point at which Raid devs started to multitask and help out in other projects (instead of the devs from other projects helping them) was somewhere between w4 and w5 - which incidentally is considered by many raiders as the point where the release schedule went straight to kitten.

Exactly.

@Astralporing.1957 said:Yes. That still doesn't mean it didn't require too much resources to keep running on a level that would be satisfying to Raid community.

Imo Anet just never gives anything a fair shot. They release some "pilot" Raids, Strikes, whatever every couple months, and then expect massive engagement in that content to tell them if they should properly invest and commit to it, but that's just not how things work.If Anet had really committed to supporting Raids with a new Wing every ~3 months, and expansion like PoF launching with 3+ Raids etc, and then didn't have the numbers to justify the investment after trying to properly grow that community and cancelled it then, fair enough.But they just keep dipping their toe into things, and if everybody doesn't immediately absolute love it and throws themselves at it, it's already abandoned by them before it can grow and prosper and be iterated on.That's at least how Raids, as well as a majority of other thing's they tried, looked to me (even as someone who was anti Raids for years before trying them).

@Astralporing.1957 said:Well, as they found out (for the second time, but it seems they have fogotten the original lesson - or they really were intending to wind the game down), LS alone is not enough to retain game population longterm. You need expansions for that. And Anet went and cancelled the one that should have been released after LS4.

I see what you meant with cancellation, and yes, at least we can fully agree on that one.

@Astralporing.1957 said:Anet flat out said they nerfed the dungeon rewards because they wanted dungeon players to move to raids. That was what dealt the killing blow. Partially reverting that nerf later on didn't help - by that point everyone already got the message and left. Up to this point however, even after being abandoned, dungeons were doing fine.So, yeah, while devs had other reasons for not wanting to touch dungeons, they killed them because of raids.

Yea, I do remember that. Although I recall it as a pretty much universally disliked move which no one but Anet, as unfortunately so often, quite understood. Least of all the people into instanced PvE, like then Raiders.I'm not sure why Anet thinks that every time they want to try something new, everything "old" just needs to be utterly abandoned and/or die, be it terms of builds/balance or content, like there isn't room for multiple options.I do think Dungeons were already far from doing "fine" at that point though.

@Astralporing.1957 said:It's not about the lightshows. It's about trying to "educate" the players so they could "graduate" to raids. The whole "stairway to raids" idea affected the whole game, including many, many people that didn't want to have anything to do with raids or anything connected to them. And yeah, the first year of raids was basically devs telling everyone that all roads lead to raids, and you should start walking fast if you don't want to remain a second category citizen.Or at least large number of players read it that way.

That's a bit strange to me tbh. I never had been a raider before in any other game, and ate up all the anti Raid hate in the community with HoT and was firmly convinced that that content just wasn't for me and way to difficult and demanding, and it took me until shortly before PoF to first even try them, to then discover it as some of the most fun, by far best designed and friendly community building content.But even then I never really had that impression in the two years after HoT that Anet was pushing for or advertising Raids hard, if at all.Just seemed like a barely supported side thing I eventually wanted to try for completion sake, bc mastery completion was still locked behind them back then.

@Astralporing.1957 said:That's probably most of those players didn't care about those "improvements". A lot of players i know actively dislikes when Anet tries to do something new and "inventive" to circumvent normal, old style combat engine., and learned to associate any new mechanics with getting a new annoyance they won't like. A number of my friends stopped doing fractals (which they were very actively doing before) as a direct response to bullet hell mechanic on Nightmare. That's how well they thought of that neat new mechanic.I understand that raiders will consider those "neat little things" to be positive, but you need to understand as well that not everyone saw them that way.

I have to say that I simply don't understand that mindset. If I wanted everything to be just Queendale, I would just stay in Queensdale. Imo it's vitally important for games, especially MMO's and RPG's, and even more so the combination of the two, to evolve over time and get more intricate and complex with Expansions and such, as players slowly master all the systems moving through the game, in order to keep the experience fresh.If two to three expansions down the line it's still exactly the same gameplay loop with the exact same mechanics, builds, approaches, I'm not sure what could be worse or how that could keep entertaining. And it's not like I love things like that bullet hell for example, but at least it's something different for a short moment, keeping the gameplay loop from going stale. I mean, GW2 exactly wasn't supposed to be the "swing a sword and swing it again" game.But to each their own I suppose.

