Do you have any idea how absolutely nonced you sound?
"Coin-operated bosses", piss off with that. I'm so sick of this falsehood being tossed around as though it were the absolute truth. I'm also sick of the absolute smugness a lot of the people on here have toward games that aren't Everquest, but then profess that they hate hardcore elitists and 'poopsockers', and yet they carry themselves with the same exact air of smugness and arrogance. The ONLY real difference between open world raid encounters and instanced raid encounters is availability -- that's it. No challenge is lost. No designs are constrained. In open world, other guilds can block you off and hinder you, and in instanced raid encounters, they can't. It's that simple. End of discussion. Anyone who wants open world 'for competition' of content simply wants it to be possible to block off others from engaging in said content.
Since you're so keen on telling other people to 'go look for another game', then don't mind if I likewise make the exact same suggestion. Go play Everquest. It's still right there. It hasn't gone anywhere -- both versions of it, even.
"Oh well I never had any problems with Clan Dbag training or interfering with OUR raids" I can already hear. Well, maybe because your guild WAS Clan Dbag? It's easy not to have content all that contested, when your guild is the one that is doing the contesting and has it all on lockdown.
Even bosses in instanced raids still need to actually be downed by competent raiding groups. Raids are still a challenge that require coordination, even in supposedly 'causal' games like WoW. Don't try to sit here and tell me that several top end raiding guilds having well-practiced and beaten raid encounters on 'farm' status wasn't a thing in Everquest. My husband was there. He saw it happen all the time, and it will happen no matter what game it is. Again, the only real difference between modern MMOs and Everquest in regards to raiding was that you didn't need to worry about another guild coming in and training you, or trying to steal your boss during your encounter. This isn't to mention the vast majority of Everquest's raids being simple tank-and-spank encounters, whereas modern games actually try to incorperate some kind of critical thinking or pattern recoginition mechanics, at the very least.
Instancing has absolutely no bearing on how difficult or challenging a raid encounter should be, and to try to allude to as such is nothing short of ignorant at best, and trying to be misleading at worst. The only real 'social interactions' instancing cuts people off from in a raiding environment is the other guild trying to tag and steal your boss from you. I suppose the other big notable difference is that you can actually do raids in a reasonable time frame now, instead of having to be up until the early hours in the morning, but I don't miss that garbarge in the slightest.
There's a difference between respecting your time, and demanding it. Everquest did the latter, and in response, as soon as ONE viable alternative came along, players abandoned EQ in droves.
There's a reason for that.
OCastitatisLilium said:The ONLY real difference between open world raid encounters and instanced raid encounters is availability -- that's it.
Yes that is the reason I call them coin operated. Everyone gets a weekly boss handed to them. From what we know VR plans to have guilds spawn their bosses, in an open world, but locked behind some sort of barrier mechanic simulating an instance. Dungeons on the other hand wont hand you weekly or daily bosses why should raids? Everyone is fine with dungeons giving you the equally best loot in the game. Everyone is fine with dungeons neednig players to play the game to spawn bosses. The spawn mechanics of dungeons are something people want to see, but when scaled up to raiding they are the worst thing in the game apparently?
OCastitatisLilium said:No challenge is lost. No designs are constrained. In open world, other guilds can block you off and hinder you, and in instanced raid encounters, they can't. It's that simple. End of discussion. Anyone who wants open world 'for competition' of content simply wants it to be possible to block off others from engaging in said content.
This has nothing to do with the post. The raids will be as hard as they will be. I have made this point when people were arguing raids are only for the elite 2% of people who raid. Whatever percentage of the game that raids will be placing these fights on farm status. They will be waiting for their weekly loot pinyata. Spawn mechanics are important. Timers being instances or coin operated weekly clickies or even fully contested whatever they frame it as are bad design.
OCastitatisLilium said:Since you're so keen on telling other people to 'go look for another game', then don't mind if I likewise make the exact same suggestion. Go play Everquest. It's still right there. It hasn't gone anywhere -- both versions of it, even.
I am not suggesting EQs spawn system. EQ was on a timer. People knew exactly where to look. They new within a window when to start looking. They would wake up at 3AM to go kill the spawn. Did you even read the post? Spawn mechanics for raids should be like dungeons? Is that how EQ works now? It certainly isn't how it used to work. My understanding is EQ is mostly instances now. I have not played it in years but if raids are just open world dungeons now then that would be amazing.
OCastitatisLilium said:"Oh well I never had any problems with Clan Dbag training or interfering with OUR raids" I can already hear. Well, maybe because your guild WAS Clan Dbag? It's easy not to have content all that contested, when your guild is the one that is doing the contesting and has it all on lockdown.
...
Again, the only real difference between modern MMOs and Everquest in regards to raiding was that you didn't need to worry about another guild coming in and training you, or trying to steal your boss during your encounter. This isn't to mention the vast majority of Everquest's raids being simple tank-and-spank encounters, whereas modern games actually try to incorperate some kind of critical thinking or pattern recoginition mechanics, at the very least.
