Protecting Our Casuals: Gear

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

This last line of yours is mostly just about the numbers aspect again, right? The 'Dev limit' in question. Or is it your opinion/experience that Devs generally or always specifically script how groups should take on harder PvE content?

It's mainly a response to Noaani's explanation of what "top lvl pve" for him is and his reasoning for why owpvp is always easier. "You're limited by the devs in pve, while you can always add people in owpvp". And my counter to that is "your upper limit in pve is dev-based, while my upper limit in owpvp is me-based". I'm sure you can beat 40-man raids with fewer people, but I'd assume Noaani would just says that it wasn't top lvl pve if you could. If I'm wrong on that assumption @Noaani pls correct me.

Ok, that does indeed sound like a 'numbers' aspect.

I doubt Noaani is talking about strategy or difficulty relative to numbers, based on what Noaani has explained relative to personal skill. I also am not generally speaking relative to numbers.

Basic example, there is an instanced content battle (technically five of them) in FFXI where you take your party of six players, and go up against an enemy party of six Beastmen.

These Beastmen, like most mobs, have all the abilities of their 'class', but they're explicitly tuned to this and work in a group, and can use the 'Ultimate' of their class one per fight. Their advantage is high HP, the player advantage is having consumables (minor) and being able to raise after falling (major until you are really good at it).

In this case, the Devs have indeed implied 'A fair fight here is a 6v6'. The instance is capped at level 60 (at the time it was made, it was possibly the cap, and continued to be semi-relevant content when the cap was raised to 75).

For some of these five encounters, I know where to find strategies. For a specific one, there are no easily available strategies that I could find in the usual places, because the specific combination of 'classes' employed by the Beastmen in question, plus their innate 'racial abilities', means you would basically never be able to come up with a strategy that isn't massively adaptation after about 3 minutes in.

So you'd have to just 'choose your team, choose your tactics, and adapt if the enemy uses certain techniques', which was in turn random (within the range of main options).

I can say with FAIRLY deep confidence that the Devs had NO intent, no 'script', no 'way you're supposed to beat this' other than 'probably should bring a full party of 6, they should probably work well together'. From the others that DO have strategies, some have many, some strategies are outright the reverse, people disagree on the best way to do it based on what risks they are comfortable with. There is no META for some of these fights that isn't a risk of 'well the enemy responds with a hard counter because you went for maximum damage and nothing else' or 'The enemy uses AoE sleep because you're all playing defensively' or such.

You simply 'know that the enemy can do XYZ things, and you prepare for those'. What I'm failing to see is if the ONLY thing people are discussing as 'the thing that makes PvP more challenging' is the 'numbers' part. Because it's entirely possible that they've just never 'had to face the equivalent of Grimshell Shocktroopers' in their games of choice and just don't think it can even be done.

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

Here's a question that will give me the absolute answer for this situation: Have you ever tried to or heard of <40-man raid groups clearing top lvl 40-man raid instances in EQ(2)?

Azherae wrote: »

Basic example, there is an instanced content battle (technically five of them) in FFXI where you take your party of six players, and go up against an enemy party of six Beastmen.

These Beastmen, like most mobs, have all the abilities of their 'class', but they're explicitly tuned to this and work in a group, and can use the 'Ultimate' of their class one per fight. Their advantage is high HP, the player advantage is having consumables (minor) and being able to raise after falling (major until you are really good at it).

Same question to you, Azherae, have you tried/heard of people beating those Beastmen instances with <6 people?

Azherae wrote: »

You simply 'know that the enemy can do XYZ things, and you prepare for those'. What I'm failing to see is if the ONLY thing people are discussing as 'the thing that makes PvP more challenging' is the 'numbers' part. Because it's entirely possible that they've just never 'had to face the equivalent of Grimshell Shocktroopers' in their games of choice and just don't think it can even be done.

The answers to my question will provide me with explanation. Or will at least let me make a parallel for the mentality of both groups.

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

Just as an additional question to make sure: was there a reason for never even trying?

NiKr wrote: »

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

Here's a question that will give me the absolute answer for this situation: Have you ever tried to or heard of <40-man raid groups clearing top lvl 40-man raid instances in EQ(2)?

