Notes: Reading the portions around bolded terms will carry you through the main message. All numbers and timespans have been chosen to produce an example situation and should not be considered as set in stone. Also, this type of mechanic would not have to be applied to all Raid Bosses uniformly and could be used sparingly if diversity is preferred. There is also a TL;DR version at the bottom.
I love learning new raid mechanics and developing strategies, but I’m not a fan of the repetitious slog through old content. It is inevitable that static content will become easier once you find a solution and improve. This leads to every boss having a climax in fun factor: when you first down the boss. You will continue to improve, but poor ole’ Supreme Dragon Overlord somehow becomes a pushover in a matter of weeks. In order to remedy this, we can adopt solutions that already exist in the gaming world. Why not move away from static challenge Raid Bosses in MMOs? Let’s look at some analogous gameplay situations to get an idea of how other games maintain their challenge.
Continual Scaling: Tetris employs a tried and true scheme where your task becomes increasingly more difficult as you progress and you are rewarded for success. Your experienced level of challenge is scaled to your ability to succeed.
Stepped Scaling: This is like increasing the AI difficulty in Starcraft or really any game with bot opponents. This provides an increased challenge each time the difficulty is changed, but just as before you will eventually outgrow the competition.
Comparative Scaling: Think of how people compete with single player games like Tetris. Each player challenges themselves to do better than another player and they take turns trying. Their challenge bar is determined by the other player’s performance and competition will drive each player to improve.
Direct PvP Scaling: The opposition can learn from your behaviors because they are also a person. This provides the highest challenge until seriously intense levels of AI are developed.
Continual scaling generally works best for “play until you fail” and PvP has myriad issues when combined into PvE content. The Pantheon devs have hinted at smarter enemies than we have previously seen, but any static AI will eventually be overpowered by the players, since we are intelligent and can truly learn. As a result, I am suggesting an approach that utilizes comparative scaling.
The goals that I have set for this mechanic are as follows:
Increase Raid Boss challenge: Keeps the challenge-seeking population happy.
Set limits on server and group gear collection: Extends the longevity of the relevance of raiding content.
Introduce variability: Raiding is less easily combat log data-mined and reverse engineered if the challenge is scaled.
What triggers can we use to enact a scaling mechanic in a traditional MMO?
Your kills of the Raid Boss: Appropriately determines how challenging content is to you.
Other’s kills of the Raid Boss: Appropriately determines how challenging content is to others.
Kills on other Raid Bosses: Can result in the weaker bosses being killed, pushing the hardest out of reach.
Deaths/wipes against the Raid Boss: Can be reproduced at will to intentionally affect the mechanic.
DPS/HPS/Gear: Can be modified by the player to intentionally affect the mechanic.
Using kills of the Raid Boss, we can introduce mechanics that would scale the difficulty of the Raid Boss to the success of your group and others on your server.
Raid Boss’ strength adjustment: If a Raid Boss is killed more than 7 times per week, each additional kill increases the Raid Boss' strength by some small margin. If the boss is killed less than 5 times in a week, then its strength is reduced. The measure of “strength” would be determined on a case by case basis and would work best on non-gear related checks (e.g. interrupt time window, missed mechanic penalty, or increased mechanic frequency). This would result in a comparative scaling method of increasing Raid Boss difficulty, since you are competing against other groups. The details could be hidden from the player to introduce a mystery factor.
Exemption mechanic variant: Any group who is new to the boss is exempted from the difficulty scaling. If the top group has killed the boss 100 times, then your difficulty would scale relative to that total. At 0-20 kills your difficulty is the original difficulty level. At 20-40 kills you go from 0-100% scaled difficulty and any kills performed by a group in this range would not contribute to the 7 kills/week . Any group above 40 kills is considered to be "competitive" and would be included in the scaling mechanic as normal.
This would have the effect of letting weaker and slower guilds get up to 20% of the kill count of the top group before they experience the full difficulty. If it takes the top group 2.5 weeks to get 5 kills, then a smaller group could get a kill every 2.5 weeks without seeing their difficulty increase. This would allow them to have a "training period" where they get as many kills as they are able up to a certain rate.
Player’s strength vs. Raid Boss: If this mechanic is implemented alone, then the top group would repeatedly farm the Raid Boss and drive its strength up out of reach of other groups. In order to prevent this, it must be paired with a player-level mechanic to inhibit farming. This could be accomplished by one of these two mechanics (or something similar):
Simple Timed Lockout: Each player is locked out for one week after killing the Raid Boss. This means that 7 unique groups will be able to get a kill each week before the strength is scaled up. This will have the effect of scaling the Raid Boss’s strength to match the ability of the 8th strongest group.
Soft Tiered Lockout: Each time a player kills a boss, they gain a debuff, which decays 1 week later. New debuffs do not refresh existing debuff's timers. At the start of each Raid Boss attempt, the player with the most debuffs determines the tier of challenge. This allows any given group the chance to kill the Raid Boss multiple times per week, but would come at a sharp increase in difficulty tier, which adds some effect (e.g. cleave damage, taunt immunity, or aoe mana drain) and is a form of stepped scaling. Killing the Raid Boss two (or three) times per week requires a kill at tier 1 (or 2). The Raid Boss will still balance out at being killed 7 times per week, but the top groups can get multiple kills per week by accepting a significantly steeper challenge. The rewards for kills at higher tiers could also change, rewarding groups who are significantly stronger than their competition. A safety net could be put in place where tier 3 introduces instant death, in order to prevent abuse/farming, effectively creating a cap of 3 kills per week.
I believe that the Soft Tiered Lockout approach would be better, but would come at the cost of implementing individual tier mechanics for each Raid Boss. Both systems would function to increase the challenge of Raid Bosses based on the community’s abilities. This would be an inherent counter to mudflation (stat inflation as players collect better gear), but also does not devalue the collecting of better gear.
