I'd be interested to hear "real" thoughts on City of Heroes / GW2 style raid scaling.
Instead of focusing on raids through the lens of the "fixed membership raiding guild". What about the more sandboxy concept of dynamically scaling encounters?
For those that don't know, in GW2 when a "raid target" spawns, any amount of players can participate in the event. No need for raidgroups, tagging, lockouts, or instancing. No raid blocking or killing targets just to prevent competetive guilds from keying. Just a threat to the world that every member of the world can chose to fight.
No matter how many people show up, the fight itself gains elements to match the incoming threat (more adds, requiring seige weaponry to break shields, etc...). Usually theres a bit of a call to arms serverwide once the zone starts "preparing for the arrival of the dragon" and zonewide Q&A before everyone engages. Where the system breaks down in GW2 is that there's no death penalty so zerg tactics work better than they should, and guilds grief the community by showing up to increase difficulty but not participating (raises the difficulty, but they don't care if they die so the server suffers). With a stiff death penalty both zerg and grief are addressed, but now you don't need instances or raids as a first class construct. Keep the main content accessible to 1-2 group dungeon crawls/camps while having big "community targets".
Code wise it's easier to implement (and protect from exploitation) dynamic scaling than it is to maintain all the locks, timers, and character metadata required for theme-parky lockouts. And the evils of instancing have been well discussed already.
vladrynne said:I'd be interested to hear "real" thoughts on City of Heroes / GW2 style raid scaling.
Instead of focusing on raids through the lens of the "fixed membership raiding guild". What about the more sandboxy concept of dynamically scaling encounters?
For those that don't know, in GW2 when a "raid target" spawns, any amount of players can participate in the event. No need for raidgroups, tagging, lockouts, or instancing. No raid blocking or killing targets just to prevent competetive guilds from keying. Just a threat to the world that every member of the world can chose to fight.
No matter how many people show up, the fight itself gains elements to match the incoming threat (more adds, requiring seige weaponry to break shields, etc...). Usually theres a bit of a call to arms serverwide once the zone starts "preparing for the arrival of the dragon" and zonewide Q&A before everyone engages. Where the system breaks down in GW2 is that there's no death penalty so zerg tactics work better than they should, and guilds grief the community by showing up to increase difficulty but not participating (raises the difficulty, but they don't care if they die so the server suffers). With a stiff death penalty both zerg and grief are addressed, but now you don't need instances or raids as a first class construct. Keep the main content accessible to 1-2 group dungeon crawls/camps while having big "community targets".
Code wise it's easier to implement (and protect from exploitation) dynamic scaling than it is to maintain all the locks, timers, and character metadata required for theme-parky lockouts. And the evils of instancing have been well discussed already.
And how are you going to handle loot in such a situation? If you're a member of the guild that started the event, how happy will you be when everyone who just showed up out of the blue all start clammoring for being given drops? You want the loot to scale with the number of attackers? Again, how are you going to handle loot across guildmates and outsiders? If you raided in EQ1 do you ever remember a time of having to lock down a raid boss corpse for fear someone would try to ninjaloot it? Could you imagine the difficulty of that with a zerg approach? Sorry, but having unlimited numbers to throw at content is no solution.
@Vandraad: Thanks for considering an outside opinion! I think you're confirming my point about viewing through the lens of guild-owned or fixed-group-raiding. In the old system, you HAVE to own the loot process, because you are responsible for the content. And you're totes correct that old-school loot mechanics would not work for dynamically scaled encounters.
Yeah, instead of having on-the-fly RBAC code for looting (master,commie,need/greed,etc), there would need to be a dynamic loot system as well. I'd argue that same system, if done right, would work for group play and could even reward players for "parsing well" better than a non-dynamic system.
vladrynne said:@Liam: Thank you for reminding me why I shouldn't post... How about this: I'm in favor of *no* instances.
I considered your opinion. I just didn't like it. That's all.
I played GW2 and all of the public events were an absolute travesty of MMO gameplay. I've never seen a "dynamically scaled" anything that is even remotely competitive or interesting. It just turns into a very loosely organized mob with zero responsibility outside of making sure they meet the minimum standard of contribution to get a free reward.
I sort of have to agree with Liav. The only thing I can think of with GW2s public events is Zergfest. And thats definitely not something Id like to see again. Now its possible it can be done in a way thats interesting and fun and doesnt break down into a zergfest, but Im not seeing it.
GuildWars 2 was one of the worst experiences I've had in an mmorpg. The combat was dire (run around smack a mob in the bum until it switches onto you then you run around in circles while your friends smacks the mobs bottom.) and the "raid" content was just a messy zerg, 90% of the player base ignored the mechanics and expect others to do it for them. I may be a little quick to say "please no Gw2 flavour" but its just left a very bitter taste in my mouth, not to mention it being one of the front runners for pushing no trinity into the mmorpg. Still frustrates me to this day how hard it is to find mmorpgs that actually allow you to play healers or tanks properly.