Azherae wrote: »

Basic example, there is an instanced content battle (technically five of them) in FFXI where you take your party of six players, and go up against an enemy party of six Beastmen.

These Beastmen, like most mobs, have all the abilities of their 'class', but they're explicitly tuned to this and work in a group, and can use the 'Ultimate' of their class one per fight. Their advantage is high HP, the player advantage is having consumables (minor) and being able to raise after falling (major until you are really good at it).

Same question to you, Azherae, have you tried/heard of people beating those Beastmen instances with <6 people?

Azherae wrote: »

You simply 'know that the enemy can do XYZ things, and you prepare for those'. What I'm failing to see is if the ONLY thing people are discussing as 'the thing that makes PvP more challenging' is the 'numbers' part. Because it's entirely possible that they've just never 'had to face the equivalent of Grimshell Shocktroopers' in their games of choice and just don't think it can even be done.

The answers to my question will provide me with explanation. Or will at least let me make a parallel for the mentality of both groups.

Assuming I'm allowed to use a parallel (because the Beastmen ones are rarely spoken about, people don't make guides for this type of content). There is a similar encounter against six giant Scorpions, meant to be done by the same 6 people.

The Legendary Red Mage Avesta can do it alone.

Forgive me if that's not helpful, I seem to be unable to make the connection between the two points, but I presume you will proceed to do it.

I expect that a sufficiently skilled group could do at least Divine Punishers with five... Maybe four at an absolute stretch (at which point they would be extremely limited in which classes they could bring and still have a reasonable chance of winning, 'RPS' style, but not exactly, moreso classes that diminish the danger of the special attack type of the Beastmen in question for that one).

Azherae wrote: »

I expect that a sufficiently skilled group could do at least Divine Punishers with five... Maybe four at an absolute stretch (at which point they would be extremely limited in which classes they could bring and still have a reasonable chance of winning, 'RPS' style, but not exactly, moreso classes that diminish the danger of the special attack type of the Beastmen in question for that one).

This is kind of my point. Yes, the "difficulty" in owpvp does usually come down to numbers, but any self-respecting pvper always tries to go for the lowest possible number on their side against the highest possible number on the enemy's side. A type of 300 Spartans approach to owpvp.

And what I was trying to get at by asking my question is whether pvers have a similar/same kind of mentality when it comes to pve. Noaani has said that he's beaten all EQ2 content at the time of him playing the game. That would mean that he overcame all difficulties of that pve. And by asking whether anyone at the time has ever tried beating the same content with fewer people I wanted to learn whether top lvl pvers had the same desire to prove themselves against, in their eyes, difficult content by making it even more difficult, by pushing it and themselves to the limit.

Because to me, the truly difficult content is something that I can't beat. I don't care if the limiters on my ability to beat said content were placed by the devs or by me myself. Either of those limits are arbitrary because someone came up with them. Devs designed encounters with some way to beat it. The only difference is that some devs don't really care how it gets beaten, so the encounter itself is quite easy, while other Devs make such granular and detailed combat designs that you might have a very limited amount of successful approaches to the encounter.

I do the same with owpvp. There's a guild of 200 people defending a castle? Let's sit and think up a way where we use the least amount possible of people to successfully siege that castle. If we win - we're super cool, but the content was still fairly easy. Let's make it even harder the next time. Let's maybe give that side some good gear or give them a boss that we previously controlled, so that they become stronger before the next siege.

Obviously this kind of approach is not widespread among the pvp population, but from my experience with thousands of people in L2, this kind of approach is always respected and is usually the goal for a lot of people. Everyone wants to be the 300 spartans, while the whole server are the persians.

This video ingrained this desire into me and countless other people back when we were just starting to play L2. It was also the main reason why I mained Dark Elf Tank for several years, but that came mainly from the coolness effect of the video itself
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1feB1I0ohQ

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

So yeah, this whole post was the direct example of "granular and detailed pve design", where Devs planned exactly what their players would have to do in order to overcome the raid barrier.

To me personally, "just adding more people" is the same limiter as this design was for you, except the direction of member amount is opposite. You couldn't decrease that number because the devs told you so, while I couldn't increase that number because I limited myself. Of course you can dismiss that kind of approach as "fake difficulty" or "unreasonable attitude", but that's just where we'll have to disagree due to differing opinions on the topic.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

I expect that a sufficiently skilled group could do at least Divine Punishers with five... Maybe four at an absolute stretch (at which point they would be extremely limited in which classes they could bring and still have a reasonable chance of winning, 'RPS' style, but not exactly, moreso classes that diminish the danger of the special attack type of the Beastmen in question for that one).

