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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsForum post of the day: Raid timers (poll)
by Amanda Dean 
Feb 7th 2009 at 10:00PM
Today's forum post of the day serves a dual purpose: it brings up issues with raid timers and it demonstrates how not to make friends and influence people on the forums. Our hot-headed friend Phearing of Silver Hand is a mighty bit miffed that he zoned into a 10-man Vault run only to find that there were no mobs there. He was saved to the instance, and thus does not get another shot at it until the raid timer resets.Nubbyzor of Whisperwind quickly pointed out that if the raid leader is saved to the instance you join their raid ID. This has happened since the dawn of raid timers. People have been mislead into joining raids in progress and cannot get a second shot at a heroic if their group is under par. Heroics aren't really a big deal, if your group fails, you can try again tomorrow. It's lame, but it's only one day. The week-long timer on raids makes this a little bit harder to swallow.
The original poster insists, in a rather unpleasant manner, that this happens because Blizzard is too cheap to invest in additional content and raid timers keep people from progressing too quickly. I'd like to think it has more to do with allowing groups to go back to the dungeon over several days instead of a single marathon session. It also could be something about throttling progression so that guilds don't gear up overnight. In any case raid timers can be a problem, especially for PUGgers. While you can check the armory for PUG members to assess your chances, there is no way that I know of to check someone's raid timer.
This brings us to our poll:
| Nothing, it's worked well this long, why change it? | |
|---|---|
| Allow raiders to select a number of days between resets. | |
| Reset raids twice a week, maybe Tuesday and Saturday. | |
| Reset raids daily. | |
| Let raid leaders reset raids at their leisure, with restrictions. | |
| Allow raid leaders to reset raids any time, no restrictions. | |
| Make raid timers personal. | |
| Just do away with raid timers all together. |
As for how to make make friends and influence people on the forums:
1. Don't insult someone who is agreeing with you.
2. If you insist on insulting people, be creative in your verbiage "go pee in a cup" gets old fast.
3. Don't be a troll.
4. If you're going to be a troll, which I don't recommend, check your spelling. It will be the first thing that gets called out.
5. Pay attention to the content of responses, there may be something insightful there.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Raiding, Forums, Forum Post of the Day
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 4)
Vraiel Feb 8th 2009 2:07AM
Alright, Malygos, OS, Vault should all be on a 4 day reset at least. Easy, little to no adds to clear. Should be no problem. Waiting for those instances to clear every week is annoying.
Naxx I believe should be allowed to reset as soon as the raid clears it. It should be a decision your raid should be able to make. I don't see how a casual guild would be opposed to that.
Anyways, off to more older things. Noone goes to older 40 man raids anymore. It wouldn't matter much if those instances would be reset every day, or at least have an option to reset manually. I dont see the point in making those instances a week long reset anymore.
Teaspoon Feb 8th 2009 2:13AM
If the pug-raid's leader is already saved to his own guild's half-cleared Naxx25 and forgets to switch off Heroic then anybody who walks in will immediately be saved to that Naxx25 and be unable to enter their guild's one later that week. This is what the complaints are about - instead of immediately saving you to it when you walk in, either you should only be saved after a boss kill, or be presented with a prompt asking if you want to join a Naxx25 that's already in progress that will dump you back at the portal if you say no.
Viper007Bond Feb 8th 2009 2:43AM
They would be silly to change the timers.
Seeing as how my guild clears Naxx 10 in 2-3 hours tops and Naxx 25 in not much longer, timers stop us from literally farming Naxx multiple times a night and getting every single person best in slot in a matter of days. Timers are what make people go back into instances week after week.
WoW isn't a newspaper comic. You don't get a new instance every day.
However, I would like to see some sort of warning to avoid being accidentally saved. Perhaps a confirmation dialog that kicks you out 60 seconds after you enter the instance if you don't accept getting saved or whatever.
GoldenGoat Feb 8th 2009 3:12AM
I think that hard-timered resets to raid content are one of those MMO concepts akin to EQ corpse runs and xp-loss on death ... one of those things we'll look back on and say, "Man, how did we put up with that...?"
If it's the aim of Blizz (or any company) to slow down progression, I've always thought the RIGHT way to do that is by creating more difficult content. A hard-timered bottleneck just seems anachronistic.
Of course, judging by poll responses I may find little agreement on that point. So to more universally agreeable concepts, I absolutely agree that people should be warned, in some way, before they're saved to someone's instance. Moreover, there should also be clearer documentation for noobs explaining the nature of raid IDs and saved instances. When I was first starting out heroics, I unwittingly saved an entire party to Black Morass (who proceeded to call me everything but a white man) because I simply did not know about the way that raids save and reset. How would I? I had spent 70 levels resetting instances at my leisure, and there is simply NO Blizzard documentation explaining the way this works. Something as simple as a Tip on the load-in screen when entering heroics/raids of "Heroics may be attempted only once per day, raids once per week" would go a long way to preventing noobs from becoming villains in this way.
