An alternative to variance

[Raev]

Originally Posted by Daldaen

Your own membership's size, and playtime, coupled with stupid 16-hour variance windows are what are inhibiting your guild from killing Trakanon.

Yes, but the problem is Trakanon ain't that hard. You can kill him with 15-20 if you have the right class composition and are willing to burn a lot of clickies. After a few months of powerleveling some shared Rog/Wiz accounts the result would be the usual 10 guild lines for every mob except Gorenaire, and that would not have given BDA/Taken/Divinity more pixels.

Originally Posted by Culkasi

but reality is, it will just turn into a 24/7 sock

The only solution IMO is to force everyone to start from the same spot, i.e. port them to a random firepot location, strip all of their buffs, and reset them to full HP/mana. Even as a new card-carrying member of Class C I think this + velious would be fucking awesome.

Originally Posted by Llodd

Yes please. Could we see how this went down? I assume there's nothing to hide in there? Who has the right to this archive anyway?

The original BDA proposal was 'no alliances at all, every target must be killed in 1 hour, guilds that were signed up for Gorenaire solo start in 1st tier with every good target, other guilds must qualify by killing Gorenaire'. Their second proposal is on the forums in the Raid Discussion section. Sirken made them change the gatekeeper mob to CT, but with the 1 hour time limit its not that much easier. It also included Talendor as the gatekeeper mob to Maestro IIRC (facepalm). We made what we thought was a very fair counter proposal:

Originally Posted by The A-Team adiabatic proposal

1. There is a tier system.
2. There are dark hours, and alliances are allowed during dark hours, but will come with a soft penalty. Alliances of any sort are not allowed during light hours.
3. The following penalties apply equally to light and dark hour kills (note that the notation '+X' indicates that the guild will drop X slots in the rotation):

-- +1 penalty across the tier for alliances during dark hours. That guild is not required to maintain this alliance for any subsequent kills. (Alliances during light hours are of course not allowed).
-- If you fail to kill your target within 60 minutes (90 minutes for CT), +1 penalty on that target only.
-- If you fail to kill your target within 3 hours: +4 penalty across the tier, +2 across other tiers and the target now become FFA within class R.
-- If class C kills your mob: +4 penalty across all tiers

I still think it's a very elegant proposal and I'm not sure why BDA wouldn't accept it.

As Catherin says, there were also a lot of insults and bullying. The average Class R officer is roughly as immersed as the average Class C member.

[Ravager]

Originally Posted by Raev [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

As Catherin says, there were also a lot of insults and bullying. The average Class R officer is roughly as immersed as the average Class C member.

After reading half of what you posted in RnF on the issues, it doesn't seem like you did much to stymie it yourself.

[Daldaen]

Penalties, tiers. That shits all dumb.

Rotation for mobs. You ally you all drop to end of rotation, with the guild who was #1 being at very bottom. Or you ally in advance (like Gorenaire) and you share a rotation slot. It's really simple. You kill a mob, you drop down.

But this is all moot since the rotation is exploded and Velious is on the horizon.

Give us 0 Variance and limit to 2 Players in zone on spawn please. That'd be sweet.

[Samoht]

Originally Posted by Daldaen [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Rotation for mobs. You ally you all drop to end of rotation, with the guild who was #1 being at very bottom. Or you ally in advance (like Gorenaire) and you share a rotation slot. It's really simple. You kill a mob, you drop down.

it's really not that simple. at all.

the issue that rose up was that there were a dozen splits for VS because you don't need to be allied to kill him and 4 splits for gore (nobody needs gore). they wanted to set it up so that you weren't on the list for VS unless you could kill gore so that the VS loot was limited to the higher end of the class R guilds.

they tried to make it into an exclusive club.

the smaller guilds actually had no leverage to compromise, though. they liked to pretend they did. they're going to have to face class R FFA with lockouts instead now. that's probably going to end up meaning less loot overall for them.

[Juryiel]

Originally Posted by Samoht [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

the smaller guilds actually had no leverage to compromise, though. they liked to pretend they did. they're going to have to face class R FFA with lockouts instead now. that's probably going to end up meaning less loot overall for them.

The 2 main reasons for reduced leverage from smaller guilds is 1) because in an interesting turn of events lockouts protect the larger guilds in that situation , and 2) because some of the smaller guilds smartly decided that if they're going to sock, they may as well do it in class C where there is more mobs to be had.

Also this is an odd way to see things. You may be able to get more loot than before, but I'm going to bet the man hours you invest per piece of loot is much larger now with the socking in R and increased FFA competition. So that is the leverage the small guilds have have - you can get more stuff than them sure, but it costs you proportionally much more to get every single piece of loot than it did in the rotation. Clearly this is not what BDA wants given the existence of this thread asking GMs to essentially intervene to further reduce smaller guilds' leverage in class R. You say no leverage yet this thread exists specifically because of that leverage forcing you to poopsock more than you like.