Because to me, the truly difficult content is something that I can't beat. I don't care if the limiters on my ability to beat said content were placed by the devs or by me myself. Either of those limits are arbitrary because someone came up with them. Devs designed encounters with some way to beat it. The only difference is that some devs don't really care how it gets beaten, so the encounter itself is quite easy, while other Devs make such granular and detailed combat designs that you might have a very limited amount of successful approaches to the encounter.

This video ingrained this desire into me and countless other people back when we were just starting to play L2. It was also the main reason why I mained Dark Elf Tank for several years, but that came mainly from the coolness effect of the video itself
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1feB1I0ohQ

I understand you. So let's circle way back (yes I've been tracking the relevance of this to the rest of the game this whole time).

1. Self respecting PvPers are not usually the problem-person that 'casuals' face, as you probably know.
2. With a larger gear gap, the devs don't have to make the encounter easy for people, they can make it mechanically difficult to the point where even if you play perfectly you lose with insufficient gear but you can tell that's what happened .
3. The above means that you practice the run even if you don't have the gear to survive it, sometimes, while you gather that gear. This is an option for 'casual raiders'. Since 'top end' raiders don't expect the win EITHER, expecting the win as a casual player is not relevant.

But if the encounter is FUN, you don't need to win it. Winning it (assuming you get better gear) just makes it easier, a thing to do on days when you aren't at the top of your game (and hence it is still pretty challenging).

I must disagree with the idea that because Devs don't care exactly how a target is beaten, that the fight is easy. I don't want to say 'this must be L2's experience', but I certainly can see... no. I certainly can DESIGN fights where I don't much care how exactly you do it, but it still is not overwhelmingly easy for any given group mechanically. This is literally just a matter of knowing one's own balance levers, and adding things to 'counter' main strategies and obvious things. This is how PvE improves over time in games all the time.

But none of this 'makes sense' to players who haven't faced good PvE, and therefore finally back to the point of the topic. When a player thinks 'PvP will result in me dying if the gear gaps are big', they want a chance to win. You... don't. Not truly, as far as I can tell. You just want to 'fight'. To get better, to see yourself 'be yourself'. I am pretty sure I understand you in this regard.

The key point being made is that if you don't have good PvE experience, it is reasonable to conclude that PvP is the main source of this challenge, and unlike PvE where 'if I play perfectly and have great gear this should be beatable some of the time because it's designed to be' at MINIMUM, you get...

"If I play perfectly and my opponent is ahead of me in the gear progression this is not winnable."

The sensible thing to do here if you want a chance of winning is to ask for clamped gear progression, but that is based on the underlying 'wish to have a dynamic experience in the game'. If PvE is boring, but PvP is basically unwinnable even when at perfect skill, why play?

If PvE is interesting enough to engage the same part of your mind and then rewards you with gear, there is always a feeling of progression because the PvE encounter is static. If the only solution to this in a PvP heavy game is to make the PvP encounters 'gear-static' as well, rather than altering the behaviours of PvP players or adding enough PvE to give people other things to do, then I don't think one has a PvX game.

Therefore my expectation is that the best way to 'protect casuals' is to make a good PvE gear-ladder where 'getting higher on the ladder requires more and more effort or allies'. Anyone who comes into the game thinking "PvE is just boring trash but I need PvP to be gear-homogenous" is missing the POINT and therefore some recent posters have had some attempts made to reach an understanding on this.

Azherae wrote: »

Therefore my expectation is that the best way to 'protect casuals' is to make a good PvE gear-ladder where 'getting higher on the ladder requires more and more effort or allies'. Anyone who comes into the game thinking "PvE is just boring trash but I need PvP to be gear-homogenous" is missing the POINT and therefore some recent posters have had some attempts made to reach an understanding on this.

And here's where I chime in with a "haven't you people ever heard of closing the god damn door" my suggestion of the Solo Tower instance (this one

NiKr wrote: »

What if we had a donation-like system. Time-hardcore players would obviously have excess of gear, so why not have a system that lets them exchange that excess gear for upgrades to their main gear, while sending all that excess down the power lvl pyramid.