Caelrial Feb 8th 2009 3:34AM
This post is mainly intended for the Naxx raid timer. OS and VOA are fine they way they are unless the loot table is dropped drastically. Drop the number of loot along with the shorter timer if there is an issue.
I think with the comming of dual specs, the raid timers will destroy the pure classes. Hunters, Mages, and Rogues will end up only seeing more partial content. Why take a hunter for dps when you can take a shadow preist that if a healer needs to leave can quickly respec and bring in a pure class for a filler. When the original healer comes back, then there ya go. Bye to the pure class and back to how it started.
Another current problem with the current set up is that with the plauge known as Death Knights, and how EZ mode it is to level them to 80, there are more toons to go around but not more content to have for all of them.
MAIN POINT BELOW!
Teens make up a large portion of the game and have things that take priority IRL ( I.E. School) but these kids may stay up too late and sacrafice real life priorities cause they fear that the older members will take their spots and finish the raids when they know they won't get to see it again till the following week.
A type of soft reset that becomes availble on Friday mornings would be fantastic for both the casual and hardcore raid guilds. A new raid ID could be created for the people that choose to reset on or after the Friday of that week. Have this ID make it now impossible to enter with any member that is still on an ID that was before the soft reset period, also to lower the number of loot drops to prevent too fast of a gear progression. This prevents people from clearing by Thursday, hitting there reset, then jumping in with a Fri-Mon group while having the ability to help a Tues-Mon group clear.
This sort of versatility will allow the hardcore guilds to hone there skills and be ready for new content that comes out. Most of the hardcore guilds have current content on farm anyways and are doing nothing but running alts through waiting for new content to arrive. As for the smaller raiding guilds, they will still have the full week to complete the content and now have something to shoot for as far as a type of guild raid progression. Casual/family friendly guilds can now allow a hardcore feel for some of its members while being able to allow the younger members to raid without having to have them basically choose raid or school.
Melchior Feb 8th 2009 4:29AM
Here's an idea: Any Dungeon that has been cleared should be saved and LOCKED to only the members who completed it. If you didn't clear it you should be locked out. Simple enough... Right?
David Feb 8th 2009 4:33AM
In my opinion. Make raid timers affect gains only.
By this i mean for example
say a raid forms and 5 people in it have done half of the raid instance earlier during the current reset.
These people can still join. Though the first half of the bosses (that those 5 people allready have killed only grant rep, marks and other loot to the 5 people that haven't been there before.
This system would enable you to help other people through timer limited content, and also let you get that last boss with a different group if you wanted.
All att the same time you can't actually go in and farm stuff since you only get the benefits of the kills once per reset.
This would also solve problems with say a guild member went to a raid with some friends earlier the same week since he couldn't raid the day the raid with the guild was. But then it turns out he is available, then he can just join and help his guild anyways, no drama ^^
Linandir Feb 10th 2009 6:08AM
This is crap, worked fine so far?
I think it would make pugging a lot safer since you really can't trust people sitting behind a computer on the internet. You have no guarantee that a person doesn't save you for something when you enter, it is always a risk.
This is all I'm concerned about. Resetting once a week works fine, otherwise everyone would get geared in 3 days. Should make a new ZA-like instance though.
Thysmage Feb 8th 2009 12:03PM
The best thing would be to prompt the raider if he wants to get saved to this timer or not..
Muse Feb 8th 2009 7:39AM
If my guild could raid everything as often as we wanted, most of us would have burned out by raiding five hours a day for several weeks.
Raid lockouts helps keep raiders sane, whether we like them or not.
Trippy Feb 8th 2009 8:03AM
I voted the last option, do away with em. But I only voted that because my own opinion as to what should happen isn't listed.
Personally I think someone should get a warning message asking them if they want to get saved to that instance if they're about to run into one that is saved at some point.
Other than that I think it's mainly peoples own responsibility to check if they are saved or not and any person that screws up for others should be burned on a big pile of fire. =P
Dagissimo Feb 8th 2009 8:45AM
I say leave it the same but allow people to go to the Raid ID tab and lookup the Raid ID before they Zone in. Just something that shows which bosses have been killed should be sufficient.
Dag
Dan Feb 8th 2009 8:36AM
Above, is one of the most sensible suggestions by far. Don't change the reset times or whatever, just have a prompt that says something along the lines of "Entering this raid will save you to ID#, continue?" yay, nay.
