Personally for me I would like to see about 50/50 mix of raid and group content.
I am very curious as to what others opinions on this are though.
Some of my favorite raid zones include: Temple of Veeshan(EQ), Plane of Time(EQ), Ancient Port Warehouse(VG)...
Favorite group zones include: Sebilis(EQ), Velkators Lab(EQ), Graystone(VG), Ruins of Trengal Keep(VG)
Kiz~
Depending on the time it takes for player advancement and how much content there is for grouping, the number of raid-capable players will probably be fairly small, at least in the early days. Its a big assumption, but if Pantheon is even remotely like EQ, most players will not be raiders. I know its probably hard to imagine, but that was fine with most people in a game like EQ. Not everything in the game revolved around getting max level or killing the biggest boss.
Even comparing it to modern MMOs, the amount of raiders represents less than 20% of most playerbases. Therefore, creating 50% of the content for raiders makes very little sense. It also stands to remove the exclusivity that revolves around raiding.
For me it depends somewhat on how you define group and raid content. I am assuming that the idea of a raid is content for any number of players greater than a group, and group content being designed for pretty much a full group. I understand the question is about raid vs group ratio but I am going to approach it as a general breakdown of how much content for each size of group. In this case I would favor a breakdown of about 20/50/30 with about 20% being small group (maybe 3/6 party members, possibly soloable with considerable difficulty), 50% of content for about a full group (5-6/6 party members), and 30% large scale content or raids if you prefer ( 2 full parties to whatever the maximum amount of players deemed appropriate).
Dullahan said:
Depending on the time it takes for player advancement and how much content there is for grouping, the number of raid-capable players will probably be fairly small, at least in the early days. Its a big assumption, but if Pantheon is even remotely like EQ, most players will not be raiders. I know its probably hard to imagine, but that was fine with most people in a game like EQ. Not everything in the game revolved around getting max level or killing the biggest boss.
Even comparing it to modern MMOs, the amount of raiders represents less than 20% of most playerbases. Therefore, creating 50% of the content for raiders makes very little sense. It also stands to remove the exclusivity that revolves around raiding.
Nevertheless, it's EQ with serious raiding that people played for many, many years; and many watered-down MMOs that emerged later were played for a few months and abandoned. It's EQ that we still remember, and all the "make it easy and accessible" games are forgotten.
It's like studying in a hard school. Yes, it takes a lot of effort, and many people do not want to expend such effort. But it gives you a feeling of pride in yourself, not a fake pride in "everyone is special" style, but the real one because you did in fact accomplish something.
We do not need yet another watered-down, everything-is-soloable MMO. There are plenty of those to go around.
Those 20% of the population are those that were pulling the entire population ahead. They were those against whom we measured ourselves, and eventually became one of them if we worked on it.
We must have raid content because we must have something greater than ourselves, greater even than a small random pickup group, to look up to, to look forward to, to be the goal. Or else we might as well play Diablo.
Also, creating a game based on what the majority of the total gamer population wants is a recipe for bringing it down to the lowest common denominator. It would be the junk food of gaming.
It's like McDonalds vs five-star french cuisine. Many more people eat at McD. And it's likely that McD as a company has more money than any given 5-star french restaurant. But which of the two has better food?
Thinking that something is right because the majority is for it is a common logical fallacy. Otherwise if you see a bunch of flies on a pile of metabolic waste matter, would you join them, simply because there is more of them than of you?
Do not create content aimed so that the "average" player will achieve it before your next expansion.
That just creates a big (and growing) portion of your player base that have nothing to do, which leads to bad press (or mouth to mouth) which leads to even more complaints etc. You will also lock yourself into a spiral of trying to produce content faster than people consume it, which is a nowin situation.
I would suggest that you create content right out of the bat that isn't supposed to be beaten until the next expansion (for the average player), this will mean that some dedicated people that can spend the time but more importantly the organisation will probably beat it before the next expansion but the majority of the players wont.
This will leave a very small amount of people with nothing new to strive for (but that is inevitable) and they will probably still need to do it for awhile to get the gear out of there. The big majority will still have something new to gun for,all the time, which is a healthy thing for a game imo. Like all the modern mmorpgs that actually have any PvE focus and not just token pve mixed in with pvp (that in most cases are pretty pointless and therefor boring imo) still build their content so a large majority of the player base reach "max" gear and has nothing new to do before the next expansion. They also combine this with a huge power increase with each expansion so all the work from the former expansion is void.
I went way way off topic :)
My answer to the OP would be 30% raids 70% group and like 10% of each type should be set so that it's unlikely that most people will beat it during the same expansion. The power creep in an expansion should not be humongous either, maybe in the order of 10-15% total (so like 1-2% per gear slot max).
Aethor said:
Dullahan said:
Depending on the time it takes for player advancement and how much content there is for grouping, the number of raid-capable players will probably be fairly small, at least in the early days. Its a big assumption, but if Pantheon is even remotely like EQ, most players will not be raiders. I know its probably hard to imagine, but that was fine with most people in a game like EQ. Not everything in the game revolved around getting max level or killing the biggest boss.
