There is one certainty: enough players will try to abuse game mechanics to ruin the experience for others that they will be a problem. If there isn't a way to directly police other players, which there won't be in the PvE ruleset, nothing will stop these people. Anyone who thinks otherwise is being naive.
However, there are several things VR can do to lessen the impact these poeple have on the game.
1. Give everyone kill credit (for quests and experience) for a mob if they got on its agro list.
2. Give everyone rights to their personalized loot table (quest and regular items) for every mob they have been given kill credit.
3. Implement an individual lockout timer on raid mobs similar to what they did in VG.
Folks pining for competition over contested mobs are confusing what made EQ1 great. The challenge and community of that game made it great, not waiting in line for the chance to farm your FBSS.
@nscheffel -- Sorry but I completely disagree. As soon as the rewards for an encounter are given to every participant, then :
1) There is no competition. Which is something that many enjoy a great deal
2) There's incentive for everyone that wants a drop from a named to pile into a room together, which results not only in no challenge from the encounter (because its melted to slag the second it spawns), but also the balance of loot distribution goes completely out the window with X number of an item being generated on every death of the named, with X being the number of participants. Hell at that point there's no reason to even group for a prized spawn. Just show up and whack him once.
The toxic social consequences observed in EQ1 is -why- many 2004+ MMO's went to personal quest credit, at the very least.
Personally I don't care about the static competitive loot, but quest credit? Yeah, I care. I was blocked on EQ1 TLP from completing my Epic because the mobs involved were on "kill because we can" status and only spawned in the base picks. If I had been able to at least tag it for quest credit, I could have moved on with the quest, and ignored the douchebaggery.
I'l put it another way. If I have to put up with all the toxicity of EQ1, in Pantheon, I'll just play EQ1. :) There's far more content, and will be for years.
VR has already talked about being concious of that kind of thing, and I believe they've said that they are open to things like ghosting or triggered spawns, especially when it involves quest gates to avoid those very issues. There's an upside and down to this IMO, but it's a fair compromise to consider between full competition for everything and anything, and instancing all dungeons.
The last I heard they are looking at using "Shards" to create an additional 1-3 open-world versions of populated zones. Much like the current EQ /pick system. It does not totally solve the issue of kill stealing, but if they do decide to go this route it will increase the number of named mobs, within reason, and that should help reduce conflict and KSing. There are a few threads where this is debated, some of the really conservative EQ vets feel like it's instancing and will spread out the community, but if you search for shards or sharding, you should be able to locate those threads.
In my opinion, I think it's a solid compromise between all-out griefing, kill stealing, and monopolizing content in a single open world zone, but without going as far as creating closed off instances that will flood the server with rare drops and separate the community from one another.
If anyone has the stomach for it, here is one of those threads - https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/5899/will-camps-be-enforced/view/page/2
oneADseven said:...
In an open world with rare named spawns (in the traditional EQ way), the camp itself is the resource. If it was claimed then that resource was considered taken, no ghosts or anything needed. It was in the best interests of all to uphold camp claims and allowed (especially the longer a server existed) for leveling groups to enjoy more fun and excitement since they could camp different named mobs with groups as they leveled up and occationally get into a particularly desired named camp for some very great items. Without camps then it's largely NOT going to be in the best interest (more so as a server ages) of a group trying to level to go after named spawns where there is any competition as the leveling will suffer greatly. Without camps it also makes it mostly futile for low-mid level groups to go after useful named mobs that will end up camped by solo max level characters who can out DPS the entire group easily. If a tagging system, that unfairly rewards the fastest reaction time (and further would lead groups into not trying to get exp in a camp so they can watch the spawn like hawks instead) which is slanted toward people with better internet connections to the server, younger players, and is a slight to handicapped players. Tagging also makes helping others who might need aid with a mob impossible, so you just ignore others.
Perhaps one solution to guilds locking down entire spawns and trading off would be having all named mobs in a zone rotate around at random with each camp ending up just being areas where any named for the zone can spawn, of course that does take away some of the thematic/design of a dungeon at times. Or as you suggest, have named mobs in dungeons be something spawned by a trigger/force pop like killing x amount of mobs near the area or combining a few uncommon item drops from mobs in the zone.
Even on P1999 it's rare for players to brute force or steal a camp, though that might be due to their rules/policy which cut that from being a problem. The Wild West approach isn't largely conducive to a cooperative atmosphere of players against the world as such hyper competition for any noteable resources promotes being unfair and taking advantage of other people. Instances came about because people were fed up with the overpopulation in relation to valuable spawns/leveling spots/raids so instead of adding tons and tons of content with overlapping items they made instances since the alternative of having players to just go full no holds barred and saying it's part of the fun wasn't something most people wanted/enjoyed. Plenty of old hardcore EQ players that came back to play P1999 ended up finding upon getting to the highly contested no holds barred raids that they actually understood and desired what they thought they hated: instances or fast respawns with lockouts.
