Do raids need easy/normal/hard difficulty mode? [merged]

[Feanor.2358]

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@nia.4725 said:And the answer is NO. A complete rework is not "just involve changing the movement patterns or relative strenghts of certain abilities", it would require much more work, not just tweaking here and there.

Again, I am not making a serious proposal here, I am not quantifying the

amount

of work this would take or making any claims that "this would be easy," or any such thing. There is no need to get defensive about it. The only point I'm making in this portion of the discussion is that it would be

possible

to redesign the encounter such that it could be soloed, and the play experience for that solo encounter would involve the same mechanics

for him

as

he

would be expected to perform if he were one man in a ten-man raid squad. Clear?

In the most simple terms, if a very basic "spam DPS" boss takes 100,000 damage to kill, and each player in a team is expected to average 10,000 damage to meet that total, then a single player could simulate that experience by reducing his HP to 10,000

or

buffing the player's damage by 10x. If the boss could "strip" one of those 10x buffs, then it would be equivalent to if he killed off a single player in a raid squad in terms of the overall DPS.

About the shrines thing, I think maybe you don't know how DPS works in raids. Most people will do whatever deals most damage, to the point of skipping mechanics if that allows the party to deal more DPS. The thing goes like this:

I'm aware of those mechanics, and those could likewise be simulated in a solo encounter. Whether it's one person attacking or ten, so long as you would be capable of reaching the DPS to phase the boss, the same tactic would work.

And this would apply to your shrine thing. The drop in DPS caused by a shrine destroyed would be tested. If moving and dealing with that mechanic is a bigger DPS drop than the drop caused by the mechanic failing, or if reaching certain % of the boss cancels the mechanic, then the mechanic will be ignored.

Sure, but the point of it was to

replicate

the impact of the "if you don't break a player's breakbar then that player will be sacrificed" mechanic you were talking about above, so the same discussion would happen. "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that character, and prevent his DPS from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same scenario, "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that shrine, and prevent its DPS buff from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same thing, same outcome to either scenario, same choice for the player to make. You see my point here? If it's balanced properly, then players would make the same decision, either to save the player/shrine or allow it to die, in both scenarios.

Again, I'm not suggesting this as some new and clever mechanic that should be added to raids, I'm using it to make the point that existing raid mechanics that rely on party interaction

could

be replaced with equivalent effects that would alter the outcome of the matches in the exact same ways, and would require identical player interaction to resolve them, with identical results based on whether they succeed or fail to do so.

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

But what if you think even that is too generous to the plebes? So what if the 50lb. weight pays out $20 each time? That means you'd need to lift twenty of the 10lb. weights, 200lb. in total, to equal one of the 50lb. weights. This is clearly unbalanced in favor of the 50lb. weight, nobody would lift the 10lb. weights if they had any capacity to lift the 50lb., and anyone who couldn't lift the 50lb. would have a significant incentive to improve so that they too could lift the 50lb. weight.

And yet,

as unfair as this arrangement is to the 10lb. people, there is still choice. They still have

an option.

It is not fair, but they can progress. If their goal is to make $1000, it will take them 1000 lifts, 10,000lbs. in total, when compared to the alternative of 50 lifts, 1/4 the total weight, but if 50lbs. just isn't an option for them,

they can still reach their goal eventually.

Your analogy falls apart. If raids right now are lifting 50lbs and getting $20 dollars, easy mode raids that are designed to be solo'd and beatable by anyone regardless of build, gear, and skill that rewards legendary armor is comparable to someone watching 50lbs sit on the floor and getting $20.

And I guess this is my point, that it's impossible to have a conversation on this subject with someone who so devalues the basic humanity of his fellow players that

none

of their efforts can

ever

possibly match up to what He is capable of.

I actually kinda like the idea of a solo encounter. If some mechanics require another person, couldn’t another npc be brought in to assist?

Right,

or

that mechanic would just handle itself. Like if there were two circles and you had to stand in both at once, then either A only one circle would be required, or B, an NPC would run for one circle and you would have to run to the other. Either way the experience for that one player would be the same.

So if you did it solo you would get like one third an insight?

Well, again,

this is not a proposal for something they should do.

I actually do not think that implementing a solo mode version of raid encounters would be an effective use of their time. Too much work relative to the payoff. I was just discussing the

concept

that Sarrs raised that group oriented content is somehow

automatically

more challenging than solo content, just by virtue of it involving multiple players. I'm trying to point out that any challenges that might be raised in an encounter by adding more players could be

simulated

simply by just adapting the mechanics accordingly. This is especially true in cooperative content.

I also think that from a

fairness

perspective, if the individual challenge would be equal, then the reward should be equal as well. Feanor raised the point that you want to

encourage

group content for the interest of the community, so you want to provide group content above and beyond what is fair, and I agreed with that to some degree, but if they ever did implement a solo mode that was as challenging as the group raid, then the rewards should at least be close, like 2/3 of an Insight or something.

But when we

were

discussing "easy mode" versions of the encounters, still ten people but with the challenge actually

reduced,

the proposal was 1/3 of an insight per encounter, yes.

I mean if they did a solo encounter, you could in theory shoot for 5 man as well.

Sure, there's nothing that would prevent either from being doable. The reason I'm not in

favor

of solo/five man versions though is that I believe that the balance and design changes needed to craft those, while 100% doable, would be more significant than what it would take to just make easy mode versions of the existing 10-man encounters. I feel like the cost/benefit balance is less worth doing.

ye making raids 5 manable addresses 0 issues. The issue is the content gap, i.e:

wvw available for casual to hard core - yesDoes 5 man instances have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does pvp have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does open world have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.

Does raids (>=8 players say) have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - not yet in GW2, available everywhere else.

Which leads me to a different point, what if Anet introduced easier 8 MAN raids, and kept 10 man as it is? now there's a way to get a win win here.

That's false.

pvp has not content tailored to all players. all players get mixed until skill level gets its way through mmr rating and the best players get higher ranks. but still high ranks get mixed with lower ranks, being that a source of big frustrations, sided matches and great toxicity

open world has not content tailored for all players. there's no ow challenging enough for hardcore players.

raids are

The Hardcore Part of PvE

. so many years and so many pages and you still don't get this.

your wrong, pvp does have content for all players including hardcore, its called ranked, your confusing balance with accessibility. And hardcore players have access to open world content, the challenge is there if they want it. and yet again you are wrong, TUNED raiding is for hardcore players, raids are also tuned for non hardcore players - this is not wow.

ranked is the same content as unranked, the only difference is the level of expectations and rewards, but the content is exactly the same. so no you can't say that ranked is content for hardcores and unranked for casuals wth. yeah you can say that hardcores are competitive and so they play ranked but ranked right now is a lot more about rewards than the leaderboards. ranked is played by all types of players, not only hardcores. xd

open world content has no challenge. are you going to say that hot metas are challenging? open world bosses? shadow behemoth? what part of ow is challenging and suited for hardcore players, in your opinion? because you're saying that there is, but you're not giving any example of that. i have yet to find any ow content that is challenging enough for me, and i'm far from being a hardcore raider. still, ow is numb and boring af for me.

raids are for hardcore players, it's really incredible that after all this time you still haven't understood all those anet statements about the purpose of raids. you can argue that raids should be aimed for a wider range of players, you could argue that raids should not be only hardcore content and that's fine, but not this. like really.

that's completely different from accessibility of course, are you now going to say that recurrent lie that casuals do not have access to raids?

i was probably raiding on paper when you were still in nappies, I know what raiding is. Raiding is an instance supporting more than 5 player generally speaking. difficulty is irrelevant from that perspective. However raiding is the premium end of pve for hardcore players and games like WOW. Hardcore raiding being the end all of PVE died oh nearly a decade ago. the rest of your chat has got nothing to do with my points, whether or not the ranking process works has nothing to do with accessibility, and open world being easy does not make it inaccessible to hardcore players (open world is not about difficulty). Raider obsession with difficulty is not the be all and end oll of mmorpg, your a niche market, get over yourself.

ps read the thread, we know whats Anets comments are, this thread is not about Anet's current position.

If difficulty is irrelevant, then easy mode raids exist - they're called T1 fractals. Because what is even more irrelevant is the player number limit. The only reason raids are considered premium endgame is because they are not trivial. Which - surprise, surprise - is only because of their difficulty.

t1 fractals is 5 man and ofc number of players changes game dynamics. Let's not be obtuse and lets not pretend games like WOW and ESO don't exist where there are a literally millions of players playing raids with > 5 players that are tuned to be accessible with little preparation.

Oh, you mean large-scale accessible events like the Octovine? Or the Jungle Wurm? I agree, these have their place.

lol ok Feonar, we are not stupid people are we.

So what exactly is your point? You can't make accessible endgame. It's pretty much an oxymoron. You want accessible events? You get those. I really fail to see the point of adding accessible versions of the raids - they'd be the same experience the game already offers.

[Bladestrom.6425]

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@nia.4725 said:And the answer is NO. A complete rework is not "just involve changing the movement patterns or relative strenghts of certain abilities", it would require much more work, not just tweaking here and there.

Again, I am not making a serious proposal here, I am not quantifying the

amount

of work this would take or making any claims that "this would be easy," or any such thing. There is no need to get defensive about it. The only point I'm making in this portion of the discussion is that it would be

possible

to redesign the encounter such that it could be soloed, and the play experience for that solo encounter would involve the same mechanics

for him

as

he

would be expected to perform if he were one man in a ten-man raid squad. Clear?

In the most simple terms, if a very basic "spam DPS" boss takes 100,000 damage to kill, and each player in a team is expected to average 10,000 damage to meet that total, then a single player could simulate that experience by reducing his HP to 10,000

or

buffing the player's damage by 10x. If the boss could "strip" one of those 10x buffs, then it would be equivalent to if he killed off a single player in a raid squad in terms of the overall DPS.

About the shrines thing, I think maybe you don't know how DPS works in raids. Most people will do whatever deals most damage, to the point of skipping mechanics if that allows the party to deal more DPS. The thing goes like this:

I'm aware of those mechanics, and those could likewise be simulated in a solo encounter. Whether it's one person attacking or ten, so long as you would be capable of reaching the DPS to phase the boss, the same tactic would work.

And this would apply to your shrine thing. The drop in DPS caused by a shrine destroyed would be tested. If moving and dealing with that mechanic is a bigger DPS drop than the drop caused by the mechanic failing, or if reaching certain % of the boss cancels the mechanic, then the mechanic will be ignored.

Sure, but the point of it was to

replicate

the impact of the "if you don't break a player's breakbar then that player will be sacrificed" mechanic you were talking about above, so the same discussion would happen. "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that character, and prevent his DPS from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same scenario, "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that shrine, and prevent its DPS buff from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same thing, same outcome to either scenario, same choice for the player to make. You see my point here? If it's balanced properly, then players would make the same decision, either to save the player/shrine or allow it to die, in both scenarios.

Again, I'm not suggesting this as some new and clever mechanic that should be added to raids, I'm using it to make the point that existing raid mechanics that rely on party interaction

could

be replaced with equivalent effects that would alter the outcome of the matches in the exact same ways, and would require identical player interaction to resolve them, with identical results based on whether they succeed or fail to do so.

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

But what if you think even that is too generous to the plebes? So what if the 50lb. weight pays out $20 each time? That means you'd need to lift twenty of the 10lb. weights, 200lb. in total, to equal one of the 50lb. weights. This is clearly unbalanced in favor of the 50lb. weight, nobody would lift the 10lb. weights if they had any capacity to lift the 50lb., and anyone who couldn't lift the 50lb. would have a significant incentive to improve so that they too could lift the 50lb. weight.

And yet,

as unfair as this arrangement is to the 10lb. people, there is still choice. They still have

an option.

It is not fair, but they can progress. If their goal is to make $1000, it will take them 1000 lifts, 10,000lbs. in total, when compared to the alternative of 50 lifts, 1/4 the total weight, but if 50lbs. just isn't an option for them,

they can still reach their goal eventually.

Your analogy falls apart. If raids right now are lifting 50lbs and getting $20 dollars, easy mode raids that are designed to be solo'd and beatable by anyone regardless of build, gear, and skill that rewards legendary armor is comparable to someone watching 50lbs sit on the floor and getting $20.

And I guess this is my point, that it's impossible to have a conversation on this subject with someone who so devalues the basic humanity of his fellow players that

none

of their efforts can

ever

possibly match up to what He is capable of.

I actually kinda like the idea of a solo encounter. If some mechanics require another person, couldn’t another npc be brought in to assist?

Right,

or

that mechanic would just handle itself. Like if there were two circles and you had to stand in both at once, then either A only one circle would be required, or B, an NPC would run for one circle and you would have to run to the other. Either way the experience for that one player would be the same.

So if you did it solo you would get like one third an insight?

Well, again,

this is not a proposal for something they should do.

I actually do not think that implementing a solo mode version of raid encounters would be an effective use of their time. Too much work relative to the payoff. I was just discussing the

concept

that Sarrs raised that group oriented content is somehow

automatically

more challenging than solo content, just by virtue of it involving multiple players. I'm trying to point out that any challenges that might be raised in an encounter by adding more players could be

simulated

simply by just adapting the mechanics accordingly. This is especially true in cooperative content.

I also think that from a

fairness

perspective, if the individual challenge would be equal, then the reward should be equal as well. Feanor raised the point that you want to

encourage

group content for the interest of the community, so you want to provide group content above and beyond what is fair, and I agreed with that to some degree, but if they ever did implement a solo mode that was as challenging as the group raid, then the rewards should at least be close, like 2/3 of an Insight or something.

But when we

were

discussing "easy mode" versions of the encounters, still ten people but with the challenge actually

reduced,

the proposal was 1/3 of an insight per encounter, yes.

I mean if they did a solo encounter, you could in theory shoot for 5 man as well.

Sure, there's nothing that would prevent either from being doable. The reason I'm not in

favor

of solo/five man versions though is that I believe that the balance and design changes needed to craft those, while 100% doable, would be more significant than what it would take to just make easy mode versions of the existing 10-man encounters. I feel like the cost/benefit balance is less worth doing.

ye making raids 5 manable addresses 0 issues. The issue is the content gap, i.e:

wvw available for casual to hard core - yesDoes 5 man instances have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does pvp have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does open world have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.

Does raids (>=8 players say) have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - not yet in GW2, available everywhere else.

Which leads me to a different point, what if Anet introduced easier 8 MAN raids, and kept 10 man as it is? now there's a way to get a win win here.

That's false.

pvp has not content tailored to all players. all players get mixed until skill level gets its way through mmr rating and the best players get higher ranks. but still high ranks get mixed with lower ranks, being that a source of big frustrations, sided matches and great toxicity

open world has not content tailored for all players. there's no ow challenging enough for hardcore players.

raids are

The Hardcore Part of PvE

. so many years and so many pages and you still don't get this.

your wrong, pvp does have content for all players including hardcore, its called ranked, your confusing balance with accessibility. And hardcore players have access to open world content, the challenge is there if they want it. and yet again you are wrong, TUNED raiding is for hardcore players, raids are also tuned for non hardcore players - this is not wow.

ranked is the same content as unranked, the only difference is the level of expectations and rewards, but the content is exactly the same. so no you can't say that ranked is content for hardcores and unranked for casuals wth. yeah you can say that hardcores are competitive and so they play ranked but ranked right now is a lot more about rewards than the leaderboards. ranked is played by all types of players, not only hardcores. xd

open world content has no challenge. are you going to say that hot metas are challenging? open world bosses? shadow behemoth? what part of ow is challenging and suited for hardcore players, in your opinion? because you're saying that there is, but you're not giving any example of that. i have yet to find any ow content that is challenging enough for me, and i'm far from being a hardcore raider. still, ow is numb and boring af for me.

raids are for hardcore players, it's really incredible that after all this time you still haven't understood all those anet statements about the purpose of raids. you can argue that raids should be aimed for a wider range of players, you could argue that raids should not be only hardcore content and that's fine, but not this. like really.

that's completely different from accessibility of course, are you now going to say that recurrent lie that casuals do not have access to raids?

i was probably raiding on paper when you were still in nappies, I know what raiding is. Raiding is an instance supporting more than 5 player generally speaking. difficulty is irrelevant from that perspective. However raiding is the premium end of pve for hardcore players and games like WOW. Hardcore raiding being the end all of PVE died oh nearly a decade ago. the rest of your chat has got nothing to do with my points, whether or not the ranking process works has nothing to do with accessibility, and open world being easy does not make it inaccessible to hardcore players (open world is not about difficulty). Raider obsession with difficulty is not the be all and end oll of mmorpg, your a niche market, get over yourself.

ps read the thread, we know whats Anets comments are, this thread is not about Anet's current position.

If difficulty is irrelevant, then easy mode raids exist - they're called T1 fractals. Because what is even more irrelevant is the player number limit. The only reason raids are considered premium endgame is because they are not trivial. Which - surprise, surprise - is only because of their difficulty.

t1 fractals is 5 man and ofc number of players changes game dynamics. Let's not be obtuse and lets not pretend games like WOW and ESO don't exist where there are a literally millions of players playing raids with > 5 players that are tuned to be accessible with little preparation.

