I did some sifting through the search mechanic and I found posts on instanced verses non-instance type of raid content and so on but I was unable to find anything on anyones concern or lack of concern about open world raid content only(atm it is my understanding there is no raid instancing)
I love the idea of no instancing HOWEVER my 5 year history in EQ, pre-Kunark till wow launched, it was painfully obvious in the endeavors of class weapons that the biggest guilds, on most the time controlled all major open world boss's and the little people or those with more of a life got the shaft.
it is my understanding that all raid content is going to be in the world and that concerns me because what I am PERASONALLY after is to schedule a consistent raid time with my friends/guildies. if, however, everything is openly contested the biggest guilds will manipulate those raid encounters. I know there is a fine line between competition+risk reward and mob dominance. I saw this a lot in EQ and it's one those things I really don't ever want to see again. I don't mind not seeing everything in the game if i can't work for it but thats a different scenario then not being to see everything in the game because it's being hoarded and domincated by 1 or 2 powerful guilds.
Xanier
EQ after that got much easier over time. You still always had problems with being left out, but so did you in wow. The quest system in wow just made it so much easier and the tradeskills so you are not seeing the whole picture right now.
Instanced is good, so is lower limit raids and upper limit raids. I also agree open world, zoned raids should still be added, but limited to a few boss mobs at the start.
I also think it has to do with time, and the longer the time the more chances you will be able to get in on those raids.All real open world raids, and instanced raids required a guild or open ended raids. Group boss mobs, would require up to 6 or 12 depending on what the devs have planned for us.
So was there much difference in gear vs a raiding person? yes and yes. Could a group person catch up on gear? yes and yes... In the end of 16 years i was able to pretty much power lvl from 85 to 100 in little over a few weeks, i also pownded out a few thousand AA's gear before i was read was being upgraded so fast it was rotting.
So at the begining it is much harder to be the top level geared person in the game. Only those that went on raids had a chance to be at that level.
But give yourself some credit, EQ was so new to the industry we learned over 17 years how to do all of this correctly. Wow was a different game, and for the sake of it i was happy it was different.
Either you play as a casual player or hardcore raider, but never both. So all you can do, is the best you can do. Never expect it to be equal if someone is playing 40 hrs a week vs someone who logs in for 2 hrs a week. It should be so much different, but if you speaking of boss group mobs like we had in pre kunark.. you have to realize the game was so new guilds only learned from each other. Heck we didnt have too much then either. We didnt know how to effective raid either.
Crazzie said:Either you play as a casual player or hardcore raider, but never both. So all you can do, is the best you can do. Never expect it to be equal if someone is playing 40 hrs a week vs someone who logs in for 2 hrs a week. It should be so much different, but if you speaking of boss group mobs like we had in pre kunark.. you have to realize the game was so new guilds only learned from each other. Heck we didnt have too much then either. We didnt know how to effective raid either.
I would agree in play time different people are going to have different amount for sure, I work form home so i get to play a lot, many of my guidlies have jobs so they are post work time players and weekends. I would not describe myself as casual by any definition. in 5 years of eq I retired my shaman with 400days played.... I put alot fo time into it
I don't think time committment describes casual/hardcore i wold rather describe ones intentions on what it wanting to be accomplished. My point, which i may not have made well, isn't about those who play more own the map as opposed to guild sizes can capitalize raid content, thats not casual or harcore that's just not something I am interested in. I would also think all the guilds not getting to raid in a game that is about raiding would get frustrated and walk because of it.....
xanier
I agree that might be a problem for some players. I am not sure if anything can change this. I know I have seen multiple smaller guilds work together to get farther in past games but this is no answer. I would say join one of these higher end guilds if you want to do the same stuff they are capable of but I know sometimes changing guilds is not something people would be willing to do.
Maybe dynamic spawn timers so that the more people on a server at max level the more times the mobs spawn. I am not sure how this would work mechanically or if it would even begin to fix the problem. No matter what you are going to get people who are going to group together that are really good at their characters. Put enough of those players together and they will dominate. I imagine we are going to have a lot of good players in this game or at least it looks that way from the caliber of recruits I see joining the forums.
I am interested to see how they will handle open world raids without instances for the masses.
I think Alpha and Beta will flush out the problems on this.
