Tanix said:I would not like to see game play aspects tethered to the player trade market as it always tends to end up in abuses and gimmicks, especially when the plat sellers get involved. I think every requirement in play should be achieved through play specifically and not allowed for advantage using the player trade market.
I can definitely see your point. Sometimes tying things to the market is not a good solution. I'd then just amend my suggestion to make the specific reagent you need to be NoDrop.
Nephele said:@Iksar - are you just basing this on how peridot-buffs worked in EQ? Or is there more to it than that? Not questioning your opinion, just trying to better understand the scenario that you see playing out here. :)
That's certainly a big part of it. It was pay up or settle for the lesser HP buff, though in this case it would be "pay up (+extra on top) or have fun walkin." I know "feels" aren't the best argument but it really doesn't feel good having unique parts of a class locked behind expensive/rare/tedious gates, especially ones that have to be repeated over and over just to get minimal value. The idea of a port is saving X amount of time that would be spent traveling, that saved time is pointless if you have to spend much time trying to farm a reagent.
Tanix said:The problem with mounts is they become a one time solution for all. The very essence of mounts is a class circumvention requirement in play. Think of it in the same way that PoP invalidated ports from specific classes, so would mounts invalidate run buffs from every class.
Unless run speed buffs stack with mount speed.
Iksar said:The idea of a port is saving X amount of time that would be spent traveling, that saved time is pointless if you have to spend much time trying to farm a reagent.
I get what you're saying here but I look at it a little differently. By having the reagent cost it allows players to "bank time" in a way. In other words, you can spend your free-time farming these reagents when you don't have anything more important going on. If you do have something important going on, and there is a sense of urgency to get somewhere, you can then leverage the resource that you spent time acquiring earlier on. I think it's a pretty good trade-off.
oneADseven said:I get what you're saying here but I look at it a little differently. By having the reagent cost it allows players to "bank time" in a way. In other words, you can spend your free-time farming these reagents when you don't have anything more important going on. If you do have something important going on, and there is a sense of urgency to get somewhere, you can then leverage the resource that you spent time acquiring earlier on. I think it's a pretty good trade-off.
If it went that route then I would hope it applies across the board and not only have wizard/druid singled out. That is to say if their unique time saving class utility features require expensive or rare farmed reagents then do that for all the time saving spells in the game, most namely: resurrection. Players are likely to save far more play time over the course of their stay in Pantheon via resurrection than they will being ported around, so why not make that a chore to perform as well? Would suck for druid though, having to farm reagents for TP & resurrect but eh oh well.
These things wouldn't really go well with the majority of players, I wouldn't think. They also go against building community/co-operation/teamwork and helping one another, when you add a non-insignificant cost to help you greatly reduce incentive to do so without recompense.
Iksar said:
Tanix said:The problem with mounts is they become a one time solution for all. The very essence of mounts is a class circumvention requirement in play. Think of it in the same way that PoP invalidated ports from specific classes, so would mounts invalidate run buffs from every class.
Unless run speed buffs stack with mount speed.
Which would only hasten the demise of travel as an obstacle.
Tanix said:Iksar said:
Tanix said:The problem with mounts is they become a one time solution for all. The very essence of mounts is a class circumvention requirement in play. Think of it in the same way that PoP invalidated ports from specific classes, so would mounts invalidate run buffs from every class.
Unless run speed buffs stack with mount speed.
Which would only hasten the demise of travel as an obstacle.
Yep. It's a big time NO for me on mounts.
I suppose you are right. Mounts are a big NO for me as well.
#communitymatters #makenightmatteragain #riskvsreward
How do mounts benefit a game like this?
A lot of people simply enjoy having and even collecting mounts. Even where there is no practical benefit to them - just the cosmetics. After all you can only ride one at a time. Other things being equal, giving players something they enjoy helps a game even if there is no especially logical reason that they *should* enjoy it.
