10 person raids?

They're sticking with 20/40 man raids. Maybe if there was enough of a clamour they can do something about ten man raids but in my experience they were always a bit eh.

Ok, thank you. Hopefully it will become a serious consideration. I really hope to see long term staying power with Wildstar.

Agree with this. Sure make 10 man dungeons and heroics. Hell even 15 man dungeons and heroics is epic fun. But, 10 man is not a raid and I personally dont believe that size should ever be considered a raid (Just my opinion). UBRS, Strat and Scholo were so much fun. 15 man UBRS was freakin awesome and it was (initially) hard and even after you started gearing it was still challenging. Some awesome memories trying to get the 1H set off rend for my besty ... soooo many runs >.<.

I think a flexible raid size is the way to go in this day and age.

Tell me exactly HOW you see that happen, for personally I see more problems occuring then that it gives solutions.

Pretty simple. The mob difficulty scales depending on the number of people in the raid. As far as how this works technically I have no idea but it's definitely possible. This allows guilds both large and small to do the content even if only 15 of 20 or 30 of 40 people show up for the event.

My problem with it is that things get only even more boring. As seen in raids in WoW there were some differences between the 10/25 mans. Either with extra adds or some other things, so at which point do you make it so an extra tank is needed?

Also do you want it to scale with every person so people can enter with groups of 29, 33, 37 men?

When will a boss drop extra loot?
Well I can come up with hundred more questions that you have to think about. But overall I think it will only make raiding more dull. You don't have to do your best anymore to get a full raid.

And if I think back to some mechanics in some encounters.....some wheren't really that eas to make it for a scalable raid.

Mayby if a game is made around the concept that it will be possible....but still I don't think the raids would be as ''special/awesome'' as in a game that doesn't have the scaling.

Except it doesn't work. For scaling like that to actually be successful it would need to take into account not only how many classes are present, but which ones and in what roles because adding players does not increase group power linearly. Group buffs and more dps in general drastically change the outcome of a fight. More dps means you need less healing, and often times less tanks, especially on a design level.

That would be up to the raid leader to figure out. I'm just saying the technology to make a raid a flexible size is possible as seen in other games. It would be a nice addition to those of us who would rather play with a small close knit group of friends rather than a large group of strangers.

What games are those? Every system with scaling is mediocre to terrible because the mobs cannot scale in the same way your raid does. The ability to just "grab people and go" is only a good fit for unorganized groups because any decent organized one will destroy it every single time. This is why you cannot equate scaling with challenge.

While I am perfectly ok with you asking for essentially pug content, I have to ask you what exactly is the point of that? Why "raid" at all if its the very zerg content that people are already leveling at 40 mans in the first place?

Wow has Flex and its pretty decent up to normal difficulty (dubbed "heroic" for WoD).

Hardest difficulty (dubbed "mythic") is still fixed size (20) so that says something.

This has gone through an iterative process for that game that's been going on since Wrath, it's not something that can be tacked on and their experience with different raid sizes for the same instances cannot be discounted (the process of trying to balance 10-25 as distinct raid sizes for the same instances, accentuates the breakpoints, defines the problem, and a well defined problem is the first step to solutions)

On the other hand a flexible or multiple size raid has a rather obvious flaw.
Tuning numbers and loot up or down is the (relatively) easy part.
Space allocation particularly in a game with such a pronounced movement element is impossible to tune so it works uniformly across a range of sizes.

It limits design to have to make an encounter that works for 10 to 30 and I don't think WildStar would be well served.
I prefer that the content is designed with a raid size in mind because that actually frees the developer to offer more options inside that size.
(How would you design an encounter that has 5 teams with 5 tanks splitting off to handle different tasks in the whole battle and then make it work in 10man?
The obvious answer is: "you don't make such encounters" and herein lies the problem)

Sadly, the powers at be feel 20 and 40 man are the way to go. Theres a huge debate whether 40 mans are going to be successful. In my personal opinion, people are looking through rose colored nostalgic glasses with 40 man and forgetting the pains that went along with it. I do think they could and should have taken that invested energy and put it into 10 mans instead to make 10 and 20 mans. I think 40 is a thing of the past. But, we'll see!

