What i can guess from the materiel so far shown is
ZennExile has it figured out and what i can include is that it may be accessed by harder dedication, let me explain. The higer up the chain the content is it will be harder to reach thus they dont whant teleport to be easy , so climbing, enviroment and alot of travel so "only" the most dedicated can reach it, with no instant porting to hijack a raid, this will also call for dedication and planing. All diffrent obsacles depending on tier of "raid" this may be a path and never used in a mmo i played before, right up with what VR whant us to have new and content that makes us talk and contribute in unision . Well just my thoughts on the subject .
Grizzly said:What i can guess from the materiel so far shown is
ZennExile has it figured out and what i can include is that it may be accessed by harder dedication, let me explain. The higer up the chain the content is it will be harder to reach thus they dont whant teleport to be easy , so climbing, enviroment and alot of travel so "only" the most dedicated can reach it, with no instant porting to hijack a raid, this will also call for dedication and planing. All diffrent obsacles depending on tier of "raid" this may be a path and never used in a mmo i played before, right up with what VR whant us to have new and content that makes us talk and contribute in unision . Well just my thoughts on the subject .
I'm not really sure I have an opinion that's strong one way or another here. But it seems like there would be issues with guilds being instrumental in or entirely responsible in triggering the next stage, and then while regrouping to tackle the next wave and gain its rewards a guild that's taken no part in advancing the story "steals" those rewards.
Feysh, Thanks for identifying a potential technical challenge to this implementation. I do think you continue to make some assumptions. Even in your last post, you assume a prohibitively high number of players in the zone, and you assume that the zone could not be designed to prevent the zerging you fear. If there are really 1,000 raid-level characters on a single server trying to compete for raid targets, then a lot of content would be needed to sustain them, so, like Durp said, you might need more than one raid zone to spread things out. That seems like a large number of raiders for a single server that doesn't have instances.
In any event, you clearly raise good points here. But I tend to think it's worth trying to identify ways to work around these flaws, given the alternative of batphones. Fundamentally this idea is an attempt to design a mechanic that provides an environment for competitive raiding that doesn't rely on batphoning so that people who need to schedule their MMO time can also compete for some prized raid targets, without relying on instancing. It's not an easy balance to strike, obviously, which is why so many games just go with instancing, which allows people to schedule raids. To give that group of players predictability and let them schedule their raids without instances, the raid event needs to occur at a predictable time. This of course raises the zerging and server load challenges that you identified. But I would think that bright minds like yours could probably come up with some workarounds.
Gnog, to be clear, my posts aren't trying to say that zones like this shouldn't be done. Aside from the potential technical issues already mentioned, the idea, I think, is vaild as one option of many that can be presented to the players. Having plenty of content for the player base is probably the solution to "end game" and raiding. Just tons of content, contested, uncontested, group, raid, timed, locked, keyed, etc. And apparently endless universe of ever turning opportunities. Of course it is an illusion. It isn't endless and there is only so much content one team can create in a span of time. But having multiple mechanics to hid it all behind and having layered levels of "randomity" can create the illusion.
The raid events could also be affected by population in the given zone, or on the server. Trying to set up a "prime time" schedule for raiding is exclusionary to midnight warriors. There is also the ability for VR to manually spawn raid targets for events.
And no Frey, there would be no risk at all because in order for those guilds to unlock content, they would also need support from smaller guilds, and random groups feeding on the high volume targets that block the way back to a hard raid target. You can very easily combine the efforts of the entire server with the potential outcome of the raid as well. Maybe the rest of the player base can spawn NPC support or buffs for the raid group that is trying to hit a top tier mob. Or maybe the players decide that guild doesn't deserve help because they are elitist a-holes all the time.
There is a lot more depth to the idea than just, uber guild directs traffic.
