Liav said:Dullahan said:I can think of numerous ways to prevent all of the things you just said, and I think the devs can as well.
If the player is 50 and the content is so low that it's trivial to move around a zone, A) they should change the way the AI works to make it more dangerous, and B) the item may not belong in content of that level or there needs to be better higher level alternatives to encourage players to engage in level appropriate content. If it's hard lock down an item and there are other higher level alternatives, then farming low level content will be more rare.
The worst cases of over level farmers and it being a problem existed mostly in EQ when developers were still getting a handle on balancing server populations and providing enough content. Those two things alone could avoid most of the problems being discussed in this thread.
I'm well aware of how simple it is for the developers to reduce or eliminate high level farming. I also have zero interest in going through an inexhaustible list of ways that can be done. Instead, I'll simply reject that it's a problem in the first place. Certainly not a problem going out of your way to code for.
I'm happy to hear arguments for why high levels shouldn't be able to farm things, but only if the arguments account for the fact that a level appropriate group could accomplish the same thing and have the same end result. End results are all that matter, and the economic/social/whatever impact of a group of 30s killing a level 30 named for a drop is hardly different than a single level 50 doing the same.
In EQ it wasn't even a problem. I'd say it positively influenced things by allowing players to buy super rare items they probably wouldn't be able to get for themselves.
I agree, high level players should be able to farm lower level things. It just shouldn't be the norm. Anyone that played early EQ, let alone took part in it's design, knows by now how to prevent those issues. As such, I'm with you in that this topic is probably much ado about nothing.
Farmers want no restrictions, casuals want restrictions. No middle ground, everyone trying to convince each other of things, but it's the devs that will implement the mechanics, not the ppl posting. Personally, I think this topic has a lot of merit, and apparently so does Brad and the dev team based on their statements of intent regarding it.
This forum is intended for suggestions to help the dev team on how best to handle it, not if we want them in game or not. There will be soft machanics in place, so it should not surprise anyone when it happens.
Portalgun said:Farmers want no restrictions, casuals want restrictions. No middle ground, everyone trying to convince each other of things, but it's the devs that will implement the mechanics, not the ppl posting. Personally, I think this topic has a lot of merit, and apparently so does Brad and the dev team based on their statements of intent regarding it.
This forum is intended for suggestions to help the dev team on how best to handle it, not if we want them in game or not. There will be soft machanics in place, so it should not surprise anyone when it happens.
Sounds kind of defeatist to me. I highly doubt a developer hasn't been influenced bit by something they read here, even if it is minor.
Regardless of if these things are put in or not, it'd be a horrible mistake for them to outright dismiss our suggestions and discussions, particularly during alpha and beta which is actually designed to gather feedback.
Liav said:Yes, you can load up items with flags to cripple farming. It still doesn't address the question of why farming is a problem worth going these lengths to "fix", though.
You and I actually agree on that. I've actually been rebuked (more of a smack with a big soft pillow) a little for being not as diplomatic as I maybe should have.
My thing is, whether I agree with a lot of the sentiment here or not (I don't. I see it a lot like class warfare, with the classes being casuals and the more hardcore), I am willing to acknowledge their concerns. I offered a solution to what they perceive as a problem that costs me very little. If it makes them happy, that's fine with me.
corpserunner said: Liav, there's a certain school if thought that says if you're 6-boxing and paying for 6 accounts, you've earned the right to play how you wish. How many people actually 6-boxing though, unless they are large scale gold sellers? In which case making excessively-farmed items TIMED NO DROP LORE ITEM, and LORE ITEM ON ACCOUNT would help throw a spanner in the works, no?
Nah, sorry. Dont like this part of the idea. It suggests that my warrior cant camp for an FBSS because my crusader already has one. Regardless of whether they are doing it at the appropriate level with the intended risk. If you apply the flag only to over level characters, then my warrior (who is desperately undergeared because I suck) who has an FBSS is preventing my necro (yes, I'm still campaigning for necros at release) cant go get an fbss in order to get money to get better gear so he's less undergeared than my suck warrior.
