Feldon 
A funny thing happened when I was chatting with some folks about today’s news of Critical Mitigation being completely removed from EQ2. A few of them were surprised when I reminded them that Crit Mit has been part of EQ2 for over 3 years.
Critical Mitigation was introduced in November 2008 with The Shadow Odyssey expansion. At first, it played no part in solo quests or group zones, thus many people weren’t even aware of it at the time. But anyone who was into raiding x4 (24 person) zones, and later, Ward of Elements x2 raids, has been collecting this stat for a while.
The Shadow Odyssey was fairly gradual with the amount of Crit Mit required. At the time, exceptional healers could keep an undergeared character alive long enough to get necessary gear upgrades.
Sentinel’s Fate cranked things up a bit, requiring at least 1-2 Crit Mit adornments to do the harder content and making it a bit harder for healers to “cover” for a player who a few points short.
But Destiny of Velious went completely bananas, initially requiring Crit Mit to do all raid, group AND solo content. Many of us fondly remember getting one-shotted by badgers and sea urchins during the Velious Beta.
Everywhere Crit Mit
At the launch of Velious, each group zone had a progression of gear, and that progression HAD to be followed to get enough Crit Mit to even consider moving into the next set of group zones. And unlike the somewhat forgiving Crit Mit mechanic of past expansions, Velious made Crit Mit a “do or die” stat. Being a few points short became a death sentence.
Although the requirement of Crit Mit was eventually dropped for solo content, and more recently for all group content except Drunder, the requirements for raiding have remained incredibly steep.
As a result, Velious has attracted parallels to the merciless “back-flagging” that made the original EverQuest’s Planes of Power expansion so maddening. Every new applicant to a raiding guild has needed remedial trips to raid zones and targets which the guild has moved on from (typically EM or non-Challenge zones), just to get the right gear pieces to have enough Critical Mitigation to even dream of resuming work on their usual targets.
Ironically, it was into this climate of challenging progression that EQ2’s well-intentioned Dungeon Finder service blundered into and promptly collapsed. A system that randomizes player styles and skill levels into a random selection of zones only works if the content is interchangeable. Dungeon Finder would have been a fantastic introduction in Kunark or The Shadow Odyssey, but with Velious tiered content, it never had a chance.
If I recall correctly, Critical Mitigation was introduced as a way to mitigate the need for bi-annual level cap raises which tend to be a tremendous drain on development resources for content which, quite frankly, most people burn through in a week or two.
Ending the Crit Mit Rat Race
Before today’s news, I had been advocating a 20-30% across-the-board reduction in Critical Mitigation requirements. This would be a big enough change that raiders wouldn’t need to walk down memory lane quite so often, and players would have the option of equipping adornments other than Crit Mit.
You may recall that the mechanics changes in Velious (stripping cool effects/procs off most items and moving them to Adornments) were sold to players with the lofty idea that it would usher in an era of freedom of choice.
Yet acquiring new gear has been the definition of mixed emotions, as a a steady stream of Primal Velium Shards has been needed to re-purchase Crit Mit adornments for each new slightly upgraded piece of gear just to stay in the Crit Mit rat race.
The reality was, anyone serious about progressing through the harder group zones, into x2 raids, and finally into x4 raids had only one choice of adornment — Crit Mit. An EQ2 developer famously stated that any EQ2 player interested in progression should exclusively be using Critical Mitigation adornments.
A New Progression?
Love or hate Crit Mit, it has marked the progression of gear beyond level 90 for two going on three expansions. Short of raising the level cap, which seems unlikely based on past development comments, what will be the next “progression” stat?
The ugly truth is, every MMO is a treadmill. The art of MMO design is concealing that reality and doing so tastefully.
If the required crit mit levels had been assigned with even half a brain in play, it wouldn’t be the ugly swear word it is now. I agree with your idea of lowering the levels 20-30%, enough to free up 3 or 4 adornment slots for something actually useful. But we all know how it goes–either you barely get something, or a lot of it. Witness the ‘This Expansion’s Overused Mechanic’ tradition going back years…
I’m rambling, but I guess if they can’t be reasonable in how something is used, the tool just needs to be taken from the toolbox.
