Raiding is like....

Living out a Math Equation through fantasy characters.

Its completely unheroic and completely unmemorable.

I won't raid until its random every time, until you can do heroic things in a raid based on something other than a math equation of statistics.

Like in that movie Willow where Val Kilmer has to catapult himself across a gorge, then leap onto the back of a fire breathing two headed dragon and jam his sword through one of its heads all while a hot redheaded chick stares on in awe from the ground at his sexiness. Thats what I want a raid to be.

That shyte should be in a Raid, and until it is... I ain't interested.

I like raiding.  I enjoy it. I like it because its like a team sport.

I simply do not have the time. I may do a regular dungeon if I find a group but I prefer to PvP.

I do not wish to raid....

My lifelong friends in real life however are my raid leaders.....and power/control freaks......

Therefore I raid......

Originally posted by heerobya 

So what you are suppose to lose at PvE? 

 

Ideally your supposed to have fun in PvE.  Right?

Ok, well I think a good argument could be made that running the same scripted routine over and over and over is somewhat lacking in fun for most people. 

Don't try to tell me that encounters couldn't be designed with randomness incorporated and at the same time adjusted to make it possible to beat.  The only reason randomness wouldn't work in the current, typical sort of raid encounter is because they are designed to be impossible to beat if you don't go through the pre-ordained routine.

Making raids more dynamic and chaotic and random wouldn't solve the other problems with raiding but at least then it might not be so unbearably boring.

As for my "forum posting 101 handbood" I'm afraid you'll just have to endure it if my witty repartee isn't up to snuff.  I'm sorry but we can't all be as astute and terribly impressive as you so obviously are.

To me, beating a particularly well designed first encounter can be fun in and of itself, but after a while all the raiding gets rather boring.

For one thing, you have to keep to schedules!... As a person who's designed his life and career so that he'd not have to keep to schedules routinely, it's no surprise it bores and even suffocates me really fast :)

And then, there's the problem that many encounters actually feel more like karaoke at best or Simon says at worst. Not much room for imagination and creativity, which is why I just cannot see it as teamsports. I've done teamsports for years, and the most thrilling part of it for me was that it gave you room for a lot of creativity - in fact, creativity was something to be cherished... Whereas in raids, being perceptive, following the rules and generally "doing your bit right" is more important. That's why in raiding you make a difference by screwing up, and not stepping up. You don't step up and save the day when your raid is having a particularly bad day, unlike, say, basketball.

So you can get some sort of satisfaction as in being a cog in a well-oiled machine, but I just feel it doesn't have enough room for individual flair. That's why to me, group PVP is a bit more like teamsports - especially when the numbers are smaller.

So, yeah, I'll initially do raiding in most MMOs, at least to see what the encounters are like, but I tend toget bored relatively quickly...

Originally posted by Innoss

Just reading some of the replies here makes me wonder what guilds/games people come from. I have lead a raid guild in every game ive played as in eq/ eq2/wow etc. I cant help but think most of the replies here are from people in mid to low tier guilds.

In my opinion, I equate guilds to jobs. Sure if your in a 25k a year job washing dishes then yea, that sucks. If your in a 125k a year job working with a team and accomplishing goals then you will be more fulfilled there.

Each guild and its structure is different and all have different ways to accomplish goals. You just have to find the one best suited for you. I enjoy raiding and unlike some posters here, we dont read the strats after they are posted. We write them. Theres a difference in the game between being a leader and a follower. Followers tend to get bored easily and give up. Leaders keep slogging along and in the end usually get the job done.

In my experience, most people look up the farthest progressed guild on thier server and try to join it hoping for easy loots with little involvement or dedication. Those are the people that burn out quick and your always having to replace them. Dont do this and your raiding experience will be better not only for you but the guild.

In closing, its up to you to get the most out of raiding. You make it fun or not.

Yeah the problem being is if you have a $125k a year job, you're not spending all of your free time raiding because you don't have a lot of free time to begin with and most of the people in the "hardcore" guilds fail so much at real life and are usually the one on the low end of the real life scale...
 

So win in life = fail at raids

Win in games = call Gamers anonymous because it is probably destroying your life, relationships and work.

One steps to making raids less of a damn drag would be to completely eliminate lock out timers... so it wouldn't such a friggin chore to get 6/10/25 to run an instance etc.

Originally posted by Neanderthal

Originally posted by heerobya 

So what you are suppose to lose at PvE? 

 

 

Ideally your supposed to have fun in PvE.  Right?

Ok, well I think a good argument could be made that running the same scripted routine over and over and over is somewhat lacking in fun for most people. 