Said policy from P1999 in regards to camps:
1. You may not steal kills.
Kill Stealing is defined as the killing of an NPC for any reason that is already fighting or pursuing another player or group that is prepared to engage that same NPC without that group's specific permission.
The intent of this rule is discourage and make note of habitual Kill Stealers, not to punish those who honestly try to work together or those who make an honest mistake. Its enforcement by the Project 1999 Customer Service Staff will reflect this philosophy.
2. You must comply with arbitration for contested spawns.
There are cases where two or more groups wish to kill the same NPC or hunt in the same area. In these cases, the groups are required to compromise.
If an equitable compromise cannot be reached between the players prior to Project 1999 Customer Service Staff involvement, the P99CSR will mandate a compromise. Any such compromise is final and not open to debate. Refusing to abide by these terms will be considered disruption and may result in disciplinary action.
It is therefore strongly suggested that the groups make every attempt to reach a compromise that they can live with prior to involving a P99CSR, who may mandate a compromise that does not suit you to the extent that a player-devised compromise would.
Note: A "group" in this case is defined as a party of one or more characters that are united in a common belief or goal and are capable of completing that goal.
Project 1999 Staff will not be defining what constitutes a camp. Instead, Project 1999 Customer Service Staff will arbitrate spawn disputes on a per-case-basis. We greatly encourage players to find their own resolution to spawn disputes, as the solution provided by the staff will at best be a win-lose situation, and possbily a lose-lose situation. No two decisions, even at the same 'camp', are guaranteed to be the same, as we will take into account multiple factors in making a determination on a 'camp'.
That being said, you can absolutely "camp" mobs, and you cannot steal another players 'camp'. In general, if the placeholder or placeholders for a spawn are being killed, that 'camp' can be considered held by the player doing the killing so long as they are keeping the placeholders cleared, within the same zone, do not die or log off. You do not necessarily need to be at the spawn point to call it 'claimed' while it is uncontested, however, if someone else wishes to contest the 'camp' you do need to return to the 'camp' and maintain a presence at or very near the spawn(s) in order to hold it. You cannot hold multiple 'camps' if another group wishes to contest one that you are holding. The player holding multiple 'camps' retains the right to choose which 'camp' to give up.
Please do your best to use courtesy and common sense when interacting with other players in spawn disputes.
It is against the rules to "afk camp" any npc or groups of NPC's by placing a pet nearby and letting it kill while you are away from your computer. Any other form of "afk camping/xping" is also against the rules, and you may be subject to disciplinary action (character de-leveling by deathloop is a popular punishment).
I have stated before , there needs to be a game mechanic that prevents griefing or locking content down.. I am pro encounter lock like eq2's . The first person , group or raid to engage the mob "owns" it. This prevents this entire type of behavior entirely. The above said group can not receive help outside of there already established set up to zerg content, out dps , train etc. The set up either has the ability to complete the encounter or not.
The entire play nice policy does nothing to prevent content from being locked down and then shifted , that also throws out the entire camp argument. What prevents me from holding a camp all day , inviting my guildys and continue the cycle? Also p99 is extreamly toxic at top end content if not flat out corrupt all major content is locked down the same way I described above with people hiding behind a "play nice policy". There are reasons eq1 live has moved away from this type of policy.
This also does not even take into consideration the amount of GM hrs needed to police such a policy , weed through /petitions etc because someone got there feelings hurt in contested content.
Katalyzt said: The last I heard they are looking at using "Shards" to create an additional 1-3 open-world versions of populated zones. Much like the current EQ /pick system. It does not totally solve the issue of kill stealing, but if they do decide to go this route it will increase the number of named mobs, within reason, and that should help reduce conflict and KSing. ...In my opinion, I think it's a solid compromise between all-out griefing, kill stealing, and monopolizing content in a single open world zone, but without going as far as creating closed off instances that will flood the server with rare drops and separate the community from one another. ...
Yep, heard they were going to try this. In EQ1 TLP, as you say, they have this. Unfortunately, it turned into a loot amplifier for krono farming guilds (of which there are many). How?
It worked like this: They kill the named, zone in enough accounts to spawn a pick, /pick over, kill the named, repeat as desired. Leave behind farmers or just continue to spawn picks.