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@"Astralporing.1957" said:.Anet flat out said they nerfed the dungeon rewards because they wanted dungeon players to move to raids. That was what dealt the killing blow. Partially reverting that nerf later on didn't help - by that point everyone already got the message and left. Up to this point however, even after being abandoned, dungeons were doing fine.

Source?

So, yeah, while devs had other reasons for not wanting to touch dungeons, they killed them because of raids.

Source?

EDIT:

I’ll just make my point here instead of wait for you to find your source.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-guild-wars-2-heart-of-thorns-economy/

Over the last couple of years, dungeons have been a major part of the game’s economy; between unique armor and liquid rewards, they’re often farmed. In the expansion, we’ll move away from this paradigm. As the game progressed, we shifted focus from dungeons to fractals and raids, and we firmly believe that fractals and raids are the content that we want to continue to support. As a part of that process, we’ll shift some rewards away from dungeons and into other pieces of content. While dungeons will remain cool experiences that’ll reward players with unique items, their liquid rewards will be reduced and other content will become more rewarding. The shift in rewards is a direct representation of our focus on raids and fractals and our commitment to make them the best they can be.

Notice how they mentioned other areas of the game such as fractals?

You blame raids for the reason that Anet killed dungeons when Anet has clearly stated in the past that they had intended for fractals to be the new dungeons going forward and they were only going to support them. You’re clearly wrong.

You’re also partially wrong in regards to the rewards nerf as the rewards also went to fractals which you left out for some reason.

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@"Astralporing.1957" said:And, by the way, the point at which Raid devs started to multitask and help out in other projects (instead of the devs from other projects helping them) was somewhere between w4 and w5 - which incidentally is considered by many raiders as the point where the release schedule went straight to kitten.

The point where the Raid devs started to multitask was between W3 and W4. The Raid lead and many of the developers working on the so called "Raid team" were involved in Rising Flames and Flashpoint. And if you check the release schedule, it does look like one raid release was "missing" at the time:

Out of the ShadowsRising Flames (Raid team)A Crack in the IceThe Head of the Snake (Bastion of the Penitent)Flashpoint (Raid team)One Path Ends

Mythright Gambit was delayed due to the delay of Long Live the Lich, yes the Raid schedule turned bad between W4 and W5 but at least the entire game's release schedule was kitten at that time. I would never expect Raids to keep releasing, while the rest of the game had troubles, looked like a company wide problem.

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Sure it was because of fractals. And the fact that Fractals already existed for 3 years at this point, but the nerf happened only at the moment first wing got introduced was certainly accidental and had nothing to do with them being afraid people will not want to move to Raids at all.

The fact that in the subsequent months they started calling Fractals the stairway to raids - which was the first use of that term - also didn't signify anything about the final destination they planned for all those people they chased out of dungeons. Not at all.

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@"Astralporing.1957" said:Sure it was because of fractals. And the fact that Fractals already existed for 3 years at this point, but the nerf happened only at the moment first wing got introduced was certainly accidental and had nothing to do with them being afraid people will not want to move to Raids at all.

The fact that in the subsequent months they started calling Fractals the stairway to raids - which was the first use of that term - also didn't signify anything about the final destination they planned for all those people they chased out of dungeons. Not at all.

Have the developers ever stated that the dungeon rewards were changed due to raids? The change coinciding with the HoT launch does NOT mean this was due to raids. There was a massive fractal rework as well and given the similarity in group size AND the recent push for fractal participation, it seems far more likely that this was intended as a shift between 5 player instanced content. Also no, fractals had NOT existed for 3 years. They saw massive ground up reworks multiple times, the most notable one directly with HoT. That is on top of the continuous push for fractals both via ascended loot, which was fractal exclusive back then, as well as gold reward. Seems to me fractals were the new kid on the block with an old name.

Not to mention that there was precedent for reworking dungeon rewards from years earlier to encourage more dungeon paths see play (the August 1st, 2013 daily change). Where a change was implemented to encourage content WITHIN the same player size groups.

Don't know, unless there is a direct quote about raids being the new instanced content direction, this seems like reaching on your part. The most likely explanation is the easiest here: dungeons were nerfed (and later buffed) to encourage the newest 5 player instanced content which had just received a major overhaul AND a mastery from HoT: aka fractals.

