Prominus said:I don't really post much but this topic really bugs me because all games pull this ****.
I have a pretty good idea that someone already touched on Horizantal gear based leveling with resistances and I will give a pretty good example with some dumbed down numbers.
Lets say the original game the best sword is 100str well well the new expansions requires fire so and upgraded sword will have 100str +1 fire so on and so forth but the key is to gain strength in the original content too without breaking it. Well the final sword in the new expansions may be 105str 100 fire. Then the next expansion your starter sword is 105 str 100 fire 1 ice. so on and so forth leading you to a 110 str 105 fire 100 ice at the end of it. Now add a main game expansion that requires a 110 str sword to begin with etc etc.
Of course you cant just give out the best gear so this is best case scenario someone who farmed best swords in the games and expansions.
We also must remember that power creep within the expansion it occurs, isn't really a problem. Your example of the sword shows the start of the issue. What happens when 3-4 expansions later you can get +110str +105fr, +105cr, +105dr, etc and its tradeable? You get the people working through the original content using items from 'the future'. Thats the problem, not the power creep itself, but the fact it can be employed where it is not needed.
Perhaps a new item restriction should be introduced: Expansion restricted. Item can only be equipped/used when in the expansion in which it appeared or later. :)
Vandraad said:Prominus said:I don't really post much but this topic really bugs me because all games pull this ****.
I have a pretty good idea that someone already touched on Horizantal gear based leveling with resistances and I will give a pretty good example with some dumbed down numbers.
Lets say the original game the best sword is 100str well well the new expansions requires fire so and upgraded sword will have 100str +1 fire so on and so forth but the key is to gain strength in the original content too without breaking it. Well the final sword in the new expansions may be 105str 100 fire. Then the next expansion your starter sword is 105 str 100 fire 1 ice. so on and so forth leading you to a 110 str 105 fire 100 ice at the end of it. Now add a main game expansion that requires a 110 str sword to begin with etc etc.
Maybe a "Quest" for the end of the previous expansions that will allow you to "Unlock" the full potential of items in the new expansions.
Of course you cant just give out the best gear so this is best case scenario someone who farmed best swords in the games and expansions.
We also must remember that power creep within the expansion it occurs, isn't really a problem. Your example of the sword shows the start of the issue. What happens when 3-4 expansions later you can get +110str +105fr, +105cr, +105dr, etc and its tradeable? You get the people working through the original content using items from 'the future'. Thats the problem, not the power creep itself, but the fact it can be employed where it is not needed.
Perhaps a new item restriction should be introduced: Expansion restricted. Item can only be equipped/used when in the expansion in which it appeared or later. :)
Expansion restricted items is actually a really good idea but who likes to have items locked out... I firmly believe if you have it you can equip it. Original DAOC if I recall you could equip everything at any level but if you were not a high enough level the stats were reduced. You were still gaining a lot more than if you wore items of your level but it did not make you overpowered.
What about a final quest in the original game or added a few months prior to the expansions that explains the lore of the new content and allows you to "Learn" how to use their new items and weapons and unlocked the full potential of them. And if you did not complete this major quest you could still wear them but with majorly reduced stats.
This topic is both right and wrong imo. I agree that dragons shouldn't be killed by fodder trash sheep/horses/etc but to say that those things cant be stronger than the dragon after living in another part of the world under different circumstances is wrong. That's like saying if I take my skills from the US to India the people around me should be able to keep up. We were raised in totally different environments. They would be better than me at some things and I would be better than them at some.
Basically, new areas of stronger creatures means stronger fodder that had to adapt to survive.
It is traditional for an expansion to require stronger gear than earlier areas. And to provide such gear - typically a new expansion will give you "old world" raid tier 2 gear as a quest reward from the entry quests just so you can kill the mobs. Why is this tradional? Because a lot of players play for the gear. If the character's gear gets better they are happy. If the enemies require the same gear to kill and all the expansion gives is new areas to play around in they are unhappy. Happy players buy expansions, it is that simple.
Nothing that any of us can say or do will change this dynamic - gear inflation keeps people paying.
If I remember correctly WoW - not a game I'm very familiar with - tried fairly late into the game to do a rollback. Instead of a rat in a new zone having 100 million hit points (so that it took two hits to kill it not one) they gave it more ...ratlike statistics. They slashed attributes and abilities drastically. I thought at the time it was a wonderful idea if they could pull it off - I didn't stick around to see if they did.
It is an obvious answer here. Every now and then cut the mobs' abilities by 90% and ours by 90% then start the spiral all over again. So ...hmmmm ...every 4 expansions we get back to rats with D6 hit points (yes my first roleplaying games were D&D based).