Happy days, and yeh greatlich, entering a raid with a raid leader who has already downed a bosses and therefore saved to the ID will get you saved aswell instantly. Is very lame.
Nellius Feb 8th 2009 8:39AM
I reckon it's not as simple as the options you give. For longer raids, like BT was, for example, a week's reset timer was perfect. But for single bosses, like malygos and sartharion, a week is way too long.
npm Feb 8th 2009 10:49AM
I think they should give you the option of resetting your raid timer by individual, either to an empty dungeon or to that of the raid leaders, that way you could join another raid in progress or start over entirely.
I don't think it'd take too much imagination for Blizzard to work out a better way to handle raid ids.
Ash Feb 8th 2009 10:41AM
TBH there are 2 issues with raid timers I have encountered, the first is being saved into an already half cleared raid that is then an epic fail train because it's only a 1/4 of the original group that went in initially, of course not being informed that it wasn't a fresh run first was a real piss-off, I now always ask.
The 2nd is not re-inviting the member of the original raid with priority over new people, having cleared the arachnid quarter it was late and the raid disbanded, I noticed one of the original members (not original raid leader) shouting the next day for Naxx, asked for in as I was saved to that id and got "Sorry too many DKs", seeing as I was top 5 dps I was a little pissed off, esp. as I now have to wait until next week to get another raid id.
Both need some sort of solution imo.
Ash Feb 8th 2009 10:53AM
Thinking about it a bit more and reading some of the comments I really dislike the raid timer system, never really questioned it before.
Sure there will be guilds that literally 24/7 farm a raid get everyone everything then stand around Dalaran flexing their muscles, so what? Does this matter, all the raid timer does is stretch that from being a week to a couple of months, very artificially may I add.
How about let people play the game they want to, removal of raid timers, not necessarily ids, so you can come back to a raid later, would encourage more people to pug these, as if it turns into a big run of fail it doesn't matter, they can go with their experienced guild. It would also provide a platform for pimped out players to show off their "l33t skills" to us mere mortals with only a repair bill being their penalty, which from a person who mostly pugs, would increase the pool. I can deal with being called a nub, by a 14 year old with all the time in the world to raid, if I can get some more progress out of the game and a few new shiny items. Also the calls in Dalaran for pug members to already have exp. would be reduced because if it fails, it doesn't matter, which means those levelling 2nd/3rd characters or have taken their time to get to raiding level don't get artificially locked out of pugs because the players wanting to complete them don't want to burn this week raid id on a bad group.
Angus Feb 8th 2009 11:05AM
Most people are in agreement, and it doesn't make sense that it wasn't put in with the introduction of the Vault.
Step 1: If you kill Arch, the vault tags you.
Whenever you attempt to join a raid group, the raid leader sees a pop up that indicates you are saved to the vault. (User Omgdksrul is saved to Normal Vault, do you wish to be saved on their Raid ID? Yes, No. User Leetpwnzzr is saved to Heroic Vault. Do you wish to be saved on their Raid ID? Yes, No.)
Whenever you create a raid group, anyone joining your raid sees a pop up indicating you are saved to the vault.
(Raid leader Bubblehearth is saved to Normal Vault. Do you wish to be saved to their Raid ID? Yes, No. Etc...)
Step 2: ??
Step 3: ...
The other thing to have that would be nice would be to have a Raid ID interface. Or better yet, fix LFG to have raid functionality.
When making a raid, you use the LFG tool.
"Making Heroic Naxx."
Invite people. If you create a raid later in the week, you get asked if you want to re-invite everyone on the Raid ID and it automatically sends whispers with invite requests.
"Whisper from Omghealmeplz: I am reforming our (normal/Heroic) Naxxaramas raid. Do you wish to re-join us?" As this is sent the raid invite pops up too.
You can also tag people in the LFG tool so people can see what they are saved to using the tool.
Seriously, the LFG tool needs a revamp to be useful. This might make more people actually use it.
edward Feb 8th 2009 11:37AM
Make raid timers personal.
Why punish others because leader forgot that they are saved?
If you are saved, then you are saved, why make 4 others victim of one person's absentmindedness. This happened to me yesterday while attempting to do the daily heroic, leader was saved but forgot.
For raids, its harder to forget and its harder to put together. Still whats the harm in making raid timers personal. If you are saved, you alone is "marked" as saved.
Seladoris Feb 8th 2009 12:09PM
Didn't the old raid timer system in TBC only get you saved when you killed a boss? I think the raid timer system should return to that. This stuff about getting saved for walking in the door has caused too many headaches.