They'll do it like they did in Vanguard. Raid bosses in dungeons will have lockout timers of 3-7 days. They'll always be up. Maybe not in the same places, but they'll always be up. Overland raid bosses will spawn randomly or be triggered someway, but will not always be up. They will also have lockout timers and be locked to the group that tags it 1st, but they will be the contested targets. In the 7 years i played Vanguard, I've never heard of guilds arguing over raid mobs with this system.
for balancing purposes you have to set parameters. to clean up my expression, if you want to balance the encounter for 12 or 24 then you only have to make adjustments for two sets.
if you want it to balance between 12 up to 24 people, you now have to adjust for twelve sets not including class diversity
Keiiek said:They'll do it like they did in Vanguard. Raid bosses in dungeons will have lockout timers of 3-7 days. They'll always be up. Maybe not in the same places, but they'll always be up. Overland raid bosses will spawn randomly or be triggered someway, but will not always be up. They will also have lockout timers and be locked to the group that tags it 1st, but they will be the contested targets. In the 7 years i played Vanguard, I've never heard of guilds arguing over raid mobs with this system.
Yeah, if something that is intended to be a real challenge and bring a sense of accomplishment/prestige is able to be zerged then all sense of accomplishment/prestige goes right out the window. Allowing something intended to be challenging that awards items that more or less show off a players accomplishments/skill to be zerged would be nearly as bad as just directly selling any loot on a cash shop.
Iksar said:Yeah, if something that is intended to be a real challenge and bring a sense of accomplishment/prestige is able to be zerged then all sense of accomplishment/prestige goes right out the window. Allowing something intended to be challenging that awards items that more or less show off a players accomplishments/skill to be zerged would be nearly as bad as just directly selling any loot on a cash shop.
And the leet guilds with high end gear throughout their raid force will have content on farm status at some point as well. Where's the prestige in that?
Iksar said:Yeah, if something that is intended to be a real challenge and bring a sense of accomplishment/prestige is able to be zerged then all sense of accomplishment/prestige goes right out the window. Allowing something intended to be challenging that awards items that more or less show off a players accomplishments/skill to be zerged would be nearly as bad as just directly selling any loot on a cash shop.
RIP archeage
Keno Monster said:Iksar said:Yeah, if something that is intended to be a real challenge and bring a sense of accomplishment/prestige is able to be zerged then all sense of accomplishment/prestige goes right out the window. Allowing something intended to be challenging that awards items that more or less show off a players accomplishments/skill to be zerged would be nearly as bad as just directly selling any loot on a cash shop.
And the leet guilds with high end gear throughout their raid force will have content on farm status at some point as well. Where's the prestige in that?
then you end up with pvevp XD
I have always seen raid size restricting itself in open world games.
Raiding is about gearing up your raid force. If one guild is taking 100 people to beat a raid and another is only taking 50 that guild will be able to gear up and progress to the next content twice as fast. That time can be adjusted with spawn times and drop rates, but often that difference in the time it takes to gear up a large raid force compared to a small raid force is months of difference.
Disclaimer*:If this is the highest tier content in the game and no other content is coming out that is a different issue about development speed.
Those guilds that are rushing to gear up their raid force first are going to be as efficient as possible so they can move on to the next tier of content first.
The guilds that come later already have strategy guides and spoilers. These later players aren't hard core/cutting edge players. Why does it matter if they bring extra people? That content has already been made much less difficult by spoilers at that point anyway.
I feel like anyone who is worried about non-hardcore/high end players taking extra people into a raid to make it easier, after the content has already been beaten and spoilers/strat guides are readily available is taking this hobby way to seriously.
Keno Monster said:And the leet guilds with high end gear throughout their raid force will have content on farm status at some point as well. Where's the prestige in that?
Well considering you'd recognize them as "leet" guilds it sounds like they'd have their prestige right there. Heads don't turn when things can be trivialized/zerged, no one gives a care at all. Yet when challenge is preserved it isn't uncommon to see crowds gather around to inspect someone or /tell them asking about it.
Sorry for taking so long to respond to this discussion. It's been kind of a crappy week irl for me.
To 1AD7's original question:
- I think "raid tier" means diferent things depending who you ask. For some people, it is a measure of the numeric requirements of the content. Meaning that you have to have better gear in order to have a chance. For others, it's a measure of the overall complexity and challenge of the content - which may or may not express itself in terms of numbers.
- I am ALWAYS in favor of content that promotes intelligent and skillful play by players. Whether it's raid content or group content, I want that content to challenge me in terms of actual gameplay. Give me unexpected situations I need to react to, new enemy abilities and mechanics that I need to plan for, and above all, unique mechanics that make each encounter something new and different. I want this at all levels of the game - not just the max level, though I would expect and presume that there's a learning curve as players level up, where you're doing a lot more with those level 50 fights than you are with the level 10 fights.