Oh, you mean large-scale accessible events like the Octovine? Or the Jungle Wurm? I agree, these have their place.

lol ok Feonar, we are not stupid people are we.

So what exactly is your point? You can't make accessible endgame. It's pretty much an oxymoron. You want accessible events? You get those. I really fail to see the point of adding accessible versions of the raids - they'd be the same experience the game already offers.

what are you talking about? all the other significant AAA mmorpg have easy mode raids that are accessible to all without the time commitment tightly tuned raids require This is like ground hog day, we know this, its been discussed to death, there is precedent, its common sense blah blah blah. You may not see the 'point' in adding accessible raids because you're part of the little nich that has 10 man instances tailored to your needs, well great, now what about the rest of the player base.

[mortrialus.3062]

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@nia.4725 said:And the answer is NO. A complete rework is not "just involve changing the movement patterns or relative strenghts of certain abilities", it would require much more work, not just tweaking here and there.

Again, I am not making a serious proposal here, I am not quantifying the

amount

of work this would take or making any claims that "this would be easy," or any such thing. There is no need to get defensive about it. The only point I'm making in this portion of the discussion is that it would be

possible

to redesign the encounter such that it could be soloed, and the play experience for that solo encounter would involve the same mechanics

for him

as

he

would be expected to perform if he were one man in a ten-man raid squad. Clear?

In the most simple terms, if a very basic "spam DPS" boss takes 100,000 damage to kill, and each player in a team is expected to average 10,000 damage to meet that total, then a single player could simulate that experience by reducing his HP to 10,000

or

buffing the player's damage by 10x. If the boss could "strip" one of those 10x buffs, then it would be equivalent to if he killed off a single player in a raid squad in terms of the overall DPS.

About the shrines thing, I think maybe you don't know how DPS works in raids. Most people will do whatever deals most damage, to the point of skipping mechanics if that allows the party to deal more DPS. The thing goes like this:

I'm aware of those mechanics, and those could likewise be simulated in a solo encounter. Whether it's one person attacking or ten, so long as you would be capable of reaching the DPS to phase the boss, the same tactic would work.

And this would apply to your shrine thing. The drop in DPS caused by a shrine destroyed would be tested. If moving and dealing with that mechanic is a bigger DPS drop than the drop caused by the mechanic failing, or if reaching certain % of the boss cancels the mechanic, then the mechanic will be ignored.

Sure, but the point of it was to

replicate

the impact of the "if you don't break a player's breakbar then that player will be sacrificed" mechanic you were talking about above, so the same discussion would happen. "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that character, and prevent his DPS from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same scenario, "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that shrine, and prevent its DPS buff from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same thing, same outcome to either scenario, same choice for the player to make. You see my point here? If it's balanced properly, then players would make the same decision, either to save the player/shrine or allow it to die, in both scenarios.

Again, I'm not suggesting this as some new and clever mechanic that should be added to raids, I'm using it to make the point that existing raid mechanics that rely on party interaction

could

be replaced with equivalent effects that would alter the outcome of the matches in the exact same ways, and would require identical player interaction to resolve them, with identical results based on whether they succeed or fail to do so.

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

But what if you think even that is too generous to the plebes? So what if the 50lb. weight pays out $20 each time? That means you'd need to lift twenty of the 10lb. weights, 200lb. in total, to equal one of the 50lb. weights. This is clearly unbalanced in favor of the 50lb. weight, nobody would lift the 10lb. weights if they had any capacity to lift the 50lb., and anyone who couldn't lift the 50lb. would have a significant incentive to improve so that they too could lift the 50lb. weight.

And yet,

as unfair as this arrangement is to the 10lb. people, there is still choice. They still have

an option.

It is not fair, but they can progress. If their goal is to make $1000, it will take them 1000 lifts, 10,000lbs. in total, when compared to the alternative of 50 lifts, 1/4 the total weight, but if 50lbs. just isn't an option for them,

they can still reach their goal eventually.

Your analogy falls apart. If raids right now are lifting 50lbs and getting $20 dollars, easy mode raids that are designed to be solo'd and beatable by anyone regardless of build, gear, and skill that rewards legendary armor is comparable to someone watching 50lbs sit on the floor and getting $20.

And I guess this is my point, that it's impossible to have a conversation on this subject with someone who so devalues the basic humanity of his fellow players that

none

of their efforts can

ever

possibly match up to what He is capable of.

I actually kinda like the idea of a solo encounter. If some mechanics require another person, couldn’t another npc be brought in to assist?

Right,

or

that mechanic would just handle itself. Like if there were two circles and you had to stand in both at once, then either A only one circle would be required, or B, an NPC would run for one circle and you would have to run to the other. Either way the experience for that one player would be the same.

So if you did it solo you would get like one third an insight?

Well, again,

this is not a proposal for something they should do.

I actually do not think that implementing a solo mode version of raid encounters would be an effective use of their time. Too much work relative to the payoff. I was just discussing the

concept

that Sarrs raised that group oriented content is somehow

automatically

more challenging than solo content, just by virtue of it involving multiple players. I'm trying to point out that any challenges that might be raised in an encounter by adding more players could be

simulated

simply by just adapting the mechanics accordingly. This is especially true in cooperative content.

I also think that from a

fairness

perspective, if the individual challenge would be equal, then the reward should be equal as well. Feanor raised the point that you want to

encourage

group content for the interest of the community, so you want to provide group content above and beyond what is fair, and I agreed with that to some degree, but if they ever did implement a solo mode that was as challenging as the group raid, then the rewards should at least be close, like 2/3 of an Insight or something.

But when we

were

discussing "easy mode" versions of the encounters, still ten people but with the challenge actually

reduced,

the proposal was 1/3 of an insight per encounter, yes.

I mean if they did a solo encounter, you could in theory shoot for 5 man as well.

Sure, there's nothing that would prevent either from being doable. The reason I'm not in

favor

of solo/five man versions though is that I believe that the balance and design changes needed to craft those, while 100% doable, would be more significant than what it would take to just make easy mode versions of the existing 10-man encounters. I feel like the cost/benefit balance is less worth doing.

ye making raids 5 manable addresses 0 issues. The issue is the content gap, i.e:

wvw available for casual to hard core - yesDoes 5 man instances have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does pvp have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does open world have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.

Does raids (>=8 players say) have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - not yet in GW2, available everywhere else.

Which leads me to a different point, what if Anet introduced easier 8 MAN raids, and kept 10 man as it is? now there's a way to get a win win here.

That's false.

pvp has not content tailored to all players. all players get mixed until skill level gets its way through mmr rating and the best players get higher ranks. but still high ranks get mixed with lower ranks, being that a source of big frustrations, sided matches and great toxicity

open world has not content tailored for all players. there's no ow challenging enough for hardcore players.

raids are

The Hardcore Part of PvE

. so many years and so many pages and you still don't get this.

your wrong, pvp does have content for all players including hardcore, its called ranked, your confusing balance with accessibility. And hardcore players have access to open world content, the challenge is there if they want it. and yet again you are wrong, TUNED raiding is for hardcore players, raids are also tuned for non hardcore players - this is not wow.

ranked is the same content as unranked, the only difference is the level of expectations and rewards, but the content is exactly the same. so no you can't say that ranked is content for hardcores and unranked for casuals wth. yeah you can say that hardcores are competitive and so they play ranked but ranked right now is a lot more about rewards than the leaderboards. ranked is played by all types of players, not only hardcores. xd

open world content has no challenge. are you going to say that hot metas are challenging? open world bosses? shadow behemoth? what part of ow is challenging and suited for hardcore players, in your opinion? because you're saying that there is, but you're not giving any example of that. i have yet to find any ow content that is challenging enough for me, and i'm far from being a hardcore raider. still, ow is numb and boring af for me.

raids are for hardcore players, it's really incredible that after all this time you still haven't understood all those anet statements about the purpose of raids. you can argue that raids should be aimed for a wider range of players, you could argue that raids should not be only hardcore content and that's fine, but not this. like really.

that's completely different from accessibility of course, are you now going to say that recurrent lie that casuals do not have access to raids?

i was probably raiding on paper when you were still in nappies, I know what raiding is. Raiding is an instance supporting more than 5 player generally speaking. difficulty is irrelevant from that perspective. However raiding is the premium end of pve for hardcore players and games like WOW. Hardcore raiding being the end all of PVE died oh nearly a decade ago. the rest of your chat has got nothing to do with my points, whether or not the ranking process works has nothing to do with accessibility, and open world being easy does not make it inaccessible to hardcore players (open world is not about difficulty). Raider obsession with difficulty is not the be all and end oll of mmorpg, your a niche market, get over yourself.

ps read the thread, we know whats Anets comments are, this thread is not about Anet's current position.

If difficulty is irrelevant, then easy mode raids exist - they're called T1 fractals. Because what is even more irrelevant is the player number limit. The only reason raids are considered premium endgame is because they are not trivial. Which - surprise, surprise - is only because of their difficulty.

t1 fractals is 5 man and ofc number of players changes game dynamics. Let's not be obtuse and lets not pretend games like WOW and ESO don't exist where there are a literally millions of players playing raids with > 5 players that are tuned to be accessible with little preparation.

Oh, you mean large-scale accessible events like the Octovine? Or the Jungle Wurm? I agree, these have their place.

lol ok Feonar, we are not stupid people are we.

So what exactly is your point? You can't make accessible endgame. It's pretty much an oxymoron. You want accessible events? You get those. I really fail to see the point of adding accessible versions of the raids - they'd be the same experience the game already offers.

what are you talking about? all the other significant AAA mmorpg have easy mode raids that are accessible to all without the time commitment tightly tuned raids require This is like ground hog day, we know this, its been discussed to death, there is precedent, its common sense blah blah blah. You

may not

see the 'point' in adding accessible raids because you're part of the little nich that has 10 man instances tailored to your needs, well great, now what about the rest of the player base.

The most significant other MMORPG with raiding, WoW, had more people playing on Vanilla, BC, and WotLK servers where there were no easy mode raids until Blizzard forced Nostalrius to close down. According to server population analytics Draenor's active user based dropped below 1 million players for the first time in WoW's history. If easy mode raids were so good for WoW's health, why did more people play older versions of the game that than the Live WoW? It got so bad that Blizzard had to announce Classic 1.12 WoW official legacy servers years before they were ready to be implemented.

[Pomdepin.7068]

I believe we need an “easy” mode which shouldn’t be that easy but a lot less punishing than the normal mechanics we have now. Many bosses are very punishing and 1 single error can translate into a wipe, which discourage new comers and don’t make them learn the fight that much.

An easier mode would give the opportunity to new people to learn the mechanics, have a grip on the fight with less restrictions group-wise (lfg-wise). It would therefore increase our small raiding population.

I maintain that it must be a means to learn mechanics in a less punitive environment, so it should not be much easier or skip mechanics!!!

[Pomdepin.7068]

Double post. Sorry!

[Bladestrom.6425]

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@nia.4725 said:And the answer is NO. A complete rework is not "just involve changing the movement patterns or relative strenghts of certain abilities", it would require much more work, not just tweaking here and there.

Again, I am not making a serious proposal here, I am not quantifying the

amount

of work this would take or making any claims that "this would be easy," or any such thing. There is no need to get defensive about it. The only point I'm making in this portion of the discussion is that it would be

possible

to redesign the encounter such that it could be soloed, and the play experience for that solo encounter would involve the same mechanics

for him

as

he

would be expected to perform if he were one man in a ten-man raid squad. Clear?

In the most simple terms, if a very basic "spam DPS" boss takes 100,000 damage to kill, and each player in a team is expected to average 10,000 damage to meet that total, then a single player could simulate that experience by reducing his HP to 10,000

or

buffing the player's damage by 10x. If the boss could "strip" one of those 10x buffs, then it would be equivalent to if he killed off a single player in a raid squad in terms of the overall DPS.

About the shrines thing, I think maybe you don't know how DPS works in raids. Most people will do whatever deals most damage, to the point of skipping mechanics if that allows the party to deal more DPS. The thing goes like this:

I'm aware of those mechanics, and those could likewise be simulated in a solo encounter. Whether it's one person attacking or ten, so long as you would be capable of reaching the DPS to phase the boss, the same tactic would work.

And this would apply to your shrine thing. The drop in DPS caused by a shrine destroyed would be tested. If moving and dealing with that mechanic is a bigger DPS drop than the drop caused by the mechanic failing, or if reaching certain % of the boss cancels the mechanic, then the mechanic will be ignored.

Sure, but the point of it was to

replicate

the impact of the "if you don't break a player's breakbar then that player will be sacrificed" mechanic you were talking about above, so the same discussion would happen. "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that character, and prevent his DPS from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same scenario, "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that shrine, and prevent its DPS buff from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same thing, same outcome to either scenario, same choice for the player to make. You see my point here? If it's balanced properly, then players would make the same decision, either to save the player/shrine or allow it to die, in both scenarios.

Again, I'm not suggesting this as some new and clever mechanic that should be added to raids, I'm using it to make the point that existing raid mechanics that rely on party interaction

could

be replaced with equivalent effects that would alter the outcome of the matches in the exact same ways, and would require identical player interaction to resolve them, with identical results based on whether they succeed or fail to do so.

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

But what if you think even that is too generous to the plebes? So what if the 50lb. weight pays out $20 each time? That means you'd need to lift twenty of the 10lb. weights, 200lb. in total, to equal one of the 50lb. weights. This is clearly unbalanced in favor of the 50lb. weight, nobody would lift the 10lb. weights if they had any capacity to lift the 50lb., and anyone who couldn't lift the 50lb. would have a significant incentive to improve so that they too could lift the 50lb. weight.

And yet,

as unfair as this arrangement is to the 10lb. people, there is still choice. They still have

an option.

It is not fair, but they can progress. If their goal is to make $1000, it will take them 1000 lifts, 10,000lbs. in total, when compared to the alternative of 50 lifts, 1/4 the total weight, but if 50lbs. just isn't an option for them,

they can still reach their goal eventually.

Your analogy falls apart. If raids right now are lifting 50lbs and getting $20 dollars, easy mode raids that are designed to be solo'd and beatable by anyone regardless of build, gear, and skill that rewards legendary armor is comparable to someone watching 50lbs sit on the floor and getting $20.

And I guess this is my point, that it's impossible to have a conversation on this subject with someone who so devalues the basic humanity of his fellow players that

none

of their efforts can

ever

possibly match up to what He is capable of.

I actually kinda like the idea of a solo encounter. If some mechanics require another person, couldn’t another npc be brought in to assist?

Right,

or

that mechanic would just handle itself. Like if there were two circles and you had to stand in both at once, then either A only one circle would be required, or B, an NPC would run for one circle and you would have to run to the other. Either way the experience for that one player would be the same.

So if you did it solo you would get like one third an insight?

Well, again,

this is not a proposal for something they should do.

I actually do not think that implementing a solo mode version of raid encounters would be an effective use of their time. Too much work relative to the payoff. I was just discussing the

concept

that Sarrs raised that group oriented content is somehow

automatically

more challenging than solo content, just by virtue of it involving multiple players. I'm trying to point out that any challenges that might be raised in an encounter by adding more players could be

simulated

simply by just adapting the mechanics accordingly. This is especially true in cooperative content.

I also think that from a

fairness

perspective, if the individual challenge would be equal, then the reward should be equal as well. Feanor raised the point that you want to

encourage

group content for the interest of the community, so you want to provide group content above and beyond what is fair, and I agreed with that to some degree, but if they ever did implement a solo mode that was as challenging as the group raid, then the rewards should at least be close, like 2/3 of an Insight or something.

But when we

were

discussing "easy mode" versions of the encounters, still ten people but with the challenge actually

reduced,

the proposal was 1/3 of an insight per encounter, yes.

I mean if they did a solo encounter, you could in theory shoot for 5 man as well.

Sure, there's nothing that would prevent either from being doable. The reason I'm not in

favor

of solo/five man versions though is that I believe that the balance and design changes needed to craft those, while 100% doable, would be more significant than what it would take to just make easy mode versions of the existing 10-man encounters. I feel like the cost/benefit balance is less worth doing.

ye making raids 5 manable addresses 0 issues. The issue is the content gap, i.e:

wvw available for casual to hard core - yesDoes 5 man instances have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does pvp have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does open world have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.

Does raids (>=8 players say) have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - not yet in GW2, available everywhere else.

Which leads me to a different point, what if Anet introduced easier 8 MAN raids, and kept 10 man as it is? now there's a way to get a win win here.