The progression stat is seeing how many more long time players quit the game.
another week another stuff up… not too many weeks to go before EQ2 stops looking like a fun option for me.
are you kidding after working to get the gear and buying the adornments you now just BAM change it . maybe will help non raiders and thats good but is a knife in the back to all of us worked to gain the high crit mit .once again i dislike velious worst expansion in the games history full of bugs , tons of nerfs and far more than i care to list . and AOD is a hollow shell of a expansion seen nothing so far worth my 40 bucks that i don’t mind paying soe IF YOU GET IT TOGETHER . yep dream on , i know but it’s eather hope they do or leave the game after 7 years . return to SF / ROK ways the best expansions ever and leave the velious armor as is . just add new content and in time move away from velious with it’s lame , boring , yawn giants .
Where did this quote come from?
Critical Mitigation is your protection or mitigation of the enemy’s ability to “Critical” against you. If an enemy has 30% Crit Chance, then you need 30% Critical Mitigation to reduce its damage to “normal”.
Cuss it’s different than what I’ve read previously (crit mit reduces the mob’s crit multiplier against you) and would make reading the monster’s CRIT BONUS stat pointless. But whatever, i guess it isn’t going to matter anyway for much longer.
Well, summoners should be happy if HP becomes part of the new progression checks.
CM was a pretty cheap way to deal with progression when we already have 4 kinds of resists that could be managed. Critical Avoidance is equally lame, maybe it will be the next to die.
“Critical Avoidance is equally lame, maybe it will be the next to die.”
So you want no real character progression at all? You want to go into a raid zone and just have all the mobs die the second you enter and loot corpses?
@Necromancer: Yes, because before critical mitigation and critical avoidance were added to the game, that’s how it worked. You should have seen it. We could walk into any raid zone, type “/say All your loot are belong to us” and all the mobs just died and dropped their chests. 🙂
You also seem to forget during that mythical time, itemization and stats were completely different. Classes were not dumbed down to just two stats. STR, INT, WIS, and AGI each did different things. Then you had things like Heal Amount, Spell Damage, Combat Art Damage, Taunt Amount, Critical Chance, amongst various other stat modifiers that made classes and gear a lot more dynamic. Progression was there because of the level of complexity that went into finding the proper assortment of gear to properly equip your character so that it could survive in various different content – depending on what your raid force was doing at that time.
You’ve always struck me as one of those ungrateful players that wants everything handed to them, dethdlr. The one’s that don’t actually want to play the game, but what the game to play its self for them. The one’s that want everything to come easy without having to actually progress. The kind of player that doesn’t want any sort of challenge, and wants to conquer everything right off the bat.
I suppose that’s why you enjoy the changes – it makes the content of EQ2 that much easier for players like you who want no challenge or actual progression…and want everything handed to them.
I find your post extremely offensive and just as ignorant.
The only thing that mattered in Kunark and TSO was player skill. Hardcore raiders successfully cleared Kunark using Echoes of Faydwer raid gear. TSO was cleared with almost entirely Kunark raid gear.
It was not until SF and even worse Velious that player skill took a backseat to “back flagging”, having to run and rerun the same “easy” raid zones repeatedly until every player in your raid force had this artificial Crit Mit stat not to succeed but just to survive.
The point Dethdlr was making, which you seem to have missed, is that player skill on its own seems to get you nowhere, whereas merely average players (who do less than 1/2 the DPS parse, heal parse, etc. of a more skilled player) are coasting along in successful raid guilds because of two things — their willingness to kill the same mobs over and over and over for loot they already have, and their Crit Mit score. Collecting Crit Mit has turned into collecting baseball cards. You keep buying new packs of cards every week, opening them up and hoping that a card you need is contained in the package.
If you think that’s a “challenge” but people who have worked on casting orders and strategy to bring up their skill at DPS, Healing, and Tanking but haven’t grinded old zones for 8 months want “everything handed to them”, then you’re an idiot.
Woah woah woah!
You mean there was challenge? I’m sorry, but EQ2 has always been a comparatively ‘easy’ game.
The choice to make Critical Mitigation your checkpoint flags was just a bad decision all around. It was a lazy way out.
Crit Mit doesn’t add fun, it doesn’t add complexity. It adds tedium and it’s good it’s leaving.