Sorry I had to chime in after reading this. While I do like the fact that Carbine wants tough content, I do not feel that only 1% of the players should be able to see the 40-man raid.

Also, I'm pretty sure they said somewhere that they're only doing one 20-man and one 40-man at launch to see how the community reacts, and they're still open to changing them.

40-mans won't last, I will be surprised if they do. They're just a big cluster<beep> of mostly random people who are only there for the loot. Its nice to be able to raid with people that you're on a first name basis with.

Prediction: Launch day will still be 20/40 mans, but the first content (raid) patch will have a 15/30 man raid.

only the first 2-3 times I did 40 mans were they cluster-clucks. the other 200+ times they were like choreographed symphonies. back then I knew everyone in my raid as well as i want to know someone on the internet, in a game. except for the few new people we had to get from time to time, but we got to know them soon enough.

fast forward 5 years to face roll zerg lk raids and there were different pugs that had transferred in from different servers in our raid every other day and 80% of vent chat was childish drivel, there only to break the monotony of mindlessly zerging ezmode bosses.

I also recall far less loot drama in 40 man days. in LK days, all anyone cared about was gearscore this and gearscore that, and badges badges badges badges and moar badges!!1!!. No way most of the people in my 10 mans would have wiped on Razorgore for 3 weeks straight. They would have given up and just farmed their badges in the ezmode dungeons or non-heroic versions.

if they switch to 10/25 and all that heroic mode garbage, i'll be gone the next day.

I should add, I feel Kara, TK, SSC, and pretty much all of TBC were awesome. The problem for me was more the addition of heroic mode dungeons and raid gear for badges.

Those that support the 10-man raid(?) groups (The 10s) keep asking "Well, why do you care if there are 10-mans? It doesn't affect you does it?" The answer is yes, and it affects the entire raiding community.

20 and 40-man raiders (I'll lump them all together as "the 40s") don't want people to have any other choice, because the majority of people will pick the easiest route. Now the 10s will say "Bigger doesn't mean harder!" and in some instances they are correct, especially if you are looking at difficulty per player. A 40 might lose 8 people and be able to recover, where a 10 could only lose 2 because the instanced are tuned around a specific number of players. You might have some slackers in a 40 and not notice it (except EVERYONE's going to be looking at those meters) while the same probably wouldn't be true in a 10.

That's just numbers, and that's just the majority of the time in my experience. There are some instances in both groups where NO ONE can mess up and the difficulty of a 40 ramps up exponentially in those situations, because as a lot of people agree it's 1) harder to get 40 people together in the first place and 2) it's even harder to make sure all 40 of them are on their A game at all times. Again, it might not be the difficulty of the encounter, but the difficulty of making sure 40 people know their roles and play them well that makes 40s more difficult.

Everyone agrees that it's harder to get 40 people together than it is to get 10 together right? Right? Ok, now imagine a scenario where 1 person is in a 40 and they just can't get this boss down. Maybe a few people have been skating by and now it's more evident, maybe a few people just can't get the hang of this new mechanic. This person has the choice of either giving up completely or sticking with this group to finish the content. Maybe, at best, there'd be a switching of a few members who "just couldn't" because that's the way it is sometimes, or at worst he'd be looking for a whole new group of 39 other people. Looking for those 39 other people is an epic quest all by itself, but if he wants to do the content he has no other options so he "deals with it" and soldiers on.

Now, there were no 10s in the previous scenario. He couldn't just drop his 39 companions (or more likely take 9 of them with him) to go do a 10 that was just a scaled down version of the 40 with similar rewards. He couldn't take the easy way out (because, I'll say this again, it's much easier to get 9 other people than 39) and reap the same rewards. Or, honestly, even taking the better rewards out of the equation, he couldn't just give up on his 40 (just to be clear I'm talking 20 and 40-man here because it's different content in Wildstar) because there was no alternative for him if he wanted to see that content.