EDIT: and just in case you were not active in fractals ever since their release. I can tell you, subjectively as someone who was running fractals nearly daily beginning 2 weeks into their initial release, fractals post HoT were massively different than pre HoT. The increase in players was insane over time as rewards and reward incentives were changed. Initially it was not uncommon to run into the same players over and over around rank 30, max "useful" rank for rewards, due to the small size of the community running this content regularly.

Soooo given I am aware you are knowledgeable of Occam's Razor law.... ;)

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@"Cyninja.2954" said:EDIT: and just in case you were not active in fractals ever since their release. I can tell you, subjectively as someone who was running fractals nearly daily beginning 2 weeks into their initial release, fractals post HoT were massively different than pre HoT. The increase in players was insane over time as rewards and reward incentives were changed. Initially it was not uncommon to run into the same players over and over around rank 30, max "useful" rank for rewards, due to the small size of the community running this content regularly.

Indeed. The biggest change pre and after HOT in my opinion was the ability to run a single Fractal. Before that you had to run 4 Fractals in a row to get rewards. The complete nerf of many fractals at T1 (most didn't have a separate T1 version) led to more players joining Fractals too. Then we have the addition of dailies and recommended Fractals which made lower tier Fractals (as well as higher ones) more rewarding. And let's not forget the legendary journey, all precursors requiring Fractal runs to acquire the components for them. There was a massive push towards Fractals, and reducing dungeon rewards was only inevitable.

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I would give anything to play the raid content. It has been bothering me for 5 years every single day. Raids are exactly what I want out of GW2, and I was so excited for them to come. I just never expected them to release them at a baseline difficulty that required the degree of precision and build specificity that they do. There is definitely grounds to have a trinity style or very hardcore raid difficulty for the people who like that, but that's not what GW2 puts forward primarily. It's just such a missed opportunity. People don't play raids because they are brutally difficult, even if you think they are not. It is all about perspective. You deserve to have your difficulty, we deserve to have ours too. Not letting us have our difficulty for over 5 years has permanently damaged this product and permanently damage ArenaNet. Yelling GIT GUD isn't going to change that. For every one person that wants to play at peak human performance, there probably 80 million that don't. The raids would be played if they were playable, it is unconscionable that they haven't been improved yet.

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@"Asgaeroth.6427" said:I would give anything to play the raid content. It has been bothering me for 5 years every single day. Raids are exactly what I want out of GW2, and I was so excited for them to come. I just never expected them to release them at a baseline difficulty that required the degree of precision and build specificity that they do. There is definitely grounds to have a trinity style or very hardcore raid difficulty for the people who like that, but that's not what GW2 puts forward primarily. It's just such a missed opportunity. People don't play raids because they are brutally difficult, even if you think they are not.Problem is not that they are tailored at some "brutal" level of difficulty. Comparing to raids in other games, they actually often give significantly more leeway to players. The problem is that, due to how the game is designed, the skill curve in GW2 is much steeper, so even relatively small skill differences result in massive effectiveness gaps. Also, the freestyle build system offers a lot of choices to build your character, but most of those choices are just plain bad. Making a single difficulty mode that is meant to offer some kind of challenge in this kind of situation is a really big problem. Make it require a bit more skill, and it's beyond the reach of a huge majority of players. Make it require slightly less skill, and suddenly the players that wanted challenge are rolling over it withou noticing any kind of difficulty. While watching Netflix. And a lot of other players still find it too hard.

Basically, it's not a consequence of how raids are designed. It's caused by how the game is designed.

This was for the most part unintentional, btw. The old gw1 freestyle skill system worked relatively well, so they went with it again when they started working on the continuation. Unfortunately, adding to it a new trait system, boons, food bonuses, and (as one of the relatively late decision changes) stat bonuses to gear unbalanced that to a massive degree. What might have worked okay when operating separately turned out to be borderline ridiculous when it got stacked on top of each other, with each subsystem reinforcing the others. Unfortunately, since it was unintentional, the consequences got noticed way too late. And now we have to live with them.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"Asgaeroth.6427" said:I would give anything to play the raid content. It has been bothering me for 5 years every single day. Raids are exactly what I want out of GW2, and I was so excited for them to come. I just never expected them to release them at a baseline difficulty that required the degree of precision and build specificity that they do. There is definitely grounds to have a trinity style or very hardcore raid difficulty for the people who like that, but that's not what GW2 puts forward primarily. It's just such a missed opportunity. People don't play raids because they are brutally difficult, even if you think they are not.Problem is not that they are tailored at some "brutal" level of difficulty. Comparing to raids in other games, they actually often give significantly more leeway to players. The problem is that, due to how the game is designed, the skill curve in GW2 is much steeper, so even relatively small skill differences result in massive effectiveness gaps. Also, the freestyle build system offers a lot of choices to build your character, but most of those choices are just plain bad. Making a single difficulty mode that is meant to offer some kind of challenge in this kind of situation is a really big problem. Make it require a bit more skill, and it's beyond the reach of a huge majority of players. Make it require slightly less skill, and suddenly the players that wanted challenge are rolling over it withou noticing any kind of difficulty. While watching Netflix. And a lot of other players
still
find it too hard.