Instancing has absolutely no bearing on how difficult or challenging a raid encounter should be, and to try to allude to as such is nothing short of ignorant at best, and trying to be misleading at worst. The only real 'social interactions' instancing cuts people off from in a raiding environment is the other guild trying to tag and steal your boss from you. I suppose the other big notable difference is that you can actually do raids in a reasonable time frame now, instead of having to be up until the early hours in the morning, but I don't miss that garbarge in the slightest.
VR plans to lock bosses behind a wall for a simulated instance like mechanic right? Why would they abandon that idea if they changed how the bosses spawn? Who is pushing for them to change that mechanic? Is there training in dungeons? Should VR do away with open world dungeons in your opinion and turn the bosses into daily spawns you can force out to make their "dungeon dailies?" Instancing and other coin operated mechanics are about guaranteed loot AKA the loot pinyata. You don't play the game to see if you get the spawn. You don't explore dungeons and try to camp bosses. You don't search the world for harvest nodes trying to get lucky with a rare. You have forced the target with your loot to spawn for a guaranteed reward.
OCastitatisLilium said:
Even bosses in instanced raids still need to actually be downed by competent raiding groups. Raids are still a challenge that require coordination, even in supposedly 'causal' games like WoW. Don't try to sit here and tell me that several top end raiding guilds having well-practiced and beaten raid encounters on 'farm' status wasn't a thing in Everquest. My husband was there. He saw it happen all the time, and it will happen no matter what game it is.
I said the same things. "Contested are even viewed as the same way by those who farm them, the mobs are simply limited access." I am not asking for EQ style spawns. Everything becomes farm status eventually, that is why spawn mechanics are important. Rewarding the top end guild for speed running a boss every week is a bad system vs rewarding the top end guild for putting in time to spawn the boss balances things out. If I can solo a dungeon boss. Should I have to spend time in the area to spawn the boss or should I just walk in and force it to spawn every day?
OCastitatisLilium said:There's a difference between respecting your time, and demanding it. Everquest did the latter, and in response, as soon as ONE viable alternative came along, players abandoned EQ in droves.
There's a reason for that.
Am I suggesting what EQ did? No
Am I suggesting what WoW did? No
Is this post about spawn mechanics? Yes
Is this a post about raid difficulty? No
Every argument you make in favor of raids being instanced apply exactly the same way to dungeons. Every single one. If you truly believed your arguments you would be pushing for instanced dungeons as well. Do you want that?
With every aspect of the game VR plans to reward players for their time invested, except for raiding where there are plans to reward people for not raiding.
You seem to be under the impression that I'm against instanced dungeons: I'm not.
You also seem to be under the assumption that I think killing a boss, and getting loot from it, is a bad thing: I'm not.
And fine, here's your obligatory response to your idea of having raids basically being dungeons: neat, and it will probably work out more in the long run given how small of a playerbase this game is going to have if it ever releases.
I don't think players being able to face a challenge and being rewarded for it is a bad thing. It's really to look down on people and call what they want 'coin operated', and calling bosses with actual loot for them 'loot pinatas', and you can go ahead and keep thinking that. If I had to pick between that, and the other extreme where dozens of people gathered together for a raid encounter, only for one or two people to get anything out of it, then I would pick the former.
The "work" you're referring to is time spent, that is it. When you and others on here suggest "putting in the work", the implication is facing the challenge, but what you're really referring to is pure time investment, and then probably not even getting rewarded for it all that often because getting loot with any kind of frequency is apparently a bad thing. I think this is an inherently bad mentality, that sitting on your ass and waiting for a spawn for several hours, only to not be rewarded for it once the boss does spawn, is "putting work in." The work and challenge of an encounter should be the actual encounter itself and getting to it. And the time invested argument doesn't work if you at all want to make this actually playable by people who have lives. People who want to play a game, not 'live in a world.' Even from an immersions standpoint it makes no sense: "We fought our way down to Castle Bigbad's throne room! But, uh, another group killed him last week, so we have to wait for him to magically ressurect and pop up here."
Not speaking ill of the dead, but I think Brad's design philosophy of designing a 'world to get lost in' is fundamentally flawed and unhealthy. I don't care if your time spent in Everquest 'felt' 'more meaningful' than other games. You shouldn't be looking for 'fulfillment' in a video game. It's a false sense of accomplishment -- a fake reward that will fade away as soon as you hit the power button on your computer. If someone is looking for more 'purpose' and a sense of accomplishment by diving into a video game, then said person should probably take a closer evaluation at the rest of their life as a whole. These are video games. Pieces of electronic entertainment. You will never find any sort of actual 'sense of accomplishment' or 'meaning' in them, and to seek those things out in them is folly.
