Iksar said:oneADseven said:What part of my idea locks up the real honest raid to the hardest of the hardcore? In what way does it deny others from content? The entire post was predicated on making content more accessible. It's an open world game ... killing something shouldn't be labeled as "people getting their kicks denying others content." Also, please see the Coliseum idea. Solid paragraph that touches on the HV encounters being accessible to everybody. I have no idea how your analogy is relevant to anything I posted but I find it pretty hilarious that you thought of something like that. If you can think of any ideas on how to improve raiding in any way, I would love to hear them. Thank you for your feedback.
You are still trying to bar the biggest incentive to raid and tie that up only for the hardest of the hardcore, the loot. I'd bet 90% or more of the people who raid aren't there just for the thrill of it or the experience. The analogy is a reference to that, get the other raiders to do the easier common raid for lesser rewards while the hardest of the hardcore dominate the valuable real raid target respawn timers. Once an expansion comes out or all their members are reasonably geared up, they move on and let someone else move in to take the turf. But you better believe those people who have been stuck raiding the lesser version are going to be sick and tired of the fight by then.
One way to improve raiding is getting rid of the elitist mentality. Let the challenge be the barrier between those who are skilled and those who are not, who can earn the loot and who can't. Not some timer. If you actually want accessability for raids, then make them accessable for anyone who wants to throw themselves against the rocks.
Yes, I think the most challenging encounters in the game should drop the best loot, just as they always have. Contested raid content is at the top of the food chain when it comes to loot becuase A) Risk vs Reward and B) Supply vs Demand. It touches on both of those very important factors and it doesen't take a rocket scientist to figure out how or why. One idea I have that could balance the scale a little bit would be to add long respawn group bosses as well, similar to the timer of raid bosses. I don't see any reason why there couldn't be group con mobs that spawn once every 1-2 or 3-5 days that drop amazing loot. I don't think it should be quite amazing as contested raid loot, but pretty close, depending on the challenge. That's all it comes down to. At the end of the day, the rewards should befit the challenge. Being fortunate enough to kill a rare and difficult mob that has a long respawn is in and of itself considered quite a challenge.
Finally, the coliseum idea is one way that could allow true accessibility to raids. FFXI had a "BCNM" campaign that worked really well. You could earn special tokens throughout the game and then use them to unlock special limited instances. I have always been a fan of ideas like that but I know there are plenty of folks out there who would hate it. For me, content is king, moreso than anything else. Rather than unlocking an instance, perhaps these tokens could be exchanged to spawn raid bosses. Ideally, they would be locked to the guild that spawned them and have some sort of timer ... it shouldn't stay up forever. There should be plenty of these spawning grounds in the coliseum to ensure that all guilds have equal access to this kind of gameplay.
The main issue I have with the coliseum is that it could take away from the experience of the rest of the game. A big part of taking out bad red dragon X is getting there and killing it while it's in it's natural environment. Force spawning it in a coliseum just doesen't feel the same. Also, force spawning consecutive bosses in a short amount of time .. it just takes away from the feel of the world. There is no adventure in that. Unless, of course, the tokens used to spawn these things are so extremely rare that getting the token in the first place was considered an adventure. Then we're talking business. Having an additional currency of some sort is another idea I am a huge fan of. I actually have a pretty large detailed post on my idea for such a currency: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/5753/spiritual-conversion
Personally, I think the open world contested raid bosses should drop the best loot in the game and it should be semi-exclusive to only those mobs. Beyond that, the ghost versions have their own tier of loot that is also extremely good, and they would even have a chance of dropping a single piece from the hyper version loot table. If the coliseum were to exist, in my opinion, it should be used as a way to allow guilds to force pop encounters. Guilds with players who can't mobilize for 3 AM batphone calls but can get together on Friday nights for a coordinated raiding endeavor. It would be very important that these encounters do not drop the same quality of loot as the hyper or ghost version. I think the coliseum itself should have some sort of reward vendor that people could build faction with based on what they kill in the coliseum. You can never please everybody but there are definitely a couple compromise type solutions out there that could make raiding more accessible across the board.
The problem with the contested raid content is that most people don't enjoy it, it is pretty much turning PvE content into PvP. On top of that anyone who has a normal job and/or family/social obligations will likely never be able to partake. The reason we have been living in an MMO world of instances for the past 13+ years is because people recognized and were sick of the over contested targets and having to hope the stars aligned for them to experience certain content while still managing a normal life schedule.