Feyshtey said:corpserunner said: Liav, there's a certain school if thought that says if you're 6-boxing and paying for 6 accounts, you've earned the right to play how you wish. How many people actually 6-boxing though, unless they are large scale gold sellers? In which case making excessively-farmed items TIMED NO DROP LORE ITEM, and LORE ITEM ON ACCOUNT would help throw a spanner in the works, no?Nah, sorry. Dont like this part of the idea. It suggests that my warrior cant camp for an FBSS because my crusader already has one. Regardless of whether they are doing it at the appropriate level with the intended risk. If you apply the flag only to over level characters, then my warrior (who is desperately undergeared because I suck) who has an FBSS is preventing my necro (yes, I'm still campaigning for necros at release) cant go get an fbss in order to get money to get better gear so he's less undergeared than my suck warrior.
Did you read the part about the NO DROP and LORE being on a timer? That would allow you to get as many as you want, but maybe not 10 in a row, permacapmping something for a week straight.
corpserunner said:Did you read the part about the NO DROP and LORE being on a timer? That would allow you to get as many as you want, but maybe not 10 in a row, permacapmping something for a week straight.
So if you get another drop you'd rather see items rot than go into the economy and be sold?
I just can't grasp why this is needed in the first place.
corpserunner said: Liav, I'm suggesting the player would move on to another camp, making room for another player. The drop wouldn't be "wasted". And remember this is all up to the GMs, on an item by item basis. Just another tool in their bag. My thought is that it would only be used in particularly troubles spots that seem to be generating a lot of complaints (justified or not) for them to deal with.
I mean, it could be very well be wasted. You run through a dungeon and you forget you have one in your bank. Another named spawns and drops the same item. I can think of a pretty large list of scenarios where this mechanic would lead to needless waste.
Regardless of that, farming still isn't a problem that I feel needs to be "fixed", which is what all of these suggestions are predicated on.
Yet another thread of what has at times reduced itself to an argument about whether or not devs should solve problems for players, or if players should solve it themselves. The more of these I read, the more I begin to ask myself: what are devs and moderators for? If the answer is: "to build us a game and then leave us alone besides maybe hotfixing and updating", then I have to wonder at the efficacy and purpose of a system in which massive amounts of players interact online in a (mostly) static environment without an explicit system, agreed upon by the playerbase at large, by which the problems can be addressed. Until I see this system, the logic of the counter-complaint and argument for essentially an unregulated environment seems at best to be niave and at worst fallacious.
Zorus said:Yet another thread of what has at times reduced itself to an argument about whether or not devs should solve problems for players, or if players should solve it themselves. The more of these I read, the more I begin to ask myself: what are devs and moderators for? If the answer is: "to build us a game and then leave us alone besides maybe hotfixing and updating", then I have to wonder at the efficacy and purpose of a system in which massive amounts of players interact online in a (mostly) static environment without an explicit system, agreed upon by the playerbase at large, by which the problems can be addressed. Until I see this system, the logic of the counter-complaint and argument for essentially an unregulated environment seems at best to be niave and at worst fallacious.
While I happen to be in agreement with the your stance on the topic, I can't say that I agree with the reasoning of your argument. I may be misunderstanding you though. To draw a loose analogy...
If you have a loose beam that may or may not hold weight, you can either use your hammer (devs) and some nails (mechanics that prevent farming) or leave it be. It seems like you're saying that the existence of a hammer is by itself an indication that nails should be used. There may yet be unforeseen consequences.
I have been a proponent of mechanics that are minimally intrusive to high level farmers and aim to prevent abuse. However, those arguing for an unregulated environment are far from naive, they're just the ones saying "you're gonna break something if you put that nail in".
I'm jumping in late here on this topic (I just backed because this game looks like hotness ...) ...but watching the last stream, I feel the issue of "player collision" of a contested resource, which is what the OP is really talking about, is clearly not well thought out by the dev team. This could be a high level camping a low level mob, but could also be another group of players, or could also be some dedicated trolling kill stealers, etc. Visionary Realms is adopting from what I can tell is the EverQuest model, and the EverQuest model was clearly broken. CLEARLY BROKEN. You'd have this amazing, creative, dungeon full of twists, turns, and surprises, a work of art, really ...and when you went into it, it'd be polluted with group camps at all the best spots grinding away. Lower Guk was a perfect example of this. So instead of a dungeon, it felt like a theme park where you had multiple attractions, and each had a line (waiting list). That was back in the day, and how trhe communityh resolved it. It wasn't a good resolution, it wasn't fun for most people, and it took away totally from the whole "this is a scary dungeon" feel, and just turned it into a camp/grind fest.