If you want to make things hard then use scripting to do it. Tighten timing. Punish inattention.
And as far as progression goes? No one’s beaten the current progression and I’m sure they’re already past the Critical Mitigation checks anyway. So how’s this going to change things? People are still going to get curb-stomped if they try to go into zones with crap gear and, more importantly, crap skills.
The world is not ending.
I already played that expansion. The one with failure conditions where if you don’t do something in 4 seconds, the raid wipes. It was called The Shadow Odyssey. NEVER AGAIN.
The mobs which haven’t been killed are BUGGED. Look at the number of “patch day kills” this expansion. That’s mobs that don’t die until bugs or design flaws are fixed.
I love these folks passing judgment on EQ2 raiding who obviously haven’t raided since Kunark, if at all.
@Necro
What good does it do you to take your criticism to the level of a personal attack? Call me crazy but DethDlr didn’t attack you on a personal level. Your post is very presumptive about him and I for one think it was uncalled for. I “happen” to agree with DethDlr but I see your points as well. However, you have lost any credibility with me due to taking your comment to an unneeded “shot” at someone who disagrees with you simply because they don’t share your view.
I’m going to have to agree with Dethdlr as well. I’ve played the game since the beginning, and I’ve raided for years. Raid content worked before CM, and CA, and there was no real reason to add it to raiding to begin with. Raiding wasn’t sunshine and lollipops, with free fabled loot before CM. The raid zones while most were just tank and spank, many still yet had thought put into them to make them a challenge. You didn’t need a special armor stat just to play. What CM showed was lack of vision in how to produce raid content in a way to make it fun and challenging. It was a product of a lazy content team. It was duct tape place over the hole in the Titanic. A failed idea that only time would prove to be a poor idea. It was compounded by their idea to included the stat outside of raids. And by doing so proving just how flawed the idea was.
Raiding can have progression without having special stats. It did in the past, and it can again.
As much as Crit Mit may have been a PITA an even bigger pain is the constant need to rebuild characters to suit the whims of developers.
Personally I think there are a lot more issues that need to be dealt with in this game such as the relegation of healers to spamming the cure button or the whole reactive nature of the healing professions.
Oh please, Feldon. The concept of Critical Mitigation was added to include another level of depth to the content of EverQuest 2. It was designed to actually put in another layer of progression in order to make players actually work, earn and progress through the content as presented. It provided a benchmark for players and raid forces alike to know where they stood in progression and what they needed to work on in order to progress more – that is the concept of an MMO – to actually go through the content, step by step as you obtain more gear and more skill.
Now, the removal of Critical Mitigation completely obliterates that notion of progression. Anybody with any armor can come into any of the DoV or Drunder raid zones and survive just as well as someone who has worked for the past year in order to obtain their mixture of Easy Mode and hard Mode gear – thus nullifying the hard work they have put in, and thus nullifying the sense of progression. Do you even understand or comprehend what actually entails?
You bring up “skilled players”, and if a player is truly skilled a raid force will take him and put in the time to gear that skilled player up because that is generally the respect they get. People understand that as a raid, back tracking is needed sometimes, especially if you have a truly skilled player worth investing the time into. Both of my raid forces have done it and we’ve become better for it. It’s called sacrifice.
I also find it ironic you sit there and say things like “8 months of killing the same mob” – well what exactly do you think is going to happen now? Kael and possibly even drunder will be rendered completely useless because the barriers of separation that separated raid forces are now gone with the removal of Crit Mit – meaning, now, everyone will be attempting, and clearing content they should not be ready for otherwise. Eventually, and I’m assuming maybe 3-4 months after this change goes to live, a lot of different guilds will reach the end of progression content, and will be forced to do the same things over and over and over again without anything to progress to. A lot of people will reach the end of what the current content of EQ2 entails and will have nothing else to do because of the removal of crit Mit – or do you not see this? Replacing months and months of killing the same mob for gear to raise crit mit with months and months of killing the same mob because it’s the end of the current content is foolish.
I have a lot of respect for you Feldon, but I highly disagree with you on all of this and i figured you’d be able to see the much larger picture as you usually do, but you’re not with this.