That's false.

pvp has not content tailored to all players. all players get mixed until skill level gets its way through mmr rating and the best players get higher ranks. but still high ranks get mixed with lower ranks, being that a source of big frustrations, sided matches and great toxicity

open world has not content tailored for all players. there's no ow challenging enough for hardcore players.

raids are

The Hardcore Part of PvE

. so many years and so many pages and you still don't get this.

your wrong, pvp does have content for all players including hardcore, its called ranked, your confusing balance with accessibility. And hardcore players have access to open world content, the challenge is there if they want it. and yet again you are wrong, TUNED raiding is for hardcore players, raids are also tuned for non hardcore players - this is not wow.

ranked is the same content as unranked, the only difference is the level of expectations and rewards, but the content is exactly the same. so no you can't say that ranked is content for hardcores and unranked for casuals wth. yeah you can say that hardcores are competitive and so they play ranked but ranked right now is a lot more about rewards than the leaderboards. ranked is played by all types of players, not only hardcores. xd

open world content has no challenge. are you going to say that hot metas are challenging? open world bosses? shadow behemoth? what part of ow is challenging and suited for hardcore players, in your opinion? because you're saying that there is, but you're not giving any example of that. i have yet to find any ow content that is challenging enough for me, and i'm far from being a hardcore raider. still, ow is numb and boring af for me.

raids are for hardcore players, it's really incredible that after all this time you still haven't understood all those anet statements about the purpose of raids. you can argue that raids should be aimed for a wider range of players, you could argue that raids should not be only hardcore content and that's fine, but not this. like really.

that's completely different from accessibility of course, are you now going to say that recurrent lie that casuals do not have access to raids?

i was probably raiding on paper when you were still in nappies, I know what raiding is. Raiding is an instance supporting more than 5 player generally speaking. difficulty is irrelevant from that perspective. However raiding is the premium end of pve for hardcore players and games like WOW. Hardcore raiding being the end all of PVE died oh nearly a decade ago. the rest of your chat has got nothing to do with my points, whether or not the ranking process works has nothing to do with accessibility, and open world being easy does not make it inaccessible to hardcore players (open world is not about difficulty). Raider obsession with difficulty is not the be all and end oll of mmorpg, your a niche market, get over yourself.

ps read the thread, we know whats Anets comments are, this thread is not about Anet's current position.

If difficulty is irrelevant, then easy mode raids exist - they're called T1 fractals. Because what is even more irrelevant is the player number limit. The only reason raids are considered premium endgame is because they are not trivial. Which - surprise, surprise - is only because of their difficulty.

t1 fractals is 5 man and ofc number of players changes game dynamics. Let's not be obtuse and lets not pretend games like WOW and ESO don't exist where there are a literally millions of players playing raids with > 5 players that are tuned to be accessible with little preparation.

Oh, you mean large-scale accessible events like the Octovine? Or the Jungle Wurm? I agree, these have their place.

lol ok Feonar, we are not stupid people are we.

So what exactly is your point? You can't make accessible endgame. It's pretty much an oxymoron. You want accessible events? You get those. I really fail to see the point of adding accessible versions of the raids - they'd be the same experience the game already offers.

what are you talking about? all the other significant AAA mmorpg have easy mode raids that are accessible to all without the time commitment tightly tuned raids require This is like ground hog day, we know this, its been discussed to death, there is precedent, its common sense blah blah blah. You

may not

see the 'point' in adding accessible raids because you're part of the little nich that has 10 man instances tailored to your needs, well great, now what about the rest of the player base.

The most significant other MMORPG with raiding, WoW, had more people playing on Vanilla, BC, and WotLK servers where there were no easy mode raids until Blizzard forced Nostalrius to close down. According to server population analytics Draenor's active user based dropped below 1 million players for the first time in WoW's history. If easy mode raids were so good for WoW's health, why did more people play older versions of the game that than the Live WoW? It got so bad that Blizzard had to announce Classic WoW official legacy servers years before they were ready to be implemented.

your deluding yourself, its quite sad really.. Go check current stats for WOW and ESo to name but 2. MILLIONS happily raid in easy mode every week. Maybe you were not aware of this but normal mode raiding population destroys the little niche that likes hardcore, your outdated, the world moved on a long long time ago as the player base matured.

[mortrialus.3062]

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@nia.4725 said:And the answer is NO. A complete rework is not "just involve changing the movement patterns or relative strenghts of certain abilities", it would require much more work, not just tweaking here and there.

Again, I am not making a serious proposal here, I am not quantifying the

amount

of work this would take or making any claims that "this would be easy," or any such thing. There is no need to get defensive about it. The only point I'm making in this portion of the discussion is that it would be

possible

to redesign the encounter such that it could be soloed, and the play experience for that solo encounter would involve the same mechanics

for him

as

he

would be expected to perform if he were one man in a ten-man raid squad. Clear?

In the most simple terms, if a very basic "spam DPS" boss takes 100,000 damage to kill, and each player in a team is expected to average 10,000 damage to meet that total, then a single player could simulate that experience by reducing his HP to 10,000

or

buffing the player's damage by 10x. If the boss could "strip" one of those 10x buffs, then it would be equivalent to if he killed off a single player in a raid squad in terms of the overall DPS.

About the shrines thing, I think maybe you don't know how DPS works in raids. Most people will do whatever deals most damage, to the point of skipping mechanics if that allows the party to deal more DPS. The thing goes like this:

I'm aware of those mechanics, and those could likewise be simulated in a solo encounter. Whether it's one person attacking or ten, so long as you would be capable of reaching the DPS to phase the boss, the same tactic would work.

And this would apply to your shrine thing. The drop in DPS caused by a shrine destroyed would be tested. If moving and dealing with that mechanic is a bigger DPS drop than the drop caused by the mechanic failing, or if reaching certain % of the boss cancels the mechanic, then the mechanic will be ignored.

Sure, but the point of it was to

replicate

the impact of the "if you don't break a player's breakbar then that player will be sacrificed" mechanic you were talking about above, so the same discussion would happen. "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that character, and prevent his DPS from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same scenario, "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that shrine, and prevent its DPS buff from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same thing, same outcome to either scenario, same choice for the player to make. You see my point here? If it's balanced properly, then players would make the same decision, either to save the player/shrine or allow it to die, in both scenarios.

Again, I'm not suggesting this as some new and clever mechanic that should be added to raids, I'm using it to make the point that existing raid mechanics that rely on party interaction

could

be replaced with equivalent effects that would alter the outcome of the matches in the exact same ways, and would require identical player interaction to resolve them, with identical results based on whether they succeed or fail to do so.

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

But what if you think even that is too generous to the plebes? So what if the 50lb. weight pays out $20 each time? That means you'd need to lift twenty of the 10lb. weights, 200lb. in total, to equal one of the 50lb. weights. This is clearly unbalanced in favor of the 50lb. weight, nobody would lift the 10lb. weights if they had any capacity to lift the 50lb., and anyone who couldn't lift the 50lb. would have a significant incentive to improve so that they too could lift the 50lb. weight.

And yet,

as unfair as this arrangement is to the 10lb. people, there is still choice. They still have

an option.

It is not fair, but they can progress. If their goal is to make $1000, it will take them 1000 lifts, 10,000lbs. in total, when compared to the alternative of 50 lifts, 1/4 the total weight, but if 50lbs. just isn't an option for them,

they can still reach their goal eventually.

Your analogy falls apart. If raids right now are lifting 50lbs and getting $20 dollars, easy mode raids that are designed to be solo'd and beatable by anyone regardless of build, gear, and skill that rewards legendary armor is comparable to someone watching 50lbs sit on the floor and getting $20.

And I guess this is my point, that it's impossible to have a conversation on this subject with someone who so devalues the basic humanity of his fellow players that

none

of their efforts can

ever

possibly match up to what He is capable of.

I actually kinda like the idea of a solo encounter. If some mechanics require another person, couldn’t another npc be brought in to assist?

Right,

or

that mechanic would just handle itself. Like if there were two circles and you had to stand in both at once, then either A only one circle would be required, or B, an NPC would run for one circle and you would have to run to the other. Either way the experience for that one player would be the same.

So if you did it solo you would get like one third an insight?

Well, again,

this is not a proposal for something they should do.

I actually do not think that implementing a solo mode version of raid encounters would be an effective use of their time. Too much work relative to the payoff. I was just discussing the

concept

that Sarrs raised that group oriented content is somehow

automatically

more challenging than solo content, just by virtue of it involving multiple players. I'm trying to point out that any challenges that might be raised in an encounter by adding more players could be

simulated

simply by just adapting the mechanics accordingly. This is especially true in cooperative content.

I also think that from a

fairness

perspective, if the individual challenge would be equal, then the reward should be equal as well. Feanor raised the point that you want to

encourage

group content for the interest of the community, so you want to provide group content above and beyond what is fair, and I agreed with that to some degree, but if they ever did implement a solo mode that was as challenging as the group raid, then the rewards should at least be close, like 2/3 of an Insight or something.

But when we

were

discussing "easy mode" versions of the encounters, still ten people but with the challenge actually

reduced,

the proposal was 1/3 of an insight per encounter, yes.

I mean if they did a solo encounter, you could in theory shoot for 5 man as well.

Sure, there's nothing that would prevent either from being doable. The reason I'm not in

favor

of solo/five man versions though is that I believe that the balance and design changes needed to craft those, while 100% doable, would be more significant than what it would take to just make easy mode versions of the existing 10-man encounters. I feel like the cost/benefit balance is less worth doing.

ye making raids 5 manable addresses 0 issues. The issue is the content gap, i.e:

wvw available for casual to hard core - yesDoes 5 man instances have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does pvp have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does open world have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.

Does raids (>=8 players say) have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - not yet in GW2, available everywhere else.

Which leads me to a different point, what if Anet introduced easier 8 MAN raids, and kept 10 man as it is? now there's a way to get a win win here.

That's false.

pvp has not content tailored to all players. all players get mixed until skill level gets its way through mmr rating and the best players get higher ranks. but still high ranks get mixed with lower ranks, being that a source of big frustrations, sided matches and great toxicity

open world has not content tailored for all players. there's no ow challenging enough for hardcore players.

raids are

The Hardcore Part of PvE

. so many years and so many pages and you still don't get this.

your wrong, pvp does have content for all players including hardcore, its called ranked, your confusing balance with accessibility. And hardcore players have access to open world content, the challenge is there if they want it. and yet again you are wrong, TUNED raiding is for hardcore players, raids are also tuned for non hardcore players - this is not wow.

ranked is the same content as unranked, the only difference is the level of expectations and rewards, but the content is exactly the same. so no you can't say that ranked is content for hardcores and unranked for casuals wth. yeah you can say that hardcores are competitive and so they play ranked but ranked right now is a lot more about rewards than the leaderboards. ranked is played by all types of players, not only hardcores. xd

open world content has no challenge. are you going to say that hot metas are challenging? open world bosses? shadow behemoth? what part of ow is challenging and suited for hardcore players, in your opinion? because you're saying that there is, but you're not giving any example of that. i have yet to find any ow content that is challenging enough for me, and i'm far from being a hardcore raider. still, ow is numb and boring af for me.

raids are for hardcore players, it's really incredible that after all this time you still haven't understood all those anet statements about the purpose of raids. you can argue that raids should be aimed for a wider range of players, you could argue that raids should not be only hardcore content and that's fine, but not this. like really.

that's completely different from accessibility of course, are you now going to say that recurrent lie that casuals do not have access to raids?

i was probably raiding on paper when you were still in nappies, I know what raiding is. Raiding is an instance supporting more than 5 player generally speaking. difficulty is irrelevant from that perspective. However raiding is the premium end of pve for hardcore players and games like WOW. Hardcore raiding being the end all of PVE died oh nearly a decade ago. the rest of your chat has got nothing to do with my points, whether or not the ranking process works has nothing to do with accessibility, and open world being easy does not make it inaccessible to hardcore players (open world is not about difficulty). Raider obsession with difficulty is not the be all and end oll of mmorpg, your a niche market, get over yourself.

ps read the thread, we know whats Anets comments are, this thread is not about Anet's current position.

If difficulty is irrelevant, then easy mode raids exist - they're called T1 fractals. Because what is even more irrelevant is the player number limit. The only reason raids are considered premium endgame is because they are not trivial. Which - surprise, surprise - is only because of their difficulty.

t1 fractals is 5 man and ofc number of players changes game dynamics. Let's not be obtuse and lets not pretend games like WOW and ESO don't exist where there are a literally millions of players playing raids with > 5 players that are tuned to be accessible with little preparation.

Oh, you mean large-scale accessible events like the Octovine? Or the Jungle Wurm? I agree, these have their place.

lol ok Feonar, we are not stupid people are we.

So what exactly is your point? You can't make accessible endgame. It's pretty much an oxymoron. You want accessible events? You get those. I really fail to see the point of adding accessible versions of the raids - they'd be the same experience the game already offers.

what are you talking about? all the other significant AAA mmorpg have easy mode raids that are accessible to all without the time commitment tightly tuned raids require This is like ground hog day, we know this, its been discussed to death, there is precedent, its common sense blah blah blah. You

may not

see the 'point' in adding accessible raids because you're part of the little nich that has 10 man instances tailored to your needs, well great, now what about the rest of the player base.

The most significant other MMORPG with raiding, WoW, had more people playing on Vanilla, BC, and WotLK servers where there were no easy mode raids until Blizzard forced Nostalrius to close down. According to server population analytics Draenor's active user based dropped below 1 million players for the first time in WoW's history. If easy mode raids were so good for WoW's health, why did more people play older versions of the game that than the Live WoW? It got so bad that Blizzard had to announce Classic WoW official legacy servers years before they were ready to be implemented.

your deluding yourself, its quite sad really.. Go check current stats for WOW and ESo to name but 2. MILLIONS happily raid in easy mode every week. Maybe you were not aware of this but normal mode raiding population destroys the little niche that likes hardcore, your outdated, the world moved on a long long time ago as the player base matured.

Which is why Blizzard felt the need to rerelease WoW patch 1.12.

Again, millions more players were on private classic WoW servers compared to live, especially when Nostalrius was still a thing.

[Feanor.2358]

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@nia.4725 said:And the answer is NO. A complete rework is not "just involve changing the movement patterns or relative strenghts of certain abilities", it would require much more work, not just tweaking here and there.

Again, I am not making a serious proposal here, I am not quantifying the

amount

of work this would take or making any claims that "this would be easy," or any such thing. There is no need to get defensive about it. The only point I'm making in this portion of the discussion is that it would be

possible

to redesign the encounter such that it could be soloed, and the play experience for that solo encounter would involve the same mechanics

for him

as

he

would be expected to perform if he were one man in a ten-man raid squad. Clear?

In the most simple terms, if a very basic "spam DPS" boss takes 100,000 damage to kill, and each player in a team is expected to average 10,000 damage to meet that total, then a single player could simulate that experience by reducing his HP to 10,000

or

buffing the player's damage by 10x. If the boss could "strip" one of those 10x buffs, then it would be equivalent to if he killed off a single player in a raid squad in terms of the overall DPS.

About the shrines thing, I think maybe you don't know how DPS works in raids. Most people will do whatever deals most damage, to the point of skipping mechanics if that allows the party to deal more DPS. The thing goes like this:

I'm aware of those mechanics, and those could likewise be simulated in a solo encounter. Whether it's one person attacking or ten, so long as you would be capable of reaching the DPS to phase the boss, the same tactic would work.

And this would apply to your shrine thing. The drop in DPS caused by a shrine destroyed would be tested. If moving and dealing with that mechanic is a bigger DPS drop than the drop caused by the mechanic failing, or if reaching certain % of the boss cancels the mechanic, then the mechanic will be ignored.

Sure, but the point of it was to

replicate

the impact of the "if you don't break a player's breakbar then that player will be sacrificed" mechanic you were talking about above, so the same discussion would happen. "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that character, and prevent his DPS from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same scenario, "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that shrine, and prevent its DPS buff from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same thing, same outcome to either scenario, same choice for the player to make. You see my point here? If it's balanced properly, then players would make the same decision, either to save the player/shrine or allow it to die, in both scenarios.

Again, I'm not suggesting this as some new and clever mechanic that should be added to raids, I'm using it to make the point that existing raid mechanics that rely on party interaction

could

be replaced with equivalent effects that would alter the outcome of the matches in the exact same ways, and would require identical player interaction to resolve them, with identical results based on whether they succeed or fail to do so.

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

But what if you think even that is too generous to the plebes? So what if the 50lb. weight pays out $20 each time? That means you'd need to lift twenty of the 10lb. weights, 200lb. in total, to equal one of the 50lb. weights. This is clearly unbalanced in favor of the 50lb. weight, nobody would lift the 10lb. weights if they had any capacity to lift the 50lb., and anyone who couldn't lift the 50lb. would have a significant incentive to improve so that they too could lift the 50lb. weight.

And yet,

as unfair as this arrangement is to the 10lb. people, there is still choice. They still have

an option.

It is not fair, but they can progress. If their goal is to make $1000, it will take them 1000 lifts, 10,000lbs. in total, when compared to the alternative of 50 lifts, 1/4 the total weight, but if 50lbs. just isn't an option for them,

they can still reach their goal eventually.

Your analogy falls apart. If raids right now are lifting 50lbs and getting $20 dollars, easy mode raids that are designed to be solo'd and beatable by anyone regardless of build, gear, and skill that rewards legendary armor is comparable to someone watching 50lbs sit on the floor and getting $20.

And I guess this is my point, that it's impossible to have a conversation on this subject with someone who so devalues the basic humanity of his fellow players that

none

of their efforts can

ever

possibly match up to what He is capable of.

I actually kinda like the idea of a solo encounter. If some mechanics require another person, couldn’t another npc be brought in to assist?

Right,

or

that mechanic would just handle itself. Like if there were two circles and you had to stand in both at once, then either A only one circle would be required, or B, an NPC would run for one circle and you would have to run to the other. Either way the experience for that one player would be the same.

So if you did it solo you would get like one third an insight?

