3. the key system in my opinion should be non-retryable if failed. so people will need to arrange their best squad aiming for 1 chance to get the best score. in order to do this the devs surely need to rebalanced the boss HP and difficulty. this way player won't spend too much time for raid. and able to focus on other things too.
+1 to the above suggestion.
Raid keys should be
non-refundable or (as a mid-way compromise) be allowed only
a maximum number of retries per day (meaning a person can have a maximum of 3 "successful" runs but given a maximum of 6 tries
for example. Each retreat will count as 1 try and if he overdoes his retreats he may just not have 3 "successful" runs
),
Due to the above change, the amount of
HP each boss has should be
drastically reduced to compensate that, such that,
a fail in RNG for a few runs will not break the guild's progress.
The guild raid in current status is just
making your players burn out faster. In other games with raids, the grind is on a weekly basis (different bosses are/can be attempted or downed each day of raid per week) whereas here in VF (yes there are currently 4 bosses and i'm sure more will be introduced later, but
for most players in VF the grind is the same for a few/every day (
even for those who can down more than 1 boss because there's seriously very limited formations to raid effectively at the moment).
3 Raid keys should (in your developer's books) be done
in a maximum of 20 mins, but if your players are
forced (yes, i say forced and i mean it because there is no way in hell that anyone/guild can down 4 bosses without having players that restart for good RNG)
to grind more than double that time (1 hour/2 hours) to do what you envision your players to do is
seriously bad game design and will/already cause burn out for your players.
In other games, RNG is involved like when a poison pool spawn randomly and players get killed because they did not move out fast enough (It is their fault, mostly) But RNG usually does not play a very significant role in determining how most fights / bosses go.
However,
in VF, RNG basically takes center stage (partly due to the game design with triggers
which in itself is not wrong and is also quite unique). RNG is involved in the same random poison pool spawn and players also have to get out of it to not get their units killed, yes. But RNG is also heavily involved in damage generation and
players are being punished heavily for something they totally have no control over, and it becomes
worse when you (developers) design content to be cleared based on getting favored by incredible RNG. While I do not fault the game system of triggering (and actually quite like it), I
do fault the developers for creating content that can only be cleared by relying heavily on RNG favoring the player. It removes whatever meaningful control the player has of the encounters (
I can stay out of poison pools, heal, don't die but still not achieve my goal because RNG decides to abandon me a few times and because the bar is set so high, there's no point continuing because seriously i won't do enough damage to matter in the end -> time to restart and grind again urgh)
and basically all we can do is click start and pray. (Well if anyone or the developers could actually come up with a formation that doesn't rely heavily on almost perfect RNG and still clear 4 bosses, well you can refute my point here but i wait to be corrected)
This is not the same as the normal scenario where a raid in other games fails to down a boss because of failing to meet the dps requirement. In those other games, the players can maybe switch skill rotation, move faster, gear up more to steadily and with little RNG increase their dps to meet the dps requirement of encounter. However, in VF, i can have all the units and gear and yet fail the dps check because of RNG,
As much as i understand changes takes time, they just can't come fast enough right now and i hope that
major improvements to raid are being made sooner rather than later because right now, raids are the destroyer of guilds (just look at how active your guild recruitment forum is after you released raids - i'm not even sure if that's a positive).