Basically, it's not a consequence of how raids are designed. It's caused by how
the game
is designed.

This was for the most part unintentional, btw. The old gw1 freestyle skill system worked relatively well, so they went with it again when they started working on the continuation. Unfortunately, adding to it a new trait system, boons, food bonuses, and (as one of the relatively late decision changes) stat bonuses to gear unbalanced that to a massive degree. What might have worked okay when operating separately turned out to be borderline ridiculous when it got stacked on top of each other, with each subsystem reinforcing the others. Unfortunately, since it was unintentional, the consequences got noticed way too late. And now we have to live with them.

You're looking at it backwards in my opinion. The core design may have problems, but they are not insurmountable. I am not an inexperienced raider. I cleared every heroic raid in WoW as main tank while it was the current raid from Wrath to the end of Pandaria. The problem is GW2 raids are not tuned around the game design, they are tuned around arbitrary checks that make no sense for the majority of players.

All of GW2's best mechanics, best art, best everything is in these raids. We as customers paid them to make all these advanced assets and they are just wallowing in nothingness. I love the GW2 raids, they are in many places masterworks in the industry. They are just sadly locked behind the worst of GW2, the clunky grouping, the elitist build snobs, etc. There's nothing about that that is unfixable and it is nothing that has to be lived with. The baseline raid difficulty doesn't need to be on par with Ascalon story mode, it just also should not be so ridiculously daunting. The DPS check on gors is unwinnable in a pug, I've tried to teach the fight to like 75 groups at this point, it's just impossible. A middle ground had to happen and still could happen. The raids don't need to be 2 hours of trying to fill and then replacing 3 slots every two wipes, they could be so good if they just took the edge off the baseline difficulty.

And to me the worst of it is the people who yell GIT GUD at every raid difficulty discussion are so self defeating. So many people say the problem is for some it's too easy and for some it's too hard. The raid community is really small because of this problem. If there was more people able to see the layouts of the instances and get comfortable with them, there would be more people working their way up through the ranks to a harder difficulty. If we had difficulty options, there could be a facemelting absolute "and then we doubled it" mode for the people bored with the way too brutally difficult version we have. Every problem with raiding in GW2 is solved instantly with difficulty options. It's blatantly obvious and is a standard necessary modern MMO feature. How could anyone with any amount of ability to think critically not see it?

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You do realize that it was the community that made Gors a DPS check and not Anet, right? You can do the actual mechanic for that attack instead if the group's DPS is that low. If a group still insists on skipping that mechanic, they can just break the bar slower assuming they have the sustain to deal with retal.

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:You do realize that it was the community that made Gors a DPS check and not Anet, right? You can do the actual mechanic for that attack instead if the group's DPS is that low. If a group still insists on skipping that mechanic, they can just break the bar slower assuming they have the sustain to deal with retal.

I've actually seen people that don't know that you can break a wall and glide to avoid the attack.

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@knite.1542 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:You do realize that it was the community that made Gors a DPS check and not Anet, right? You can do the actual mechanic for that attack instead if the group's DPS is that low. If a group still insists on skipping that mechanic, they can just break the bar slower assuming they have the sustain to deal with retal.

I've actually seen people that don't know that you can break a wall and glide to avoid the attack.

I've seen that too and that kind of thing is common in other areas of the game. The community adopts a method and players assume that must be the only way, The whole circle strat in Dragon's Stand wasn't the intended method but it was the simplest to make work with pug maps. Most players don't know that there are also pods down in the pit which control the spawns that run up the ramp to the pods above.

