Off-topic Discussions from 'we have a new lead game designer bill trost'

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But in the bigger picture the balance stays the same. The ones who missed one farm would now have a higher desire to not miss the next one and definitely win against you, otherwise you might snowball in power. So now they might bring more people to the next farm or do whatever is in their power to mess you up.

So between those 2 farms the overall risk/reward equation stays equal.

It's similar to boss mechanic rng. On one day you might get insanely lucky and the boss won't do half of his super hardcore mechanics, while on the other day he might do them all more than usual. So while one farm was super easy, the overall encounter history would still be considered difficult, because of the implication.

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Doesn't this go against your own words? You said that EQ2 had the fiercest competition in the genre. You keep saying that EQ2 still releases updates that are amazing and great.

Those two things would imply that the most competitive mmo out there is also the longest lasting one, which contradicts this comment.

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Yeah, I dunno the specifics of what AA had in their bosses that people couldn't give fewer shits about them in this way. Or maybe it was just your server or whatever other reason.

I'm speaking from experience of being that one guild that decided to farm a boss instead of defending a siege and has been the guild that had to bring stronger forces to the next farm because we missed a boss. And I've been on the sidelines of other guilds doing exactly this.

And all of this was on private servers where the perceived value of the gameplay itself is lower, cause your character are not "endless" how they'd be on official servers. So if AA had problems with people fighting over bosses - to me that's either a problem in design or the fact that AA attracted more non-competitive players to itself.

Cause if you're talking about the release of AA, that's the exact time when I was big time GLing in L2 and the exact time when the experiences I'm talking about took place. So to me it's obvious that either the target audiences of the games were different (and we'll have to see which one Ashes attracts) or that the design had some kind of a flaw where the best boss with the best loot in the game was so damn worthless that people didn't even contest it.

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But you said that the next week there were fewer people instead of more, so imo that boss' loot didn't enough value in people's eyes to fight over it as much as they should've.

It kinda feels like AA attracted more of a casual scene at the start and by the time your group was already farming the boss (I assume yours was a hardcore one) the general playerbase hadn't distilled to a super hardcore group that would try harder to fight for the boss. While on L2 private servers that's pretty much what the entire playerbase was.

Were there cases later on where people tried to contest the bosses harder if they lost/missed on the previous farm? Or did your group just dominate everyone so they didn't even try to fight you?

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Then it seems that it was just a weird fluke. Those will inevitably happen even if the pve is great (your own group's people either can't make it or servers having issues or whatever).

But as we've discussed before, I do agree that we need good pve in the game, no matter how pvp is designed into/around it.