Is it time to retire T1+W1?

[Vorbiz]

Moved to Raids and Tactics.

[kennyfisterbotm]

It's not the content that is making a bad player bad.

It's the lack of desire to learn each class to it's fullest. I have seen people in T3 gear who are epic sad/bad at the toon they are on. And the moment you suggest improvement's to them, they get all but hurt and cry about it.

Case and point, it's not the dungeons, it's not the content in general. It's the personality of some of the players in the game who don't care about success, they have someone carrying them through content and they get loot. It's all the same to them.

What would fix the game though, is if the moderators of the forums ran the raids, and then banned the bad players they came in contact with. That is what should happen!

[LunaticAsylumLA]

Additional content, as the game director noticed, is never bad. Actually, tier one and two raids teach people a lot in terms of coordination and tactics; especially when they read on the raids and start to lead by sorting groups. These raids are also an entry point for a lot of raid leaders. Those are also good learning points for tanks.

If you prefer to avoid those raids, you can always buy culture sets for damage-dealing or healing classes and jump right into tier 3, as the storyline was intentionally broken anyway.

[Arishanya]

What would fix the game though, is if the moderators of the forums ran the raids, and then banned the bad players they came in contact with. That is what should happen!

As much as I appreciate your sentiment to give us more abilities, I don't want that power haha. I will not comment on people's play styles or abilities, but I will say that if we, moderators, had moderation powers in game, we would be well over-stepping our boundaries as volunteer players. For all you know we do lead raids on our servers and kick people from raid already! We just don't have the moderator tag behind us in game, and I'm glad for that.

[Brutalicus]

wow aren't we trying to keep content , let alone be so pompus and consider making rude comments , precisely what I meant with vets have monster egos and some way or the other draw negativity,. t1 and w1 very much great instances,. and great learning curves,.

[Rathothis]

There was days when HM was only source of rares. But then some qq'ers cry out their out and we got rares in solo instances, from golem and in NM.

So from one side we have ones who find game too hard but want best gear.
From other we have ones who want AoC challenging with lool quality bound to difficulty level.
FC tied to find balance and failed. That cannot be fixed anymore without revamping whole lvl 80 content. And even if somehow FC could find resources, a lot of current players would be not happy with changes because they would wake up in reality where they can't beat stupid t1 boss, not mentioning t2 or khitai instances.

This is not an AoC problem, but inherent to MMOs:

* Gear progression is considered an integral part of the PvE experience, so devs provide incentives to do harder content by including new, more shiny gear;
* At the same time, too much gear progression hurts the game because it raises entry barriers for new players.

In AoC, you can add AAs to that equation. So it is only natural that, with the addition of new raid tiers and a number of new dungeons, Funcom also made it easier to obtain the gear required to do this new content.

Of course this also means that you cannot tell by gear alone whether a player is skilled. But you never can in any MMO. In fact, it is still reasonably possible to do so in AoC, if you look for certain items (not T4 stuff though).

In any case, regarding the issue raised by the OP, I think AoC does a reasonably fine job at encouraging people to play that game. When you go to Khitai on a new gear without AA and gear, you are forced to watch the cast bar, identify CCs and big hits, use your own CCs, etc, even in solo play. But some people may not want that. It is perfectly fine to have some content which even those people can do. If that is enough for them to enjoy the game, why would we want to take it from them?

[Mellaus]

T1 and W1 raids seem just fine to me.
The only thing that would be good is to have people parse more often in pugs.

[bogus]

In any case, regarding the issue raised by the OP, I think AoC does a reasonably fine job at encouraging people to play that game.

Play the game - sure, try all content for sure not.

- Jade Dugout is deserted
- Erlik is long forgotten
- compared to Flame/Vortex/Palace/KK all others Khitai insteces almost not exist in pugs
- even if you offer on global t4 spot on some easy spot as healer or dps random people don't have guts to ask for it ( I understand some guild have thier own raid, but really no one?).
- poeple complaining that KK run takes a lot of time and that loot should be moved should be moved somwhere elese, when there is Ai that can be run in 15-20min?
- instead of joining random pug I rather run Iron Statues+Dead Man to get rares for raiding pots (those two instances give 7-8 rares in 15min, even if you count crashing and getting borred, that means in 1h I can run through 3 chars, two days and I have all rares I need for 3 raids)
- pugs do not stick to t1/w1/3 raids - because they are fun, or otheres are too demanding - they do that because:

• t1 is f2p
• w1 is run by shard leechers
• w3 is run because shard leechers have to spend their shards somwhere

[Rathothis]

Play the game - sure, try all content for sure not.

- Jade Dugout is deserted
- Erlik is long forgotten
- compared to Flame/Vortex/Palace/KK all others Khitai insteces almost not exist in pugs
- even if you offer on global t4 spot on some easy spot as healer or dps random people don't have guts to ask for it ( I understand some guild have thier own raid, but really no one?).
- poeple complaining that KK run takes a lot of time and that loot should be moved should be moved somwhere elese, when there is Ai that can be run in 15-20min?
- instead of joining random pug I rather run Iron Statues+Dead Man to get rares for raiding pots (those two instances give 7-8 rares in 15min, even if you count crashing and getting borred, that means in 1h I can run through 3 chars, two days and I have all rares I need for 3 raids)
- pugs do not stick to t1/w1/3 raids - because they are fun, or otheres are too demanding - they do that because:

• t1 is f2p
• w1 is run by shard leechers
• w3 is run because shard leechers have to spend their shards somwhere

All of this is true, but what's the conclusion from this?

* If there are issues finding people to do some of the more challenging content (Dugout, Erlik, Lurker), this is primarily an overall population issue. More people means more casuals, but also more pros.

* I don't think that "forcing" people to progress, as suggested by OP, is a solution to the problem. Very casual players who don't want to progress are more likely to quit than to adapt to the situation. In any case, they wouldn't be the material you are looking for to do the content which is currently dead.

* The one point I do agree with is that itemisation in this game could be better balanced based on the difficulty of the encounter. Ofc no game will ever be perfect on this, and there are good examples on how it should be done in AoC (e.g. Ti'an'an). But players should probably get better rewards for doing a difficult HM like Dugout. I guess (don't know from experience) that this is even more true for Erlik (difficulty / reward ratio is botched compared to T4) and especially for Lurker (tactics for this encounter look crazy even on paper and the rewards are a joke).

[bogus]

There is none. FC haven't had great plan why any player would need to sum up our situation. It's Joel job now.

I'll just stick to doing in AoC what I like too as long as it's possible. Then delete, cancel sub and move on. No bad feelings, but some fun memories.