As an example of this, when I played Wildstar I absolutely loved their single-group dungeons for how hard the fights were. Granted, it's a different style of combat than Pantheon will have, but the idea that something didn't have to be a raid in order to be challenging to the players doing it was just deliciously awesome. While it's not my primary focus in MMOs, I thrive on being challenged to be a better player, and I want the game to continually challenge me.
- On the other hand, I am generally NOT in favor of having stats and/or gear act as gating factors for content. This doesn't mean I don't want to see an equipment progression - but in my mind, the equation for success in any fight should be something like 70% skill, 30% gear. If gear makes too much of a difference then several negative things occur. First, you end up promoting the mentality that gear is all that matters, and that leads to all sorts of bad or even downright toxic player behavior. Second, you end up with encounters that can be defeated just by overgearing for them, which can, over time, actually work against the idea of meaningful choices and diversity in terms of what abilities players use. So while the numbers should matter, and should help, they should never help so much that they become a crutch.
- Finally I want to say that while I understand that sometimes people don't thrive on challenge as much as I do, I think that every piece of content in Pantheon needs to be very challenging, within reason. The reason for this is that if you set the default challenge level of the game's content to "easy", then you create the perception among players (in general) that anyone can do anything easily unless it's something special like a raid. This is a pitfall that almost every other game has fallen into over time - just think about how many games recently have had to resort to publishing "hard mode" versions of their content. In some cases, multiple tiers of difficulty modes. On the other hand, if you make the default state of the game's content "tough", then you train players to not expect victory, and to treat each encounter or piece of content on its own merits. This doesn't mean that you still won't end up with some people for whom things seem harder or easier, but the goal should be to make it so that things are truly challenging for something like 75% of the people playing the game, if not more.
I'm going to avoid the discussion about availability of content right now as I feel the question was more about the difficulty of content. Though as anyone who has been around here for a while probably knows, I have plenty of opinions on content availability too :)
Iksar said:Keno Monster said:And the leet guilds with high end gear throughout their raid force will have content on farm status at some point as well. Where's the prestige in that?
Well considering you'd recognize them as "leet" guilds it sounds like they'd have their prestige right there. Heads don't turn when things can be trivialized/zerged, no one gives a care at all. Yet when challenge is preserved it isn't uncommon to see crowds gather around to inspect someone or /tell them asking about it.
The mere fact that it requires a zerg means the encounter is not trivial. And is the content not trivialized by the power guilds with epicly geared characters face rolling?
It just rings false to me. Fire giants in sol b are not a raid encounter, but in the first few months in EQ they had to be done by 2 or 3 groups because people didn't yet have enough power concentrated in 1 group. So people did the FGs the way they could. And later that changed and people could duo them. Why all of a sudden does a "raid" need to have a limit on it when nothing else in the world does? It's a glaringly fake, made up mechanic that does not promote the sense that this is a virtual world with integrity.
How do we explain away the 25th person not being alllowed to enter the dragon's lair or the 13th person not being allowed to throw a lightning bolt at an "open world" mob? When we start referring to content as a "12 man" or "24 man" that's when, for me, the integrity of the content itself ceasese to have value. It's like people on wow forums referring to their gear by item level instead of by the name of the item itself. There is a HUGE difference in "Hey guys let's get a 12 man together" and "Hey guys let's go do the fire giant king".
Vandraad said:Keiiek said:They'll do it like they did in Vanguard. Raid bosses in dungeons will have lockout timers of 3-7 days. They'll always be up. Maybe not in the same places, but they'll always be up. Overland raid bosses will spawn randomly or be triggered someway, but will not always be up. They will also have lockout timers and be locked to the group that tags it 1st, but they will be the contested targets. In the 7 years i played Vanguard, I've never heard of guilds arguing over raid mobs with this system.
Unless you can show a quote from Joppa stating that is indeed fact, you're only speculating. But I'll take your bet and say the approach will be like EQ1 where the mob spawns in X days with some +/- random variable. If you want the mob, be in the right place at the right time and before anybody else.
It is indeed speculation. But it solves so many of the drama causing issues like poopsocking, content blocking, bottlenecking, KSing, having to have agreements on what guilds get to kill what mobs on what week/day, that i see it more likely to be implemented than classic EQ mechanics.