Necromancer,
I never advocated the removal of Critical Mitigation, only its reduction from “You must have every last piece of armor from one tier of content AND every adornment available with Crit Mit before you can even THINK of doing the next tier” to being only a FACTOR in the measure of success. Basically how it and other stats were from the launch of the game until Sentinel’s Fate.
I appreciate that you’ve been on SOE’s Progression Hamster Wheel for the last year, but look around you at the number of raid guilds that have collapsed. I don’t have hard numbers, but the burnout factor seems to be absolutely through the roof.
3-4 months is a normal amount of time to complete an expansion’s content. Yet here we are in February and some of the content introduced in a Game Update from August remains untouched. That’s not normal.
Should raiding require hard work? Absolutely. Is back-flagging to some degree necessary? Always. With Kunark and TSO, it was Mythical weapons. But Velious got ridiculous and I don’t know anyone who thinks the current rate of progression by world first guilds, let alone us mere mortals, is sustainable.
I think completely removing Crit Mit was a total overreaction, as with many of SmokeJumper’s directives.
A reduction in crit mit requires would have been perfectly fine because obviously the difficulty of content is currently too steep when you have top guilds struggling to get through hard mode Drunder and into Plane of War, despite the fact GU61 launched what…4 months ago?
Removing crit mit all together is a stupid decision, and will have a drastically negative impact on the game overall.
I can say one thing: This might actually make me come back to the game, pay for an unlock for a full set of gear and see what I missed in Drunder and stuff.
OK, I must be missing something. Why does everyone keep insisting that this will make things EASIER. Currently people gear up with crit mit to the level that no one takes any criticals. Definitely the tanks and main healers, preferably everyone. From now on everyone will take critical. Damage output will jump 30%-50%. HP may go up, but heals will be unaffected.
I think that HP will become the new CM and it will be worse than current CM requirements.
Crit Mit turns me off grouping and raiding because even though I consider myself a very good healer, and people I’ve raided with in the past could vouch for that, if I don’t have enough CM, there is no chance I’m going anywhere. I hate it when mechanics like this are put in, it turns the game into “if you don’t have this piece of gear or enough of this stat, we want nothing to do with you”, rather then “as long as they know how to play their class, and don’t have a bad reputation, bring them along” like it should be. This kind of mechanic forces me to do nothing but solo. When I’m healer, I do my best to make sure people stay alive. I thought THAT was supposed to be what really mattered.
Eschia,
You will still not be able to jump into raiding because of mob’s crit avoidance and the similar debuff put on healers crit chance. Drunder raid zones require 270 to 310 crit chance (easy to hard modes) to crit 100% of the time. If you go in as a healer with significantly less than that, your heals will be inadequate. So are they supposed to remove Crit Avoidance from raid zones now as well?
@Makya:
That’s exactly the problem. Eschia could be the most skilled healer that has ever played the game (I don’t know Eschia, just saying). But because Eschia doesn’t have the crit chance, Eschia’s heals will be “inadequate”.
Wouldn’t it be better if the game rewarded skill over time played? Prior to mobs having crit avoidance, if Eschia was the most skilled healer that ever played the game, you’d notice it if they came along on a raid. Now, Eschia would seem inadequate, regardless of skill. Sad.
Why don’t we remove all gear from the game? Then only player skill matters?
I know what you are saying about player skill but MMORPG are always about player skill AND gear. In good and balanced MMORPG player skill and gear are equally important but most of them leans towards gear, it’s the nature of the genre. If you want player skill to be far more important than gear, then why not play an FPS or MMOFPS?
Lets remove critical avoidance but what’s next? Hit rates? Spell resists?
I have to agree with Feldon, the skill of a player got lost in the DoV crit mit fest to such an extent it has become a running joke. There are quite alot of players in raid guilds who as was stated are coasting on crit mit not that they are bad players per say but that skill rarely comes into play…I’m concerned at the possibilty of asking more from healers with the removal of crit mit due to increased incoming damage (I play a templar in raid) and needing 2 healer per group setups even in em potentially but until this goes live I can speculate all I want.
Kind of more concerned with the fact they are taking it out but leaving avoidance in, it all needs to come out, I just seeing this being one huge mess thats going to take a lot of patches to get it right.
Wish I could +1 Dethdlr’s comment lol.