These threads always lead to the same thing, people saying the advantage of instanced raids, the thrill of killing a raid target in non instanced, and than we try to combine the 2 a little and everying nip picks at it til they right back into the instance/non instance arugment again, I've been there and honestly i just hope the devs find their way into the way they want to do it and hope it works out the way they see it in their vision, becuase honestly their isn't no right answer anything they will bring up will make some people not happy and they the other thrilled, simply becuase their is no right answer. i personally wouldnt't mind anything they bring up at this point, for as long it isnt full blown open world with long respawn times, becuase that worked in EQ for the mere fact the mmp industry was still quite small compared to today, and becuase of that i wouldnt seeing that method work today, but other than that i say go devs and try your best to make the raiding enviroment great and try to make a lot of us happy, without fearing to make some of us disappointed, becuase thats is going to happen regardless of you do unless you make servers with different rulesets or time-locks, open world, and instanced, but thats going a bit far and honestly would be a terrible idea due to it would seprate the population on the servers and theirs no need to do something liek that.
I have been wondering why some people have this desire to place so many limitations on their own gameplay until I realized it is never limits on their own gameplay they want limits placed but rather onto the gameplay of those they feel are better than themselves or those who can get to content earlier, can defeat it faster, etc. I then have to ask if you really truly want a game where you face artificial limitations imposed arbitrarily onto your enjoyment, because that is what threads like this are asking.
Consider This:
EQ Progression Servers had instance raids zones and my raidng time on EQ2 has them. It worked well even for competition.
Lockout on making a new instance
Open world was contested
Add this
What if you could join maybe a limited number of created instances as invaders. Once you die you are lockout for an additional time that goes against your orginal lockout.
This makes it so if you lose you have more time to wait to raid but fi you win you get more loot.
If you are killed you get a lockout decrease or even a reset.
Instances would become pvp if invaded. I'm playing off Darksouls here.
I truely think pvp needs to be involved in raiding to make it as near close to a world.
Just a thought.
Vandraad said:I have been wondering why some people have this desire to place so many limitations on their own gameplay until I realized it is never limits on their own gameplay they want limits placed but rather onto the gameplay of those they feel are better than themselves or those who can get to content earlier, can defeat it faster, etc. I then have to ask if you really truly want a game where you face artificial limitations imposed arbitrarily onto your enjoyment, because that is what threads like this are asking.
Games are limited by nature. Deciding what those limitations are is important.
Your argument is also flawed in the suggestion that having raiding that isn't completely cancer would somehow be detrimental to my enjoyment of the game. Quite the contrary.
I wonder if a lot of people just lost interest in competitive gaming over the years. I've seen it mentioned plenty of times on here that people used to love the competitive stuff when they were younger but they just don't have the time/patience for it anymore. This obviously doesen't apply to everyone (there will be 35+ who still enjoy it, or younger folks who don't).
Something else to consider: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-23/why-competitive-video-gaming-is-the-hot-new-thing-quicktake-q-a
Seems to be hot and trending in a big chunk of the target market that Pantheon is looking to attract. Like many others have posted on a bunch of different threads, I think looking for a balance where there is something for everybody would be ideal.
It's not about decreasing competition, it's about making a game that isn't terrible to play. You don't have to have awful open world mechanics to have a competitive raiding scene. There are hundreds of far more competitive activities than raiding in video games. Please look at any game with an esports scene.
You know what those activities don't require? Being on call 24/7. It's baffling to me how people are missing the point here.
The type of competitive raiding you are talking about is not the same. I was specifically referring to player vs player vs environment. It baffles me that you enjoy PVP so much but find open world racing/tagging so awful. You compete for resources in MMO's ... that's just how it works. You start doing it pretty early on and the content grows more difficult over time. Risk vs Reward is important in MMO's and a big part of the risk when it comes to limited resources is losing the booty/bounty to other players. Nobody is on call 24/7 to farm for low level mobs because the risk vs reward is obviously much lower. Contested raid mobs are the pinnacle of risk in an MMO and the notion to have them shut down because "some" people have a lower risk tolerance or consider them cancerous seems outrageous.