Well, again,

this is not a proposal for something they should do.

I actually do not think that implementing a solo mode version of raid encounters would be an effective use of their time. Too much work relative to the payoff. I was just discussing the

concept

that Sarrs raised that group oriented content is somehow

automatically

more challenging than solo content, just by virtue of it involving multiple players. I'm trying to point out that any challenges that might be raised in an encounter by adding more players could be

simulated

simply by just adapting the mechanics accordingly. This is especially true in cooperative content.

I also think that from a

fairness

perspective, if the individual challenge would be equal, then the reward should be equal as well. Feanor raised the point that you want to

encourage

group content for the interest of the community, so you want to provide group content above and beyond what is fair, and I agreed with that to some degree, but if they ever did implement a solo mode that was as challenging as the group raid, then the rewards should at least be close, like 2/3 of an Insight or something.

But when we

were

discussing "easy mode" versions of the encounters, still ten people but with the challenge actually

reduced,

the proposal was 1/3 of an insight per encounter, yes.

I mean if they did a solo encounter, you could in theory shoot for 5 man as well.

Sure, there's nothing that would prevent either from being doable. The reason I'm not in

favor

of solo/five man versions though is that I believe that the balance and design changes needed to craft those, while 100% doable, would be more significant than what it would take to just make easy mode versions of the existing 10-man encounters. I feel like the cost/benefit balance is less worth doing.

ye making raids 5 manable addresses 0 issues. The issue is the content gap, i.e:

wvw available for casual to hard core - yesDoes 5 man instances have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does pvp have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does open world have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.

Does raids (>=8 players say) have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - not yet in GW2, available everywhere else.

Which leads me to a different point, what if Anet introduced easier 8 MAN raids, and kept 10 man as it is? now there's a way to get a win win here.

That's false.

pvp has not content tailored to all players. all players get mixed until skill level gets its way through mmr rating and the best players get higher ranks. but still high ranks get mixed with lower ranks, being that a source of big frustrations, sided matches and great toxicity

open world has not content tailored for all players. there's no ow challenging enough for hardcore players.

raids are

The Hardcore Part of PvE

. so many years and so many pages and you still don't get this.

your wrong, pvp does have content for all players including hardcore, its called ranked, your confusing balance with accessibility. And hardcore players have access to open world content, the challenge is there if they want it. and yet again you are wrong, TUNED raiding is for hardcore players, raids are also tuned for non hardcore players - this is not wow.

ranked is the same content as unranked, the only difference is the level of expectations and rewards, but the content is exactly the same. so no you can't say that ranked is content for hardcores and unranked for casuals wth. yeah you can say that hardcores are competitive and so they play ranked but ranked right now is a lot more about rewards than the leaderboards. ranked is played by all types of players, not only hardcores. xd

open world content has no challenge. are you going to say that hot metas are challenging? open world bosses? shadow behemoth? what part of ow is challenging and suited for hardcore players, in your opinion? because you're saying that there is, but you're not giving any example of that. i have yet to find any ow content that is challenging enough for me, and i'm far from being a hardcore raider. still, ow is numb and boring af for me.

raids are for hardcore players, it's really incredible that after all this time you still haven't understood all those anet statements about the purpose of raids. you can argue that raids should be aimed for a wider range of players, you could argue that raids should not be only hardcore content and that's fine, but not this. like really.

that's completely different from accessibility of course, are you now going to say that recurrent lie that casuals do not have access to raids?

i was probably raiding on paper when you were still in nappies, I know what raiding is. Raiding is an instance supporting more than 5 player generally speaking. difficulty is irrelevant from that perspective. However raiding is the premium end of pve for hardcore players and games like WOW. Hardcore raiding being the end all of PVE died oh nearly a decade ago. the rest of your chat has got nothing to do with my points, whether or not the ranking process works has nothing to do with accessibility, and open world being easy does not make it inaccessible to hardcore players (open world is not about difficulty). Raider obsession with difficulty is not the be all and end oll of mmorpg, your a niche market, get over yourself.

ps read the thread, we know whats Anets comments are, this thread is not about Anet's current position.

If difficulty is irrelevant, then easy mode raids exist - they're called T1 fractals. Because what is even more irrelevant is the player number limit. The only reason raids are considered premium endgame is because they are not trivial. Which - surprise, surprise - is only because of their difficulty.

t1 fractals is 5 man and ofc number of players changes game dynamics. Let's not be obtuse and lets not pretend games like WOW and ESO don't exist where there are a literally millions of players playing raids with > 5 players that are tuned to be accessible with little preparation.

Oh, you mean large-scale accessible events like the Octovine? Or the Jungle Wurm? I agree, these have their place.

lol ok Feonar, we are not stupid people are we.

So what exactly is your point? You can't make accessible endgame. It's pretty much an oxymoron. You want accessible events? You get those. I really fail to see the point of adding accessible versions of the raids - they'd be the same experience the game already offers.

what are you talking about? all the other significant AAA mmorpg have easy mode raids that are accessible to all without the time commitment tightly tuned raids require This is like ground hog day, we know this, its been discussed to death, there is precedent, its common sense blah blah blah. You

may not

see the 'point' in adding accessible raids because you're part of the little nich that has 10 man instances tailored to your needs, well great, now what about the rest of the player base.

GW2 also has accessible, easy group content. Both instanced and open-world. What is the magical property that makes raids stand out? Could it be... difficulty?? Because if that's not it, then there's just one more difference - rewards.

[Cyninja.2954]

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@nia.4725 said:And the answer is NO. A complete rework is not "just involve changing the movement patterns or relative strenghts of certain abilities", it would require much more work, not just tweaking here and there.

Again, I am not making a serious proposal here, I am not quantifying the

amount

of work this would take or making any claims that "this would be easy," or any such thing. There is no need to get defensive about it. The only point I'm making in this portion of the discussion is that it would be

possible

to redesign the encounter such that it could be soloed, and the play experience for that solo encounter would involve the same mechanics

for him

as

he

would be expected to perform if he were one man in a ten-man raid squad. Clear?

In the most simple terms, if a very basic "spam DPS" boss takes 100,000 damage to kill, and each player in a team is expected to average 10,000 damage to meet that total, then a single player could simulate that experience by reducing his HP to 10,000

or

buffing the player's damage by 10x. If the boss could "strip" one of those 10x buffs, then it would be equivalent to if he killed off a single player in a raid squad in terms of the overall DPS.

About the shrines thing, I think maybe you don't know how DPS works in raids. Most people will do whatever deals most damage, to the point of skipping mechanics if that allows the party to deal more DPS. The thing goes like this:

I'm aware of those mechanics, and those could likewise be simulated in a solo encounter. Whether it's one person attacking or ten, so long as you would be capable of reaching the DPS to phase the boss, the same tactic would work.

And this would apply to your shrine thing. The drop in DPS caused by a shrine destroyed would be tested. If moving and dealing with that mechanic is a bigger DPS drop than the drop caused by the mechanic failing, or if reaching certain % of the boss cancels the mechanic, then the mechanic will be ignored.

Sure, but the point of it was to

replicate

the impact of the "if you don't break a player's breakbar then that player will be sacrificed" mechanic you were talking about above, so the same discussion would happen. "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that character, and prevent his DPS from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same scenario, "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that shrine, and prevent its DPS buff from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same thing, same outcome to either scenario, same choice for the player to make. You see my point here? If it's balanced properly, then players would make the same decision, either to save the player/shrine or allow it to die, in both scenarios.

Again, I'm not suggesting this as some new and clever mechanic that should be added to raids, I'm using it to make the point that existing raid mechanics that rely on party interaction

could

be replaced with equivalent effects that would alter the outcome of the matches in the exact same ways, and would require identical player interaction to resolve them, with identical results based on whether they succeed or fail to do so.

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

But what if you think even that is too generous to the plebes? So what if the 50lb. weight pays out $20 each time? That means you'd need to lift twenty of the 10lb. weights, 200lb. in total, to equal one of the 50lb. weights. This is clearly unbalanced in favor of the 50lb. weight, nobody would lift the 10lb. weights if they had any capacity to lift the 50lb., and anyone who couldn't lift the 50lb. would have a significant incentive to improve so that they too could lift the 50lb. weight.

And yet,

as unfair as this arrangement is to the 10lb. people, there is still choice. They still have

an option.

It is not fair, but they can progress. If their goal is to make $1000, it will take them 1000 lifts, 10,000lbs. in total, when compared to the alternative of 50 lifts, 1/4 the total weight, but if 50lbs. just isn't an option for them,

they can still reach their goal eventually.

Your analogy falls apart. If raids right now are lifting 50lbs and getting $20 dollars, easy mode raids that are designed to be solo'd and beatable by anyone regardless of build, gear, and skill that rewards legendary armor is comparable to someone watching 50lbs sit on the floor and getting $20.

And I guess this is my point, that it's impossible to have a conversation on this subject with someone who so devalues the basic humanity of his fellow players that

none

of their efforts can

ever

possibly match up to what He is capable of.

I actually kinda like the idea of a solo encounter. If some mechanics require another person, couldn’t another npc be brought in to assist?

Right,

or

that mechanic would just handle itself. Like if there were two circles and you had to stand in both at once, then either A only one circle would be required, or B, an NPC would run for one circle and you would have to run to the other. Either way the experience for that one player would be the same.

So if you did it solo you would get like one third an insight?

Well, again,

this is not a proposal for something they should do.

I actually do not think that implementing a solo mode version of raid encounters would be an effective use of their time. Too much work relative to the payoff. I was just discussing the

concept

that Sarrs raised that group oriented content is somehow

automatically

more challenging than solo content, just by virtue of it involving multiple players. I'm trying to point out that any challenges that might be raised in an encounter by adding more players could be

simulated

simply by just adapting the mechanics accordingly. This is especially true in cooperative content.

I also think that from a

fairness

perspective, if the individual challenge would be equal, then the reward should be equal as well. Feanor raised the point that you want to

encourage

group content for the interest of the community, so you want to provide group content above and beyond what is fair, and I agreed with that to some degree, but if they ever did implement a solo mode that was as challenging as the group raid, then the rewards should at least be close, like 2/3 of an Insight or something.

But when we

were

discussing "easy mode" versions of the encounters, still ten people but with the challenge actually

reduced,

the proposal was 1/3 of an insight per encounter, yes.

I mean if they did a solo encounter, you could in theory shoot for 5 man as well.

Sure, there's nothing that would prevent either from being doable. The reason I'm not in

favor

of solo/five man versions though is that I believe that the balance and design changes needed to craft those, while 100% doable, would be more significant than what it would take to just make easy mode versions of the existing 10-man encounters. I feel like the cost/benefit balance is less worth doing.

ye making raids 5 manable addresses 0 issues. The issue is the content gap, i.e:

wvw available for casual to hard core - yesDoes 5 man instances have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does pvp have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does open world have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.

Does raids (>=8 players say) have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - not yet in GW2, available everywhere else.

Which leads me to a different point, what if Anet introduced easier 8 MAN raids, and kept 10 man as it is? now there's a way to get a win win here.

That's false.

pvp has not content tailored to all players. all players get mixed until skill level gets its way through mmr rating and the best players get higher ranks. but still high ranks get mixed with lower ranks, being that a source of big frustrations, sided matches and great toxicity

open world has not content tailored for all players. there's no ow challenging enough for hardcore players.

raids are

The Hardcore Part of PvE

. so many years and so many pages and you still don't get this.

your wrong, pvp does have content for all players including hardcore, its called ranked, your confusing balance with accessibility. And hardcore players have access to open world content, the challenge is there if they want it. and yet again you are wrong, TUNED raiding is for hardcore players, raids are also tuned for non hardcore players - this is not wow.

ranked is the same content as unranked, the only difference is the level of expectations and rewards, but the content is exactly the same. so no you can't say that ranked is content for hardcores and unranked for casuals wth. yeah you can say that hardcores are competitive and so they play ranked but ranked right now is a lot more about rewards than the leaderboards. ranked is played by all types of players, not only hardcores. xd

open world content has no challenge. are you going to say that hot metas are challenging? open world bosses? shadow behemoth? what part of ow is challenging and suited for hardcore players, in your opinion? because you're saying that there is, but you're not giving any example of that. i have yet to find any ow content that is challenging enough for me, and i'm far from being a hardcore raider. still, ow is numb and boring af for me.

raids are for hardcore players, it's really incredible that after all this time you still haven't understood all those anet statements about the purpose of raids. you can argue that raids should be aimed for a wider range of players, you could argue that raids should not be only hardcore content and that's fine, but not this. like really.

that's completely different from accessibility of course, are you now going to say that recurrent lie that casuals do not have access to raids?

i was probably raiding on paper when you were still in nappies, I know what raiding is. Raiding is an instance supporting more than 5 player generally speaking. difficulty is irrelevant from that perspective. However raiding is the premium end of pve for hardcore players and games like WOW. Hardcore raiding being the end all of PVE died oh nearly a decade ago. the rest of your chat has got nothing to do with my points, whether or not the ranking process works has nothing to do with accessibility, and open world being easy does not make it inaccessible to hardcore players (open world is not about difficulty). Raider obsession with difficulty is not the be all and end oll of mmorpg, your a niche market, get over yourself.

ps read the thread, we know whats Anets comments are, this thread is not about Anet's current position.

If difficulty is irrelevant, then easy mode raids exist - they're called T1 fractals. Because what is even more irrelevant is the player number limit. The only reason raids are considered premium endgame is because they are not trivial. Which - surprise, surprise - is only because of their difficulty.

t1 fractals is 5 man and ofc number of players changes game dynamics. Let's not be obtuse and lets not pretend games like WOW and ESO don't exist where there are a literally millions of players playing raids with > 5 players that are tuned to be accessible with little preparation.

Oh, you mean large-scale accessible events like the Octovine? Or the Jungle Wurm? I agree, these have their place.

lol ok Feonar, we are not stupid people are we.

So what exactly is your point? You can't make accessible endgame. It's pretty much an oxymoron. You want accessible events? You get those. I really fail to see the point of adding accessible versions of the raids - they'd be the same experience the game already offers.

what are you talking about? all the other significant AAA mmorpg have easy mode raids that are accessible to all without the time commitment tightly tuned raids require This is like ground hog day, we know this, its been discussed to death, there is precedent, its common sense blah blah blah. You

may not

see the 'point' in adding accessible raids because you're part of the little nich that has 10 man instances tailored to your needs, well great, now what about the rest of the player base.

The most significant other MMORPG with raiding, WoW, had more people playing on Vanilla, BC, and WotLK servers where there were no easy mode raids until Blizzard forced Nostalrius to close down. According to server population analytics Draenor's active user based dropped below 1 million players for the first time in WoW's history. If easy mode raids were so good for WoW's health, why did more people play older versions of the game that than the Live WoW? It got so bad that Blizzard had to announce Classic WoW official legacy servers years before they were ready to be implemented.

your deluding yourself, its quite sad really.. Go check current stats for WOW and ESo to name but 2. MILLIONS happily raid in easy mode every week. Maybe you were not aware of this but normal mode raiding population destroys the little niche that likes hardcore, your outdated, the world moved on a long long time ago as the player base matured.

Which is why Blizzard felt the need to rerelease WoW patch 1.12.

This.

I'm sorry but the mere fact that Blizzard is bringing back classic servers after years of denying that they are ever going to do that is sufficient proof that WoW is not in as glorious place as most might want to believe. Definitely not as popular as it used to be (which will have to do with a lot more than just raids admittedly).

[Bladestrom.6425]

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@nia.4725 said:And the answer is NO. A complete rework is not "just involve changing the movement patterns or relative strenghts of certain abilities", it would require much more work, not just tweaking here and there.

Again, I am not making a serious proposal here, I am not quantifying the

amount

of work this would take or making any claims that "this would be easy," or any such thing. There is no need to get defensive about it. The only point I'm making in this portion of the discussion is that it would be

possible

to redesign the encounter such that it could be soloed, and the play experience for that solo encounter would involve the same mechanics

for him

as

he

would be expected to perform if he were one man in a ten-man raid squad. Clear?

In the most simple terms, if a very basic "spam DPS" boss takes 100,000 damage to kill, and each player in a team is expected to average 10,000 damage to meet that total, then a single player could simulate that experience by reducing his HP to 10,000

or

buffing the player's damage by 10x. If the boss could "strip" one of those 10x buffs, then it would be equivalent to if he killed off a single player in a raid squad in terms of the overall DPS.

About the shrines thing, I think maybe you don't know how DPS works in raids. Most people will do whatever deals most damage, to the point of skipping mechanics if that allows the party to deal more DPS. The thing goes like this:

I'm aware of those mechanics, and those could likewise be simulated in a solo encounter. Whether it's one person attacking or ten, so long as you would be capable of reaching the DPS to phase the boss, the same tactic would work.

And this would apply to your shrine thing. The drop in DPS caused by a shrine destroyed would be tested. If moving and dealing with that mechanic is a bigger DPS drop than the drop caused by the mechanic failing, or if reaching certain % of the boss cancels the mechanic, then the mechanic will be ignored.

