Open letter to Bioware about raiding with 16 ppl

You think the end boss of Directive 7 doesn't take "time and effort" or have a "learning curve"?

You better study up on your flashpoints before you make such false, sweeping claims.

WoW went to them being equal and I agreed with the change and I agree with them using it here as well. Its all about preference and what you enjoy doing. The only thing you should get in 16 man is twice the loot. 16 man is just over-tuned. I don't think Bioware really meant for the 16 man normal to be loads harder than 8 man normal. At this point in time though, they have a lot more high priority items to fix / change. Im sure the next tier , coming out in march, will be more balanced.

First time in on D7 hard mode, we one shotted him. He isn't very hard at all. Its no different than other encounters. Avoid stuff, kill stuff, loot.

Sadly I dont see the difference between 8man and 16man for loot being changed anytime soon.

Simple solution. Gear that drops in 8-man Hard/Nightmare drops in 16-man Normal and then 16-man Hard/Nightmare drops a new set (better than Rakata). Do it BioWare.

We do 8-man for the gear. We do 16-man for the feeling of accomplishment. It also gives us a chance to get the guild together.

When coming from WoW or Rift you're doing to have to down-size. 16 of our dedicated raiders from Rift came, but we added a few more before lvl 50 and some that had disappeared in Rift came back in TOR. So, now we're at 25, and we have a rotation of 3 8-man teams. 2 do the 16-man, and 1 does the 8-man. Each week we rotation out.

Gives a chance for everyone to play together and to get the loot from 8-man.

While I'd like for things to change and have 24-man content (since the operations allow up to 24 to be in a group), I doubt they'll do it. Alas, that's what we're stuck with.

You gotta adapt. Don't force guilds to find 16 people just to get the same gear.

Really, just make 16-mans get better vanity stuff (titles, pets, mounts, or differing looking armor sets with the same stats).

All BW needs to do is tune the 16m down alil and add more of the same loot to drop. To balance the gear with the amount of people. This whole adding better loot for 16m will kill 8 man raiding all together.

Why? Simple answer really. Why would a person waste their time doing 8m ops when 16 man gives better loot. Yes some people would still do 8 mans cause they want to raid with a smaller group of people, but why would you keep the best gear in the game from them because they choose to raid in smaller groups. Just cause you choose to raid in a larger group does not give you any more reason to attain the best loot in the game than the person who wants to raid with a smaller group.

This is all about equality in raiding.

I have been following this thread pretty close and hopefully Bioware does the same.....

Simply put the game does need more for the hardcore guilds out there, so the guilds who have been playing together for years and years and the game does need to have different loot in the larger raids - again I don't care if the stats are better but all these games need to get away from the fact you get your loot off a vendor. The 16 mans absolutely need to have prestige gear and should not be the same vendor gear. It is simple if you do not have goals for the hardcore people the game dies.

Whether you like it or not if you are a smaller guild or larger guild with not so many hardcore players the game DOES need to have something to improve or distinguish your character. It boggles my mind how anyone can think differently, you really think a game will survive when you can all go do 8 man hard modes easier than a normal 16 mode and get better gear and not only better but the best in the game? So when you are done getting your Rakata in a few weeks you stop logging in because there is nothing else to improve your toon with? seriously?

Case in point - 2 million pre-orders and 1.7million subs after just over a month. - you lose 300K subs in a month is NOT good at all, and these numbers are decreasing daily.

This also goes similar to PvP - why would any MMO once you hit top level (battlemaster) give you nothing to continue doing pvp (warzones) to upgrade your pvp gear? Sure there is the daily circle jerk on ilum and the 3 warzone wins a day but NONE of that keeps the end PvP players in the warzones!! Make a BM bag cost 1000 warzone comes - something to keep them playing !!

There must be end game reasons to keep people subbed and playing. If there is one thing that ANY new MMO in development must do is allow players to differentiate themselves from others. Players hate looking the same as every other player in an MMO. Most of this change comes in end game gear loot or different fashion so to speak inventories.