Regarding dorotea's comment that Wow did to a stat crunch during the warlords of draenor patch because they felt the dps figures went from 20k in early cata to about 500k dps during late MoP. It only took one expansion to get back up to big numbers.
What really kills it for me in games when it comes to expansion is rapid power creep. I was falling out of 'love' with wow more and more once they got the gear obsolescence cycle to less than 3 months which was just before the high point in WoW with ICC. One content patch and any effort I put in was near worthless. WoW introduced it (in my opinion) because they wanted players not to be perpetually stuck in dead end guilds. Final Fantasy 14 went this rapid gear cycle too, which resulted me leaving that one too.
So to me this is why everquest had such enduring raiding atmosphere, gear wasn't truly obselete when an expansion was released. As a guild if you wanted to step up to the next tier level, you had to do the previous so it had relevence to your guild. As a guild a player would only have to get a handful of peices (not a full gear upgrade) and the guild was in better shape to attempt the next tier.
I agree with dorotea that it should be applied once in every 4 to 5 expansions, but I think we are thinking way too far into the future. It's something to keep in mind but it shouldnt take any develoment budget or hours until the squash, maybe make the system steamline to implement it at most.
The problem: People's characters outgrow the content at some point and there is nothing left to explore.
The solution: create more content.
What kind of content?
level cap increase (must)
more higher levels zones (must)
higher level items (must)
lower level zones? (depends)
You have a population growth curve for every game that will fit some distortion of a standard deviation curve. The first expansion may see an uptick in new players coming to the game. Along with new high end content, it would probably make sense to create another race and lowbie zones for those characters. This is all fine and dandy; as long as the population continues to grow.
Annnnnd this is where the wheels fall off the cart.
You are now into your 3rd expansion. Population is stagnating (as all games do at some point). Maybe even, more people are leaving the game than entering - "people are leaving the castle sire." Every time you create another zone, the server's population is going to spread out thinner, worse, people start gathering into cloisters, usually in the new zones, which are higher level. You can't have new newbie zones at this point, the low level,new player population is low enough that you can't spread them out any more.
What do you do? What is the solution to prevent creating a world with so many zones that much of the content never gets used again?
I don't know. The simplest solution is that, there is no solution. Short of destroying old world content (maybe zones that could be considered superfluous) in the next "expansion" pack content, the sad truth is that every game must come to an end, or at least try to power through and try to whistle away the "zone-creep".
Nothing is worse than starting a new character and your home city zone is completely empty of other people. Cities MUST remain a nexus through the expansions. Don't create other nexii(sp?)
Just to be pedantic, the specific example of dragons/deities is already recognized by the dev team. Brad has stated that Dragons and Celestials will be at astronomically high levels (200/500 iirc).
Pedantry aside, I believe this is not that big of a problem because Pantheon is following in the veins of pre-vertical progression games. Even in the December stream you could see how different weapons had damage bonuses and maluses, and how certain gear could help you acclimatize better. I think you can reasonably infer that an individual class will be seeking quite a few gear sets alone, not to mention the more exotic spells that have been discussed.
From there, all you do is protract the gear grind and spread it out over a variety of endgame content types which you release periodically, and design them such that the assumption is a group will potentially farm it on and off for years. If, by 3 expansions at the same level cap the average endgame guild has 6~7 different activities they could do on any given night, but they don't need the earlier battle types as much so they prioritize them less then you've successfully made a game that lasted for 5+ years at one level cap.
If it were up to me you'd have no bosses like the loot pinatas of modern games, where they have guaranteed loot drops of an arbitrary level that's designed to get a full raid group gear in 3 months. You'd have whole zones chock full of high level enemies of all ranks grunt-super boss that all might drop 1 or 2 interesting items so a group would have to prioritize what they wanted to do.
I just don't see this as a problem unless you go for pure vertical or pure horizontal progression and make the treadmill reset every 3 months. If that's what you're doing then this is actually a problem.
I concur with Jimmayus on this, surprisingly. Pretty solid post.
Vanguard actually did a surprisingly good job with this. In the years that game was up, a very wide variety of content had been added over the years while only one small (5 level) level cap took place (50 to 55). The amount of content that managed to keep us occupied without feeding into drastic power creep and level cap increases was pretty impressive.
It is entirely doable, I agree, and the previously mentioned horizontalish progression mechanics such as acclimation certainly should help alleviate the severe creep that is present in exceptionally linear content models. While treadmills are certainly the popular choice in modern game, it is not necessary at all.
That said, a healthy upgrade path through content releases is certainly needed for all/most slots, but that can trickle in over time.
Beefcake said:The thing I hate the most about expansions in MMOs is the stat inflation of random trash mobs.