The thing about raid bosses is that the minimum DPS that you need is the boss' HP divided by the number of seconds in the fight until the enrage timer. Technically in some cases you can go past that but I'll assume a group of new players wouldn't be able to. For gorseval, with 6 DPS players doing all of the damage, they would need to do around like 9K each. The downside with longer fights though is that the players will then have to deal with more of the mechanics which opens up the opportunity for bad things to happen.

For those that want other difficulties, I wonder how many of them have actually tried raids at all. For those of them who have, I wonder how many of them failed because of the enrage timer.

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:You do realize that it was the community that made Gors a DPS check and not Anet, right? You can do the actual mechanic for that attack instead if the group's DPS is that low. If a group still insists on skipping that mechanic, they can just break the bar slower assuming they have the sustain to deal with retal.

I've actually seen people that don't know that you can break a wall and glide to avoid the attack.

I've seen that too and that kind of thing is common in other areas of the game. The community adopts a method and players assume that must be the only way, The whole circle strat in Dragon's Stand wasn't the intended method but it was the simplest to make work with pug maps. Most players don't know that there are also pods down in the pit which control the spawns that run up the ramp to the pods above.

The thing about raid bosses is that the minimum DPS that you need is the boss' HP divided by the number of seconds in the fight until the enrage timer. Technically in some cases you can go past that but I'll assume a group of new players wouldn't be able to. For gorseval, with 6 DPS players doing all of the damage, they would need to do around like 9K each. The downside with longer fights though is that the players will then have to deal with more of the mechanics which opens up the opportunity for bad things to happen.

For those that want other difficulties, I wonder how many of them have actually tried raids at all. For those of them who have, I wonder how many of them failed because of the enrage timer.

Yeah, unfortunately that is an issue with group content. It can be difficult to get people to think for themselves and also difficult to get people to do things different than what they've seen or done before.

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@Asgaeroth.6427 said:

You're looking at it backwards in my opinion. The core design may have problems, but they are not insurmountable. I am not an inexperienced raider. I cleared every heroic raid in WoW as main tank while it was the current raid from Wrath to the end of Pandaria. The problem is GW2 raids are not tuned around the game design, they are tuned around arbitrary checks that make no sense for the majority of players.

All of GW2's best mechanics, best art, best everything is in these raids. We as customers paid them to make all these advanced assets and they are just wallowing in nothingness. I love the GW2 raids, they are in many places masterworks in the industry. They are just sadly locked behind the worst of GW2, the clunky grouping, the elitist build snobs, etc. There's nothing about that that is unfixable and it is nothing that has to be lived with. The baseline raid difficulty doesn't need to be on par with Ascalon story mode, it just also should not be so ridiculously daunting. The DPS check on gors is unwinnable in a pug, I've tried to teach the fight to like 75 groups at this point, it's just impossible. A middle ground had to happen and still could happen. The raids don't need to be 2 hours of trying to fill and then replacing 3 slots every two wipes, they could be so good if they just took the edge off the baseline difficulty.

That dps check is so hard that you can 5man it. Why is it so hard to change builds? It costs nothing. You can win that dps check with Daredevils just auto attacking. im not even joking. it has been done. The problem is that you just cant balance for random builds without boons. 2 good dps players are already enough to hardcarry that boss. I've almost never seen the enrage on a boss in a training. training groups struggle with builds and (nonexistant) rotations and most of the time they arent even attacking the boss but are running around doing 3digit dps. The gorseval updraft dps check is incredible easy. Maybe a kill of a 4mill golem in less than 3min should be a requirement to enter a raid. Almost every build would be able to do that with only autoattacks but a lot of players in training groups would probably fail.Holo has a 2 apm build that does 29k dps. cant make it simpler than that. gorseval would be below story mode difficulty in ff. Some bosses are harder and require specific builds for certain roles but w1-4 are fairly simple with the exception of deimos. Most problems can be solved with 30min on golem + a copypasta build. Builds do matter and they should. its just that they dont matter in open world at all.

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@"Asgaeroth.6427" said:You're looking at it backwards in my opinion. The core design may have problems, but they are not insurmountable.Unfortunately, as long as there's only one difficulty tier, they are.

I am not an inexperienced raider. I cleared every heroic raid in WoW as main tank while it was the current raid from Wrath to the end of Pandaria. The problem is GW2 raids are not tuned around the game design, they are tuned around arbitrary checks that make no sense for the majority of players.You have experience with non-gw2 raids then, and thus are probably judging this ones using those past experiences. Problem is, GW2 design is significantly different. Things that work in other games simply do not work here.