I do like the idea of having a few instanced raid dungeons that guilds can plan on hitting each week but coming from a hardcore raiding background I do love the guild rivalries you get from having open world contested raid mobs. So in short I think having a splash of both is a good thing for raiders. Just my 2 cents.
Pyde Pyper
P.S. It's always fun to watch the other guild go splat, then you get to steal the kill afterwards..... Or this goes the other way around and they get to watch you go splat lol
From their FAQ:
Will the game have instances?
Pantheon will support instancing to a limited degree, using it primarily for storytelling in a linear fashion, perhaps at the end of an epic quest. The vast majority of content, however, will exist in non-instanced shared zones.
The vocal complaint about instances is largely the concept of players acting like they are in a single player game despite being in an MMORPG. This is the type of play you can often find in WoW right now where you queue up for a dungeon, get ported to the instance, barely say a word with your group, finish the content, and then return to your starting location. Dungeons in Pantheon are going to be closer to Everquest where a dungeon is a shared zone where people can socialize, help each other, or any other combination of interaction.
Instances are a tool that can be used properly or improperly by dragging the life out of the game. Just as open world content can be a detriment when the largest guilds are keeping the raid targets on farm status.
With creative solutions one can overcome these problems and add variety.
The trick is to avoid a one size fits all methodology that negatively impacts the game.
I played through the competition of fighting over EQ world bosses and even fighting over dungeons themselves..Vex Thal and Plane of Time come to mind. While it was thrilling and exciting to have that level of competition it was EXTREMELY time consuming and demanding. With a guild of 100+ active players we had people with alts camped out at boss locations and trying to spy boss kill times to estimate when the next pop would occur was paramount. Not to mention the fact that you had to be able to mobilize a sizeable raid force at all times.
This I think presents somewhat of a problem in the MMO world of today. I know I don't have that kind of time anymore and I doubt many guilds of today will be calling guildies at 3am to kill raid bosses when they spawn like we did in EQ. However, that doesn't mean I'm against an open world environment without instances. I'm not a huge fan of instances because I think it closes off the world and makes it less interesting.
What I would love to see is some sort of mechnics in game to prevent one guild or a handful of guilds from dominating raid bosses. One idea that I can think of would be to have some sort of raid boss triggering mechanism. Guild A kills (or maybe even engages) one raid boss that is up and that triggers another raid boss to spawn in another location. This would open up more raid encounter possiblities going on at the same time so no one guild could easily horde all the kills. It would also be sort of dynamic so if there were 3 main raid guilds and they all engaged in raid bosses it would present at least 3 more raid opportunities somewhere else for other guilds who are trying to raid as well but not able to compete. The choicest raid spawns would probably still get locked down by the top guild but at least there would be options.
I'm not sure how you would prevent this from being exploited but maybe engaging in a raid boss (or the 3rd raid boss in X number minutes or whatever) starts some sort of lockout timer so guilds couldn't just chain kill bosses endlessly. Could call it exhaustion or something so no one guild could kill more than 3 in a 24 hour perior or whatever. I don't know.
The details of how something like this would work would take some thought but I think it could work. I'm sure there are some other things that could be done as well to make raiding a bit more accessible in an open game world. I also feel like I wouldn't mind a small number of instanced raid encounters/dungeons so long as the bulk of the game is non-instanced but maybe that is a silppery slope to WoW raiding that we want to avoid completely. Not sure.
@EQBallz I know what you are talking about. I doubt we would want go back to the phone tree system but we all have cell phones now and are 30 secs away from a text message. I would not expect everyone in the guild to mobilize at 3am anymore as some of us once did but I would expect people to be able to drop what they are doing between 7pm and 12am to hit whatever targets may or may not be up or coming up.
I do think you actually had some great ideas though. I really like your direction.
You need a majority of "instanced" raid content both for sanity and time constraints. Otherwise, it becomes a trolling, pseudo-GM policed, lagfest as 4 raid guilds fill the zone and make it unusable for everyone. Not to mention the endless forum posts and ensuing moderation.
This can be done in 2 ways - pure instances or open world mob spawns using an item.
I will never, ever, EVER again sit on a tiny ledge with 100 other people trying to kill the Mutagenic Outcast like in EQ2, but I can be convinced to spawn an open world raid encounter using an item like in Rift. With that said I prefer instancing. It may feel less in line with an immersive game world, but really solves more problems than it creates for players and GMs. Plus raid zone specific story lines can be innovated.
