CrystalRAID

I'll jump in and make one last quick comment before this account gets abandoned forever, or maybe not since it's only one letter removed from my name.

Thanks for all the nice comments, it's really heartwarming to know how much the players have enjoyed the content I've worked on. And there were so many amazing memories watching you try to take down these challenges via Twitch on release day, so thank you for playing and succeeding (but mostly failing). I moved out of creative development over 2 years ago is why I haven't had a lot to say here in a while. I suspect that trend will continue, such is the life of management.

Go forth and be excellent to each other.

Muh feels rn! I'm so happy to hear you're getting the same amount of enjoyment out of a game mode that got me hooked on MMO's over a decade ago! Feels great to know and hear about the positive impact you've left in someone's gaming life. Thanks for sharing. (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ

If you guys could PM the details to u/anet_jason, this will help them get stuff resolved faster.

Screenshotted.

There are a number of things going on behind the scenes in that map that are unique in its structure compared to other open world maps like Sparkfly Fen. The number of agents in the map overall are considerably reduced for starters. If you zone back to other waypoints in the map during the final encounter, there isn't a ton going on. In the encounter itself, a lot of the difficulty in that encounter relies on the named Legendary creatures you fight (Hareth etc), instead of huge waves of scaling creatures like Teq. There also aren't any active events going on at the same time as the final encounter. One issue with older open world maps is that there are probably a handful of players running around who aren't participating in the world boss at the time. So that means additional events and spawns that take up some amount of resources. Dragon's Stand is designed to funnel everyone to the same place.

Also, the programmers have been making tweaks to the game for years to o...

Spike zerged basically means that, with regards to the TT encounter specifically, they'd organize into 4 groups. They'd have roughly 10-15 people for 3 of the groups, and then one massive group of 100+ players. They'd start off with the zerg group, and one of the smaller groups at Amber Wurm, trigger the vulnerability, and spike it down to 10% or less and then stop. Then the Zerg would waypoint away and go to Crimson and do the same, and then Cobalt. They were able to get the wurms all down very quickly, but they had trouble managing the coordinated kill check from that point.

TT was really just a big evolution of Teq. Overall the server performance improved with the Teq redesign since we were promoting players spreading out more (to the batteries) but it still suffered when he went vulnerable since all 100+ players were using their skills at the same time in one concentrated point, which is the main issue we're trying to solve. That's why TT (and more recent World bo...

The team has been investigating the issue and are working to get a fix out as quickly as they can.

No.

Thank you!

Correct.

Difficult question to answer since the goals of each team vary. The AI system can get pretty complicated when you get really deep into it. I would say the raids team uses the most simplistic form of it since we only care about the combat behaviours. Other teams care about both combat and what the creatures are doing when not in combat.

All designers here use the same tool, but different teams will manipulate it in different ways. For example: the way the Raids team uses the AI system is different from how a Living World team might use it.

To clarify... The designers I helped spin up were a mix from different teams and none of them joined the raids team. There has always been "two teams on raids that leapfrog" (not including Spirit Vale) except at various points in time the teams were a single designer.

Edit for clarity

When I say "teams" I'm specifically referring to designers only. All other resources (art, programming, qa) are shared between the two.

Also fix incoming for that too.

The fact the bosses didn't immediately go into combat when they aggro'd was always a bug. We fixed that in the recent patch and we're working on fixing KC.

Going forward the expectation should be that the raid group is in the "boss arena" and ready to go before you pull the boss. If someone is caught lollygagging behind then they're going to be considered out of bounds and unable to participate in the encounter.

We had planned a Mini Deimos for ship, but the art asset was far too expensive to just shrink down into a mini and would have required a ton of work to scale down properly. It's one of the crazier creatures that team has come up with in terms of complexity!

Late reply, but yes we are looking in to this.

This is pretty awesome.

The team is looking into these issues right now and hope to get a fix out soon.

We don't have plans to go back and change previous raid rewards, including the Challenge Mote for Keep Construct. However, the Challenge Mote rewards for BotP are all significantly better than KC. They're still one time achievements and there are no plans to change that.