Don't try to tell me that encounters couldn't be designed with randomness incorporated and at the same time adjusted to make it possible to beat.  The only reason randomness wouldn't work in the current, typical sort of raid encounter is because they are designed to be impossible to beat if you don't go through the pre-ordained routine.

Making raids more dynamic and chaotic and random wouldn't solve the other problems with raiding but at least then it might not be so unbearably boring.

As for my "forum posting 101 handbood" I'm afraid you'll just have to endure it if my witty repartee isn't up to snuff.  I'm sorry but we can't all be as astute and terribly impressive as you so obviously are.

Heero, play Monster Hunter, it should answer what a boss fight could be like. For PS2, PSP, whatever. Or just watch videos I guess online, though its not the same feel as playing yourself at all.

Monster Hunter Freedom Unite is the newest one, look for boss fight videos of that on youtube. The monsters are mildly scripted and do the same "attacks" but they are random intervals and at random times. Every battle is different and it is extremely challenging. If you die 3 times or your group dies three times (can play 4 players) then you lose. You die in a few hits, sometimes one hit. Everytime you die you lose reward money and some of the experience you gain for completely the quest.

 I can't stand waiting on other people without knowing exactly why and how long it will take within 1 min max +/-. There is no "but" I just simply cannot stand and wait without knowing why I am wasting my time. That's the main reason I don't raid.

The second reason is that I hate the feeling of just being a small part of something big. In a group dungeon you can really feel you matter. In a raid you don't.

I never really did PVE raids on a grand scale until I played WOW and plowed through MC, BWL and AQ40.

Prior to that it was an occasional Dragon raid in DAOC which was more like a gigantic pick up group in most caes than an organized activitiy.

At first I enjoyed it, and the sense of accomplishment when my guild got through it the first time or two.

But once they got to farm status, I grew to loath them, even though i was getting gear and stuff at a fair rate.

As we went through AQ 40, I realized that it was only a matter of time.  We were using the scripts others had prepared, and soon as we practiced it enough, we'd have it licked. 

And I got to thinking...what was the point?  To say that I completed something that 1000's of others had? To get yet more gear? That was cool...but then they announced TBC and I realized all my hard won raid gear was soon going to be totally obsolete.

I gave up on WOW then, and on raiding in general.  Now I play games that don't have PVE raiding as their main end game focus.  I don't mind a big fight, but running scripted PVE encounters offers me no challenge other than a lesson in patience.

I was enjoying ROM for a while, until I realized I was going to have to do a lot of PVE end game raiding in MA and Cyclops to earn the cash to make the gear I needed for PVP, which I didn't want to do.  So my time in that game has also come to a halt.

Good news though, still playing EVE and now going full force again with a new set of goals and objectives. 

Glad its always there for me.

Originally posted by heerobya

I'm just trying to provoke a good argument and discussion.

In a very condescending manner...

It's easy to say "I don't like this and here is why" but it is much harder to come up with something better most of the time.

But again, this is a designer's problem and not the players. It isn't the player's fault that they don't enjoy the mechanic that the developers created.

And then if/when you think you have, you have to cut through the idealistic ideas and bring it back down to Earth and then you realize the limitations of the systems and everything else.

Again, this is not the player's problem.

Why don't raid bosses have a lot more random variables and abilities and such so that you can't predict them and make it more then a dance? 

There are a lot of reasons. First and foremost because learning how an encounter works and then besting it and winning is the point of PvE. You are suppose to win. Second, 99% of gamers in PvE don't want something 100% random they want something they can learn and get better at and eventually beat.

I'm going to have to disagree. While it should be possible to figure out a boss's pattern and weaknesses, this should not guarantee victory. There needs to be enough leeway that even a well practiced and skilled group will only beat the boss maybe... 80 to 90% of the time. By that same token, it should also be possible for an extremely skilled group to defeat that boss on their first encounter without ever glancing at a FAQ or strategy guide.

Randomness is saved for PvP. Also no matter how "random" you make an encounter you are still limited by the AI and you can't make the AI too smart in a MMO because of technological limitations, huge complicated AI + online with thousands of people is a recipe for horrible performance. So you have to run things based off of scripts, and scripts can be learned and predicted.

Since most video game AI are really just finite state machines this point is kind of moot. The nature of FSMs is that they react according to where they are on the state tree. It's very rare that a game requires high level AI routines and that rarity drops to never with RPGs.

Also you have to program in every single one of those "random" things a boss can do, and that takes time and money and when you have 14 other bosses to program and a deadline of 3 days you can only spend so much time on a single encounter.

