There were lack of people for progression raid. Again. This time Cho'Gall was the lucky one who avoided us. Of course the farm raids aew overbooked. The "people come to farm raid and not to progression" is common among guilds.
This thinking is counter-intuitive at first glance. I mean everyone must firstkill a boss, why do people prefer doing it in a farm raid (meaning most others killed the boss)? If he is not good enough (which is likely when he sees him first), he will fail anyway, regardless the raid being "progression" or "farm".
Finally figured it out what's wrong with progression raids: other people failing. If I firstkill the boss with a raid where everyone else are veterans, we can only wipe if I fail. Unless I am M&S who can't improve, I can only kill the boss or fail and learn, become a better player, and soon get the fun of overcoming a challenge. On the other hand on progression raids the very frustrating "I did not do anything wrong and we wiped" can happen again and again. Imagine the situation of a DD at Chimaeron: he does his best rotation, stack up when has to and disperse when needed, yet wipe, wipe, wipe. The problem is not wiping itself, it's being totally impotent to do anything. He cannot play better to prevent the wipe, healers has to.
While good players have this kind of frustration every time when we wipe, it's limited to a few wipes in farm raid and can be soothed by punishing the failer. On the other hand on a progression wipefest even the worst player has it. If he has 50% fail chance and everyone else has just 10%, than the chance of kill is 20% and in half of the wipes he did everything right. There is a chance that the boss will not even get to the next phase, despite you have nothing left to improve there.
What can I do to overcome it? The only thing I have is the newbie fee. It's currently practically capped at boss loot /10, around 600G. I can elevate it to 2000G by saying you must pay it when you firstkill a boss (and of course you get pot share). Of course it has the drawback of keeping newbies away from the guild. We are 9/12, so on the first farm week he would pay around 9000G (assuming 1 other newbie paying and boss pot is 6000G). If progression halts, it may comes to that.
However I have a design idea, and if you find it good I'd ask you to echo it on forums, your blog and so on: "the ghosts of progression". This is a game feature when you can talk to an NPC who offers "practice with helpful ghosts". You choose a boss, your role and off you go with 9 bots. The ghost boss acts exactly as the real one, the bots are doing their job, you have to do your own. The practice is over when you or the boss is dead. Of course you can get no loot from the ghost-boss, but you get an achievement what can be demanded by every guild before raid inv.
The pros of this system are obvious:
PS: One thing wasn't clear. The bots only allow you to practice some generic tactics, basic do-not fail stuff, like on Maloriak don't stack on others in blue, do stack on red except when debuffed, attack adds in green. 10 people who did it with bots wouldn't be automatically able to do the encounter as for example no one practiced interrupting, bots did it. No one broke ice blocked bots as other bots did. The bots would be able to carry the person unless he fails miserably, simulating a farm raid with veterans, you being the only newbie. 10 such people would have much to learn and organize to kill the boss, the bots would merely save the others from hopeless fails.
This thinking is counter-intuitive at first glance. I mean everyone must firstkill a boss, why do people prefer doing it in a farm raid (meaning most others killed the boss)? If he is not good enough (which is likely when he sees him first), he will fail anyway, regardless the raid being "progression" or "farm".
Finally figured it out what's wrong with progression raids: other people failing. If I firstkill the boss with a raid where everyone else are veterans, we can only wipe if I fail. Unless I am M&S who can't improve, I can only kill the boss or fail and learn, become a better player, and soon get the fun of overcoming a challenge. On the other hand on progression raids the very frustrating "I did not do anything wrong and we wiped" can happen again and again. Imagine the situation of a DD at Chimaeron: he does his best rotation, stack up when has to and disperse when needed, yet wipe, wipe, wipe. The problem is not wiping itself, it's being totally impotent to do anything. He cannot play better to prevent the wipe, healers has to.
While good players have this kind of frustration every time when we wipe, it's limited to a few wipes in farm raid and can be soothed by punishing the failer. On the other hand on a progression wipefest even the worst player has it. If he has 50% fail chance and everyone else has just 10%, than the chance of kill is 20% and in half of the wipes he did everything right. There is a chance that the boss will not even get to the next phase, despite you have nothing left to improve there.