Anyway, I stand by my comment ... I think a lot of the "old school" crowd around here are people in their mid 30's or older, right around the age where a lot of men's competitive nature starts to wane. It's not a bad thing. Some people still get into it though and I don't think they should be denied something they enjoy because the stars wouldn't align perfectly for someone else. It is an oldschool mechanic after all and the majority of my favorite MMO memories involved OTM calls for raid pops. Most were during the day. I've told you several times I don't miss the 3 AM stuff but if that's what it takes to have open world competition for valuable raid mobs, so be it. Not everybody is going to be perfectly happy.
I believe this discussion is a non-issue. The VR team has said they have a way to do it that they are confident will fit in their vision. I am game to try what they have in store before bemoaning the evils of one design or another. The "ghost lockout" idea I believe was used on some mobs in Vanguard sounds like a great solution to me.
The hill/storm giant event that Brad recently used as an example of dynamic content sounds really fun. Have a read for yourself: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/3564/quick-switch-for-gear/view/page/9
These are the kind of "thrill of the hunt" encounters that I really want to see in Pantheon. World awareness will be important ... rare mobs/items become temporarily attainable ... adept/clever guilds watch for these events and opportunistically take advantage of them ... if you aren't keeping an eye out for this event, you might miss out. Call it whatever you want ... but as long as we have stuff like this in Pantheon I'll be a happy camper.
oneADseven said:The type of competitive raiding you are talking about is not the same. I was specifically referring to player vs player vs environment. It baffles me that you enjoy PVP so much but find open world racing/tagging so awful. You compete for resources in MMO's ... that's just how it works. You start doing it pretty early on and the content grows more difficult over time. Risk vs Reward is important in MMO's and a big part of the risk when it comes to limited resources is losing the booty/bounty to other players. Nobody is on call 24/7 to farm for low level mobs because the risk vs reward is obviously much lower. Contested raid mobs are the pinnacle of risk in an MMO and the notion to have them shut down because "some" people have a lower risk tolerance or consider them cancerous seems outrageous.
Anyway, I stand by my comment ... I think a lot of the "old school" crowd around here are people in their mid 30's or older, right around the age where a lot of men's competitive nature starts to wane. It's not a bad thing. Some people still get into it though and I don't think they should be denied something they enjoy because the stars wouldn't align perfectly for someone else. It is an oldschool mechanic after all and the majority of my favorite MMO memories involved OTM calls for raid pops. Most were during the day. I've told you several times I don't miss the 3 AM stuff but if that's what it takes to have open world competition for valuable raid mobs, so be it. Not everybody is going to be perfectly happy.
Your comparisons aren't actually addressing my point. You don't have to log in to the game at god awful hours to get good PvP.
Any developer who thinks 24/7 contested content is a good idea is a moron, period. If a guild believes themselves to be competitive, then they can compete during daylight hours when more than 5 human beings are actually awake.
Building a content model that demands that you sacrifice your health to be #1 is absolutely disgusting.
Liav said:oneADseven said:The type of competitive raiding you are talking about is not the same. I was specifically referring to player vs player vs environment. It baffles me that you enjoy PVP so much but find open world racing/tagging so awful. You compete for resources in MMO's ... that's just how it works. You start doing it pretty early on and the content grows more difficult over time. Risk vs Reward is important in MMO's and a big part of the risk when it comes to limited resources is losing the booty/bounty to other players. Nobody is on call 24/7 to farm for low level mobs because the risk vs reward is obviously much lower. Contested raid mobs are the pinnacle of risk in an MMO and the notion to have them shut down because "some" people have a lower risk tolerance or consider them cancerous seems outrageous.
Anyway, I stand by my comment ... I think a lot of the "old school" crowd around here are people in their mid 30's or older, right around the age where a lot of men's competitive nature starts to wane. It's not a bad thing. Some people still get into it though and I don't think they should be denied something they enjoy because the stars wouldn't align perfectly for someone else. It is an oldschool mechanic after all and the majority of my favorite MMO memories involved OTM calls for raid pops. Most were during the day. I've told you several times I don't miss the 3 AM stuff but if that's what it takes to have open world competition for valuable raid mobs, so be it. Not everybody is going to be perfectly happy.
