Byr
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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doubt it, theres been a couple raid flagged accounts for sale on various sites.
Wildstar Launch Thread - Server: Stormtalon | Faction: Dominion
- Thread starter Flipmode
- Start date
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Seems like a waste of money when they'll most likely have raid testing opened to the normal closed beta before the release so you'll have plenty of leaks, or direct access to it.
Byr
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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is it just me that wishes raid testing was all done in house somehow so it was new to everyone on release?
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Yeah in theory that's nice, until every encounter breaks because stuff. See AoC raiding, wasn't tested, everything was massively exploitable and mostly a bunch of shit.
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I agree with that, but there is another side to that coin as well.
How do people usually figure out raids? By doing them repeatedly until they figure out the mechanics, at which point the raid goes from difficult to steamroll fairly fast. Coil in FF 14 being the example, people doing turn 5 was it? Over and over and over. Then someone figured out how to do the tornado thing (I've never done it, only seen videos) and the coil went from "world first" to being done regularly on every server within a few days according to the thread. Reason for that was not that the various servers suddenly geared up to the required levels, but rather that they figured out the mechanics by reading up on what someone else did.
Say the beta squashes every single bug and exploit due to massive amounts of beta testers actually doing their job, and testing and bug reporting every single raid. Come release, what will happen? Every single raid will be known beforehand, and only the most basic of pug raids will not look up how to defeat those raids beforehand. Once the NDA drops, the details of every raid tested will be available, and the path of least resistancewillbe taken. No raiding guild is going to have a moral "oh no, we have to figure out this for ourselves, no spoilers". Especially raid guilds who are interested in world firsts and the likes.
So what will happen then? Content will be blasted through because the end game will already have manuals for it on how to beat it.
I think the best thing would be to handle it internally, but it would require lots of internal Q&A testers, which would cost a lot, money better spent on developing the actual game, not testing what is already there. I have no idea what the best way to do it would be, but I see why Byr made the statement.
Also, why is it so hard to get 40 people to raid today when EQ, with a much smaller player base than the mmos of today regularly did 72? We waited, we traded accounts, everything to make it work. Then again, we had to talk to eachother, which seems to be something mmos really try to avoid these days. Community be damned, we should be able to solo everything and communicate with nothing but emotes!!!...... /sigh
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I think they could just test normal modes then have hard modes tested internally. That or testing the final boss internally, and having the rest being publicly tested. Even if you do a lot of QA, shit's gonna go wrong if you don't do semi largescale tests. It's one thing that the fights are untested and people spend a lot of time to figure out the strat. Remember what happened with FFXIV though? Turn5 was cleared like a week and a half after launch by an exploit. They hotfixed it, and then it was cleared again by a similar exploit cause the fix wasn't good enough. Only after that it actually went back into wiping to figure out the strat thing and did take a fairly long time since a lot of people thought it was unbeatable especially considering the rest of the instance was very straightforward in comparison and fairly easy.
The thing though about knowing the strat or not is for 99% of the players, it doesn't matter. They're not going to find out the strats. They'll be leveling too slow, will have slow progression through the easy content and by the time they're actually on the hard content, the top guilds will have already cleared it and have it on farm and strats will be known. It only matters for the top guilds. And it only matters for top guilds who don't get invited really. Finding out how an encounter works during beta or during live makes no difference. You wipe a lot, you figure out how it works, you farm it. It does diminish your interest once the game goes live, but the beta was also more enjoyable than doing nothing than just leveling.
As for the EQ raid thing, it was easier finding 72people in EQ because you didn't need to find 72 good players, you just needed to find a bunch of quasi sentient lifeforms that happened to have an EQ character and then have your 10competent players actually do most of the job while they sometimes pressed a button when told to. It wasn't hard finding 40people to do MC either, the 40man shit only started becoming a burden when they started making actual decent encounters and you couldn't carry the 30retards anymore without wiping.
The thing though about knowing the strat or not is for 99% of the players, it doesn't matter. They're not going to find out the strats. They'll be leveling too slow, will have slow progression through the easy content and by the time they're actually on the hard content, the top guilds will have already cleared it and have it on farm and strats will be known. It only matters for the top guilds. And it only matters for top guilds who don't get invited really. Finding out how an encounter works during beta or during live makes no difference. You wipe a lot, you figure out how it works, you farm it. It does diminish your interest once the game goes live, but the beta was also more enjoyable than doing nothing than just leveling.
As for the EQ raid thing, it was easier finding 72people in EQ because you didn't need to find 72 good players, you just needed to find a bunch of quasi sentient lifeforms that happened to have an EQ character and then have your 10competent players actually do most of the job while they sometimes pressed a button when told to. It wasn't hard finding 40people to do MC either, the 40man shit only started becoming a burden when they started making actual decent encounters and you couldn't carry the 30retards anymore without wiping.
Raign
Golden Squire
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This. Add an additional monster power or two for hard modes from what was already tested in beta. Greatly reduces the chance of gaping exploits slipping through and still changes it up enough that guilds with pre-existing knowledge only have a leg half up.
I bet they have no raid testing done whatsoever, people still buy it on faith, spend 3 weeks justifying their purchase to themselves and then trash the game
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The problem isn't really finding a guild group doing shit, it's finding all the potential bugs and exploits in a given encounter. If you have one group of people doing the same encounters, they might find some stuff, but they'll probably just keep doing the same thing more or less over and over, so you can make sure the scripts don't break in normal conditions, but not that if you have the tank getting pulled on a small rock by ability X then taunt the boss at a certain angle, the boss will walk through the geometry and gets stuck out of LoS for example, shit like that. There's only so much one group of people can find simply because most of the bugs are completely weird shit quite often and they're found by coincidence, not by doing it on purpose, which is hard to reproduce without hundreds of people doing your encounter.
Xevy
Log Wizard
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Well comparing the amount of abilities that do x is fairly pointless. You don't need 10aoe heals if the one you have is superior to every other class for example. It's a really pointless chart, other than giving a very rough view of the 3 healers mostly done by comparing average range and instant vs targetted vs freeform heals. Can see medic is more short range but has more instants and aoes, esper is more long range but has a lot of targetted(single target for the most part until tier8 bonus) stuff and spellslinger is about inbetween.
Raign
Golden Squire
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Number of abilities means substantially less in this game than in WoW or EQ. In those, more abilities generally mean more versatility in healing, but as Pyros alluded to, with a limited action set, most of those are stabled (though obviously you could swap out between encounters). Range means less in this game than it did in WoW/EQ as well as far more abilities extend well beyond melee range.
For what it is worth, I found the SS playstyle the most enjoyable so far of the healers.
For what it is worth, I found the SS playstyle the most enjoyable so far of the healers.