While most of us do not look to encourage a speed-race to high level - most of us on the other hand do want players encouraged to stick to the game month after month after month - which is encouraged by giving them a goal to strive for. One goal can be an impressive looking mount - maybe even tailored to the class or race and unique to it. Giving an incentive to subscribe long enough to get a character of a different class or race to mount level.
I think an equally important question is how does VR keep mounts from *hurting* a game like this. Two things come to mind.
The paradigm of getting mounts as a way of racing around the world very rapidly is not written in stone or dictated by the Gods. Mounts can be impressive and desirable to many players even if they only give a small speed increase. Maybe not more than any class can give with a temporary buff. Maybe even a tiny bit less so the class buff is always beneficial.
After all, if running around with SoW or the like doesn't wreck the game why should riding around at the same speed with SoH (speed of the horse) wreck it. In fact to the question of will this make travel too quick or easy there are many that will say ...neigh!!
On mounts -
Immersion-wise, ground mounts typically make sense. I'm going to use EQ's horses and Vanguard's horses as a frame of reference here, because when I envision mounts for Pantheon, I think of something similar to that (though they don't necessarily need to be horses in all places - Skar, for example, could have giant lizard mounts). So, from a pure immersion/fiction perspective, I don't see a problem with ground mounts.
I think the challenge with mounts is in four areas:
1) If you have them, you need to try to keep them hard to obtain and special over time, so that the players that have them appreciate them. This is hard to do. Not that I would condone a flying mount in Pantheon, but one of the things Vanguard did right with its flying mounts was make them very hard to get. The gryphon quest was nearly equivalent to an EQ epic weapon quest (although it didn't include a raid mob). The wyvern mount was an actual raid drop. So, I see no reason why ground mounts - especially fancy/non-standard ground mounts, shouldn't require a similar level of effort in Pantheon to obtain.
2) You can't allow the mount to work as a way to routinely bypass travel hazards by running through monsters. This means there probably needs to be an AI layer to most monsters where if they see a player on a mount, they attack the mount. A long time ago when Brad talked about what they wanted to do with the pet system, there was a pet type that was obviously meant to represent mounts, and the implication was that they could set it up so that the mount could be hurt and/or killed if the player wasn't careful. I'm ok with allowing someone to ride their horse through a crowd of orcs and out the other side to escape, if it means that the horse is probably not going to survive very long afterwards and then that player will have to go buy/obtain a new horse.
3) You have to ensure that the benefits of having a mount don't erode player interdependence. If mounts grant a speed boost, then that speed boost shouldn't eclipse the benefit of obtaining a run speed buff from another player. There's two sides to that however - you can't use the existence of mounts as an excuse to overpower speed-boosting spells, either.
4) The zones themselves need to be truly big enough to support mounted travel. If you can cross a zone in 5 minutes on foot without a run speed buff, it really doesn't make sense to have mounts. On the other hand, if crossing on foot at normal runspeed takes 20 minutes, and buffed runspeed takes 14 minutes.... then maybe there's a place for mounts to fit there too.
If #4 was not an issue, and I were designing a mount system for Pantheon I think this is what I would do:
1) Different primary mount types by continent - Kingsreach might have traditional horses, Reignfall giant lizards, etc.
2) Mounts take an involved, epic-style quest to initially obtain - because they are rare and special. Replacement mounts would cost a lot of money.
3) Mounts would have hit points and armor values and can be killed. NPCs in overworld zones would have an AI layer where they would likely attack the mount if they encounter a mounted adventurer.
4) Mounts have a base speed bonus roughly equivalent to first-tier speed buffs. Mounts also have endurance and can sprint/gallop for short periods of time, but expend that endurance by trotting or galloping. If your mount ran completely out of endurance, it would need to walk or rest for a while (and be fed) in order to recover. Players have a riding skill that slightly influences the speed and rate of endurance drain.
5) Mounts gain experience over time (very slowly) as they are ridden and can gain levels. When a mount gains a level, it gains potential that can be directed to either endurance, hit points, or carrying capacity through training.