Wipe 5 times in a 40? Drop group and do the 10. /shrug It's the same instance, just with less people. It's not like you've given up, you just don't have time for all that 40 bull. It's actually "harder" with 10 people because you have less room for error right? If your first group doesn't work out, simply switch a few, or hell, get a whole new group. It's no biggie, you only need 9 people after all.

That's the threat that 10s pose for 40s. Choice. If there's no alternative, most people will deal with what they've got (if they continue to play the game at all) because that's just the way most humans seem to be hard-wired. People don't like to be failures. They'll smash their head at the same thing, over and over instead of giving up, simply to avoid that bitter taste. Now, for those 40s this is a great thing because it'll keep them coming back and dealing with those wipes/people they don't like/time constraints far longer than they normally would if there were 10s in the picture.

That's just how I see it, and why I don't particularly like, or want 10s in Wildstar. They're a threat to what I want to happen, and expect to see, in Wildstar. There are plenty of other games out there, with Devs who don't mind changing their vision for their game if it'll increase profits, but I'm really, truly hoping Carbine isn't like that. Then again, maybe I'm just biased because I like 40s?

Planning around that kind of difficulty though is honestly stupid to me. Making a fight hard just because you need 40 people to work nearly perfectly is just lazy, unnecessary, and about the farthest thing from fun they could do. Making all of them work around mechanics is fine, but let 1 guy out of 40 mess up and it's a wipe?

As for the rest of your argument, it all fails on one very large factor. The fact that if Carbine did introduce 10 man raiding I have no doubt it wouldn't just be the same thing scaled down. They're making separate raids for 20 and 40 mans, if they added 10 they'd make separate raids for them as well. And since I've been given the impression that 20s will have easier fights than 40s, 10s would have even easier fights than 20s. So the choice then becomes what level of difficulty do you prefer, which IMO is a fine one to offer.

2 things.

Firstly, I don't feel that 20/40 is the ideal raid comp size. Mainly for logistical reasons, but also because of the fact that it takes a decent PC to run 40-mans. On WoW, my PC ran great in 10-mans, decently in 25-mans but if I did a 40-man world boss, more often than not, I would completely freeze up on the initial pull and my computer wouldn't come out of the coma until the boss was already dead. I'm sure Carbine is aware of this. Hopefully they're not making people turn their settings down so everything is in 8-bit blocks just to raid.

Secondly, I don't think 10/25 is the ideal comp either. I think 15/30 would be perfect. Only time will tell, but I don't see 40-mans doing well. I play MMO games, like most people do, to reach the end boss at the highest difficulty. If I'm being told before I step foot on Nexus that I have a 99% chance of not getting there, I'd probably re-think the whole ordeal.

Your arguments are valid and I agree with you about the way Carbine would probably handle it, but I wasn't talking about different 10-man raids. I was talking about scaled-down versions of the 20 and 40-man raids with comparable gear (or a badge grind for better gear), which is what a lot of people keep wanting to see in this game, like they have in others.

The planning around the difficulty thing isn't a big deal though. Tuning a 40 so that a minimal amount (minimal, not 1) of people could die wasn't the norm, but I, personally, did enjoy it when it happened.

I can't speak from experience about the 15-30 raid size, but I can say I haven't really had problems with groupings of any size, mainly due to the communities I was in. I mean, why not throw in 35s as well, if we're going to cover all the 5-40 group sizes xD

As far as the 99% thing though, I can say that would sound like a challenge to me, and I'd be put both feet firmly on Nexus soil and daring any to prove I wasn't that 1%. That's just me though, and not everyone will feel the same, but I don't think they should change it to make it more accessible. I'd much prefer it that the Wildstar community proved them wrong and worked to make sure that more people saw that content then they'd ever dreamed.

Not sure if you realized or not, but that person you replied to posted almost an entire year ago ( Jul 2013 )
The original poster bumped his own thread to ask a question, so most of this discussion is super old.

Haha no I didn't look at the dates