@OCastitatisLilium It is clear we are both wanting very different things out of the game. I understand the desire for a quick reward via instances and the like but it burns out quickly. Yes it is easy to be a raider when you have limited time frame, so everyone raids. It is the common mechanic in most games for a reason, both the most successful and the failures. VR is not preparing itself to be some WoW killer / clone or anything of that nature. It is likely going to be known as a grind. With different mechanics, no single person can easily do everything. PCs would vary between what they focus on. Short playtime players will eventually level to max level. They don't need to be rewareded with XP bonuses to drag them to max level.
Putting in the work isn't about a mechanical challenge, its a delivery system for the content as well as being a system in line with the rest of the game. Instances include the same flaw you pointed out, "We cant fight our way down to Castle Bigbad's throne room! WE killed him last week, so we have to wait for him to magically ressurect and pop up here." It is a game these kind of things will exist in some form.
OCastitatisLilium said:
Not speaking ill of the dead, but I think Brad's design philosophy of designing a 'world to get lost in' is fundamentally flawed and unhealthy. I don't care if your time spent in Everquest 'felt' 'more meaningful' than other games. You shouldn't be looking for 'fulfillment' in a video game. It's a false sense of accomplishment -- a fake reward that will fade away as soon as you hit the power button on your computer. If someone is looking for more 'purpose' and a sense of accomplishment by diving into a video game, then said person should probably take a closer evaluation at the rest of their life as a whole. These are video games. Pieces of electronic entertainment. You will never find any sort of actual 'sense of accomplishment' or 'meaning' in them, and to seek those things out in them is folly.
Your arguments against video games are against media in general. Getting lost in a book, a movie, a TV show, a game are all great experiences that some people obsess over. Just as people can have an unhealthy focus on real things. Sports, politics, religion, individual people, skin color, you name it there are people with unhealthy obsessions. Are you actually trying to say fully instanced games don't have people with unhealthy obsessions? I don't see how any of this is relevant to anything being discussed in this thread.
OCL - I agree with much of what you say, although your way of saying it seems much more antagonistic than is called for. But saying that a "world to get lost in" is impossible because, essentially, no one cares about computer games and they simply go poof when turned off is so alien to the way 99% plus of us think that I wonder what you expect to see in Pantheon that makes it worth your time.
By the way in case you haven't been playing games much over the last 30 years - some smart people invented floppy drives and hard drives and something called a cloud and unlike the days of Colossal Cave and Starfleet Orion progress in computer games is saved and doesn't vanish when the off switch is hit.
You are responding to things I did not say. I never said anything about VR trying to make a 'WoW-killer', I never said anything about dragging players to max level and xp bonuses, and I never said that instanced games were excluded from unealthy obsession. I realize the latter was from kind of left field, but I suppose I wasn't responding specifically to you, but a summation of what others have stated over time on these very forums. I never said video games were unique in their potential for addiction or obsession, either. Those comments were a response to much of what has been said throughout the history of this very forum and in other discussions. Time investment and how much the game is going to demand of your spare time is part of that discussion.
I am actually really confused by your example at first, because it was addressing something of which I wasn't even talking about. Are you talking about raid lockouts? How if you defeat a boss, your guild/raid is 'done' with the encounter for that week and can't just fight the raid boss again? The issue I was pointing out in said example was that SOMEONE ELSE killed Boss Bigbad, and that your group/raid never got the chance to, so you would have to wait a week because Clan Dbad came along and killed him before you. That is the difference, and what I was talking about.
And I didn't say that 'no one is capable of getting lost in a world, because it's fake and will disappear', at all -- I was talking about getting invested, those looking for a real sense of accomplishment. My meaning was that no one SHOULD try 'getting lost' in a world, because it's a video game, and not real. As many have said in other threads and discussions, modern MMO's are 'bad' because they're 'just games', and not worlds to get lost in. I know you think you were being clever with your floppy disk comment, but you unfortunately missed the meaning of my words entirely. I wasn't saying that video games aren't valuable or important because 'they could disappear at any time!' as you seem to think. If you want to enjoy them in the moment, that's fine, but in the context of playing a video game, that is all I want -- a game, not to live a second life in a world that demands as such. I was talking about others desire to 'get lost in another world', and how obsessive it is to even have such a mindet -- to want a game that is so grindy and mundane that you have to spend hours upon hours in it to get anything at all accomplished. We already have the real world for that.
Was this particular topic out of left field? Sure, but it is related to the topic of grinding, time investment, and how much a game should respect your time versus demanding it from you in order to get anything done, like Everquest did.
OCastitatisLilium said:Not speaking ill of the dead, but I think Brad's design philosophy of designing a 'world to get lost in' is fundamentally flawed and unhealthy. I don't care if your time spent in Everquest 'felt' 'more meaningful' than other games. You shouldn't be looking for 'fulfillment' in a video game. It's a false sense of accomplishment -- a fake reward that will fade away as soon as you hit the power button on your computer. If someone is looking for more 'purpose' and a sense of accomplishment by diving into a video game, then said person should probably take a closer evaluation at the rest of their life as a whole. These are video games. Pieces of electronic entertainment. You will never find any sort of actual 'sense of accomplishment' or 'meaning' in them, and to seek those things out in them is folly.