You could tie this to social structures in the game so that players get better augments from their preferred social structures by investing their overtime into their future enemies. Make each gear piece have some arbitrary point value and set different point prices for different upgrades. Add some diminishing returns to repeatable donations, so that a player couldn't get 1k points for donating 1k t1 boots.

And on the side of the low lvl/casual players, have a tower-like solo instance where clearing floors would give them points that they need to combine with rewards for some open world quests, in order to buy the donated gear. This would give those time-casual people some constant content and a way to catch up faster. Add some reward scaling for clearing floors super fast and you'll have yourself a reward for all the hardcore-challenge casual-time players.

This system doesn't add gear into the overall market out of nowhere. It rewards everyone for doing things that they would've been doing either way and/or just like doing. It creates a soft equalization of gear on the whole server w/o creating direct systems that do so.

If you put some quantity limiters on the donation amounts per node (considering node's lvl) and add a caravan-like pvp event for transferring all the excess gear to another node - you have yourself an additional fun thing for the high lvl pvpers to do.

The instance tower thing could even go up to max lvl and give out some title/cosmetic rewards, akin to FF14's "The Necromancer" title.

from this thread ) with this exact feature in mind. Give the casuals an alternative way to acquire gear w/o just giving out gear out of nowhere, while also giving higher lvled people some benefits.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Therefore my expectation is that the best way to 'protect casuals' is to make a good PvE gear-ladder where 'getting higher on the ladder requires more and more effort or allies'. Anyone who comes into the game thinking "PvE is just boring trash but I need PvP to be gear-homogenous" is missing the POINT and therefore some recent posters have had some attempts made to reach an understanding on this.

And here's where I chime in with a "haven't you people ever heard of closing the god damn door" my suggestion of the Solo Tower instance (this one

NiKr wrote: »

What if we had a donation-like system. Time-hardcore players would obviously have excess of gear, so why not have a system that lets them exchange that excess gear for upgrades to their main gear, while sending all that excess down the power lvl pyramid.

You could tie this to social structures in the game so that players get better augments from their preferred social structures by investing their overtime into their future enemies. Make each gear piece have some arbitrary point value and set different point prices for different upgrades. Add some diminishing returns to repeatable donations, so that a player couldn't get 1k points for donating 1k t1 boots.

And on the side of the low lvl/casual players, have a tower-like solo instance where clearing floors would give them points that they need to combine with rewards for some open world quests, in order to buy the donated gear. This would give those time-casual people some constant content and a way to catch up faster. Add some reward scaling for clearing floors super fast and you'll have yourself a reward for all the hardcore-challenge casual-time players.

This system doesn't add gear into the overall market out of nowhere. It rewards everyone for doing things that they would've been doing either way and/or just like doing. It creates a soft equalization of gear on the whole server w/o creating direct systems that do so.

If you put some quantity limiters on the donation amounts per node (considering node's lvl) and add a caravan-like pvp event for transferring all the excess gear to another node - you have yourself an additional fun thing for the high lvl pvpers to do.

The instance tower thing could even go up to max lvl and give out some title/cosmetic rewards, akin to FF14's "The Necromancer" title.

from this thread ) with this exact feature in mind. Give the casuals an alternative way to acquire gear w/o just giving out gear out of nowhere, while also giving higher lvled people some benefits.

I've seen it, so forgive my... arrogance?

They can do better. I know they can do better because I can do better and if they legitimately can't figure out how to do it better than me at least (in their own opinion) then they can just ask me how to do it better.

This is a lot of work, and systems that can be gamed, for a problem that can be resolved entirely via itemization. This whole thing can be solved via itemization and normally is. That's why this whole thread has morphed into what it has. It started with people not understanding balance via itemization (I blame WoW for this) and looped back around to that from the PvE perspective later.

I hope that Intrepid just blows this sort of discussion out of the water by implementing such finely tuned Itemization goals (greatness is a function of goals here) that literally everything, all 30 pages of this, is moot and a general waste of all our time (relative to them getting anything useful from it).

EDIT: Also just to be snarky, this system exists in the game already, it's called 'money'.