I like a lot of points all posters have made and it's good to think abou those points.
couple things I want to point out I am NOT after-
Not after the game being like WoW...... just want to make that clear.
Not after a game that only favors those who have massive amounts of time rather then those who have mssive amounts of skill (I.E. raid encounters)
Not after useless mechanics soley for time sinks that serve no other value to the competition the game offers.
Not after an easy game.
Not after a game filled with instances.
I really liked that someone found their explanation of instances. I think there could be a healthy mix in raid content between instanced and non-instanced... The major question I have is ---- Is phasing considered instancing? because phasing could be a valuable tool in the raid set up.
Xanier
Xanier said:I did some sifting through the search mechanic and I found posts on instanced verses non-instance type of raid content and so on but I was unable to find anything on anyones concern or lack of concern about open world raid content only(atm it is my understanding there is no raid instancing)
I love the idea of no instancing HOWEVER my 5 year history in EQ, pre-Kunark till wow launched, it was painfully obvious in the endeavors of class weapons that the biggest guilds, on most the time controlled all major open world boss's and the little people or those with more of a life got the shaft.
it is my understanding that all raid content is going to be in the world and that concerns me because what I am PERASONALLY after is to schedule a consistent raid time with my friends/guildies. if, however, everything is openly contested the biggest guilds will manipulate those raid encounters. I know there is a fine line between competition+risk reward and mob dominance. I saw this a lot in EQ and it's one those things I really don't ever want to see again. I don't mind not seeing everything in the game if i can't work for it but thats a different scenario then not being to see everything in the game because it's being hoarded and domincated by 1 or 2 powerful guilds.
Xanier
Hey Xanier,
I believe this is a thing of the past. Question, did you play Vanguard by any chance? VR has multiple people who worked on it on staff, and they had a sweet Open World Solution. That is, once you kill said_raid_mob_01 in the open world, It would respawn 30 minutes (or less?) later, but it would be invulnerable to you (or transparent) indicating you could not attack it for another 7 days, but other guilds waiting could.
I do not believe this logic to be lost on the VR Staff, and I hope they use it.
In EQ1 my guild blocked all server guilds for 57 times successfully on Vulak'Aerr. The last 20 weeks was a joke, almost no one needed anything but Jaelen's Katana (we never got it, Warrior Rage! lol), but we had the time zone advantage, so it was uncontested everytime. A bunch of us felt bad, but it was just the hand we were dealt.
EDIT: Times, not weeks.
We have in fact discussed this is great detail many ideas were put forward to mitigate this including one that I mentioned about lockout timers, which were used in VG to allow huge open world raiding and still control over raiding or camping boss mobs, it worked very well.
Basically, if your guild kills a mob, you are locked out from killing it again for 7 days, it respawns either instantly or within an hour and then the next guild can kill it, this way, multiple guilds can work out schedules to kill the boss without interfering with each others raiding schedule and it stops mobs from being over camped for their gear, removing the overcrowding issue between guilds, having multiple raiding mobs on these lockout timers allows guilds to communicate with each other and assign certain days/raids to kill specific mobs, once you get the first week or two down it becomes a normal raiding schedule with little to no interference from other guilds and solves many problems.
Ive said it in a number of threads by now and Ill say it again. I would like to see systems like Sky from FFXI. Copying and pasting from here:https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/1348/instanced-versus-non-instanced-areas
Here is a link complete with a flow chart for the Gods: http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/wiki/Sky_(FFXI)
Its basically (to me) the perfect meeting of contested and non contested. Multiple Named in a large zone so no uberguild can be all places at once. Open world competition for trigger or pop items that drop from Named. Then using the trigger items to summon the Gods. All open world. All despawn on wipe (which means collecting pops again), unless another Guild grabs it. All have rare drop rates for loot should you beat them. No instancing, 50/50 ratio of competitive and triggered Named. Back in the day when competiton was fierce (4 to 6 guilds on any given night) and the Gods were relevent. My guild could expect to spend 2 of 3 nights just trying to get the pop items (3-5 hours a night) needed to trigger a Named by day three.... roughly. So it was almost like having a 72 hour lock out with the addition of rare loot tables (it wasnt unheard of to have 3 God runs in a row drop jack ****). It was also a dangerous zone and wasnt uncommon to come around a bend and find an entire guild of dead people lol.