Your comparisons aren't actually addressing my point. You don't have to log in to the game at god awful hours to get good PvP.
Any developer who thinks 24/7 contested content is a good idea is a moron, period. If a guild believes themselves to be competitive, then they can compete during daylight hours when more than 5 human beings are actually awake.
Building a content model that demands that you sacrifice your health to be #1 is absolutely disgusting.
Apparently Brad McQuaid and Verant Interactive back in 1998 and 1999 were morons, because 24/7 contested content is what they actually did, and it was a huge hit. Much like training and other negative interactions are remembered with fondness today by many of us, but disdained back then... so too is contested content. Sometimes you need the bad to remember how much you love the good. What fun is listening to an entire playlist full of songs you absolutely love, without a few songs you consider "meh" to bring you back to reality.
Rallyd said:Apparently Brad McQuaid and Verant Interactive back in 1998 and 1999 were morons, because 24/7 contested content is what they actually did, and it was a huge hit.
I think you have a bizarre definition of a "huge hit", considering that the number of people who actually participated in that was probably 1% or less of the total playerbase of EQ at the time.
Rallyd said:Much like training and other negative interactions are remembered with fondness today by many of us, but disdained back then... so too is contested content.
Contested content isn't a bad thing. Contested content that requires you to lose sleep to be the best is a bad thing. Please stay on topic.
as i will list again, in EQ1 the open world content was a big hit, but back than the population playing mmos were extremely small compared to now. we are in my eyes more competitive in mmos than we were back than as well, and are smarter gamers as well, so in todays gaming society i don't think open world content is going to be the best choice, the ghost form is okay, i believe it can my open world if you get a time locked system on it that way if it is killed during 4am it doesn't affect anyone, but the people who killed it by getting their loot. theres will be too much bad blood between guilds i think if it is completely open world, and will possibly make general chat, and possibly zone chat very unfriendly, and i don't want to see all the toxic stuff everywhere, and than start giving guild bad reps over simply raid targets, just want a the game to be great, and have it to where people can enjoy the raid content if they want to, and also i believe the biggest obstacle of the raid targets should be his mechanic, not that he is open world or long respawn timer, it should simply be your cant get his loot becuase he completely destroyed your team.
Liav said:oneADseven said:The type of competitive raiding you are talking about is not the same. I was specifically referring to player vs player vs environment. It baffles me that you enjoy PVP so much but find open world racing/tagging so awful. You compete for resources in MMO's ... that's just how it works. You start doing it pretty early on and the content grows more difficult over time. Risk vs Reward is important in MMO's and a big part of the risk when it comes to limited resources is losing the booty/bounty to other players. Nobody is on call 24/7 to farm for low level mobs because the risk vs reward is obviously much lower. Contested raid mobs are the pinnacle of risk in an MMO and the notion to have them shut down because "some" people have a lower risk tolerance or consider them cancerous seems outrageous.
Anyway, I stand by my comment ... I think a lot of the "old school" crowd around here are people in their mid 30's or older, right around the age where a lot of men's competitive nature starts to wane. It's not a bad thing. Some people still get into it though and I don't think they should be denied something they enjoy because the stars wouldn't align perfectly for someone else. It is an oldschool mechanic after all and the majority of my favorite MMO memories involved OTM calls for raid pops. Most were during the day. I've told you several times I don't miss the 3 AM stuff but if that's what it takes to have open world competition for valuable raid mobs, so be it. Not everybody is going to be perfectly happy.
Your comparisons aren't actually addressing my point. You don't have to log in to the game at god awful hours to get good PvP.
Any developer who thinks 24/7 contested content is a good idea is a moron, period. If a guild believes themselves to be competitive, then they can compete during daylight hours when more than 5 human beings are actually awake.
Building a content model that demands that you sacrifice your health to be #1 is absolutely disgusting.