6) Mounts have carrying capacity which can be used for either saddlebags (bag space) or for armor. The player gets to decide what ratio of bag space to armor they want but there is always the trade-off. Players who routinely ride their mounts off the beaten path may want the armor to make it less likely that their mount will be killed and eaten by monsters. Players who tend to stick to the normally-safe roads could potentially go with less armor and allow their mount to carry more.
I personally feel pretty comfortable with the above as a possible implementation because it helps insure that mounts are rare and special, that they are valued and useful, and it makes players less likely to routinely run them through crowds of monsters. I am quite sure that some of you will say it doesn't go far enough and the game shouldn't have mounts and that's totally cool for you to have those opinions. My point in posting this was to logically think through how to solve or mitigate many of the problems that people have pointed out. Not to convince anyone who is philosophically opposed to mounts to change their thinking. Because really, trying to get anyone to change their view on a philosophical topic is a lost cause in this community, and we all hopefully have better things to do with our time.
dorotea said:How do mounts benefit a game like this?
A lot of people simply enjoy having and even collecting mounts. Even where there is no practical benefit to them - just the cosmetics. After all you can only ride one at a time. Other things being equal, giving players something they enjoy helps a game even if there is no especially logical reason that they *should* enjoy it.
While most of us do not look to encourage a speed-race to high level - most of us on the other hand do want players encouraged to stick to the game month after month after month - which is encouraged by giving them a goal to strive for. One goal can be an impressive looking mount - maybe even tailored to the class or race and unique to it. Giving an incentive to subscribe long enough to get a character of a different class or race to mount level.
I think an equally important question is how does VR keep mounts from *hurting* a game like this. Two things come to mind.
The paradigm of getting mounts as a way of racing around the world very rapidly is not written in stone or dictated by the Gods. Mounts can be impressive and desirable to many players even if they only give a small speed increase. Maybe not more than any class can give with a temporary buff. Maybe even a tiny bit less so the class buff is always beneficial.
After all, if running around with SoW or the like doesn't wreck the game why should riding around at the same speed with SoH (speed of the horse) wreck it. In fact to the question of will this make travel too quick or easy there are many that will say ...neigh!!
It is about ease of access and group reliance. Having certain classes with the abilities to cast a temporary speed increase builds reliance, community interaction and pro/con in class selection. Mounts typically are for "everyone" and they remove that game play aspect. You don't want to eliminate the obstacle of travel, nor do you want to normalize a given bonus. In the case of mounts, if eveyrone has one, you might as well make that the default run speed because everyone now has that speed which then invalidates the benefit of classes who uniquely had it (ie you breakdown the community/group interaction component).
Now if you want to have mounts with no speed increases, and some "unique" benefits, I guess that is fine, but again... once everyone has it, you are back in the same boat. If you are going to allow some limited self speed items, they must be very rare so that it is limited in play AND the benefits of such should not challenge that of the classes who provide speed spells. The players should always wish to seek that which another class provides (building group interaction). The less self reliance in the game, the better off it will be. In EQ, there were some speed boots called "J-Boots". Initally these dropped in a dungeon called Najena, and due to the very powerful benefit of these speed boots, the dungeon was perma camped by high level players (the boots while not providing equal to SoW speed, did provide a noticable boost which was coveted by classes who did not have access to SoW or similar abilities). The solution then was place the reward in a very long and drawn out quest hidden behind numerous rare spawns and progressions.
This greatly reduced the influx of the item, keeping the reward special and as I said, because its speed was still considerably slower to that of SoW, it was not something people used "instead" of seeking a SoW.
As for people collecting mounts and that type of play, I honestly think that a lot of that in modern games is a gimmick to try and keep people busy because the content is lacking. I think that if you build a very detailed and long term progression system, balanced properly for risk vs reweard, you won't need to gimmick the players with worthless digital collectables as they will be busy with game play, often spending time collecting the unqiue items of use throughout the world.
