Raidan said:@Mekada
In my post I said time magnifies all others, not that time is challenging in and of itself. Without slow progression, downtime, grinds, strategy in combat, resource management, etc. you have a clone of every new MMO today.
And this is where we disagree. I think your point is good except I think downtime is a waste that should be eliminated from my play session.
And, you didn't have to wait for your health to regen for 20 minutes outside combat if you grouped in EQ. You did if you soloed as a warrior (good luck), which EQ wasn't designed for. In a group-centric game, you have to have designed downtime to promote groups and class interdependence or everyone would solo - almost everyone (including me) will take the path of least resistance. And, even in Pantheon Brad has already said that some classes will solo better (guessing Summoner) than others, so if you "had" to solo, I'd recommend testing which class soloes the best.
I beleive the game could be designed without 20min regen solo. Have to mobs use too much abilities for one person to be able to counter them all if you don't want soloing. Avoid letting one person kill a mob and then wait an eternity to try again. I did try a druid on P99 and didn't like soloing that much, so my point is not about that.
And, the developers have already discussed that Pantheon dungeons are being designed with the 2-3 hour play session in mind by using "safe spots." Dungeons will have safe spots where you can camp and pick-up where you left off the next day versus the 8+ hour family crushers that were EQ. So, if you're wanting to tackle dungeons in 30 minutes or so by running an instance - I don't think you've researched Pantheon's tenets and/or design enough. I'm sure there will be plenty of other tasks that could be completed such as crafting in 30 minutes, or if you picked a class that could solo "better" I'm sure you could kill a few mobs, but, as I've stated in other threads - it's your (the player's) expectations that have to change. If you only have one 2-3 play session every week or every 2 weeks, it will take you *much* longer to obtain max level. Doesn't mean it couldn't occur, it just means your expectations of having to be the best/first does.
I did research Pantheon, thanks... I am insisting the dev stick to that 2-3 hours play session. I get the feeling some, maybe not you specificaly, seem to think nothing significant should be achievable in a "short" time session. Again, I don't care to be max level in 1month. What I care is for my 3 hour session to feel "worth it". I am all for slowly chipping away at progress.
I fall directly in line with your avoidance of family agro and having limited time; however, I wouldn't want to sacrifice others gameplay so the game could cater to my time commitments. My expectations have to change as well - and I'm highly competitive - so it's not easy.
@Mekada
I see your points, but I think having resource management and downtime is a necessary evil for gameplay (unless you're not wanting the strategy in combat that was in EQ). And for the record, I wasn't intending to be rude or come off as harsh at the 2-3 hour point (although it does read that way), I just wanted to emphasize that the game is being built for the 2-3 hour play session to be viable (not specifically the 20-30 minute play session at least for dungeon grouping). I'll copy a post I made over at MMORPG in reply's in Sinist's thread about Mob HPs affecting challenge. I think my point on time will make more sense.
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@Torval
At some point Mob HP directly effects challenge if the game mechanics are designed similar to Vanilla EQ - especially without in-combat mana/endurance/(whatever character resource) regen.
Example: Resource management was a big deal in Vanilla EQ, and, if mob hps were extremely low, or player DPS would have been scaled much higher in Vanilla EQ - that never would have been the case. You couldn't simply spam skills/spells/abilities (as a caster) and melee DPS wasn't overpowering. So fights, took longer, which caused a lot of strategy within the combat.
If Pantheon was designed with Spammy combat with no fear of ever running out of resources in combat (like many MMOs today), then increased HPs would do nothing to "add' to the challenge other than being more tedious, but, hopefully, that won't be the case, and where I'm in agreement with Sinist's "slower" combat.
That, at least, is how I'm reading into Sinist's points.
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So, in my above scenario, the added "time" of HPs added directly to the challenge because it magnified another aspect of EQ gameplay - Resource Management.
Aldie said:MMORPG's have gotten much more challenging in terms of raiding, boss mechanics, and boss complexity. Lets not kid ourselves in this regard.
In terms of every other aspect, the exact opposite is true.
I'd like to continue on with the current raid difficulty while bringing back all the old school open world challenge.
I disagree with this - hear me out before your head explodes please. Raids have become extremely tightly scripted. The difficulty is then in learning the script. You can actually "learn" it by watching it over and over and over online before you actually do it (if you are so inclined). The scripts might have SOME variety in them - but that variety is limited in scope.