It actually amazes me today that new MMO's come out with all these things missing, the race is always to end game level and they all know that but when you get there the game goes south somewhat fast due to ALL the issues many have posted here. End game level 50 or whatever level is all about bettering your character. If you can not better your character past Rakata gear in this game it is a failure as once you have them you are done. Items need to drop off mobs regardless of the 8 man or 16 man. Rare items are a MUST have.



Even putting in actual hard world bosses would be nice.......


One can only hope that EQnext is done just like the original Everquest.

First of all I want to give some kudos to the OP for this intresting topic and secondly for all the good suggestions and arguments all people have brought fourth.

Now more specifically to your quote Viper1: although I'm opposed to you when it comes to 16 man and 8 man raids and how to change them to be more suitable you had some very good arguments that made me reconsider some of mine. =)

So I've mostly raided in WoW from BC to Cata untill FL and did the hc raids since Cata. Personally I liked BC's approach of giving some 10 man raids that led to 25 man raids but as Viper1 pointed out it's not very fair on the players that for what ever reason don't have the ability to do the larger raids. So after thinking about it I came to the conclusion that random epic drops in the larger raid size would be a good thing (I'd like to keep these BOE so we have another moeny dump in the game and people from 8 mans can also benefit from them). I'm also advocating for the larger raid sixe to be harder and aimed at the "Hard-core raiders", thus also giving better equipment ( and unique equipment like a new tier set, before you respond to this let me explain...). The better and unique gear I base on me believing in that harder content should give better rewards (you know high risk and challenge = high reward) and the fact that even if your gear has a different colour if it's heroic mode gear it will still look the same in shape and form thus making you still look like everyone else (instead of having millions of different insects all we have are butterflies in different colours... ok bad example maybe but I hope you get the point).

BUT I don't want this better gear to be a requirement to enter the smaller raid size's new raiding tier. In other words it should be possible to progress in the smaller raiding size enviroment through the smaller raid size-lane solely by solely doing the smaller sized raids (the Random epic BoE's from the larger raid size could be used as a gear crutch in some cases even and as they are BoE do not require you to run the larger raid size version)! This would work the same with the larger raid size lane and (hopefully) creating 2 equally valued raid types. The smaller one for the casual player as it's easier and they also have a right to see the end game content. And the larger raid size for the "hardcore raiders" which is harder. (Maybe the larger raid size does not need better gear only more unique gear but I think the better gear is needed as uniqueness is not enough of an incentive on its own).

When specifically speaking about SWTOR I like the challenge of 16 mans but I think they should be harder, especially in 8 man, although I understand if BW wants to have 8 man as the casual raiding format, because my Guild Diesel on the server Ahto City has cleared both raids on 8 man in all difficulties and cleared 16 man HM EV and all of those raids were fairly simple (this excludes 8 man NM EV as I was not in the raid and thus can't speak of it).
Other than that I'm very pleased with SWTOR and I understand that it's a work in progress (like every MMO ) and can't be perfect at launch but it will get closer to it as time progresses.

Thank you for reading this rather long post. I can understand if some of you think I'm promoting elitism, somethign I know many players abhor. A short answer to that is: yes I'm doing that and I'm aware of it, as I believe that elitism (with all its negative aspects) has some positive aspects and one of the most important of these is that it promotes progression. As this is another topic and I don't want to derail the thread feel free to PM me and we can discuss about it or start another thread together.

Once again thank for reading and I look forward to read other great suggestions and answers (especially from you Viper1 =) ) on this thread.

I'm surprised they even put 16 mans in the game to be honest. If you look at MMOs in general, raid size is shrinking (see EQ, WoW, Rift and now ToR), with smaller raid sizes easier to develop around, itemize and tune. Multiple difficulty levels only compound this problem.

They could have easily avoided these kinds of problems both from a reward and a development standpoint by having only 8 man raids from the beginning. I seriously doubt many, if any, players would have refused to purchase the game had there only been 8 man raids, and it would have made tuning and itemization a lot easier for BW moving forward.

As it is, the only thing they can do really is ensure the difficulty is the same (which is impossible) and/or make one or the other clearly drop better rewards (which is against their design intent of "play how you want.") Either way, large raids are slowly dying out, and BioWare could have avoided these issues completely.