Downsides:
This system ceases to balance if too few guilds are in play, at which point it relies entirely on initial balancing. At its worst, this system functions like the status quo of current MMO Raid Bosses, which relies on the developer’s ability to balance content.
This would not have an equal balance on servers with different populations. A server with a lower or less competitive raiding scene would result in weaker Raid Bosses than their higher population or more competitive server counterparts. However, the numbers involved (like kills per week threshhold) could be adjusted based on server population metrics in order to balance this out.
Weaker guilds must wait until the kills per week drops below 5 for enough weeks that it drops into their ability range. Some may see this as inhibiting the enjoyment of the more casual guilds, but would not prevent the weaker guilds from attempting the content.
TL;DR Version:
Raid bosses are most fun when you first down them. It would be great if their challenge scaled to match your server’s ability to kill them. Any time a Raid Boss is killed, it gets stronger generally, but over time the Raid Boss will weaken. Any time YOU kill a Raid Boss, it gets better at killing YOU, but this effect is also removed with time. If your goal is to kill the Raid Boss as much as possible to acquire loot quickly, then you have to compete against other groups in an ever-increasing challenge.
The difficulty must never be based on what some other guild is or isn't doing, or else a guild of people who play 12 hours a day would quickly make the boss impossible for those who play 3 hours a day.
Of course, it's partially a moot point if the boss is outdoor type (once killed, he's dead for anyone until he respawns). Still, the dificulty should not be increased since then the first guild that gets to him will have an easier time than the 5th guild. And you can't exactly tell guilds to wait till the kills per unit of time drop... what will they do with their time? And if they wait, some other guild might not wait.
Also, don't count on a guild that farms a boss to stop farming a boss. Depending on that boss' loot table, they might happily farm the same boss for a year, inbetween raids on new content.
And even if they don't, given 5-6 uberguilds on the server, I don't see that any boss with loot that's still relevant to the game will stop being farmed.
Or you mean to force them to stop by making the boss too tough? Ok, but then if the toughness is the same for the whole server, if an uberguild can't, no regular guild will be able to do it either, so you just removed a chunk of game content from everyone - from those who find it interesting as well as from those who find it boring. I don't see how will that help.
And what will all the guilds do with their time if they can't farm a boss? That becomes a question of availability of content.
If there's enough content, they will have something to do, but then that will resolve your original problem without a need for dynamic boss difficulty.
If there isn't enough content then you will run into that problem no matter what you do.
You could maybe make it cyclical - when a boss is killed, the next time he respawns on higher difficulty and better loot. And so on, for 4-5 times, after which he resets to the base version, and normal guilds can kill him again. Uberguilds would farm him when he's in uber mode, which will eventually reset him into regular difficulty and loot, for which the uber guilds might not be interested... or they might kill him anyway just because they can.
What it all comes down to is, the game needs new content to come on regular basis, expansions, mini-expansions, new zones, bosses, whatever.
I see your point as to uberguilds pushing content out of reach for weaker guilds. I appreciate the feedback.
1) Your assumption seems to be that if uber-guilds can kill the boss with their awesome gear, then slower guilds won't even have a chance until it's obsolete. However, this can be avoided to some extent by the correct choice of scaling mechanic (I have updated the OP to emphasize this). It can also be negated to a large degree by having this mechanic only used on a subset of end game raid bosses. This would allow weaker guilds to proceed gear-wise and allow them a better chance at the competitive bosses.
2) I don't think all guilds should be able to down all content. If there are 7 (it could be more/less or scaled to some server size metric) guilds that can down the content, then maybe that's enough. In my opinion, the weaker guilds should always be given the opportunity to try, but should never be entitled to succeed. I don't see "weaker guilds won't be able to kill it" as a problem.
Ainadak said:Raid bosses are most fun when you first down them.
Well, that is your opinion. While I agree that learning an encounter (or entire dungeon) is indeed fun, getting better at killing the boss is what extends that fun. Learning how to do it with fewer losses, faster, with fewer people, with different approaches is what is fun. Your frankly terrible ideas would do little or nothing to keep the enjoyment flowing. Yes, eventually killing the boss becomes trivial and boring, but that is actually critical to the overall health of the game. Why? It forces guilds to move on to other content. So long as content remains enjoyable and worth the effort, guilds will not move on to new content.
Ainadak said:It would be great if their challenge scaled to match your server’s ability to kill them. Any time a Raid Boss is killed, it gets stronger generally, but over time the Raid Boss will weaken. Any time YOU kill a Raid Boss, it gets better at killing YOU, but this effect is also removed with time. If your goal is to kill the Raid Boss as much as possible to acquire loot quickly, then you have to compete against other groups in an ever-increasing challenge.
I know that Aethor pointed out that having when I approach an encounter and having its difficulty determined by the actions of another guild would be totally unacceptable and I have to agree with him. How difficult any encounter, or any content for that matter, may be should be the same for everyone. And if my guild wants to farm loot off a boss what should determine how often we get to kill that boss is how effective other guilds are in beating us to that content. That is a far more interesting gameplay (racing other guilds) than keeping plotting some graph to determine the optimum mean-time-between-kills that your approach would obligate the entire server to follow.
Vandraad said:
How difficult any encounter, or any content for that matter, may be should be the same for everyone.
This is just your opinion that not everybody agees with .
From my point of view the idea of scaling proposed by the OP is certainly better than the primitive "same difficulty for everybody" .
To realize it technically would not be so hard - basically a raid attempting a Boss X would have to state its target before engaging (or zoning) and the power of the Boss X is then adjusted to the cumulated Power of the Raid .
Or to the weighted average of the number of Boss X kills of the members of the raid what is basically the same thing .
In case that 2 or more raids declare the same target, the Boss' Power is adjusted to the raid with highest power .