On the other end of the spectrum you had the old tank and spank fights from years ago. On the surface, easier. BUT - because the world around that fight wasn't scripted, you always had the chance that the game world around your encounter would rear its ugly head and cause you untold disaster (if you could not deal with it).
To me - I think you absolutely MUST have the chance for the environment around your raid to impact your raid - for it to be difficult... because that means that on level, the challenge can always change. Scripted fights though? Once you learn them - your fingers just dance your way to success (asuming everyone knows the dance).
Add to that that many of the games today have obviated things like resource management. Cast away, forever, no fear... like agro control... don't worry about tank agro, just fire away, etc... All of those things that you USED to have to contend with, that you don't any longer - were things that made an encounter more challenging.
Going to second Raiden and say all the things that made EQ hard, with the time factor being the big one.
Time itself is an indirect challenge. It doesn't challenge your skill, but rather your dedication to the game. Just because a player is highly skilled and plays with other skilled players, doesn't mean the world bows down for them. Time should be a constant that everyone has to deal with. When time doesn't matter everything gets steamrolled, the mysterys that drive you to continue playing become exposed, and the game becomes short lived. Such is the case for modern MMOs.
Liav said:This is pretty much it. Making challenging raids is easy. Keeping the rest of the game challenging is where developers fail.
However, it's not easy to just "make it challenging" either. For instance, one thing that made release-day EQ super challenging was the fact that your hit rate was probably like 20-30%. It was kind of artificial and didn't rely on the skill of the player to succeed. If you solo'd in the first 10 levels, you were just staring at a mob hoping that the RNG would favor you and your hit rate would be high enough to kill the mob before it killed you.
So the first time you fired a gun you were as accurate with it as you were 1000 rounds later? What was your hit rate at level 49?
Krixus said:Liav said:This is pretty much it. Making challenging raids is easy. Keeping the rest of the game challenging is where developers fail.
However, it's not easy to just "make it challenging" either. For instance, one thing that made release-day EQ super challenging was the fact that your hit rate was probably like 20-30%. It was kind of artificial and didn't rely on the skill of the player to succeed. If you solo'd in the first 10 levels, you were just staring at a mob hoping that the RNG would favor you and your hit rate would be high enough to kill the mob before it killed you.
So the first time you fired a gun you were as accurate with it as you were 1000 rounds later? What was your hit rate at level 49?
I don't like referencing real life as a basis for game mechanics, personally. As a result, I don't enjoy "random" mechanics unless you have very tight control over influencing them.
Liav said:Krixus said:Liav said:This is pretty much it. Making challenging raids is easy. Keeping the rest of the game challenging is where developers fail.
However, it's not easy to just "make it challenging" either. For instance, one thing that made release-day EQ super challenging was the fact that your hit rate was probably like 20-30%. It was kind of artificial and didn't rely on the skill of the player to succeed. If you solo'd in the first 10 levels, you were just staring at a mob hoping that the RNG would favor you and your hit rate would be high enough to kill the mob before it killed you.
So the first time you fired a gun you were as accurate with it as you were 1000 rounds later? What was your hit rate at level 49?
I don't like referencing real life as a basis for game mechanics, personally. As a result, I don't enjoy "random" mechanics unless you have very tight control over influencing them.
I don't think the RNG was the problem. Random behavior in general is one of the things that forces strategy, the need to have a strategy to deal with a bad run of resists. The problem at first 10 levels was the lack of ways to deal with the 20%-30% hit rate.
Wandidar said:Aldie said:MMORPG's have gotten much more challenging in terms of raiding, boss mechanics, and boss complexity. Lets not kid ourselves in this regard.
In terms of every other aspect, the exact opposite is true.
I'd like to continue on with the current raid difficulty while bringing back all the old school open world challenge.
I disagree with this - hear me out before your head explodes please. Raids have become extremely tightly scripted. The difficulty is then in learning the script. You can actually "learn" it by watching it over and over and over online before you actually do it (if you are so inclined). The scripts might have SOME variety in them - but that variety is limited in scope.
On the other end of the spectrum you had the old tank and spank fights from years ago. On the surface, easier. BUT - because the world around that fight wasn't scripted, you always had the chance that the game world around your encounter would rear its ugly head and cause you untold disaster (if you could not deal with it).