Beside the bad taste it has left its another option the developers have none the less, there is plenty they can run with, I just hope what ever it ends up being its done well. Were pretty sure its going to be fully open at this point apart from the odd story element and I'm sure Brad and his team have enough experience to do a good job. Still stand by my biggest fear with this game, a lot of the older systems that we know and love are fairly exploitable by trolls and community policing is much harder than it use to be.
I honestly can not see the GW2 Raid style working for Pantheon, and here is why:
1. The Gameplay style that we are looking for is a return to hard mobs with tricks up thier sleeves that requires tactical knowledge, innovation, and solid player skills. if anyone can come up and join the raid by smacking the mob, then you will have tons of players outright ignoring the mechanics and running up to die then running back to get in a few more hits before dying again. then the group that started the encounter will feel that they might be in danger of not getting enough participation for loot so they start the kamikaze style too, which will degenerate raiding into just zerg till it dies.
2. with this type of raid encounter it would require personal loot tables, with everyone getting a prize causing oversaturation of raid loot and taking away the feeling of achievement you get when you finally have that item you spent 5 months with your guild raiding hoping to be able to get with your DKP. also allowing everyone to get all thier raid gear faster will put more strain on the developers to make more updates/expansions and could very well cause them to put Quantity over quality ending up giving us tons of zergfest dps check type encounters because they are easier to develop than strategic encounters with new gimmicks every time.
3. in many cases i have found that scaling content (even when that content is scaled to specific numbers like 12man vs 24man suchas SWTOR) doesnt usually scale correctly keeping the same difficulty throughout, and if it does with more people comes the need to make ccirtain that a majority of those people have decent enough gear that they can at least offset the increase of challenge that comes from adding them into the encounter so that they arent just needlessly making it harder for others.
Liav said:I don't think you understand the concept of a lockout. The point of lockouts is that you can't engage the mob at all if you've killed it within X amount of time.
We used to zone in with 60 or 70 people stand in the raid and fire off all sorts of spells to cause lag. Or my favorite watch the buffs and when they get ready to pull based off the groups buffs pull the mob witha group stay alive loong enough to mess up there long term buffs and laugh. Was it a dick move Yah it was but we wanted loot
Liav said:EQ/Phinigel has what I would consider the absolute optimal system for all of their content honestly. I really don't want to poopsock Pantheon.
I did like this feature but only if the shard forced closed after the main shard got back to normal. Otherwise you might have a group keep it open as long as possible and have easy farming.
Kalgore said:Liav said:I don't think you understand the concept of a lockout. The point of lockouts is that you can't engage the mob at all if you've killed it within X amount of time.
We used to zone in with 60 or 70 people stand in the raid and fire off all sorts of spells to cause lag. Or my favorite watch the buffs and when they get ready to pull based off the groups buffs pull the mob witha group stay alive loong enough to mess up there long term buffs and laugh. Was it a dick move Yah it was but we wanted loot
You and your kind are why we can't have contested raid bosses as the only type of raid bosses anymore. I grant you that it was part of the "style" back in early EQ up to PoTime but instancing raids to at least VG styles is pretty much required for any game these days as people want to be able to plan out a raid schedule and know that they can have stuff up during their raid times 2-3 nights a week.
geatz said: I agree that this type of behavior is deplorable and hopefully this kind of selfish behavior can be combated. However, I still believe we can have contested mobs without a lockout or instancing. I offered 3 solutions to combat this that doesn't break the game world and I'm sure Brad has better ones at the ready.
To me, it comes down to coding and development time. With lockouts, it is easy to adjust it. If 3 days is too long, lower it to 32 hours, if too short increase to 5 days etc. If you have a boss that has stacks of anti-magic on it then you have to balance and develop that and that takes time away from stuff that affects the game in a meaningful way.
Dreconic said:geatz said: I agree that this type of behavior is deplorable and hopefully this kind of selfish behavior can be combated. However, I still believe we can have contested mobs without a lockout or instancing. I offered 3 solutions to combat this that doesn't break the game world and I'm sure Brad has better ones at the ready.To me, it comes down to coding and development time. With lockouts, it is easy to adjust it. If 3 days is too long, lower it to 32 hours, if too short increase to 5 days etc. If you have a boss that has stacks of anti-magic on it then you have to balance and develop that and that takes time away from stuff that affects the game in a meaningful way.
How is coding a long debuff effect more difficult than implementing a lockout feature. I assume debuffs are already going to be coded in game. None of the solutions I offered should be that difficult to code, and the foundation for building them should already be in game without having to build a whole new feature.
geatz said:Dreconic said:To me, it comes down to coding and development time. With lockouts, it is easy to adjust it. If 3 days is too long, lower it to 32 hours, if too short increase to 5 days etc. If you have a boss that has stacks of anti-magic on it then you have to balance and develop that and that takes time away from stuff that affects the game in a meaningful way.
How is coding a long debuff effect more difficult than implementing a lockout feature. I assume debuffs are already going to be coded in game.
Coding a single debuff is not any harder or different than coding a lockout... you weere talking about a debuff that grew the number of times you attacked/killed a boss. This would require balancing etc. if all you are doing is swapping out a char flag lockout with a char debuff lockout what is the difference between the two?