I just don't think it is important to game play, though I understand why some people like it, I just personally think due to limited resources, effort is spent better in places where it has a much larger return in my opinion. /shrug
Well the solutions for mounts and skipping area's is pretty easy. When attacked you are forced to dismount, you can't make them invisible or silent so riding them through a zone in hopes of skipping it is pretty much out of the question. A horse would let you ride through town faster and area's without any hostiles but other then that their just cool to have.
Don't be like other games where when you dismount, your horse disappears. And you can't just call your horse from across the world. It's wither there with you or it is not.
You have to tie it up outside of dungeons/castles, and you risk it being attacked while your away.
You need to feed and water your horse, this includes while your away.
You need to pay a stable hand to care for it when you leave it in town.
Make it so you really don't want to bring your horse with you every time you go somewhere, and reserve it for those longer travel routes.
You horse would get you between cities, town, villages, but you would set out on foot from that location to adventure.
All the crazy amount of mounts you see in game stores like ESO and Rift are there for the micro-transactions. Mounts, XP potions, Health regen potions, all micro-transactions designed to push me away from the game ASAP.
Better to just charge me the monthly fee and give me unique classes.
DracoKalen said:Well the solutions for mounts and skipping area's is pretty easy. When attacked you are forced to dismount, you can't make them invisible or silent so riding them through a zone in hopes of skipping it is pretty much out of the question. A horse would let you ride through town faster and area's without any hostiles but other then that their just cool to have.
Didn't work in LoTRO, though LoTRO had leashing as well. So, people would just rush on through, risk the chance of dismount, run off the mob until it leashed back and then would mount again and ride on.
The other issue is that your solution only works if you massively populate the zones with mobs where travel requires you to fight through. This population method works fine in games that employee leashing for the very reason above, but in a game like EQ, which may not have leashing (mobs chase you to the zone), stacking mobs up thick throughout the zone doesn't work well. So, there will likely (and I think Brad even mentioned it once) be roads that are "relatively" safe in staying on them which means a mount would create the problems I have discussed.
Thing is, you don't want people riding through the content "faster" as a base concept. You want to have travel as an obstacle to which the players constantly struggle to overcome. This brings meaning to travel and also slows play in the process.
Personally I hear all of what you say.
I think there must be an element of investment of time to get across the world and make adventuring.....well....an adventure! It should take time to cross continents and travel vast distances. I think we all agree we want an immersive world and scale is a large part of that. Also bear in mind some zones may well take longer than "normal" to travel across due to the climate system. So I seriously hope we avoid the flying taxi like travel in many games as it totally removes the player from the world they are travelling in and breaks the immersion. I don't see why it should take much less than an hour to cross a continent - maybe more.
However. As time goes by and players become more powerful and invested in the game, then the wonder of travel will become more of a burden and just a time sink and not a consequence of adventuring through Terminus. At this point I think teleports and such like should reduce the time burden on experienced players. And the way I think it should be done is related to the level of the hero in question. There should be a drain on health/mana/something that means joining a Wizard or Druid to be teleported through the ether requires a minimum amount said resource depending on distance/time/planes travelled. Otherwise the teleport would be impossible for the lower level hero to make because they lack the stamina/focus/whatever to contribute to the communion with the Wizard and it cannot be made stable enough as a portal to travel through. Or it kills them outright - I'm fine with either :)
But I think something like this would create a limit on trivial travel for lower level heroes but potentially make it available as you progress through the world gaining power as a hero.
Just my thoughts.
Fulton said:Don't be like other games where when you dismount, your horse disappears. And you can't just call your horse from across the world. It's wither there with you or it is not.
You have to tie it up outside of dungeons/castles, and you risk it being attacked while your away.
You need to feed and water your horse, this includes while your away.
You need to pay a stable hand to care for it when you leave it in town.