Even if they have to wait days (yes, literal RL days) they will hold those picks open and simply farm the named as long as they wish, with almost no competitive, because they had the zone to themselves. I saw with my own eyes 6 picks of Runnyeye open to farm blackened iron medallions, with exactly three level 50 mages in each pick, killing everything non-stop. They held those picks open from server up to server down, for the entirety of the duration of the classic era. If you wanted a blackened iron medallion, you paid krono. (repeat for many other items, in respective era's)
Now, in the past year, they attempted to make some changes to picks to prevent this, and all the changes were incredibly punitive to casual/legit players, and did almost nothing to stop the krono farming guilds. So, all good for the krono farming guilds, still. The only thing the guilds really care about is the threshold of accounts required to spawn a new pick, which they can trivially match no matter what it's set to, with multi-box armies available.
The only difference in Pantheon, as described currently, is that there won't be krono, as far as I can tell. You can claim "but , but , but CSR's, and GM's, reputation, community, /ignore, and TOS, and EULA" but none of that applies. They're not doing anything wrong. There are no camps. There is no kill stealing. Training is permitted. Malicious FD'ing is possible. The game mechanics permit ALL OF IT. Hundreds of people will be in these guilds doing this as a job; reputation and community means nothing to these players. Voila, perfect storm for toxicity, by design.
I mean, it's possible they see some of this in beta and make the right decisions to fix it before launch. But... at this point I'm more skeptical than hopeful. :)
nscheffel said:There is one certainty: enough players will try to abuse game mechanics to ruin the experience for others that they will be a problem. If there isn't a way to directly police other players, which there won't be in the PvE ruleset, nothing will stop these people. Anyone who thinks otherwise is being naive.
However, there are several things VR can do to lessen the impact these poeple have on the game.
1. Give everyone kill credit (for quests and experience) for a mob if they got on its agro list.
2. Give everyone rights to their personalized loot table (quest and regular items) for every mob they have been given kill credit.
3. Implement an individual lockout timer on raid mobs similar to what they did in VG.
Folks pining for competition over contested mobs are confusing what made EQ1 great. The challenge and community of that game made it great, not waiting in line for the chance to farm your FBSS.
1, Being able to tag a mob just to get kill credit for quests, I would assume exp would be equally divided by damage dealt, sounds likea participation trophy that doesn't really even require participation. Sounds terrible and handholdy
2. Now you run into a issue and in the end it solves nothing. Let's say a mob respawns 1 time an hour and the developers want about 1 of an item to be given to players per a day. It would have close to a 5% loot drop. with personal loot the developer has basically one of 3 options:
A. reduce loot chance to 5%/max raid or group size. In a sense anyone with less than a max group has a worse chance of getting the loot than a full group. It also again adds a participation bonus and would allow me to bring a alt on another account to the party who does nothing just to raise our group's chances.
B. not reduce the chance at all. Well now the developer just flooded the item into the world and killed the value of the item. That was always an issue in WoW when I played it, any non-bound equipment was worthless and meaningless except for disenchanting basically. I'm sure developers want to keep drops from rare named mobs valuable so this path isn't going to be taken.
C. generate a single loot table and distribute any drops to a specific member of the kill group. This is basically non-personal loot except the loot get distributed by the game instead of the group. Absolutely terrible idea. It keeps the balance, solves all the other problems, but gets rid of group control for who gets the loot. It's a good party loot distribution choice if the party desires it but options like master looting, round robin, ect should still be allowed.
3. Absolutely not, I don't want to have game mechanics that don't allow me to touch a mob, now your closing in on instances. If they do allow it it should be restricted to only certain mobs and for certain lore reasons. For example, I'm wearing a necklace that reduces the power of a raid mob. When the raid mob dies in his dying breath he sucks the power from mine and all other raid members necklaces making it impossible for us to resist some of his abilties.
Xxar said:othing to prevent content from being locked down and then shifted , that also throws out the entire camp argument. What prevents me from holding a camp all day , inviting my guildys and continue the cycle? Also p99 is extreamly toxic at top end content if not flat out corrupt all major content is locked down the same way I described above with people hiding behind a "play nice policy". There are reasons eq1 live has moved away from this type of policy.
Good game design for one. There needs to be enough content that if a group of players is locking down a certain part of content that players can do something else. The rest of the content has to be decently awarding so that both A: one guild doesn't feel the need to monopolize a specific content because they can do other things as well and B: a player doesn't miss a certain area of content because it's being constantly farmed.
Competing for resources without having the leverage of PvP seems counter-intuitive to me. Maybe some of you should join us PvPers on a PvP server so we can compete for resources properly without the invisible barrier of player immunity like we're having an argument using a mediator while giving each other the silent treatment.
Ok, ok, I'm only being half serious.
On a more serious note; People here seem to be incessant about the grouping, community, and player inclusion - so where exactly does competing over mobs/resources tie in to that? If there is to be competition, should it necessarily be over resources/mobs?
