As it stands, we basically just go free lot on items. I know over the long haul, that's probably going to end up leading to a lot of butthurt over various items. That's been one of my biggest issues thusfar in organizing Abyssea runs is that people seem to be a lot more adamant about what they want to do and willing to force an organizer's hand to get their way. Really kind of irritates me to no end.
My priority in organizing these things has been to try to nail down as many pieces of Abyssite for our members as we can. I feel like getting the core a large number of these will just make our runs that much more efficient since it seems they really only take effect if a person holding a particular Abyssite actually gets killshot. If only 2 or 3 of us have Kismet Abyssite, for example, then our odds of capping Azure light faster are rather small. Some will look at that and say "just make sure the people with kismet get killshot". I can only counter that with "have you ever tried to get 18 people on the same page as far as killshots go?"
Getting Abyssite is boring though. Most people don't see the usefulness in doing this. They just see a pair of Tumbler Trunks and want to go kill that damn tiger or want to go XP a job somewhere. The worst ones are when people want to come as a melee job so they can skill up or refuse to come as a critical support job because their PUP needs XP. It's because of things like this that I've probably sent more Obsidian people off to other groups. Bottom line is, if you're not the one organizing it or are unwilling to do what it takes to help the team accomplish it's goals, then we don't want you in our runs. I think this is the major thing that has to be understood from the onset. It's not a doctrine on anyone personally. It just takes everyone being on the same page to make the best use of the time allotted in Abyssea.
The Basics:
Telepoints: We're to a point now in our runs where we'll likely stop allowing people to come if they don't have all the telepoints. They don't take long to get and it really just means you're going to miss only one run.
Abyssites: A number of Abyssites can be picked up via cruor purchase or via quests. These are generally things to get on your own time.
Understanding of Time: This is probably the most fundamental aspect of Abyssea. Learning how to manage your time. Going in with an ally of 18 people where 10 of them only have 2 stones and the other 8 have 120 mins is just maddening. Try to always have 90 mins available for any organized run.
The Categories:
You can classify Abyssea runs into one of three categories. I tend to think the structure for the overall group hinges on these three categories.
XP/Farming run: Pretty self-explanatory. You spend copious amounts of time farming up key items via gold chests or leveling jobs all while building up a time buffer for a future run. These seem to be necessary. It doesn't always work out where people end up having just as much time left over as they entered with, but as long as you're running out with pop items and whatnot later on, then you should be in good shape.
Basic/Forced Pop NM run (Bazaar pops): The vast majority of the items that come off these NMs have silly drop rates. And by silly, I mean insanely high. Not all of the details have been fleshed out on a number of them, but from what I can tell, if it's a pop item you can buy from a Bazaar, it's got a good drop rate and is easy to get to. I don't necessarily feel these are important enough to allow any form of bidding on since the drop rate is what it is. Using Obsidian's current rules, we'd basically end up with a ton of 4 point bids and no real exodus of points.
The biggest issue with these types of NMs is that people see how simple they are and don't particularly understand anything beyond "We can just go do this real quick". "Real quick" is 15 mins. 15 mins is a huge chunk of time if everyone's only going in with 90. There are a number of ways to handle this sort of issue though.
Obsidian Dynamis/Einherjar style bidding:
The first idea is to simply do bidding the way we normally do for Dynamis or Einherjar. On paper, it looks like you can just pick the zone and then just do blanket bidding for every item that can drop in the zone (or just further classify what you're going after). It's easy. It's painless (from an admin standpoint). The cons to this are that we end up with some butthurt if we don't go after an NM we listed or potentially set up someone to believe we were going to go after. Or we kill something that wasn't on the list to kill originally because it happened to be up in our way (clusterfuck). Are you going to just leave an NM sitting there if you know it drops something good because it wasn't on the original list to kill?
Lists:
Have everyone make out a list of the top 5 items they want from each zone and limit bidding to that. You can easily build runs around this and knock out a couple items at a time potentially. The pros to this is it basically provides a lot of input from the members themselves. The con to this is when do you decide to move on to a diff. item? You have 10 people wanting tumbler trunks, but 5 have it listed at number 1 on their list, 3 have it listed at number 3 and 2 have it at number 5? Do you build an entire run around those 2 who have it listed at number 5 (should you run out of time and only get 8 done) or do you wait until more people have it listed before doing it again?
Freelot:
Because of how frequently stuff drops, we currently employ this tactic. Again, it's not something I'd like to permanently use, but it's doing it's job for now. There's about 14 of us who make it to every Abyssea run, so the primary con to this (having someone who rarely comes get something over someone who's there every run) isn't a huge issue. The pro to this is it makes everyone feel like they're on equal footing for every item which, in some cases, can cause people to enjoy their time more. I'm not a big proponent of this mentality, but I do acknowledge it exists.
Key Item Pop/Big Shit: This is the third and final category and where I feel points should be used heavily for anything that drops as they seem to generally requires a ton of people. There's a lot of stuff that drops from these particular baddies that I feel really isn't much better than some of the stuff that you can get from the 2nd category, but because of the time involved in farming up the key items and such, this is where a member's time invested becomes important.
These are also runs where, odds are, this is the only thing you're going to do during the run. That might not make a huge difference to some people, but I tend to view events where I'm potentially going to be spending an hour or more fighting one thing, and one thing only, as events where people need to go all out in terms of preparation and research. The people who do are generally the ones who spend the most time in the events themselves and should have a mechanism in place, from an organizational standpoint, that gives them a better chance to obtain what they want and get rewarded for their work.