To me - I think you absolutely MUST have the chance for the environment around your raid to impact your raid - for it to be difficult... because that means that on level, the challenge can always change. Scripted fights though? Once you learn them - your fingers just dance your way to success (asuming everyone knows the dance).
Add to that that many of the games today have obviated things like resource management. Cast away, forever, no fear... like agro control... don't worry about tank agro, just fire away, etc... All of those things that you USED to have to contend with, that you don't any longer - were things that made an encounter more challenging.
In theory you are correct about scripted encounters. In reality, the opposite is true. It's never taken me over 600 wipes on any encounter in any old school MMO. The difference is in the room for error category, in which there is none anymore. One person dies and it's a wipe. This was never the case back then. There were always more bodies that could get tossed to the slaughter to widdle something down. I'm not a fan of the no room for error as i feel it creates artificial difficulty tied to enrage timers which is another story altogether.
As far as outside circumstances from the environment, i agree with you. I personally never saw them as a challenge because i was always prepared for the worst. However i did see less prepared guilds struggle with anything out of the norm. I love when everything goes wrong. That's what separated the good guilds from the bad or subpar.
Yeah - for sure with the raid size limits and people having to tailor raid forces precisely there is an added risk component where if one person dies, you wipe. I don't know if I personally think of that as making the encounter more or less difficult - because the encounters (as in modern scripted events) are discrete things that are more or less the same every time you do them.
It's a fine line I'm drawing, because oddly I think people issues DO add difficulties to some of the older events. In some regard I consider people in the older events as another component of the environment that has te potential to go wrong. The new guy who gets agro and runs away from it and gets adds, rather than running into the tank so that they can grab agro, etc...
We are likely just seeing those things differently.
It's tough to say, but I would rather see a game have a "one death = wipe" type of vibe as opposed to just throwing nearly endless bodies at a mob until it dies. I don't really think zerg warfare is healthy for a game. This is one of the things I don't like about classic EQ, even though it made sense at the time. I like seeing individual players having the responsibility to influence the outcome of a fight, as opposed to just being another cog in the zerg machine.
Edit: Not to mention that I feel there is some cognitive dissonance between wanting death to be harshly penalizing, whiel simultaneously advocating for raid encounters that are very lenient about player deaths.
Liav said:It's tough to say, but I would rather see a game have a "one death = wipe" type of vibe as opposed to just throwing nearly endless bodies at a mob until it dies. I don't really think zerg warfare is healthy for a game. This is one of the things I don't like about classic EQ, even though it made sense at the time. I like seeing individual players having the responsibility to influence the outcome of a fight, as opposed to just being another cog in the zerg machine.
Edit: Not to mention that I feel there is some cognitive dissonance between wanting death to be harshly penalizing, whiel simultaneously advocating for raid encounters that are very lenient about player deaths.
One death = wipe isn't a viable solution because even when everyone knows exactly what to do, there are still outside factors which can cause that 1 person to fail. Network outages are still common as are sudden and inexplicable lag spikes. Family emergencies, etc all can cause problems. Do you want your raid wiped because a vehicle somewhere hit a pole that knocked out an entire neighborhood's internet connection and it just so happens one affected person was on your raid? Of course you do not.
There has to be a grey area, a slope that as people die, the possibility for failure increases. In EQ1 I'd say that was about 10% on average. Main tank dies? Yes, that could very well mean a wipe so there you have your 'one death = wipe' but at the same time if your guild is good (and comes prepared) they have practiced MT switching for just such occassions. Mob is out of position and some AE kills a few clerics? Or a bunch of casters and rogues die? Now your DPS is too low and the clerics will run out of mana before the target dies...but you cant spare a cleric to stop and rez.
For every mistake, blunder or unlucky roll of the RNG dice you want the players to have at least a small window of opportunity to fix the situation. THAT is what makes a raid challenging. That is why long fights are better because you have to pace yourself. Yet if mistakes happen you do have time to recover if you're good enough.
Vandraad said:One death = wipe isn't a viable solution because even when everyone knows exactly what to do, there are still outside factors which can cause that 1 person to fail. Network outages are still common as are sudden and inexplicable lag spikes. Family emergencies, etc all can cause problems. Do you want your raid wiped because a vehicle somewhere hit a pole that knocked out an entire neighborhood's internet connection and it just so happens one affected person was on your raid? Of course you do not.