What can I do to overcome it? The only thing I have is the newbie fee. It's currently practically capped at boss loot /10, around 600G. I can elevate it to 2000G by saying you must pay it when you firstkill a boss (and of course you get pot share). Of course it has the drawback of keeping newbies away from the guild. We are 9/12, so on the first farm week he would pay around 9000G (assuming 1 other newbie paying and boss pot is 6000G). If progression halts, it may comes to that.
However I have a design idea, and if you find it good I'd ask you to echo it on forums, your blog and so on: "the ghosts of progression". This is a game feature when you can talk to an NPC who offers "practice with helpful ghosts". You choose a boss, your role and off you go with 9 bots. The ghost boss acts exactly as the real one, the bots are doing their job, you have to do your own. The practice is over when you or the boss is dead. Of course you can get no loot from the ghost-boss, but you get an achievement what can be demanded by every guild before raid inv.
The pros of this system are obvious:
- People could learn the boss without suffering from others failure. Bots don't fail.
- The raid encounters would be free of simple errors before even PTR as many errors would be identified by countless botmatches (10 bots must kill the boss)
- The raid encounters could be perfectly fine-tuned both gear and skill-wise by "failing bots", bots programmed to be a bit slow or use sub-optimal specs. The normal boss must be killed by "average" bots in blue gear, while Sinestra demands error-free execution in full epic.
PS: One thing wasn't clear. The bots only allow you to practice some generic tactics, basic do-not fail stuff, like on Maloriak don't stack on others in blue, do stack on red except when debuffed, attack adds in green. 10 people who did it with bots wouldn't be automatically able to do the encounter as for example no one practiced interrupting, bots did it. No one broke ice blocked bots as other bots did. The bots would be able to carry the person unless he fails miserably, simulating a farm raid with veterans, you being the only newbie. 10 such people would have much to learn and organize to kill the boss, the bots would merely save the others from hopeless fails.
39 comments:
I'd like to point out, as others no doubt will as well, that there's a minor flaw in the plan - you're going to have to programme the bots to use boss-specific strategies. Which means that other people are going to look at what the bots are doing, and save on having to figure out that much of the boss, as a result.
You could only allow the feature on regular servers, meaning that people on the PTR would still get to experiment with the bosses, but still.
Hohoho:
http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2011/02/world-of-warcraft-in-2020.html
The social aspect in raiding is based on exactly the thing you want to remove from the game. In order to first kill you need to communicate with 9\24 other people, so everyone will stay calm till kill and noone will do too much mistakes. There's nothing in raiding besides first kills. Farm is boring and the only reward is purple pixels, which are useless if you don't need to progress more with that gear. If anyone is able to kill by himself first, first kill will be farm too. And it will became a solo-player game with a lot of grindable purple and gold pixels.
"If you can't get into P2 with bots, there is no one else left to blame."
I think you are underestimating the M&S. They will blame the bots, or their gear, or their Internet connection, or anything else but themselves. Failure with the bots is no more objectively undeniable than DPS below the tank on recount.
There's another rather significant disadvantage you didn't mention, that being the fact that to implement such a feature would be expensive and time consuming for Blizzard for at best a marginal improvement in the game, and at worst something that could limit their profits. After all, if people can practice on their own against bosses without penalty there's no reason to do progression raids at all, they'd all be farm raids by the time anyone got around to doing them. The obvious consequences of that would be that the vast majority of people wouldn't need guilds for raiding, and wouldn't need to actually raid nearly as often or for as long, so they would lose their social links and leave the game much quicker.
The real purpose of raiding is basically to get people to play for as long as possible with the minimum investment of design resources. Sometimes that means making raiding accessible to as many people as possible, sometimes it means gating the content so people don't blow through six months of design work in a week. Think about it, how much time would it take to create, say, Vashj'ir, the zone? How much effort must go into the quest design, building the zone, creating phased areas, cinematics, and everything else that goes along with it all? Compare that to how long it must have taken to create Blackwing Descent. Now consider how much time most people spend in Vashj'ir compared to Blackwing Descent. It's days versus months for what has to be a fraction of the design effort. Blizzard isn't going to do anything that could possibly jeopardize that balance.
