Forming Exploratory Voyages Group/Event

TL;DR: 3.1 Airship content brainstorming, origination and planing so we can rock it like a hurricane.

The live letter the other day has put some great info out about the next expansion to airship content coming in 3.1. Up to 24 man FC groups, Eso from objectives, multiple difficulty levels, and a slew of other info. Thanks to lots of hard work we have the airships, now we need the people!

In case you haven't seen the specifics yet, here's how it works: Each ship can take one full party, and if multiple ships queue from the same FC they should all be placed together. Moreover, only lvl 50 FC airships can go to the hardest level area. Now I did say, 24 man cap which means 3 of the 4 ships are needed. Once your in you have a timer of 90 min. to get what you want done, just like a dungeon, before your kicked out and have to wait though a 30 min. cooldown timer before you can go back in. Now what makes things a smidgen complicated is that the ships used to take the groups cannot be out on a venture and cant take anyone else out for 20 min. So, if there is high demand or if groups are unorganized, we could easily end up with too few seats for a given time.

OK, back to what i'm actually here to talk about. I want that 24 man group to go in, kick ass, get gear/loot/eso and have a good time doing it. And i'd like it to be a recurring event. Weekly? Monthly? Still figuring out specifics, like how much interest do we actually have in the FC for this? Would it be a static? Semi-static? Would it be easiest to bring in 3 preexisting flights and just run with that as our group? There's a bunch to nail down, but best to get the ball rolling early.

Comments, suggestions, vague curses? Send em! Its a big ball and i'm only one guy.

~Grimm Stronghamer

I am 120% against doing it as 3 pre existing flights. The absolute last thing we want to do is encourage clicey behavior. We're a huge FC, and we are gonna have a LOT of people who want to do it when the patch drops.

I'd say that we should probably just run them as often as we can at the start. Fill up the ships as much as we can, and go. Once the hype dies down, then we can start assigning individual days for it. It's silly to do it now, because as soon as the 10th rolls around, everyone is gonna be chomping at the bit to go.

I can see what you mean about the pre-existing flights being an issue, and i agree with your reasoning. But i still think the need for organization is real. We're an FC of roughly 500. Even if only 120 people, a mere 25%-ish of the FC, is interested that first day that's still 15 ships worth of seats. Even assuming free reign on all 4 ships, it would still take over an hour and a half to get everyone launched. Toss in the normal set backs of no-shows and "2 sec brb"s and suddenly it's much worse.

The officer team is discussing how to handle using the airships and possible FC events using them. There will be more details once it's worked out and all specifics are known.

I'm offering my seat up to the first person to grab it since I'd be a liability for wanting and making tanks and healers contribute DPS.

I believe we may be able to preform alliances and go through the ishgard airship docks as well. I know that was mentioned as an option for those without an FC. We could use that to help with the overcrowding.

It looks like there's no limit to the number of times the FC can send airships in to do this, and the airships return to the FC house 20 minutes after being launched, so worring about "cliquey behavior" is completely unnecessary. Organized Flights are going to go in as Flights - they work well together, so why wouldn't they? And Flights will probably want to work with other Flights for that same reason. But that's not going to prevent everyone else from going. It's also not going to prevent people in Flights from going at random times. Or from bringing people from outside their Flight as a replacement. Or from any other combination of possible things that could happen.

Calm down.

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Originally Posted by Haz

Calm down.

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Originally Posted by Dresdel

I believe we may be able to preform alliances and go through the ishgard airship docks as well. I know that was mentioned as an option for those without an FC. We could use that to help with the overcrowding.

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I know that full parties can go In from ishgard (not sure about alliances) but then they are locked out of the hard mode and really thats where the meat of the rewards are. So yes it will help if people aren't particular who they are grouped with or are just trying it out, but if they are going for loot it won't be much help.

So I don't understand all the animosity towards the flights, if they decided they want to go together are we actively discourage them from doing so? If this was a limited system where only X number of ships from a FC could go in a day or week, I would be a bit more open to the idea of being slightly more controlling. However given Haz's point of only having a 20 min turnaround on getting a ship back, if flights want to roll out as an 8 man team why on earth would we stop them from playing with the people the feel comfortable and have fun with?

The exploratory content is going to be really difficult to get polices in place for until we actually see how it plays out in game. We are currently having discussions on ideas to make it accessible to anyone interested but I can assure you that it will not come at the expense of someone else's progress or fun.