Early Access Schedule

I'm with you bud. I don't like the "raid" concept at all. Seems when it takes a large group to farm the best gear only the "in-crowd" ends up with the good gear. I hate the 4 hour dungeon crawl just to see the buddy of the guild master get the best loot.

I much prefer a concept of serveral rare rare drops in the wild that lets you create the GM gear. Then I can hunt for 30 mins or 2 hours and come back tomorrow if I didn't find what I'm looking for. The road runner will die!! Then I'll use his body parts for the Grand Master Bow that is the best of the best!

 

I wouldn't have a problem with large scale raids in SotA. My raiding experience in other MMOs has been a lot of fun because the guild I raided with had a great way of rewarding members for raid attendance. No "friend of a friend" would ever get to loot something unless everyone else on the raid had already passed on it, anything else would have been reason enough for me to leave. I am looking forward to SotA in its entirety; if they allow 40 or 72 man raids, all the better. I love the challenge of those large scale events.

 

It doesn't make it anymore fun when it's fair. I was in a good guild where attendance earned points, the more points you had the more chances at winning the item you had, eventually you'd get to the point where you were guaranteed it. (Early raids were done where the guildmaster would hand out based on who he knew would show up everytime, then switched to that method once we started "farming" it) The issue I have with raids is they are designed for so many people and only a handful of people can get the items, you can only do them so many times in a given period, and they are frequently very long, taking many hours to complete. There is nothing fun about doing the content over and over and over again for hours on end each time and not getting the items you need because 1) they didn't drop or 2) someone else gets it for whatever reason. That is how all end game dungeon/raid content is in wow. It is very boring which is why I haven't raided since cataclysm, and even then didn't do it much, WoTLK was the last time I did it very heavily, and probably spent the most time raiding in BC by a big margin. It's just designed to make it so you have to keep your subscription up if you want to achieve and progress through all the content.

I also didn't find it very fun trying to keep 40+ people organized for a raid. We weren't the most hardcore guild but we had some top notch players in there, there were only a few guilds ahead of us on content on our server during BC and WoTLK. I guess we had a core of 20 hardcore people and then 30-50 casuals who could raid a bit.

 

I would not participate in anything that required me to be there for more than 1.5-2 hrs consecutively. I've played wotlk but have never raided, I've done a few, and i mean a few dungeons because that too required a long commitment. In GuildWars I did dungeons for gear since those you could do them in 1-1.5 hrs which I enjoyed

 

Hi, i am spanish, there are spanish people here ? ... 2 days to 2 release!!! =)

 

Raids can be a lot of fun with the right group. That said, something like a "raid" should not be the only path to getting the best gear and coolest loot drops. That not only requires too much regular dedication for hours at a time, but creates a caste system with "elite" raiders with a monopoly on the best stuff, and everyone else.

And frankly, I'd like to see most of the best stuff crafted, not looted from bosses. Pretty much all the previous MMORPGs have gone away from that concept as they aged and expanded, and concentrated on making all the best stuff drop from raid bosses -- and the net result was that crafting became more and more irrelevant. Let's not make crafting irrelevant.

 

I feel like the problem with raiding itself isn't necessarily the time you spend (you're playing a video game anyway, it's all free time) or the organizational problems or even that it is often the only way to get end game gear. Those are horrible to be sure but all fixable issues with a competent Dev team (though I have yet to find one). The problem is that raid content is one shot. You do it once you've done it a thousand times. But people *have* to do them over and over to get the items they want so it's in the devs best interest to make raids as hard as possible, with lockouts too, to prevent people from "being done"with it. Devs balance raids around optimally geared max level characters with prime builds and super tight rotations for this purpose as well.

My point is raids suck not because of the challenge and reward cycle but because mmo developers purposely design light, barely functional content for a hundred people that most are never going to touch and this is supposedly "hardcore". Not in my sota, plz.

 

Im ok with raid type events if the rewards are not weapons and armor that make gameplay item based instead of skill based !

Plus if dungeons are open world instead of instanced, raids could be for safety... people should only exit "these" type of dungeons from the door they entered.... no recalls / exits in the midle...

 

Ok so how do we exit a town, is there a command or do we run out of town in any direction?

 

My guess is; you normally get the overhead travel map with the isometric view. But now you just teleport to the next town?

 

Yep Firesparx, that's what I expect. I expect you'll be able to leave town in any direction, but there might be boundaries of the town area that are not passable mountains/walls so you can only leave in certain areas.

 

I'm guessing the Southern road from Owl's Head that had the one extra NPC will lead directly into Kingsport.

 

Seem reasonable based on the Vale map; guess we'll have to just see how much effort was put into it (hopefully not much as it will be a one-time thing).

 

Thats also my guess. If you leave the town, they teleport you to the next town and vice versa.

 

Well in the videos we've seen LB never runs out of town, he uses a command. He only ever runs into town.

 

Yea I know they can change things, I just like the idea of a quick to overland map, which in this case is a teleport to other city

 

• Town 2: An additional municipality (likely village sized) will be open for business! Exiting one municipality will take you immediately to the other municipality.

For R2, if you exit Owl's Head at any one of several exit areas, you'll automatically be teleported to the next town (perhaps Kingsport). The overworld map tech won't be enabled until R4.

 

He said in those videos that this was simply for demonstration purposes and the game wouldn't function like that. But yeah, they could use that same implementation here if they want to for the Alpha testing.

 

RELEASE 2: January 23 - January 25 2014.... server up 0930 central time?

 

Seriously? Thursday through Saturday? So for those of us with a life we get one day of actual play time?