However, I'm not saying your idea isn't good from the standpoint of raid coordination and individual efficiency. It most manifestly is, it would improve the speed with which a guild could get boss kills drastically. I'm just saying it wouldn't be good for Blizzard.
A great idea, with one unfortunate problem in that programming the AI of the bots would be unbelievably hard, unless you are suggesting that the bots themselves essentially ignore encounter mechanics and it is only the player that is worrying about these things. Even still, I still think there are so many variables in fights these days it would be too hard to code, I couldn't imagine programming 9 AI actors to complete conclave, for example. It would be much harder than programming the boss fight itself, which Blizzard seems to have enough problems getting right in the first place.
This isn't a Blizzard-endorsed forum, so I can speak freely about private servers here.
It's an interesting idea in concept. You could program this fairly easily in a private server - set up a bot to tank/heal/DPS optimally, and run the boss mechanism.
The only problem I could forsee is that bots are too perfect. Even if you succeed with 9 bots by your side, that's no guarantee when real DPS fluctuates based on other players. You would need the bots to perform with average (but reasonably successful) latency and inefficiencies to mimic an average raid, otherwise, all it demonstrates is that a person can be carried.
And the only negative is enough reason for such a system to never be implemented, as it will cost WoW most of it's player-base instantly. Though, such thing may become more interesting for the developers closer to the end of the game life cycle, when most of the population will migrate somewhere else anyway. Also, it's quite interesting proposal for them to use internally, preparing and tuning content, that one they may aim for (or even already use, as for developer such a way must be quite obvious for preliminary testing).
Your missing a key part of the fun of progression raiding: Watching each try get closer to downing the boss. Improving each time, brain storming between wipes and trying out new tactics. Its fun, its only a "wipe fest" chore if peoples hearts and minds arent focused on the achievment just the shiney epics they get for it.
Theres a sweetness to downing a boss for the first time, one thats lessened if your "carried" to it by "veterans" as opposed to taking it down with 9 other guildies for the first time ever. If farm raids are more popular I have to question if the people doing them truely love raiding at all and why they value the epics so badly if they arent wanting to use them for what they are meant for: wiping like silly on the HC modes.
Probably the best idea I have ever heard on any blog. Look at all the work Blizzard has done to get people to do raids: Dungeon finder, including the included welfare payments for your role and welfare buffs to help pickup groups, yet your idea would be far more popular and effective without being a Blizzard welfare program trying to rope people in like cattle. I love it!
The essential problem is a discrepancy in individual incentives for raiding.
Some people raid for the loot.
Some people raid for the social experience.
Some people raid for the challenge.
I'm sure there's other reasons - and some raid for a combo of reasons.
Skill is not related to any of the reasons - meaning, you can have a crappy player who raids for loot and a good player who raids for loot. Or a good player who raids for the social experience and a crappy player who raids for the social experience.
If your raid is harmonized along lines of individual incentive then you will have a smoother time.
However, this is extremely hard to harmonize - people aren't introspective and don't know why they raid, people lie about why they raid, whatever individual psychosis - so it is easier to just put in place an attendance rule for raiders. You've noted all of the reasons for attendance rules on here in the past.
So, I don't think it's just that the good players don't want to have to deal with other people's failures. My experience from four years now of raiding is that, within reason, people will deal with some level of weaker players for the sake of a stable guild, nice people, whatever reason x.
But, I think people who care about the easier loot won't show up no matter what the other experiences unless they also get the easy loot.
I never figured out what to do about this. Often those motivated by loot are nice people, good players, and they always have an excuse (or, in your rubric, they don't need one, they just don't show). So instead, over time, my guild just boiled itself down to people whose incentives for raiding are harmonized. Basically, it's about the challenge and the social experience. I think these are more stable foundations than loot/financial incentives - but this is anecdotal, not generalizable. Which is why I enjoy reading about your guild experiment so much, in spite of not agreeing with you philosophically.
I think adding "simulation rooms" wouldn't be a bad idea really - but I'm not sure it would overcome the barriers to the loot motivated players. Wipes would happen anyway - even good players make mistakes.
Anyway, thanks, as always, for the post - again, it's an interesting one to think about.
