Cool story.Penril wrote:Spoiler:
I'm not concerned with the "win", it's about competition. What you've detailed is the path that a hardcore player would take. That's great, some people enjoy working at a game for hours and it fulfills them in that way. Yes, groups will win battles when they're coordinated, it's really obvious. The insinuation, and literal translation of the state of the game, is that if you've worked hard for your end-game gear, and you play with an organized group, you deserve _are entitled_ to crushing pugs because you're better now. If you're so concerned about it being an end-game raid, why are you advocating the casual players must stick through being your punching bag? This is the same high-level problem that WAR had back in the day. If you hit R32 and wanted to PvP, you were screwed. The scaling difference from R32 to RR80 for gear is insane, then from RR80-100 was just as bad of a gap, yet still was inexplicably the same tier.
The problem is population density, and not being able to fill that high-level of competition. You need casual players to fill in the gaps, to have an arena where they can fight each other and grind up their skills and gear without being pubstomped on a regular basis. You can't get blue or purple gear unless you score a kill in the first place, even then you're rolling against 11 other people in the hopes it's for that 1 class out of 12. The odds are bad. Casuals are gonna be wearing greens for a long time.
I see you defending the side of those who have worked hard to hit RR30 and wear purple gear, but are you considering the general health of the game at the same time? WAR needed casual players, RoR does too. Every game needs casual players. WAR thought it was going to be hardcore enough back in the day to survive without casual players too, and it didn't, all the while charging us suckers 15$ a month with empty promises of future content to boot. They made a whole shitload of cash pets to sell us instead, which if they had been paying attention, might have mattered to a casual player if any were left. Before the group queue, scens were a place that casuals could jump in, play a couple matches, and kill an hour or two.
But hey, instead of arguing past each other, maybe find a different solution that's more acceptable. No point in tearing out group queue if it's actually working. If it can't be separated into solo/group, what else fixes the issue of driving your casual players out of the one aspect of the game that's made to drop in and play? Make R20 the entry point to the end-game queue, if there's a way to dump premades into that queue as well, even better. This is when you stop leveling, and the only progression left is gearing up, it makes sense to have it separated. This gives players leading up to R19 an arena where the vast majority of players are going to be at least in the same quality of gear and your premades will have that top tier to compete in like they're designed to do.
