The best design, I have seen so far in a mmo is standardized raid zones being instanced based with a lockout. The open world being for contested content , anything besides this allows guilds to block progression or horde content if everything is open world. The other solution that was discussed was kill flags , if it is indeed all contested .
I'm not against competition for resources. I have made this abundantly clear. I am against a very, very specific subset of competition. I will summarize my point, and I will discontinue contributing to this thread before I stroke out.
I want my success to be determined by playing better than others, not more than others. You don't need dragons spawning in the middle of the night to have meaningful competition.
I have nothing further to say.
The obvious divergence in threads like this is between people that enjoy competing with other players even outside of a pvp situation and those that do not want a great deal of competition with other players on a pve server.
More modern MMOs cater more to those that prefer being able to do content without having their ability to progress taken away because other people are more aggressive, faster, have more friends and guildmates to work with them etc. Thus the common approach today of letting anyone that contributes to killing a mob share the credit, or "public quests" where anyone in the area automatically gets certain quests and shares in the credit if they help at all. I know those aren't raid examples but I think this is the same dynamic - cooperation preferred over competition.
In these forums the phrase "modern MMO" tends to be a shorthand for "overly simple nerfed boring game catering to the almost braindead" but this is an enormous oversimplification. Many changes in the genre since 1999 have been because developers made actual *improvements* not merely catered to the lowest common denominator. Obviously many changes are not what most of us would consider improvements but some are.
My own preference is cooperation - thus in four years playing the classic pvp centered game Dark Ages of Camelot I was almost exclusively on the one cooperative server, Gaheris.
But many people including many of the people posting on these forums get a thrill out of competing woth other players to do content.
VR cannot satisfy both groups. The goal should be to have significant content available to almost everyone (through rapid respawns, lockout timers, shared credit, instances or other mechanisms that almost all of us are familiar with) with at least some content for the more competitive among us to fight over.
If there are a few peices of gear that only the top guilds that farm an area 24/7 ever get I can live with this if it helps the game by keeping the competitive types active and happy (and subscribing).
Liav said:I'm not against competition for resources. I have made this abundantly clear. I am against a very, very specific subset of competition. I will summarize my point, and I will discontinue contributing to this thread before I stroke out.
I want my success to be determined by playing better than others, not more than others. You don't need dragons spawning in the middle of the night to have meaningful competition.
I have nothing further to say.
And when dragons spawn during the day, you would be able to leverage your superior gaming skills to claim them. You seem to be perfectly fine with contested content as long as it spawns during your preferred windows. Time is, and always has been, the primary factor as it pertains to progression in an MMO. It doesen't matter how good you are ... if someone plays three times as much, they are going to have more opportunities to find success. As I mentioned earlier ... MMO's have "persistent worlds." They don't shut down when you go to work or go to sleep. They continue to exist. Rare mobs will continue to spawn, people will continue to buy/sell, harvest or craft. You have suggested that it would be better if contested raid mobs only spawned during daylight hours. Okay, what about all of the people who work jobs during the day? There are a ton of people who would never be able to raid at noon because they are working. When it comes to late night spawns ... at least they have the "option" to stay up late, or wake up during the wee hours to go after them. If raid mobs "only" spawned during daylight hours anybody who works 9-5 is going to miss out on the majority of them.
Contested spawns during daylight hours is a worst case scenario to me, honestly.
Vanguard's system would be the best, fully instanced raiding would be the next best.
I'm legitimately done arguing this as of now. All I can say is that I hope the devs make a game that's fun to play. If they don't, someone eventually will.
The more I think about it, the more I think that the right answer is a combination:
Some raid targets should be contested, because not making them contested would simply require doing something that can/would break immersion for a lot of people. In addition, there's the practical consideration of slowing down the flow of any loot they might drop into the game.
However, the spawning method used for contested content should be sufficiently random such that no one group of people can figure it out and monopolize the spawn. If the giant purple worm was just killed, it's ok to say it's not going to spawn again for at least 6 days. But it might actually be 12 (or more) before it shows up. The spawn times cannot be predictable at all, otherwise you get people camping them.
At the same time, the game needs to provide raid content that groups of players can go and do at any time. This allows players to schedule around real life and still enjoy this kind of content.
Rather than turning all raid "zones" into instances, triggers might be the better way to handle spawning these encounters. This would allow the spawn rate of encounters to be balanced individually (through adjusting their trigger conditions) and yet still allow players to essentially do them on-demand, assuming that the trigger conditions were all actions under player control.