What's more, a sense of accomplishment can be gained from even the most ordinary tasks. If you gave yourself a haircut during the pandemic, you probably felt accomplished eventually when it looked halfway decent. The same with baking sourdough bread and talking to friends on Zoom. When we walk away from a task having learned something new about ourselves, others, and/or the world around us, that is fulfilling. Why should (or how could) a virtual world be excluded from that? If the reason has to do with tangible rewards than why do we tell bedtime stories to our children? Why do we visit museums and view the paintings, sculptures, and fossils? Why do we research the myths of ancient civilizations?
Why do we make art & why are humans creative? Brian Eno Interviewed by Vikas Shah MBE
OCastitatisLilium said:You are responding to things I did not say. I never said anything about VR trying to make a 'WoW-killer', I never said anything about dragging players to max level and xp bonuses, and I never said that instanced games were excluded from unealthy obsession. I realize the latter was from kind of left field, but I suppose I wasn't responding specifically to you, but a summation of what others have stated over time on these very forums. I never said video games were unique in their potential for addiction or obsession, either. Those comments were a response to much of what has been said throughout the history of this very forum and in other discussions. Time investment and how much the game is going to demand of your spare time is part of that discussion.
I am actually really confused by your example at first, because it was addressing something of which I wasn't even talking about. Are you talking about raid lockouts? How if you defeat a boss, your guild/raid is 'done' with the encounter for that week and can't just fight the raid boss again? The issue I was pointing out in said example was that SOMEONE ELSE killed Boss Bigbad, and that your group/raid never got the chance to, so you would have to wait a week because Clan Dbad came along and killed him before you. That is the difference, and what I was talking about.
And I didn't say that 'no one is capable of getting lost in a world, because it's fake and will disappear', at all -- I was talking about getting invested, those looking for a real sense of accomplishment. My meaning was that no one SHOULD try 'getting lost' in a world, because it's a video game, and not real. As many have said in other threads and discussions, modern MMO's are 'bad' because they're 'just games', and not worlds to get lost in. I know you think you were being clever with your floppy disk comment, but you unfortunately missed the meaning of my words entirely. I was saying that video games aren't valuable or important because 'they could disappear at any time!' as you seem to think. If you want to enjoy them in the moment, that's fine, but in the context of playing a video game, that is all I want -- a game, not to live a second life in a world that demands as such. I was talking about others desire to 'get lost in another world', and how obsessive it is to even have such a mindet -- to want a game that is so grindy and mundane that you have to spend hours upon hours in it to get anything at all accomplished. We already have the real world for that.Was this particular topic out of left field? Sure, but it is related to the topic of grinding, time investment, and how much a game should respect your time versus demanding it from you in order to get anything done, like Everquest did.
Designing the game to give players a weekly spawn is the same as designing the game to give players a weekly anything for free. If waiting for free stuff over time is a good game design VR should use it all over the place. WoW clearly does and it is successful for it. If weekly raid spawns are good why not daily or weekly dungeon spawns, why not weekly xp bonuses, why not weekly rare resources for crafting? The core idea you push for is to make the game convenient for people with a small amount of time. Why waste a good idea on only one aspect of the game? Everything should be parceled out over a real world time table if it is a good mechanic.
Convenience has a cost. It is something VR seems to have recognized for the most part. They may make raid spawns convenient for Pantheon. If they do raiding will have an advantage over the inconvenient dungeons and crafting scenarios.
As for your quote I altered the text with itallics to show what I had changed. Respawns are always a silly mechanic if you focus on it nomatter who kills it. That aspect is what I wrongly thought you were focusing on. As for the waiting a week bit I can only repeat. I am not asking for EQ style raid respawn timers. I don't know how else to say it. Long respawn timers are bad... Instance timers are bad... clicky spawn timers are bad...
I don't think it is about the drive to get "anything done" as much as it is about the drive to get "everything done." People coming from the current gen MMOs want to do it all. They want to "beat" the game. In order to beat the game the game must be convenient. It is inconvenient to spend time leveling. It is inconvenient for raids and dungeons not to be on your time table. It is inconvenient to not teleport around. It is inconvenient to spend too much time on crafting when you only want the bonuses for raids. No game mechanics should stand between players and the content. Games must be convenient so players can feel they beat the game and feel accomplished while on a short time frame.
Inconvenience is of course not the ideal, but there should be a standard in the game. WoW has a clear standard for convenient play. If VR makes raids convenient in a world of inconvenience they will tell the players raids are what they should be doing. You don't have a lot of time to play and there are three main paths infront of you for progression. One of them is a paved road with weekly carriages to ride in. The others look time consuming. Which path do you choose?