Something you might consider is a "Raiding" rank in which you promote people who are currently in the progression raid and demote them back down when it is over. At this higher rank offer full repairing from the guild bank.
At best the only increase in costs between a progression raid and a farm raid would be increase in food needed. I know personally my hardcore guild was willing to beat our heads against Maloriak late at night when we weren't planning on attempting him and managed to down him after 3 wipes(6 people hadn't done the fight yet). I imagine this had alot to do with the fact we didn't really have anything to lose by trying him.
Solo raiding would be great for a guild like The PuG but for the average social guild it would crush arthasdk's hopes and dreams. Which we know happens to be Blizzard's favourite source of income.
You would remove a lot of peoples' drive to even join raid groups with this suggestion. I would never see Sinestra while it's current... whoops, nevermind, just spent 10 min doing it via bots. GG. Turning progression into single-player content simply makes the literal raiding part merely farming. If you thought people get pissed/demoralized when you wipe of farm content before, just imagine how much worse it would be when everyone could practice those fights 24/7 if they wanted.
Also, think of the tuning. You queue as DPS and 9 bots are programmed to defeat the boss unerringly unless you fail to do X. What will X be? Hit 10k DPS? 11k? Class balance suddenly gets shifted on its ear - everyone will complain about who can hit X easier. There will, of course, be things like "don't stand in fire" for X. But once you have eliminated everyone elses' performance issues, how hard is this game, really?
That would be the ultimate benefit of this ghost system, eh? But think about what happens when you demonstratively prove that you could be 13/13 HM or whatever if only A) you weren't stuck with the people in your guild/faction/server, and B) could/would be willing to do what the HC guild asks of you. That is more of a social concern, but social consequences will impact you indirectly at a minimum.
I don't decide to join a raid whether a progression raid or a farmraid. If I have time for an evening then I raid, but I would prefer a whole evening raid for the full raid time from 19:00-23:30 and not only 1,5h, because if I take time for raiding I have time for the enitre evening. Maybe this could also be an issue for other palyers.
If we would stay the entire time in Bastion of Twillight there would be enough time to progress on Cho'gall. (eg Wednesday or Thursday)
Maybe next week I try to organise a raid by myself only in one instance during the whole raid and at least for 3 hours.
Cu in the next raid!
Also you forgot about one thing. Tactics for boss doesn't exist before the world first kill. Blizzard doesn't try to kill their own bosses first, they just throw out some set of abilities and world first guilds find their way to overcome them. As a result, there are different tactics to the bosses, mostly because every raid is different. Sometimes bosses are unkillable, or there's an easy way to "cheat" the encounter (Magmaw hc for example), so Blizzard makes a fix and old tactics become obsolete.
Imagine Blizzard would implement for Magmaw a tactic with frost dk kiting adds, and your raid includes 10 people with no dks, not to mention frost specced one trained to kite. Everyone practiced to heal\nuke, noone knows how to kite. Or you have 3 healers, each of them trained as raid heal. Or tank heal. I can throw up a lot of examples like this, many bosses provide special roles for people, not just tank'n'spank'n'throw some heals somewhere. One interrupter can screw up the whole evening wiping on Maloriak hc, then some healers fail on Chim, then dpsers catch sound on Atra, then some tank fails to rotate Ony, then kiter sucks on Nef.. It's always different people, Blizzard had done excellent work with providing different important mini-tasks on bosses in current tier. And you can't assume you will have someone trained to this particular thing by ghosts.
For hardmodes single tactic doesn't exist at all. You need to tweak things if you are less\more geared, have different tank\healer\dps setup, etc.
It's just unrealistic in the game we play.
With your idea in place all players will spend most of their play time alone, practicing on the ghost bosses and then doing one farm run with their guild per week. I think you are killing the MMO concept with this idea.
One other flaw: the players will expect their fellow players to play as the bots they praticed with, but since the only role any player has not seen being done by a bot is their own role, the results may be quite funny.
If Blizzard would be able to develop a sufficient intelligent henchman AI they would do that, I'm sure. But not for training. We would finally be able to run dungeons and raid without other human beings and the game would be a lot more fun.
Actually there are raid simulations ingame, they are the hc dungeons.
