The Death of group play? (Open tapping/contribution discussion)

[Trusilver]

Its a bad idea, but not a bug (at least when I checked the known issues thread it wasnt on it). This feature was talked about a lot on the forums as well as in beta, im certain this issue came up.

So the thoughtful thing to do is start a petition for a change to the feature, not have a pissing match over specifics in a thread titled "the death of group play?". The open tapping rule shouldnt apply to fellows, Ive done several slayer deeds in groups and it worked just fine as is.

The open tapping rule should apply to solo toons only.

+rep as the most intelligent thing anyone has said here so far.

[Gandie2]

*sigh* So this annoying new mechanic that I dislike as a soloer (because it actually gives people an incentive to jump in on all my kills) is also disliked by groupers? That's just brilliant. How did this make it out of testing?

Khafar

Good lord Khafa: Finially something you and I can agree on.

See my post over

http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...50#post6470350

wait... let me copy the revelent part over to this one.

....

.....People who like to solo content, without help, are the only people that ever complained about people helping them, so to fix this we put in a mechanic to reward people for running round helping people who would rather solo content?

/boggle

and the full post....

Gotta love this mentality.

"I don't like grouping up to level and explore, therefore there is no reason for anyone to group up, therefore a mechanic that screws people that like to group up is GREAT!"

Its an MMO. The game, should be putting in design elements that make grouping better, not worse.

If as someone suggested ^ up there. It is too hard to have both open tapping and group credit regardless of tapping then by all means. Lose this stupid open tapping.

I normally don't bother reading ahead of time what xpacs are going to be like. But the other day someone in kin chat was mentioning somethings that cause me to go browse the release notes. I saw this open tapping idea and stated then that I thought it was a stupid idea and a solution in search of a problem; and this was before the idea that it would screw with existing group mechanics was brought forward.

This change makes this the #1 stupidest thing I've seen an MMO do.

As I recall the blue post on this in the pre release notes stated as a reason or even 'the reason' for this the idea that someone fighting a mob and getting healed by someone not in group would lose experience. The post went on to state that with this change not only would the person being healed not lose expeience but the person healing him would get full experience and maybe this would foster people running around healing people.

Lack of strangers running by and healing people was not the problem. The problem was strangers running by and healing people. The solution to this problem was to do what DAoC did, and which I mentioned as a solution to this problem in a post a couple years back, put an option in social options to set a 'no help' flag. You check this no help box and people not in your group can't heal you. Just like the no sparring invites, no kin invites flags.

People who like to solo content, without help, are the only people that ever complained about people helping them, so to fix this we put in a mechanic to reward people for running round helping people who would rather solo content?

/boggle

[furtim]

FUD, FUD, FUD.

Start a thread when you actually know what's happening in game. 90% of posts in this thread are responding to what the poster thinks is happening, which generally is not the same as what is happening.

[podgie_bear]

FUD, FUD, FUD.

Start a thread when you actually know what's happening in game. 90% of posts in this thread are responding to what the poster thinks is happening, which generally is not the same as what is happening.

It is happening in game, or have you not tried fellowship in Rohan yet? My kin is complaining like hell about how fellowship play is now broken and some players who do a lot towards the groups success are getting naff all reward!

[2cents]

I have to say this is a fairly stupid idea. It should work out nice for my RK though. Screw grouping. I'll just get a LI with + pulses of prelude to hope, but no plus to healing, don't want to grab agro, then max prelude to hope get it so it lasts 30 seconds and go around spaming it on everyone I can find. Sit back and watch the loot poor in. I should be able to hit 85 without ever hitting a mob in anger.

Only problem is, I've always enjoyed grouping with people. Hmmmmm. Oh well. To heck with that. This is the brave new world of solo play in an MMO. I race to 85 on my RK or my hunter and want to do some group content - but wait, then I'll need that stupid phat headed guard who is still plugging along and that burg and LM that I used to group with and level together with. That way when I wanted to do an instance I had support classes and a tank to do it with.

The person that is going to get screwed is my guard. I want to round up a bunch of mobs, I don't go in swinging; I use my aoe taunts. My three main agro AOE skills do ZERO damage to any mob. So one of my main sources of fun as a guard is out the window. I loved the last expac grouping with some friends running round the landscape seeing how many mobs I could scoop up and bring back and have the LM and champ AOE them down, and yeah, people in the group that did not have big AOE killing skills got to benefit, and you know what, I was fine with that, the champ was fine with that, the LM was fine with that and the hunter was fine picking off the ranged guys that didn't come within AOE range and were picking on the healer. Now all that changes. Instead of trying to get agro on a bunch with me AOE taunts I'll need try and make sure I tag them all with my mighty vexing blow, hitting 3 at a time. Only how do I know which ones I hit and didn't hit. And the hunter will say screw trying to protect the healer by picking off those couple of ranged guys back there. I need hit that group with rain of arrows and run in and do some Low cuts so I can make sure to tag as many as possible. Not sure what the burg will do. Again he mainly protected the healer, mezzing one or what not.

