One of the problems in any MMoRPG is how the player base evolves through time.
In the first few months:
-Newbie areas are overcrowded,chaotic and drive off people due to lack of content.
-Higher level zones are not used
After a year
-Newbie areas are nearly empty (wasted designer time)
-Higher level zones are overcrowdedwith toxic behavior at rare spawns /quests
Usually what happens is that a number of years down the line, the devs refactor some newbie zones into higher levels... Why not design zones from the start to prevent wasting designer time?
The design approach would be:
- Create many areas in zones that have 2 states overflow and permanent
- Overflow is only used in the initial wave of players from start of the game focused on simple newbie zones and deliberately built to be:
-Easy for designers to build
-Geometry / pathing with permanent state in mind
-Share mobs and quests with other permanent areas (i.e. an overflow to a smaller permenant newbie area)
- Permanent is used after the initial player base wave has passed through
-This is where the bulk of designer capacity is put
-With unique quest givers /mobs etc.
-Mini event (GM led?) or just a patch message to communicate change
Example: West common-lands in EQ1
Overflow state:
There are various bandit camps that drop dervish rings, with an occasional Sand Giant (30-35) or wandering bear. The bears and bandits drop quest items for levels 10-12 but also exist in east common-lands.
Permanent state:
East common-lands remains permanently as low level zone and bear pelt / dervish ring quests can be completed using this area. West common-lands changes to it's permanent state where the dervishes are replaced by a camp of giant hunters level 45-50 whom offer some quests. The bears are replaced by more sand giants (45-50). Pathing of giants same as bears, original giant is replaced by a rare spawn named (lvl 55).
The only downside I can see is that:
-Takes a bit more developer time (even though this is kept deliberatly low)
-This initial newbie content is generic and not as individualised (but will result in less overcrowding, and willbe played through quickly)
-As expansions arrive and people level up, even the permanant states would become unused - but this at least is put off for some time
Thoughts?
Well, assuming that your post count is reflective of the amount of time you have been following this game and being a member of the forums, you'll be happy to know that much of what you are concerned about were addressed 5+ years ago.
Unlike EQ1 where the world, over time, always expanded outwards and the core world was quickly left vacant and barren, Terminus is being designed quite differently. Zones will have very wide level spread of NPCs, new zones won't always be tacked onto the borders of the world but integrated into the matrix of existing zones (where possible). VR is, well they say they are, putting in a lot of effort to keep earlier zones useful as long as possible.
Morraak said:I'm pretty sure they've stated before that zones will have a mix of low and high level content throughout, I could be wrong though.
Not exactly the same thing - this is about temporarily re-purposing higher level areas to deal with initial high population at low levels.
Hopfully image explains.
Vandraad said:Well, assuming that your post count is reflective of the amount of time you have been following this game and being a member of the forums, you'll be happy to know that much of what you are concerned about were addressed 5+ years ago.
Unlike EQ1 where the world, over time, always expanded outwards and the core world was quickly left vacant and barren, Terminus is being designed quite differently. Zones will have very wide level spread of NPCs, new zones won't always be tacked onto the borders of the world but integrated into the matrix of existing zones (where possible). VR is, well they say they are, putting in a lot of effort to keep earlier zones useful as long as possible.
Excellent, wasting too much designer time on expansive lower level areas that become desolate after 3 months is a false economy.
While I get your worry, I think this is too much work to plan on doing it well without good reasons and stories based around it. If there are reasons or stories behind it then people who can only play 10 hours a week or less will be upset they missed them. I think it will negatively impact people who play a lot as well. If you leveled up fast and were told hey, you can't do that content, it is being used by level 10s you would be really annoyed. Many zones will also be separating camps by climbing and acclimation checks so those would have to be reworked. Slow your idea down to expansion timelines.
An expansion changing the world to funnel low-mid level players into a reduced area while adding in new content works well. The "world" is the same but now you have giants who ran the smugglers off. These giants are lvl 53 and the survivors of the smugglers are asking for skilled adventurers to stop the gian'ts from taking over the continent. The high level players are now "protecting" the safe area low level players are funneled into. The zone is still alive, new players can ask for help from even higher level players, and low level population is funneled closer together.
For private EQ servers it literally takes a few seconds to change mobs and loot in zones. There's an entire GUI for the database. You can click to a zone, select a mob and change it to literally anything else in the game, same for loot and drop rates, spawn rates, and pathing. Want a level 1 kobold to spawn in each frenzied ghoul spot that 100% always drops a sceptre of destruction? It's a few clicks. And with no gui, it's still just some sql statements. AKA, basically trivial to change bears into sand giants, once you have bears and sand giants.
Mind you, this was all designed by volunteers in their free time.
Zorkon said:You're missing an arrow on your graphic....
There, after High Zone (Level 48+) 12X you need to add a long arrow coming out of the right going up and then looping back over to the left and pointing back to Newbie Zone (Level 1 to 10)
lable the Arrow "Progeny"
Trudat. There's possibly some arrows needed for 'alts' and 'mentoring' too. Maybe some for all the horizontal stuff people do instead of progressing forwards/upwards.
It's a useful analysis, though, and good thinking.
As has been noted, though, I think VR are well aware and are taking more measures than other devs for other games have.
Good reasons are:
- Overcrowded newbie area in first month or two drives people off. Most games nowdays have instancing to deal with this. Pantheon wont.
- Lack of content at month 3-6 drives players off.
- Lots of newbie content is a waste of developer time , as the area is only used for a short time. Even progeny will not see volume of people in newbie zones. Time better spent on higher level content so the middle and end game is not underdeveloped for the main wave of players.