Now add in money farmers, auction house farmers, powerlevellers, and all the ills and poisons that have since evovled in MMO culutre, wiki culture and streaming culture, on-line gang rape culure (my term for groups of like minded trolls that get together through social networking, like Reddit, Twitter, Twitch, etc, for the sole pupose of trolling others for QQ and lols -see Eve Online) etc, and these open world systems that were unchecked during the age of innocence of on-line culture, and were broken then, are just absurdely broken in 2017. Relying on the server community itself to black list certain indivduals, which in itself can easily be abused, is just not going to work well enough to prevent strife and furstration amongst most well meaning players. While some may love it, there is no doubnt in my mind Visionary Realms will eventually have to change their system from no plan to some plan, it's just a matter of how many new people trying to onboard into the game they are willing to churn through and lose before they do it.
The issue "really" isn't so much that other players can contest resources you or your group may want. Player contestion is actually an exciting mechanic missing from mordern MMOs, and adds a level of "real" and grittiness to the world through a kind of competition. And it does build community, as well, boith through those that act with honor, and those that don't. However, the issue here is both that you can't do anything about player contested resources, and that there is no limit to how many other players can contest a given resource. For example, the open world EverQuest model was intolerable on my actual server near mas population, but when I started playing on the EverQuest Test Server (with a drastically reduced population), it worked much better. When you go into a dungeon and it's mostly scary and intact, and very dangerous, and you occasionally ecounter another group ...that's a totally different expereince than going into a dungeon and having nothing to kill because it's completely camped out by both groups and farmers.
In my opinoin, the first solution would be to instance major portions of zones such that player collision is lighter but not gone. This would be very easy. For example, maybe 12 people in a given dungeon, or even 24, if the dungeon is big enough ...but only so much that you could run into another group, or random people, but not so many people that the dungeon is even half "camped". This design would be necessary as it would preserve the ideal feel of a dungeon encounter, as server populations exapnded. Allowing for some player contested resources also creates reasons for groups to meet, and maybe take on other challenges together, bond socially, etc.
The other part of the solution would be to enable PvP in any contested area, this is harder, but also MUST happen. PvP should be scaled such that a level 1 can fight agaisnt level cap player, and win given equale skill. Even if the game simply made you play a game of rock paper scissors to the death, it'd be better. Thus, when players ecountered a contested area, they have tools in thier bags to sort out it, either amicably or through violence. A group of level appropiate players could easily take an over levelled camper, he's not goign to win against all of them. This would force the camper to work with the lower levels, perhaps granting them right of passage, etc. If this included a mecahnic where when the killed player might getting funnled into another instance, it could provide a means to force out a player or group of players into another instance.
Aluna I don't want to sound patronizing, but neither of your solutions are either necessary or even desirable. The first one, instancing, is already something the devs have taken a hard stance on, so advocating for it is pretty pointless. The second one, enabling pvp, is pretty anathema to the entire idea of pve servers, so it by definition is not something that must be implemented.
I would take a step back and read more dev diaries about the lessons they've learned from EQ and Vanguard, and specifically at their already released information. The dungeon zone Amberfaet, which they have presented in incredible detail, is designed for "80-100 players" to fit comfortably together. That is just a single dungeon!
Presuming an average online population of 1500~ on a given server, with a maximum of maybe 3k, it only takes maybe a half dozen of these such zones to handle people grinding for exp at max level. That's 6 Amberfaets to handle 600 max level players actively grinding, a full third of people online at any given time! Far more that will probably be grinding at any given time, meaning they only need maybe 20 zones out of dozens to facilitate literally every single player online grinding at once. I prefer this system to implementing a bunch of bizarre rules like arbitrary pvp and instanced zones.
