Posted by ReDDoT in Blue Milk & Cereal | 13 Comments
Blue Milk & Cereal: What Is Your Ideal Raid Size?
No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal. Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!
When a player goes through their class story in Star Wars: The Old Republic, and finally reaches the level cap, he will reach the end-game. While we don’t know BioWare’s exact plan yet, this end-game content is crucial for any MMO, as that’s normally what progression is based around, and what keeps players coming back for more. In many MMOs, this end-game content takes the form of large groups known as raids.
Among the huge variety of MMO games out there, each stands with its own specifics in regards to how many players make up a “raid” group. For example, World of Warcraft’s first raid – Molten Core – was originally a 40-man raid. Today, World of Warcraft’s largest raid size is 25 players. Most current MMO games have raid content that accommodates group sizes of about 20 people.
So far, we know that TOR’s raids will be called Operations. We even have a trailer for one of the operations, titled the Eternity Vault. And just recently we found out from a german GameStar magazine, that interviewed BioWare’s Gabe Amatangelo, that all raids will come in 8 and 16-man sizes, with different difficulty settings per size. This news immediately sparked a large debate on the official forums and is still quite heated. Of course, any news will do that. :)
Personally, I think an 8-man raid is a perfect size. It allows the groups to be organized much quicker, requires a reasonable amount of people, while still keeping the functional organization and coordination at a challenging level. I went through 40-man raids, 25-man raids and many others – and I believe that the ideal size of a group hovers between 8 and 18 people, luckily, TOR seems to be just in that range, so big thumbs up to BioWare from my end.
What about you though? Are you happy with the 8 and 16-man raid size? What’s the ideal raid size for you? Let us know!
Loading ... Loading ...Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Shoulda been bigger.
Sounds like a doable size imho.
Smaller raids means that you won’t need to get into some ridiculously large or exclusive guild in order to raid. If you can get together just a dozen people, you should be able to participate in raiding. That, imo, makes an MMO SO much more accessible.
Naturally, they should still have larger raids for that incredible mass-play experience, but there should be smaller raids, definitely.
I love the 8-man size, personally. I remember running MC etc back in Vanilla WoW. While I admit, that when it worked having all those people working together to slay the beast in front of you was quite epic and felt awesome. When it didn’t work, it felt laborious and like hours of time wasted.
8 is perfect to me. It means more people have to be organized. It means probably two tanks, two or three dedicated healers, and three or four dps. Depending on how ops are set up, maybe it will be switched up from that, with only two dedicated dps, a hybrid dps/healer, a hybrid dps/tank, two healers, and two tanks. We’ll have to wait and see.
I feel that two groups is enough to warrant additional organization and gives the devs the room to make encounters more interesting than a single group can manage, without the whole thing becoming obscenely out of control. For people who want bigger, i’m sure 16 will provide sufficient opportunity for larger experiences.
It’s hard to judge, since we know so little about ops in general and the Eternity Vault specifically. I can’t wait to find out more!
I would have liked to allow larger non-raid groups (What if I have more than 3 friends on? =/) but for operations, I think that 8 and 16 are great sizes. 8 people isn’t that hard to put together, an 16 is large enough to get the full raid experience without being tortuous.
I like the raid sizes. Back in vanilla WoW (when I was single and didn’t have a child), 40 didn’t bother me as I wasn’t pressed for time. But now that that has all changed my time is more restricted. Being able to gather up 7 other buddies and bust out some Ops shouldn’t be too hard to do. When I get to raid I will most likely just have a few hours in the late evening and don’t wanna waste too much of that time organizing a large raid group.
Amen brother! When I think about the hours I spent in MC, BWL, AQ40 and Naxx it brings a brief smile to my face and a long shiver down my spine. No way I could do that now with two baby girls. They helped me come up with my screen name though. ;)
8 man Hard Ops sounds like a real treat to me and with the small tight-knit guild I run with (late at night when babies sleep). After a few months we should have enough people online to run a 16-man here and there. Balancing it so that a 10-20 person guild can run most content is really nice.
Isn’t it so true…many of the hard core WoW ers (back when it was actually a challenge) are now fathers to younger children not to mention husbands as well.
The only time I will get to play is late at night when my wife and daughter are asleep.
I am kind of glad they are making gouping easier as I really don’t have hours to wait for a raid to get organized.
I also don’t do well with guilds as they usually require me to play more than I have time for so I think I will be a PUGer.
I guess I am glad that is why this game has a distinct focus on the single player aspect of the game.
I like the smaller sizes. In WoW, the only way my guild could get a raid together was 10-m. While some people may turn up their nose at it, we liked a small tight-knit guild and needing 35+ people in a guild didn’t really seem “small”.
With the 10-m raids, we were able to “beat” WotLK. Had we needed to do 25-m, I probably never would have seen him.
I’m down for smaller raids.
Great sizes to be honest. I was hoping something like 8 and 12 or 16. These sizes allow you to have a reasonably sized guild that doesn’t need crazy management and still run these raids smoothly as well. It also means there can be more micro management events and individual player skill rather than more macro tactics.
The size makes sense since groups are of four, and everyone will have their own opinon on the size due to convenience. Say that you are going into TOR with a previous group of 10 people that you did normal raids with in WoW, and now you are pressed into finding 6 more people or losing 2. What people think is best is going to be based on their situation.
The bigger issue is the loot system, I prefer competitive looting because it encourages people to do raids and instances more which helps everyone. But we should reserve judgement on this until we actually experience it for ourselves.
I’m not a fan of big RAID sizes (more than 6)for two reasons:
– The time it takes to get a group of people together (not just anyone, but people who know what they’re doing and won’t rage quit if the smallest thing doesn’t go their way)
– Smaller groups reduce LAG and the chance that someone will get link dropped and have to catch back up with the group.
Sounds like Flashpoints are just for you then :)