arazons said:HemlockReaper said:There should be no reward for taking the harder path, because the act of doing something for the challenge is in itself its own reward.
I disagree, the reward for more difficult content should be more rewarding. Such as raid gear should be on a whole different playing field as opposed to group gear.
I’m not referring to doing more difficult content, but rather doing content in such a way that makes it more difficult, which is what I took the OP to mean.
For example, I could go hunting for deer, and choose to hunt with a gun, Bow or Knife. My choice to use a knife over a gun is what makes the hunt more challenging, not the hunt itself.
HemlockReaper said:I’m not referring to doing more difficult content, but rather doing content in such a way that makes it more difficult, which is what I took the OP to mean.
For example, I could go hunting for deer, and choose to hunt with a gun, Bow or Knife. My choice to use a knife over a gun is what makes the hunt more challenging, not the hunt itself.
huh... let me start by saying that this is not a personal attack and is a parallel thought process to help me understand your mode of operation.
suppose you are a healer attempting to keep a tank alive...
you have max level rank 7 healing spells/abilities.
would you use rank 1 spells/abilities all the time at the risk of your tank dying for the sake of challenge?
edit- i should add that there must be a reason or reward to operate in this manner: such has increase % for a drop, but i don't think it's possible since we'll have the option to downrank for mana efficiency, quicker cast time, etc etc. or else why do it?
stellarmind said:HemlockReaper said:I’m not referring to doing more difficult content, but rather doing content in such a way that makes it more difficult, which is what I took the OP to mean.
For example, I could go hunting for deer, and choose to hunt with a gun, Bow or Knife. My choice to use a knife over a gun is what makes the hunt more challenging, not the hunt itself.
huh... let me start by saying that this is not a personal attack and is a parallel thought process to help me understand your mode of operation.
suppose you are a healer attempting to keep a tank alive...
you have max level rank 7 healing spells/abilities.
would you use rank 1 spells/abilities all the time at the risk of your tank dying for the sake of challenge?
edit- i should add that there must be a reason or reward to operate in this manner: such has increase % for a drop, but i don't think it's possible since we'll have the option to downrank for mana efficiency, quicker cast time, etc etc. or else why do it?
No, I wouldn't do that. That’s not only endangering the party, I’m not in favor of coaxing players with rewards to be artificially handicapped, Nor would I choose to do so myself, as I stated before.
stellarmind said:huh... let me start by saying that this is not a personal attack and is a parallel thought process to help me understand your mode of operation.
suppose you are a healer attempting to keep a tank alive...
you have max level rank 7 healing spells/abilities.
would you use rank 1 spells/abilities all the time at the risk of your tank dying for the sake of challenge?
edit- i should add that there must be a reason or reward to operate in this manner: such has increase % for a drop, but i don't think it's possible since we'll have the option to downrank for mana efficiency, quicker cast time, etc etc. or else why do it?
No that is just dumb. And even if someone does succeed. The reward should be just the thrill of it.
But what is actually asked...The easy way and hard way ?
The easy way is to solo the guards for xp or the hard way get a group and kill the boss of that dungeon. In this case choosing the hard way has a loot drop from the boss. Easy to implement
The easy way is fighting in a dungeon close to the starting city or the hard way to travel a long distance to a rarely used dungeon. In this case again the loot or xp should be better, but the risk of dying is harder due to distance. Easy to implement
The easy way is just go out and hack and slash everything in your path to gain xp. The hard way is to quest everything. People who really choose questing usually have fun out of that already. No need to give additional xp, but I cannot remember any game that made questing not xp rewardful and thus people rush quests for xp, not even reading the quests. Easy to implement
I find it interesting that you ask how to reward people "the hard way". But actually if there is a reward big enough, people will do it. The reward could be a title, quest hunting, a good item or an item that can be made into something, faction standing and saving the princess obviously. You could easely ask how do we reward people and leave the hard part out iof this question. When it comes to good rewards, nothing is hard suddenly, except keeping the saved princess obviously
If you want to do something for people who take it slow, make it possible to go slow. (In my case I would not mind finding seeing option to turn gaining xp off).
And if you want to people who only hunt with their newbe sword or if you want to reward an Ogre venturing to elven lands at an early level. Give him a tittle "The ultimate noob / the little Explorer" or a silly item or piece of furniture to remember. Those people are not out to gain only XP or to get the best loot. But they play the game in their own way and explore all corners of it. They love a remembrance or acknowlegment of their achievement however small it is.
Just make the game hard. If you make things easy in the game then you invite a different culture of gamers into the game that are usually toxic, look at WoW. However, if you reach a certain threshold those types of gamers won't play, or they will adapt and become less annoying.