MMO's have a persistent world ... no matter what any person or guild is doing at any given time, the world lives on. It doesen't stop living because you have a bedtime, family, or job. Please respond to my last comment regarding the storm/hill giant event. What was described sounds very similar to "contested content" -- whatever would you do if that event triggered while you weren't playing?
oneADseven said:MMO's have a persistent world ... no matter what any person or guild is doing at any given time, the world lives on. It doesen't stop living because you have a bedtime, family, or job. Please respond to my last comment regarding the storm/hill giant event. What was described sounds very similar to "contested content" -- whatever would you do if that event triggered while you weren't playing?
The term "persistent world" is pretty devoid of information. The only requirement of a persistent world is that the servers stay up as close to constantly as possible. It has absolutely nothing to do with the mechanics of raid content. In other words, it is irrelevant. Vanguard had a persistent world. It also had raid content that could be scheduled. That content was also contested if two guilds didn't have a lockout, or the content hadn't been killed by anyone on the server yet.
As far as the event goes, I think it would be idiotic if the event wasn't scripted to only trigger during normal daylight hours of whatever server it triggers on. GM events, double experience events, etc. are all generally activated at reasonable times. A specially triggered raid event should probably follow the same rules.
So rare events are only okay when they are "rare" when it's convenient for you? It's been stated that the "end-game" won't be confined to just raiding. There will likely be group content where comparable rewards are attainable ... should these group encounters also be limited to daytime hours? Let's consider this aspect of the hill/storm giant event:
"Or perhaps nobody paid attention, it was off-hours, and the invasion took place but there were no players around to do anything about it."
The bigger picture, as I see it, is that if there happens to be contested content to the extent as described in this thread and others regarding anything end game, is that "there isn't enough content for the population base." That would be worrisome. If content is being absorbed at a rate too fast for VR to keep up with, that will inevitably lead to animosity and apathy. If content is being skipped then resources that have been expended to produce and provide such content have been wasted.
I think most of us are in agreement that we don't want resources to be wasted so all content should matter or at least have had a focus for its development and creation (understanding that it can change over time). I also think most of us don't want to become apathetic or even full of animosity that we become estranged - a broken community.
When I read these discussions (I mostly just read about these end-game scenarios since it isn't a concern for me) I get the feeling that two things are a given: 1) that people will race to end game, skipping content and only consuming the content that exists at end-game; 2) that there will be a lot of people doing this and so there will be contested content and not enough content to go around at end-game. Then discussions become how to deal with what I described in number 2.
One theory would be for there to be a lot of content developed for end game to an extent that the content developed up to that point really doesn't matter for those engaged in end-game content - basically presenting an argument for where resources and development effort are best expended. That's a paradox then when it comes to resources expended for content not end-game. It also strives to separate the community where there are simply proponents and opponents of contested content.
Everything continues to come back to: what will keep your interest (and thus the subscription to keep the game active and in development) and what will be the draw to bring others into the game (and their ensuing subscriptions)? It definitely needs to have a strong community for people to stick around and for new people to be welcomed.
Understanding that there will be times where a particular encounter or some content will be contested - and many folks have pointed out just exactly how this will come about, what could be the path forward for VR such that we are still a community that wants Pantheon to be around for a long time? I am not the player who will be engaged in end-game contests as my consumption of content is different than those who have strong feelings concerning end-game (or even current level contested content and not necessarily end-game), but I am a player who wants there to be a strong community with a game that has longevity - which means a subscription base that won't diminish through attrition at a rapid pace. There's already plenty of animosity being shown and there isn't even any content to be absorbed, at the moment. The more these discussions focus on opposing wills where folks are on both sides, have entrenched their positions, and can only see the pros of their position and the cons of the opposing position the more it will simply be an exercise in who can yell the loudest or push the longest.
Why not take a differentapproach and revisit the issue from a different angle. See if there is something that the other sides (opposing viewpoints) are sharing that you can understand (perhaps not agree with but actually understand) and come at it from a community that wishes Pantheon to be a game (world) that will be here for the long haul. It doesn't invalidate anything, but it may be able to strengthen discussions. Some folks have gone to great lengths to do this and sadly, to my dismay, those aspects of discussions just seem to peter out or get left behind and forgotten and we end up at opposing wills just pushing against each other.