I am not necessarily as well-read on every single detail released about the game so far, so its entirely possibly I am missing some sort of mechanic that adddresses this. But I have seen numerous comments talking about how Raid content and Dungeon content (single group) should be treated as just the same in relation to rewards. That dungeon content could be tuned to be just as difficult for a single group as a 40 man dungeon could be tuned for a 40 man raid, and that the loot drops should be similarly equal. But in an open world dungeon, what's the stop people from simply bringing 10 or 12 people to a dungeon boss and trivializing the encounter? To use EQ as an example, you could bring 120 people to a 72 person raid if you wanted too. Granted, doing such would present some challenges of its own, but would still ultimately result in something like a damage check encounter being trivialized. But due to the amount of loot dropped, and the difficulty for the types of guilds who might utilize this strategy being able to mobilize that many people in short order, it was in some ways a self-correcting problem, compared to the dungeon alternative. Gathering up 10 people at your convenience, working down to a spawn point, and camping it is easy for any even remotely active guild. If you can simply bring 10 people to a 6 person encounter, trivialize it, and still get gear drops that are the equivalent of 40 person raids, what's to stop a particular guild from simply camping these encounters, occasionally rotating new people in and out as some arrive and some have to leave, and completely monopolizing them? Again, assuming that deliberately training the competition will be a punishable offense in order to stop such camping behavior. That was always my understanding of why raid loot was always better than dungeon loot when it came to a game like EQ. Dungeons are easily trivializable (is that a word? Whatever, it is now), where as doing so with raids is significantly more difficult.
As for solving the problem of spawnable vs. random encounters and the monopolization that goes with it, what if the general principle of EQ spawn times was taken to a more extreme scenario? Spawn times for bosses in EQ were somewhat predictable. I have very clear memories of places like camping Emperor Ssra for hours because we knew he was guaranteed to spawn within something like a 12 hour period if I remember. But what if the randomness was simply expanded? What if a boss, once killed, would be guaranteed to be down for 48 hours, but could then spawn anytime within the next 72 hours? Or 96 hours? I don't think even the most dedicated of raid guilds is going to sit on their butts for 3 days straight waiting for a spawn. And while there are additional aspects that need to be worked out, why wouldn't this be a good starting point?
*edit* By the way, I actually really like the idea of random resets and complete respawns of bosses around the world. The "earthquake" example someone mentioned earlier, sorry I don't remember who said it. This at least creates the ability to mix things up, provide opportunity to guilds that may play at different hours, or even just a smaller guild of dedicated players who can't simply camp mobs endlessly.
Perhaps I'm not fully understanding your idea of placeholder. To me, a placeholder mob was one that spawned in the place of the desired mob that had to be killed. You then had to wait for the spawn timer to go in the hopes that the desired mob would spawn the next time. This is generally how single-group dungeons have functioned, and it works fine for that. But for raid bosses that require something like 40 people? Are you suggesting we should create an even more camp-heavy scenario where a guild would fight its way through the raid zone all the way to the boss spawn point, kill the placeholder, and then wait for a respawn hoping its the boss? And if its the placeholder, rinse and repeat? And what if no one is camping the placeholder? Will it eventually change into the boss when some secondary spawn timer goes off, or must the placeholder be killed in order to reset the timer in the hopes the boss will spawn next time? While its an alternative, I can readily see some glaring downsides, particularly to smaller guilds that are attempting to progress and haven't put the raid zone in question on farm status yet.
Multiple spawn points is an interesting possibility I haven't given a great deal of consideration, but my immediate thought is that raid zones or raid dungeons would have to be pretty freaking huge to have the desired effect, or else you will still end up with 2 or 3 guilds camping certain recognized areas and still locking down the encounter.
Ok. So, I have to assume the placeholder would be significantly easier than the desired boss. Would the placeholder drop gear? Gear that is worth camping but not necessarily equivalent to the Boss? Or are you suggesting that rather than armor/weapons, they could be a good source of crafting reagents? Depending on how the various crafting professions are introduced, I could see this as a potentially satisfactory consolation prize for when the actual boss doesn't spawn, depending on the value of crafted equipment, but I would suggest the placeholder only be a good source for drops in relation to amounts, not rarity. The instant you make a placeholder the ONLY source for a certain needed reagent, you will almost certainly run into a situation where top end guilds continue to monopolize the placeholder simply for the needed reagent.
Expanding on the placeholder idea, here's a consideration. Did you play EQ during the velious era? The Sleeper essentially required a certain amount of Primal gear in order to defeat. So people cleared the guardians over and over in order to gain enough primal gear before defeating the ultimate boss. What about if the placeholder, in addition to dropping crafting reagents which I still think is a worthy idea, also dropped gear that was inferior to what the actual boss dropped, but was perhaps superior to gear found anywhere else (except perhaps certain dungeon drops? Discussion on raid vs. dungeon continues). I just feel that its important to avoid a situation where placeholders are only relevant to, say 5 dedicated crafters out of 40 people, and the rest are just camping.