@Badcat
If you remove avoidance, how do you propose that tanks (and everyone in general) mitigate damage?
Personally, I like the fact every adornment doesn’t have to be crit mit is a welcome change, so now the “player skill” of customizing gear is more flexible like the adornments were supposed allow.
Secondly, the design theory example comes to mind is akin to Dark Souls/Ninja Gaiden vs Skyrim/Fallout. In other words, what is more fun?… Being able to outgear content to the point of trivial difficulty and come back and own it (Skyrim/Fallout). Or having content that is difficult regardless of the tools/gear provided. (Dark Souls/Ninja Gaiden) – granted some might argue with more tools the stuff gets easier.. but I don’t trivial.
My point being is I think the removal of crit mit isn’t the end of the world. Although, our (play) world is at the mercy of the devs for what direction they intend to go. In wait and see mode.
@ dethdlr
“That’s exactly the problem. Eschia could be the most skilled healer that has ever played the game (I don’t know Eschia, just saying). But because Eschia doesn’t have the crit chance, Eschia’s heals will be “inadequate”.”
So removed crit chance. Then hps become the determining factor? Then what if Eschia is the most skilled that ever played but doesn’t have the hps? Get rid of hps? Then what? Resists? Main stat? Crit bonus? Potency?
Where does it stop?
CritMit to me just narrowed it down to one stat. It was basically a gear score that determined if you were overall more than likely geared correctly for the level zone you were in. Agreed it was implemented incorrectly. But as Feldon and others have suggested, a reduction in the required cm would have fixed the issue imo.
Removing cm isn’t going to solve the problem of ‘great’ players in bad gear not being effective. Its just going to make determining what is good gear vs bad gear even harder to determine.
Necro, CM was NOT put in to make the players “work”. It was put in so the Devs did not have to work so hard at designing content that the players would blow through. Without CM and or impossible timing (as pointed out) the players would just eat up content, thus the need for either better game design or an artificial road block to slow the players down.
Also as has been said, red arornmanets were supposed to add flavor back to the classes. I remember being really really excited to be able to add some class skills type adornments to my healers, only to be TOLD that I needed Crit Mit adorns to even be able to go into the raid zones. What a total waste of a good idea.
Agreed Grimmond.
Again, to me at least, the issue wasn’t cm in general. It was that the cm levels were to high.
To me it should have worked like this:
To do Drunder content you would need a full set of Rygorr, which would carry maybe a total cm value of 160.
If you were missing a piece or 2, you could adorn cm to make up for it. Thus, ‘undergeared’ toons could still participate. There was a way to make up for a less than perfect gear set. A talented player could do drunder with less than the full set (thus providing a way to adress dethdlrs concerns).
As your gear matches or exceeds the level of cm expected, replace the cm adorns with the fun stuff the gear was intended for.
Drunder1 will give ya better gear drops (and thus better cm values) to do drunder2. Etc etc.
Let’s face it, other than removing gear entirely, there will ALWAYS be a gear level required to do harder content. Cm was something I always just looked at as a gear score, that made figuring out what overall level I needed easier to determine, and also assured me (within reason fo couse) that the people I was grouping with weren’t just being dragged thru a zone they shouldn’t have been in yet.
People are getting lost in the numbers.
Faydwer, Kunark, and to a lesser extent TSO did not discourage “reaching” or trying to do content harder than you probably should have been trying given the gear most people had.
SF and Velious said “You must grind mob A until every member of your raid force has their items. Until you do this, you cannot even attempt mob B.” Repeat ad nauseum.
This is like saying that you cannot ski any Green circle slopes until you have done every Blue square slope on the planet, and you cannot attempt to ski any Black diamond slope until you have first practiced every Blue square slope in the world. It’s insane.
To some degree, game designers should not be afraid to let players set their own pace. If the players try content and, not through any SINGLE stat, but due to various deficiencies in the raid strategy, roster, or gear, they have to regroup and do some remedial content, so be it.
Velious smacks you in the face any time you try to “reach”.
I really don’t see how anything has changed. You can still “reach”. If you “overreach” you fail. Same as its always been. Only difference now is you’ve got a more defined set point for “over reaching”. Again, the cm is way too high and doesn’t allow enough room to reach, that I won’t argue for a second. But I still think, if used properly, its a useful stat.