Passions are strong, but there are a bunch of us reading on the sidelines who are getting earfulls of lots of discussions centered around "this is what I don't like about what you said," and that turns into "I don't like anything you say." And that is leading to apathy and estrangement.
If an event is so poorly designed that literally no one participates and it just disappears, then that speaks for itself.
Raid content generally has long respawns with variance that leads to extreme hour contested calls. Group content has never been like that in EQ or any other game. If group content ends up like that, that will be a huge leap backwards in content design.
Your definition of rare doesn't make sense. Let's say an event/contested encounter can only spawn between 8 A.M. PST to 12 A.M. PST. Shaving off 1/3 of the potential spawn time is not going to suddenly trivialize things and make it less rare. It will still be completely unpredictable if it's designed that way.
Or we can just copy & paste Vanguard's raid content system which was miles better than anything EQ ever had. Inb4 someone who killed Vox 3 years after it was relevant tells me how great EQ's contested raiding is.
muscoby said:Passions are strong, but there are a bunch of us reading on the sidelines who are getting earfulls of lots of discussions centered around "this is what I don't like about what you said," and that turns into "I don't like anything you say." And that is leading to apathy and estrangement.
If someone feels apathetic and estranged by this topic, they probably don't care enough about raiding to participate to begin with.
There will always be competition for resources in a good MMO. If everybody gets everything, nothing is worth anything. There should absolutely be events that players or guilds can opportunistically take advantage of. I proposed the hyper/ghost concept many months ago and for the most part it was well received ... but it wasn't 100% appealing to everybody. I personally think it's a great compromise because it adds both exclusivity/accessibility to every high end raid encounter. Guilds wouldn't be able to "block" others from learning the encounter mechanics. Guilds who miss out on the hyper version wouldn't be left in the dust progression wise because they could still get high-end raid gear each and every spawn rotation from the ghost version.
Liav, I am pretty sure you mentioned that EQOA was your favorite MMO. In that game, all content was 100% contested. Even when it came to getting epic weapons ... Parathior and Arch Lich were both contested mobs that had to be killed in order for someone to finish their quest. How is it that you could have enjoyed that game so very much, but today you so strongly oppose some of the basic mechanics that made that world feel so alive? There were no instances ... no ghosts. You played when you played and you took advantage of what opportunities you were able to. If you missed out on something, there were plenty of other things to do and there was always next time. Missing out on a late night spawn was not the end of the world back then ... why would it be now?
Also, you mentioned how no other game has utilized the longer respawns on group content before. FFXI did. There were plenty of NM's (Notorious Monsters) that could only spawn 1 time per day, maximum. It's not quite as bad as a 3 day respawn but it's still very rare compared to any "named" I have seen in other MMO's. These long respawn timers are a part of what made these encounters so awesome. There was always plenty to choose from and it was impossible to lock down all of them. This limited supply is what made these targets so valuable. Players had to be opportunistic with their time. You could rest assured that if you were sitting around trying to camp one raid mob, you were missing out on potentially dozens of other raid/group mobs that could be spawning in that same window. There was no way to be everywhere at once.
I am pretty sure WoW also had really rare contested group content. I remember buying my wife an underwater mount for 150k gold ... it was worth that much because only one mob dropped it and it only spawned once every few days. It was the most valuable mount in the game ... if you saw someone with it, you definitely got the WOW effect. It all boils down to risk vs reward. The more rare/exclusive something is, the more valuable it is. As I have mentioned before in a bunch of my posts ... I think there should be a large mixed bag of content. You can create a game where there is plenty of accessible content by utilizing ghosts or lockouts. Likewise, there should be plenty of contested content that only spawns once a day maximum. If you only have 5 contested mobs in the game then yeah, the competition for these mobs is going to be extreme. Create a bunch ... spread them out ... make it impossible to camp them all.