Continuing with my question of whether the actual boss can spawn even if a placeholder is present, again we go back to longevity. Lets say we have a mid-range raid boss. Difficult and an important stepping stone, but not top end. What if there are 4 spawn locations for him, but only 2 guilds currently at that progression range. Are we going to expect the follow-up generation of guilds to clear entire dungeons that were formerly camped by 3 or 4 higher ends guilds when it was newer content?
Jobeson said: So VR has to limit raids for the 15 year olds and 45 year olds, but those same people don't need to be protected from dungeons or harvesting?
Well yea, of course it should apply to dungeons and harvesting. I want an enforced pnp. If I can't have it, I want some new awesome set of mechanics that prevent the efficiency of perma camping. Barring that, instances and/or coins and/or loot pinyatas, so maybe the perma campers move on with their lives a little faster. Open world with no actual protection to make up for what you lose when you take away instances, is terrible, at least in a PVE server.
No matter how much I might detest instances, I much more detest the situation you see in well populated EQ servers where people can't even hope to achieve the biggest game goals unless they poopsock for an uber guild.
P.S. as far as harvesting goes, it looks like the best harvesting will require you to have access to otherwise valuable content, like dungeons and raids. So if you protect that otherwise valuable content, and then tie harvesting into that content, you naturally protect harvesting.
Eolair said:I am not necessarily as well-read on every single detail released about the game so far, so its entirely possibly I am missing some sort of mechanic that adddresses this. But I have seen numerous comments talking about how Raid content and Dungeon content (single group) should be treated as just the same in relation to rewards. That dungeon content could be tuned to be just as difficult for a single group as a 40 man dungeon could be tuned for a 40 man raid, and that the loot drops should be similarly equal. But in an open world dungeon, what's the stop people from simply bringing 10 or 12 people to a dungeon boss and trivializing the encounter? To use EQ as an example, you could bring 120 people to a 72 person raid if you wanted too. Granted, doing such would present some challenges of its own, but would still ultimately result in something like a damage check encounter being trivialized. But due to the amount of loot dropped, and the difficulty for the types of guilds who might utilize this strategy being able to mobilize that many people in short order, it was in some ways a self-correcting problem, compared to the dungeon alternative. Gathering up 10 people at your convenience, working down to a spawn point, and camping it is easy for any even remotely active guild. If you can simply bring 10 people to a 6 person encounter, trivialize it, and still get gear drops that are the equivalent of 40 person raids, what's to stop a particular guild from simply camping these encounters, occasionally rotating new people in and out as some arrive and some have to leave, and completely monopolizing them? Again, assuming that deliberately training the competition will be a punishable offense in order to stop such camping behavior. That was always my understanding of why raid loot was always better than dungeon loot when it came to a game like EQ. Dungeons are easily trivializable (is that a word? Whatever, it is now), where as doing so with raids is significantly more difficult.
One potential solution to the zerg problem might be environmental.
A virus that spreads more rapidly amid larger gatherings, doing more damage over time per tick.
A castle with rooms that grow brighter or darker based on the min/max capacity.
Or structural, if at all possible.
A floor that could not support the weight beyond a certain number of players, causing them to fall to their deaths or into a part of the zone with more powerful raid targets.
However, these would leave players open to being griefed in non-instanced content.
As to the issue involving group content being vultured incrementally around the clock by zerg guilds...it sounds as though that might be solved by the infamy system but we'll have to wait and see what it entails.
Eolair said:As for solving the problem of spawnable vs. random encounters and the monopolization that goes with it, what if the general principle of EQ spawn times was taken to a more extreme scenario? Spawn times for bosses in EQ were somewhat predictable. I have very clear memories of places like camping Emperor Ssra for hours because we knew he was guaranteed to spawn within something like a 12 hour period if I remember. But what if the randomness was simply expanded? What if a boss, once killed, would be guaranteed to be down for 48 hours, but could then spawn anytime within the next 72 hours? Or 96 hours? I don't think even the most dedicated of raid guilds is going to sit on their butts for 3 days straight waiting for a spawn. And while there are additional aspects that need to be worked out, why wouldn't this be a good starting point?
Project1999 has targets with equally long windows. Raid guilds simply leave one or two of their players in the zone with a pet macro to check if/when the target spawns, all the while screen sharing. Add a drinking bird into the mix and even less work is involved. One example of this isn't even a raid target—Vessel Drozlin, needed for the enchanter epic, has a 2-7 days (random) and still dies within minutes of spawning. Players create level 1 iksars and leave them at the spawn location to monitor it, while others stay on their enchanters and use GINA audio triggers to alert them when it spawns.
