Winter Trial Cap Changes

[SSR]

Out of curiosity why were the Winter Lord Trials changed to CAP at 16?  Is it possible to change them back.  I recommend reversing that change due to it being a Holiday event and being so popular especially with adding a new badge.

[lemming]

I like the new mechanism, but it would be nice to be able to have a full league.  Scale the WL, or maybe the frequency of the mobs going to the essence with size of the league.

Edited Monday at 03:42 AM by lemming

[mechahamham]

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. Not only do I like the smaller teams, but I feel that the 16 player cap is VERY well balanced for the difficulty of the event. 1 team attacks Lord Winter and the other is responsible for clearing the crystal spawns. If either team makes egregious mistakes, the extra 'Icebreaker' badge is lost.

 

However, I don't make any secret of the fact that I dislike 'full league' events, so YMMV.

[srmalloy]

17 hours ago, mechahamham said:

1 team attacks Lord Winter and the other is responsible for clearing the crystal spawns. If either team makes egregious mistakes, the extra 'Icebreaker' badge is lost.

I could see tweaking the trial so that it spawns one fewer winter guardian than the number of teams -- so if you had two teams, it would be exactly as it is now, but if you had four teams, you'd get three winter guardians each time -- and with the additional guardians, it would be much harder to keep the bar from reaching 100% and ruining your shot at the Icebreaker badge.

[SSR]

22 hours ago, mechahamham said:

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. Not only do I like the smaller teams, but I feel that the 16 player cap is VERY well balanced for the difficulty of the event. 1 team attacks Lord Winter and the other is responsible for clearing the crystal spawns. If either team makes egregious mistakes, the extra 'Icebreaker' badge is lost.

 

However, I don't make any secret of the fact that I dislike 'full league' events, so YMMV.

So what's the reasoning for hating large leagues?

 

 

4 hours ago, srmalloy said:

I could see tweaking the trial so that it spawns one fewer winter guardian than the number of teams -- so if you had two teams, it would be exactly as it is now, but if you had four teams, you'd get three winter guardians each time -- and with the additional guardians, it would be much harder to keep the bar from reaching 100% and ruining your shot at the Icebreaker badge.

Sure why not spawn more but that doesn't mean the bar should go to 100% instantly.... they could at least gradually go up.

[mechahamham]

6 hours ago, SSR said:

So what's the reasoning for hating large leagues?

 

This largely falls into personal preference and not 'My way is the right way, period', but here goes:

 

When you're on those big leagues, a few different things happen. The first of those things is that it becomes far less important, and even impossible in some cases, for players to understand what's happening around them. You don't know if the debuffer is debuffing or if the buffer is buffing. Is the tank taunting or does the brute have agro? You don't get the opportunity to lean into a team synergy. Big events like zone invasions see everyone blasting like mad and stacking ridiculous numbers of effects on both the players and enemies. There is ZERO finesse in such a situation. It's about who can click all their buttons the fastest.

 

Because of that, you end up in the second issue I have with big leagues: It doesn't really matter if you're there or not. Take the Rikti mothership raid as an example. You have the Raid leader, who's maybe communicating with team leads. Then you have everyone else who plays follow the leader during the pylon phase and then just goes into scrapperlock mode or sit in center of the bowl and blindly blast/buff/debuff. Once everyone's in the bowl, the event kinda just goes into maintenance mode, even before U'kon Grai is down. People can and do go AFK, and you really only notice when they're sitting at Point Du Hoc after the event with a power still on auto.

 

"We need a 50 to start a league," is my next big issue and the one that causes me the most pain. If a level 35 player tries to organize during an event, a lot of players will just outright not join that league or team because a 50 is not leading it. Who cares that the player knows how to anchor the team's level by setting an active mission? They're not going one second without their Ageless and Judgement blast. I've run into this problem again and again and again, to the point I can type out 'Please take a level 50 tip mission so I can anchor the team's level,' in under 5 seconds. The most recent time I ran into this was a couple days ago. Someone advertised a Winter Lord in Talos. My character needed the Frozen Fury badge, so I hopped over. Nobody else was organizing, so I stepped up to lead. Many of the people I invited either rejected the invitation to my team or joined and then bounced when they saw their level dip for a second. I eventually got around seven people to join my team, which DID anchor at 50 as soon as I got a player who had an open mission, but then six or seven more who were just hanging out solo despite asking for league invites. Happily, my team had enough damage to qualify for the badge.

 

A couple years ago, I was trying to organizing a Lord Winter trial at level 30 or so. I started building the league, dealt with players who asked to join and then VOOPed as soon as they saw my level, and then had a player demand the league star while I was still recruiting. I'm certain they didn't mean to treat me like a child, but they managed. It takes rather a lot of need or frustration to get me to try to organize anything now, regardless of my characters' levels. After that mess in Talos, I've given up even trying for the year. I'm here for fun and not frustration.

 

That's the long and short of it. Fun and Frustration. Big leagues have far more of the latter for me and very little of the former.

 

Again, this is my personal preference and experience. Maybe you enjoy the chaos. Maybe you enjoy any of the things I listed above that bother me. Maybe you try to lead everything and get your enjoyment of the game that way.

 

If so... just please be considerate of people who try to step up to lead.

Edited Tuesday at 06:12 AM by mechahamham

[Faultline]

The new version of the trial saw extensive testing in beta earlier this year, and 24 players made it too easy even with GM scaling. 16 players is a much better spot for it.

[mechahamham]

55 minutes ago, Faultline said:

The new version of the trial saw extensive testing in beta earlier this year, and 24 players made it too easy even with GM scaling. 16 players is a much better spot for it.

 

This may be out of scope, or even dev desire to scratch an itch, but I'd love to know if and how it would scale for a team of 8. Could you angle the GM so that 4 players could tackle it and another 4 watched the crystals? It seems like maybe you'd have to be a lot more careful of team composition, or maybe having a version of the GM doable for a total of eight would make him 'too weak' to be challenging at all.

Edited Wednesday at 07:19 AM by mechahamham