This post is hitting the nail on the head. The guard pulling all the mobs with AOE taunts is not going to get credit for the kills. But what group would say he did not do his part? The mini healing the tank - and yes if the mini does group heals this wont happen - the mini healing the tank, single target healing like a smart mini as the tank having the agro is the only one that needs heals wont get credit. The hunter keeping the mini alive by killing those ranged mobs wont get credit for the mobs the champ and LM aoed, and the burg casting the skill on the ranged mobs that brings them into aoe range or de buffing the mobs wont get credit.

Yes, in the old days some people in a group doing landscape mobs got a little bit of a ride on other peoples abilities. But this ensured that when you went to group up for a 12 man raid you had burgs and LM's and such, and burgs may not contribute that much in a six man tearing through landscapee mobs the way the above poster describes they sure are handy to have around in the six mans and 12 mans.

The only reason I've seen anyone give to support this 'open tapping' is that it makes kill tasks easier to solo. One of the things I noted in the early days of Galtrev was people where advertising for groups to go group up to kill the people at the lumber camp instead of competing over kills. This is what puts the M in MMO.

Instead of open tapping Turbine should have made the auto loot thing and made it so that if a quest item dropped for one person in a group it dropped for everyone in the group. Increasing the chance to have that quest item drop. If there is a 25% chance it will drop for a person but then if that person is in a group it automatically drops for everyone when it drops for that one, being in a group means each kill will have 150% chance to drop a quest item.

Making being in a group a faster way to do landscapee quests then solo. Encouraging people to group. Instead of open tapping do this. Instead of open tapping make more mobs spawn. Instead of mobs only conveniently spread out equal distance all across the landscapee make groups of them. A concentration around a camp fire that baffed - (baf old school mmo term meaning Bring a Friend) a solo guy pulled one from that camp he would get at least two maybe three, a group pulled from
the camp they get 4 or more. Tank could go in and pull twice to get 8 bring them back to group. Makes for spontaneous groups, grouping for fun and because it is faster. Still have singles scatted about for the folk that like that. But encourage group play by building in benefits to being in a group. Like faster quest completions and more experience.

Lotro is taking a massive turn in the wrong direction. Yeah there are a lot of people that like to run as fast as they can through all the content solo. But that is partly because of years of design making it so this is the fastest way to level. But even with years of design promoting solo play there are still lots of mature players who enjoy grouping. This is killing us.

oh yeah and as a finial note, I don't post much but I come lurk and read the forums from time to time and I have to say some of the early repliers were most definitely condescending, belittling and a few other choice words to people complaining about the way 'open tapping' is affecting group play.

[Findellin]

This is counterintuitive, counterproductive, and just plain horrible.

This wasn't the case under the closed tapping system. What exactly is about the way open tapping works in a fellowship that necessitated this change?

I think I can answer this question:

Amlug's response in this thread to the question of who gets the loot in a fellowship:
http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...ing-with-Rohan

"Everyone gets loot off the monster as if they killed that mob solo. So if a mob has a 15% chance to generate a hide, it now has a 15% chance to generate a hide per person." -Amlug

Imagine a scenario where a gold farmer runs around in a group with five other characters on autofollow. Under the "old-world" loot rules this group would split the loot from each kill, but with the new system each chacacter in the group would get FULL loot. I believe this loot multiplier is a primary reason why the fellowship RoR tapping rules are the way they currently are.

I'm not saying I agree with how things are. I'm just trying to answer the question of "Why?".

[scrumtrelescent]

I do understand why some people dislike open tapping. Respectfully, I disagree. I used to get really frustrated when soloing if I had to compete with someone 30 levels higher just there to grind deeds rounding up all the mobs and mowing them down, making it hard to actually complete my quest objectives. I understand people saying "Yes, well I don't like it because it interferes with the way I choose the play the game." But not having open tapping does the same thing, it just does it to a different group of people. Still, if you don't like open tapping I can understand why. I like it, but that's me.

As for it affecting groups, I'm not down with that. I understand the OPs view on this, and I agree: if you're a single target class you're forced to make sure you get AoEs in and fast, otherwise you lag behind the rest of the group. I don't dig that.

[Khafar]

Imagine a scenario where a gold farmer runs around in a group with five other characters on autofollow. Under the "old-world" loot rules this group would split the loot from each kill, but with the new system each chacacter in the group would get FULL loot.

Yeah, I suspect this is why it works the way it does at the moment - the game cannot easily tell the difference between a fellowship running around doing what they're supposed to be doing, and a fellowship of bots tagging along to multiply the loot.