I know you and I won't ever see eye to eye here but I respect you trying to come up with ideas as I know raiding is close to your heart.
Iksar the content may be contested but it sounds like (lockout timers, fast repop, FTE) will cut down on some of the horsesh** people hated.
It never happened on my server (Nameless) in EQ, but I know some servers were able to make up a mutually beneficial rotation.
If there's no incentive to train and you cannot DPS race, more than likely the problems will be minimal.
Which I see being positive
There should be some raid content that requires less time devotion akin to clearing planar regions in EQ. However, when you start making things easier or considering instancing, it kills the sense of accomplishment and exclusivity. If items are supposed to be "rare" and "sought after", that means no everyone can conveniently obtain them.
It was the rare mobs and items and the eternal struggle to obtain them that kept people playing EQ for so long. Minimizing that struggle or the prestige associated with such accomplishments will inevitably harm the longevity of the game.
Xonth said:As a reply to the original topic I don’t like the idea of changing an encounters difficulty base on the group or raids skill level. It all goes back to sharing experiences with others that do it before and after you. If I brought a room full of old EQ players together and we all started talking about breaking in Fear in vanilla days we could all relate our experiences even though we most likely never raided with each other. What I felt and experiences is the same as what they did. Now say we go back to vanilla EQ and we instance PoF and we let people pick from a list of difficulties that match each guilds skill level. Pulling all those players in today to talk about it would not feel the same. You could never know what the other guy experiences because it may not have been the same.
It’s the same reason people in Dark Souls really resist adding difficulty sliders to the game. If you beat a boss or a zone you can assume your friend who also beat it shard the same experiences, has roughly the same skill and it allows you to share something you did independently.
Like most have said (and what I think will end up being the case) the answer is to make content for each difficulty. The level 50 pirate fortress raid can be a Tier 1 zone which is the most basic raiding can be. The forest giant lair a Tier 1.5, the Wizard King a Tier 2, the Robot Overlord a Tier 2.5 …..
This way that hardcore guild might not find it worth it to even waist time with your Pirate fortress and jump to the Wizard king. The family guild that raids once a month can go to the easy Pirates and have easy raids. They can get a taste for raiding without interfering with the more pro raiders. Now in a year when the hard core raiders are all in Tier 5 the slow family guild moves into the wizard kings raid. When pro raiders at Tier 10 the family guilds in tier 4 and so on. You never have to artificially change any difficulties.
Couldn't agree more with this, also the more dedicated guilds will kill/progress faster, in some cases lower tiered guilds won't even be affected by the higher ones, because the content they're are doing is already irrelevant to the more accomplished guilds.
In relation to my orignal topic, it wasn't so much about making things easier, or instancing content and letting players choose from a difficulty. It was about making certain fights harder, by having a trigger in the encounter, let's say killing the kings son first and the king would enrage, making the fight harder and giving better loot.
But Kilsin already replied, there will be only one difficulty per zone/raid, but there will be different zones/raids with varying levels of difficulty. As a whole it's way better for the game to have only one difficulty and I'm happy VR went this way, but for sure it's harder, because they have to create more content.
I liked what SWTOR did with 1 of their world bosses. They made it so that every time you killed the guy he would drop items or charges that would allow you to buff him upon respawn. So you continued killing the guy and using charges to make him more difficult. Eventually he would reach nightmare level at 10 charges with increased abilities, hps, dmg, etc and he would drop an item used to summon a hardcore boss in another raiding area. Now I get that they have already stated one difficulty per zone/raid with different zones/raids with varying levels of difficulty, but would be nice if they maybe put something like this in so the hardcore raiding groups could get their thrills or maybe some speciality item for cosmetic purposes/bragging rights. Heck maybe unlock a special title for defeating a raid boss that is fully charged. Anyone agree with me?
Sunmistress said:Iksar the content may be contested but it sounds like (lockout timers, fast repop, FTE) will cut down on some of the horsesh** people hated.
It never happened on my server (Nameless) in EQ, but I know some servers were able to make up a mutually beneficial rotation.
If there's no incentive to train and you cannot DPS race, more than likely the problems will be minimal.
Which I see being positive
We had a mutal calendar on Bristlebane. It worked well for a few years and eventually faded, but by then IIRC there was plenty of content for most everyone.