Furthermore, even if some group of players has no leverage you'd probably enjoy EQ more to try to work with them anyway. It's nice to help and be considerate of other people just of your own free will, rather than only considering how much leverage they have to compel you to cooperate.

[Troubled]

Originally Posted by Juryiel [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The 2 main reasons for reduced leverage from smaller guilds is 1) because in an interesting turn of events lockouts protect the larger guilds in that situation , and 2) because some of the smaller guilds smartly decided that if they're going to sock, they may as well do it in class C where there is more mobs to be had.

Also this is an odd way to see things. You may be able to get more loot than before, but I'm going to bet the man hours you invest per piece of loot is much larger now with the socking in R and increased FFA competition. So that is the leverage the small guilds have have - you can get more stuff than them sure, but it costs you proportionally much more to get every single piece of loot than it did in the rotation. Clearly this is not what BDA wants given the existence of this thread asking GMs to essentially intervene to further reduce smaller guilds' leverage in class R. You say no leverage yet this thread exists specifically because of that leverage forcing you to poopsock more than you like.

Furthermore, even if some group of players has no leverage you'd probably enjoy EQ more to try to work with them anyway. It's nice to help and be considerate of other people just of your own free will, rather than only considering how much leverage they have to compel you to cooperate.

What? I gave no thought to class R when I made the thread. Not sure why you'd claim that. I've always hated variance. Your claim that higher variance would help has also been tried and proven false. Lowered variance would help you more than us anyway. Feels like you're just arguing to argue.

[Juryiel]

Originally Posted by Troubled [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

What? I gave no thought to class R when I made the thread. Not sure why you'd claim that. I've always hated variance. Your claim that higher variance would help has also been tried and proven false. Lowered variance would help you more than us anyway. Feels like you're just arguing to argue.

I don't think higher variance would help stop socking. I think a totally random chance for a mob to pop at any given time would make socking much less meaningful except for that specific mob you are socking though. Sure people would do it still, but if you decide to sock VS, trak may spawn 10 times before VS (totally uniform random, and therefore independent), so the effectiveness of your sock will be reduced. Maybe everyone would just sock trakanon and VS then with porters nearby, who knows. But many mob spawns would not be socked since there would be no windows to tell you when to sock each particular mob. With a trully uniform random spawn chance, unless every guild has like 5 raid forces you won't get the same amount of socking per mob as you do now. There just aren't enough bodies. I think it would make things more fun rather than 0 variance FTE clickfest, which, although would mechanistically eliminate socking, would do so in a way that is super unfun to me. So I don't consider it a good solution even though it would accomplish the no socking thing. Uniform random spawn times are also not the best solution btw, but if modification of variance is all we have I would go with that over 0 variance.

And you may not have given thought to class R, but the increased socking you're doing is a result of it. I'm just pointing out that you have some ability to entirely eliminate socking on 1/2 (class R) of mobs you engage and reduce socking on the other 1/2 (FFA) by working with players rather than asking GMs to step in. Clearly you don't care enough to do this so it weakens the argument that GMs should care enough.

The thread is about an alternative to variance in the title anyway.

[Ravager]

The best solution is completely not classic, but would give classic feels. All raid mobs should be like Quillmane. Kill Juggs, there's a chance of a Trak pop. Raid Hate, there's a chance that one of the mobs triggers Inny. Raid trash in VP, there's a chance that a dragon there pops.

It would force people to actually play the content instead of training the shit out of each other for a 20 second kill. Make it so the mob is invulnerable for 20 minutes to all but the guild that triggered it.

It's a stupid idea, but it's way more classic feeling and immersive than 16/96 hour poopsock sessions.

[Whirled]

Originally Posted by Ravager [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The best solution is completely not classic, but would give classic feels. All raid mobs should be like Quillmane. Kill Juggs, there's a chance of a Trak pop. Raid Hate, there's a chance that one of the mobs triggers Inny. Raid trash in VP, there's a chance that a dragon there pops.

It would force people to actually play the content instead of training the shit out of each other for a 20 second kill. Make it so the mob is invulnerable for 20 minutes to all but the guild that triggered it.

It's a stupid idea, but it's way more classic feeling and immersive than 16/96 hour poopsock sessions.

[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Juryiel]

Originally Posted by Ravager [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The best solution is completely not classic, but would give classic feels. All raid mobs should be like Quillmane. Kill Juggs, there's a chance of a Trak pop. Raid Hate, there's a chance that one of the mobs triggers Inny. Raid trash in VP, there's a chance that a dragon there pops.

It would force people to actually play the content instead of training the shit out of each other for a 20 second kill. Make it so the mob is invulnerable for 20 minutes to all but the guild that triggered it.

It's a stupid idea, but it's way more classic feeling and immersive than 16/96 hour poopsock sessions.

Absolutely love this idea from a fun perspective. Won't ever happen, but most of the good solutions to the problems we have won't either so [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]