Scripting behaviors is not that difficult. Making the art assets that are linked to those behaviors can be very time consuming though. Although it isn't as bad as it used to be. With a fully finished and rigged model, you can complete whatever animations you want to add in just a few hours.

Again, take the idealistic "big" ideas and break them down to the realistic and what you can actually do, and what players actualy want. In the end, you have a game.

I can't really say that limited randomness isn't possible in an MMORPG. You can't seriously expect me to believe that CPU time is spread so thin that the varied behaviors of 16 bit era bosses are impossible to recreate on a server cluster, of multiple quad core cpu machines, that renders nothing and is really only juggling database statistics. What you see on your screen is only the minimal directions from a glorified MUD server. And yes, you can do something like this with MUD scripts.

At the very least, these creatures should adjust their movement and targeting in response to the players. You could put together a simple herding movement (so the players never surround the boss) with just a few lines of code. Hell, you could slightly randomize the target for each attack with only one line of code!

Here take a look at some of these bosses:

Berial from Devil May Cry 4

Elvis from Godhand

The Colossus of Rhodes from God of War 2

Seven Force from Gunstar Heroes

Now compare those battles to your standard raid boss. See the difference?

With regular, single player boss fights, the behaviors were very simple bu they adjusted themselves to the players position and / or state. The raid boss however, just kind of stands there. Yes, the raid boss does adjust it's behavior, but only to the player with the most aggro. And right there is your problem.

The devs need to design these things to fight raid groups as a group. This means that the boss needs to try and herd the players by attacking the edges of the group and then target players according to their role rather than aggro. None of that is particularly difficult to code or process intesive. The boss will still have a very limited number of behaviors to accomplish this, so the players can still win if they know the boss or spot the pattern, but each fight would somewhat different and therefore more entertaining.

Originally posted by heerobya

 

All games, every single one is designed so that you can and will eventually win if you learn the game and are skilled enough at playing it.

 

Just Plain Wrong.

Are you really that sad and desperate to back up your illogical arguments you bust that out? Some Japanese arcade game that like 6 people know about? 

Jesus. I'm done.

It's like talking to a wall, and a particularly stupid wall at that.

l2game develope, then come back and actually make sense

Originally posted by Jimmy_Scythe

Originally posted by heerobya

All games, every single one is designed so that you can and will eventually win if you learn the game and are skilled enough at playing it.

 

 

Just Plain Wrong.

Except the person playing that game did eventually win, even though they just screwed around at the end.  Yes, it might have taken 4 lives to do it but they still did.

You're just plain wrong.

Originally posted by heerobya

Originally posted by mbd1968

I used too a couple of years ago but I now lack the patience. Getting 25-40 people through a raid is an act of futility. You always have 3-4 people afk without telling the raid leader - attending kids/babies, gone for a smoke or top up the Jack Danials - 2-4 other are constantly dueling and not paying attention and 3-4 more either can't follow simple instructions or don't know how to play there class. You always get people who turn up late which means the raid start late resulting in people who need to finsih by a certain time leave early. People never brings consumables (pootions/elixirs/buff food), rangers/hunters forget arrows or bullets or they have there pet on aggressive and agro the whole dungeon.

So, why don't you raid anymore?

 

This is why I only raid with good players and serious gamers.

And also why I like 10 person so much better then 25 or 40.

I spent a good year of my life in 40 person dungeons, even longer in 25... no thanks.

Agree whole heartedly. Give me my one group, whatever size that is in the particular game,  6- 7- 8 members and I'm good. I want a solid consistent team of friends with the occasional pick up player like the days of daoc.

Run your guild group and short one tank? Grab the guy or girl you know that plays well and is fun and invite him, don't just pick up any tank.

<Mod Edited>

And if you think you can make a boss fight as complex as one in an offline single player game for a MMORPG.. well...

No one has done it yet, so unless you know something Blizzard, NCSoft, Sony, etc. doesn't know....

It's called server to console/PC communication. A whole lot more intensive then simply asking the game/console/your own PC to load up and do something.

Sure, I would LOVE to have EVERYTHING you are describing, I agree with you 100% on that, but if it could be done, someone would have done it already, and it would have likely been Blizzard because they have the biggest budget, probably the best tech, and some of the smartest devs.

You may disagree with that statement about Blizzard, but all you have to do is look at the critics score of ANY game they have ever made or the popularity of their games, and ask if such things are possible by untalented people?

Originally posted by heerobya

 

<Mod Edited>

 

And if you think you can make a boss fight as complex as one in an offline single player game for a MMORPG.. well...