It's much easier to introduce "raid" mechanics into a dungeon boss (like a "regroup-disperse" phase, intensive healing phase, burning hp boss down phase, etc), than creating an entire raid simulator.
Another thing I think someone else pointed out, it's the fact that people would expect other raiders to act like the simulator bots, and it would dramatically decrease the little time reaction people have in pve before unexpected movements. Althought a simulator would be fine as a learning dummy, of basic bos habilities, but not as a personal quality improvement ala Rocky.
(Sorry for my bad english, I'm from Crapland)
I disagree with your contributors who claim this would be technically difficult to achieve. As we know this is a client/server application, every action we take translates into a state change that is communicated to the server. It would be relatively trivial to record all actions from an encounter enacted by real people and play them back as a macro/script from dummy clients. Obviously replacing one of the scripts with the trainee person.
However, I think this is against the whole ethos of the game. Let's not forget the "multi player" element in this game genre. Yes, I understand that you're only suggesting this as a form of training but personally, as others have commented, I like the learning experience with real people.
@The P.S. part
If it only does the basic stuff it is pointless. People who actually can kill Cata bosses without being carried can get the basics right the first time.
Its the advanced stuff that wipes raids. Even if only by proxy (as in - advanced stuff distracts from the basics, then fail on basics).
Playing with bots will only train you to be a better player when raiding with bots. There is a reason why sports teams suffer in performance when they have an influx of new but very talented players: the team hasn't learned to work together yet.
In order for a team to progress they must practice together. Humans behave differently in different groups because a lot of the visual queues and abilities change. Once a consistent group of players have practiced a bit together they adjust their playstyle according to the needs of the group.
"The problem is not wiping itself, it's being totally impotent to do anything."
Certainly the issue I have. I enjoy learning a boss.
However, performing to spec on a progression boss is hard. Performing to spec while be repeatedly wiped by other people is boring.
When I get bored, it gets harder and harder to concentrate. Soon, I'm causing wipes myself because...it's not like we were going to kill the boss anyway on this try. Why should I bother bringing my A game?
Yeah, the ghost idea would effectively down bosses. I instinctively know people would do everything in their power to avoid using it, though.
And then not only would people be wiping me long after I've learned the fight, they'd be doing so when a clear alternative exists. And I'd seriously risk ragequitting.
I think there's a more obvious solution to this problem that Gevlon is overlooking. Probably because it's the social solution ;)
If everyone is totally focused on themselves, then progression probably WILL be frustrating. Even among the best guilds in the world, there are going to be small differences in the learning curve each player has for figuring out their role in each boss fight. In the vast majority of guilds, that difference may be quite a bit larger. In other words, someone is going to be comfortable with a fight first, and someone is going to be last.
In the asocial type of guild Gevlon frequently talks about, this is a built in problem. The instant someone figures out a fight and is playing well enough to carry their own weight, they're going to get frustrated that everyone else isn't doing the same at that moment and not want to try any more. And why would they, when the whole asocial philosophy is that you shouldn't carry others and all that? It's even worse when someone THINKS they are playing better than others, because they're going to be both angry and unhelpful to the group.
The bots idea is certainly *A* solution, as it's a way to free anyone from having to tolerate anyone else playing less than perfectly...assuming it works the way Gevlon suggests. And it might work that way, although others have definitely pointed out some issues with the idea. But plenty of guilds maintain solid progression in a simpler way...most of the players see themselves as part of a group, and are interested in the success of the group as a whole.
This doesn't mean they carry bad players through their runs, since better guilds are selective about who they bring in the first place. But it does mean that they have enough interest in the GROUP victory that they don't instantly get angry and stop showing up if they've figured out a boss before someone else...or if they think there is a chance that could happen.
Raiding is, after all, a GROUP activity that requires significant cooperation from 25 or 10 people. The "don't sign up for progression" is just one of the problems you get if you encourage, or even require, that the 25 or 10 people think of the raid as a bunch of individuals only in it for themselves. Raiding as a group isn't being overly social at all, it's just being practical :)
I don't raid anymore precisely because of this. After two months of random failures trying to do 10-man Sindragosa HC, I quit. Sick of bringing my A-game every night and doing nothing but wiping because of M&S guildies who couldn't focus on the mechanics for whatever lame reason they came up with.