I would certainly welcome this kind of dynamical adjustments of a Boss' power, skills and abilities . It would provide diversity, surprise and challenge even for fights that one has done several times .
pretty sure this would require instancing, which i am fairly sure devs have stated instancing will not be a thing. not to mention that while i agree with the thought that if a guild cant take down a raid boss its thier fault, that only applies if the stats of the boss and encounter mechanics are the same for everyone.
to me it would make much more sense for have 3 difficulty choices with better gear in each choice with the highest difficulty being one that is simply not intended to be beaten with the gear available from this expansion. which would let everyone have fun whenever they would be able to grab the mob.
It would be interesting to see a system using an algorith that determines the quanitity of raiders, their average or mean level, the raid class composition(how many warriors, clerics, etc), the "presumed" damage output of the raid force, and then use that to determine the boss mobs abilities, fighting style, use of abilities, etc.
Essentially, the raid Boss' difficulty would be determined by the raid force there to take him/her out, and would scale (within a min/max range) to the opponents forces. If don't correctly, it could close the gap on change in difficulty as players forces, abilities, equipment changes.
Ainadak said:Notes: Reading the portions around bolded terms will carry you through the main message. All numbers and timespans have been chosen to produce an example situation and should not be considered as set in stone. Also, this type of mechanic would not have to be applied to all Raid Bosses uniformly and could be used sparingly if diversity is preferred. There is also a TL;DR version at the bottom.
I love learning new raid mechanics and developing strategies, but I’m not a fan of the repetitious slog through old content. It is inevitable that static content will become easier once you find a solution and improve. This leads to every boss having a climax in fun factor: when you first down the boss. You will continue to improve, but poor ole’ Supreme Dragon Overlord somehow becomes a pushover in a matter of weeks. In order to remedy this, we can adopt solutions that already exist in the gaming world. Why not move away from static challenge Raid Bosses in MMOs? Let’s look at some analogous gameplay situations to get an idea of how other games maintain their challenge.
Continual Scaling: Tetris employs a tried and true scheme where your task becomes increasingly more difficult as you progress and you are rewarded for success. Your experienced level of challenge is scaled to your ability to succeed.
Stepped Scaling: This is like increasing the AI difficulty in Starcraft or really any game with bot opponents. This provides an increased challenge each time the difficulty is changed, but just as before you will eventually outgrow the competition.
Comparative Scaling: Think of how people compete with single player games like Tetris. Each player challenges themselves to do better than another player and they take turns trying. Their challenge bar is determined by the other player’s performance and competition will drive each player to improve.
Direct PvP Scaling: The opposition can learn from your behaviors because they are also a person. This provides the highest challenge until seriously intense levels of AI are developed.
Continual scaling generally works best for “play until you fail” and PvP has myriad issues when combined into PvE content. The Pantheon devs have hinted at smarter enemies than we have previously seen, but any static AI will eventually be overpowered by the players, since we are intelligent and can truly learn. As a result, I am suggesting an approach that utilizes comparative scaling.
The goals that I have set for this mechanic are as follows:
Increase Raid Boss challenge: Keeps the challenge-seeking population happy.
Set limits on server and group gear collection: Extends the longevity of the relevance of raiding content.
Introduce variability: Raiding is less easily combat log data-mined and reverse engineered if the challenge is scaled.
What triggers can we use to enact a scaling mechanic in a traditional MMO?
Your kills of the Raid Boss: Appropriately determines how challenging content is to you.
Other’s kills of the Raid Boss: Appropriately determines how challenging content is to others.
Kills on other Raid Bosses: Can result in the weaker bosses being killed, pushing the hardest out of reach.
Deaths/wipes against the Raid Boss: Can be reproduced at will to intentionally affect the mechanic.
DPS/HPS/Gear: Can be modified by the player to intentionally affect the mechanic.
Using kills of the Raid Boss, we can introduce mechanics that would scale the difficulty of the Raid Boss to the success of your group and others on your server.
Raid Boss’ strength adjustment: If a Raid Boss is killed more than 7 times per week, each additional kill increases the Raid Boss' strength by some small margin. If the boss is killed less than 5 times in a week, then its strength is reduced. The measure of “strength” would be determined on a case by case basis and would work best on non-gear related checks (e.g. interrupt time window, missed mechanic penalty, or increased mechanic frequency). This would result in a comparative scaling method of increasing Raid Boss difficulty, since you are competing against other groups. The details could be hidden from the player to introduce a mystery factor.
Player’s strength vs. Raid Boss: If this mechanic is implemented alone, then the top group would repeatedly farm the Raid Boss and drive its strength up out of reach of other groups. In order to prevent this, it must be paired with a player-level mechanic to inhibit farming. This could be accomplished by one of these two mechanics (or something similar):
Simple Timed Lockout: Each player is locked out for one week after killing the Raid Boss. This means that 7 unique groups will be able to get a kill each week before the strength is scaled up. This will have the effect of scaling the Raid Boss’s strength to match the ability of the 8th strongest group.
Soft Tiered Lockout: Each time a player kills a boss, they gain a debuff, which decays 1 week later. New debuffs do not refresh existing debuff's timers. At the start of each Raid Boss attempt, the player with the most debuffs determines the tier of challenge. This allows any given group the chance to kill the Raid Boss multiple times per week, but would come at a sharp increase in difficulty tier, which adds some effect (e.g. cleave damage, taunt immunity, or aoe mana drain) and is a form of stepped scaling. Killing the Raid Boss two (or three) times per week requires a kill at tier 1 (or 2). The Raid Boss will still balance out at being killed 7 times per week, but the top groups can get multiple kills per week by accepting a significantly steeper challenge. The rewards for kills at higher tiers could also change, rewarding groups who are significantly stronger than their competition. A safety net could be put in place where tier 3 introduces instant death, in order to prevent abuse/farming, effectively creating a cap of 3 kills per week.