Xxar said:I have stated before , there needs to be a game mechanic that prevents griefing or locking content down.. I am pro encounter lock like eq2's . The first person , group or raid to engage the mob "owns" it. This prevents this entire type of behavior entirely.
- Guild A starts camping a mob on a 15-20 day spawn cycle on day 14 of that cycle and have a group there 24/7
- 5 minutes before the mob spawns on day 20, Guild B shows up.
- Player from Guild B has the quickest hit of their /target mob, /attack mob macro
How does Guild A feel about a first hit lockout in that scenario?
For me personally, first tag is one of my least favorite options to solve the problem.
That is contested content , if guild B engaged first it is there target. The amount of time camping has nothing to do with a encounter. The argument you present is based on the logic that guild A has some kind of right to the encounter and that defeats the entire point of contested content.
Wandidar said:- Guild A starts camping a mob on a 15-20 day spawn cycle on day 14 of that cycle and have a group there 24/7
- 5 minutes before the mob spawns on day 20, Guild B shows up.
- Player from Guild B has the quickest hit of their /target mob, /attack mob macro
How does Guild A feel about a first hit lockout in that scenario?
For me personally, first tag is one of my least favorite options to solve the problem.
Exactly. Not to mention things like ranged vs melee, travel time of ranged vs other ranged, etc. I've never liked the tag first mechanic, either. Though I haven't often been in situations where I couldn't attack a player for doing it, or get attacked for doing it.
Spawn timers and the actual encounter are entirely different things , the logic you present has nothing to do with encounter locks.
Odd how such things are to some totally great and okay in a game but in the real world they would probably be appalled. People trampling others for Black Friday deals rushing to take the limited resources before others isn't considered enjoyable in any way or promoted as a good thing. Same idea with people who camp out for new merchandise releases thoughout the year (iPhones etc), if people just up and charged in the store the second it opened while ignoring those who spend their time committed to waiting it would be seen as a huge dick move/negative experience. Online game? Screw other people! I want mine!
First come, first served. When demand exceeds supply this principle keeps things civil and orderly. There are plenty of ways design can be taken to handle issues like monopolization and excessive demand without resorting to complete lawless chaos, massive competition, and/or mob tagging systems.
Iksar said:Odd how such things are to some totally great and okay in a game but in the real world they would probably be appalled. People trampling others for Black Friday deals rushing to take the limited resources before others isn't considered enjoyable in any way or promoted as a good thing. Same idea with people who camp out for new merchandise releases thoughout the year (iPhones etc), if people just up and charged in the store the second it opened while ignoring those who spend their time committed to waiting it would be seen as a huge dick move/negative experience. Online game? Screw other people! I want mine!
First come, first served. When demand exceeds supply this principle keeps things civil and orderly. There are plenty of ways design can be taken to handle issues like monopolization and excessive demand without resorting to complete lawless chaos, massive competition, and/or mob tagging systems.
You sir, have obviously not met my sisters or their daughters. The five of them sing in the church choir every week... but on Black Friday they are up early and come home bruised.
Iksar said:Odd how such things are to some totally great and okay in a game but in the real world they would probably be appalled. People trampling others for Black Friday deals rushing to take the limited resources before others isn't considered enjoyable in any way or promoted as a good thing. Same idea with people who camp out for new merchandise releases thoughout the year (iPhones etc), if people just up and charged in the store the second it opened while ignoring those who spend their time committed to waiting it would be seen as a huge dick move/negative experience. Online game? Screw other people! I want mine!
First come, first served. When demand exceeds supply this principle keeps things civil and orderly. There are plenty of ways design can be taken to handle issues like monopolization and excessive demand without resorting to complete lawless chaos, massive competition, and/or mob tagging systems.
Absolutely mate, but we are not playing a game about standing in line at the counter waiting to get what you paid for, this is about fighting against the world and dying and fighting again and getting beaten to the punch and fighting again and finally getting what you have worked for... you will get there in Pantheon, sometimes you will have to work harder than the last person who was there, sometimes you will get lucky, sometimes you will get unlucky and it gets stolen. If there is a rule for KSing and the like then you have some avenues to persue to try to rectify a wrong doing and have someone punished or at least get a warning regarding that behaviour.. and by that very means you then get to affect their experience in a potentially negative way and over time potetially have a positive effect on the game world socially in a way that does not break down one of the core values of VR. So using GM's in cases of extreme griefing is what you should do, and by doing that and VR having a good consequence for these actions people will learn or get themselves removed.
How is A more fun or in any way better than B? And how is it not PvP instead of PvE?
A) "I'm going to log in for a couple hours and stand in a room full of other players hoping maybe I can beat all of them to claim/kill a rare mob."
B) "I'm going to log in for a couple hours and find a camp to get some exp and maybe win a drop from the camp's rare mob."