Points Allocation
Final topic on Abyssea revolves around how to reward points. There isn't a cookie cutter method to it since there are so many different things to do. If you go by what I've laid out so far, I tend to think points should be awarded accordingly:
Category 1: XP/Farming Session
No points per hour, points per key item that drops.
Category 2: Basic/Force popped NMs (Bazaar)
Points per hour, points per key item (if you're going after those).
Category 3: Key Item popped/Big Shit
Points per hour, points per bad guy killed.
How many you reward is up for discussion, but that's generally how I feel about how rewards should be distributed. I think most groups have found themselves with members who have a lot of different ideas about how to run things. Obsidian is no exception. We have yet to really open an official debate on this subject, but a lot of the sacks have discussed these sorts of things at length amongst themselves. Most of us are on the same page even though our agendas for what we want to do are slightly different.
I think the biggest thing all of us understand though (and I find this to be completely critical to the success of any group):
We all know we're going to get what we want individually eventually and have the patience to wait and develop something that's good for everyone.
Other News!
Trial 1850
This trial fucking sucked. Not because of what I was killing, but because of the lack of options. You basically have:
Ifrit's Cauldron: Bombs. Spread out like crazy and involves a lot of running.
WotG zones with Djinns: See previous entry. Plus the perpetual Bio effect I'd probably have on me will just make the damage range of Geirskogul even more ridiculous. (Remember, most infuriating part of these trials is using the WS and leaving 1% of life on the target...)
Sky: Not exactly the paragon of kill speed excellence up there. Do I want to risk getting Despot'd killing dolls or do I want to watch my wyvern die a lot to the AoE from Golems? That leaves...
Ro'Maeve: Needless to say, I'm not the only one who realized these things about the other 3 locations. You basically just run a loop and grab whatever arcane critter is up and kill it. On good days, I'd get somewhere around 70 kills/hour. On most days, it was more like 30 kills/hour because people loved to team up there. Not that I blame them. It's just hard to work in a huge group when the relic trial requires the kill shot and you don't have much HP on a monster to build TP to begin with.
I made up my mind around the middle of last week to not leave Ro'Maeve until this damn trial was done. I started the day Friday with about 700 kills to go. I knocked out 200 on Friday night. I then got some help in the form of Kaelis and Jance for the remaining 400 or so. We essentially set it up so that they would pull and I would kill. This worked out for them both as Jance should have knocked out about ~200 (since he joined far later than Kaelis) of his gun trial and Kaelis got a few random completions for a BLU sword trial (needed thunder day/weather).
I also need to point out the following:
If I'm in the zone with you and you need the same kills as me, don't even bother trying to ask me to team up. If you don't understand what the relic trials involve, then there's no need for you to waste my time or yours unless you're capable of being self-sustaining and willing to pull for me.
I've already snapped at 2 idiots in Ro'Maeve because they started bitching that I wouldn't team up with them. It's not that hard to understand:
"I have to get killshots, the more people you have, the less likely I build TP."
"I have to get killshots, the more people you have, the more likely it is someone's an idiot."
One guy even offered to let me join his party and continue to let me do my own thing. Anyone care to guess what type of response that got out of me?
"I'm not doing the work for you."
Anyway...by about 11PM Saturday night...
And about 11:01PM Saturday night...
I promptly went to help Theora kill off Tenzen and unload about a month's worth of frustration.
Plus I hate Tenzen anyway and any chance I get to skullfuck his ass, I'm taking it. (That's another story for another day...)
Trial 1851
After 1850, I was semi-dreading 1851. Mostly because it's 500 MORE killshots. The good news is that there are far more options for these than that of arcana. Generally speaking, vermin are in packs and in areas with 6 min respawns. Arcana are not generally in this category. On top of that, I can drag my pocket RDM out with me to help speed things along.
Pretty much just screwing around testing various camps out yesterday, I managed to knock out 250 of these in around 4 hours of killing stuff. There was probably about an hour or so of me wandering around to boot. It makes me feel a lot better at the moment that I likely won't have to invest 2 entire workweeks to get this trial done.
That still doesn't make me hate SE any less for piling this amount of shit on a relic holder. The only real silver lining to this is that I have a very effective way of shutting people up when they start bitching about their trials.
(Glacian) 750 more Tachi: Goten uses >.<
(Qtipus) You can log in as me and do my trial if you hate yours so much.
(Glacian) No thanks.
(Mav) Q takes all the fun out of bitching about trials.
Hopefully by the end of the weekend, I'll have a level 80 Gungnir, but realistically, I'd put it by the end of next week.
As long as you're considering potential future problems... :P
ReplyDeleteIf you don't mind my saying, something else you may want to consider is that the people who farm the pop items may not be the same as the people who fight the NM.
Runs have been on a first-come-first-served basis, and so far that's worked out, but I'd imagine that some of the people who did the farming might be pissed if they found out they couldn't go on the run to fight the NM.
As for organization, maybe Abyssea should be added to the raids on the website with a description of what the night's event will be? Just a thought.
Gawayne has been working on an overhaul of our website for a while now. What you see here is likely what the breakdown will be on the site when we can organize it in that manner.
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