I believe that the Soft Tiered Lockout approach would be better, but would come at the cost of implementing individual tier mechanics for each Raid Boss. Both systems would function to increase the challenge of Raid Bosses based on the community’s abilities. This would be an inherent counter to mudflation (stat inflation as players collect better gear), but also does not devalue the collecting of better gear.
Downsides:
This system ceases to balance if too few guilds are in play, at which point it relies entirely on initial balancing. At its worst, this system functions like the status quo of current MMO Raid Bosses, which relies on the developer’s ability to balance content.
This would not have an equal balance on servers with different populations. A server with a lower or less competitive raiding scene would result in weaker Raid Bosses than their higher population or more competitive server counterparts. However, the numbers involved (like kills per week threshhold) could be adjusted based on server population metrics in order to balance this out.
Weaker guilds must wait until the kills per week drops below 5 for enough weeks that it drops into their ability range. Some may see this as inhibiting the enjoyment of the more casual guilds, but would not prevent the weaker guilds from attempting the content.
TL;DR Version:
Raid bosses are most fun when you first down them. It would be great if their challenge scaled to match your server’s ability to kill them. Any time a Raid Boss is killed, it gets stronger generally, but over time the Raid Boss will weaken. Any time YOU kill a Raid Boss, it gets better at killing YOU, but this effect is also removed with time. If your goal is to kill the Raid Boss as much as possible to acquire loot quickly, then you have to compete against other groups in an ever-increasing challenge.
I Likw your Idea man, i would love to know that There is something out there that makes the bosses more difficult, another idea to fit in with this one is to make it to where raid bosses come back with a different set of abilities each tie so you can't use the same mechanic twice and except it to work you have to go through trial and error each time to see what it is that he is doing and counter work around it on in mid fight. that way your not fighting a raid boss and be like on guys every 12-20 seconds he's going to fea and cast a Frost AoE worth 400hp, simply by this they become easy regardless how much you buff the raid target simply becuase you just have to the same thing over and over gain just longer depending on how much harder he becomes.
Gawd said:pretty sure this would require instancing, which i am fairly sure devs have stated instancing will not be a thing. not to mention that while i agree with the thought that if a guild cant take down a raid boss its thier fault, that only applies if the stats of the boss and encounter mechanics are the same for everyone.
to me it would make much more sense for have 3 difficulty choices with better gear in each choice with the highest difficulty being one that is simply not intended to be beaten with the gear available from this expansion. which would let everyone have fun whenever they would be able to grab the mob.
I don't think it would require instancing, given that the devs have hinted at some mechanics that allow them to control raiding forces without the use of instancing. They haven't been super clear on the details of how such a system would work, but they definitely brought it up on the topic of zerging raid targets down. Take this with a grain of salt though, since there aren't any hard facts and my opinion is not that of a game developer, but just a player.
What you have suggested is a form stepped scaling, which is definitely a way to extend the length of the climb. Sabot also presented a similar suggestion based on this type of mechanic, but one would not have a choice of which step you land on. I would see stepped scaling as preferable to purely static, but I think an adaptive approach would still be best.
Fulton said:It would be interesting to see a system using an algorith that determines the quanitity of raiders, their average or mean level, the raid class composition(how many warriors, clerics, etc), the "presumed" damage output of the raid force, and then use that to determine the boss mobs abilities, fighting style, use of abilities, etc.
I think that this type of smart encouter adjusting to your raid comp is a great thing (they might already be looking into this), with one exception. I would imagine that a "presumed" damage output would be calculated based on gear level, which means that a developer would need to determine how the boss should scale based on gear, which is a daunting task. Developers already have a heck of a time trying to balance a static encounter, which is why I think that using a self-adjusting metric like a group's ability to kill the raid boss is best.
Thank you all for taking part in the discussion and you're really helping me reform my idea based on your input. I am adjusting the OP to include a new portion. This would be an "exemption" of sorts for weaker/newer guilds. I'm not saying that I 100% agree with exempting newer guilds from the scaling of difficulty, but this mechanic could achieve that goal.
Exemption mechanic variant:
Any group who is new to the boss is exempted from the difficulty scaling. If the top group has killed the boss 100 times, then your difficulty would scale relative to that total. At 0-20 kills your difficulty is the original difficulty level. At 20-40 kills you go from 0-100% scaled difficulty and any kills performed by a group in this range would not contribute to the 7 kills/week . Any group above 40 kills is considered to be "competitive" and would be included in the scaling mechanic as normal.
This would have the effect of letting weaker and slower guilds get up to 20% of the kill count of the top group before they experience the full difficulty. If it takes the top group 2.5 weeks to get 5 kills (kills at tier 1), then a smaller group could get a kill every 2.5 weeks without seeing their difficulty increase. This would allow them to have a "training period" where they get as many kills as they are able up to a certain rate.
The uber-guilds would still have their competition, the weaker/newer guilds would not be overburdened by difficulty, and any guilds working their way up the ladder would face a steadily increasing difficulty. At least that might be how it would work out.
I enjoy doing raid content over and over and did i say over? so i cant agree, but i can agree once a guild has pushed past content, they do not really go backwards because of the time sync it takes to re outfit raiders. Mostly for new members, which is very hard on our time together to push forward.
we will never learn from our past.
Amsai said: I don't agree with the OP idea. But I wouldn't mind more randomized combat. Maybe 1 fight the drag likes to spam AoE stuns but next time he never does but does do 3 x more Breath attacks. That kind of change I could get on board with but not scaling difficulty.
I think this is a much better solution. It still makes each fight more dynamic, while not getting into all the issues with scaling difficulty (of which there are many). I think it's safe to say that the mindset of something only being "fun" the first time and this constant need to be entertained by the devs in new and exciting ways is basically what led to the downfall of the MMO genre in the first place.