Even comparing it to modern MMOs, the amount of raiders represents less than 20% of most playerbases. Therefore, creating 50% of the content for raiders makes very little sense. It also stands to remove the exclusivity that revolves around raiding.
Nevertheless, it's EQ with serious raiding that people played for many, many years; and many watered-down MMOs that emerged later were played for a few months and abandoned. It's EQ that we still remember, and all the "make it easy and accessible" games are forgotten.
It's like studying in a hard school. Yes, it takes a lot of effort, and many people do not want to expend such effort. But it gives you a feeling of pride in yourself, not a fake pride in "everyone is special" style, but the real one because you did in fact accomplish something.
We do not need yet another watered-down, everything-is-soloable MMO. There are plenty of those to go around.
Those 20% of the population are those that were pulling the entire population ahead. They were those against whom we measured ourselves, and eventually became one of them if we worked on it.
We must have raid content because we must have something greater than ourselves, greater even than a small random pickup group, to look up to, to look forward to, to be the goal. Or else we might as well play Diablo.
I agree, but you posted this as if it was somehow juxtaposed to what I said. I did not say anything about making it like a modern game, nor did I suggest anything about making it easier or based around soloing. Only that contrary to popular belief around here, most players are not raiders in a themepark game, let alone a "hardcore" game like classic EQ. It simply took way more time, effort, leadership and coordination than most players were willing to devote to a game. Therefore, it doesn't make much sense to focus so heavily (50%) on raid content.
If it was up to me, 1% of content would be soloable, 75% would be group, and 24% would be raid. Since I know that people would lose their mind without more to solo, I'd say 15% solo, 60% group and 25% raid is more realistic.
One mistake I've seen a lot of developers make is underestimating how quickly top guilds will progress through the high end content. Once they pave the way other guilds will follow, and before you know it people are cancelling subs because "there's nothing to do in the endgame." I think a game should have more than enough raid content in place for launch if they want to get through the first couple of months without too many cancellations. I'd figure whatever your projected amount of raid content is, double it. Also, having multiple tiers from the start would be a good idea. If there's one thing raiders love, it's progression. If there's no more progression after the first tier, you risk losing them. Raiders make up a pretty big chunk of the population, so it would be wise to keep them climbing that ladder.
I know it's a tradeoff. You can only create so much content before release. But if there's a way to keep the raid progression wheel turning without taking resources away from other parts of the game, I think it would be worth considering. Maybe scaling raid content? What if top tier raid content included small, incremental increases as the content scales to the either power of the raid-leader or the average of the players combined, with rewards that scale accordingly with no fixed ceiling? The returns would diminish the higher they go but they would never have the "best" gear because the next raid might drop something a little bit better. By the time the next expansion is released the most hardcore raiders will still be pushing for those small gains because they accumulate over time. Except now they'll have a new ladder to climb with all new rewards, again with an expanding ceiling to keep them busy for a while. If there's enough variation in content it might ease the tedium of repetition a little bit.
Just a thought. That's assuming of course that Pantheon will be a gear-centric game. If it's isn't, that's perfectly fine with me. But raiding is, by its very nature, gear-centric. I'd be curious to hear what hardcore raiders think of scaling raid content. If the returns diminished the higher you go, how long do you think it would keep you satisfied?
Typhon, what do you mean by scaling exactly? As the game progresses, new content, etc, the gear will be upgraded automatically? Please elaborate a bit as it is an interesting concept. One thing that I enjoyed was the novel items in EQ that even 3-4 expansions later they still had value: Examples are quest items in velious that required tears (Dozekar I believe?), items from Plane of Air, etc. Even epics were still useful for a few expansions..
Valith said:
Typhon, what do you mean by scaling exactly? As the game progresses, new content, etc, the gear will be upgraded automatically? Please elaborate a bit as it is an interesting concept. One thing that I enjoyed was the novel items in EQ that even 3-4 expansions later they still had value: Examples are quest items in velious that required tears (Dozekar I believe?), items from Plane of Air, etc. Even epics were still useful for a few expansions..
I love the idea of old world items being used in later expansions for upgrades, like epics for epics. My idea was more about giving raiders something to do once they reach the point where they've fully geared out and done all there is to do in the endgame. What then, besides wait for the next expansion? If that top tier was scalable, they could keep working on it for a while.
I was thinking the drops could have slight, random stat boosts based on the average gear score of the raid. This would only apply to the highest tier. That way people who have done all the raid content available can keep tackling slightly harder versions of the highest tier raids for slightly better rewards, scaled to their respective power. The more they do it, the higher their gear score gets, the more the difficulty scales in relation to their gear score, the better the drops, and so on ad infinitum. Of course there would have to be diminishing returns, so the higher the content scales the smaller the improvements to the drops.
I considered the possibility that new members to raid guilds might be shut out for having too low a gear score, so I thought maybe allowing them to set the scale of the content based on one person's score would allow for players with lower scores to join them and gear up.
Also "gear score" is for lack of a better word, but I think it's a fairly accurate way to look at it.