Kilsin said:We have in fact discussed this is great detail many ideas were put forward to mitigate this including one that I mentioned about lockout timers, which were used in VG to allow huge open world raiding and still control over raiding or camping boss mobs, it worked very well.
Basically, if your guild kills a mob, you are locked out from killing it again for 7 days, it respawns either instantly or within an hour and then the next guild can kill it, this way, multiple guilds can work out schedules to kill the boss without interfering with each others raiding schedule and it stops mobs from being over camped for their gear, removing the overcrowding issue between guilds, having multiple raiding mobs on these lockout timers allows guilds to communicate with each other and assign certain days/raids to kill specific mobs, once you get the first week or two down it becomes a normal raiding schedule with little to no interference from other guilds and solves many problems.
Most of the EQ boss raids after awhile where 1 day, 3 days and 7 days. It gets to a point, you have to meet the demands of the guild size. If group A gets all the gear over the month and nobody else does, you run into problems all over the place.
/Raises hand remembering how fun racing other guilds to raid bosses, the adrenaline rush, the excitement, the joy of beating them..and the frustration of losing...but still it was fun.
Competition for spawns is a social component of the game. It fosters interaction between smaller guilds to work together and pits larger guilds against each other. You don't need complex lock-outs or other crutches. Random spawn timers fixes so many issues but better yet are X days +/- random Y hours. Basically if you want to kill raid bosses, put in the effort to watch for them yourself. If that means running by the spawn area several times a day every day then so be it. Guild leaders should be delegating these tasks and members should happily be doing this because the payoff is the betterment of your guild.
Xanier said:I love the idea of no instancing HOWEVER my 5 year history in EQ, pre-Kunark till wow launched, it was painfully obvious in the endeavors of class weapons that the biggest guilds, on most the time controlled all major open world boss's and the little people or those with more of a life got the shaft.
it is my understanding that all raid content is going to be in the world and that concerns me because what I am PERASONALLY after is to schedule a consistent raid time with my friends/guildies. if, however, everything is openly contested the biggest guilds will manipulate those raid encounters. I know there is a fine line between competition+risk reward and mob dominance. I saw this a lot in EQ and it's one those things I really don't ever want to see again. I don't mind not seeing everything in the game if i can't work for it but thats a different scenario then not being to see everything in the game because it's being hoarded and domincated by 1 or 2 powerful guilds.
Xanier
I personally do not believe there is a need for mechanics like instancing or even lockout timers to exist if designed properly with the contraints necessary to prevent players from easily gaming the system. I've put forth a few suggestions on this in the past that I'll post again here.
The first of which would be server repops similar to those which existed in EQ following maintenance. Back then, servers usually came up during the day when a lot of players were still at work or school. Still, on Tarew Marr I remember raid targets remaining up, even in the evening. That probably was not the case on some servers with most hardcore guilds. Now, if these repops happened during prime time, all guilds would have a shot at a raid mob.
The second would be variance (see Ragefire in EQ circa 2000), but variance alone solves very little. Having followed and participated in the raid scene on P99 for years on both the blue and red servers, I think its also necessary to prevent players from easily determining whether a raid mob is up. Having the ability to track raid targets, or park a character in a raid target's lair means only the players that go to that extreme have a legitimate chance to compete. Then you have guilds that camp entire raids in a room when the mob comes into window. These things should be prevented. No tracking raid targets, no sneaking or training into a lair, no camping trackers or spotters in lairs, and definitely no camping guilds in a raid area.
If a guild wants to kill a raid mob, they should actually have to gather a raid force, and manually check whether a raid boss was up. While that guild was committed to checking one target, it would allow other guilds a chance to check others.
That said, contested open world content will mean competition. It will be unlikely that guilds will just casually waltz into a dungeon at a pre-planned hour and be guaranteed a chance at a raid boss. I can tell you the names of a dozen MMOs out there that offer ways of achieving that, but its my hope that Pantheon won't be one of them.
I've raided in many different MMOs and imo VG had the best system.