I personally don't mind grinding. I think most of us here that were raised on EQ are used to it and actually find it fun rather than monotonous. VR has said it's a necessary aspect of gaming because players are always gonna chew through content faster than they can produce it. That said, in my opinion, unless you run a raid with the same exact people on the same exact characters every time, it's almost always gonna be something new and interesting because of the team composition. And even if you exclusively raid with the same group every time, maybe one time your trash kiter misclicks at the wrong time and dies. Or maybe your tank DC's in the middle of the fight and aggro goes to hell. Those are just a few examples of how you always have to stay on your toes. Those are also the stories that stay with you the longest. Don't assume that you're just gonna be able to walk up to a boss in Pantheon and slaughter it on your first attempt without any problem. This isn't WoW. VR said it's going to be much more challenging than that. It'll probably take several attempts before you even begin to understand what the appropriate approach is, let alone have it so down pat that you barely have to think about it.
But again, I wouldn't mind seeing each boss have several different fight "profiles," where one is loaded at random when the boss spawns. That profile determines how that boss is going to behave until it dies. Each profile is comprised of a different set of abilities, tells, summons, movement patterns, etc. That is a simple way to keep the fights engaging, without putting them out of reach or making it feel like the same old chore. But I kind of like the feeling of repeating something so many times that I feel like I have mastered it and know it inside and out. That's not boring. That's rewarding. All depends on how you look at it :)
Perhaps that could tie in nicely with the mob behavior and dispositions feature. So that even a Raid boss might act/react differetly to certain situations, atmospheres or Class dispersion of the raid?
Mage heavy? Better bring cure silence potions.
Thunderstorm? Prepare for Lightning damage to be 2x more potent.
Healer going nuts on heals? Raid boss spawns adds that target to kill healers only till all healers are dead or all adds are destroyed (evil)
Amsai said:Perhaps that could tie in nicely with the mob behavior and dispositions feature. So that even a Raid boss might act/react differetly to certain situations, atmospheres or Class dispersion of the raid?
Mage heavy? Better bring cure silence potions.
Thunderstorm? Prepare for Lightning damage to be 2x more potent.
Healer going nuts on heals? Raid boss spawns adds that target to kill healers only till all healers are dead or all adds are destroyed (evil)
I think the technology of AI has come far enough to make mobs adaptable and clever like this. Hopefully VR has the resources to do this because it would be so worth it. I know EQN attempted to, but it's much easier said than done. Anyway, It's crucial to remember that giving a boss more HP or making them hit harder IS NOT the same as making it more difficult. I cannot emphasize this enough. Almost every game makes this mistake. This only makes it more time-consuming, as well as ostracizes players that do not have enough time in the day to grind out adequate gear. And I'm afraid this is what the OP had in mind, unless I really misunderstood.
Rather, having to actually "outsmart" the boss rewards the skilled players, instead of just those that have the best gear. Of course, gear is still really important. But the key differentiator is a mob's ability to modify their behavior to counter the actions of the group. That's the real challenge. That also solves the problem of raids being exactly the same every run. Stats need not be "scaled" (almost a swear word in MMOs as far as I'm concerned).
Just make open world boss and an instanced version, like on phinnigel(eq) atm. Instance version could be "leveled" up by buying and handing in a token to make him stronger, which would in turn make the loot better. This would be a great plat sink and solve the problem of it being stale.
Each "tier" would add a new mechanic and would only be reachable by beating the previous tier.
Ainadak said:Notes: Reading the portions around bolded terms will carry you through the main message. All numbers and timespans have been chosen to produce an example situation and should not be considered as set in stone. Also, this type of mechanic would not have to be applied to all Raid Bosses uniformly and could be used sparingly if diversity is preferred. There is also a TL;DR version at the bottom.
I love learning new raid mechanics and developing strategies, but I’m not a fan of the repetitious slog through old content. It is inevitable that static content will become easier once you find a solution and improve. This leads to every boss having a climax in fun factor: when you first down the boss. You will continue to improve, but poor ole’ Supreme Dragon Overlord somehow becomes a pushover in a matter of weeks. In order to remedy this, we can adopt solutions that already exist in the gaming world. Why not move away from static challenge Raid Bosses in MMOs? Let’s look at some analogous gameplay situations to get an idea of how other games maintain their challenge.
Continual Scaling: Tetris employs a tried and true scheme where your task becomes increasingly more difficult as you progress and you are rewarded for success. Your experienced level of challenge is scaled to your ability to succeed.
Stepped Scaling: This is like increasing the AI difficulty in Starcraft or really any game with bot opponents. This provides an increased challenge each time the difficulty is changed, but just as before you will eventually outgrow the competition.
Comparative Scaling: Think of how people compete with single player games like Tetris. Each player challenges themselves to do better than another player and they take turns trying. Their challenge bar is determined by the other player’s performance and competition will drive each player to improve.
Direct PvP Scaling: The opposition can learn from your behaviors because they are also a person. This provides the highest challenge until seriously intense levels of AI are developed.
Continual scaling generally works best for “play until you fail” and PvP has myriad issues when combined into PvE content. The Pantheon devs have hinted at smarter enemies than we have previously seen, but any static AI will eventually be overpowered by the players, since we are intelligent and can truly learn. As a result, I am suggesting an approach that utilizes comparative scaling.
The goals that I have set for this mechanic are as follows:
Increase Raid Boss challenge: Keeps the challenge-seeking population happy.
Set limits on server and group gear collection: Extends the longevity of the relevance of raiding content.
Introduce variability: Raiding is less easily combat log data-mined and reverse engineered if the challenge is scaled.
What triggers can we use to enact a scaling mechanic in a traditional MMO?
Your kills of the Raid Boss: Appropriately determines how challenging content is to you.
