Feedback on the New MSR Trial (LFG)

[CU_Krow]

Hello,

Decided to post this here instead of the Patch thread. As of evening of 10/02/19, on Everlasting server, we attempted the MSR trial through LFG by recruiting 48-man league.

Some things to note:

1-MSR recruitment took longer than usual time, not due to the lvl 35+ req, but the badge requirement. It was just unnecessarily long, and some people were willing to do MSR despite the Vanguard merit obtainment.

2- With current league bugs+the badge req, the decision was made to disengage from the MSR trial and instead resume it regular through RWZ without going through the LFG. Currently, It's easier, faster, and simpler than MSR trial through LFG.

3- At this time, MSR Trial through LFG does not seem to pose a greater benefit compared to running regular MSR through RWZ (e.g. as far as I'm aware, MSR trial does not give increased awards, badge...). If there are known reward benefits,  #3 will be reconsidered. At time of league creation, none of the 48 members could identify any reward benefit of doing MSR LFG trial compared to the regular MSR run.

 

Summary: As of now, Everlasting players (and I generalize, cause this was general consensus from league discussion), have not found the greater benefit of running MSR trial through LFG in contrast to regular MSR run through the RWZ. Despite that, I am planning to run a minimum #, 16-man lvl 50 incarnate MSR trial test run just to double check if there are any awards given through the trial that are not obtained through regular MSR run. If so, I will post those results in this thread either the night of 10/03/2019 or some time on 10/04/2019. I know some people were test runners for the MSR trial, so if they have any feedback where they disagree with any of the above points, please share!

 

P.S. Just a side note, and this is towards the Devs, very big THANK YOU from multiple players for the added timer on the MSR! Everyone who commented on it were appreciative. :}

Edited October 3, 2019 by kenro90

[Apparition]

IMO, the Rikti mothership raid trial isn't about added benefit.  It's about letting people do other things in the Rikti War Zone without worrying about the 50 player cap, and about better control for the raid leader.  Have a griefer or someone leeching by being AFK for more than five minutes?  Kick him or her.  Problem solved.

 

That said, there are added benefits to the Rikti mothership raid trial.  It's limited to level 35+, so you don't have to deal with having a bunch of level 10 or 20 PCs in your league, dragging down your Vanguard merit count, (sometimes substantially).  Hamidon and Rikti mothership raids also cause CoH's RAM and system resource usage to balloon up.  If you do multiple zone raids, there's a greater chance of disconnects.  By using the Rikti mothership raid trial, you free up the RAM and system resources by loading into another zone after the raid ends.  So, theoretically, it should make multiple Rikti mothership raids run much more smoothly with much fewer people disconnecting.

Edited October 3, 2019 by Apparition

[Sura]

Also I think when you use the LFG everyone is upped to 50, so if a team leader crashes you don't all of a sudden have a team in the league that's level 43 or something. 

 

Like Apparition, I never got the impression that there was supposed to be any added rewards.

[Steampunkette]

Yeah... I think the biggest benefit of the MSR LFG Queue is that you can do it from Crotoa or Kallisti or some other zone where there's a higher cap with less people doing content in the zone and everyone can get together to hit the button to go in, instead of juggling RWZ1 and 2.

Edited October 3, 2019 by Steampunkette

[Apparition]

Exactly.  I form up my Rikti mothership raids in Pocket D now.  I don't understand the "more difficult forming up" argument.  Now that everyone is combat level 50 once inside, there's no more juggling people around in the league just to make sure that every team is lead by a level 50 character.  There's no more zone cap issues as Pocket D and Kallisti Wharf have 200 player zone caps.  Of course, I already restricted my mothership raids to level 35+ (with exceptions if someone was level 30 - 34 and that was his or her only toon), so that isn't an issue for me either.

Edited October 3, 2019 by Apparition

[CU_Krow]

Fair enough, I appreciate all the feedback so far. Least it's confirmed that there's no added benefit rewards-wise from the trial MSR outside 1) Everyone is bumped up to lvl 50 and 2) Potential for increased Vanguard merits.