There's nothing about that that is unfixable and it is nothing that has to be lived with. The baseline raid difficulty doesn't need to be on par with Ascalon story mode, it just also should not be so ridiculously daunting.And here's the problem - what you consider daunting is actually not requiring anything even close to peak performance. There are players out there that consider even the hardest of the raid encounters to be too easy to pose a challenge.

Let's put it that way - the encounter considered to be the hardest, the Dhuum Challenge Mode, has been done by a guild in budget (under 5g worth of TP-acquired equipment for a person, if i remember right) gear. Meaning, they used green equipment, cheap runes and sigils, and had no access to some stat sets (like the ones with boon duration). Each gear tier is an improvement of around 10% dps over the tier just below it, so we're talking about at least 30% dps loss right there. On a fight with a dps check in the last phase. A dps check that is way, way harder than the Gorse one.

In any other MMORPG that would relegate it to an easy raid tier. In GW2 even the non-challenge mode version is consideed to be top difficulty. Why it is so? Again, the answer is game design.In FF XIV, for example, when you go into max level content, the difference in dps between bad and good player nowadays is around 3x. Average players end up somewhere in the gap of between half to 2/3 of that good player's dps. In gw2, the good player has a dps of 5 to 10 times that of an average player. And bad players are even worse than that. Think what does that mean for encounter designs.

The DPS check on gors is unwinnable in a pug, I've tried to teach the fight to like 75 groups at this point, it's just impossible.Some people already commented on that, but i will repeat - there are several other ways to do that encounter, that let you do it with lower dps. Also, gorse dps check is not even that high.

A middle ground had to happen and still could happen. The raids don't need to be 2 hours of trying to fill and then replacing 3 slots every two wipes, they could be so good if they just took the edge off the baseline difficulty.Except in a single difficulty mode it cannot be anything but what it is now. You cannot properly balance the encounters for groups with such massive effectiveness gaps.

Basically, in order to do that, you would need to completely remove dps from the equation. What would result from this would not be a boss fight. It would be a kind of a mechanical puzzle. Which might be interesting once or twice, but that's hardly what people would want from all (or even majority) of boss encounters.

So many people say the problem is for some it's too easy and for some it's too hard.Because it is.

The raid community is really small because of this problem.Indeed.

If there was more people able to see the layouts of the instances and get comfortable with them, there would be more people working their way up through the ranks to a harder difficulty.Possibly, although at this point i no longer believe the conversion would be all that high. the main benefit from multiple difficulty mode would not come from "teaching" players to improve (most players are either incapable of improving beyond their current level, or simply do not want to put enough effort that would be required to do so. Which is understandable - this is a game, not everyone wants to change it into some sort of challenge or work)

If we had difficulty options, there could be a facemelting absolute "and then we doubled it" mode for the people bored with the way too brutally difficult version we have.Indeed.

Every problem with raiding in GW2 is solved instantly with difficulty options.I definitely wouldn't go that far (there's a number of problems that are completely unrelated to this) but i do believe that multiple modes would help at least a bit. But that's only assuming Anet even wants to still do something about the mode, instead of just abandoning it and never speaking of it again, as they like to do to anything that has run into problems that require a bit more effort to fix.

It's blatantly obvious and is a standard necessary modern MMO feature. How could anyone with any amount of ability to think critically not see it?"LFR destroyed WoW", remember? People believe what they want to believe.

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@"Asgaeroth.6427" said:Every problem with raiding in GW2 is solved instantly with difficulty options. It's blatantly obvious and is a standard necessary modern MMO feature. How could anyone with any amount of ability to think critically not see it?

Let's take a look at Fractals, that have multiple difficulty options. One "problem" is that a player cannot join a Fractal CM without having the necessary KP first, and since you get those from running Fractal CMs it's a circular problem. How is that problem "fixed" with multiple difficulties?

Also, T1 fractals lack certain abilities, that do exist at higher levels. This means beating the lower difficulties is done using completely different tactics, as an example in Uncategorized Fractal Old Tom's room doesn't require using the fan at lower difficulties. This means, the problem of players going into content without having a clue of how the content is played isn't going to be fixed by multiple difficulties

Just found two problems not solved with difficulty options. With proper amount of critically thinking you can find more

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