So we will ski. I’ll run one grean circle slope and then decide to “reach” and run a black diamond. I seemed pretty good so why not? But wait. There are 23 other people running the black diamond also. And we are all roped together. If one or 2 fall we can probably haul them up and continue on. But if more than that go down we will all crash. That’s right, we will wipe.
If only there was some type of system in place that would give me a quick indication of the experience of the other 23 before we started, so that I could replace those that were too ‘green’ and thus likely not skilled enough with someone that would not only not hinder the rest, buit actually help! Wouldn’t it be neat if they could just not let the ‘overreachers’ onto the slope at all, thus making my skiing more enjoyable overall? Count me in!!
(Btw, I’ve never been skiing in my entire life lol)
Stepchylde: if such a mechanism of readiness would really be useful, then the basis of mechanism and means to aid with that cursory ‘experience’ level of a player is in place through the achievement system. If only more fully and properly used…
Having an achievement certainly doesnt mean a player really knows any particular event, as they could have been carried through, or may have done it long ago, or someone else completely different actually got it for them..
And hopefully, if we were to consider using the achievement system to develop a readiness indicator, it would -not- be as mandatory checkpoints, but rather a relative, fuzzy measure of what the player has experienced in terms of event styles (script theme, tank and spank, or others), event size (solo, short-handed group, short-handed raid, etc), relative difficulty (achievement rated level compared with actual level at date of award), and recent exposure (achievements earned 4 years ago mean something but probably not as much as the achievements last month).
Like any “measure” you might choose, it won’t give you a clear picture of the person behind the toon(s), and that doesnt come till you try them out for a while.
Agreed. Its all a fuzzy indicator. But I personally liked having it there.
Just for the record, I’m a very casual player. I’m in a very small family guild. We have only killed a handfull of em named, and only raid once a week….if that. I have done maybe 2 pug raids, neither a zone clear. I rarely even pug group, maybe 6 or 7 this entire expansion. I think I have only 1 slr item, drunder x2 shoulders. I am by no means a raid geared toon. Yet I’m at 180+cm, which is plenty for the zones we are currently progressing thru. /shrug
I do think skill needs to be a bigger factor, and I like to think I’m at least slightly above average in that regard. Ask anyone who has had to group with me and I am sure they will disagree (they are all dirty liars, so pay no heed to their vile words!).
I’m one of the minority that actually liked cm, although it obviously was not being implemented correctly. Removing it is overkill. I supposed it really doesn’t matter, seeing how the removal seems pretty much a done deal.
I love how no casual player who ever raided thinks they are so uber that they shouldn’t be required to play the game to achieve their potential.
Just because you were awesome once means nothing today in ANY gear. The treadmill is both the pain AND pleasure in this game. When persistence pays off the pain makes the reward feel better.
Should ONLY play time be rewarded, NO. Should ONLY”winning” require you to play the game regularly? YES. Whatever mechanic they use, this should be the case.
So, to all “has beens” or “never were” players, just stop on your gear constrained uberness. If you’re in RyGor your probably not putting in the time and likely less uber than your ego will tolerate.
wanyen,
What you want is a reputation stat, where doing anything, going into a zone, killing a boss mob, finishing zones and or raids (short handed or quickly), having master level spells, earning epic and or mythical gear all earn reputation points (obviously all these items should be weighted for their effort required). Time spent away from the game or epic failures would reduce reputation points. Also points would fade with time … so points earned one expansion ago would all fade a bit in the next expansion and older points earned would fade away even faster, so you would know at a glance just how “bad arse” a player really is.
I don’t know that I want it that way.
I think it is a more worthy alternative than purely a quantitative gear stat. Just because you or I have 50k hps as an example, doesn’t mean chit; or on the hand, if you are I had 15k hps it would not mean we know nothing about anything relevant.
I also see the allure in deducting ‘reputation’ based on fails, but at the same time, I am adventure seeker, and failing is just part of the discovery and learning process many times. Weighting failures at all as a factor would put too much emphasis on doing the sure thing, or worse yet, doing nothing at all. People hate to lose points, as they are so hard to gain in the first place, right? Flawless and urgent victories should matter, though.