 

In the end, looks like it will come down to personal preference of the raid leader.  My SG on Everlasting has several raid leaders that run various trials. In addition, we're friendly with the other known raid leaders on the server. From my understanding, the average MSR run is usually well-balanced with lvled toons, so having lowbie toons has never been a major concern for MSRs on Everlasting server. We're pretty consistent with kicking known leechers as well and being able to find easy replacements within very short time. To my knowledge, there has not been any complaints about the vanguard merit count either. The lvl 50 leader crashes are far and few between, so that has been another minor concern that I rarely witness/hear about as well. So as of the moment, I still can't see the outweighed benefits of running MSR trial in contrast to reg MSR, just based on recruitment time alone. Like I said though, since this came out two days ago, the outlook on this could very well change and maybe people will lean more towards MSR trial for the reasons mentioned above.  From above comments, my highest seen concern is in regards to the RAM and system resource usage build-up, which I was not aware of, but makes sense.

Edited October 3, 2019 by kenro90

[krj12]

I wish they'd make it a 24 man raid, and actually let you fight your way into the ship,  then fight an AV or two at the end.  

It would be a lot of work, but the innards of the ship could be made from existing assets...

 

[Cooltastic]

9 hours ago, kenro90 said:

1-MSR recruitment took longer than usual time, not due to the lvl 35+ req, but the badge requirement. It was just unnecessarily long, and some people were willing to do MSR despite the Vanguard merit obtainment.

This could be fixed simply by having the trial version award everyone the badge upon getting teleported into the zone at the start of the trial version.

[CU_Krow]

Ok,

 

Here's a 10/05/2019 update on the MSR trial of two test runs on Everlasting:

 

1st test run- Early afternoon, attempted to do test run of league. Met in KW. Recruited 5-team league lvl 35+ and with badge (which took long time to recruit as of itself, even consideration its a wknd). Upon queue, all 48 accepted, but then it mapserved 75% of league back to KW, only 25% left. League left in zone was in chaos, whole test was decided to disengage. Too much of hassle to recruit everyone back in.

 

2nd test run- Late evening, decided to do an all lvl 50, 16 man (minimum # requirement) MSR trial. We successfully queue'd in, all 16 people. Few things to note:

 

Pros:

-trial itself was SMOOTH. Way less laggy compared to RWZ event MSR trial. 

-smaller map zone. Pylons lot closer than regular RWZ zone. Also, lot less mobs to deal with outside of ship.

-With all lvl 50s, trial went without barely a hitch. With less than half a normal full-size league, we earned up to 1000 merits.

 

Cons

-With lvl 35+ AND badge requirement, still takes significant time longer to recruit others. Many league members were possibly suggesting removing badge requirement for trial entry. If toons miss out on V-merits, that's on them.

-Again, huge part of success was queu'ing in small. Only positive is that when we began with 16, I was able to invite 8 more people from within trial. So we had close to 3 teams. But honestly, using this tactic for a full league is just putting a lot on the league leader and huge turn-off, regardless of extra merits and less laggy-ness. League leaders, such as myself, will still prefer RWZ MSR event due to this reason alone.

 

 

Overall,

it has its pros and cons. I for one am still for the argument of increasing RWZ population cap to 75 or 100. For me, the pros do not outweigh the cons. I understand this might be upon league leader preference, but hey, just speaking my 2 cents.

 

Edited October 6, 2019 by kenro90

[Megajoule]

Yeah, I'll say it again:

While I do appreciate the work Leo did on the LFG version, and all the little QoL things like adding a timer and re-enabling the Priests (that apply to both the zone and trial versions), I still feel that a simpler and more practical solution would have been to just raise the player cap in the RWZ (not the Hive) back to some round number greater than 50 (I'd prefer 100 just for consistency and plenty of wiggle room).

[CU_Krow]

Thank you for the feedback, Megajoule.

 

I'm hoping this thread attracts more raid leaders to go out, test the MSR trial, and come back here to provide feedback. Including members that participated in those trials! Just hearing from 3-4 people is not enough for Devs to consider making anymore big moves.

[Sura]

I did a LFG one last week, and the experience was good.  The only hurdle we hit was the badge requirement; eventually the team leaders had to go one by one through the people on their team until we found the one player who didn't have the badge (and wasn't apparently paying any attention to the League chat).  Honestly, I think if it were me I'd just have the LFG method award the badge if a player doesn't have it.  It's not like it's hard to get, and the level requirement means that no one ineligible would be getting it.  It'd be like getting the Midnighter badge by going to Night Ward.  