No one has done it yet, so unless you know something Blizzard, NCSoft, Sony, etc. doesn't know....

It's called server to console/PC communication. A whole lot more intensive then simply asking the game/console/your own PC to load up and do something.

Sure, I would LOVE to have EVERYTHING you are describing, I agree with you 100% on that, but if it could be done, someone would have done it already, and it would have likely been Blizzard because they have the biggest budget, probably the best tech, and some of the smartest devs.

You may disagree with that statement about Blizzard, but all you have to do is look at the critics score of ANY game they have ever made or the popularity of their games, and ask if such things are possible by untalented people?

 

Bye? And I always thought Square was better then Blizzard, but I don't feel like a debate today.

And no, you can't have all the AI and boss stuff client side like in a single player game because people would hack the shit out of it.

It doesn't matter if people hack the shit out of non-multiplayer games because you are only effecting your own game experience.

Look what happened when a game like Halo allowed you to download maps to your harddrive, before they figured out how to protect them, most hacked shit ever.

In a MMO where you are paying a fee to play the game online, you cannot have some r-tard hacker screwing up the game for thousands/millions of others because they think it's be funny to change boss X's damage to over 9,000!!!!

Originally posted by heerobya

 

<Mod Edited>

 

And if you think you can make a boss fight as complex as one in an offline single player game for a MMORPG.. well...

No one has done it yet, so unless you know something Blizzard, NCSoft, Sony, etc. doesn't know....

It's called server to console/PC communication. A whole lot more intensive then simply asking the game/console/your own PC to load up and do something.

Sure, I would LOVE to have EVERYTHING you are describing, I agree with you 100% on that, but if it could be done, someone would have done it already, and it would have likely been Blizzard because they have the biggest budget, probably the best tech, and some of the smartest devs.

You may disagree with that statement about Blizzard, but all you have to do is look at the critics score of ANY game they have ever made or the popularity of their games, and ask if such things are possible by untalented people?

 

Um... You're welcome?

Someone didn't get his cocopuffs this morning.

Seriously though dude, if you can't debate without going bat-shit crazy and making personal attacks, don't bother visiting any forum on the internet.

Originally posted by heerobya

And no, you can't have all the AI and boss stuff client side like in a single player game because people would hack the shit out of it.

And where did I say that?

Mob AI is based on a script and CPU time is allotted in batches according to tics. The minimal, brain dead AI behaviors that i suggested were not out of the ordinary. Here, go get the CoffeeMUD server and play around with the scripting. You'll see that the behaviors I mentioned can be done in less than five minutes and take up almost not processing time.

 

Originally posted by Jimmy_Scythe

Originally posted by heerobya

Also you have to program in every single one of those "random" things a boss can do, and that takes time and money and when you have 14 other bosses to program and a deadline of 3 days you can only spend so much time on a single encounter.

Scripting behaviors is not that difficult. Making the art assets that are linked to those behaviors can be very time consuming though. Although it isn't as bad as it used to be. With a fully finished and rigged model, you can complete whatever animations you want to add in just a few hours.

Again, take the idealistic "big" ideas and break them down to the realistic and what you can actually do, and what players actualy want. In the end, you have a game.

 

I can't really say that limited randomness isn't possible in an MMORPG. You can't seriously expect me to believe that CPU time is spread so thin that the varied behaviors of 16 bit era bosses are impossible to recreate on a server cluster, of multiple quad core cpu machines, that renders nothing and is really only juggling database statistics. What you see on your screen is only the minimal directions from a glorified MUD server. And yes, you can do something like this with MUD scripts.

At the very least, these creatures should adjust their movement and targeting in response to the players. You could put together a simple herding movement (so the players never surround the boss) with just a few lines of code. Hell, you could slightly randomize the target for each attack with only one line of code!

Here take a look at some of these bosses:

Berial from Devil May Cry 4

Elvis from Godhand

The Colossus of Rhodes from God of War 2

Seven Force from Gunstar Heroes

Now compare those battles to your standard raid boss. See the difference?

With regular, single player boss fights, the behaviors were very simple bu they adjusted themselves to the players position and / or state. The raid boss however, just kind of stands there. Yes, the raid boss does adjust it's behavior, but only to the player with the most aggro. And right there is your problem.

The devs need to design these things to fight raid groups as a group. This means that the boss needs to try and herd the players by attacking the edges of the group and then target players according to their role rather than aggro. None of that is particularly difficult to code or process intesive. The boss will still have a very limited number of behaviors to accomplish this, so the players can still win if they know the boss or spot the pattern, but each fight would somewhat different and therefore more entertaining.