Sure, but the point of it was to

replicate

the impact of the "if you don't break a player's breakbar then that player will be sacrificed" mechanic you were talking about above, so the same discussion would happen. "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that character, and prevent his DPS from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same scenario, "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that shrine, and prevent its DPS buff from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same thing, same outcome to either scenario, same choice for the player to make. You see my point here? If it's balanced properly, then players would make the same decision, either to save the player/shrine or allow it to die, in both scenarios.

Again, I'm not suggesting this as some new and clever mechanic that should be added to raids, I'm using it to make the point that existing raid mechanics that rely on party interaction

could

be replaced with equivalent effects that would alter the outcome of the matches in the exact same ways, and would require identical player interaction to resolve them, with identical results based on whether they succeed or fail to do so.

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

But what if you think even that is too generous to the plebes? So what if the 50lb. weight pays out $20 each time? That means you'd need to lift twenty of the 10lb. weights, 200lb. in total, to equal one of the 50lb. weights. This is clearly unbalanced in favor of the 50lb. weight, nobody would lift the 10lb. weights if they had any capacity to lift the 50lb., and anyone who couldn't lift the 50lb. would have a significant incentive to improve so that they too could lift the 50lb. weight.

And yet,

as unfair as this arrangement is to the 10lb. people, there is still choice. They still have

an option.

It is not fair, but they can progress. If their goal is to make $1000, it will take them 1000 lifts, 10,000lbs. in total, when compared to the alternative of 50 lifts, 1/4 the total weight, but if 50lbs. just isn't an option for them,

they can still reach their goal eventually.

Your analogy falls apart. If raids right now are lifting 50lbs and getting $20 dollars, easy mode raids that are designed to be solo'd and beatable by anyone regardless of build, gear, and skill that rewards legendary armor is comparable to someone watching 50lbs sit on the floor and getting $20.

And I guess this is my point, that it's impossible to have a conversation on this subject with someone who so devalues the basic humanity of his fellow players that

none

of their efforts can

ever

possibly match up to what He is capable of.

I actually kinda like the idea of a solo encounter. If some mechanics require another person, couldn’t another npc be brought in to assist?

Right,

or

that mechanic would just handle itself. Like if there were two circles and you had to stand in both at once, then either A only one circle would be required, or B, an NPC would run for one circle and you would have to run to the other. Either way the experience for that one player would be the same.

So if you did it solo you would get like one third an insight?

Well, again,

this is not a proposal for something they should do.

I actually do not think that implementing a solo mode version of raid encounters would be an effective use of their time. Too much work relative to the payoff. I was just discussing the

concept

that Sarrs raised that group oriented content is somehow

automatically

more challenging than solo content, just by virtue of it involving multiple players. I'm trying to point out that any challenges that might be raised in an encounter by adding more players could be

simulated

simply by just adapting the mechanics accordingly. This is especially true in cooperative content.

I also think that from a

fairness

perspective, if the individual challenge would be equal, then the reward should be equal as well. Feanor raised the point that you want to

encourage

group content for the interest of the community, so you want to provide group content above and beyond what is fair, and I agreed with that to some degree, but if they ever did implement a solo mode that was as challenging as the group raid, then the rewards should at least be close, like 2/3 of an Insight or something.

But when we

were

discussing "easy mode" versions of the encounters, still ten people but with the challenge actually

reduced,

the proposal was 1/3 of an insight per encounter, yes.

I mean if they did a solo encounter, you could in theory shoot for 5 man as well.

Sure, there's nothing that would prevent either from being doable. The reason I'm not in

favor

of solo/five man versions though is that I believe that the balance and design changes needed to craft those, while 100% doable, would be more significant than what it would take to just make easy mode versions of the existing 10-man encounters. I feel like the cost/benefit balance is less worth doing.

ye making raids 5 manable addresses 0 issues. The issue is the content gap, i.e:

wvw available for casual to hard core - yesDoes 5 man instances have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does pvp have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does open world have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.

Does raids (>=8 players say) have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - not yet in GW2, available everywhere else.

Which leads me to a different point, what if Anet introduced easier 8 MAN raids, and kept 10 man as it is? now there's a way to get a win win here.

That's false.

pvp has not content tailored to all players. all players get mixed until skill level gets its way through mmr rating and the best players get higher ranks. but still high ranks get mixed with lower ranks, being that a source of big frustrations, sided matches and great toxicity

open world has not content tailored for all players. there's no ow challenging enough for hardcore players.

raids are

The Hardcore Part of PvE

. so many years and so many pages and you still don't get this.

your wrong, pvp does have content for all players including hardcore, its called ranked, your confusing balance with accessibility. And hardcore players have access to open world content, the challenge is there if they want it. and yet again you are wrong, TUNED raiding is for hardcore players, raids are also tuned for non hardcore players - this is not wow.

ranked is the same content as unranked, the only difference is the level of expectations and rewards, but the content is exactly the same. so no you can't say that ranked is content for hardcores and unranked for casuals wth. yeah you can say that hardcores are competitive and so they play ranked but ranked right now is a lot more about rewards than the leaderboards. ranked is played by all types of players, not only hardcores. xd

open world content has no challenge. are you going to say that hot metas are challenging? open world bosses? shadow behemoth? what part of ow is challenging and suited for hardcore players, in your opinion? because you're saying that there is, but you're not giving any example of that. i have yet to find any ow content that is challenging enough for me, and i'm far from being a hardcore raider. still, ow is numb and boring af for me.

raids are for hardcore players, it's really incredible that after all this time you still haven't understood all those anet statements about the purpose of raids. you can argue that raids should be aimed for a wider range of players, you could argue that raids should not be only hardcore content and that's fine, but not this. like really.

that's completely different from accessibility of course, are you now going to say that recurrent lie that casuals do not have access to raids?

i was probably raiding on paper when you were still in nappies, I know what raiding is. Raiding is an instance supporting more than 5 player generally speaking. difficulty is irrelevant from that perspective. However raiding is the premium end of pve for hardcore players and games like WOW. Hardcore raiding being the end all of PVE died oh nearly a decade ago. the rest of your chat has got nothing to do with my points, whether or not the ranking process works has nothing to do with accessibility, and open world being easy does not make it inaccessible to hardcore players (open world is not about difficulty). Raider obsession with difficulty is not the be all and end oll of mmorpg, your a niche market, get over yourself.

ps read the thread, we know whats Anets comments are, this thread is not about Anet's current position.

If difficulty is irrelevant, then easy mode raids exist - they're called T1 fractals. Because what is even more irrelevant is the player number limit. The only reason raids are considered premium endgame is because they are not trivial. Which - surprise, surprise - is only because of their difficulty.

t1 fractals is 5 man and ofc number of players changes game dynamics. Let's not be obtuse and lets not pretend games like WOW and ESO don't exist where there are a literally millions of players playing raids with > 5 players that are tuned to be accessible with little preparation.

Oh, you mean large-scale accessible events like the Octovine? Or the Jungle Wurm? I agree, these have their place.

lol ok Feonar, we are not stupid people are we.

So what exactly is your point? You can't make accessible endgame. It's pretty much an oxymoron. You want accessible events? You get those. I really fail to see the point of adding accessible versions of the raids - they'd be the same experience the game already offers.

what are you talking about? all the other significant AAA mmorpg have easy mode raids that are accessible to all without the time commitment tightly tuned raids require This is like ground hog day, we know this, its been discussed to death, there is precedent, its common sense blah blah blah. You

may not

see the 'point' in adding accessible raids because you're part of the little nich that has 10 man instances tailored to your needs, well great, now what about the rest of the player base.

The most significant other MMORPG with raiding, WoW, had more people playing on Vanilla, BC, and WotLK servers where there were no easy mode raids until Blizzard forced Nostalrius to close down. According to server population analytics Draenor's active user based dropped below 1 million players for the first time in WoW's history. If easy mode raids were so good for WoW's health, why did more people play older versions of the game that than the Live WoW? It got so bad that Blizzard had to announce Classic WoW official legacy servers years before they were ready to be implemented.

your deluding yourself, its quite sad really.. Go check current stats for WOW and ESo to name but 2. MILLIONS happily raid in easy mode every week. Maybe you were not aware of this but normal mode raiding population destroys the little niche that likes hardcore, your outdated, the world moved on a long long time ago as the player base matured.

Which is why Blizzard felt the need to rerelease WoW patch 1.12.

Again, millions more players were on private classic WoW servers compared to live, especially when Nostalrius was still a thing.

all very interesting, but has no relevance to the fact that millions enjoy easy mode raiding every week now and for the last 5 -10 years. World has moved on.

[mortrialus.3062]

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@nia.4725 said:And the answer is NO. A complete rework is not "just involve changing the movement patterns or relative strenghts of certain abilities", it would require much more work, not just tweaking here and there.

Again, I am not making a serious proposal here, I am not quantifying the

amount

of work this would take or making any claims that "this would be easy," or any such thing. There is no need to get defensive about it. The only point I'm making in this portion of the discussion is that it would be

possible

to redesign the encounter such that it could be soloed, and the play experience for that solo encounter would involve the same mechanics

for him

as

he

would be expected to perform if he were one man in a ten-man raid squad. Clear?

In the most simple terms, if a very basic "spam DPS" boss takes 100,000 damage to kill, and each player in a team is expected to average 10,000 damage to meet that total, then a single player could simulate that experience by reducing his HP to 10,000

or

buffing the player's damage by 10x. If the boss could "strip" one of those 10x buffs, then it would be equivalent to if he killed off a single player in a raid squad in terms of the overall DPS.

About the shrines thing, I think maybe you don't know how DPS works in raids. Most people will do whatever deals most damage, to the point of skipping mechanics if that allows the party to deal more DPS. The thing goes like this:

I'm aware of those mechanics, and those could likewise be simulated in a solo encounter. Whether it's one person attacking or ten, so long as you would be capable of reaching the DPS to phase the boss, the same tactic would work.

And this would apply to your shrine thing. The drop in DPS caused by a shrine destroyed would be tested. If moving and dealing with that mechanic is a bigger DPS drop than the drop caused by the mechanic failing, or if reaching certain % of the boss cancels the mechanic, then the mechanic will be ignored.

Sure, but the point of it was to

replicate

the impact of the "if you don't break a player's breakbar then that player will be sacrificed" mechanic you were talking about above, so the same discussion would happen. "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that character, and prevent his DPS from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same scenario, "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that shrine, and prevent its DPS buff from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same thing, same outcome to either scenario, same choice for the player to make. You see my point here? If it's balanced properly, then players would make the same decision, either to save the player/shrine or allow it to die, in both scenarios.

Again, I'm not suggesting this as some new and clever mechanic that should be added to raids, I'm using it to make the point that existing raid mechanics that rely on party interaction

could

be replaced with equivalent effects that would alter the outcome of the matches in the exact same ways, and would require identical player interaction to resolve them, with identical results based on whether they succeed or fail to do so.

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

But what if you think even that is too generous to the plebes? So what if the 50lb. weight pays out $20 each time? That means you'd need to lift twenty of the 10lb. weights, 200lb. in total, to equal one of the 50lb. weights. This is clearly unbalanced in favor of the 50lb. weight, nobody would lift the 10lb. weights if they had any capacity to lift the 50lb., and anyone who couldn't lift the 50lb. would have a significant incentive to improve so that they too could lift the 50lb. weight.

And yet,

as unfair as this arrangement is to the 10lb. people, there is still choice. They still have

an option.

It is not fair, but they can progress. If their goal is to make $1000, it will take them 1000 lifts, 10,000lbs. in total, when compared to the alternative of 50 lifts, 1/4 the total weight, but if 50lbs. just isn't an option for them,

they can still reach their goal eventually.

Your analogy falls apart. If raids right now are lifting 50lbs and getting $20 dollars, easy mode raids that are designed to be solo'd and beatable by anyone regardless of build, gear, and skill that rewards legendary armor is comparable to someone watching 50lbs sit on the floor and getting $20.

And I guess this is my point, that it's impossible to have a conversation on this subject with someone who so devalues the basic humanity of his fellow players that

none

of their efforts can

ever

possibly match up to what He is capable of.

I actually kinda like the idea of a solo encounter. If some mechanics require another person, couldn’t another npc be brought in to assist?

Right,

or

that mechanic would just handle itself. Like if there were two circles and you had to stand in both at once, then either A only one circle would be required, or B, an NPC would run for one circle and you would have to run to the other. Either way the experience for that one player would be the same.

So if you did it solo you would get like one third an insight?

Well, again,

this is not a proposal for something they should do.

I actually do not think that implementing a solo mode version of raid encounters would be an effective use of their time. Too much work relative to the payoff. I was just discussing the

concept

that Sarrs raised that group oriented content is somehow

automatically

more challenging than solo content, just by virtue of it involving multiple players. I'm trying to point out that any challenges that might be raised in an encounter by adding more players could be

simulated

simply by just adapting the mechanics accordingly. This is especially true in cooperative content.

I also think that from a

fairness

perspective, if the individual challenge would be equal, then the reward should be equal as well. Feanor raised the point that you want to

encourage

group content for the interest of the community, so you want to provide group content above and beyond what is fair, and I agreed with that to some degree, but if they ever did implement a solo mode that was as challenging as the group raid, then the rewards should at least be close, like 2/3 of an Insight or something.

But when we

were

discussing "easy mode" versions of the encounters, still ten people but with the challenge actually

reduced,

the proposal was 1/3 of an insight per encounter, yes.

I mean if they did a solo encounter, you could in theory shoot for 5 man as well.

Sure, there's nothing that would prevent either from being doable. The reason I'm not in

favor

of solo/five man versions though is that I believe that the balance and design changes needed to craft those, while 100% doable, would be more significant than what it would take to just make easy mode versions of the existing 10-man encounters. I feel like the cost/benefit balance is less worth doing.

ye making raids 5 manable addresses 0 issues. The issue is the content gap, i.e:

wvw available for casual to hard core - yesDoes 5 man instances have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does pvp have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does open world have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.

Does raids (>=8 players say) have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - not yet in GW2, available everywhere else.

Which leads me to a different point, what if Anet introduced easier 8 MAN raids, and kept 10 man as it is? now there's a way to get a win win here.

That's false.

pvp has not content tailored to all players. all players get mixed until skill level gets its way through mmr rating and the best players get higher ranks. but still high ranks get mixed with lower ranks, being that a source of big frustrations, sided matches and great toxicity

open world has not content tailored for all players. there's no ow challenging enough for hardcore players.

raids are

The Hardcore Part of PvE

. so many years and so many pages and you still don't get this.

your wrong, pvp does have content for all players including hardcore, its called ranked, your confusing balance with accessibility. And hardcore players have access to open world content, the challenge is there if they want it. and yet again you are wrong, TUNED raiding is for hardcore players, raids are also tuned for non hardcore players - this is not wow.

ranked is the same content as unranked, the only difference is the level of expectations and rewards, but the content is exactly the same. so no you can't say that ranked is content for hardcores and unranked for casuals wth. yeah you can say that hardcores are competitive and so they play ranked but ranked right now is a lot more about rewards than the leaderboards. ranked is played by all types of players, not only hardcores. xd

open world content has no challenge. are you going to say that hot metas are challenging? open world bosses? shadow behemoth? what part of ow is challenging and suited for hardcore players, in your opinion? because you're saying that there is, but you're not giving any example of that. i have yet to find any ow content that is challenging enough for me, and i'm far from being a hardcore raider. still, ow is numb and boring af for me.

raids are for hardcore players, it's really incredible that after all this time you still haven't understood all those anet statements about the purpose of raids. you can argue that raids should be aimed for a wider range of players, you could argue that raids should not be only hardcore content and that's fine, but not this. like really.

that's completely different from accessibility of course, are you now going to say that recurrent lie that casuals do not have access to raids?

i was probably raiding on paper when you were still in nappies, I know what raiding is. Raiding is an instance supporting more than 5 player generally speaking. difficulty is irrelevant from that perspective. However raiding is the premium end of pve for hardcore players and games like WOW. Hardcore raiding being the end all of PVE died oh nearly a decade ago. the rest of your chat has got nothing to do with my points, whether or not the ranking process works has nothing to do with accessibility, and open world being easy does not make it inaccessible to hardcore players (open world is not about difficulty). Raider obsession with difficulty is not the be all and end oll of mmorpg, your a niche market, get over yourself.

ps read the thread, we know whats Anets comments are, this thread is not about Anet's current position.

If difficulty is irrelevant, then easy mode raids exist - they're called T1 fractals. Because what is even more irrelevant is the player number limit. The only reason raids are considered premium endgame is because they are not trivial. Which - surprise, surprise - is only because of their difficulty.

t1 fractals is 5 man and ofc number of players changes game dynamics. Let's not be obtuse and lets not pretend games like WOW and ESO don't exist where there are a literally millions of players playing raids with > 5 players that are tuned to be accessible with little preparation.

Oh, you mean large-scale accessible events like the Octovine? Or the Jungle Wurm? I agree, these have their place.

lol ok Feonar, we are not stupid people are we.

So what exactly is your point? You can't make accessible endgame. It's pretty much an oxymoron. You want accessible events? You get those. I really fail to see the point of adding accessible versions of the raids - they'd be the same experience the game already offers.

what are you talking about? all the other significant AAA mmorpg have easy mode raids that are accessible to all without the time commitment tightly tuned raids require This is like ground hog day, we know this, its been discussed to death, there is precedent, its common sense blah blah blah. You

may not

see the 'point' in adding accessible raids because you're part of the little nich that has 10 man instances tailored to your needs, well great, now what about the rest of the player base.