One possible fix in a fellowship scenario would be to require skill use by all people getting a share of the loot, but I suspect they don't have things set up that way - it seems like they're doing "accounting" on a per-target basis. That might not be a very easy fix, and the gold farmers would then just have all the bots fire off a skill on a timer just so they could get credit.

*sigh*

Khafar

[Jeffor]

What if I'm deeding with a hunter friend and he heartseekers our target to death? What if I happen to do the same with remorseless strike? Should we like 'hey lets both hit it with an autoattack first, just to be safe!'. There are mobs even on equal lvl that can be oneshotted, and grouping for deeds has been made impossible, grats!

Or two hunters facing opposite directions each pulling different MOBs. They could easily burn down their respective targets without the other tagging them yet I feel they both deserve credit (the way it's worked for over five years).

[Mysterion]

I'm fine with the changes. If I don't hit it (or heal someone hitting it) I shouldn't get credit. I never understood how I could just go on follow and get credit for kills. If the trade-off for open tapping is grouping being a little extra work, I'll take it. Sure I'd like both, but I'm fine with the way it is and prefer it to the old way.

I've really enjoyed the stress-free questing in the early zones of the expansion. There aren't the normal bottlenecks of people waiting for spawns for the kill 0/x quests. I can still remember a couple from RoI that were a major bummer.

Keep innovating Turbine.

[maxjenius]

FUD, FUD, FUD.

Start a thread when you actually know what's happening in game. 90% of posts in this thread are responding to what the poster thinks is happening, which generally is not the same as what is happening.

I don't usually resort to this but ...

This: "90% of posts in this thread are responding to what the poster thinks is happening."

I wonder how many people know what "FUD" is.

[Trusilver]

To anyone joining the discussion, keep in mind that a petition to remedy this situation is available here:

http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...ellowship-play

Please take a moment to go over and sign it.

[Saxzon]

I see it as a problem/issue. If you are GROUPED with someone, you should not have to tap. Period.

What is going to happen in a group instance, where you're on some final boss... and someone in the group gets stuck dealing with some adds while the group kills the boss...

Boss dies.. CC person forgot, or didn't get any "taps" in... and didn't get any credit. 30-45 minutes wasted.

Lame

[Isharra]

It's a real shame so many people don't like this change. I have been enjoying it. Maybe my experiences with this so far have been pretty different from some of the other posters in this thread - very probably, in fact. Maybe most of my server was unable to play last night, maybe layers are working well, or maybe I just plain missed the landrush (two of these are highly unlikely), but I didn't see any jerky behaviour and I didn't have to madly tap everything in sight just to get credit before people one-shotted everything mere moments after they spawned. In fact, what I saw were a handful of other players trying to get their quests done just the same as I was. There was a tacit agreement that we would scratch each others' backs and all get the quest done. No tapping wars a la pre-Rohan content releases, no waiting for 36 spawns just so 3 strangers can all get their quest to kill 12 done. That number was cut down to maybe 15, taking into account a slight overlap.

So instead of a pvp-flavoured tag-war pitting people against each other, a bunch of people just shared and played nicely together. It was smooth, pleasant and amicable.

As for fellowships no longer sharing credit - I am not sure how I feel about that, but I am leaning toward being fine with it. There are probably game-balancing and coding issues with making everything work fairly/correctly, so if the solution is that everyone has to contribute in certain fashion to each kill, then so be it.

My only hesitation, really, is that I hope debuffs are seen as contributing, and I haven't tried it so I do not know. This isn't a fellowship concern so much as a general gameplay one.

In the end, this is just an adjustment individuals and the community are going to have to make together in order to have fun together in a new way.

[Batf1nk]

Just my opinion, but I like the changes. It makes more sense to me that if you don't hit a mob, you don't get experience. Also, what mobs on landscape do you really need a tank/healer for?

[Jeffor]

Just my opinion, but I like the changes. It makes more sense to me that if you don't hit a mob, you don't get experience. Also, what mobs on landscape do you really need a tank/healer for?

You are missing the point. Read some of the arguments.

[monteeburns]

Keep innovating Turbine

Give the credit where it's due. This wasn't Turbine's innovation

[Batf1nk]

You are missing the point. Read some of the arguments.

I read them, and they have some merit, but I still stick by with what I said. Turbine has created landscape quests to be geared towards solo play, therefore not needing people to heal/debuff/tank. Maybe I don't see the problem cause I've been playing GW2 for over a month and I'm used to open tapping there

[maxjenius]

What is going to happen in a group instance, where you're on some final boss and someone in the group gets stuck dealing with some adds while the group kills the boss. Boss dies. CC person forgot, or didn't get any "taps" in and didn't get any credit. 30-45 minutes wasted.