 

The performance was a lot better I thought.  Really smooth.   Very nice to have everyone auto-leveled to 50.  

 

My two suggestions for LFG would be to do something with the badge requirement (at least maybe ID the player(s) that don't have it) and to use LFG tech more.  Make it so that you can queue up for the MSR no matter where you are, and join an instanced MSR in progress.  For non LFG I think it'd be better to set the level limit on RWZ back to 35+.  I don't see any reason to not have both methods, but right now both have their drawbacks and benefits. 

[Apparition]

FWIW, I lead an instanced Rikti mothership raid trial Saturday, and that time it did tell me one person didn't have the badge, and identified the person.  How someone level 50+3 wouldn't have the Member of Vanguard badge is beyond me, but I digress.  I didn't see the notification Thursday night.  I don't know if it didn't display or somehow I missed it. 

 

You can join an instanced MSR in progress by having the raid leader invite the person. 

[Sura]

Well that's much better then!  🙂  

 

I remember now you mentioned having the raid leader invite, but I still think LFG would be the better way to do it, if possible.  What I'd really like to see is people just putting themselves into the LFG queue while they work the market or do solo missions and then having it pop when you or another leader starts one up, or when 48 people are queued.  Can it do that?  I haven't used LFG much.  Plus the "join in progress" would be good to be able to use.

[Apparition]

Unfortunately, Leandro said that the LFG "Join in progress" is broken and never worked, even before sunset. 

[Apparition]

The two biggest issues I have seen against the instanced trial are LFG issues and having greater difficulty getting people. 

 

I haven't experienced any LFG issues in the four trial raids I have ran thus far, but I do know that the LFG system is buggy and it should be looked into. 

 

In regards to the higher difficulty getting people... I submit that the Halloween event went live last week.  It has been more difficult finding people for anything outside of the Halloween event. 

 

Try it in a few weeks and see if you still have difficulty getting a league together. 

[CU_Krow]

2 hours ago, Sura said:

Well that's much better then!  🙂  

 

I remember now you mentioned having the raid leader invite, but I still think LFG would be the better way to do it, if possible.  What I'd really like to see is people just putting themselves into the LFG queue while they work the market or do solo missions and then having it pop when you or another leader starts one up, or when 48 people are queued.  Can it do that?  I haven't used LFG much.  Plus the "join in progress" would be good to be able to use.

 

If LFG worked like that, it would be awesome! From a league-leader's perspective (@Apparition, I'd love to hear your experience on Excelsior), the main difficulty for the MSR trial invite is 1) When we tried queuing in 40+ people in at once from KW, it instantly crashed and half of league was mapserved. 2) Even when recruiting and informing people about the lvl 35+ and badge req, still had people coming in without badge, and the recruitment time took forever (got tired of waiting so started without full league), and 3) When in trial, I'm not going to try recruiting more people through LFG to make it easier to get people in, especially when the trial is currently running.

 

There are some benefits and recommendations I've thought of for people who are wanting to try leading the new MSR trial:

 

1) In order for less risk of crashing/mapserving upon queue, treat the MSR trial as if it were a 24-man BAF/KEYES/TPN/UG/Magi run and recruit up to 3 teams. Queue in to MSR, and then recruit people from there. (Good thing about MSR trial is that time doesn't start till ship shields are down)

 

2) As Apparition pointed out earlier in this thread, MSR trial does have considerable better benefits compared to zone MSR such as A) Smoother runs (less lag), and B) More merit rewards [due to higher lvl toons working in unison).

 

On Everlasting, I'm going to try the 24-man recruitment method, queue in, and then hire within as needed. I'll post results in this thread.

---------------------

 

@Apparition,

 

Just saw your recent post & 100% agree. Those are the two main issues. Also saw your post on the other thread about bringing back the lvl 35 req for the RWZ zone.

 

Edited October 7, 2019 by CU_Krow

[CU_Krow]

MSR Trial Test Run #3

 

Ran MSR trial through LFG with a 24-man league. Just like over the weekend with the 16-man league, the trial was successful and smoothly operated.

 

Couple feedback I received from league members:

1-MSR trial through LFG is smoother in terms of frame-rate, less lag.

2-Map/zone is easier to navigate, due to it being smaller than RWZ.