The idea that bots could be programmed to do current raid content seems really outrageous to me. I suppose it could be possible for Chimaeron, but for Cho'gall?
Blizzard would have to design bosses that can be beaten by a script without making any of the kinds of decisions that humans are good at and computers are bad at.
I'm not saying that these tasks are beyond computers, but I think they are far beyond the amount of processing power that blizzard would be able to devote to running more than 1,000,000 copies of them at once.
If you disagree then just give me a simple, easily computable answer to this: When should a Discipline priest accept the healing loss and "tank" a tentacle on Cho'gall phase 2?
I think if you're doing progression raiding and you have the mentality "I did not do anything wrong and we wiped" you're in the wrong place, you should be thinking "what else can I do to make this successful". Chimereon is a very good example, if you're DD and all you're focused on is maxing your damage and not doing what you can to stay alive or keep others alive and you wipe then you did do something wrong. If you're not looking at what you can do to help the team then go do some farm content where you can focus solely on maxing out your numbers where your healers/tanks outgear the encounter and can handle anything that might arise.
I think Gevlon's suggestion does not go far enough. The training session as outlined actually has one fewer bot than necessary.
I think the player should be able to watch the encounter with all 10 bots doing the action. The other 9 members of his 10 man guild will also have bots.
Once the bots defeat the boss, the bots are awarded bot loot, and the players get the enjoyment and satisfaction of knowing that their avatar's avatars are well skilled, well equipped adventurers.
This also incidentally saves players alot of real life time.
Its unlikely to happen but sounds like a nice idea to me. As long as it only helps with normal difficulty and not heroic raids then the real challenge of the current game will be unaffected.
I think it would work best if the mini-game demonstrated the mechanics of the fight as well as possible without actually being the fight. It should almost definately not involve the need for using actual spells. Mechanics that require specific things should offer the user a generic 'dps' or 'heal' or even 'interrupt' buttons that they can hit to demonstrate the interaction.
It would pretty much end up as an in-game, interactive version of watching a vid of the fight. Those vids are already available to everyone anyway so what difference would it make?
The answer to any concerns about giving the boss away when it is brand new is simply to only introduce the VR version 2 weeks or so after the raid release. This is really no different from something like the ICC buff.
Your idea is a waste of devs time. In most guilds, wiping on progression is not a big deal. It costs a little repair gold, a little buff food. Most guilds are full of "socials" and the wipes become a source of humor and camaraderie until we finally learn how to get the boss down. Your solution is the epitome of anti-social raiding. You may as well buy a console game with difficult, scripted single player fights.
Yes, some fights put more pressure on particular players. "Socials" know that and are patient with the healers because the next fight may very well be a tight enrage timer and rest on the abilities of DPS. They know if they are patient, they will get patience in return.
I think you're missing a fundamental component of team play here, Gevlon. Team performance is not the sum of individual performance, but rather the sum of individual performance plus the sum of interactive performance. (In other words, player performance is not an independent variable nor is it the only variable in a kill).
For example--hopefully we all remember Magtheridon and the importance of "cube clickers". But the function of these clickers wasn't simply to click a box, but to click a box *simultaneously*. Thus the condition for satisfaction was based on an individual component (eg: did I click the box?) and an interactive component (eg: did we click the boxes together?). Five players clicking the box at different times would not satisfy the requirements of the encounter—this is the inherent difficulty of raiding and what your proposed “ghost” raiding would like circumvent with AI functionality.
It would be wonderful if indpendant training did work, but as "all pro" or "All American" teams demonstrate, individual skill does not result in a golden ticket to success. I would imagine that players would find it infinitely more frustrating to go through the entire exercise of pseudo-kills, only to attempt to do the real thing and fall very short of success.