Perhaps you can tell us which RoR instance you've experienced this in.

You're fretting in a vacuum.

[Kril]

Perhaps you can tell us which RoR instance you've experienced this in.

You're fretting in a vacuum.

I don't think we'll be having open tapping in instances, however, think of group quests like in limlight gorge. Sure, trees get blown away by the entire fellowship, but what about the starter quests?

Specifically the spiders. The little spiders were horribly anti-melee, but you needed to loot them. The ranged classes would tear them apart before they hit the group ideally. Now this wouldn't be possible as to be able to get credit and loot for them, you have to hit them???

[Batf1nk]

I don't think we'll be having open tapping in instances, however, think of group quests like in limlight gorge. Sure, trees get blown away by the entire fellowship, but what about the starter quests?

Specifically the spiders. The little spiders were horribly anti-melee, but you needed to loot them. The ranged classes would tear them apart before they hit the group ideally. Now this wouldn't be possible as to be able to get credit and loot for them, you have to hit them???

I'm not in game yet, but I didn't know they scaled LL to 85! That's great! Did the jewellry get scaled too?

[JaironKalach]

I don't think we'll be having open tapping in instances, however, think of group quests like in limlight gorge. Sure, trees get blown away by the entire fellowship, but what about the starter quests?

You know we've made the assumption that the decision to limit open tapping to Rohan was because it was there as a trial. (At least a lot of people did.) However, I wonder if, instead it's because of balance issues such as this. There are a few other similar examples: The trolls in Isengard (no deed because you didn't tap?, Ferndur (???) and a few others in Angmar...

[BelamanthDE]

I have to agree with the general sentiment here. I'm not even concerned about the buffing and the healing, I'm just concerned about AoE damage vs single-target damage. It's going to cause XP disparity in groups that try their hardest to avoid it. If this is still going on in an instance, you could wind up unable to complete the quest to kill 10 rats, because there were only 12 rats in the instance and you missed dropping shots on 3 of them because the Champ was anxious to go all AoE.

As has been said, whatever the dev diary said, it did not say there was going to be a change from the current fellowship tapping mechanic, even though everybody asked in the thread that immediately followed. Based on the way things have always worked in-game until now, it was not unreasonable for us to suspect that when it came to tapping, the same fellowship rules that had always applied would continue to apply: that fellowships are treated the same as single-players when it comes to tapping.

Yes, as long as players are aware of it, there are ways they can work around it. But do you really want players deciding their attack strategy based on this? Do I want my Burg focusing on debuffing and CC, or do I want him making sure to get a hit on every mob so he gets credit? Do I want my Guard focusing on tanking the big nasty boss while the rest of us kill adds, or do I want her kiting the boss around while trying to get tags on all the adds?

This needs to be corrected, please.

This pretty much sums up what I find so disturbing (beside the fact that this was not plainly laid out clearly from the beginning, i.e. the Dev Diary for us non-beta-testers.)

On the other hand, after thinking about this for a while now, I think I have a theory why this could be WAI:

Scenario: A single player or fellowship A is fighting a mob. Fellowship B comes along, and player X from fellowship B taps that mob, the others do not get involved. Who to credit now? If we have the old mechanic of group crediting, all members of group B would have to get credited, because one of their players was credited with a kill.

It is the only way this change makes sense to me.

[Shrelana]

I'm fine with the changes. If I don't hit it (or heal someone hitting it) I shouldn't get credit. I never understood how I could just go on follow and get credit for kills. If the trade-off for open tapping is grouping being a little extra work, I'll take it. Sure I'd like both, but I'm fine with the way it is and prefer it to the old way.

I've really enjoyed the stress-free questing in the early zones of the expansion. There aren't the normal bottlenecks of people waiting for spawns for the kill 0/x quests. I can still remember a couple from RoI that were a major bummer.

Keep innovating Turbine.

But at the same time, if you buff, or debuff, it doesn't count either. I actually tried this on my minstrel last night - buffed my husband's champion as he killed 2 orcs (didn't heal or dps because I wanted to know if buffs counted). I raised his mitigations and his icmr, but did not technically heal him. The game did not consider this "helping" to bring down the mobs, so I got no credit for buffing....This means that captains buffing, loremasters supporting and any other class that specifically supports the fellowship will be banged here...not good imho.

This is teaching people how NOT to play their classes when they are grouping for instances and you will end up with even more folks in end game that don't know how to buff, debuff, support, etc, etc...

[Kril]

I'm not in game yet, but I didn't know they scaled LL to 85! That's great! Did the jewellry get scaled too?

I never said that, I'm using an example of old game-play that isn't feasible because of the new group tapping mechanics. Basically, we won't see any group world content like LLG, and if we do, it will be a subject of much woe... The new jewellery remains crafted, scaled instances, or Hytbold