Capped raids with both overland bosses and a form of instanced dungeon bosses such as APW. APW had 6 shards iirc which were sort of like instances but they weren't. These shards didn't seclude you from the rest of the population. They just created an environment where if one shard became overpopulated a guild could move on to a different shard. Each shard was big enough for a few guilds to find different targets to take on and not constantly bump heads but small enough to where there was still plenty of bosses being contested. I remember battling a few different guilds for Zarrax since he roamed a large area and there were 2 or 3 different ways to get to him.
As Kils and others have mentioned, bosses had lockout timers so that if guild A killed one they would have to wait several days to engage again disallowing them to camp any bosses.
It was a great system that allowed guilds to really set up not only a good raid schedule but to just be efficient as well. And it was perfect for players such as myself who have a job, children, and other RL responsibilities where having a neat constructed schedule for raiding just worked. I raided 3-4 days a week at least and never felt like I was missing out nor did it ever become boring as I enjoy contested raid targets and it still allowed for a healthy dose of this.
My honest opinion is that I just think there shouldn't be the possibility of keeping raid content in a chokehold like was possible with EQ. A raid of 40 people could clear every boss in the game in Classic+Kunark+Velious in 2-3 days... just one guild... that's not the way it should be IMO. We do not want instances or lockouts, but if there was 1 thing I would change, it would be that there should be either enough content that even 5 major guilds can't keep even half of it down, or the content that is there should be so hard and so time consuming that the same is true.
When you run into a situation like in Everquest where a server of 2000+ can be strangled by a single raid of 50 on a weekly basis, there just isn't enough content or the content isn't hard enough.
Kilsin said:We have in fact discussed this is great detail many ideas were put forward to mitigate this including one that I mentioned about lockout timers, which were used in VG to allow huge open world raiding and still control over raiding or camping boss mobs, it worked very well.
Basically, if your guild kills a mob, you are locked out from killing it again for 7 days, it respawns either instantly or within an hour and then the next guild can kill it, this way, multiple guilds can work out schedules to kill the boss without interfering with each others raiding schedule and it stops mobs from being over camped for their gear, removing the overcrowding issue between guilds, having multiple raiding mobs on these lockout timers allows guilds to communicate with each other and assign certain days/raids to kill specific mobs, once you get the first week or two down it becomes a normal raiding schedule with little to no interference from other guilds and solves many problems.
Yes, raiding in VG was Awesome ! Loved the way they did it :) Never any conflicts
Kilsin said:We have in fact discussed this is great detail many ideas were put forward to mitigate this including one that I mentioned about lockout timers, which were used in VG to allow huge open world raiding and still control over raiding or camping boss mobs, it worked very well.
Basically, if your guild kills a mob, you are locked out from killing it again for 7 days, it respawns either instantly or within an hour and then the next guild can kill it, this way, multiple guilds can work out schedules to kill the boss without interfering with each others raiding schedule and it stops mobs from being over camped for their gear, removing the overcrowding issue between guilds, having multiple raiding mobs on these lockout timers allows guilds to communicate with each other and assign certain days/raids to kill specific mobs, once you get the first week or two down it becomes a normal raiding schedule with little to no interference from other guilds and solves many problems.
I see the value of forcing guilds to wait while creating chances for others. One issue I see with this idea is if the raid mob respawns right away for the next guild you have basically created an instance that only has one copy running at a time.
The way I could see this helping is if the respawn of the raid boss was more unpredictable and the lockout time was long. Say if you killed it you could not fight it again for six days. The creature itself could respawn 10-40 hours again. This still keeps its unpredictability up for that “o sh*t, Dragon X is up, we have to mobilize” rather than a “ we have five guilds that want the mob and we are four in line so show back up in 4 hours”. Or even worse five guilds all waiting at Dragon X spawn point, and every hour a battle royal for the Dragon happens where the winner gets loot and gets to move on and the losers wait another hour to try again, and again, and again .
Also I would assume the lock out is for the person and not the guild, so an individual cant lock others out just themselves.
Vandraad said:/Raises hand remembering how fun racing other guilds to raid bosses, the adrenaline rush, the excitement, the joy of beating them..and the frustration of losing...but still it was fun.