Make it so you really don't want to bring your horse with you every time you go somewhere, and reserve it for those longer travel routes.
You horse would get you between cities, town, villages, but you would set out on foot from that location to adventure.
Interesting ideas, but you are trying to balance risk vs reward, choice and consequence and to be honest, I don't think a lot of people look at things this way, rather they look at these implementations along the lines of how fun they would be to have.
I agree though with what your saying, it is that in some cases we are fighting an uphill battle I think based on what people are looking for in the game.
Keep mount access locked until mid-high levels when more of the overworld threat has diminished, though still have common means for mobs to snare/dismount players.
No mounts in "dungeons" (even outdoor ones), additional overland zones could be made to exclude mount use as well.
Limit the speed buff a mount offers but let it stack with player buffs. Also: make mount handling more stiff so turning takes time unless the player slows down dramatically.
Make mount ownership require a not entirely insignificant recurring platinum fee.
Don't allow mounts to be "summoned" or global, that is to say where you leave your mount is where it stays. Something where after 10ish minutes of dismounting the mount will return to the nearest stable and remain at that specific stable until retreived and moved elsewhere. This would also add some extra thought for players when considering taking a teleport, the TP might save them time in the short term but gathering their mount and riding across however many zones to have their mount near them might end up saving more time in the long run.
Iksar said:Keep mount access locked until mid-high levels when more of the overworld threat has diminished, though still have common means for mobs to snare/dismount players.
If they design the content anything like it was in EQ, zones won't be linear progressions where simply gaining level invalidates them. There will be content mixed at numerous levels making the zones a threat regardless of your level. This make the dangers and importance of travel significant regardless of ones level. A high level player should view travel as an obstacle as well. The point is not to invalidate important game mechanics simply because someone hits a level cap.
Personally the time of travel should be depending of distance, accessability. The journey should be the focus not the distance or time of travel. I would love to have a journey take two hours of traveling with facinating things and places on the way then a 10 min run between hubs. Making traveling too easy also undermines the utility of wizard and druids abilities.
I loved meaningful travel in previous games - bards must explore, and out-of-the-way places make for interesting discoveries. If you are interested - check out this EQ blast from the past, I'm sure many have similar fond memories.
Provided mounts are difficult to come by and don't run too fast, I think they could be great trophies without ruining anything. The day I finally won my unicorn in Vanguard was a proud and wonderful day. I could travel a little faster, but not so much that "distance" was in any way hurt. True, it made traveling over land less of an obstacle, but no more than an epic weapon or piece of armor makes fighting mobs easier. What ruined traveling for me in Vanguard was the ability to teleport between continents, not the mounts.
Jabir said:Provided mounts are difficult to come by and don't run too fast, I think they could be great trophies without ruining anything. The day I finally won my unicorn in Vanguard was a proud and wonderful day. I could travel a little faster, but not so much that "distance" was in any way hurt. True, it made traveling over land less of an obstacle, but no more than an epic weapon or piece of armor makes fighting mobs easier. What ruined traveling for me in Vanguard was the ability to teleport between continents, not the mounts.
Only difference is that with power difference in mobs vs player power, all you need to do is add more poweful mobs, while in travel, you reach an apex of benefit in terms of speed and distance. That is, players speed is finite and you will reach a point where going faster is irrelevant (that or you increase the size of areas in new content in coorelation to your speed increases).
As I mentioned in a previous post, because content is going to be horizontal and layered in leveling obstacles, providing a linear increase in player speed directly has a negative result on travel as an obstacle in game play. If they aren't careful, they could invalidate travel as an obstacle in play, which has a subtle but large effect on many game play systems (leveling speed, content progression, gear population, player distribution, etc...). Having a linear increase in speed works fine in games where the content is "once and done" throway content and the player who has defeated it can pass through it quickly. This however does not deal with future content issues and the level of speed a player is able to bypass it.
I view mounts or any speed increasing ablity with extreme caution as it can make or brake important elements of a games "game play".