The issue of griefers is just a truism, it's not something you solve by trying to prevent it. You just have to give people a lot of options for stuff to do, multiple avenues for progression. Where a lot of games pre-WoW failed in early development was in not having enough avenues in this fashion. I expect Pantheon might have similar issues, but like the games of old they will solve them through variety.
I'm pretty sure i saw this mentioned earlier in this very thread, but i thought it was a pretty good idea to stop botting or unfair camping. Anyways the idea was something about a "lockout" of sorts, let the same group or individual kill the same named creature 3 times in succession, after that they are locked out from being able to kill said named character again for lets say 24 hours. Doesn't stop it completely, but does give other people a chance to kill the creature as well without a rediculously long wait time, or hoping for that lucky strike giving you the most damage. Now that i think about it more, it even would be extremely helpful in mitigating those people that we know will eventually show up, the loot ninja/kill stealers. Just a thought, and like i said, pretty sure its not completely original to this post, although i may have worded it in an easier way to explain.
Aduna said:I'm jumping in late here on this topic (I just backed because this game looks like hotness ...) ...but watching the last stream, I feel the issue of "player collision" of a contested resource, which is what the OP is really talking about, is clearly not well thought out by the dev team. This could be a high level camping a low level mob, but could also be another group of players, or could also be some dedicated trolling kill stealers, etc. Visionary Realms is adopting from what I can tell is the EverQuest model, and the EverQuest model was clearly broken. CLEARLY BROKEN.
Seemed to work perfectly for me.
Aduna said:You'd have this amazing, creative, dungeon full of twists, turns, and surprises, a work of art, really ...and when you went into it, it'd be polluted with group camps at all the best spots grinding away. Lower Guk was a perfect example of this. So instead of a dungeon, it felt like a theme park where you had multiple attractions, and each had a line (waiting list). That was back in the day, and how trhe communityh resolved it. It wasn't a good resolution, it wasn't fun for most people, and it took away totally from the whole "this is a scary dungeon" feel, and just turned it into a camp/grind fest.
Lower guk was at a time with severely limited high level content. By the time Kunark came out and the population was spread out a bit, dungeons still felt dangerous despite people camping all of the popular spawns.
Working as intended.
Agree with you that PvP servers are an alternative for some, but people have to come to terms with the fact that Pantheon won't be Burger King. In an open world MMORPG, you won't always be able to have whatever you want. That's part of the reason that getting your shot at a rare camp or finally obtaining that item you've been after was memorable and rewarding. If everyone just got their own Lower Guk to kill anything they wanted, you'd have everything you want in short order, and you'd be looking for the next game to consume.
Nothing Liav, it was just added as an afterthought relevant to the chain of thought of stopping griefing is all, thought that was obvious. And no offense meant corpserunner, but (and this is just my opinion like everything anyone but a dev posts on here) but farming when taken to the extent of botting, or stopping other people from advancing is not competition, but rather a form of griefing. Which I would guess is why the devs referred to it in one their streams as "being handled by the community, because they would get a bad reputation ".
Keep it on-topic please folks or risk having the thread closed.
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/1595/pantheon-developer-forum-guidelines
Liav said:snip
I'm happy to hear arguments for why high levels shouldn't be able to farm things, but only if the arguments account for the fact that a level appropriate group could accomplish the same thing and have the same end result. End results are all that matter, and the economic/social/whatever impact of a group of 30s killing a level 30 named for a drop is hardly different than a single level 50 doing the same.
In EQ it wasn't even a problem. I'd say it positively influenced things by allowing players to buy super rare items they probably wouldn't be able to get for themselves.
Content is King. According to the Tenets.
Bypassing content so players can just purchase rare items completely disregards that tenet.
The stance of farming for one's alt has been dropped in this thread as well. What's the point in maintaining worthy content if one cannot bring their alt to the content for the chance to earn an exceptional item? "meh, that's a hard camp, I'll just go buy the item in the market."
This all assumes that rare items in game will be of similar design to an FBSS or some other piece of gear so your alts can breeze through content when you're ready to level said alt. And dare I say, without the need for a full group.
Also, what about the crafters? If rare items are so valuable and fantastic what's the point of crafting?