For example, in EQ2, they had DRAGONS that were level 50+. Then an expansion came out, now we had level 60 BEETLES and SNAKES. Then more expansions come out. Now we had level 80 SHEEP.
Seriously, should ANY sheep be able to kill a dragon?
If you are going to add random fluff trash mobs to an area, don't make them expansion appropriate levels. If a player is level 70, they should NEVER have a problem killing a sheep.
Does this bother anyone else? Do you have any pet peeves from expansions?
There are a number of problems with the necessary evil known as expansions. Stat inflation is certainly one, which then leads to the trivialization of content. There will come a day if VR isn't careful where the launch raids will be getting 2 and 3 manned.
I think expansions have to be thought out in more detail than they have in the past. One important thing is to examine how expansion changes will affect the game long-term. I am no fan of WoW, but they did "try" to address some of the lesser used zones by changing them completely with Cataclysm. While that may not be the best approach, it's one of the few attempts to address it short of reworking the content with a scaling level.
I'm not honestly sure the right way to handle expansions. You need new content and features to keep players interested, but you also have to, in this day and age, think them out more than has been done in the past. I seem to recall (assuming my memory isn't playing tricks on me) reading an interview sometime back with Brad where he talked about another common expansion topic, raiding, and how they kind of boxed themselves into a corner with expansion raiding in EverQuest. Hopefully they're considering the cons along with the pros this time around. On that I do not envy them.
Yeah that's why I prefer the concept of diagonal progression. People always talk about horizontal and vertical but I think neither of those really describe what it is old game did. In FFXI (there are some special problems for FFXI that I think are not useful to extrapolate here, for anybody wanting to be pedantic) the difference between what was generally the best at release was very different from what was best 6 years later, but many pieces would: a) remain the same, b) have upgrades that were so minor and that not having them was a non-factor for almost everything, or c) had upgrades that were so difficult to get (imagine if the only upgrade for the waist slot was off of Kerafyrm) that nobody considered them worth consideration. So a BiS guy in 2002 was still totally capable of functioning in 2009, but clearly the goalposts had moved enormously.
Spot on Jimmayus. I also like the loot idea you propose. You shouldnt be able to farm "XX" boss and know you are getting 3 tokens and an armor piece or two. Make the loot rare and worthwhile. Put a huge loot table into bosses and make drop rates insanely low.
Nothing like taking down a boss and having it drop the item you have been looking forward to getting for months with that .01% drop rate. Or heck maybe you never get it but you farm yourself up 10000000 gold and finally buy it.
Also planning items before expansions is a great idea for the dev team. Maybe the original game has Tier 1-5 items available with 1 being the starter end game gear from quests 2 being end game dungeons / small group boss drops. 3 can be 10 man + bosses and rare dungeon bosses. 4 can be large raids and 5 being near impossible to get then the expansion drops tier 2-6 gear with 2 being the starter gear for the expansion and 6 being almost impossible to get.
Can even estimate the number of people who will ever hit those tiers based on diffulty and drop rates. Tier 1 100% of endgame players will get it if they try. Tier 2 90% Tier 3 40% Tier 4 20% Tier 5 1%
The great part about how this could work is even when the expansion is out there is no way you are going to skip out doing that content but you are also going to want to stay in the original game because tier 3+ gear is still exceptional.
Well I have a pretty extreme dislike of tiering gear because it's a concept from vertical progression games. Nothing turns me off more than arbitrarily making one pair of leather boots of the same level better in every way than another; tennis shoes are great all-rounders but I bet you'd sure as **** use snow shoes in the tundra.
I just think discussions like this require people to totally unlearn all the nonsense modern games have presented. I can't believe it when people present FFXIV as some pinnacle of endgame design, it's just laughable. People need to move away from the fixiation on raids as a series of bosses and more as raids as a hostile, dangerous general environment. For example:
Let's imagine part of the endgame for one expansion involved "nightmare" versions of the main cities. Each version is basically an endgame zone that requires clearing parts of the expansion story to unlock. In the zone (which can house multiple full raid groups each) are roving bands of monsters. While each zone has a particular list of gear, and each monster type could drop anything from the list, certain monsters drop more slightly more often (10% chance of a drop per monster, even distribution among x items except 5x that chance for 1 or 2). A group can only be in for so long (30 mins + 30 mins more for each time extension up to a cap) so often (can only enter a nightmare zone every x days).
Individual monsters are of maybe trivial difficulty for a full raid group of average gear, but there are tons of them and they flock together buffing each other or whatever so you need to work as a raid to farm groups. You can stay in one area farming or you can find respawning lieutenants that have higher chances to drop but are rarer and harder. Maybe you have zone bosses whose purpose is to unlock more nightmare zones once you've beaten a tier of bosses or whatever, but have no other drops so he could respawn quickly.