Network outages suck but it's usually a one-off thing. I've done dozens of raids with one death = fail mechanics and honestly, network/hardware related failures are pretty rare. That said, having a stable internet connection/hardware is a prerequisite to top tier raiding. If you fail to meet these requirements it's as much of a reason to get kicked out of a guild as being unable to play your class properly.
I personally probably caused a couple wipes throughout my gaming career due to these outside factors. I got trolled for it for 5 minutes then we re-pulled the mob and that was that. Not as big of a deal as you're making it out to be.
Vandraad said:There has to be a grey area, a slope that as people die, the possibility for failure increases. In EQ1 I'd say that was about 10% on average. Main tank dies? Yes, that could very well mean a wipe so there you have your 'one death = wipe' but at the same time if your guild is good (and comes prepared) they have practiced MT switching for just such occassions. Mob is out of position and some AE kills a few clerics? Or a bunch of casters and rogues die? Now your DPS is too low and the clerics will run out of mana before the target dies...but you cant spare a cleric to stop and rez.
I don't disagree. One death = wipe is a polar extreme and not something that I would personally want, I was just saying that I would prefer it to the opposite extreme. I definitely think a middle ground is preferrable. Competent guilds should be able to recover from some errors, definitely. Recovering from near-wipes was a huge part of the thrill of a lot of encounters I've done. The fire summoner in IOG from Vanguard was a good example of this. Many deaths could make that fight last a really long time, and be super stressful, but it was definitely fun as hell.
Vandraad said:For every mistake, blunder or unlucky roll of the RNG dice you want the players to have at least a small window of opportunity to fix the situation. THAT is what makes a raid challenging. That is why long fights are better because you have to pace yourself. Yet if mistakes happen you do have time to recover if you're good enough.
I agree fully.
Obliquity said:One of the reasons EQ was a challenge was the Devs didnt cave to a playerbase that would whine about how hard something was. They would just say its working as intended.... Some encounters would feel like you would never beat them, everyone worked for it.
All new MMO's are afraid of losing subs/members and give in way to easy or just design it so everyone is a winner.
I prefer EQ's approach you felt like you earned it, even when you lost you learned from it.
You couldnt beat a raid encounter in EQ til your raid force was strong enough, people had to help eachother get geared. When you would finally beat the encounter everyone in your guild felt it and shared in the joy.
This is a really good one too, I main tanked Akylios for the world first kill with Voodoo on Rift and it took us about 6 days of 8 hours a day attempts to get it down good enough to kill it, everything had to be perfect. I consider that encounter, in the state we did it in, to be one of the most difficult encounters I've ever done. That being said, within a week after we downed it, it was nerfed and instantly 100 more guilds killed it.. that was the nail in the coffin for that game for me, to put in so much time and effort and have the accomplishment watered down by devs wanting to accomodate everyone with their content, for the almighty dollar.
I should've learned my lesson with Trion then, but I tried Archeage down the road... don't even get me started on that.
Rallyd said:Obliquity said:One of the reasons EQ was a challenge was the Devs didnt cave to a playerbase that would whine about how hard something was. They would just say its working as intended.... Some encounters would feel like you would never beat them, everyone worked for it.
All new MMO's are afraid of losing subs/members and give in way to easy or just design it so everyone is a winner.
I prefer EQ's approach you felt like you earned it, even when you lost you learned from it.
You couldnt beat a raid encounter in EQ til your raid force was strong enough, people had to help eachother get geared. When you would finally beat the encounter everyone in your guild felt it and shared in the joy.
This is a really good one too, I main tanked Akylios for the world first kill with Voodoo on Rift and it took us about 6 days of 8 hours a day attempts to get it down good enough to kill it, everything had to be perfect. I consider that encounter, in the state we did it in, to be one of the most difficult encounters I've ever done. That being said, within a week after we downed it, it was nerfed and instantly 100 more guilds killed it.. that was the nail in the coffin for that game for me, to put in so much time and effort and have the accomplishment watered down by devs wanting to accomodate everyone with their content, for the almighty dollar.
I should've learned my lesson with Trion then, but I tried Archeage down the road... don't even get me started on that.
That was by far my favorite encounter ever. Having to be perfect for 20 minutes was both challenging and difficult. That one fight threw so many mechanics at you that you were dealing with so many aspects at one time and it made the fight both amazing and epic. I too was quite frustrated that it was nerfed before i had a chance to beat it.