Otherwise some really good ideas in this thread.
OakKnower said:Liav said:snip
I'm happy to hear arguments for why high levels shouldn't be able to farm things, but only if the arguments account for the fact that a level appropriate group could accomplish the same thing and have the same end result. End results are all that matter, and the economic/social/whatever impact of a group of 30s killing a level 30 named for a drop is hardly different than a single level 50 doing the same.
In EQ it wasn't even a problem. I'd say it positively influenced things by allowing players to buy super rare items they probably wouldn't be able to get for themselves.
Content is King. According to the Tenets.
Bypassing content so players can just purchase rare items completely disregards that tenet.
The stance of farming for one's alt has been dropped in this thread as well. What's the point in maintaining worthy content if one cannot bring their alt to the content for the chance to earn an exceptional item? "meh, that's a hard camp, I'll just go buy the item in the market."
This all assumes that rare items in game will be of similar design to an FBSS or some other piece of gear so your alts can breeze through content when you're ready to level said alt. And dare I say, without the need for a full group.
Also, what about the crafters? If rare items are so valuable and fantastic what's the point of crafting?
Otherwise some really good ideas in this thread.
There are several things here that just dont add up.
"Content is King" - This is a tenent based on the notion that there needs to be plenty of engaging content. This is in part so that contention for a camp in a dungeon is minimized, because players have options of content available to them and when a named is camped there's another to which the group (or player) can go and have the possibility of a comparable gear drop. It is not a tenent that states unequivocally that gameplay must necessarily involve only going thru a prescribed path and must involve a presecribed level of risk to get gear. That's sort of the antithesis of deviating from theme park style MMOs that are currently so pervasive in the market.
"Bypassing Content" - The economy and player interactions are also key tenents. Engaging in either, or both, is not bypassing content. It's participating in one or more of the several avenues available to immerse yourself in the gameworld. If the organic nature of a player-driven economy is bypassing content, then I wonder if you truly understand the idea of a sandbox MMO or if you instead desire player interaction to be limited to who's in your group for a kill in a dungeon?
"Farming for your alt" - How do you suppose a main character was able to gain sufficent power and skill to be able to farm lower content? It has been stated repeatedly that twinking and replayability are important aspects the devs wish to support. Twinking might have some scaling so that a low level character can't have the uber sword of badass and mow thru content at a completely unintended rate, but the specifics of that remain to be defined. I've personally started multiple alts specifically because I got a nice drop that was great for class-X. And I've gone out of my way from there to get more for that class. It has led to a multitude of alts that I wouldn't have otherwise played at all without a leg up, and which I have occasionally focused on entirely after effectively making them my main. Your argument of bypassing content comes back into play here, in that while I did give a "leg up" to an alt by farming some drops, I ultimately ended up playing thru a great deal more content at appropriate levels with the alts precisely because I engaged in farming lower level items with a main.
"FBSS" - Having an FBSS didnt remove the need to have groups. Far from it. It was absolutely impactful, and it combined with other gear items certainly made leveling less time-consuming. But only because it allowed killing at a greater rate in a group. It didnt bypass the need to have a group in order to get the best xp rewards. It simply augmented the rate at which that group could move thru appropriate level content, and perhaps rarely allowed engaging in content that was perhaps very slightly higher than they could have otherwise tackled. Again, no content was bypassed. No content was trivialized thru the farming or twinking, and suggeting otherwise is a bit disengenuous.
"Crafting" - It has been stated that many, or perhaps most dropped items will also be craftable. So farming may just well be made pointless by that very notion alone. However, arguing that farming will eliminate the value of crafting is entirely contradictory to also arguing about bypassing content. You can't argue that you must make crafting not only viable but compelling, and argue that farming allows people to bypass content. If the latter is true, does not the former allow the same?
Liav said:In EQ it wasn't even a problem. I'd say it positively influenced things by allowing players to buy super rare items they probably wouldn't be able to get for themselves.
I guess I have a different opinion of what postively influences things. I don't see how allowing someone to get something they normally couldn't by paying money as a good thing. This is the definition of pay to win.