Finally, some level of instancing might be appropriate for on-demand content, but it should be used very sparingly - the reason why is that instancing becomes a slippery slope in regards to loot entering the game once players get to a level of critical mass.
For what I'm about to type I need to define an itemization hierarchy, which is something I don't think we've really done yet. But consider that items/equipment have varying "power" levels, classified as follows: Common, uncommon, rare, legendary, artifact - with artifact being the most powerful and unique.
Here's how I see things working in terms of risk/reward scaling for raid encounters, in conjunction with spawn mechanics.
Contested spawns - very high risk (requires lots of people working together to bring down), guaranteed rare drops, chance for artifact-level and legendary rewards.
Triggered spawns - high risk (requires a strong coordinated effort by players both to trigger and defeat the encounter), chance for rare and legendary rewards.
Instanced spawns - moderate risk (requires a coordinated effort by players to defeat), chance for rare rewards.
I feel that the primary determinant of rewards for an encounter *should* be the difficulty of the encounter itself, not the spawn mechanism. So if the giant purple worm is going to drop artifact-level rewards, then it should be the sort of thing that requires a small army to bring down. You shouldn't hear about "hey Shadowfire killed the GPW last night" but instead hear people saying "omg, the GPW spawned last night and it took three raiding guilds working together to beat it". However, if you look at spawning mechanics as a way to control the flow of very powerful items into the game, it makes sense that the more predictable something is, the more people will do it - and thus, those spawning mechanics should influence the rewards in a secondary way.
I hope that all made sense, I have not had coffee yet this morning.
Admittedly I haven't read the whole thread yet but I will be and will edit if need be.
This is both a good idea, and a bad one.
It's good because it opens a whole nother side of raiding. It allows for more skill base and coordination based raiding rather than just time invested. It supports community play because if multiple guilds are shooting to go, they can coordinate targets so they aren't competing.
It's bad, well for a lot of the same reasons. Being time based, non top notch guilds will never have a shot because they won't have the time to learn the fights before someone else nabs the mob after a wipe. Top guilds would mass recruit and split into 2/3 raids to still dominate the entire thing.
Here's my main issues with raiding in the EQ format:
1) Guild control. If 1 guild can control the flow of loot on a server, it's a horrible thing for the entire community. Denial of content causes people to quit guilds/games. It's not healthy for any game and was moved away from in 2002 for a very good reason. *Edit* - People suggested flagging for access ala PoP style. For those that don't remember, you only had to block sol ro to stop access to elemental planes and time. Most servers had a guild that did just that for months, some even years. Flagging is not really a fix to anything when mobs are contested because content denial is still a thing.
2) Non capped raid sizes. You only needed maybe 30-40 people to kill a target in EQ. Yet you could bring 72. There was little to no challenge in early EQ raiding (the part Brad was involved in).
3) Bat phones. Early raiding boiled down to what guild had more people that could be on at any time day or night. If you had the people you got the target. If not, you waited 3 days and hoped it popped on your time. Another bad design flaw. Don't ask your playerbase to abandon a real life to make any progress in the game. That's not physically healthy and again is bad for the game. Schedules exist in every part of life and not allowing players to have them is a bad thing.
4) DPS racing. Absolute dumbest idea ever put into a game. Can't even count how many people we trolled with a well timed mem blur. Not to mention that this ends up boiling down to simply who has more people when combined with uncapped raid sizes.
So this is still a double edged sword. I'd enjoy it cuz I am one of those hard core raiders who likes things like this. But I know that the community would not see this content for months/years because guilds will control it completely since it's a timed thing.
*EDIT* - Since others are making suggestions I may as well do the same to put in my thoughts to a fix rather than just state problems.
1) Contested content spawning in the open world as usual. Every 12-24 hours. Not the hardest content but still requires coordination and gives epic level loot. Gives things to fight for against other people but if you don't get it it's not that huge a deal.
2) Raid zones - non linear zones with progressively harder bosses. End bosses locked behind flag/keys/quest chain. NToV style zones. EQ style raiding everyone wants the only difference is once a boss is killed you get no loot from that boss for 7 days. Bosses respawn every 4-6 hours. Discourages any type of camping or controlling.
That's it. You don't need to dive in anymore because it's all covered. Top guilds will move through raid zones faster without stepping on the little guys as much because there is no incentive to control. The only thing I can't stress enough is to make any type of epic quest mobs be spawned mobs. Don't require raid mobs to be killed for them. It just creates a focus point to block.
