Suggestion: Expand Sortie Event to Accommodate Alliances of 18 Players

[Pixela]

The amount of data that gets sent around when in an alliance today makes it problematic, it works if it's a load of casual players but if you are in an alliance of min/maxers it will be hellish.

The only way they could make this work would be to allow alliances to queue, but break them into 3 groups inside as with Omen or something. Or people to communicate in chat still but remove all the alliance ui stuff.

When you have 3 parties, and half of them or more are using gearswap to constantly change gear for every possible reason the amount of UI HP/MP updates being sent to everyone is insanity, which normally would not matter but when you run a game with 56k cap it does.

Either that or just add a ui option to hide block data being sent about mp bars of anyone outside your party at a bare minimum or something.

Make a video of an alliance with a lot of people using GS and their hp and mp bars are constantly bouncing around, and every single change from every single player is sent to everyone's client every second.

Try Dyna D with a group of casual players in an alliance and then try it with a load of people using gearswap, and awe at the lag as the connection gets congested.

[Feanorsof]

I agree with this, please make Sortie 18 man or provide us with some alliance content before the developers leave for other projects...

This game has kept us all playing not just for the content but the community and was built on linkshells and alliance content for its endgame. There are still linkshells out here who need alliance content and we've been doing dynamis for almost 6 years.
Forcing us into 6 man content is just breaking up these communities and ruining this aspect of the game.

[Alhanelem]

And I get that some people are concerned that people could be "carried." To you I say, so what? If you don't want to "carry" people, don't! Problem solved!!

Except problem not solved because some people did the work and others didn't. Of course the people who aren't carrying people don't want to carry people, and already don't. Duh? The problem is that allowing this minimizes the work other people put into getting what they want.

You can still play with friends. Why do 18 of you have to do it simultaneously? Play with different people each day, you still have odyssey.

This content wasn't designed for 18 players, just letting 18 people in with no changes absolutely and completely trivializes the content and also trivializes Prime Weapon progression. And I don't see how they can adjust the content for 18 players without punishing the people who were doing it with just a few before and don't have 18 friends.

This gets a hard no from me. You might have a whole army of friends but a lot of us don't and doing something like this puts the have-nots at a disadvantage.

Forcing us into 6 man content is just breaking up these communities and ruining this aspect of the game.

Form three groups and go in at the same time. Chat with eachother in linkshell. I fail to see how this is a problem.

Again, you may have 18 buddies to do stuff with at all hours of the day but a lot of people don't. This is why they leaned heavily towards 6 man content. I don't get it, this isn't a problem in other games, which have all generally moved away from massive groups for content. WoW used to have 40 man raids and it doesn't anymore.

I've generally disliked alliance content anyway, since it usually takes like an hour just to prepare for it, then you gotta wait for that one guy to go onto three mules to swap out the gear for the job he's playing and yadayada yeah no thanks.

Sortie is not going to become alliance content. What is really being said is that the player base would like alliance content to be considered for future updates. Alliance content supports larger linkshells and more social play. That's what we want.

Then say that. This thread is clearly about sortie, not new content.

[RichLester]

Well, making Sortie 18-man would allow people to get to the 1 mil gal we need to at least get one prime weapon stage 2 but there is the issue of now that Resurgence has finished, it's pretty much the last expansion so servers may dwindle down to just a few people on at any one time, depending on the time of day & server.

At the moment, I'm finding I'm stacking loads of sapphires & eikondrites with no way of trading them in for gal for the prime weapon stage 2. We still have stages 3 & 4 to go with 2 new items. If they are 2 mil & 3 mil gal respectively, I feel there's no point getting the prime weapons as we'll never get there. Focusing on getting empy+3 gear for jobs is much more beneficial. Also, the text said 1 mil gal to have the prime weapon "fully upgraded"? That's plain wrong as its stage 2 with 3 and 4 left to go.

As for the community, depends which linkshells you're in & if they are active enough at the time or you'll be soloing Sortie to get 5k gal to not waste time.

All this needs fixing somehow. I don't mind a bit of a grind, just not 1 mil gal just for prime weapon stage 2.

[Alhanelem]

Well, ask yourself what you're going to do after you complete your prime weapon. There's nothing that especially requires it so.... the only thing to do is grind more prime weapons.

That's why the grind is long. It is specifically an objective to keep us busy as long as possible. While the devs have indicated that there will be some updates in the future, it's going to be a while.

[RichLester]

I play the game casually, knowing that once i got high level weapons & gear, I go and complete a load of outstanding quests I have stored up over the years, just to watch the cutscenes. I did the missions & quests I needed to do. Did a load of quests in the 3 main cities but have plenty in WotG & Aht Urghan to be getting on with. The ones who will continue grinding for prime weapons are those who have completed all the quests & got jobs up to lvl 99 already.

[Immortal]

I am always open to more options, I dont see any problem with it

[Alhanelem]

I am always open to more options, I dont see any problem with it

More options is not always a good thing.

As I said, allowing 18 players would mainly have negative effects:
- It would trivialize the content without a massive rebalancing which would exclude solos and small groups
- By extension it would mean you can add a bunch of people who don't have to do anything to get content currency, and/or let people get it a lot faster than originally intended without rebalancing
- Without said massive rebalancing, the content would simply be less fun becuase any challenge the content might have is reduced.

Playing with more friends at the same time doesn't really outweigh these problems from my perspective.
The desires of big linkshells shouldn't outweigh the desires of solo players and smaller circles of friends either.

And rebalancing = work, and there is limited dev time avialable.

[Sp1cyryan]

More options is not always a good thing.

As I said, allowing 18 players would mainly have negative effects:
- It would trivialize the content without a massive rebalancing which would exclude solos and small groups
- By extension it would mean you can add a bunch of people who don't have to do anything to get content currency, and/or let people get it a lot faster than originally intended without rebalancing
- Without said massive rebalancing, the content would simply be less fun becuase any challenge the content might have is reduced.

Playing with more friends at the same time doesn't really outweigh these problems from my perspective.
The desires of big linkshells shouldn't outweigh the desires of solo players and smaller circles of friends either.

And rebalancing = work, and there is limited dev time avialable.

I agree.

They just have half a party of botting mules that they want to leech points. Their viewpoint is inherently bias and without regard to balance.

[Sirmarki]

They just have half a party of botting mules that they want to leech points. Their viewpoint is inherently bias and without regard to balance.

It just opens it up to more Mercing.

So, it's a no from me.