Keiiek said:Vandraad said:Keiiek said:They'll do it like they did in Vanguard. Raid bosses in dungeons will have lockout timers of 3-7 days. They'll always be up. Maybe not in the same places, but they'll always be up. Overland raid bosses will spawn randomly or be triggered someway, but will not always be up. They will also have lockout timers and be locked to the group that tags it 1st, but they will be the contested targets. In the 7 years i played Vanguard, I've never heard of guilds arguing over raid mobs with this system.
Unless you can show a quote from Joppa stating that is indeed fact, you're only speculating. But I'll take your bet and say the approach will be like EQ1 where the mob spawns in X days with some +/- random variable. If you want the mob, be in the right place at the right time and before anybody else.It is indeed speculation. But it solves so many of the drama causing issues like poopsocking, content blocking, bottlenecking, KSing, having to have agreements on what guilds get to kill what mobs on what week/day, that i see it more likely to be implemented than classic EQ mechanics.
Drama as described is exactly what games need these days. Forcing people to deal with each other, negotiate and form agreements is fantastic, deep, meaningful gameplay.
SoWplz said: I thought I heard somewhere the raid mobs would have zerg fail safes built in. Where if too many players were in a certain area the mob would react accordingly, maybe by fleeing, calling in help of more then the raid can handle, leading to raid wipe. Maybe I just made that all up??
You're not dreaming, what you said is 100% true, I was watching the stream when Mr. McQuaid stated this in answer to a question about the issue of zerging. The two examples he gave were the boss could possibly summon in more npcs to make it an even fight if players showed up with more than the encounter was designed for. Or, the boss maybe would just gate/evac out - ending the encounter, and leaving the players with no chance to fight. He said there would be many possibilities, but those were the examples he gave.
Keno Monster said:The mere fact that it requires a zerg means the encounter is not trivial. And is the content not trivialized by the power guilds with epicly geared characters face rolling?
It just rings false to me. Fire giants in sol b are not a raid encounter, but in the first few months in EQ they had to be done by 2 or 3 groups because people didn't yet have enough power concentrated in 1 group. So people did the FGs the way they could. And later that changed and people could duo them. Why all of a sudden does a "raid" need to have a limit on it when nothing else in the world does? It's a glaringly fake, made up mechanic that does not promote the sense that this is a virtual world with integrity.
How do we explain away the 25th person not being alllowed to enter the dragon's lair or the 13th person not being allowed to throw a lightning bolt at an "open world" mob? When we start referring to content as a "12 man" or "24 man" that's when, for me, the integrity of the content itself ceasese to have value. It's like people on wow forums referring to their gear by item level instead of by the name of the item itself. There is a HUGE difference in "Hey guys let's get a 12 man together" and "Hey guys let's go do the fire giant king".
Something eventually trivialized by those with the skill to beat a high/top end encounter with the intended difficulty doesn't seem like a big problem.
People are throwing out wild numbers for zergs but an encounter intended/tuned for 24 players can be made dramatically easier with as little as 30 (one full group extra) non-braindead players showing up. The idea that it will take vastly more time to gear up would only really be true in the most extreme cases, especially when you consider that it could take a group weeks/months (or sometimes never) before they beat an encounter for the first time. Yet being able to go above the "limit" would mean they could start pulling out loot from week 1 by just throwing an extra group or two in there, negating a lot of (if not all) the "extra time" to gear everyone.
Virtual world/immersion/etc integrity doesn't hold too much water for me because all said and done it is game, full of all kinds of mechanics that limit or alter the "reality" of things for the sake of gameplay.
Keno Monster said:Keiiek said:It is indeed speculation. But it solves so many of the drama causing issues like poopsocking, content blocking, bottlenecking, KSing, having to have agreements on what guilds get to kill what mobs on what week/day, that i see it more likely to be implemented than classic EQ mechanics.
Drama as described is exactly what games need these days. Forcing people to deal with each other, negotiate and form agreements is fantastic, deep, meaningful gameplay.
I respect you as a person, player, and friend. Here are my thoughts. Using the language translator in FFXI felt fantastic, deep, and meaningful. I remember learning a little Japanese and mixing it into my messages while trying to get groups going, hoping it would increase the likelihood of getting a response. These were the good old days when the world was dangerous and players respected the environment. Players weren't treated as a commodity, they were cherished as a precious resource or investment. The amount of XP on your bar was also considered a precious resource since it was entirely possible that a poorly planned adventure could end up costing you some of it. When a world is dangerous and challenging it will command respect from it's players. The world should never ease up and allow players to get the upper hand. Content is king while players are tiny specks who should feel lucky just to get a chance to move a row on the chess board, in any direction.