For some reason these posts made me think of the City of Villains Mission Architect expansions where you can create your own missions.

You can set level of difficulties of mobs: minion, boss, lt.  archvillian, elite boss , you can choose two sets of powers from any power available to players, you can choose the difficulty of their powes, easy/hard/extreme  , and you can choose if that boss prefers ranged or melee attacks, or you can make bosses and minions healers so they will assist each other as well.  It only takes about 3 minutes. I don't see where the technology doesn't exist to create better content or raids.

You can trigger events by grabbing an item,, by saving someone, by the boss's health (at half health you get ambushed by mobs),  and various other things.

So I do believe that companies can be able to make challenging pve content, but the taunting and AE CC abilities, PBAOE , and ranged AOE are what take a lot of the challenge out of the battles. Imagine if all crowd control was single target, there were no taunt abilities, and any AOE's were on a singlecast with a long reset timer of say 60 seconds.  You could then create large epic battles with pve armies that would be challenging.

Raid for what? 

DKP?

Armor sets that look like complete crap.  And you really don't have much choice in what gear you want to wear, if you want to be on top of the heal/dps etc.,.. meters. 

Raid strats that you must follow... each and every time you go in.  X number of this class, that class, etc.,... go here, do this here... Yawn.  No excitement... just paint by numbers.

Sit on your ass for 3-4 hours looking at the same scenery. 

You may or may not get jack sh*t out of your 3-4 hour investment. 

You may play your part to the max and perform flawlessly... if your raid-mates don't do the same, then you're screwed.

Did I mention lack of choice in armor/gear?  Sure, in the new dungeon there are hundreds of pieces of armor and gear, more than all of our last expansion!!!!!!!!  And I can wear how many of those?  I can actually equip and use how many of those with my class and my spec?  Very limited. 

If you have killed the boss once... the epic/heroic 'awesome' feeling dies, just as that boss does the first time you take them down.  Is it really awesome to need to run a dungeon 30-40 times (at least) to get everyone geared? 

Maybe I'm just fried and burned out on the whole idea of raiding, but it just stopped being fun for me... at all.  I'd rather roll alts and level to 10-15 or make lvl 19/29 twinks before I'd raid again. 

Customers want this and that, they want the best thing for the cheapest price, they want the impossible. Not getting it (of course), they'll go for the best price / quality (or performance) ratio. What's wrong with that? With demanding? After all It's called "supply and demand", isn't it? :)

The internet is a lot like life, only worse :) People tend to go way overboard, too offensive, too provocative, or just plain too thick... My advice, if you're going to visit the forums, never sit in front of your screen without your cooler :)

Originally posted by mbd1968

I used too a couple of years ago but I now lack the patience. Getting 25-40 people through a raid is an act of futility. You always have 3-4 people afk without telling the raid leader - attending kids/babies, gone for a smoke or top up the Jack Danials - 2-4 other are constantly dueling and not paying attention and 3-4 more either can't follow simple instructions or don't know how to play there class. You always get people who turn up late which means the raid start late resulting in people who need to finsih by a certain time leave early. People never brings consumables (pootions/elixirs/buff food), rangers/hunters forget arrows or bullets or they have there pet on aggressive and agro the whole dungeon.

So, why don't you raid anymore?

Simple answer is because of what i saw when i did do some raiding.It is the biggest joke going for a challenge or anything skillful.I think we had maybe 40 maybe 50 players one time i na raid,i was the designated tank.We di not do much preparation,i was confident in my ability and i knew i had a few very good players,the rest were a bunch of people who joined or were in the guild.

Utter chaos,it was a complete joke,80% of the players were off in other aggro,most did not know we had even started the fight,and i only survived thanks to 2 very good players helping me with heals and hate.Tried a few more raids,the same result only most times lots of deaths even though we would win.I do not agree wit ha system that allows victory when so many die,as far as i am concerned ,it is a loss not a win.Many raids are far worse,many tanks die over and over and are rezzed over and over,complete wipes can happen as well.

To make matters worse,is that i would say 99% after the net info is out there all COPY the internet setups to the "T".Nobody can think for themsleves ,they are all looking for someone else to tell them how to do it.If raiding was forever changing,with no one setup ever the same,then it would be a lot more fun and challenging.even so getting so many people together is timely and IMO not needed.We should have the same content easily available through a normal 6 man party,just because it states 40 man raid ,that does not auto mean it is more skillful,it auto means more people nothing more.