Other’s kills of the Raid Boss: Appropriately determines how challenging content is to others.
Kills on other Raid Bosses: Can result in the weaker bosses being killed, pushing the hardest out of reach.
Deaths/wipes against the Raid Boss: Can be reproduced at will to intentionally affect the mechanic.
DPS/HPS/Gear: Can be modified by the player to intentionally affect the mechanic.
Using kills of the Raid Boss, we can introduce mechanics that would scale the difficulty of the Raid Boss to the success of your group and others on your server.
Raid Boss’ strength adjustment: If a Raid Boss is killed more than 7 times per week, each additional kill increases the Raid Boss' strength by some small margin. If the boss is killed less than 5 times in a week, then its strength is reduced. The measure of “strength” would be determined on a case by case basis and would work best on non-gear related checks (e.g. interrupt time window, missed mechanic penalty, or increased mechanic frequency). This would result in a comparative scaling method of increasing Raid Boss difficulty, since you are competing against other groups. The details could be hidden from the player to introduce a mystery factor.
Exemption mechanic variant: Any group who is new to the boss is exempted from the difficulty scaling. If the top group has killed the boss 100 times, then your difficulty would scale relative to that total. At 0-20 kills your difficulty is the original difficulty level. At 20-40 kills you go from 0-100% scaled difficulty and any kills performed by a group in this range would not contribute to the 7 kills/week . Any group above 40 kills is considered to be "competitive" and would be included in the scaling mechanic as normal.
This would have the effect of letting weaker and slower guilds get up to 20% of the kill count of the top group before they experience the full difficulty. If it takes the top group 2.5 weeks to get 5 kills, then a smaller group could get a kill every 2.5 weeks without seeing their difficulty increase. This would allow them to have a "training period" where they get as many kills as they are able up to a certain rate.
Player’s strength vs. Raid Boss: If this mechanic is implemented alone, then the top group would repeatedly farm the Raid Boss and drive its strength up out of reach of other groups. In order to prevent this, it must be paired with a player-level mechanic to inhibit farming. This could be accomplished by one of these two mechanics (or something similar):
Simple Timed Lockout: Each player is locked out for one week after killing the Raid Boss. This means that 7 unique groups will be able to get a kill each week before the strength is scaled up. This will have the effect of scaling the Raid Boss’s strength to match the ability of the 8th strongest group.
Soft Tiered Lockout: Each time a player kills a boss, they gain a debuff, which decays 1 week later. New debuffs do not refresh existing debuff's timers. At the start of each Raid Boss attempt, the player with the most debuffs determines the tier of challenge. This allows any given group the chance to kill the Raid Boss multiple times per week, but would come at a sharp increase in difficulty tier, which adds some effect (e.g. cleave damage, taunt immunity, or aoe mana drain) and is a form of stepped scaling. Killing the Raid Boss two (or three) times per week requires a kill at tier 1 (or 2). The Raid Boss will still balance out at being killed 7 times per week, but the top groups can get multiple kills per week by accepting a significantly steeper challenge. The rewards for kills at higher tiers could also change, rewarding groups who are significantly stronger than their competition. A safety net could be put in place where tier 3 introduces instant death, in order to prevent abuse/farming, effectively creating a cap of 3 kills per week.
I believe that the Soft Tiered Lockout approach would be better, but would come at the cost of implementing individual tier mechanics for each Raid Boss. Both systems would function to increase the challenge of Raid Bosses based on the community’s abilities. This would be an inherent counter to mudflation (stat inflation as players collect better gear), but also does not devalue the collecting of better gear.
Downsides:
This system ceases to balance if too few guilds are in play, at which point it relies entirely on initial balancing. At its worst, this system functions like the status quo of current MMO Raid Bosses, which relies on the developer’s ability to balance content.
This would not have an equal balance on servers with different populations. A server with a lower or less competitive raiding scene would result in weaker Raid Bosses than their higher population or more competitive server counterparts. However, the numbers involved (like kills per week threshhold) could be adjusted based on server population metrics in order to balance this out.
Weaker guilds must wait until the kills per week drops below 5 for enough weeks that it drops into their ability range. Some may see this as inhibiting the enjoyment of the more casual guilds, but would not prevent the weaker guilds from attempting the content.
TL;DR Version:
Raid bosses are most fun when you first down them. It would be great if their challenge scaled to match your server’s ability to kill them. Any time a Raid Boss is killed, it gets stronger generally, but over time the Raid Boss will weaken. Any time YOU kill a Raid Boss, it gets better at killing YOU, but this effect is also removed with time. If your goal is to kill the Raid Boss as much as possible to acquire loot quickly, then you have to compete against other groups in an ever-increasing challenge.
I want to preface this by saying that this is a great read and that I appreciate all the effort you put into compiling this. You bring up some great and novel ideas that I think could help to push the depth of this or some other game.
That being said, your approach is one that could definitely drive up the difficulty of encounters but it doesn't really solve the problem of the climax in fun factor. Increasing difficulty does not neccessarily translate to an increase in fun and, if I'm being honest, there are scenarios that could actually make encounters less enjoyable by adopting one of these approaches. Aside from making balancing an incredibly taxing job for developers (stepping-up difficulty would require testing in each phase instead of just one) there is also the question of whether or not a step in difficulty is actually going to make things more fun or just more tedious/inconvenient. Also, for the masochists like myself who want to do everything on 'hard-mode', any step down in difficulty could diminish the fun factor especially if loot tables are also affected.
The biggest fundamental problem, in my opinion, is that raid content represents perhaps the worst ratio of net-gain vs time invested. Taking 40 people to a raid and getting 2-3 items is just insanely inefficient and REQUIRES you to continuously slog through old content that is no longer enjoyable. I'm not saying that dragons should be loot pinatas but raiding guilds so often get stuck only doing raid content because they have to. Imagine if you only had to kill a target 2, 3, 5 times to get an item you need instead of 25+ times. Making it so raiders do not have to kill the same targets over and over and over again is the only real way to end the slog and it would help alleviate other problems as well such as guilds monopolizing content and making players explore other aspects of the game outside of raiding.