I think that by making most items tradable that they are opening the door to this type of behavior. After a fair amount of time I think that most people will avoid deep dungeon crawling for gear on lower and mid level characters because they know that A: It's probably camped by a farmer or B: I can just buy that item from the farmer later and not be exposed to that dungeons danger in my exp group. Or C: I can go back with my main character and get the item for my alt. This to me promotes safe and fast exp camps with little reward, vs nice level appropriate gear dungeons that challenge the party. Sure there are those of us that want to experience all the content at the appropriate level, but the path to least resistance will be to sit in a safe area and grind exp and buy gear in my opinion. I don't think this would be a good thing.
Pay-to-Win would be using real life currency to help you do better in game. I don't see any issue with making in-game currency legitimately and using it to buy items others acquired in dungeons. I mean, I can't make clothing in real life...but I have other skills that I have used to earn money and buy clothes.
Yes, there were some ways to get experience in EverQuest that were steadier or safer, but didn't offer much loot compared to other, more dangerous ways. Still, a lot of people enjoyed zones for reasons other than loot.
Anyway, if you make it so these items are not tradeable (I sure hope this doesn't happen), you'd have more higher level players in lower dungeons instead of just the ones who have decided they'd prefer to experience more of the content rather than simply buying the items.
Edit: Awkward usage
Dullahan said:Lower guk was at a time with severely limited high level content. By the time Kunark came out and the population was spread out a bit, dungeons still felt dangerous despite people camping all of the popular spawns.
Working as intended.
Agree with you that PvP servers are an alternative for some, but people have to come to terms with the fact that Pantheon won't be Burger King. In an open world MMORPG, you won't always be able to have whatever you want. That's part of the reason that getting your shot at a rare camp or finally obtaining that item you've been after was memorable and rewarding. If everyone just got their own Lower Guk to kill anything they wanted, you'd have everything you want in short order, and you'd be looking for the next game to consume.
We're saying the same thing. You said things got better by Kunark because people could spread out. You are basically saying x number of people per amount of content allows dungeons to feel dangerous. The question is only how many people, and how much content. That's what I'm saying too. The difference is we have different solutions. Of course, I prefer your solution. Adding massive expansions and volumes of content is the best way to reduce levels of player contested resources. Now let's get realistic, it's very idealistic to expect a huge amount of content for this game at launch. What then?
Again, what the OP was really talking about, in my opinion, was resources contested by other players, his case a high level camper as an example. World of Warcraft made 0% contested resources by doing full dungeon instancing, quick respawns, not allowing kill stealing. EverQuest made 100% contested resources by doing no instancing at all, full kill stealing, etc.. Neither "extreme' works well, for a variety of reasons.
In my opinion, the ideal would be something in between these extremes. We can debate how much content vs how many people is ideal to achieve the right amount of contestation, but what we can't debate is that when there is no system in place, there is no way to control things to hit that "right amount of contestation". From where I'm sitting, the only systems in place for Pantehon is to limit the overall server population, and to push out more content. Both these systems are clumsy and allow no fine tuning. For anyone playing recently on Project 1999 in the last few years on a double exp weekend, with a 150+ people crammed into a single dungeon, every group fighting for pulls ...it's just no where near the same experience as say, what we saw in the latest Pantheon stream ...no where near. It'd be really cool if the game itself could organically balance in such a way that could curate dungeons and other experiences to be more like the last Pantheon stream, and less like Lower Guk pre-Kunark or World of Warcraft. Again, I know the developers are going to dissmiss my suggestions, but it doesn't mean what I'm saying is wrong.
Nostalgia aside, the way forward for MMOs to bring in old school social elements of the early MMOs, and some of the advancements of the later ones. Pantheon looks to me like it's going to be a super fun game, but it's clearly also going to be a niche game and in MMO terms a relatively unsuccessful one. It's not going earn 2.1 billion dollars in sub fees for just one year of operation like World Of Warcraft did at it it's height. I don't want to see Pantheon anything like Word of Warcraft ...but in a community driven and focused MMO, I DO want to see a strong and active community. If there are no tools in the bag of developers to fine tune the experience of the individual players as the server populations expand and contract, striking that perfect balance of player contestation to create community without also creating aggravation, you might still be ok with that, I might still be ok with that ...but many, many people will not be ok with that, and there will be a high new player churn, and the community will ultimately be anemic. That's the real problem.
