Chaotic Alliance Raid: More Content for Professional Gamers

[Amh_Wilzuun]

Man if this raid was at like mild EX level difficulty it would’ve been such a hit.

[sweetietreat]

"SE needs to make harder content... No that's too hard"
"SE needs to make harder content... No that's too easy"

Man, if people spent even half as much time and effort trying to prog these fights (Chaotic) as they do complaining about the same content that they asked Square for..

Chaotic is not a hard fight. The mechanics are nothing new, or difficult. The only difficulty is getting twenty four people to either stick around to learn/practice mechanics, or not leave a farm/kill party after 1-2 wipes. That's it. This fight is on the same level of difficulty, mechanic wise, as any other extreme trial fight. It's not savage level. It's certainly not Ultimate level.
And I say this as someone who doesn't touch savage or Ultimate (lul).

People complained that DT dungeons were too difficult... So I guess the bar for "difficulty" is already set pretty low to begin with.
If you want to do the fight (Chaotic), then do it. It's that simple. Make your own PF, if nothing else, and learn the mechanics. People will and do still join practice/prog parties - content is literally only a week old, there's plenty of time to learn the fight, even weeks/months ahead. If you are spending "hours" trying to fill a party, then you need to go to whatever DC in your region is the "raiding" DC and look for/create a PF there (if EU can mange PFs that don't take hours to fill, anyone can).

The level of actual difficulty of Chaotic is a twenty four man extreme trial, that's it. If you can manage an extreme trial, or even a normal twenty four man raid, you can manage Chaotic. Heck, if you can even manage one of the (normal) eight man raids, you can manage Chaotic.

But for the love, stop asking for "harder" content and then complaining when it's added. Stop expecting to have your hand held throughout every single content in the game. The same people would, very likely, be complaining if Chaotic was added and it was no more difficult than any other twenty four man alliance raid, only much shorter. When a duty is advertised that it's intended to be on level with savage raids... I don't know what people were actually expecting. Other than to actually have their hand held through said content (and then later complain that it's "too easy").

[BigCheez]

- Had to remove post content for character limit -

Wildstar bombed because it was essentially abandoned by the devs and turned into a microtransaction hellscape. Its failure had little to nothing to do with the gameplay. The actual game content was generally very well received.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJrPrnAUKJ0

RE: Struggling with alliance raids and normal raids - this is because the game has allowed you to coast to level cap without learning how to play it. If dungeons and trials did a better job at teaching players how to play the game, you wouldn't have this problem and bridging the gap from normal content to extreme/savage would likely seem much more realistic.

[Mawlzy]

Wildstar bombed because it was essentially abandoned by the devs and turned into a microtransaction hellscape. Its failure had little to nothing to do with the gameplay. The actual game content was generally very well received.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJrPrnAUKJ0

RE: Struggling with alliance raids and normal raids - this is because the game has allowed you to coast to level cap without learning how to play it. If dungeons and trials did a better job at teaching players how to play the game, you wouldn't have this problem and bridging the gap from normal content to extreme/savage would likely seem much more realistic.

I remain unconvinced of this. I agree with your graph and how the learning/difficulty curve needs to be smoothed, but if EX+ continues to involve raid plans, (semi-)statics, and time coordination, the majority of NA/EU players will never engage with it.

We've discussed this within my FC and the consensus response to "shall we try EX on cycle" is "what's the point?" Just unsynch it in a couple of patches time.

[BigCheez]

I remain unconvinced of this. I agree with your graph and how the learning/difficulty curve needs to be smoothed, but if EX+ continues to involve raid plans, (semi-)statics, and time coordination, the majority of NA/EU players will never engage with it.

We've discussed this within my FC and the consensus response to "shall we try EX on cycle" is "what's the point?" Just unsynch it in a couple of patches time.

You're right but I think that's ok. There has to be a line drawn in the sand somewhere between content that doesn't require any preparation, organisation or co-ordination and content that does, and some people just won't want to cross that line and that's fine.

I don't think everyone needs to do high-end content but I do believe strongly that bridging the gap from normal to extreme shouldn't feel impossible. There shouldn't be people who would like to do high-end content but feel like they can't because the gap between the content that they have experience with and high-end content is too great.

[Jeeqbit]

I remain unconvinced of this. I agree with your graph and how the learning/difficulty curve needs to be smoothed, but if EX+ continues to involve raid plans, (semi-)statics, and time coordination, the majority of NA/EU players will never engage with it.

Sometimes extremes involve a sort of raidplan, but often they don't matter and are just an optional thing to help people. Example of some past extremes that were hard without showing a guide was Tsukuyomi (but nevertheless I've managed to explain it to first timers before and clear) and Hades ex (because it involved O9S strat and only people who did Omega savage knew it).

In most extremes, if you don't see a guide but you keep pulling, you'll eventually see all the possible combinations of mechanics and get used to what makes you live and what doesn't. Guides are just meant to save time by spoiling all the possible combinations and how to resolve them, but it's still realistic to clear them in a day (if not a single timer) without a guide. I think the second party I joined for Valigarmanda blind we got to enrage and when I did it later post-savage release it was ridiculously easy and forgiving due to item levels. And that one is still technically in-tier and gives Echo stacks if you wipe which make you even more overpowered.