The other issue I see is one that no one really questions but perhaps we should. Why is ALL of the best gear earned from raid content in MMO's? This to me is a fundamental problem because it creates a funnel and intentionally pulls a large number of people, some of whom don't even like raid content but are drawn by the allure of the gear, into a very small percentage of the game world. Why can't the best available chest piece for my class drop from 5-man content? Why can't the best bracer for my class come from a quest? If your game is diverse and well thought out, there is no reason why raiding should be the only place to go to get your items. Some people argue that raiding is harder or more time consuming than other content and should therefore give a better reward, but this doesn't have to be the case. In fact, in classic Everquest, raiding was probably one of the easier things in the game to do. The only real challenge was being awake when the mob spawned... Trio'ing a protector of Zek was a bigger challenge than most raids. Killing the Chardok Royals with 6 people was a greater challenge and WAY more time consuming. There are plenty of reasons and ways to avoid funneling a huge portion of your population into raiding and this allows for people to explore more of your game and keep things fresh.
I'm hopeful that the Dev's are thinking the same way as they have stated that this game will be primarily group based. Raids are great and I will be partaking in that scene but there is a better way to design this aspect of the game that doesn't require insane man hours for tiny gains. Unless of course having thousands of people addicted to a losing lottery on a few targets for months and years is core to your game design. I'd like to think we're past that stage.
Bazgrim said:I think the technology of AI has come far enough to make mobs adaptable and clever like this. Hopefully VR has the resources to do this because it would be so worth it. I know EQN attempted to, but it's much easier said than done. Anyway, It's crucial to remember that giving a boss more HP or making them hit harder IS NOT the same as making it more difficult. I cannot emphasize this enough. Almost every game makes this mistake. This only makes it more time-consuming, as well as ostracizes players that do not have enough time in the day to grind out adequate gear. And I'm afraid this is what the OP had in mind, unless I really misunderstood.
Rather, having to actually "outsmart" the boss rewards the skilled players, instead of just those that have the best gear. Of course, gear is still really important. But the key differentiator is a mob's ability to modify their behavior to counter the actions of the group. That's the real challenge. That also solves the problem of raids being exactly the same every run. Stats need not be "scaled" (almost a swear word in MMOs as far as I'm concerned).
AI has come a long way and I too think it would be possible to create truely clever mobs for players to battle. However, AI is not neatly packaged up in an API somewhere for use in an MMO. Creating a single AI, let alone many to work with various mob types, can be a complete project unto itself.
For example see Watson, it took from 2003 to 2010, by a mid sized team focused soley on this one task, to be able to create the moment you see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFR3lOm_xhE
Now I believe that a MOB based AI would likely be much simpler to create, but it goes to illustrate the complexities involved in developing/inventing such technology into systems.
Now there are cloud based APIs that would aid significantly in the development effort; however using those could incure significant costs. Not something you want to do when these APIs would likely incure a significant amount of usage and at no real gain to their bottom line. Yes, if your a buisness that wants to capitalize on your data to make better decisions, or you'r offsetting the usage with advertising in some way, this may be a good idea for you.
And there are open source projects that would also aid in creating the intial frameworks required to begin development of such a system(s). Perhaps when the Open AI guys move forward more there will less reason not to use true AI in MMO systems. But as you can see from the Open AI site they are pretty much still inventing the technology.
Yes we have Watson, Siri and Cortana but those are all very focused, highly complex systems created by companies with big money and large teams.
All that said, I really do want to see this type of technology used in MMOs. I think it would truely be the next big thing.
At the same time I can understand why they are not used like we might expect in 2016.
So, while I think we may see it in our life times, maybe soon even, I would rather have a well scripted encounter and a classic MMO experience sooner rather than later.
Wow kinda sorta off topic..oops.
But more to the topic, I like where the OP is coming from, the spirit of the post. It would be good to allow as many as possible to access raid level content, while at the same time keeping the competition component in place for the higher end guilds.
This competition is critical for keeping a loyal player base and at the same time is detrimental to aquiring new long term players. If spawn times were very short, but everyone could only kill the mob once per day then everyone would have access to the content. At the same time, if your guild has put a mob on farm status it should scale up so your competing with other guilds that are also on farm status.
Good post OP. It will be interesting to see how VR actually handles this issue.
Deadshade said:Vandraad said:
How difficult any encounter, or any content for that matter, may be should be the same for everyone.
This is just your opinion that not everybody agees with .
From my point of view the idea of scaling proposed by the OP is certainly better than the primitive "same difficulty for everybody" .
So you're saying that if another guild went up against a raid boss for the first time and they report that the hardest it hit their warrior was for 1,000 points of damage, with double hits, no quad, no enrage. Your guild steps up for their first shot it it only to see your warrior gets one-shot because the mob hits for 5,000, quad hits, and enrages plus has AoE attacks, silence and whatnot. You would want that? What if that happened every time your guild went after any target, that it was so difficult that even with the best gear available your guild wipes every time?
My point is that when you step up to the batters box for the first time, the difficulty is the same for you as it was for everyone else their first time.
Let us also be very clear and admit that 'evolving' content or content that adjusts such as the OP desires will not adversely affect the front line guilds one bit. They will handle such changes far far easier than those guilds who are well behind them. Some guilds only progress by reading spoilers or following strategies learned by others. Those guilds will be punished severely for content variability that the OP wants. And you know what? I'm perfectly fine with that because that means less competition for content for me and my guild. Why I'm against it is because for the overall health of the game the ideas presented by the OP are not in the game's best interest.