The most significant other MMORPG with raiding, WoW, had more people playing on Vanilla, BC, and WotLK servers where there were no easy mode raids until Blizzard forced Nostalrius to close down. According to server population analytics Draenor's active user based dropped below 1 million players for the first time in WoW's history. If easy mode raids were so good for WoW's health, why did more people play older versions of the game that than the Live WoW? It got so bad that Blizzard had to announce Classic WoW official legacy servers years before they were ready to be implemented.

your deluding yourself, its quite sad really.. Go check current stats for WOW and ESo to name but 2. MILLIONS happily raid in easy mode every week. Maybe you were not aware of this but normal mode raiding population destroys the little niche that likes hardcore, your outdated, the world moved on a long long time ago as the player base matured.

Which is why Blizzard felt the need to rerelease WoW patch 1.12.

Again, millions more players were on private classic WoW servers compared to live, especially when Nostalrius was still a thing.

all very interesting, but has no relevance to the fact that millions enjoy easy mode raiding every week now and for the last 5 -10 years. World has moved on.

And so has the vast majority of WoW's player base. Much of which moved on to private older versions of the game before easy modes were added. This isn't "Oh the population naturally died down." there are millions of players playing older versions of the exact same game before they added easy modes.

[Bladestrom.6425]

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@nia.4725 said:And the answer is NO. A complete rework is not "just involve changing the movement patterns or relative strenghts of certain abilities", it would require much more work, not just tweaking here and there.

Again, I am not making a serious proposal here, I am not quantifying the

amount

of work this would take or making any claims that "this would be easy," or any such thing. There is no need to get defensive about it. The only point I'm making in this portion of the discussion is that it would be

possible

to redesign the encounter such that it could be soloed, and the play experience for that solo encounter would involve the same mechanics

for him

as

he

would be expected to perform if he were one man in a ten-man raid squad. Clear?

In the most simple terms, if a very basic "spam DPS" boss takes 100,000 damage to kill, and each player in a team is expected to average 10,000 damage to meet that total, then a single player could simulate that experience by reducing his HP to 10,000

or

buffing the player's damage by 10x. If the boss could "strip" one of those 10x buffs, then it would be equivalent to if he killed off a single player in a raid squad in terms of the overall DPS.

About the shrines thing, I think maybe you don't know how DPS works in raids. Most people will do whatever deals most damage, to the point of skipping mechanics if that allows the party to deal more DPS. The thing goes like this:

I'm aware of those mechanics, and those could likewise be simulated in a solo encounter. Whether it's one person attacking or ten, so long as you would be capable of reaching the DPS to phase the boss, the same tactic would work.

And this would apply to your shrine thing. The drop in DPS caused by a shrine destroyed would be tested. If moving and dealing with that mechanic is a bigger DPS drop than the drop caused by the mechanic failing, or if reaching certain % of the boss cancels the mechanic, then the mechanic will be ignored.

Sure, but the point of it was to

replicate

the impact of the "if you don't break a player's breakbar then that player will be sacrificed" mechanic you were talking about above, so the same discussion would happen. "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that character, and prevent his DPS from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same scenario, "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that shrine, and prevent its DPS buff from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same thing, same outcome to either scenario, same choice for the player to make. You see my point here? If it's balanced properly, then players would make the same decision, either to save the player/shrine or allow it to die, in both scenarios.

Again, I'm not suggesting this as some new and clever mechanic that should be added to raids, I'm using it to make the point that existing raid mechanics that rely on party interaction

could

be replaced with equivalent effects that would alter the outcome of the matches in the exact same ways, and would require identical player interaction to resolve them, with identical results based on whether they succeed or fail to do so.

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

But what if you think even that is too generous to the plebes? So what if the 50lb. weight pays out $20 each time? That means you'd need to lift twenty of the 10lb. weights, 200lb. in total, to equal one of the 50lb. weights. This is clearly unbalanced in favor of the 50lb. weight, nobody would lift the 10lb. weights if they had any capacity to lift the 50lb., and anyone who couldn't lift the 50lb. would have a significant incentive to improve so that they too could lift the 50lb. weight.

And yet,

as unfair as this arrangement is to the 10lb. people, there is still choice. They still have

an option.

It is not fair, but they can progress. If their goal is to make $1000, it will take them 1000 lifts, 10,000lbs. in total, when compared to the alternative of 50 lifts, 1/4 the total weight, but if 50lbs. just isn't an option for them,

they can still reach their goal eventually.

Your analogy falls apart. If raids right now are lifting 50lbs and getting $20 dollars, easy mode raids that are designed to be solo'd and beatable by anyone regardless of build, gear, and skill that rewards legendary armor is comparable to someone watching 50lbs sit on the floor and getting $20.

And I guess this is my point, that it's impossible to have a conversation on this subject with someone who so devalues the basic humanity of his fellow players that

none

of their efforts can

ever

possibly match up to what He is capable of.

I actually kinda like the idea of a solo encounter. If some mechanics require another person, couldn’t another npc be brought in to assist?

Right,

or

that mechanic would just handle itself. Like if there were two circles and you had to stand in both at once, then either A only one circle would be required, or B, an NPC would run for one circle and you would have to run to the other. Either way the experience for that one player would be the same.

So if you did it solo you would get like one third an insight?

Well, again,

this is not a proposal for something they should do.

I actually do not think that implementing a solo mode version of raid encounters would be an effective use of their time. Too much work relative to the payoff. I was just discussing the

concept

that Sarrs raised that group oriented content is somehow

automatically

more challenging than solo content, just by virtue of it involving multiple players. I'm trying to point out that any challenges that might be raised in an encounter by adding more players could be

simulated

simply by just adapting the mechanics accordingly. This is especially true in cooperative content.

I also think that from a

fairness

perspective, if the individual challenge would be equal, then the reward should be equal as well. Feanor raised the point that you want to

encourage

group content for the interest of the community, so you want to provide group content above and beyond what is fair, and I agreed with that to some degree, but if they ever did implement a solo mode that was as challenging as the group raid, then the rewards should at least be close, like 2/3 of an Insight or something.

But when we

were

discussing "easy mode" versions of the encounters, still ten people but with the challenge actually

reduced,

the proposal was 1/3 of an insight per encounter, yes.

I mean if they did a solo encounter, you could in theory shoot for 5 man as well.

Sure, there's nothing that would prevent either from being doable. The reason I'm not in

favor

of solo/five man versions though is that I believe that the balance and design changes needed to craft those, while 100% doable, would be more significant than what it would take to just make easy mode versions of the existing 10-man encounters. I feel like the cost/benefit balance is less worth doing.

ye making raids 5 manable addresses 0 issues. The issue is the content gap, i.e:

wvw available for casual to hard core - yesDoes 5 man instances have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does pvp have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does open world have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.

Does raids (>=8 players say) have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - not yet in GW2, available everywhere else.

Which leads me to a different point, what if Anet introduced easier 8 MAN raids, and kept 10 man as it is? now there's a way to get a win win here.

That's false.

pvp has not content tailored to all players. all players get mixed until skill level gets its way through mmr rating and the best players get higher ranks. but still high ranks get mixed with lower ranks, being that a source of big frustrations, sided matches and great toxicity

open world has not content tailored for all players. there's no ow challenging enough for hardcore players.

raids are

The Hardcore Part of PvE

. so many years and so many pages and you still don't get this.

your wrong, pvp does have content for all players including hardcore, its called ranked, your confusing balance with accessibility. And hardcore players have access to open world content, the challenge is there if they want it. and yet again you are wrong, TUNED raiding is for hardcore players, raids are also tuned for non hardcore players - this is not wow.

ranked is the same content as unranked, the only difference is the level of expectations and rewards, but the content is exactly the same. so no you can't say that ranked is content for hardcores and unranked for casuals wth. yeah you can say that hardcores are competitive and so they play ranked but ranked right now is a lot more about rewards than the leaderboards. ranked is played by all types of players, not only hardcores. xd

open world content has no challenge. are you going to say that hot metas are challenging? open world bosses? shadow behemoth? what part of ow is challenging and suited for hardcore players, in your opinion? because you're saying that there is, but you're not giving any example of that. i have yet to find any ow content that is challenging enough for me, and i'm far from being a hardcore raider. still, ow is numb and boring af for me.

raids are for hardcore players, it's really incredible that after all this time you still haven't understood all those anet statements about the purpose of raids. you can argue that raids should be aimed for a wider range of players, you could argue that raids should not be only hardcore content and that's fine, but not this. like really.

that's completely different from accessibility of course, are you now going to say that recurrent lie that casuals do not have access to raids?

i was probably raiding on paper when you were still in nappies, I know what raiding is. Raiding is an instance supporting more than 5 player generally speaking. difficulty is irrelevant from that perspective. However raiding is the premium end of pve for hardcore players and games like WOW. Hardcore raiding being the end all of PVE died oh nearly a decade ago. the rest of your chat has got nothing to do with my points, whether or not the ranking process works has nothing to do with accessibility, and open world being easy does not make it inaccessible to hardcore players (open world is not about difficulty). Raider obsession with difficulty is not the be all and end oll of mmorpg, your a niche market, get over yourself.

ps read the thread, we know whats Anets comments are, this thread is not about Anet's current position.

If difficulty is irrelevant, then easy mode raids exist - they're called T1 fractals. Because what is even more irrelevant is the player number limit. The only reason raids are considered premium endgame is because they are not trivial. Which - surprise, surprise - is only because of their difficulty.

t1 fractals is 5 man and ofc number of players changes game dynamics. Let's not be obtuse and lets not pretend games like WOW and ESO don't exist where there are a literally millions of players playing raids with > 5 players that are tuned to be accessible with little preparation.

Oh, you mean large-scale accessible events like the Octovine? Or the Jungle Wurm? I agree, these have their place.

lol ok Feonar, we are not stupid people are we.

So what exactly is your point? You can't make accessible endgame. It's pretty much an oxymoron. You want accessible events? You get those. I really fail to see the point of adding accessible versions of the raids - they'd be the same experience the game already offers.

what are you talking about? all the other significant AAA mmorpg have easy mode raids that are accessible to all without the time commitment tightly tuned raids require This is like ground hog day, we know this, its been discussed to death, there is precedent, its common sense blah blah blah. You

may not

see the 'point' in adding accessible raids because you're part of the little nich that has 10 man instances tailored to your needs, well great, now what about the rest of the player base.

The most significant other MMORPG with raiding, WoW, had more people playing on Vanilla, BC, and WotLK servers where there were no easy mode raids until Blizzard forced Nostalrius to close down. According to server population analytics Draenor's active user based dropped below 1 million players for the first time in WoW's history. If easy mode raids were so good for WoW's health, why did more people play older versions of the game that than the Live WoW? It got so bad that Blizzard had to announce Classic WoW official legacy servers years before they were ready to be implemented.

your deluding yourself, its quite sad really.. Go check current stats for WOW and ESo to name but 2. MILLIONS happily raid in easy mode every week. Maybe you were not aware of this but normal mode raiding population destroys the little niche that likes hardcore, your outdated, the world moved on a long long time ago as the player base matured.

Which is why Blizzard felt the need to rerelease WoW patch 1.12.

Again, millions more players were on private classic WoW servers compared to live, especially when Nostalrius was still a thing.

all very interesting, but has no relevance to the fact that millions enjoy easy mode raiding every week now and for the last 5 -10 years. World has moved on.

And so has the vast majority of WoW's player base. Much of which moved on to private older versions of the game before easy modes were added. This isn't "Oh the population naturally died down." there are millions of players playing older versions of the exact same game before they added easy modes.

Your still not getting it are you, millions STILL raid normal mode in WOW and ESO. Players returning from private servers would boost this number if anything not reduce it lol.

[mortrialus.3062]

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@nia.4725 said:And the answer is NO. A complete rework is not "just involve changing the movement patterns or relative strenghts of certain abilities", it would require much more work, not just tweaking here and there.

Again, I am not making a serious proposal here, I am not quantifying the

amount

of work this would take or making any claims that "this would be easy," or any such thing. There is no need to get defensive about it. The only point I'm making in this portion of the discussion is that it would be

possible

to redesign the encounter such that it could be soloed, and the play experience for that solo encounter would involve the same mechanics

for him

as

he

would be expected to perform if he were one man in a ten-man raid squad. Clear?

In the most simple terms, if a very basic "spam DPS" boss takes 100,000 damage to kill, and each player in a team is expected to average 10,000 damage to meet that total, then a single player could simulate that experience by reducing his HP to 10,000

or

buffing the player's damage by 10x. If the boss could "strip" one of those 10x buffs, then it would be equivalent to if he killed off a single player in a raid squad in terms of the overall DPS.

About the shrines thing, I think maybe you don't know how DPS works in raids. Most people will do whatever deals most damage, to the point of skipping mechanics if that allows the party to deal more DPS. The thing goes like this:

I'm aware of those mechanics, and those could likewise be simulated in a solo encounter. Whether it's one person attacking or ten, so long as you would be capable of reaching the DPS to phase the boss, the same tactic would work.

And this would apply to your shrine thing. The drop in DPS caused by a shrine destroyed would be tested. If moving and dealing with that mechanic is a bigger DPS drop than the drop caused by the mechanic failing, or if reaching certain % of the boss cancels the mechanic, then the mechanic will be ignored.

Sure, but the point of it was to

replicate

the impact of the "if you don't break a player's breakbar then that player will be sacrificed" mechanic you were talking about above, so the same discussion would happen. "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that character, and prevent his DPS from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same scenario, "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that shrine, and prevent its DPS buff from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same thing, same outcome to either scenario, same choice for the player to make. You see my point here? If it's balanced properly, then players would make the same decision, either to save the player/shrine or allow it to die, in both scenarios.

Again, I'm not suggesting this as some new and clever mechanic that should be added to raids, I'm using it to make the point that existing raid mechanics that rely on party interaction

could

be replaced with equivalent effects that would alter the outcome of the matches in the exact same ways, and would require identical player interaction to resolve them, with identical results based on whether they succeed or fail to do so.

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

But what if you think even that is too generous to the plebes? So what if the 50lb. weight pays out $20 each time? That means you'd need to lift twenty of the 10lb. weights, 200lb. in total, to equal one of the 50lb. weights. This is clearly unbalanced in favor of the 50lb. weight, nobody would lift the 10lb. weights if they had any capacity to lift the 50lb., and anyone who couldn't lift the 50lb. would have a significant incentive to improve so that they too could lift the 50lb. weight.

And yet,

as unfair as this arrangement is to the 10lb. people, there is still choice. They still have

an option.

It is not fair, but they can progress. If their goal is to make $1000, it will take them 1000 lifts, 10,000lbs. in total, when compared to the alternative of 50 lifts, 1/4 the total weight, but if 50lbs. just isn't an option for them,

they can still reach their goal eventually.

Your analogy falls apart. If raids right now are lifting 50lbs and getting $20 dollars, easy mode raids that are designed to be solo'd and beatable by anyone regardless of build, gear, and skill that rewards legendary armor is comparable to someone watching 50lbs sit on the floor and getting $20.

And I guess this is my point, that it's impossible to have a conversation on this subject with someone who so devalues the basic humanity of his fellow players that

none

of their efforts can

ever

possibly match up to what He is capable of.

I actually kinda like the idea of a solo encounter. If some mechanics require another person, couldn’t another npc be brought in to assist?

Right,

or

that mechanic would just handle itself. Like if there were two circles and you had to stand in both at once, then either A only one circle would be required, or B, an NPC would run for one circle and you would have to run to the other. Either way the experience for that one player would be the same.

So if you did it solo you would get like one third an insight?

Well, again,

this is not a proposal for something they should do.

I actually do not think that implementing a solo mode version of raid encounters would be an effective use of their time. Too much work relative to the payoff. I was just discussing the

concept

that Sarrs raised that group oriented content is somehow

automatically

more challenging than solo content, just by virtue of it involving multiple players. I'm trying to point out that any challenges that might be raised in an encounter by adding more players could be

simulated

simply by just adapting the mechanics accordingly. This is especially true in cooperative content.

I also think that from a

fairness

perspective, if the individual challenge would be equal, then the reward should be equal as well. Feanor raised the point that you want to

encourage

group content for the interest of the community, so you want to provide group content above and beyond what is fair, and I agreed with that to some degree, but if they ever did implement a solo mode that was as challenging as the group raid, then the rewards should at least be close, like 2/3 of an Insight or something.

But when we

were

discussing "easy mode" versions of the encounters, still ten people but with the challenge actually

reduced,

the proposal was 1/3 of an insight per encounter, yes.

I mean if they did a solo encounter, you could in theory shoot for 5 man as well.

Sure, there's nothing that would prevent either from being doable. The reason I'm not in

favor

of solo/five man versions though is that I believe that the balance and design changes needed to craft those, while 100% doable, would be more significant than what it would take to just make easy mode versions of the existing 10-man encounters. I feel like the cost/benefit balance is less worth doing.

ye making raids 5 manable addresses 0 issues. The issue is the content gap, i.e:

wvw available for casual to hard core - yesDoes 5 man instances have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does pvp have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does open world have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.