I agree that raid gear needs to have a higher value , to a point. There becomes a certain point where the value of raid gear becomes a obstacle to entry level players or apps to a guild. If the value per piece was roughly 10 % or 15 % higher , I have no problem with it having better pieces . What I do have a problem with is when a fully raid geared player can out perform just based on stats the equivalant of 1 1/2 or 2 normal players or the mitigation / hp values are in a entirely dif league that you will no longer consider a non raid geared tank for example to do content.
Watemper said:Just make the game hard. If you make things easy in the game then you invite a different culture of gamers into the game that are usually toxic, look at WoW. However, if you reach a certain threshold those types of gamers won't play, or they will adapt and become less annoying.
I get what you're saying, but I wouldn't classify WoW itself as toxic. With 3million+ players you are bound to have toxicity within a community, period. EQ TLP servers have their fair share of toxic players as well and for the most part they all apart of the same guild too lol, not always just usually.
VR has stated the game won't be easy and that will already flush out many who try in beta/release I'm sure. However, if you make the game too hard you're possibly ruining the experience for more then what you bargained for as the reward may not be worth the risk.
Now as others stated, how do you properly emmulate and reward hard ways vs easy ways of experiencing, questing, exploring, etc etc? While I do like the idea of offering achievements I think that also needs to be planned and thought out carefully. WoW had a pretty decent way of doing achievements in the beginning but like I said as expansions come along they became more and more trivial and repetitive. EQ's IMO achievements were just garbage and an attempt to take a page from WoWs book and it was just horrid.
So implementing achievements, how do you make the achievement feel worth while, give a reward without making someone overpowered for doing it all the while providing a challenge for anyone who does it? You can go a couple different ways in this but I'm going to cover how I think it could be done and I'm sure more will agree/disagree (as we all view personal challenge as something different). First off titles are always great, it's a way to show off something you did in game that was challenging and can be done by anyone. So take for example from above posts about exploration. WoW did it with every zone unearthing every nook and cranny and youd get an achievement/points for it. Well rather than that, why not simply offer 1 achievement for exploring all of Terminus? You can keep track of what you've explored (in game tracking system of some sort) but an actual achievement wont be given until you've discovered everything in the world. That way when you do see someone with this title, lets just called it "Explorer of Terminus" it will really mean something. It will show this person had to go to the highest peaks and the lowest depths (remember acclimation) in order to get this title. The title will show where the grind was on that person as you'll need all the acclimation gear in order to get to the tough spots, thus providing the player a challenge, a reward for completing it and some notification from others just how hard it was to get it. No need for some legendary sword or item for doing it just a title that says what they've done. Again anyone can do it but it's up to those who are up for the challenege to actually go for it.
Another could easily be killing 1 of each mob in the world of terminus (maybe dungeons aren't included in this, maybe they are) again just do a title "Butcher". Or kill specific named mobs in every dungeon upon completing it get a title like "Dungeon Master". Or a tabard with unique colors. The reason why I say titles and not mounts is not the fact I'm against mounts by any means but Kilsin already said right now mounts won't be a thing as he doesn't want the world to be skipped, it's meant to be explored. Down the line when that changes then yes they could add a mount if they so choose. Be careful on that though because if it's too easy everyone gets a mount and it doesn't become special, but if you make it say an End game raiding boss only drop you deal with the complaints of people who will never touch end game raid content. It's about finding that sweet middle ground.
My point is Risk vs reward is nice but it doesn't always have to be a piece of gear for doing it. Achievements are a great way of showing off and getting recognition for your hard work because lets be honest, personal challenege aside, human nature loves the feeling of others around you recognizing what you've accomplished we thrive for that attention. WoW did a good job with achievements when they first were released but as the game got easier the achievements meant less and less. Mounts became easily obtainable and people would sell services to get you specific achievements for mounts. I'd like Pantheon to do their best to avoid that. Saying that they even implement any of this at all.
HemlockReaper said:No, I wouldn't do that. That’s not only endangering the party, I’m not in favor of coaxing players with rewards to be artificially handicapped, Nor would I choose to do so myself, as I stated before.
ah okay i'm taking something out of context which i'm unaware of. forgive my ignorance >.<
@qulash
there's pretty good legit reason for downranking, which would be buffer healing or mana efficiency purposes.
if there is a reward big enough, people will do it. The reward could be a title, quest hunting, a good item or an item that can be made into something, faction standing and saving the princess obviously.
this i agree with. difficulty becomes irrelevant if the reward substanial. for example: get a pvp ranking in the top .01% for the month and get a flying mount.
betcha pvers will come to the darkside just to obtain it.