I've always thought that randomizing spawn locations might help. For example, the spawn location of Severilous is common knowledge on the emulated servers but the zone itself, Emerald Jungle, is massive and un(der)used. Players gather and wait at the agreed upon zoneline, with most camping their buffs. The pull takes long enough for everyone to log in beforehand. In previous years, before it was disallowed, players would CotH duck (to interrupt the spell) for hours on end in order to get FTE; nowadays they race. When they've raced targets in the past, they've used Crown of Rile in tandem with strafing and jumping. The click effect from the crown kept their stamina/endurance bar from being drained and jumping constantly kept them in the lead. Players are still finding ways to subvert the rules and (ab)use the mechanics for a competitive edge. However, in the case of Severilous, if that dragon could spawn anywhere in the zone, near City of Mist or, hell, even right on top of the gathered players, that would create enough unpredictability to make players improvise, even with contingency plans. Needing to relocate a raid force to the target creates opportunities for miscommunication and, with more players involved, more adds. Of course, guilds could always have their rangers and bards canvas the zone, hitting track while the raid target was in window and then pull it to the safest location.
dorotea said:Iksar - I continue to argue that the terms "raid" and "top end" are not synonymous and VR very well may break the mold of current MMOs and have raid rewards and raid encounter difficulty no more, and perhaps less, than single group difficulty and rewards. Thus any comments I make about how a raid should work are not intended to apply to how top end content should work. I know you weren't responding to anything I said but I couldn't resist pointing that out.
I also don't think the point of this thread is primarily about how players should be able to get gear and other drops, earned by their time and skill as you put it. I think the point of this thread is more about how to prevent a relative handful of people from deliberately monopolizing such content - often with the express goal of blocking others not benefitting themselves - so that *more* of us can earn those rewards with our own time and skill.
I interpreted this to mean a re-thinking of a raid encounter. Where raids are more fun than intense. Although I am not sure how that could be designed, where the rewards are not top-end, but enhancements or neat and unique things to have that do not supercede gear that you can get in tough group encounters. I hate to hearken back, but in old EQ in plane of sky there were side quests for items that gave classes unique one-time, PITA rechargeable clicky items that they normally could not do. Like a magician with a Divine aura (a cleric only spell) or a shaman with a feign death (a monk/SK only ability) . So in pantheon raids could also grant no drop skill boost stones, or acclimation glyphs which could be rolled off or assigned.
Manouk said:I interpreted this to mean a re-thinking of a raid encounter. Where raids are more fun than intense. Although I am not sure how that could be designed, where the rewards are not top-end, but enhancements or neat and unique things to have that do not supercede gear that you can get in tough group encounters. I hate to hearken back, but in old EQ in plane of sky there were side quests for items that gave classes unique one-time, PITA rechargeable clicky items that they normally could not do. Like a magician with a Divine aura (a cleric only spell) or a shaman with a feign death (a monk/SK only ability) . So in pantheon raids could also grant no drop skill boost stones, or acclimation glyphs which could be rolled off or assigned.
OCastitatisLilium said:
Not speaking ill of the dead, but I think Brad's design philosophy of designing a 'world to get lost in' is fundamentally flawed and unhealthy. I don't care if your time spent in Everquest 'felt' 'more meaningful' than other games. You shouldn't be looking for 'fulfillment' in a video game. It's a false sense of accomplishment -- a fake reward that will fade away as soon as you hit the power button on your computer. If someone is looking for more 'purpose' and a sense of accomplishment by diving into a video game, then said person should probably take a closer evaluation at the rest of their life as a whole. These are video games. Pieces of electronic entertainment. You will never find any sort of actual 'sense of accomplishment' or 'meaning' in them, and to seek those things out in them is folly.
"Brad's design philosophy of designing a 'world to get lost in' is fundamentally flawed and unhealthy". Lol. You know you're in a fan forum amongst backers of a game a lot of which were drawn in large part by Brad's vision, yeah? All of which were at least aware that that vision was the foundation of the pillars of the game? Some of which have spent hundreds or thousands of real dollars in their real life hoping to see Brad's vision come to fruition? Expecting no return other than to eventually be a part of that world? Just checking hehe.
Video games have come on a *long* way from Space Invaders and even those games were more than meaningless passtimes and momentary fun to a lot of players. When fans think about Space Invaders, they don't just think about killing a few hours and some minor personal sense of accomplishment from mastering the game, they think about going to the arcade and making friends and helping each other and competing against each other and all that 'human' stuff that goes along with and around it. Often this from people who were somewhat 'geeky' at the time and didn't get that human stuff much elsewhere.
Fast forward to massively multiplayer games and the meaning in and around the game is amplified immensely. An MMO is a place where like-minded (generally) people band together over fantastical challenges. Some just enjoy the casual social aspect - the light, upper levels of interaction. Some make deeper bonds and even make life-long friends or even spouses! Most are somewhere in between.
There's a reason that companies send teams of employees to do outward bound courses together. They are a perfect situation to get those teams of 'strangers' to bond or at least learn to work together. If the course they were sent on didn't have interesting, immersive challenges to help guide that bonding, then the whole thing would be ineffective. They don't just get put in a room and told "get on".