I think the idea for boss simulation is great however a few things will need to be changed in order to maximize it's worth. One being that Blizzard has tendency to nerf old content as time passes, making them easier and easier as time goes by. This is also affected by a gear curve, bosses will be increasingly easy when the new Zul'Aman and such release providing people with easy epics. One obstacle would be that the only reason to have a simulator like this would be if the content remained challenging long enough to maintain it's worth. Secondly, it would be quite costly on Blizzard's behalf. There would have to be a great deal of interest in this in order to make it worth implementing. The achievement system sounds like a good start. Thirdly, even if Blizzard did not take upon the idea themselves, there are other outlets that can be looked into. Private servers as someone mentioned could be a possibility, though wasn't my first thought on the idea. If anyone remembers the old Gorefiend simulator back in Black Temple times, before progressively downing him we required everyone to do the simulator until they had it down to an art form. Something as simple as that simulator was does make a great deal of difference.
This is interesting. I like to explore, which is one reason I did not like WOW so much as everything in the game is known. I was going to ask your opinion on a game idea that popped in my head. This idea sorta plays into what you say about progression raiding. I used to play Dungeons and Dragons. In the appendix of the Dungeon Masters Guide was a random dungeon generator. Basically roll the die to see what comes next, more hallway, a turn, a room, a monster... fast forward to my game idea, basically a random dungeon generator, so we could have the thrill of exploring again. As far as bosses go, have a random boss generator, random type of creature, with random abilities. This way every dungeon would be an exploration adventure as well as a tough fight against bosses with skills that you cannot predict ahead of time. This gets me to your issue with progression raids. Would my type of game, a random dungeon/boss generator create a progression raid, pull my hair out type of game (obviously you could set scaling difficulty levels), or would this type of game be fun and playable due to its randomness?
Would be interested to hear feedback on the idea.
My thought on reading this was that the 5 man hc dungeons are "supposed"" to be the way that players learn bosses. Perhaps if each raid tier released with an associated dungeon with slimmed down versions of boss mechanics it would make the learning curves easier; the players would already know say, 50-75% of a boss' moveset before ever going in.
Sorry Gevlon, you missed the bigger issue. It is a bit detailed to go into here so I wrote a post about of at my place.
You can see my response here:
http://www.gtfootf.com/2011/03/gevlon-is-wrong-about-fixing-progression/
Cozmo
www.gtfootf.com
bots could leave you a space, I.E.
-bots do 90% of the DPS to reach enrage timer if you are DPS
-two other bot interrupters with interrupts that are on cooldown for 25% of the interrupts required if you queue as interrupt
-enough incoming DPS to wipe the tank if the healer doesn't do 50% of total healing on two-healer encounters
etc etc.
You could put into place an incentive for social raiders as well. As chewy said they could capture the information from a raid that downed the boss. So why not make those bots that raid group. There would be no practice sessions available till a guild got the first kill on the server, thereafter everyone could que up individually with those bots which looked (including guild tag) exactly like the players who downed that boss. This way you would give those guilds/players who get server first more attention while also helping those who are coming in later. This also takes care of the problem that Olga pointed out, and give incintives for the social but good players to aim for the earlier kills.
Most guild use familiarity and mutual trust for their progression players. This is not applicable for The PUG.
Your Good Enough players (to use Cosmo's term) could do progression, but are unsure of their ability, and unwilling to pay the penalty for failing.
There is of course a purely goblin method.
/guild: LFM
followed by
/guild: LFM . No gold penalty for first fail
followed by
/guild: LFM . Paying 100g/player for bosskill. No gold penalty for first fail.
You may try lowering threshold (pay for making it to phase 2, 3 etc - pay for 25% boss health)
Increase price / lower threshold for reward untill you have your raiders. You want to raid on a boss, others don't (yet). Pay others to come.
Pay enough, and your problem is solved
How do you imagine the usage of records from kill? Game is fully rng based, how would you use log where healer Anna heals dps Bobby on 3.25 cause he got hit by fireball on another fight, where fireball hits other persons? You can't just replay a fight if you don't replay the boss and everything else, voidzones, adds, etc. And if you do replay everything, it's just plain stupid to use this for training.
I like your practicing idea so much. I was thinking about something like this long ago. I'm not so good player to do things right on first, second, may be fifth try. I feel progress on every try - but why other people have to wipe with me on those tries?
On the other hands we have target dummies, but they can test only DD, not healers and tanks, and only in perfect condition - no fire, no dispels, no moving... People need to try also this. Heroics could be such training grounds, but players want to make them quick, just for points, as in WotLK, few months ago.
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