I would like either Debuff or lockout it might take a few months to tweak the lockout /spawn timer to where several guilds have a chance to kill the mob. I wouldnt want the Mob to be available all the time and only a lockout timer stopping people
7 day lockout and maybe put the mob on an 18 hour or 24 hour respawn.
Dreconic said:Kalgore said:Liav said:I don't think you understand the concept of a lockout. The point of lockouts is that you can't engage the mob at all if you've killed it within X amount of time.
We used to zone in with 60 or 70 people stand in the raid and fire off all sorts of spells to cause lag. Or my favorite watch the buffs and when they get ready to pull based off the groups buffs pull the mob witha group stay alive loong enough to mess up there long term buffs and laugh. Was it a dick move Yah it was but we wanted loot
You and your kind are why we can't have contested raid bosses as the only type of raid bosses anymore. I grant you that it was part of the "style" back in early EQ up to PoTime but instancing raids to at least VG styles is pretty much required for any game these days as people want to be able to plan out a raid schedule and know that they can have stuff up during their raid times 2-3 nights a week.
I agree it was a dick move nothing that wasnt done to us as well. Which is why I Oh so love PVP over a contested mob. But you take any game with contested mobs and the hard core raiders that want to be the best will find a way to lock it down as much as possible. Even if a guild couldnt kill it due to a lockout timer nothing says that guild can't zone in there entire 100 man guild to "watch" them.
My main issue witth contested mobs is it is easier for other guilds to find out strats. They can watch and realize why we might all move to a certain area every 30 seconds or that the mob deaggros every 22 seconds etc etc.
Dreconic said:geatz said:Dreconic said:To me, it comes down to coding and development time. With lockouts, it is easy to adjust it. If 3 days is too long, lower it to 32 hours, if too short increase to 5 days etc. If you have a boss that has stacks of anti-magic on it then you have to balance and develop that and that takes time away from stuff that affects the game in a meaningful way.
How is coding a long debuff effect more difficult than implementing a lockout feature. I assume debuffs are already going to be coded in game.
Coding a single debuff is not any harder or different than coding a lockout... you weere talking about a debuff that grew the number of times you attacked/killed a boss. This would require balancing etc. if all you are doing is swapping out a char flag lockout with a char debuff lockout what is the difference between the two?
That wasn't what I meant, the reason I had him casting it repeatedly was to ensure people couldn't join late, leave the fight or log off as to escape the debuff. It's one debuff that lasts a week and would need an incubation period of maybe a day before it took affect. The fact that I have to explain the difference testifies to a fundamantal problem I am seeing between 2 groups of people on this forum. The main difference is one introduces a new game law, and one doesn't. Debuffs already exist within the world, npc locking does not. By adding in lock timers you are creating a new law in the game and one that frankly doesn't make any sense, so I don't want it. It doesn't add any cool dynamics and only serves to discourage bad behavior at the expense of our freedom to play and role play as we want. At a minimum we already know that the game laws created in EQ work and still allow a theme park like experience. There is literally no reason to add new nonsensical game laws when we can easily just manipulate a current law. I'm all for adding more dynamics to the game world that increase the richness of the world, and distinguish itself as something other than the next EQ, but I will not advocate for ones that turn a fantasy encounter into some absurd hallucination.
Kalgore said:Liav said:I don't think you understand the concept of a lockout. The point of lockouts is that you can't engage the mob at all if you've killed it within X amount of time.
We used to zone in with 60 or 70 people stand in the raid and fire off all sorts of spells to cause lag. Or my favorite watch the buffs and when they get ready to pull based off the groups buffs pull the mob witha group stay alive loong enough to mess up there long term buffs and laugh. Was it a dick move Yah it was but we wanted loot
Yeah, but nobody really cares what your scrub guild did back in the day.
That said, it shouldn't be very difficult to design the game in a way to combat this kind of cancerous bullshit.
I dont mind either way tbh though they should definitely take measures against trolls and griefers in this case. Lockouts, debuffs, rare random spawn timers, random spawn locations, no "mob tagging" or what ever else they can throw at it to throw off and/or discourage it. Otherwise just do instancing or a combination of both.
Kayo said:I dont mind either way tbh though they should definitely take measures against trolls and griefers in this case. Lockouts, debuffs, rare random spawn timers, random spawn locations, no "mob tagging" or what ever else they can throw at it to throw off and/or discourage it. Otherwise just do instancing or a combination of both.
I don't like random. Encourages poopsocking. Other than that, yeah.
So contested Raid mobs are no longer contested. Adding a lockout timer or a "debuff (exact same thing really) Or some other mechnic that makes it so when that mob spawns again it cant be attacked is pretty much the exact same thing as an instance does. Granted not every guild can kill the mob before Guild A lockout time expires. It still limits the encounters. That is taking a huge turn away from the old school style. In reality if it is a contested mob and it spawns once every 6 days nothing should stop one guild from killing it over and over and over. thats the hole point of it being contested and open world. Some people get loot and some people don't. If your raid force cant gather fast enough to steal it from another raid then you dont deserve the loot.