Re. MMOs, Brad's vision of "worlds not games" is the guiding light that will lead to Pantheon having a depth beyond a typical 'game' so that it can, yes indeed, have 'meaning' to the players. You can't just put RPG fans in a virtual room and expect them to get on with it. The nature and quality of the game has a massive effect on the kind of interaction players and and the meaning that can be derived from that interaction.
Shared experiences in a fantasy world is a very different concept to just playing a fantasy-themed game in proximity to each other. Modern MMOs more often feel like the latter and the meaning to their players can be, yes, pretty minimal. I expect Pantheon to be more meaningful.
No one is expecting players to play 24/7 and derive all the meaning in their life from the game, sure, but there is a huge gap between that and "You will never find any sort of actual 'sense of accomplishment' or 'meaning' in them".
If you truly feel that the idea of coexisting in a fantasy world is "flawed and unhealthy" and without meaning then maybe you should consider it may not be the people that do want, look for, find, share and enjoy the meaning and value in these games that have a problem.
BeaverBiscuit said:Jobeson said: So VR has to limit raids for the 15 year olds and 45 year olds, but those same people don't need to be protected from dungeons or harvesting?Well yea, of course it should apply to dungeons and harvesting. I want an enforced pnp. If I can't have it, I want some new awesome set of mechanics that prevent the efficiency of perma camping. Barring that, instances and/or coins and/or loot pinyatas, so maybe the perma campers move on with their lives a little faster. Open world with no actual protection to make up for what you lose when you take away instances, is terrible, at least in a PVE server.
No matter how much I might detest instances, I much more detest the situation you see in well populated EQ servers where people can't even hope to achieve the biggest game goals unless they poopsock for an uber guild.
P.S. as far as harvesting goes, it looks like the best harvesting will require you to have access to otherwise valuable content, like dungeons and raids. So if you protect that otherwise valuable content, and then tie harvesting into that content, you naturally protect harvesting.
While perma camping a single spawn is bad and there are mechanics around that. I never saw the efficiency of it as the problem. I don't know if I am like most players but when I need or want something that is what I focus on in game. I may spend weeks in a particular dungeon, attempting to get an item, settling for xp and other loot while being unlucky on getting the camp or just unluckky getting the drop. Slowly learning the place like the back of my hand. This is often how I meet players in the game as well. It is the social aspect of the open world game. You see the same people at your regular play time, get to know them, pug with them a few times and eventually they stop being pugs. They are your friends you know and trust. We are all regulars in that one place and get to know eachother searching for the various items.
If there was a lockout or a daily quest to kill the boss I would simply burn the quest and leave, then burn the quest in the next dungeon and leave, then burn the quest in the next dungeon and leave. I don't like dalies, but virtually noone will play inefficiently given the option to optimize. Similarly if loot simply drops fast, I would never stick around long enough to become a regular of that zone and I would never meet most of the other players there. We would all just be focused on the path to easy loot for progress like every other MMO. I know it is a negative word for most people, but the slow grind of the old open world is what builds relationships outside of a guild. VR talked about slowing things down for years. I hope they stick to that commitment.
My obvious favorite method is to have multiple spawns locations forcing a single group in a dungeon to explore where multiple groups in a dungeon could potentially camp. The boss could also be spawned with a temporary key to their room from any of the rare spawns in the dungeon so no one camp can lock down the main boss. Similar to multiple spawns the boss could just be a patrol that can spawn anywhere along its route. VR has plenty of options to pick from that avoids both a single placeholder camp or a weekly clock.
I am perfectly fine if virtually noone has full masteries or the best gear on any server. There may be a few who try to get there, but I don't think the game needs to be built to ever actually let them like WoW and most other MMOs. The journey is the point. Low efficiency does still mean rewarding time played though. The people to look up to, despise, pity, help out, befriend, are all closely tied to the playtimes compared to your own. Server communities need these differences. The game should not have game mechanics trying to equalize the populace in my opinion until something like an expansion turns the old world content into a wasteland (I really hope VR doesn't go this route)
Leevolen said:What's more, a sense of accomplishment can be gained from even the most ordinary tasks. If you gave yourself a haircut during the pandemic, you probably felt accomplished eventually when it looked halfway decent. The same with baking sourdough bread and talking to friends on Zoom. When we walk away from a task having learned something new about ourselves, others, and/or the world around us, that is fulfilling. Why should (or how could) a virtual world be excluded from that? If the reason has to do with tangible rewards than why do we tell bedtime stories to our children? Why do we visit museums and view the paintings, sculptures, and fossils? Why do we research the myths of ancient civilizations?
Why do we make art & why are humans creative? Brian Eno Interviewed by Vikas Shah MBE
I had to jump in here because I am an historian, and I love Brian Eno, so I'll link this video of a brief interview he gave last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDZT67wh8jc
It's a unique quality of modern society that, through technology, we "virtualize" many of our wants, needs, and desires that in traditional societies were the necessary realities of daily life. I'm not going to make a statement whether I think that is good or bad, but I think it is worth recognizing that most people feel intuitively that there is a fundamental difference between interpersonal and virtual social interaction.