3-Trial itself, with the higher lvls, is smoother and more rewards (with 24-man league, we achieved 900+ vanguard merits, and given the number of the league compared to regular, not too bad! In addition, as a league leader, I noticed we were low on DPS, so that number is even more impressive from my view)

4-League members also added that badge reward for the trial would be nice, IN ADDITION TO removal of the Member of Vanguard badge to gain entry into the trial. As of now, this is the only trial on the game that does not grant an end-trial badge.

5-Until the LFG issue is improved or can be fixed (queuing in with 48 players increases crash rate significantly, and has done so), it has been recommended by league leaders start MSR trial with small number of players (e.g. 16 or 24), then wait inside the trial to recruit more (since you can invite players from within the trial, least league leader can).

 

From this point on, I won't be posting anymore test runs in this thread unless something significant is witnessed during a run that has not been included in this topic. Again tho, I recommend people test run it and share their views. Despite all this, I'm still in the argument for increasing RWZ cap zone OR making it a lvl 35+ requirement for zone entry.

Edited October 8, 2019 by CU_Krow

[golstat2003]

1 hour ago, CU_Krow said:

MSR Trial Test Run #3

 

Ran MSR trial through LFG with a 24-man league. Just like over the weekend with the 16-man league, the trial was successful and smoothly operated.

 

Couple feedback I received from league members:

1-MSR trial through LFG is smoother in terms of frame-rate, less lag.

2-Map/zone is easier to navigate, due to it being smaller than RWZ.

3-Trial itself, with the higher lvls, is smoother and more rewards (with 24-man league, we achieved 900+ vanguard merits, and given the number of the league compared to regular, not too bad! In addition, as a league leader, I noticed we were low on DPS, so that number is even more impressive from my view)

4-League members also added that badge reward for the trial would be nice, IN ADDITION TO removal of the Member of Vanguard badge to gain entry into the trial. As of now, this is the only trial on the game that does grant an end-trial badge.

5-Until the LFG issue is improved or can be fixed (queuing in with 48 players increases crash rate significantly, and has done so), it has been recommended by league leaders start MSR trial with small number of players (e.g. 16 or 24), then wait inside the trial to recruit more (since you can invite players from within the trial, least league leader can).

 

From this point on, I won't be posting anymore test runs in this thread unless something significant is witnessed during a run that has not been included in this topic. Again tho, I recommend people test run it and share their views. Despite all this, I'm still in the argument for increasing RWZ cap zone OR making it a lvl 35+ requirement for zone entry.

I would rather they increase the cap. I'm FIRMLY against making the zone lvl 35+.

[CU_Krow]

10/15/2019 Update

 

 

Ran another test trial run (tho originally not a test trial).

 

1) Due to QUEU bug of the game crashing when trying to queue 48 people in at once, I once again queue'd 24 people in with intention of inviting people inside once inside.

2) While inside, the trial allowed me to invite 3-4 people, before it locked the group up, kicking other invites out instantly the moment they accepted (They accepted, loaded into trial scene, then game kicked them out)

3) Trial itself went without a hitch. With 3 full teams, and 3-4 other toons, we gained estimated 900 merits, with even a little rocky start in the beginning, and getting only 3 bombs.

 

Final results/critique? Again, people complimented the smoothness/increased rewards of trial. But due to the league difficulties, the current MSR trial is still not being run or utilized. The favor still runs for the majority more alongside the regular MSR runs in RWZ.

 

@Apparition, did you have difficulty getting entire league into MSR on Excelsior? If so, any tips? From what I know, you are the only other individual who has tried running MSR trial. 

 

 

[Apparition]

I've run six MSR trials now.  Unfortunately, only one had more than five teams.  I've been having a lot of difficulty recruiting for the MSR trials the past couple of weeks, due to a combination of issues.  Mostly due to the Halloween event and competition from the multiple Hamidon raids that are ran nightly on the Excelsior server.  In any case, that one league with six teams had no issues zoning in.  The only issue was someone thinking the door at the Vanguard compound at Point du Hoc was a trick-or-treat door and zoned out when he or she clicked on it.  We'll see how it goes in November.

 

I did notice issues with inviting people to the league once inside the instance though.  Before and during the Pylon phase, no issues.  However, it's a crapshoot once the actual raiding of the mothership commences.  Sometimes inviting people into the league works, sometimes it doesn't.    Regardless, the last zone MSR I've done was back in September, and I don't foresee myself doing one ever again.