Group Caps VS New High End Zones

[Sarell]

If we removed group caps, it would pave the way for people to make extremely high end, difficult zones, that wern't just about being there the longest. Zones that people said, "WOW, we could do that fight with maybe 50 people", it might only be a half hour zone.

With relation to the rest of the mud, a fair economy would see some zones done with less people, and some done with more. A 16th necro / bard could come to BC / Scorps, you could do a zone with 13 people and not get whined at for not filling up your group. The more people you bring, the less shot at an item you have, pure balance.

I seem to have forgotten what group caps were for in all honesty.

[Nurpy Fuzzyfeet]

If we removed group caps, it would pave the way for people to make extremely high end, difficult zones, that wern't just about being there the longest. Zones that people said, "WOW, we could do that fight with maybe 50 people", it might only be a half hour zone.

With relation to the rest of the mud, a fair economy would see some zones done with less people, and some done with more. A 16th necro / bard could come to BC / Scorps, you could do a zone with 13 people and not get whined at for not filling up your group. The more people you bring, the less shot at an item you have, pure balance.

I seem to have forgotten what group caps were for in all honesty.

Hmm....so we have to limit the number of invokers we bring?

In most zones, if you can bring a 20 man group, 5 of those being vokers, I'd say you'd kill fast enough to do multiple zones in a pretty short time, therefore it sorta undoes the whole "more people, less chance of an item"
Just do three zones to make up the difference....only benefit I see from this is more people getting stacked eq more quickly......which doesn't seem to be a problem here.

[Sarell]

Any fights you bring invokers to only last about 30 seconds anyhow. More vokers wouldn't speed up the zone. They might make the pop at Izans faster. But I really don't think people would bring more than they needed. Even then, it wouldn't speed up trhe actual rate of zone completion. And absolutely not by a factor equal to bringin 33% extra people. People don't take 15 people to evermors / musp / jot / etc to get it done faster.

[Corth]

Actually.. you start getting a bit of a diminishing return at a certain point by bringing a lot of people. Sure, you have more brute force. But on the other hand, more people going afk and not doing their job, causing delay and death.

I guess the 15 person group limit was put in to try and avoid having a situation where everyone has enough high end eq for 3 or 4 alts, etc. Well it hasn't really worked. I'm with Sarell on this one. I can't see how it could hurt.

Corth

[Ragorn]

The group cap was originally designed so that area makers could gauge the difficulty of their zones. It's easy to figure out how much a group of 15 can reasonably accomplish. It's much harder to design a zone that groups can't bowl over by bringing 26 people, without being so hard that you CAN'T do it with 15.

[Vaprak]

What Ragorn said. I'm 100% against removing the 15 person group cap for anything other than zones of Tiamat difficulty. This is the official stance of Vaprak, not the staff as a whole btw.

[Nurpy Fuzzyfeet]

Any fights you bring invokers to only last about 30 seconds anyhow. More vokers wouldn't speed up the zone. They might make the pop at Izans faster. But I really don't think people would bring more than they needed. Even then, it wouldn't speed up trhe actual rate of zone completion. And absolutely not by a factor equal to bringin 33% extra people. People don't take 15 people to evermors / musp / jot / etc to get it done faster.

When you have two/three vokers pumping out areas, other two targeting, it's gonna turn hard fights into pudding.

I don't think the game needs to be made any easier. Got enough people leaving because of the lack of challenge as is.....increasing group size limits to make zone techniques even more about brute force and lack of technique isn't a good idea, imo.

I'm all for god favoritism, politics, guild halls, artifacts, etc. I'm not for dumbing down the mud some more.

[Vena]

if you wanted to churn zones faster you'd bring more melee, not more invokers.

----

ive pondered this before and i on one hand think the old system of having no group caps was great and on the other think that group caps do something along the lines of creating difficulty.

I remember being in old jot groups, 15-22 man jot groups and having a tough time winning eq because there are so many bids. Made boots so much more exhilirating because there was so much pent up demand to do certain zones... not sure that still exists today...

you might just cause more negativity regarding splits since most zones only have 1 or 2 great pieces.... could you imagine doing spob with 25 people? You would have very little chance to win something so if you didnt need anything would you still want to go?

and if you eliminate "difficulty" from the equation (since you can just bring more people you can't really quantify "difficulty")... you end up statting eq based solely on # of mobs you have to kill... some might argue that we really aren't that far away from that at present, but it really could be a lot worse... and that would mean that zone rewards would be solely based on how long they took which means zones would get even longer...

if you could make a zone 2x as hard as spob but doable in half the time, you could probably give it good maybe better rewards..... do we just want longer zones or do we want more "challenging" zones?

[Sarell]

I don't want to roll current zones with 20 people for more fun. I do them with 2 people for more fun. I want to smite zones as hard as tiamat, actual hard zones that take effort to coordinate, but only take an hour or two of my day, not my entire weekend. Increasing group sizes would allow these zones to exist. If the area cap was invented so that areas could gauge how hard a zone should be for 15, then they instantly discluded and ignored all of the zones that are designed for less than 15 anyhow. It didn't start at 15 anyhow, it was based on charisma until that for obvious reason was completely farcical.

"When you have two/three vokers pumping out areas, other two targeting, it's gonna turn hard fights into pudding."

Absolutely! Like right now how people take 15 to BC even though it only needs 10 because they get harrassed if they leave people out, and don't reach the artifical group cap. Some zones are absolutely only made for 15 people? Great, hard code portals for 15 people. Dictating what is fun in the name of balance isn't working. It made the most enjoyable zone for many people on the mud, Jot, into something boring. I completely agree the game shouldn't get easier, and we need harder to manage, larger groups, with bigger fights to do it. The current implementation of tiamat is the best yet, unfortunately it still just borders on being a slog fest. I've seen people lead their first zone ever, SPOB! YAWN......