Again I'm not saying everyone wants to do extremes and unsyncing it later on is popular in this game because of a lot of people not feeling confident doing it when it's new, but extremes are such that if people just do them for a day with no guides, they'll still usually clear them. Things like "8 people stand in the 8 towers" or "stand northwest to avoid that mechanic" or "stand where the danger isn't" become pretty obvious after enough wipes, while in other cases the mechanic isn't that dangerous anyway and just gives a harmless damage down for getting it wrong.

Going back to the Valigarmanda example, doing it blind simply wasted time. Because we were figuring "oh that is a light party stack" and "oh that is partner stacks" and "oh that is a spread", which if we'd watched a guide it would have made the clear quicker. But a guide wasn't actually needed.

I think the main issue with extremes is just that PF makes people anxious to participate, whereas if they can direct queue and get a pop then nobody can kick them for messing up. An issue that I understand JP doesn't have because they direct queue, so the developers think it's fine since they are obviously JP.

[Mawlzy]

You're right but I think that's ok. There has to be a line drawn in the sand somewhere between content that doesn't require any preparation, organisation or co-ordination and content that does, and some people just won't want to cross that line and that's fine.

I don't think everyone needs to do high-end content but I do believe strongly that bridging the gap from normal to extreme shouldn't feel impossible. There shouldn't be people who would like to do high-end content but feel like they can't because the gap between the content that they have experience with and high-end content is too great.

I guess my instinct on this is people who want to bridge the gap from normal to extreme are those that find normal too easy, and thus likely have the intrinsic capabilities to make it relatively trivial for them.

Potentially this would make it counter-productive to ramp up the difficulty of normal/required, since it'd just MSQ-gate people who never had any desire to do extreme in the first place.

I dunno, there must be some middle ground, and I agree with you we're likely not currently sitting on it.

[Lilapop]

"SE needs to make harder content... No that's too hard"
"SE needs to make harder content... No that's too easy"

Man, if people spent even half as much time and effort trying to prog these fights (Chaotic) as they do complaining about the same content that they asked Square for..

Chaotic is not a hard fight. The mechanics are nothing new, or difficult. The only difficulty is getting twenty four people to either stick around to learn/practice mechanics, or not leave a farm/kill party after 1-2 wipes. That's it. This fight is on the same level of difficulty, mechanic wise, as any other extreme trial fight. It's not savage level. It's certainly not Ultimate level.
And I say this as someone who doesn't touch savage or Ultimate (lul).

People complained that DT dungeons were too difficult... So I guess the bar for "difficulty" is already set pretty low to begin with.
If you want to do the fight (Chaotic), then do it. It's that simple. Make your own PF, if nothing else, and learn the mechanics. People will and do still join practice/prog parties - content is literally only a week old, there's plenty of time to learn the fight, even weeks/months ahead. If you are spending "hours" trying to fill a party, then you need to go to whatever DC in your region is the "raiding" DC and look for/create a PF there (if EU can mange PFs that don't take hours to fill, anyone can).

The level of actual difficulty of Chaotic is a twenty four man extreme trial, that's it. If you can manage an extreme trial, or even a normal twenty four man raid, you can manage Chaotic. Heck, if you can even manage one of the (normal) eight man raids, you can manage Chaotic.

But for the love, stop asking for "harder" content and then complaining when it's added. Stop expecting to have your hand held throughout every single content in the game. The same people would, very likely, be complaining if Chaotic was added and it was no more difficult than any other twenty four man alliance raid, only much shorter. When a duty is advertised that it's intended to be on level with savage raids... I don't know what people were actually expecting. Other than to actually have their hand held through said content (and then later complain that it's "too easy").

It's confirmed to be a 24 person Savage trial apparently. No... just because you can do any normal alliance raid doesn't mean you can do a Chaotic raid. Same for a normal eight man. What? Half of your post is just incorrect, the other half is "just do it"

[AmiableApkallu]

There has to be a line drawn in the sand somewhere between content that doesn't require any preparation, organisation or co-ordination and content that does, and some people just won't want to cross that line and that's fine.

I don't think everyone needs to do high-end content but I do believe strongly that bridging the gap from normal to extreme shouldn't feel impossible. There shouldn't be people who would like to do high-end content but feel like they can't because the gap between the content that they have experience with and high-end content is too great.

The way I see it, the problem is not that the line exists, or that it exists between Normal and Extreme.

The problem is if you're someone hoping to jump into high-end content, you open Party Finder, and the majority of listings are just word soup. And while it's true that anyone can put up their own listing with their own requirements and whatnot, when you (figuratively) read the room, you get the sense that word soup is the norm and... you have no idea what any of that means or where to start.

[SieyaM]

I seems a lot of the people who are calling this easy or "not as hard as savage" are people who have been doing savage or ultimate content for years. Which kind of proves the point that the only people who are able to approach this content with any kind of confidence or ease are people who are already engaging in the other high end content. That would mean that no this is not for mid-core or casual players and as self proclaimed "hard-core raiders" you really don't get to say what should or shouldn't be easy for other groups of players that you don't belong to.