Idea: How to fix the Raiding System

[Xorekle]

So, I have a crazy idea, and not sure it can work in the code; but hear me out for a min.

From what I understand right now, we have too many people and not enough raid targets to go around; as an interim solution, we have an FTE (Free to Engage?) that's put out when a guild poopsocks something enough to earn it, correct? Other than that, people are just waiting for Velious content, knowing it'll improve, but ultimately, not fix the core problems.

What if we put in a locking system; people poopsock a raid encounter til someone gets the FTE; once one guild gets the FTE, the game would then "lock" that encounter to the entire guild that got the FTE for 2 hours; everyone else who tries to help or engage in any way gets a free port to zone entrance, similar to modern vox/naggy.

Then, if the guild who tried the encounter fails the encounter, the entire guild, gets a 2 or 3 day lock preventing them from trying that encounter again. If they succeed and the target dies during the FTE lockout, the entire guild gets a full 7 day + variance lockout.

What this allows us to do now, is to rapidly respawn the encounters, we could tweak the encounter respawn down, to allow more shots per week, because we can guarantee that the same guilds, will never get an encounter twice; so if we bring that encounter down to a 3, 2, or even 1 day respawn; this allows everyone else a chance at that encounter.

To stop the same guilds from hoarding all the encounters, you could even put a max limit to the number of lockouts your guild is allowed to have at once; maybe its 8 or 10, 12, something like that; after that point, your guild cannot acquire any more FTEs. Then your guild at most, can only take half the raid encounters in the game, once per week. Make the lockout flags given out be given at the character level, to everyone in the guild; this prevents people from guild-flopping to get around lockouts; and since your alts, if they're in the same guild also get locked out; it would encourage you to have alts in other guilds :).

Just a crazy idea, but curious what people thought. I think it'd scale well to Velious and post-Velious content as well.

[picklefixer]

Please keep in mind that the top guilds here get their enjoyment, not so much from getting that epic piece of phat lewt for their 9th alt, but more simply from keeping others (casuals) from ever having a chance at acquiring their first piece.

<Insert SweetAss Sig Here>
Mrtwig

[Kevris]

You really want to fix it?

Look up how it worked on Stormhammer.

[quido]

roll red

[DarkwingDuck]

Please keep in mind that the top guilds here get their enjoyment, not so much from getting that epic piece of phat lewt for their 9th alt, but more simply from keeping others (casuals) from ever having a chance at acquiring their first piece.

<Insert SweetAss Sig Here>
Mrtwig

[Juryiel]

Currently, the devs do not have the 'spirit' of competitive racing in the rules. It's a race of who can tag the mob first rather than a race of mobilization.

Any change along the 'FTE' train of thought would not really foster racing competition. GMs need to implement some code or policy that prevents raid forces from assembling at all before a spawn (which is quite a challenging task). There are really two main approaches I can think of:
1. Totally random spawns similar to simulated repops
2. Scatter raid forces prior to engaging (possibly via code scattering any waiting raid forces when a mob spawns)

They probably won't do these things due to work involved, unclassicness, and difficulty to implement in a way that won't be annoying to players. Therefore races will never really be a thing, and we'll always be stuck inventing methods like mage COH and jav spam poopsocking since the current 'competitive' path totally misses the spirit of what it means to race to a target. So I don't see what the point is for the GMs to try so hard to preserve this type of 'competition' by making all these engagement rules, when all it will do is have people come up with yet another way to tag the mob within the smallest possible unit of time allowed by whatever the current rules happen to be are.

But really, if FFA and possibly class C targets were able to spawn at any random time, then you would really see some mobilization races.

[Daldaen]

Make raid bosses in the same tier spawn simultaneously.
CT and Inny are FFA, have em both spawn at the same time. Split up the competition to reduce petition quest.

Of course if it's like... Maestro and VS it's pretty clear the mob people will focus on.

But honestly, maestro needs moved to a 12hr spawn. Draco to a week. Cause classic. And both removed from class rotating.

[Swish]

There's no perfect system out there. Any system people will bend as fully as they can to get the most pixels. With the amount of time put into the C vs R stuff I'd say that's about as good as it's going to get until the snow starts falling :p

[fadetree]

This has all been gone over multiple times at GREAT length. There is no idea that hasn't already been brought up. The current system is the one the devs want, primarily (I believe) because its the easiest to adjudicate. The problem is not the system, it's the people.

[Glenzig]

This has all been gone over multiple times at GREAT length. There is no idea that hasn't already been brought up. The current system is the one the devs want, primarily (I believe) because its the easiest to adjudicate. The problem is not the system, it's the people.

Haven't raided here yet, but this seems to make the most sense based on the forum wars between raiding guilds. Even if there was a lockout in place, all that would happen is instead of having 100 people with 5 level 60 alts in one raid guild, you would have the same 100 people with alts in 5-6 separate guilds in order to sidestep the lockout. That would probably be worse than the current system.

[Whirled]

The problem is not the system, it's the people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sp-VFBbjpE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRifKEf0xr8

I still like the idea of after X amount of years the character shifts to a legends server making way for new blood ....but it's just a pipe dream probably =-P

[Tulnavara]

as an interim solution, we have an FTE (Free to Engage?) that's put out when a guild poopsocks something enough to earn it, correct?

I'm wondering if everyone TL;DR'd this part. The FTE is First to Engage. There is a special coded shout that the mob does whenever someone aggros it that lets every one else contesting in the zone which person tagged it first so there are no disuptes/kill steal attempts. It has nothing to do with who has been there the longest. You don't "camp" a raid target and if you were there first it goes to your guild on FFA targets it is whoever engages first with the force there capable of killing it.

With what you're suggesting they might as well go to instanced raid zones for each guild so everyone can have what they want when they want it.