What might a "mixed bag" look like?
Lottery Spawns: This kind of mob would have a new chance to spawn every time someone kills one of it's placeholders. Imagine a raid zone where there are 10 different kinds of NPC's and each mob has a 20-30 minute respawn timer. At the point of respawn, there is a low chance (let's use 1% as an example) that the mob can respawn as a lottery boss. There can only be one lottery boss up (maximum) for each NPC type at any given point in time, and it's spawn point would be random.
Timed Spawns: This kind of mob would be contested. You can create several respawn windows for these to offer a variety of risk/reward.
Common: 30-60 minute respawn. High chance to drop some sort of merchant fodder or currency. Medium chance to drop a tier-appropriate crafting component, low chance to drop tier appropriate gear.
Uncommon: 2-3 hour respawn. High chance to drop a tier appropriate crafting component. Medium chance to drop 1 piece of tier appropriate gear. Small chance to drop 1 piece of specialized or "situational" gear.
Rare: 4-6 hour respawn. High chance to drop both a tier appropriate crafting component and 1 piece of tier appropriate gear. Medium chance to drop 1 piece of specialized or "situational" gear. Small chance to drop all 3.
Very Rare: 8-12 hour respawn. High chance to drop 1 piece of situational gear. Medium chance to drop 1 piece of situational gear, 1 tier appropriate crafting component, and 1 piece of tier appropriate gear. Small chance to drop 1 piece of next-tier situational gear, 1 next tier crafting component, and 1 piece of next tier gear. Very small chance to drop something "very shiny."
Uber Rare: 18-24 hour respawn. High chance to drop 1 piece of situational gear, 2 tier appropriate crafting components, and 2 tier appropriate pieces of gear. Medium chance to drop 1 piece of next-tier situational gear, 1 next tier crafting component, and 1 piece of next tier gear. Small chance to drop something "very shiny."
Legendary: 36-72 hour respawn. Medium chance to drop 2 pieces of next tier situational gear, 2 next tier crafting components, and 2 pieces of next-tier gear. Medium chance to drop all of that plus something "very shiny."
Forced Spawns: These mobs can be force spawned by a player. Some triggers could be quest related, some could be based on turning in items/keys. Lockout restrictions can be imposed on some forced spawns whereas others could be unlimited, provided the player(s) have the required items/keys to trigger them. If you mix this with Lottery Spawns, (each lottery spawn in a zone drops a key, when all keys are collected you can turn in to spawn a mega boss) really cool things can start to happen.
Beyond all that, you can also add in a blend of hyper, ghost, or "shared spawns" that contain the elements of both hyper and ghost on the same mob. You can add "ultra rare" loot to the world loot table based on location, mob type, or other factors. Another thing to consider ... this "mixed bag" wouldn't be exclusive to just raiding. These same guidelines could also be applied to group content. We havent even touched on faction yet which has deep potential for progression and risk vs reward itself. You can create "situational criteria" such as increasing the spawn% of lottery mobs when certain criteria is present. For example, lightning elemental bosses have a higher chance to spawn during a storm. Wicked underlords can be "force popped" by cleansing a gloomy obelisk of it's undead presence. Some mobs might spawn exclusively in the day, or at night. Certain events might only trigger after various "situational criteria" are met and then a player rings a bell on the other side of the world. There is a ton of potential to create meaningful "opportunities" where the world feels more alive based on your knowledge of how/why certain things work the way they do.
It's been said many times that VR is looking to evolve the genre ... and one key takeaway I have observed is that "raiding won't be the end-all-be-all." So create a game that is truly rich with content. Use all of the elements outlined above but mix it up between group content and raid content, and do it for every tier. If group content is supposed to be just as meaningful as raid content, how does it make sense to impose restrictions on one but not the other? Doing so, in my opinion, would automatically imply that raid content is higher on the progression food chain. If you are going to create balance across the board then there should be consistency with named farming and loot acquisition regardless of which adventure sphere you are playing in.
For players who want to schedule their raids, they can coordinate around forced spawns, ghost spawns, and lottery spawn farming. For those who want to be opportunistic and enjoy the thrill of "monster hunting" ... you get timed spawns and hyper spawns. There is something there for everybody ... but the most important thing of all is that there is something there for the world, as well. It gets to exist ... it isn't chopped up into instances that segregate it's population. The "freedom to explore or adventure" isn't taken away by turning everything into something that can be scheduled. Terminus gets to keep it's integrity instead of being butchered into oblivion for the sake of player convenience.