Aduna said:
We're saying the same thing. You said things got better by Kunark because people could spread out. You are basically saying x number of people per amount of content allows dungeons to feel dangerous. The question is only how many people, and how much content. That's what I'm saying too. The difference is we have different solutions. Of course, I prefer your solution. Adding massive expansions and volumes of content is the best way to reduce levels of player contested resources. Now let's get realistic, it's very idealistic to expect a huge amount of content for this game at launch. What then?
Again, what the OP was really talking about, in my opinion, was resources contested by other players, his case a high level camper as an example. World of Warcraft made 0% contested resources by doing full dungeon instancing, quick respawns, not allowing kill stealing. EverQuest made 100% contested resources by doing no instancing at all, full kill stealing, etc.. Neither "extreme' works well, for a variety of reasons.
In my opinion, the ideal would be something in between these extremes. We can debate how much content vs how many people is ideal to achieve the right amount of contestation, but what we can't debate is that when there is no system in place, there is no way to control things to hit that "right amount of contestation". From where I'm sitting, the only systems in place for Pantehon is to limit the overall server population, and to push out more content. Both these systems are clumsy and allow no fine tuning. For anyone playing recently on Project 1999 in the last few years on a double exp weekend, with a 150+ people crammed into a single dungeon, every group fighting for pulls ...it's just no where near the same experience as say, what we saw in the latest Pantheon stream ...no where near. It'd be really cool if the game itself could organically balance in such a way that could curate dungeons and other experiences to be more like the last Pantheon stream, and less like Lower Guk pre-Kunark or World of Warcraft. Again, I know the developers are going to dissmiss my suggestions, but it doesn't mean what I'm saying is wrong.
Nostalgia aside, the way forward for MMOs to bring in old school social elements of the early MMOs, and some of the advancements of the later ones. Pantheon looks to me like it's going to be a super fun game, but it's clearly also going to be a niche game and in MMO terms a relatively unsuccessful one. It's not going earn 2.1 billion dollars in sub fees for just one year of operation like World Of Warcraft did at it it's height. I don't want to see Pantheon anything like Word of Warcraft ...but in a community driven and focused MMO, I DO want to see a strong and active community. If there are no tools in the bag of developers to fine tune the experience of the individual players as the server populations expand and contract, striking that perfect balance of player contestation to create community without also creating aggravation, you might still be ok with that, I might still be ok with that ...but many, many people will not be ok with that, and there will be a hight new palyer chuirn, and the community will ultimately be anemic. That's the real problem.
First, I dont think it's unrealistic to assume that Brad and VR fully recognize the issue of content and how it is coupled directly with population. They've been in this business frankly longer than anyone save those who ran MUDs and are still in the business, of whom I can think of none off the top of my head. I think they understand better than most exactly how a game with contested content needs to address that competition in such a way that there is a balance of both quantity and value. Hell, we've seen gameplay in what, 4 or 5 zones, and 3 of them were dungeons? They get it. Not only that but they've talked repeatedly about how they dont want that item from that zone to be the end-all be-all best in slot item that everyone simply must have to be taken seriously. That eleviates a hell of a lot of the conerns of contested content as a whole, but specifically in this conversation about farmers blocking content. Add in that they've said they want many, perhaps most items, to be craftable as well as lootable and the fears about farmers should be largely resolved.
Second, using P99 as a data point is asinine, because its not at all representative of even what EQ was. What exists there is not valid for a myriad of reasons, but included a double XP weekend into the equation to add validation is like saying that the behavior of people on Black Friday shows how ridiculous it is to ever go to Best Buy.
Third, part of the point here is that there are 200 games out there trying to be the next $2.1 billion venture. And they are all designing to the lowest common denominator of ease of access and convenience. Guess what? None of them will ever be the next WoW, because they are all shopping essentially the same product. More of the same. Yet another marriage of a mini-van and an SUV and it's all anyone is driving. Does that inherently mean that no one will ever be successful selling a Jeeps or a Camaros? Hell no.