Competition for spawns is a social component of the game. It fosters interaction between smaller guilds to work together and pits larger guilds against each other. You don't need complex lock-outs or other crutches. Random spawn timers fixes so many issues but better yet are X days +/- random Y hours. Basically if you want to kill raid bosses, put in the effort to watch for them yourself. If that means running by the spawn area several times a day every day then so be it. Guild leaders should be delegating these tasks and members should happily be doing this because the payoff is the betterment of your guild.
Racing was always fun and I agree competition was also part of the fun. Although on the server I was in the high end guilds ended up working out a rotation system between themselves so that everyone had a chance of the loot. This was done without any intervention of the EQ admins which I thought was quite cool. It was organised entirely by the players and that is one area of social interaction that other games have never been able to replicate because they used instances and other artificle methods to make sure that everyone got a shot at the raids mobs that they want. I always thought that was a bit of a shame.
I don't mind not getting every boss i want.
Been in the nr 4 guild on our server back then. After 2 years we have moved up to be the nr 2 guild (nr 1 being out of reach since they raced Fires of Heaven and Triton,...). So we have "lost" quite a few races and bosses.
The more organized guilds got bosses for a month or two, then did not need any more of their loot and we took over. It was annoying for the first 2 months, then we never saw them again. They all moved on to content we could not beat anyways and we killed content they where done with.
All a matter of having enough content for everyone. If at any given point in time only a single raid zone is "viable" then you NEED instancing. If enough horizontal progression is added, then you simply stop caring if you kill Boss a or Boss b. You just relax for a month and let the more organized guild do their thing, then you get in line. Alternativly you could get more organized then the better guilds and beat them to it in the future.
Obviously does not work for people / guilds that want everything and want that NOW. Those either have to be the most organized guild or find an instanced game.
Kilsin said:We have in fact discussed this is great detail many ideas were put forward to mitigate this including one that I mentioned about lockout timers, which were used in VG to allow huge open world raiding and still control over raiding or camping boss mobs, it worked very well.
Basically, if your guild kills a mob, you are locked out from killing it again for 7 days, it respawns either instantly or within an hour and then the next guild can kill it, this way, multiple guilds can work out schedules to kill the boss without interfering with each others raiding schedule and it stops mobs from being over camped for their gear, removing the overcrowding issue between guilds, having multiple raiding mobs on these lockout timers allows guilds to communicate with each other and assign certain days/raids to kill specific mobs, once you get the first week or two down it becomes a normal raiding schedule with little to no interference from other guilds and solves many problems.
While this would fix a lot of the issues, I don't agree with it. This takes a lot away from the competition that some people really want back with this game. It also makes it zero effort put in by other guilds. They can just sit back and wait till everyone else has it done before they do theres. I feel that there should be some work to get these bosses.
I purposed in my other thread to add in farmable items off of mobs in the area of the spawn that guilds would have to collect in order to spawn a summoned version. This way people have to put in an effort to get those kills or they have to race with everyone else. It still keeps that competitive scene alive without hurting guilds that don't want it.
Either way will honestly work. I just think there should be more effort involved rather than just waiting for others to clear out.
I understand building in the code for such an eventuality but would prefer a more dynamic system. Say something like boss A dies and the system goes to the database to calculate a new spawn time. Have the minimum time a boss should stay dead and the maximum and get a random number between them. If a boss can pop anywhere between 48 hours and 240 hours it may make it easier for different groups/guilds to get a shot and it makes the game harder to predict (and avoid things like GW2 timers). This can also be a mechanism to remove the patch day spawn race; if the mob is supposed to be up it spawns when the server comes up, if not it wait till its supposed to show.
In a similar vein I'd prefer to not see bosses upgraded each expansion so alts can still enjoy the old content. if its possible to determine some kind of average player level in the area have the bosses HP and DMG recieve a multiplier of some sort for any average above its level. I'd even go so far as to put in a mechanism where if its too high the boss enrages and kills everyone in the zone/immediate area (or summons a few friends). Something where even higher levels still have a challenge but once future expansions and level caps kick in some group 20 levels above can't participate (I find a mob reaction more realistic than just porting higher levels out).
I'd even enjoy seeing that mechanism with non-boss special mobs. It would make camps more intersting if the boss could spawn in any of the 30 minutes which means your 3 pull just turned into 3 + special due to variance. The old EQ mechanism of the placeholders on a specific timer did make planning camps far easier once you setup since you can predict that spawn and make sure nothing was happening when its time came.