To me nerfs to content should come from gear acquisition over time and not developers caving to the masses.
I hate when they nerf encounters like that. But I also hate encounters being nerfed by the simple expedient of vertical game growth.
I would love to see a game say "Level 50 will always be our max" or whatever... and have a game just get progressively wider over time - such that stuff you did 2 years go is still valid to do as part of your progresson IF you want to.
It makes me sad to see places I used to love relegated for all time to "let's just go do that dungeon that used to be max but is now 20 levels before max for nostalgia... AFTER we hit max"
Here's something about challenge that hasn't been fully addressed yet: don't hold my hand or tell me where to go. Make me figure it out on my own or with my friends.
I've said in a few threads, but EQ was a challenge from the minute you logged in. The tutorial was offline and not on your main, so you started off raw. If there must be a tutorial, please make it so you do it offline or not on your main. I liked starting off lost without the foggiest clue what was going on. Spawn my at the city gates with a dagger a note and go "lol good luck." That sets the tone of "you better learn to survive " right away.
Keep that vibe going too. Don't have a level 1 zone the funnies uncintrolably into a level 5 zone to a 10, 20, 30 etc. Mix them up. Make some zones like Kithikor, that aren't safe for even a level 40 at night but are a newbie zone too. I want to learn to be afraid and wary from level 1.
Make me risk my tail running through a zone too high my level to get to one better suited to my own. Make a zone have a variety of level ranges that aren't close to each other. I'm hunting level 20 gnolls, but I better stay alert because level 35 griffon and level 40 hill giants path by from time to time, akin to Oasis of Mar or Karana.
Force people to pay attention to dialogue again. Stop this insane attention span deficient crowd mechanic where I can click an NPC, skip all the dialogue, then have a detailed log of where to go and what they said with a map marker showing me where to go. Make me pry the info out of the NPC for some quest. Make me pay attention. There's nothing challenging about catering to the lazy. There are already plenty of games for the WOW quest crowd. Make questing rare, challenging, and rewarding. Make forgetting a detail have consequences just like it would IRL.
Basically, if it's a mechanic designed to make things easier, leave it out please (unless it's a mechanic making archaic mechanics more realistic with improved technology).
Realistically a level 1 could traverse Kithicor with ease by hugging the zone wall. Only way you're gonna prevent stuff like that is just by having level restrictions on zones, which just discourages exploration.
I'd also really appreciate it if you could stop insulting me by calling me an "insane attention span deficient" individual, or "lazy", or any of the other ridiculous baseless assertions you want to make about me and the millions of other people who don't think that WoW is a completely terrible game with no redeeming qualities.
Thanks.
Differences of opinion are not a personal attack, nor are you oppressed if you like something I don't like. It's a bit over the top to hear an opinion you disagree with, and twist a broad assumption into a narrow banded personal attack. Please stop derailing threads with hyperbole and drama.
Arksien said:Differences of opinion are not a personal attack, nor are you oppressed if you like something I don't like. It's a bit over the top to hear an opinion you disagree with, and twist a broad assumption into a narrow banded personal attack. Please stop derailing threads with hyperbole and drama.
I'm not oppressed, I just think you're an ass for constantly generalizing everyone who plays a specific game as falling into an extremely narrow personality set.
I guess if you're fine with that, then I'll just generalize everyone who opposes my suggestions as being old fools with an outdated mentality who have no place playing video games in 2015.
See how fun it is to generalize?
I even agreed to turn down the hyperbole and instead you just keep insulting me in lieu of meaningful conversation.
Venjenz said:Vandraad said:**Who remembers sending in sacrificial people to see if the mob DeathTouched? Or going in with a default approach just to see if any special attacks or spells were used then regrouping to best decide how to deal with them?
** - why guilds brought rangers on raids. =)
Exactly! So many great comments here! I would be beating a dead horse to repeat any! I would throw out a suggestion as far as death = wipe... How about death = wipe, unless you can have a cleric cast "raise dead"? Makes raids a little more interesting if someone goes down and makes those who try to run throw areas think twice... bit extreme? I know others will say..."what about if I DC?" etc. Well I don't have an answer for that outside of have one of your guild clerics come revive you?
Outside of wipe, unless there is some extreme penalty for death, will you really be afraid of dying unless deep on a raid?
J