Pros:
- Discourages (but not eliminate) freeloading. Players are encouraged to do better damage to get a better chest.
- Discourages selling of raid slots for real money (for eg, a strong 25-man guild can carry 10 players) since they will only get Silver chests.
- Gives better rewards for players who spent more effort in dealing higher amounts of damage.
- Encourages a whole different set of selfish behaviors for players in a guild.
- Top players are encouraged to keep raid strategies to themselves so that they can retain their MVP chest. I talked to others in some mid-tier guilds. Some of these players are in a guild where only 3 players in the whole guild know about SDD, and the remainder doesn't - and these 3 people get MVP chests for all 4 bosses. They opted not to share the strategies, since they can still kill all 4 bosses within the 14-day period.
- Near-top players are encouraged to leave their current guild for a weaker one to ensure that they can get the MVP chest more consistently. There is no real disadvantage to taking say 9 raid days to kill all 4 bosses in a weaker guild instead of 4 raid days. You don't even need to use consumables to get MVP in a weaker guild.
- Players are encouraged to camp at 5am when the raid keys refresh. The current raid system is such that the "early bird catches the large damage". You want to attack in Phase 1 instead of in Phase 2. You want to attack when Snake/Chimera has a tail to get nearly double the damage per key (due to splash damage) before the tail dies.
- Players are encouraged to hoard raid keys. For example, players will wait on the Treant boss (not attack it) and wait for others to kill it, so that they can spend their 2 keys on Chimera to get MVP on Chimera boss instead of Treant boss. This is partly because the MVP chest on the Chimera contains **much** more gold than the Treant boss, and partly because the Vanity token is harder to get. This last part about "vanity tokens harder to get" isn't true for any guild that can kill all 4 bosses every raid cycle, since all bosses drop the same amount of tokens per week.
- Players in a guild have to check and wait for all 35 members to hit the boss before dealing the killing blow. The Snake boss dies so fast (after about 4 hours, i.e about 9-10am in the morning - the head has less than 1 mil HP left) even after everyone is told to only use 1 key on it, that about 10 people still need to "throw" (waste) their key on it (send a skeleton in for 100 damage) otherwise the Snake dies. This wastes everyone's time and drags out the boss's death. Players have to use a key in the morning and another in the evening, and deal with swapping gear in and out for raiding, or changing rental leaders, all adding to the chore. It feels like poor design if I wake up at 10am, and I see 5 other people haven't hit the Snake yet, and its at 1% health remaining, and I have to "waste" a key just to tag the boss for a Silver Chest.
All of these are very frustrating for guilds. It is easy for someone (devs or players) to say "These are problems the guild should solve for themselves", but I see it differently. These are problems that don't need to exist in the same place, if the raid reward system isn't designed and tiered the way it currently is. If the reward for killing the boss is the same for everyone instead of tiered chests, then none of these selfish behaviors will even exist. If the raid rewards was given out to everyone even if they didn't hit the boss, guilds wouldn't need to create arbitrary rules to limit key use on the first and second boss.
Right now, trying to organize 35 people to login at certain hours just to tag the boss is an organizational chore. The game doesn't particularly try to help in facilitate in guild communication (poor chat system), no in game mail, and most guilds require an external chat tool such as Whatsapp, Line, Discord or Facebook Messenger. Yes, this is a "too much damage" problem, that most guilds do not encounter right now. I understand some of these problems and frustrations apply only to top guilds at the moment, but every guild's damage is just going to increase over time, and more and more guilds will encounter these problems.
Now I will touch on why people want the MVP (and Gold) chests so much. Let's look at the Chimera MVP chest: 6 Vanity tokens, 4 random tokens, and 1.5m gold. The Gold chest gives 6 Vanity tokens, 2 random tokens and 750k gold. The difference between the tier chest is a whopping 750k gold. If you talk to any whale in this game, you'll easily find out that everyone runs out of gold. Gold is needed to do everything, even Whales lack gold all the time. Between the Gold and Silver chest, the difference is still a very large 500k gold.
The problem is this 750k (or 500k) gold difference between the tier chests. This is a HUGE amount of gold. Let's say you are a F2P player and your main source of gold income is Gold Mine daily and your expeditions. On a non-gold mine day, you'll earn about 200k gold. So the 750k gold represents 3-4 days of gold income. This is a lot in F2P terms. If you can MVP all 4 bosses, you are getting more than a week's worth of gold income. If you're a whale, 750k gold represents roughly 150 gems, or a $15 SGD value, and if you MVP all 4 bosses, you're getting easily $40 value.
Is it worth camping the raid boss to be able to hit the snake/chimera tail to MVP to get a $15 monetary value in gold? Heck yes it is. A good number of people camp for it at 5am, or camp for the Treants boss death. In my guild, the Chimera tail doesn't live for more than 30 minutes.
All of these are frustrating for the weaker players in a guild to see. They want to improve their damage, but may not have the necessary heroes or resources to do so, The top players get rewarded with so much extra tokens and gold that the gear gap within a guild widens, the top players increase their damage even more and keep MVP even easier the following week, the bottom players get rewarded very little and barely make any improvement the following week. This is just horrible, and bottom players are then encouraged to leave a strong guild for a weaker guild that they can much more reliably get their raid rewards.
These are the kinds of things that will destroy guilds if not handled properly by good guild management/officers, leading to players quitting the game, because guild raiding is just not the fun experience it was intended to be. Already, the first incarnation of guild raids caused many small guilds to completely die as players migrated and consolidated into stronger guilds.
It should be obvious to anyone observing the raid ladder that Trinity has split internally into 2 raiding guilds - Trinity and Trinity II, both on the raid ladder. For a guild that can originally beat all 4 bosses in 3.5 days, having two separate guilds (say split into 17/18 members, or 15/20) will take about 8 days to kill all 4 raid bosses. This requires double the time needed to raid per raid cycle, but also double the amount of MVP chests and Gold tier chests up for grabs. I just think it is ridiculous that we are actually considering adopting the same approach because of the way the system is. It doesn't quite solve any of the negative behaviors i described above (they will still occur in a guild of 17 members, or 35 members, size doesn't matter), but hey more gold for everyone on the whole. I also don't think this is really the intended outcome that the current raid reward system is trying to achieve.
Suggestions:
- Reward all members with a reward, even the ones that did not hit the boss. Yes this will encourage freeloading, but removes the organizational need wait for everyone to tag the boss and throw their raid keys for next to zero damage.
- Otherwise list guild members that have used 0 keys on a boss. It is painful to see that 33 people have hit the boss, and it takes a couple of minutes to cross-check and find who are the 2 that haven't hit the boss, just so we can contact those 2 people to tag the boss. This is not needed if everyone gets the reward regardless of 0 keys used).
- Remove the tiered raid reward system. It encourages a whole range of selfish behaviors that are not beneficial to a guild on the whole. While guilds can/will try to fix these problems themselves, the developers should also see that the effects of the reward system promotes a whole different set of negative behaviors than the ones the system intended to discourage (freeloading/raid slot selling).
- If a tiered reward system is absolutely necessary, vastly reduce the gap between the top and bottom tier's reward chests. The difference should not amount to half a week's worth of resources, or a $15 monetary value. It should just be a 100k gold difference at most, just enough to motivate players to have a friendly competition, but not enough to encourage cut-throat unhealthy competition. The bottom players need to be rewarded significantly more so that they can improve their performances for the future weeks, and the top players need to be rewarded much much less.
- Use some other way of scaling/awarding raid rewards. Why should the rank 4 guy get 750k gold less than the rank 3 guy if both their raid damage are nearly neck to neck, with less than 100k damage difference from each other?