While I agree that I would like to see some really hard encounters (both group and raid) I don't think you need to split them off by calling them something different like hard mode encounters and I certainly don't want to see dots above a mobs head telling me if they are solo / group or raid mobs. That was the only thing in Vanguard that I hated. I want content that takes weeks to figure out and beat. I might not be able to raid all the time (our schedule is normally 3 - 4 raids a week) I would want to do some really epic group content when I am not raiding so I still get that thrill of doing something really hard that not a lot of other people can manage by working together with my guild and using team work to beat these encounters.
That would be great from my point of view and would provide people worthwhile group content when they reach max level. Having said that I don't think epic group encounters should be limited just to max level I'd like to see them occur from level 20 all the way up to max level so that people get practice doing really hard dungeon before they reach max level.
Dullahan said:There should be some raid content that requires less time devotion akin to clearing planar regions in EQ. However, when you start making things easier or considering instancing, it kills the sense of accomplishment and exclusivity. If items are supposed to be "rare" and "sought after", that means no everyone can conveniently obtain them.
It was the rare mobs and items and the eternal struggle to obtain them that kept people playing EQ for so long. Minimizing that struggle or the prestige associated with such accomplishments will inevitably harm the longevity of the game.
And making to hard will harm the longevity of the game, i'm not talking instanced but fast respawn timers with lockouts is still a viable concept to have, for one it wont allow everyone to raid him/her/it before the lockout expires but gives people/guilds enough of a chance to enjoy the content, and this should be the ultimate goal, if there is no restriction to stopping guilds from farming content (no lockouts) than that is exactly what they will do and kill some of the joy people are looking for and might quit due to it. If your also a raider and your guild is constantly looking for targets but are never up (slow respawn timers) than this could cuase people/guilds to disband or leave the game completely which is also bad. So in my eyes the fast respawn timers/lockouts is basically the best route to take, does it kill a little bit of the accomplishments of killing raid targets, yeah it does a little bit, but i would much rather have that than guilds greiving over each toher and saying bad things in general all the time, with the occassional training, frantic dps racing, and 1 or 2 guilds locking out all content from other guilds simply becuase they are "Top Dog" and are keeping the smaller guilds in check by making sure they can't advance past a certain point. Plus like other have said people have lives/jobs/families/ and other social things they like too do, so if a player basically plays 24/7 like thier guild and poop socks it they aren't the best guild becuase they have the best players, they are the best guild becuase they play all day and don't have some of the other things that stop them like people who have other things to do
I haven't read this entire thread, but Renathras mentioned the three drakes in wow - I 100% agree that it was an amazing way to make an encounter have multiple difficulties without just clicking some checkbox or something that says hardmode. That was one of my favorite raid encounters of all time. Ulduar had some amazing hard modes as well, and they were all based on how you approached the fight (which order to kill things in, leaving adds alive or not, etc.) so it felt very natural. I was always disappointed that they didn't keep going in that direction with future raids (too much development work compared to a checkbox I guess...)
I would absolutely love to see some sort of variable difficulty based on that sort of system, it was really great.
Kilsin said:dorotea said:I generally like the team's approach but I have seen the debates over instancing rage for literally decades. Barring technical obstacles, of course, I feel that the approach "instancing is always wrong" is just as incorrect as the approach "instancing solves most problems".
Gods spare me - and with Pantheon I am confident that they will - from another game where pretty much everything is instanced even open world areas. But please, if, and I repeat if, you see an issue of accessibility or variable difficulty levels that can be solved by having a certain dungeon or encounter instanced, don't rule out that option because the "i word" is anathma.
We have stated we will use Shards, similar to what VG had with APW, an open world clone of the same dungeon that anyone can enter but there may be 6 copies so 6 guilds can be in a different one each and not bother each other and any random person can enter any of the 6 shards at any time like you would in an open world.
For the record, we don't claim instancing is bad, it just doesn't suit our design philosophy or vision for our game.
Except for the potential for griefing, I am not sure I really understand the difference between having 6 shard instances of a given raid mob vs allowing a guild to request an instance of a raid mob. But as an example, if your going to ask that 54 people gather up and invest hours into defeating a raid encounter; only to have a griefer zone in and train them, or crash the zone, or cause the mob to despawn, well I doubt that is going to be a great way to encourage people to continue with their subscriptions.