When these kind of variables are in play it allows for very compelling gameplay and player interaction. When players are forced to deal with obstacles and challenges ... or negotiate a truly unforgiving and merciless environment ... they have to form agreements with each other just to survive (it definitely helps that multi-boxing wasn't a thing), let alone accomplish something meaningful. There should be no such thing as a zerg train where emergent cheese play gets to be considered the ace in the hole. The world is the supreme ruler and her majesty can never be denied. Player interdependence can be a beautiful thing but it certainly doesn't need to be mired in drama. Drama is fine, and inevitable, but the real drama should be found in PVE. When players earn the respect of the world, it's much more likely that they will earn the respect of the other players sharing it with them. Competition should be fun and healthy but it can be hard for people to respect each other when the entire competitive landscape is bogged down by degenerate behavior and cheese tactics. Players should spend more time trying to conquer an impossible world and less time squabbling about whether it belongs to casual carebears or basement dwelling neckbeards and their box armies.
Instances and lockout timers both have disadvantages - I support them both because I think they are better than having *no* mechanism to prevent important content from being monopolized but I do recognize the disadvantages.
I consider permitting "zergs" as a way to clear dungeons or kill bosses to be a terrible approach far worse than almost anything else discussed in this thread. It trivializes content. It denigrates and makes useless player skill. It obviates and makes insignificant class balance. It makes meaningless charater development and gear. It is boring.
I played DAOC on the rvr (their term for player versus player) servers for over a year - after finishing with the cooperative (player versus environment) server. When the pvp was player versus player or group versus group it was often fun even to a self-proclaimed carebear such as myself. When it was zerg versus zerg it was primarily decided by pure numbers with player skill and character abilities and gear having no slightest relevance.
In other words I agree with kreed99 in all respect when it comes to "And to be honest i am sick of twiddling my dam thumbs on raids. I want to be involved and make my skills count. "
Raids or dungeons that permit such aren't fun they at best are a boring way to get gear purely for the sake of the gear not the content.
Keno Monster said:Iksar said:Keno Monster said:And the leet guilds with high end gear throughout their raid force will have content on farm status at some point as well. Where's the prestige in that?
Well considering you'd recognize them as "leet" guilds it sounds like they'd have their prestige right there. Heads don't turn when things can be trivialized/zerged, no one gives a care at all. Yet when challenge is preserved it isn't uncommon to see crowds gather around to inspect someone or /tell them asking about it.
The mere fact that it requires a zerg means the encounter is not trivial. And is the content not trivialized by the power guilds with epicly geared characters face rolling?
It just rings false to me. Fire giants in sol b are not a raid encounter, but in the first few months in EQ they had to be done by 2 or 3 groups because people didn't yet have enough power concentrated in 1 group. So people did the FGs the way they could. And later that changed and people could duo them. Why all of a sudden does a "raid" need to have a limit on it when nothing else in the world does? It's a glaringly fake, made up mechanic that does not promote the sense that this is a virtual world with integrity.
How do we explain away the 25th person not being alllowed to enter the dragon's lair or the 13th person not being allowed to throw a lightning bolt at an "open world" mob? When we start referring to content as a "12 man" or "24 man" that's when, for me, the integrity of the content itself ceasese to have value. It's like people on wow forums referring to their gear by item level instead of by the name of the item itself. There is a HUGE difference in "Hey guys let's get a 12 man together" and "Hey guys let's go do the fire giant king".
This is a simulation vs game argument. If you just want an open world RP-simulator, then sure letting groups zerg content makes sense. But if you want a game, then accounting for the number of players is important. Basketball is a 5v5 game. If you played it 10v10, the game would be diminished. Football is 11v11. The arena version with fewer players just isn't as good. While you can attempt to scale raid encounters, ultimately having some limits is necessary to maintain the level of challenge and quality of the encounter. That raid in WoW that our guild was working weeks/months to finally defeat... if we could have just grabbed a couple of extra random people for extra dps/healing and make the fight 10x easier, that would have made the victory far less satisfing.
I'm not saying you're wrong. There are some interesting pro's to your argument, and it might work better for the type of game pantheon is aiming for (although I still think the best option would be 50% open world bosses and 50% instanced raids for set size).
This is another area where encounter locking is much different than instancing. I remember playing EQ2 and how it was impossible to have more than 24 players in an instance without the zone automatically kicking a player out. It was a popular tactic to have 1 player from the 24 man raid log out, and then bring in an additional healer. You could park the healer near a safe location where your raid team was preparing to engage a boss. Log the healer out and then bring your 24'th raid member back into the zone and raid team. If your raid wiped, you would log someone out and bring that parked healer back. That healer would then be able to rez the raid, saving them valuable time of needing to run all the way through the dungeon again. It just goes to show that players will always look for the edge of a rule and find ways to play around it.