I don't see why the above couldn't be expanded (include zone events, maybe currencies to "uncorrupt" the nightmare gear for use outside of it, whatever) on to make a system a group could farm for years. Hardcore groups would be able to get what they needed quickly, and because you have 5-6 zones that each could support 5-6 full raid groups it's laughable that anybody would be able to lock it down, especially since you could only be in there so long. Those same hardcore groups would move on to other content, and maybe catch up members if they needed it because one or two drops are sitll good for certain skills/climates.
None of it requires making drops only exist behind bosses which can be hard camped or behind making a bunch of items that get obsoleted in 3 months, because the system is designed as part of a larger ecosystem of endgame systems to be farmed over the course of years. By expanding the understanding of what it means to make "endgame encounters" you can just completely eliminate the so-called issue of loot obselesence.
I like some of your ideas but I strongly disagree with any type of lockouts or lockout timers on content. I would be more acceptable with "Lockouts" that could be overridden with farming. For example new zone has poison gas and for each green berry you eat it gives you 5 minutes of resistance. Green berries require blah blah blah and those items drop at a rate of blah blah blah but ultimately with an average drop rate and 12 hours of farming you would have enough berries for a group of 5 to survive aprox 6 hours.
Beefcake said:The thing I hate the most about expansions in MMOs is the stat inflation of random trash mobs.
For example, in EQ2, they had DRAGONS that were level 50+. Then an expansion came out, now we had level 60 BEETLES and SNAKES. Then more expansions come out. Now we had level 80 SHEEP.
Seriously, should ANY sheep be able to kill a dragon?
If you are going to add random fluff trash mobs to an area, don't make them expansion appropriate levels. If a player is level 70, they should NEVER have a problem killing a sheep.
Does this bother anyone else? Do you have any pet peeves from expansions?
The main problem with your arguement beef is that those level 50+ Dragons were raid bosses, and those level 80 sheep normal trash mobs. That is a comparison that just makes no sense, I played EQ2 for years, so i know the mobs you are referring to. Sorry to call you out on it, but there were no trash mob Dragons. Also Mobs have to get tougher with expansions, if the expansion offers a level cap anyway. Eventually there will have to be a level cap increase and an increase in trash mob toughness in the new zones to compensate, there is after all a reason games like EQ2 and WoW did so well for so many years. While EQ2 didnt last as long as WoW, which is in my opinion due to SOE's handling of the customers/service, not the game itself, as i consider eq the better game, WoW is just now starting to feel the crunch of those many many years, and yet still manages to have enough of a loyal fanbase they just released a new expansion. This is of course, as anything on a forum topic like this, just an opinion, not to be taken as cold hard fact, except the dragon thing lol.
The problems I've found from expansions is that the old zones of similar level are rarely used again. The other issue is they make old content fairly trivial. Especially low level content. This ties into my stance on mounts. You have mounts drop off a difficult mob or at the end of a long and diffcult quest, but when an expension comes out this becomes fairly easy for everyone asd you see mounts all over the place.
UnknownQuantity said:The problems I've found from expansions is that the old zones of similar level are rarely used again. The other issue is they make old content fairly trivial. Especially low level content. This ties into my stance on mounts. You have mounts drop off a difficult mob or at the end of a long and diffcult quest, but when an expension comes out this becomes fairly easy for everyone asd you see mounts all over the place.
Sounds like certain types of items should always be difficult to obtain, regardless if there are expansions.
Once again, the dev team has voiced their decision to plan what years after release looks like. Since this genre of MMOs generally does not exhibit that lack of foresight that games like WoW had, I can reasonably predict that obsoleting old zones will be pretty uncommon or, if it does happen to some, will be a rare consequence of particular groups of people utterly completing all that group could do. It will almost certainly not be the type of situation in which the entire population will simply stop using a zone, this subgenre of mmos is just not like that as a general rule.
I really like the ideas Jimmayus posted about having expansions that don't raise the level cap. There will still be some of this 'power creep', but it will come in much more slowly. I also think major expansions need to come much less frequently than games have been releasing them.
I don't really think raising the level cap matters much.
If you're level 50 or 60 in a level 20 zone, the level of obsolescence will be comparable. The same will be with a level 50 in a level 50 zone when they've exhausted most of the content. I think what constitutes obsolescence matters more for the purposes of this discussion than anything else.
If you give people incentives to go to old zones regardless of level then raising the level cap isn't a big deal. You'd be hard pressed to have a reason to go to Crushbone as a level 50 though.