Guild competition becomes very intense and lots of hard feelings develop and fester over time.
I remember so much griefing (and unaddressed hacking) in Everquest, I am guessing this will prove to be a major weakness in your overall design implementation. I have witnessed a lot of bad behavior and I would imagine that those types of behaviors have only intensified over the years. I doubt you will be able to stay on top of it.
Trustar said:Kilsin said:dorotea said:I generally like the team's approach but I have seen the debates over instancing rage for literally decades. Barring technical obstacles, of course, I feel that the approach "instancing is always wrong" is just as incorrect as the approach "instancing solves most problems".
Gods spare me - and with Pantheon I am confident that they will - from another game where pretty much everything is instanced even open world areas. But please, if, and I repeat if, you see an issue of accessibility or variable difficulty levels that can be solved by having a certain dungeon or encounter instanced, don't rule out that option because the "i word" is anathma.
We have stated we will use Shards, similar to what VG had with APW, an open world clone of the same dungeon that anyone can enter but there may be 6 copies so 6 guilds can be in a different one each and not bother each other and any random person can enter any of the 6 shards at any time like you would in an open world.
For the record, we don't claim instancing is bad, it just doesn't suit our design philosophy or vision for our game.Except for the potential for griefing, I am not sure I really understand the difference between having 6 shard instances of a given raid mob vs allowing a guild to request an instance of a raid mob. But as an example, if your going to ask that 54 people gather up and invest hours into defeating a raid encounter; only to have a griefer zone in and train them, or crash the zone, or cause the mob to despawn, well I doubt that is going to be a great way to encourage people to continue with their subscriptions.
Guild competition becomes very intense and lots of hard feelings develop and fester over time.
I remember so much griefing (and unaddressed hacking) in Everquest, I am guessing this will prove to be a major weakness in your overall design implementation. I have witnessed a lot of bad behavior and I would imagine that those types of behaviors have only intensified over the years. I doubt you will be able to stay on top of it.
That is for the community work out though, it is an open world-zoned game, the mobs are not considered to be owned by you and your guild because you are within the vicinity or have engaged them, the community will need to work issues like this out and where they cannot, we will step in but we will not create instances just for guilds to try and progress in "peace", we also have other things in mind to help with this but more on them later. ;)
First off, +2 points to Kilsin for saying "Socialisation" instead of "Socialism"...
I would like to see some testing regarding scaling. Pick an area where we can have scalable mobs. This means if your lvl 2 and wander into this area you get mobs that will be scalable to your level - meaning lvl 2. But if a lvl 50 walks up tot he same mob - it is lvl 50. I think if we were to do this, we could toggle a UI button to allow us a small overcharge on the scalability of the mobs. Say, trigger the toggle and the mobs will be your level +5. I would like to see some testing trying this long before we actually commit to it.
Nephretiti said:First off, +2 points to Kilsin for saying "Socialisation" instead of "Socialism"...
I would like to see some testing regarding scaling. Pick an area where we can have scalable mobs. This means if your lvl 2 and wander into this area you get mobs that will be scalable to your level - meaning lvl 2. But if a lvl 50 walks up tot he same mob - it is lvl 50. I think if we were to do this, we could toggle a UI button to allow us a small overcharge on the scalability of the mobs. Say, trigger the toggle and the mobs will be your level +5. I would like to see some testing trying this long before we actually commit to it.
I really dislike mob scaling as an idea. Sure for casual players like I am in ESO it is great but for people who are playing properly it reduces the desire to explore. If you can go to all zones at level 1 then there is no reason to level up to see some of the high end content. I know when I was playing EQ half the fun was leveling up and gaining access to high level zones that I had never been in before. It is the same reason I am in favour of having keys or flags required to enter certain zones. It gives players something to look forward to when they progress a bit further.
Dullahan said:There should be some raid content that requires less time devotion akin to clearing planar regions in EQ. However, when you start making things easier or considering instancing, it kills the sense of accomplishment and exclusivity. If items are supposed to be "rare" and "sought after", that means no everyone can conveniently obtain them.
It was the rare mobs and items and the eternal struggle to obtain them that kept people playing EQ for so long. Minimizing that struggle or the prestige associated with such accomplishments will inevitably harm the longevity of the game.
Well said.
Cromulent said:Nephretiti said:First off, +2 points to Kilsin for saying "Socialisation" instead of "Socialism"...