A Little off topic here but i also don't want to see a namer somewhere in a random dungeon thats looked like a practice run at a raid encounter that seems to be a thing WoW liked to do and made it to where when you finally got to the raid boss you alrdy knew how to fight half the fight due to fighting him.
Vandraad said:Deadshade said:Vandraad said:
How difficult any encounter, or any content for that matter, may be should be the same for everyone.
This is just your opinion that not everybody agees with .
From my point of view the idea of scaling proposed by the OP is certainly better than the primitive "same difficulty for everybody" .
So you're saying that if another guild went up against a raid boss for the first time and they report that the hardest it hit their warrior was for 1,000 points of damage, with double hits, no quad, no enrage. Your guild steps up for their first shot it it only to see your warrior gets one-shot because the mob hits for 5,000, quad hits, and enrages plus has AoE attacks, silence and whatnot. You would want that? What if that happened every time your guild went after any target, that it was so difficult that even with the best gear available your guild wipes every time?
My point is that when you step up to the batters box for the first time, the difficulty is the same for you as it was for everyone else their first time.
Let us also be very clear and admit that 'evolving' content or content that adjusts such as the OP desires will not adversely affect the front line guilds one bit. They will handle such changes far far easier than those guilds who are well behind them. Some guilds only progress by reading spoilers or following strategies learned by others. Those guilds will be punished severely for content variability that the OP wants. And you know what? I'm perfectly fine with that because that means less competition for content for me and my guild. Why I'm against it is because for the overall health of the game the ideas presented by the OP are not in the game's best interest.
This is a Va;id point maybe instead of scaling in difficulty, you merely make slight adjustments to his mechanic, to keep everyone entertained, like a said above maybe one time he fears and the next time he doesn't but has a different aoe of some sort, with a silence/mana drain ability anything to make it to where everyone has to stay on there toes and be like i wonder what he has in store for us now, i believe merely making his mechanic not static would be enough of a challenge for guilds to keep enterain, oh and no chaninging his appearance to give hints in what he might be doing either btw lol.
What if we were to have 100+ different raid mobs instead? All with different, interesting loot.
This might be easier to implement than some of the more complex ideas here.
I saw some other people briefly mention it.
There are multiple reasons why this idea shouldn't be implemented, but likely the biggest of all is:
Difficulty of encounter up with loot staying the same = pissed raid group. The entire concept of killing a raid boss, getting them to farm status and dishing out gear is that you've conquered that encounter.
This is necessary to get through raid content faster. What used to take 3 days of raiding cant be accomplished in 2 1/2, and then just 2, and then maybe less than 2.
Wiping to 'old content' or bosses on farm status is incredibly frustrating. Especially if you're ONLY doing this boss because 3 people could use a drop. Normally, this boss is easy, but since you're group has killed him 40 times, he is now quite a bit stronger, but his loot hasn't scaled with the difficulty. You're now spending time trying to kill something that you don't care about for items that aren't worth the difficulty of the encounter.
@Lucid
You asked: "The other issue I see is one that no one really questions but perhaps we should. Why is ALL of the best gear earned from raid content in MMO's?"
Answer: This is not 100% correct, but it is mostly correct. The answer is because the gear that is the most challenging to obtain should provide the best stats. Pretty straightforward. Item scaleing/comparison isn't always on point. Sometimes there are items very hard to get but their power is underwhelming, and sometimes bosses and easier than they should be for the gear they drop. Either way, getting 6-39 additional people together to conquer an encounter needs to have a higher reward than someone who solo crafted an item. The exception being items that are crafted from drops of raid bosses. Those should be on par or a little better considering the player needs to be skilled which takes time and effort and the material(s) are hard to obtain.
Senthin said:I saw some other people briefly mention it.
There are multiple reasons why this idea shouldn't be implemented, but likely the biggest of all is:
Difficulty of encounter up with loot staying the same = pissed raid group. The entire concept of killing a raid boss, getting them to farm status and dishing out gear is that you've conquered that encounter.
This is necessary to get through raid content faster. What used to take 3 days of raiding cant be accomplished in 2 1/2, and then just 2, and then maybe less than 2.
Wiping to 'old content' or bosses on farm status is incredibly frustrating. Especially if you're ONLY doing this boss because 3 people could use a drop. Normally, this boss is easy, but since you're group has killed him 40 times, he is now quite a bit stronger, but his loot hasn't scaled with the difficulty. You're now spending time trying to kill something that you don't care about for items that aren't worth the difficulty of the encounter.
@Lucid
You asked: "The other issue I see is one that no one really questions but perhaps we should. Why is ALL of the best gear earned from raid content in MMO's?"
Answer: This is not 100% correct, but it is mostly correct. The answer is because the gear that is the most challenging to obtain should provide the best stats. Pretty straightforward. Item scaleing/comparison isn't always on point. Sometimes there are items very hard to get but their power is underwhelming, and sometimes bosses and easier than they should be for the gear they drop. Either way, getting 6-39 additional people together to conquer an encounter needs to have a higher reward than someone who solo crafted an item. The exception being items that are crafted from drops of raid bosses. Those should be on par or a little better considering the player needs to be skilled which takes time and effort and the material(s) are hard to obtain.
I think this sums it up nicely.
I do see an argument for not having raids be the sole focal point of the "end game." I think this is a mentality that we can mostly blame on WoW and has ended up being overall bad for the MMO genre. I think it would interesting and totally possible to have some 6-man content that is extremely difficult (on par with raids) simply because you don't have as many people, resources, dps, etc. And that content should of course be very rewarding. But there is just something truly epic about raids that is a must in any MMO. That feeling of being part of something BIG and heroic. Zooming out your camera and seeing dozens of people charging head first at a massive dragon. You're with all your friends and that's where the best memories come from.