Does raids (>=8 players say) have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - not yet in GW2, available everywhere else.

Which leads me to a different point, what if Anet introduced easier 8 MAN raids, and kept 10 man as it is? now there's a way to get a win win here.

That's false.

pvp has not content tailored to all players. all players get mixed until skill level gets its way through mmr rating and the best players get higher ranks. but still high ranks get mixed with lower ranks, being that a source of big frustrations, sided matches and great toxicity

open world has not content tailored for all players. there's no ow challenging enough for hardcore players.

raids are

The Hardcore Part of PvE

. so many years and so many pages and you still don't get this.

your wrong, pvp does have content for all players including hardcore, its called ranked, your confusing balance with accessibility. And hardcore players have access to open world content, the challenge is there if they want it. and yet again you are wrong, TUNED raiding is for hardcore players, raids are also tuned for non hardcore players - this is not wow.

ranked is the same content as unranked, the only difference is the level of expectations and rewards, but the content is exactly the same. so no you can't say that ranked is content for hardcores and unranked for casuals wth. yeah you can say that hardcores are competitive and so they play ranked but ranked right now is a lot more about rewards than the leaderboards. ranked is played by all types of players, not only hardcores. xd

open world content has no challenge. are you going to say that hot metas are challenging? open world bosses? shadow behemoth? what part of ow is challenging and suited for hardcore players, in your opinion? because you're saying that there is, but you're not giving any example of that. i have yet to find any ow content that is challenging enough for me, and i'm far from being a hardcore raider. still, ow is numb and boring af for me.

raids are for hardcore players, it's really incredible that after all this time you still haven't understood all those anet statements about the purpose of raids. you can argue that raids should be aimed for a wider range of players, you could argue that raids should not be only hardcore content and that's fine, but not this. like really.

that's completely different from accessibility of course, are you now going to say that recurrent lie that casuals do not have access to raids?

i was probably raiding on paper when you were still in nappies, I know what raiding is. Raiding is an instance supporting more than 5 player generally speaking. difficulty is irrelevant from that perspective. However raiding is the premium end of pve for hardcore players and games like WOW. Hardcore raiding being the end all of PVE died oh nearly a decade ago. the rest of your chat has got nothing to do with my points, whether or not the ranking process works has nothing to do with accessibility, and open world being easy does not make it inaccessible to hardcore players (open world is not about difficulty). Raider obsession with difficulty is not the be all and end oll of mmorpg, your a niche market, get over yourself.

ps read the thread, we know whats Anets comments are, this thread is not about Anet's current position.

If difficulty is irrelevant, then easy mode raids exist - they're called T1 fractals. Because what is even more irrelevant is the player number limit. The only reason raids are considered premium endgame is because they are not trivial. Which - surprise, surprise - is only because of their difficulty.

t1 fractals is 5 man and ofc number of players changes game dynamics. Let's not be obtuse and lets not pretend games like WOW and ESO don't exist where there are a literally millions of players playing raids with > 5 players that are tuned to be accessible with little preparation.

Oh, you mean large-scale accessible events like the Octovine? Or the Jungle Wurm? I agree, these have their place.

lol ok Feonar, we are not stupid people are we.

So what exactly is your point? You can't make accessible endgame. It's pretty much an oxymoron. You want accessible events? You get those. I really fail to see the point of adding accessible versions of the raids - they'd be the same experience the game already offers.

what are you talking about? all the other significant AAA mmorpg have easy mode raids that are accessible to all without the time commitment tightly tuned raids require This is like ground hog day, we know this, its been discussed to death, there is precedent, its common sense blah blah blah. You

may not

see the 'point' in adding accessible raids because you're part of the little nich that has 10 man instances tailored to your needs, well great, now what about the rest of the player base.

The most significant other MMORPG with raiding, WoW, had more people playing on Vanilla, BC, and WotLK servers where there were no easy mode raids until Blizzard forced Nostalrius to close down. According to server population analytics Draenor's active user based dropped below 1 million players for the first time in WoW's history. If easy mode raids were so good for WoW's health, why did more people play older versions of the game that than the Live WoW? It got so bad that Blizzard had to announce Classic WoW official legacy servers years before they were ready to be implemented.

your deluding yourself, its quite sad really.. Go check current stats for WOW and ESo to name but 2. MILLIONS happily raid in easy mode every week. Maybe you were not aware of this but normal mode raiding population destroys the little niche that likes hardcore, your outdated, the world moved on a long long time ago as the player base matured.

Which is why Blizzard felt the need to rerelease WoW patch 1.12.

Again, millions more players were on private classic WoW servers compared to live, especially when Nostalrius was still a thing.

all very interesting, but has no relevance to the fact that millions enjoy easy mode raiding every week now and for the last 5 -10 years. World has moved on.

And so has the vast majority of WoW's player base. Much of which moved on to private older versions of the game before easy modes were added. This isn't "Oh the population naturally died down." there are millions of players playing older versions of the exact same game before they added easy modes.

Your still not getting it are you, millions STILL raid normal mode in WOW and ESO. Players returning from private servers would boost this number if anything not reduce it lol.

So what if millions raid in live WoW? Millions of people are doing raids and dungeons in Classic WoW, and heroic dungeons and raids in BC and WoTLK on legacy servers dedicated to authentically recreating the older versions of the game.

The lowest point in WoW's history was Warlords of Draenor, which had easy mode raids and NPC followers deliver you the best gear in the game so all you had to do was sit alone in your private base. According to people who study WoW's server population since they stopped announcing their subscriber count the active user based dropped below 1 million in those days. And that's what you want to turn GW2 into.

WoW's really lucky Legion was a second wind for the game after Draenor.

[Feanor.2358]

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@nia.4725 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Tyson.5160 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@nia.4725 said:And the answer is NO. A complete rework is not "just involve changing the movement patterns or relative strenghts of certain abilities", it would require much more work, not just tweaking here and there.

Again, I am not making a serious proposal here, I am not quantifying the

amount

of work this would take or making any claims that "this would be easy," or any such thing. There is no need to get defensive about it. The only point I'm making in this portion of the discussion is that it would be

possible

to redesign the encounter such that it could be soloed, and the play experience for that solo encounter would involve the same mechanics

for him

as

he

would be expected to perform if he were one man in a ten-man raid squad. Clear?

In the most simple terms, if a very basic "spam DPS" boss takes 100,000 damage to kill, and each player in a team is expected to average 10,000 damage to meet that total, then a single player could simulate that experience by reducing his HP to 10,000

or

buffing the player's damage by 10x. If the boss could "strip" one of those 10x buffs, then it would be equivalent to if he killed off a single player in a raid squad in terms of the overall DPS.

About the shrines thing, I think maybe you don't know how DPS works in raids. Most people will do whatever deals most damage, to the point of skipping mechanics if that allows the party to deal more DPS. The thing goes like this:

I'm aware of those mechanics, and those could likewise be simulated in a solo encounter. Whether it's one person attacking or ten, so long as you would be capable of reaching the DPS to phase the boss, the same tactic would work.

And this would apply to your shrine thing. The drop in DPS caused by a shrine destroyed would be tested. If moving and dealing with that mechanic is a bigger DPS drop than the drop caused by the mechanic failing, or if reaching certain % of the boss cancels the mechanic, then the mechanic will be ignored.

Sure, but the point of it was to

replicate

the impact of the "if you don't break a player's breakbar then that player will be sacrificed" mechanic you were talking about above, so the same discussion would happen. "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that character, and prevent his DPS from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same scenario, "Is it worth taking time away from DPS to save that shrine, and prevent its DPS buff from being removed from the encounter? Y/N?" Same thing, same outcome to either scenario, same choice for the player to make. You see my point here? If it's balanced properly, then players would make the same decision, either to save the player/shrine or allow it to die, in both scenarios.

Again, I'm not suggesting this as some new and clever mechanic that should be added to raids, I'm using it to make the point that existing raid mechanics that rely on party interaction

could

be replaced with equivalent effects that would alter the outcome of the matches in the exact same ways, and would require identical player interaction to resolve them, with identical results based on whether they succeed or fail to do so.

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@Ohoni.6057 said:

But what if you think even that is too generous to the plebes? So what if the 50lb. weight pays out $20 each time? That means you'd need to lift twenty of the 10lb. weights, 200lb. in total, to equal one of the 50lb. weights. This is clearly unbalanced in favor of the 50lb. weight, nobody would lift the 10lb. weights if they had any capacity to lift the 50lb., and anyone who couldn't lift the 50lb. would have a significant incentive to improve so that they too could lift the 50lb. weight.

And yet,

as unfair as this arrangement is to the 10lb. people, there is still choice. They still have

an option.

It is not fair, but they can progress. If their goal is to make $1000, it will take them 1000 lifts, 10,000lbs. in total, when compared to the alternative of 50 lifts, 1/4 the total weight, but if 50lbs. just isn't an option for them,

they can still reach their goal eventually.

Your analogy falls apart. If raids right now are lifting 50lbs and getting $20 dollars, easy mode raids that are designed to be solo'd and beatable by anyone regardless of build, gear, and skill that rewards legendary armor is comparable to someone watching 50lbs sit on the floor and getting $20.

And I guess this is my point, that it's impossible to have a conversation on this subject with someone who so devalues the basic humanity of his fellow players that

none

of their efforts can

ever

possibly match up to what He is capable of.

I actually kinda like the idea of a solo encounter. If some mechanics require another person, couldn’t another npc be brought in to assist?

Right,

or

that mechanic would just handle itself. Like if there were two circles and you had to stand in both at once, then either A only one circle would be required, or B, an NPC would run for one circle and you would have to run to the other. Either way the experience for that one player would be the same.

So if you did it solo you would get like one third an insight?

Well, again,

this is not a proposal for something they should do.

I actually do not think that implementing a solo mode version of raid encounters would be an effective use of their time. Too much work relative to the payoff. I was just discussing the

concept

that Sarrs raised that group oriented content is somehow

automatically

more challenging than solo content, just by virtue of it involving multiple players. I'm trying to point out that any challenges that might be raised in an encounter by adding more players could be

simulated

simply by just adapting the mechanics accordingly. This is especially true in cooperative content.

I also think that from a

fairness

perspective, if the individual challenge would be equal, then the reward should be equal as well. Feanor raised the point that you want to

encourage

group content for the interest of the community, so you want to provide group content above and beyond what is fair, and I agreed with that to some degree, but if they ever did implement a solo mode that was as challenging as the group raid, then the rewards should at least be close, like 2/3 of an Insight or something.

But when we

were

discussing "easy mode" versions of the encounters, still ten people but with the challenge actually

reduced,

the proposal was 1/3 of an insight per encounter, yes.

I mean if they did a solo encounter, you could in theory shoot for 5 man as well.

Sure, there's nothing that would prevent either from being doable. The reason I'm not in

favor

of solo/five man versions though is that I believe that the balance and design changes needed to craft those, while 100% doable, would be more significant than what it would take to just make easy mode versions of the existing 10-man encounters. I feel like the cost/benefit balance is less worth doing.

ye making raids 5 manable addresses 0 issues. The issue is the content gap, i.e:

wvw available for casual to hard core - yesDoes 5 man instances have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does pvp have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.Does open world have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - yes.

Does raids (>=8 players say) have content tailored for all players, casual to hardcore - not yet in GW2, available everywhere else.

Which leads me to a different point, what if Anet introduced easier 8 MAN raids, and kept 10 man as it is? now there's a way to get a win win here.

That's false.

pvp has not content tailored to all players. all players get mixed until skill level gets its way through mmr rating and the best players get higher ranks. but still high ranks get mixed with lower ranks, being that a source of big frustrations, sided matches and great toxicity

open world has not content tailored for all players. there's no ow challenging enough for hardcore players.

raids are

The Hardcore Part of PvE

. so many years and so many pages and you still don't get this.

your wrong, pvp does have content for all players including hardcore, its called ranked, your confusing balance with accessibility. And hardcore players have access to open world content, the challenge is there if they want it. and yet again you are wrong, TUNED raiding is for hardcore players, raids are also tuned for non hardcore players - this is not wow.

ranked is the same content as unranked, the only difference is the level of expectations and rewards, but the content is exactly the same. so no you can't say that ranked is content for hardcores and unranked for casuals wth. yeah you can say that hardcores are competitive and so they play ranked but ranked right now is a lot more about rewards than the leaderboards. ranked is played by all types of players, not only hardcores. xd

open world content has no challenge. are you going to say that hot metas are challenging? open world bosses? shadow behemoth? what part of ow is challenging and suited for hardcore players, in your opinion? because you're saying that there is, but you're not giving any example of that. i have yet to find any ow content that is challenging enough for me, and i'm far from being a hardcore raider. still, ow is numb and boring af for me.

raids are for hardcore players, it's really incredible that after all this time you still haven't understood all those anet statements about the purpose of raids. you can argue that raids should be aimed for a wider range of players, you could argue that raids should not be only hardcore content and that's fine, but not this. like really.

that's completely different from accessibility of course, are you now going to say that recurrent lie that casuals do not have access to raids?

i was probably raiding on paper when you were still in nappies, I know what raiding is. Raiding is an instance supporting more than 5 player generally speaking. difficulty is irrelevant from that perspective. However raiding is the premium end of pve for hardcore players and games like WOW. Hardcore raiding being the end all of PVE died oh nearly a decade ago. the rest of your chat has got nothing to do with my points, whether or not the ranking process works has nothing to do with accessibility, and open world being easy does not make it inaccessible to hardcore players (open world is not about difficulty). Raider obsession with difficulty is not the be all and end oll of mmorpg, your a niche market, get over yourself.

ps read the thread, we know whats Anets comments are, this thread is not about Anet's current position.

If difficulty is irrelevant, then easy mode raids exist - they're called T1 fractals. Because what is even more irrelevant is the player number limit. The only reason raids are considered premium endgame is because they are not trivial. Which - surprise, surprise - is only because of their difficulty.

t1 fractals is 5 man and ofc number of players changes game dynamics. Let's not be obtuse and lets not pretend games like WOW and ESO don't exist where there are a literally millions of players playing raids with > 5 players that are tuned to be accessible with little preparation.

Oh, you mean large-scale accessible events like the Octovine? Or the Jungle Wurm? I agree, these have their place.

lol ok Feonar, we are not stupid people are we.

So what exactly is your point? You can't make accessible endgame. It's pretty much an oxymoron. You want accessible events? You get those. I really fail to see the point of adding accessible versions of the raids - they'd be the same experience the game already offers.

what are you talking about? all the other significant AAA mmorpg have easy mode raids that are accessible to all without the time commitment tightly tuned raids require This is like ground hog day, we know this, its been discussed to death, there is precedent, its common sense blah blah blah. You

may not

see the 'point' in adding accessible raids because you're part of the little nich that has 10 man instances tailored to your needs, well great, now what about the rest of the player base.

The most significant other MMORPG with raiding, WoW, had more people playing on Vanilla, BC, and WotLK servers where there were no easy mode raids until Blizzard forced Nostalrius to close down. According to server population analytics Draenor's active user based dropped below 1 million players for the first time in WoW's history. If easy mode raids were so good for WoW's health, why did more people play older versions of the game that than the Live WoW? It got so bad that Blizzard had to announce Classic WoW official legacy servers years before they were ready to be implemented.

your deluding yourself, its quite sad really.. Go check current stats for WOW and ESo to name but 2. MILLIONS happily raid in easy mode every week. Maybe you were not aware of this but normal mode raiding population destroys the little niche that likes hardcore, your outdated, the world moved on a long long time ago as the player base matured.

Which is why Blizzard felt the need to rerelease WoW patch 1.12.

Again, millions more players were on private classic WoW servers compared to live, especially when Nostalrius was still a thing.

all very interesting, but has no relevance to the fact that millions enjoy easy mode raiding every week now and for the last 5 -10 years. World has moved on.

And so has the vast majority of WoW's player base. Much of which moved on to private older versions of the game before easy modes were added. This isn't "Oh the population naturally died down." there are millions of players playing older versions of the exact same game before they added easy modes.

Your still not getting it are you, millions STILL raid normal mode in WOW and ESO. Players returning from private servers would boost this number if anything not reduce it lol.

And so do casual players in GW2. Unless you answer my previous question about the magical property of the raids.

[Bladestrom.6425]

My point was simply millions play easy mode raids, clearly players like it. Try reflecting on why you are so horribly terrifyingly offended by this really simple obvious truth.

[Cyninja.2954]

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:My point was simply millions play easy mode raids, clearly players like it. Try reflecting on why you are so horribly terrifyingly offended by this really simple obvious truth.

If the net gain of players is negative, it doesn't matter how many people enjoy easy mode raids.

What good is it to you if you have 100 people enjoying something which cost you 200 people to implement?

[mortrialus.3062]

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:My point was simply millions play easy mode raids, clearly players like it. Try reflecting on why you are so horribly terrifyingly offended by this really simple obvious truth.

Yeah you can go ahead and cut that shit out. Stop projecting on to other people.

You pointed out WoW has tons of people currently doing easy mode raids. I'm sure that's true. I'm pointing out that back when Nostalrius was around there were more people playing older versions of WoW than there were playing live WoW. Enough people to convince Blizzard to release classic WoW after refusing to for the better part of a decade.