This type of gimmicky workaround wasn't necessary in the open world. In fact, I specifically remember open world encounters where it was really beneficial to have 30+ players present. Even though raid teams were limited to 24 players while engaging a single encounter, there were still benefits of having an extra group or two outside of the raid. The respawn rate of NPC's is generally much faster in the open world than it is with instances. In my experience it wasn't uncommon for instances to not have respawns at all. This creates an interesting dynamic where you can have extra players outside of the 24 man raid that can still interact with the environment in meaningful ways. Whether it's being able to rez a fallen team, keep an eye out for respawns or long-pathing roamers, or interact with the world and it's content in other ways, those extra players could still support the main raid.
I remember one open world encounter in specific where the boss would teleport a random player from the raid to a semi-random location in the zone. Since the zone was filled with challenging group NPC's and bosses, this could mean certain death for that player. By having an extra group outside the raid it was possible for those players to keep the teleport locations clear of enemies. This meant that the teleported player had a much better chance of making it back to the raid without getting annihilated on the way back. In other words ... the encounter lock only affected the 24 players engaged with the main raid boss. It didn't prevent outside players from having an impact on the world itself. I think this same concept could be realized in Pantheon, especially with there being so much emphasis on environmental challenges.
In some ways I suppose it could be argued that the above strategy could be considered a type of cheese play. I don't think that it was. I think this is a good example of emergent player behavior operating within the rules. Again, there is a huge difference between open encounter and open world. If you distinguish these two things as separate and ensure that they must both be respected and accounted for at any given point in time, it's entirely possible for players to bring along some extra help without compromising the integrity of encounter balance. By thinking outside the box with encounter/world synergy, it creates opportunities for players to do the same. I think it's perfectly acceptable for a 24 man raid to leverage additional help under these circumstances. It's an open world dynamic that allows for emergent gameplay while still having rules that preserve the integrity of challenging encounters. It was infinitely better than having people logging in and out of an instance for rez duty. It was infinitely better than having players parked outside the instance itself while waiting for a spot to open up, being completely removed from their guild.
No one has commented on the point I mentioned above. Why aren't most encounters just designed in a way so that bringing extra players doesn't decrease the difficulty? Seems like an easy solution to keeping the game an open world instead of adding artificial restrictions in game.
Yes that does limit some design options but better to design in a way that doesnt have to be artificially restricted later.
philo said:No one has commented on the point I mentioned above. Why aren't most encounters just designed in a way so that bringing extra players doesn't decrease the difficulty? Seems like an easy solution to keeping the game an open world instead of adding artificial restrictions in game.
Yes that does limit some design options but better to design in a way that doesnt have to be artificially restricted later.
Do you have more examples of implementations of this dynamic? If, for example, a boss could spawn more enemy NPCs or even gate or despawn if too many people showed up, that could lead to massive griefing. This is a MDD type of game so far which is why I don't think the answer of encounter locking is going to work, unless, a Raidan said, we see a lot more triggered spawns.
zoltar said:I'm not saying you're wrong. There are some interesting pro's to your argument, and it might work better for the type of game pantheon is aiming for (although I still think the best option would be 50% open world bosses and 50% instanced raids for set size).
I recognize that I might straight up just be wrong on this and that the net overall health of the game, which is what we all want, will be better with raid limits. It still offends an ideal of mine.
oneADseven said:In some ways I suppose it could be argued that the above strategy could be considered a type of cheese play. I don't think that it was. I think this is a good example of emergent player behavior operating within the rules. Again, there is a huge difference between open encounter and open world. If you distinguish these two things as separate and ensure that they must both be respected and accounted for at any given point in time, it's entirely possible for players to bring along some extra help without compromising the integrity of encounter balance. By thinking outside the box with encounter/world synergy, it creates opportunities for players to do the same. I think it's perfectly acceptable for a 24 man raid to leverage additional help under these circumstances. It's an open world dynamic that allows for emergent gameplay while still having rules that preserve the integrity of challenging encounters. It was infinitely better than having people logging in and out of an instance for rez duty. It was infinitely better than having players parked outside the instance itself while waiting for a spot to open up, being completely removed from their guild.
I like these ideas but they trigger another thought for me and that is that 24 is way too small. Such a limit is effectively going to decide how large guilds themselves are, as without instanced content, you can't get 75 other people into that raid until the mob respawns. This is also going to have a shrinking effect on the available content. Satisfying 24 people with a contested open world raid boss won't go as far as if 50 people were allowed to participate and have the opportunity to be rewarded. For a game where people are worried about griefing and content being held hostage by the power guilds, 24 seems ridiculously low.