Scatterplots.*
Today, I'm going to depart from that.
If that isn't your cup of tea... here is a lovely youtube video. Please disregard the words after it.
Still here?
Last week, Pugnacious Priest had had a fantastic and thought-provoking post on bench warming. I was struck by one thought in particular:
A raid can still be done with less than 25 or less than 10 - but never more.Why not?
Or, to translate to a galaxy far far away, why do operations use the price-is-right rules? 8 or 16 players, but never more?
Every now and then, my guild ends up one or two short for a op. No big deal, we each search our friends lists, find someone awesome, and get to hang with some other folks on the server. I'm actually a pretty big fan of pugging, so this works wonderfully.
We do this because we're a casual group: not everyone can make every operation. But over-recruiting sometimes leads to nights where too many players show up. Someone gets benched, which just isn't all that much fun, and can lead to drama from time to time.
But what if we could bring 9 players to the 8 man?
The difficulty could scale up (more HP, shorter enrage). Maybe a few more piles o yuck thrown about.
The advantage: nobody gets benched. Suppose you could run the 8 person ops with 8-10 players. Now, if 11 or 12 show up... you're within pugging distance of a group of 16, or a few players split off and do some flashpoints.
I think this fits in with other features - like dual specs - that make operations (or raids) much easier for a casual guild. The game reduces the drama-points of organization, ensuring that guild activities keep going. (I'm also guessing that players are more likely to leave MMOs when their guilds collapse, so keeping guilds stable has to be a priority for devs.)
*Punishment was originally used to keep the local systems in line. While more effective than fear, it sapped whole parsecs of the will to live. Much like Jar-Jar.
That would be a great thing for casual guilds. With the current system, if you raid only once or twice a week, benching someone is a big deal. That means this person could have to not raid for a long time. Thus, if you want everyone happy (which you should if you're the leader of a casual raiding guild), you try to manage your roster so that you have exactly a full raid of raiding players, no more, no less. But then you may have to cancel the raid is only one people can't attend.
ReplyDeleteYour idea is very interesting, and I hope future MMO or expansions will try to implement it. (The best thing would be : you can go to a raid/op with 8 to 16 people, no matter the amount between these limits, the difficulty auto-adapts)
Ugh. These problems are so much harder in the current era of raiding. In a small guild, even benching someone once makes such a headache.
DeleteComically, the next op after this post, we ended up with 9 people. Two people naked boxed to see who would sit. (And then an officer volunteered, mostly to avoid any possible drama.) Kept everything lighthearted.