Vena: "do we just want longer zones or do we want more "challenging" zones?" ... I say, Hooray for Vena! hi5.

I promise if we remove group caps I will try to exclude as many people as I possibly can from zoning with me, and only take the necessary elite to zones, does that help? I think removing group caps will even make competition more fierce! People used to be impressed and enthused at both the low and high numbers people took to zones, not upset by it.

[Maedor]

When you have two/three vokers pumping out areas, other two targeting, it's gonna turn hard fights into pudding.

Too bad rangers and rogues do as much or more dmg than invokers vs 1 mob.

So bringing invokers to target really isnt that useful...tho removing the cap might get a halfling warrior a zone invite:P

[Shevarash]

The code for increased group limits is already in, those of you have been to Timat have seen that for yourselves. If a zone is written that requires more than 15 people, it can make use of that code.

[Nurpy Fuzzyfeet]

When you have two/three vokers pumping out areas, other two targeting, it's gonna turn hard fights into pudding.

Too bad rangers and rogues do as much or more dmg than invokers vs 1 mob.

So bringing invokers to target really isnt that useful...tho removing the cap might get a halfling warrior a zone invite:P

I seriously hope you aren't saying vokers are underpowered :P

Being a halfing warrior does affect my zone invites, but the fact that there are so many warriors out there with stacked eq is the more determining factor.

[Vikaz]

The code for increased group limits is already in, those of you have been to Timat have seen that for yourselves. If a zone is written that requires more than 15 people, it can make use of that code.

The flip side of that would be, can you also code a zone so that the group limit is less than 15?

[Shevarash]

Uh, sure, if the zone was designed around that concept it could have its group size reduced.

[Ambar]

Mmm zone spankage with the whole guild .. yum

[kiryan]

sarell that was me posting as vena (cuz i was using her laptop which autosigns in).

i agree we definitely lost something somewhere, and although i do like doing the epic 16 hour zone, i do also like a 2 hour zone here and there and a 4 hour zone here and there.

I too remember when people were awed by things like toddrick doing jot invasion with 14 instead of 25. That was awe inspiring.... On the other hand, I think a lot of that awe is gone for good... You could do truly amazing things in the old days because there were real items of power that not everyone could get... artifacts... or even truly powerful items you could collect (giantbane/mistweave). All powerful eq is balanced today with rare exception, and none of it can be abused in the ways that giantbane/mistweave were in the past.

today, if you can hard with 5 elite people, 5 scrubs could probably manage the same thing (in more time with more deaths) because the power is primarily in the classes and not in the eq (with rare exception). I'm not sure you will ever get this "feeling" back unless powerful artifacts make a comeback.

You also have to ask yourself why don't you want to fill your group out? You might make someone's day by giving them the opportunity to do something... one of the biggest complaints that i hear is people are always afk and the afkrs always complain there is nothing to do... on the other hand if the lack of challenge bores you to tears then maybe you just gonna have to keep saying no so you can find your challenge....

oh and one last quip on that... choking palace still hasn't been beat... when was the last time someone attempted it? If toddrick was still leading and CS was still around, they would've done that zone weekly until they beat it with or without artifacts because they enjoyed challenge. Today, ive rarely seen anything other than a half-assed zergling rush at the zone (jalahon did try to start a passionate drive to beat the zone) and a lot of people just pussyied out and saying it was unbeatable (partly because they kept attacking it the same way they do every zone).

I find it real hard to accept that people are looking for more challenge when challenge is one gate to smoke away. If your up for some challenge, let me know when and where.

[Sarell]

I'm not hunting more challenge so much as I just think there would be lots of fun things in large groups that I can't see and I don't think they would hurt the mud, bringing whoever wants to go to a zone for instance. I think group size cap kind of tells people they should bring 15 to a zone and does detract from challenge, I think the group size should be figured out by the players for their best benefit. Some would take huge groups to assure success, some would take small groups for challenge or to assure treasure, different ways of playing. I really don't think you could speed up most zones by taking more people than 15 due to increased group management and the fact that if you have enough invokers to kill the mobs before your tank dies, more invokers arn't going to make it any faster. I don't think many people would take more anyhow.

Shev saying the code from tia can be used in new zones pretty much covers any bigger smiting I'd be interested in making/participating in which is really cool! While the group cap I don't like, my main idea here was to make zones that require lots of people, hard stuff, except short. ChP should be one of these, that zone isn't reasonably possible.

[Sarell]

I just left a group for an invoker, what did I do instead? None of your business but I wasn't playing sojourn :(

[Lilithelle]

With shrinking pbase not sure how many 15+ groups will be formed, sometimes hard enough to get 15. I like the idea of zones meant to be done with smaller groups it could give people the opportunity to do guild only zones or even for evils to do a zone! What I wonder about is how you'd stop people from forming the group outside the zone then bringing in a group of 15. You can use a portal at entrance with limited charges but then you have potential CR issues, or they can drag pcorpses in and ress them...

[Vigis]

Maybe a portal that only lets a certain sum of level through Lilithelle?

For example: A portal that will only allow 250 levels through it before it crumbles and it doesn't repop if anybody is in the zone. That way, you could take in 5 level 50 players or 12 level 20's. Increase the portal to 1000 levels and 20 level 50 characters or a horde of lower level characters could go in.

I don't know if it could be coded, but at least it could cause a crash or two if we tried :)