I would like to see some testing regarding scaling. Pick an area where we can have scalable mobs. This means if your lvl 2 and wander into this area you get mobs that will be scalable to your level - meaning lvl 2. But if a lvl 50 walks up tot he same mob - it is lvl 50. I think if we were to do this, we could toggle a UI button to allow us a small overcharge on the scalability of the mobs. Say, trigger the toggle and the mobs will be your level +5. I would like to see some testing trying this long before we actually commit to it.
I really dislike mob scaling as an idea. Sure for casual players like I am in ESO it is great but for people who are playing properly it reduces the desire to explore. If you can go to all zones at level 1 then there is no reason to level up to see some of the high end content. I know when I was playing EQ half the fun was leveling up and gaining access to high level zones that I had never been in before. It is the same reason I am in favour of having keys or flags required to enter certain zones. It gives players something to look forward to when they progress a bit further.
Exactly. It feels so artificial, which is just a huge turnoff to me. It turns a real world into a game that caters to you. Mobs should have personality. They should have unique traits and stats that players need to learn and adjust to, not the other way around. And it's fun to have certain mobs that are infamously more dangerous compared to others and gain notoriety because of who they are.
Since you used an example of a lvl 2 and a lvl 50, I can only assume this implies that there could theoretically be a field rat that could absolutely destroy a dragon. That just makes no sense to me. And once you have dozens of people of vastly different levels in one area with a bunch of mobs, trying to decide which mob scales to which player will quickly get really messy.
I don't think it's even worth testing tbh.
Fulton said:We had a mutal calendar on Bristlebane. It worked well for a few years and eventually faded, but by then IIRC there was plenty of content for most everyone.
on brell serillis we had a reservation system for planes (you reserved 2 weeks in advance and the day was yours!) and a rotation for naggy/vox (if it was your turn you had 1 or 2 days after spawn to kill it). at least all the way until pop. not sure if it ever stopped. i liked that system alot and if it was any like this, i'd be playing on p1999. it would be nice if we could have dedicated play nice servers that encourage or enforce such player made solutions. but i guess in the end it'll be luck if i end up on such a server again.
Nephretiti said:Yeah - that's why I said I would like to see some testing before we commit. There are pros and cons - testing both would do no harm.
There basically one pro to mob scaling and that is if you are lazy you don't have to go anywhere else to level up, ever. There are so many cons to mob scaling it isnt worth listing them all, and im sorry but if i see a lvl 1 character killing a mob and wins and i fight the next pop up mob but scales to me at lvl 50 and I die than im sorry but that sounds like some bs to me
Nephretiti said:First off, +2 points to Kilsin for saying "Socialisation" instead of "Socialism"...
I would like to see some testing regarding scaling. Pick an area where we can have scalable mobs. This means if your lvl 2 and wander into this area you get mobs that will be scalable to your level - meaning lvl 2. But if a lvl 50 walks up tot he same mob - it is lvl 50. I think if we were to do this, we could toggle a UI button to allow us a small overcharge on the scalability of the mobs. Say, trigger the toggle and the mobs will be your level +5. I would like to see some testing trying this long before we actually commit to it.
We won't have scalable mobs, that would involve a type of instancing for each player and we have said that it is not something we want to do, plus we have other things in mind for zones that we think you will all like :)
I am not a fan of "hardmodes". I experienced them plenty raiding in WoW during the Wrath expansion, the raids should never have a "normal" setting and a "hard" setting. There was nothing special about beating the raids on normal mode, it was laughable. Last I checked the raiding community still sees it that way regardless of what game you want to discuss so just keep the raids difficult. I don't want hard modes of my group content either...make it difficult to begin with. If I wanted easy mode I can play just about any MMO on the market right now!
I don't expect everything to be insanely difficult, especially the low level stuff. I'm sure there will be starter dungeons, even starter raid bosses. I think WoW did a solid job easing players into raiding with UBRS at launch and Kharazan in Burning Crusade. In Wrath it got ridiculous with 10 man mode, 25 man mode, Normal mode, Hardmode, etc. Vanguard:SOH and EQ did the best job with group content but I think neither of those MMOs had good training wheels for noob raiders (not to mention all the raid blocking in EQ like some mentioned).
For me no instancing is worth the price. There will be inconvenience as a result we all know that. Player interaction cannot happen if everybody is in a bubble.