The way I see it working best, if it all, is ‘reputation’ would not be a cumulative score. Instead, it’s a bit of a moving target. Recent events of current content definitely should be more relevant than old events or old content if that’s what you are looking for. Part of finding a match that best fit depends on the intent of what you plan to do. If you plan to do Cella for whatever reason, then victories, urgent victories, and flawless victories in Cella, especially recently, should be better matches than even God forbid, a character that has none of those achievements despite flawless, shorthanded, urgent victories in Sullons. Having or not having those achievements should not determine who is offered as a choice though: maybe that Sullon’s beater wants to do Cella, and the Cella pro wants nothing to do with it.
Perhaps the visual cue that would differentiate a pro from an initiate for a particular intended event would be a filled star, and an initiate of the event would be an open star (or a star enclosed within a circle — or something simple but obvious). This way the existing visual cues for best mechanical match (the star) would be unaffected, and there would be less of a learning curve for players experiencing and employing it.
While it would be tempting to put gear scores in as additional quantifiers, I think in practice it would be unnecessary. Someone who has a achievements for Drunder X2 probably can handle the Drunder group zones from purely a gear standpoint . And so on and so forth.
sry. bad paste job… delete previous if you would like and please
I don’t know that I want it that way.
I think it is a more worthy alternative than purely a quantitative gear stat. Just because you or I have 50k hps as an example, doesn’t mean chit; or on the hand, if you are I had 15k hps it would not mean we know nothing about anything relevant.
I also see the allure in deducting ‘reputation’ based on fails, but at the same time, I am adventure seeker, and failing is just part of the discovery and learning process many times. Weighting failures at all as a factor would put too much emphasis on doing the sure thing, or worse yet, doing nothing at all. People hate to lose points, as they are so hard to gain in the first place, right? Flawless and urgent victories should matter, though.
The way I see it working best, if it all, is ‘reputation’ would not be a cumulative score. Instead, it’s a bit of a moving target. Recent events of current content definitely should be more relevant than old events or old content if that’s what you are looking for. Part of finding a match that best fit depends on the intent of what you plan to do.
If you plan to do Cella for whatever reason, then victories, urgent victories, and flawless victories in Cella, especially recently, should be better matches than even God forbid, a character that has none of those achievements despite flawless, shorthanded, urgent victories in Sullons. Having or not having those achievements should not determine who is offered as a choice though: maybe that Sullon’s beater wants to do Cella, and the Cella pro wants nothing to do with it.
Now perhaps you are in progression, your list of mechanical matches (level and archtype), is extensive, but no ideal matches because no one currently seeking an adventure has achievements for what you intend to do. No pros this time around, and you are open to other options. This would know and find those that have had recent, relevant achievements in perhaps slightly less advanced content, based on the progression intent of the designers, and these options could be offered as an opportunity for you to choose from, indicating upon examination or hover what the tool saw as relevant achievements for a particular candidate.
Allowing a group or event leader to see the rules or criteria that particular player matched will probably prove critical to making them comfortable with the selection: which achievements does it think make this character a good fit for me, and if I don’t aggree with the weighting of those achievements, I need to be allowed to select someone else from the list based on my own preferences or internal weighting and value of the achievements.
Perhaps the visual cue that would differentiate a pro from an initiate for a particular intended event would be by star shape and color. A pro would be a filled green star. An initiate of the event would be an open yellow star (or a star enclosed within a circle — or something simple but obvious). This way the existing visual cues for best mechanical match (the star) would be largely unaffected, and there would be less of a learning curve for players experiencing and employing it.
While it would be tempting to put gear scores in as additional quantifiers, I think in practice it would be unnecessary. Someone who has a achievements for Drunder X2 probably can handle the Drunder group zones from purely a gear standpoint . Someone with achievements for ISK can probably contribute in ToRZ. And so on and so forth.
Another critical thing I think is a seeking player’s abilitiy to in some manner rank and give preference to events they want to particpate in, and ‘opt-out’ of ones they were previously successful in, but don’t want anything to do with.
For example, I’d prefer to wait for SuchAndSuch, or RelatedToSuchAndSuch but I am open as a last resort to doing SomethingElseEntirely.