Yeah, easy mode raids have a certain appeal. I can't deny that. It's the same appeal Istan farms have. But you can't deny the way classic WoW did things has it's own appeal considering how many people are still playing that as well. That's all I'm saying. And it'd be nice if you could actually respond to me like a grown up and have a grown up conversation with someone.

[Bladestrom.6425]

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:My point was simply millions play easy mode raids, clearly players like it. Try reflecting on why you are so

horribly terrifyingly offended

by this really simple obvious truth.

Yeah you can go ahead and cut that kitten out. Stop projecting on to other people.

You pointed out WoW has tons of people currently doing easy mode raids. I'm sure that's true. I'm pointing out that back when Nostalrius was around there were more people playing older versions of WoW than there were playing live WoW. Enough people to convince Blizzard to release classic WoW after refusing to for the better part of a decade.

Yeah, easy mode raids have a certain appeal. I can't deny that. It's the same appeal Istan farms have. But you can't deny the way classic WoW did things had it's own appeal considering how many people are still playing that as well. That's all I'm saying. And it's be nice if you could actually respond to me like a grown up and have a grown up conversation with someone.

I didnt deny class wow had good stuff, all i said was millions like easy mode raids. That's it, the rest is just ducking and diving from what i can see.

[Cyninja.2954]

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:My point was simply millions play easy mode raids, clearly players like it. Try reflecting on why you are so

horribly terrifyingly offended

by this really simple obvious truth.

Yeah you can go ahead and cut that kitten out. Stop projecting on to other people.

You pointed out WoW has tons of people currently doing easy mode raids. I'm sure that's true. I'm pointing out that back when Nostalrius was around there were more people playing older versions of WoW than there were playing live WoW. Enough people to convince Blizzard to release classic WoW after refusing to for the better part of a decade.

Yeah, easy mode raids have a certain appeal. I can't deny that. It's the same appeal Istan farms have. But you can't deny the way classic WoW did things had it's own appeal considering how many people are still playing that as well. That's all I'm saying. And it's be nice if you could actually respond to me like a grown up and have a grown up conversation with someone.

I didnt deny class wow had good stuff, all i said was millions like easy mode raids. That's it, the rest is just ducking and diving from what i can see.

Saying millions like something after a game has lost millions of players simply shows that not everything done was disproved of by the player base. Having a developer re-release a way earlier version of their game which has had hundreds of millions in development since then shows that they've noticed that they lost a very huge crowd of their initial players. This is even more evident if the games versions are competing with themselves.

Without context stating that millions like something is of 0 value. Say 2 million people liked the new BMW, that would be a terrible retention and thing to say if the previous model was loved by 10 million. Thus stating that 2 million people like the current BMW is of 0 value.

[Bladestrom.6425]

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:My point was simply millions play easy mode raids, clearly players like it. Try reflecting on why you are so

horribly terrifyingly offended

by this really simple obvious truth.

Yeah you can go ahead and cut that kitten out. Stop projecting on to other people.

You pointed out WoW has tons of people currently doing easy mode raids. I'm sure that's true. I'm pointing out that back when Nostalrius was around there were more people playing older versions of WoW than there were playing live WoW. Enough people to convince Blizzard to release classic WoW after refusing to for the better part of a decade.

Yeah, easy mode raids have a certain appeal. I can't deny that. It's the same appeal Istan farms have. But you can't deny the way classic WoW did things had it's own appeal considering how many people are still playing that as well. That's all I'm saying. And it's be nice if you could actually respond to me like a grown up and have a grown up conversation with someone.

I didnt deny class wow had good stuff, all i said was millions like easy mode raids. That's it, the rest is just ducking and diving from what i can see.

Saying millions like something after a game has lost millions of players simply shows that not everything done was disproved of by the player base. Having a developer re-release a way earlier version of their game which has had hundreds of millions in development since then shows that they've noticed that they lost a very huge crowd of their initial players. This is even more evident if the games versions are competing with themselves.

Without context stating that millions like something is of 0 value.

you do know im referring to ESO as well right? ESO has millions of players now its 2nd behind GW in my opinion. In any case, i was stating a fact, millions like easy mode. You can apply any context you like to that statement, it doesnt change the fact.

[Cyninja.2954]

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:My point was simply millions play easy mode raids, clearly players like it. Try reflecting on why you are so

horribly terrifyingly offended

by this really simple obvious truth.

Yeah you can go ahead and cut that kitten out. Stop projecting on to other people.

You pointed out WoW has tons of people currently doing easy mode raids. I'm sure that's true. I'm pointing out that back when Nostalrius was around there were more people playing older versions of WoW than there were playing live WoW. Enough people to convince Blizzard to release classic WoW after refusing to for the better part of a decade.

Yeah, easy mode raids have a certain appeal. I can't deny that. It's the same appeal Istan farms have. But you can't deny the way classic WoW did things had it's own appeal considering how many people are still playing that as well. That's all I'm saying. And it's be nice if you could actually respond to me like a grown up and have a grown up conversation with someone.

I didnt deny class wow had good stuff, all i said was millions like easy mode raids. That's it, the rest is just ducking and diving from what i can see.

Saying millions like something after a game has lost millions of players simply shows that not everything done was disproved of by the player base. Having a developer re-release a way earlier version of their game which has had hundreds of millions in development since then shows that they've noticed that they lost a very huge crowd of their initial players. This is even more evident if the games versions are competing with themselves.

Without context stating that millions like something is of 0 value.

you do know im referring to ESO as well right? ESO has millions of players now its 2nd behind GW in my opinion. In any case, i was stating a fact, millions like easy mode. You can apply any context you like to that statement, it doesnt change the fact.

Absolutely, it is a fact. Just as it is a fact that Blizzard is re-releasing 1.12 after hundreds of millions of development into their game is a fact. Just as that ESO had a very rocky launch and had to go free to play to even remotely recover and is one of the only games which offers realm versus realm.

All of those are facts. We can now take each of them individually and draw conclusions off of individual facts or try to look at the big picture and figure out what is going on overall.

No one is denying that millions enjoy easy mode raids. People simply disagree that this fact is proof in support of easy mode raids for GW2 being a good idea.

[Bladestrom.6425]

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:My point was simply millions play easy mode raids, clearly players like it. Try reflecting on why you are so

horribly terrifyingly offended

by this really simple obvious truth.

Yeah you can go ahead and cut that kitten out. Stop projecting on to other people.

You pointed out WoW has tons of people currently doing easy mode raids. I'm sure that's true. I'm pointing out that back when Nostalrius was around there were more people playing older versions of WoW than there were playing live WoW. Enough people to convince Blizzard to release classic WoW after refusing to for the better part of a decade.

Yeah, easy mode raids have a certain appeal. I can't deny that. It's the same appeal Istan farms have. But you can't deny the way classic WoW did things had it's own appeal considering how many people are still playing that as well. That's all I'm saying. And it's be nice if you could actually respond to me like a grown up and have a grown up conversation with someone.

I didnt deny class wow had good stuff, all i said was millions like easy mode raids. That's it, the rest is just ducking and diving from what i can see.

Saying millions like something after a game has lost millions of players simply shows that not everything done was disproved of by the player base. Having a developer re-release a way earlier version of their game which has had hundreds of millions in development since then shows that they've noticed that they lost a very huge crowd of their initial players. This is even more evident if the games versions are competing with themselves.

Without context stating that millions like something is of 0 value.

you do know im referring to ESO as well right? ESO has millions of players now its 2nd behind GW in my opinion. In any case, i was stating a fact, millions like easy mode. You can apply any context you like to that statement, it doesnt change the fact.

Absolutely, it is a fact. Just as it is a fact that Blizzard is re-releasing 1.12 after hundreds of millions of development into their game is a fact. Just as that ESO had a very rocky launch and had to go free to play to even remotely recover and is one of the only games which offers realm versus realm.

All of those are facts. We can now take each of them individually and draw conclusions off of individual facts or try to look at the big picture and figure out what is going on overall.

No one is denying that millions enjoy easy mode raids. People simply disagree that this fact is proof in support of easy mode raids for GW2 being a good idea.

so lets get this straight, millions clearly like easy mode, Guild wars has millions of players most of which play casually.. On top of this, Guild wars 1 had easy mode raids. all of this precedence and somehow the conclusion is that all those casual players would not like 10 man instances lol. This kind of self centered thinking is a poison that has polluted mmorpg for a few years now.

[Cyninja.2954]

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:My point was simply millions play easy mode raids, clearly players like it. Try reflecting on why you are so

horribly terrifyingly offended

by this really simple obvious truth.

Yeah you can go ahead and cut that kitten out. Stop projecting on to other people.

You pointed out WoW has tons of people currently doing easy mode raids. I'm sure that's true. I'm pointing out that back when Nostalrius was around there were more people playing older versions of WoW than there were playing live WoW. Enough people to convince Blizzard to release classic WoW after refusing to for the better part of a decade.

Yeah, easy mode raids have a certain appeal. I can't deny that. It's the same appeal Istan farms have. But you can't deny the way classic WoW did things had it's own appeal considering how many people are still playing that as well. That's all I'm saying. And it's be nice if you could actually respond to me like a grown up and have a grown up conversation with someone.

I didnt deny class wow had good stuff, all i said was millions like easy mode raids. That's it, the rest is just ducking and diving from what i can see.

Saying millions like something after a game has lost millions of players simply shows that not everything done was disproved of by the player base. Having a developer re-release a way earlier version of their game which has had hundreds of millions in development since then shows that they've noticed that they lost a very huge crowd of their initial players. This is even more evident if the games versions are competing with themselves.

Without context stating that millions like something is of 0 value.

you do know im referring to ESO as well right? ESO has millions of players now its 2nd behind GW in my opinion. In any case, i was stating a fact, millions like easy mode. You can apply any context you like to that statement, it doesnt change the fact.

Absolutely, it is a fact. Just as it is a fact that Blizzard is re-releasing 1.12 after hundreds of millions of development into their game is a fact. Just as that ESO had a very rocky launch and had to go free to play to even remotely recover and is one of the only games which offers realm versus realm.

All of those are facts. We can now take each of them individually and draw conclusions off of individual facts or try to look at the big picture and figure out what is going on overall.

No one is denying that millions enjoy easy mode raids. People simply disagree that this fact is proof in support of easy mode raids for GW2 being a good idea.

so lets get this straight, millions clearly like easy mode, Guild wars has millions of players most of which play casually.. On top of this, Guild wars 1 had easy mode raids. all of this precedence and somehow the conclusion is that all those casual players would not like 10 man instances lol. This kind of self centered thinking is a poison that has polluted mmorpg for a few years now.

I must have missed those GW1 easy mode raids. The end game zones of GW1 were by far more difficult than 95% of all GW2 content. I'm not sure what you are referring to here?

I'm to tired to answer AGAIN to all these points and quite frankly, I doubt you'd care or listen.

My point stands that posting facts without context means nothing, especially the LFR WoW situation. Not sure where basic logic is self centered but let me rebuttal this: the self centered attitude that one needs to be able to gain all rewards with minimal effort and/or solo is the disease which has polluted MMORPGS for years now.

[Bladestrom.6425]

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:My point was simply millions play easy mode raids, clearly players like it. Try reflecting on why you are so

horribly terrifyingly offended

by this really simple obvious truth.

Yeah you can go ahead and cut that kitten out. Stop projecting on to other people.

You pointed out WoW has tons of people currently doing easy mode raids. I'm sure that's true. I'm pointing out that back when Nostalrius was around there were more people playing older versions of WoW than there were playing live WoW. Enough people to convince Blizzard to release classic WoW after refusing to for the better part of a decade.

Yeah, easy mode raids have a certain appeal. I can't deny that. It's the same appeal Istan farms have. But you can't deny the way classic WoW did things had it's own appeal considering how many people are still playing that as well. That's all I'm saying. And it's be nice if you could actually respond to me like a grown up and have a grown up conversation with someone.

I didnt deny class wow had good stuff, all i said was millions like easy mode raids. That's it, the rest is just ducking and diving from what i can see.

Saying millions like something after a game has lost millions of players simply shows that not everything done was disproved of by the player base. Having a developer re-release a way earlier version of their game which has had hundreds of millions in development since then shows that they've noticed that they lost a very huge crowd of their initial players. This is even more evident if the games versions are competing with themselves.

Without context stating that millions like something is of 0 value.

you do know im referring to ESO as well right? ESO has millions of players now its 2nd behind GW in my opinion. In any case, i was stating a fact, millions like easy mode. You can apply any context you like to that statement, it doesnt change the fact.

Absolutely, it is a fact. Just as it is a fact that Blizzard is re-releasing 1.12 after hundreds of millions of development into their game is a fact. Just as that ESO had a very rocky launch and had to go free to play to even remotely recover and is one of the only games which offers realm versus realm.

All of those are facts. We can now take each of them individually and draw conclusions off of individual facts or try to look at the big picture and figure out what is going on overall.

No one is denying that millions enjoy easy mode raids. People simply disagree that this fact is proof in support of easy mode raids for GW2 being a good idea.

so lets get this straight, millions clearly like easy mode, Guild wars has millions of players most of which play casually.. On top of this, Guild wars 1 had easy mode raids. all of this precedence and somehow the conclusion is that all those casual players would not like 10 man instances lol. This kind of self centered thinking is a poison that has polluted mmorpg for a few years now.

I must have missed those GW1 easy mode raids. The end game zones of GW1 were by far more difficult than 95% of all GW2 content. I'm not sure what you are referring to here?

I'm to tired to answer AGAIN to all these points and quite frankly, I doubt you'd care or listen.

My point stands that posting facts without context means nothing, especially the LFR WoW situation. Not sure where basic logic is self centered but let me rebuttal this: the self centered attitude that one needs to be able to gain all rewards with minimal effort and/or solo is the disease which has polluted MMORPGS for years now.

your 'context' is flawed, you can 'equat' numbers to cancel out these millions of players from existence, but that's not reality. as for loot, raiders may obsess about that, but I wasnt talknig about loot, i was talking about demand. Anyway this is going nowhere, people will not listen to what they do not want to hear, im off to raid in ESO.

[Cyninja.2954]

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:

@mortrialus.3062 said:

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:My point was simply millions play easy mode raids, clearly players like it. Try reflecting on why you are so

horribly terrifyingly offended

by this really simple obvious truth.

Yeah you can go ahead and cut that kitten out. Stop projecting on to other people.

You pointed out WoW has tons of people currently doing easy mode raids. I'm sure that's true. I'm pointing out that back when Nostalrius was around there were more people playing older versions of WoW than there were playing live WoW. Enough people to convince Blizzard to release classic WoW after refusing to for the better part of a decade.

Yeah, easy mode raids have a certain appeal. I can't deny that. It's the same appeal Istan farms have. But you can't deny the way classic WoW did things had it's own appeal considering how many people are still playing that as well. That's all I'm saying. And it's be nice if you could actually respond to me like a grown up and have a grown up conversation with someone.

I didnt deny class wow had good stuff, all i said was millions like easy mode raids. That's it, the rest is just ducking and diving from what i can see.

Saying millions like something after a game has lost millions of players simply shows that not everything done was disproved of by the player base. Having a developer re-release a way earlier version of their game which has had hundreds of millions in development since then shows that they've noticed that they lost a very huge crowd of their initial players. This is even more evident if the games versions are competing with themselves.

Without context stating that millions like something is of 0 value.

you do know im referring to ESO as well right? ESO has millions of players now its 2nd behind GW in my opinion. In any case, i was stating a fact, millions like easy mode. You can apply any context you like to that statement, it doesnt change the fact.

Absolutely, it is a fact. Just as it is a fact that Blizzard is re-releasing 1.12 after hundreds of millions of development into their game is a fact. Just as that ESO had a very rocky launch and had to go free to play to even remotely recover and is one of the only games which offers realm versus realm.

All of those are facts. We can now take each of them individually and draw conclusions off of individual facts or try to look at the big picture and figure out what is going on overall.

No one is denying that millions enjoy easy mode raids. People simply disagree that this fact is proof in support of easy mode raids for GW2 being a good idea.

so lets get this straight, millions clearly like easy mode, Guild wars has millions of players most of which play casually.. On top of this, Guild wars 1 had easy mode raids. all of this precedence and somehow the conclusion is that all those casual players would not like 10 man instances lol. This kind of self centered thinking is a poison that has polluted mmorpg for a few years now.

I must have missed those GW1 easy mode raids. The end game zones of GW1 were by far more difficult than 95% of all GW2 content. I'm not sure what you are referring to here?

I'm to tired to answer AGAIN to all these points and quite frankly, I doubt you'd care or listen.

My point stands that posting facts without context means nothing, especially the LFR WoW situation. Not sure where basic logic is self centered but let me rebuttal this: the self centered attitude that one needs to be able to gain all rewards with minimal effort and/or solo is the disease which has polluted MMORPGS for years now.

your 'context' is flawed, you can 'equat' numbers to cancel out these millions of players from existence, but that's not reality. as for loot, raiders may obsess about that, but I wasnt talknig about loot, i was talking about demand. Anyway this is going nowhere, people will not listen to what they do not want to hear, im off to raid in ESO.

Are we talking trials or raids? Either way, have fun.