To summerize my answer:
VR doesn't need to answer this question.
Do your thing, keep it a mystery. Definitely find a way to mitigate the 'lightning' effect of path of least resistance. But, let the players fall flat on their face and have to reroll their character if they miss out of some dope loot because they felt that reaching max level was way more important than helping that crying child on the street who couldn't find his parents, who then later died when you hit level 30 because a band of orcs found him good eatz.
Afterall! that is why they are giving us the progeny system!
What you have outlined is basically the primary sin of linear or exponential character power growth by level. If you must be in a full group to defeat a mob your level, can solo a mob 10 levels lower than you and can solo 6 mobs 20 levels lower than you then you know you are on one of those two growth scales. A logarithmic growth would make it such that a level 30 group mob would still not be a solo mob at level 50 (pre level 30 the challenge drops off quickly).
So there are two main ways to maintain risk vs reward: Logarithmic power growth or some form of trivial loot code. Another way of saying it is limit the power of characters such that the challenge is never trivial or make it such that drops and experience are virtually not rewarded when the challenge is trivial.
Logarithmic (diminishing returns by level) power growth is a hard concept to wrap your head around and requires novel ways to continue to show character progression because we no longer see huge magnitude gains on character abilities. Personally I believe we can adjust to being as excited about a 10% increase as we seem to be with a 100% increase or better yet through horizontal progression.
The other option then becomes a loot table based on the relative challenge of the encounter. When a mob is killed it checks all the characters on the agro table to find the highest level character. The loot table is then set for that challenge rating. With the best items only available when the party is actually fighting something higher level than them. The % chance of good drops would drop off significantly the higher above the intended challenge rating of the monster the killer is.
A good Mentor system that suppresses the power level of a character to effectively be a lower level and cannot be toggled on or off without death or going back to town would be a good tool. The group could pick a target and meta-game the best level for all the characters to be in order to have the highest chance to get their prize paired with the highest chance for actually succeeding. These rewards could be loot, quest credits, achievement flags or even experience.
If the relative challenge level is maintained then there is no reason that experience needs to be a hard number so much as a total number of kills at a relative challenge rating. For example killing a level 10 group mob at level 10 might give you 100 points of experience. Killing a level 12 mob could give you 120 and a level 8 mob only 80. Likewise killing a level 30 group mob at level 30 would still only reward 100 but a 35 might reward 120 and 25 80. The amount of experience required to level would only go up a small amount each level but unless you are keeping your challenge the same then you will require many more kills.
Honestly a combination of both logarithmic and challenge ratings would give a game the greatest longevity of content.
Challenge ratings and dynamic loot would be awesome, imo, but historically, that idea hasn't gained a lot of traction with Pantheons target demographic. (static loot tables, static named drops, or go home!)
The trick with all of these types of risk : reward ideas is.. the max risk becomes the default risk, if that's the ideal. What I mean by that is, if players are told, or discover, that fighting things that offer a certain challenge nets the best rewards, then everyone simply adjusts their perspective and tactics to always fight at that challenge level, because it's the most efficient method. It drives a lot of emergent behavior, and not always in a good way, depending on your design goals.
I would say if you wanted to reward teamwork, that would be better, if the design goal is social bonding. So, design the challenge so it requires teamwork, reward that behavior, and you would likely be on a good path.
It would also permit a bit more flexibility or expand the scope of emergent player behavior, rather than narrowing it.
Trasak said:So there are two main ways to maintain risk vs reward: Logarithmic power growth or some form of trivial loot code. Another way of saying it is limit the power of characters such that the challenge is never trivial or make it such that drops and experience are virtually not rewarded when the challenge is trivial.
hollistically speaking, acclimation will probably fulfill this.
acclimation gives devs a buffer to increase or decrease the challenge without tweaking characters or encounters directly.
suppose the party wants to do firerage halls(madeup dungeon) for higher fire resistance gear.
area up to the first 3 bosses: 100 acclimation can completely migitate the negative effects of the climate. i would still be able to do if i had less acclimation but would periodically have my hp/resources burn away. it can increase in severity the furth i am from 100 acclimation.
say vr wants to expand the dungeon they can have another 3 boss and area requiring 300 acclimation. having it would reduce the effects constant hp/resource burn.
to add a hardcore mode:
slap a blacksmith npc saying he wants to supercharge his forge by carrying coals of amplication(debuffs teh partys acclimation by -700 acclimation)
give him goodies and he can make products for player blacksmiths to enhance fire resist for that disgusting raid burning embers palace requiring 1000 acclimation to even step foot in(ah the molten core attunement 2.0)
there's a lot of applications for it i'm just giving an example here.