As for effort, if you desgin the zone and your tools knowing that you will change the area its good bang for buck on development time. As Keno pointed out, if you have the tools and plan accordingly, then the change is very simple. This could cover climbing checks in tool too. If you dont have the tools then the change may take a designer weeks of re-work and be deprioritised or never done. Alpha is the time for these sorts of considerations re tools and build plan.
Concerns re. missing out / being blocked / 'alts' 'mentoring' 'progeny' etc.
Slow levelling players wont miss out as the temporary overflow areas are as the name sounds - overflow from real permenant newbie levels.
You can never provide enough content for the fastest levelling people, so you do what you can to fairly treat the bulk of your audiance on a 80/20 split. However this proposal will focus designer time on the areas people will spend more time.
I have played MMOs with strong systems to support alts / progeny (like DDO) even here the low levels are quiet, and on your second time round you blow through them at speed. However under this proposal all the content (quests/mobs etc.) is still availible but in a more constrained area. Iadded an arrow in diagram to show this :)
To recap, in an MMO the choice is basically:
@Galden
Your concern is valid, and I have yet to see a plan that is going to be able to handle peak loads at either launch or server maturity, especially if server populations are high.
Zones may have multiple level ranges but that doesn’t change the amount of available content. Each sub-area in a zone will have a limited amount of content in a specific band. Once that content is saturated no additional players can access it. Once players out level it they will no longer fruitfully return to it (farming and power level being ignored) and that area will drop in usage. The total global amount of content in a specific level range sets the maximum number of players that a single server can support in a given level range.
Cyclical progeny or Alt cycles does not actually fix the issue of overcrowding other than to give players something else to do if the character they want to play is locked out of content due to overcrowding. Mentoring could possibly relieve some of this but still at a lower efficiency than content that matches the characters actual level.
In a hand-crafted content game the only real tool to use to deal with overcrowding is instancing, hence why WoW is built on it. WoW went full instancing, but EQ and other games have had zone sharding as a way to do some load balancing without going all the way to private instances. Zone sharding makes the most sense to me as the least impactful option to deal overcrowding without totally backing away from open world design.
There are a few other options that require some pretty advanced dynamic content but have some possibility. Dynamic respawn rate base on character population is an option but not my favorite. Another option is say a zone is split into 4 areas. Each area has a specific level range and center point. The distance leveled content spawns from said center point will be relative to the number characters in zone of said level range in the previous spawn cycle. If the zone is filled with level 5-15 player and non higher then the spawn radius of the 5-15 content will extend almost the entire zones with a few small minimum areas of of 20-28 content, 35-42 content and 50 content. If 50% of players are 5-15 and 50% are 20-28 then half of the flexible spawn areas will spawn of one range or another.
The zones would need to be designed with this concept in mind for it to work and obviously would play havoc with standard camping concepts but could make for much more dynamic player movement and content utilization. Its not perfect but its partial load balancing but without moving to sharding.
There is also the concept of diminution returns character power growth by level which is also tied to exponential increases in time to level. What this ends up meaning is that content from lvl 25-50 is challenging (or at least non trivial) for all characters even at max level. 95% of character play through also happens in the 25-50 level range. In this way you level fairly quickly from 1-15 as you gain your basic class defining abilities, slow down a bit in the 16-25 range as you get the final parts that make your character group viable then you hit the level 25 wall where almost everything after is almost a hell level in time to level.
This requires very little content in the low level introductory level range as you level through it quickly then a lot of time will be spent in the upper level content. As such the more content you have in the long leveling zones the more return on your investment you can get. It actually also makes dynamic spawning a little less clunky as you can push the entire zone into a gradient scale rather than zone control.
Trasak said:/snip
Somewhat technical response
Agree, sharding is the only full solution and any attempt at dynamic content will be limited impact. Adding shards / instances would be a fundemental design consideration, and may require significant refactor and breaks the sharing the world aspect. Perhaps tolerable for newbie zones though?
Also, I think diminuation of character power is a sensible long term goal for many reasons, but must be balanced for fun factor of character advancment. Ifa level 30 beats a level 50 in PVP or DPS parses, people are gonna get angry and push back.
Dynamic scaling of zones would be good, especially if mini events managed the transition of various areas between levels. However this is probably a fair bit of work to make it non-janky,. A good set of initial minimum build functionality (MVP) would be a system where mob spawns in an area (including loot) can be manually managed via paramaterisation that is exposed to a dev (change during server downtime with patch messaqge). With more work a later stage could expose the paramaters via a UI for a CS rep (GM Events done easy!) or via dynamic spawn.
Summary (non technical):
- If VR do not plan for server population changes over launch and don't do instancing, they will probably either suffer from major content problems at launch or 3-6 months after launch.
- The longer this is left unplanned the more eventual work it is to fix.
- VR might already have a better plan, but we dont know.
- If VR does use this proposal the minimum build is something that enables them to easiely change zones from lower level to higher level spawns during server maintenance.
- Later on the same functionality could be built on to create a GM tool for events or to create dynamic zone content
/edit
A final alternative is to spin up entire new servers to cope with initial surge then merge them a few months down the line. Not sure this is a good look commercialy though and may anger those merged.
/architecthat off
If progeny is incentivized well, I expect to be doing progeny loops for the first year at least. I expect many min/maxers to do the same and for there to be guilds that focus on leveling because of progeny.
This should keep zones populated at all level ranges, minimize the max level bottleneck, and completely nullify the concerns of the OP.