Chillaxin

Obviously from the poll results so far, people prefer contested.

However I don't think it's a black or white issue. There has to be a mix of both and they have need to coexist peacfully. Anyone who devotes the time and resources to raid hardcore on a daily basis would probably quit if they didn't have the thrill of contested encounters. Conversely if the entire game was contested, people who could only play casually would quit too.

From my experience it's not the content that bothers people so much as it is the presentation. What I see in this thread isn't "should there be contested or no contested." Instead I see, how can "contested" be better presented in a way that holds true to their intended purpose.

Using the Butcherblock example from above you'll find that the "contested" there are anything but. Instead you have a single guild farming most every contested spawn with very little if any actual competition. Needless to say there's no thrill in winning when your the only one who showed up to the race.

Perhaps a tweak in the way avatars work would be the best solution. I've been tossing around some concepts. One idea is to have scripted contested encounters.

>> The idea might be to have an altar appear as a portal where a raid can cross into another zone with the avatar. The avatar itself is scripted to only attack when two or more raids are in the zone. Then based on factor x (ie. rng, or who zoned in first, or who kills the avatar's guards first) the avatar would attack the first guild, then when/if they die, attack the second guild in a turn based rotation, giving each guild a chance until the avatar died or the zone contained less than x amount of people. <<

DISCLAIMER: It's far from a perfect idea, I'd go into things even I see wrong with it (like how easily you could make a "raid" out of alt accounts), but this post is already turning into a wall of text. I'm not saying it should be this way for every single contested encounter. I am saying that something vaguely like this would give incentive to the "Lockdown Farm Guilds" to develop some sort of competition.

Remember it's easy to say something sucks, it requires no effort.
To figure out how to make something not suck takes intelligence and proves your smart enough to apply your experience to overcome a problem. I'm sure there's enough experience here on flames to somehow revive the contested encounters we all love and remember.

Enyeto

Contest: \ˈkän-ˌtest\; noun,. A struggle for superiority or victory
Loser: \ˈlü-zər\; noun,. A person who is incompetent or unable to succeed; also : something doomed to fail or disappoint

"Hey can your guild zone into this contested instance so we can kill it?"
"Why? What if it attacks us first?"
"Well, yeah but we want to kill it. So we need some noobs to trigger his activation."

~in addition~

Who's to say it doesn't bug out frequently and bum rush guilds before they are ready to pull?

Argyuile

That post was gayer than having man sex while watching the Chippendale's preform fellatio on Freddy Mercury

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Diknak

/agree

The concept of requiring two guilds to activate a mob does nothing but cause more problems. People would just have alt guilds go in and trigger it for them, which would do nothing but make another pointless hurdle. If there aren't capable guilds on the server for pulling avatars, then adding that mechanic won't make them any more capable.

I think the best solution would be to mix contesteds in the lower difficulty as well, so the only guilds capable of killing them aren't the super high end. This was done in RoK to an extent, but they didn't have anything close to VP quality/difficulty. They had shitty contesteds and kick ass contesteds, but not much in between.

Hoss

There is merit to giving the guilds their own instance to get rid of lag and harassment issues. In that case, you just have to have all versions of the avatar die off as soon as one guild kills it. Wouldn't it be awesome if you got him down to like 10% and he despawned and kicked you out of the instance because your competition killed him first?

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alvarez

being under the watchful eyes of the competition is part of the competition imo, yes even with the lag.

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Crabbok

the embarassment of a wipe, or the fact that your enemies can report you when they see you exploit. these all contribute to what we know of as modern day contested.

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Chillaxin

Guess I should have put this part at the top of my post, seeing as a few of your attention spans wane after a single paragraph. I said it wasn't perfect. I said it shouldn't be like this for every encounter. I said the faults I see in it alone would more than fill a post. What more should I have said?
All it seems some of you want to do is troll on forums about how much the current system sucks, and how much anyone else's ideas suck. I must have been mistaken when I said there was enough intelligence here to revive contested content.
Meanwhile let's sit back and watch just how bad contested content can get since noone who actually knows what a "good" idea for a contested encounter is willing to speak up.

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We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again - and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
- Mark Twain

arieste

Instanced.

And RL is mostly instanced. As awesome as it probably would be to experience going to the movies with all 10 million people that go every weekend, I think 99% of those 10 million wouldn't be able to see the screen or hear anything. So much better to have people go in separate theatres so that everyone can appreciate it.

The difference with RL really is that stuff is really spread out. So maybe it's less instanced and more just zoned. And there is more content. Yes - a nightclub or restaurant you want to go to may be full, but it's NEVER the ONLY place to dance or eat.

So if you compare to RL, you'd have to offer unlimited and largely similar content. In which case it probably wouldn't matter if it were contested.

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Davngr

either works for me, i just like to kill stuff.

i will say that most of the funner guilds i been in where instance guilds. not that i have been in any word class contested killing guilds but most seem to get overwhelmed with the "us against them" mentality to the point where you're not even killing shit so you can have fun..
you're almost doing it so they can't.
not saying this is always the case but it is a negative aspect on the flip side a lot of non-contested guilds have un-dedicated players that miss raids regularly and ruin fun for everyone.

so like i said, i don't care either way as long as content is being cleared and there is fun/progression to be had.