Well the wording could be emphasized, but players aren't attacking the outpost, they're spawning NPC's to attack the outpost, with all the faction/lore justification, rewards and penalties involved.
This distinction is important. Anyone can attack NPC's and NPC's can attack anyone, just like normal. It's also very costly, and optional to have Players spawn NPC's to attack an outpost.
Finally, you don't have to implement it at all. It could just be NPC's spawning in waves as a result of your faction enemies attacking you. But it seems reasonble to use a time/item/resource sink to let other players to trigger it, with appropriate frequency limits & tuning. Personally, I know I would do it as often as the game permitted, and it could be very fun for everyone involved.
vjek said:Well the wording could be emphasized, but players aren't attacking the outpost, they're spawning NPC's to attack the outpost, with all the faction/lore justification, rewards and penalties involved.
This distinction is important. Anyone can attack NPC's and NPC's can attack anyone, just like normal. It's also very costly, and optional to have Players spawn NPC's to attack an outpost.
Finally, you don't have to implement it at all. It could just be NPC's spawning in waves as a result of your faction enemies attacking you. But it seems reasonble to use a time/item/resource sink to let other players to trigger it, with appropriate frequency limits & tuning. Personally, I know I would do it as often as the game permitted, and it could be very fun for everyone involved.
If players can spawn "endless" NPCs to attack your outpost then griefers could use that to destroy your outpost by overwhelming the people in the outpost. Especially if you don't have NPCs internally helping you out. Everyone can't live online in the outpost or they will never get any other gameplay done.
They're not endless, they're limited by time or the duration and strength of the NPC defenders and other static defenses. If people do it too often, increase the cost. I appreciate the criticism, but these are tuning concerns you're raising, which is great, but I'm looking more for "this isn't workable at all" types of criticism. In the document, it outlines two ways it wouldn't be endless, both the cost and time restriction on defenses, so that's addressed.
The entire point of the defenses is to let players go and do whatever else they want. That's a tuning issue as well. In overly simplistic implementation, it could be that one unit of defenders, no matter what kind, defends the entire outpost for 24 hours, endlessly respawning until their time runs out. And you can stock up to 10. Whatever it takes to find balance.
vjek said:They're not endless, they're limited by time or the duration and strength of the NPC defenders and other static defenses. If people do it too often, increase the cost. I appreciate the criticism, but these are tuning concerns you're raising, which is great, but I'm looking more for "this isn't workable at all" types of criticism. In the document, it outlines two ways it wouldn't be endless, both the cost and time restriction on defenses, so that's addressed.
The entire point of the defenses is to let players go and do whatever else they want. That's a tuning issue as well. In overly simplistic implementation, it could be that one unit of defenders, no matter what kind, defends the entire outpost for 24 hours, endlessly respawning until their time runs out. And you can stock up to 10. Whatever it takes to find balance.
What you don't address, I'm sorry if it's in thee PDF and I didn't see it..... Can an outpost be destroyed by the attackers or merely "damaged"? If there is the possibility for total destroyal of the outpost, that could be a rather large problem as well.
vjek and Kalok,
This is a cool topic, and deserves to be talked about, but in this tread I"m going to continue to pull it back to the housing, or lack thereof, that Pantheon is doing.
Maybe when, or if, they do instanced housing after their "Outpost" idea they could look into something like this that would actually be a valid option for players to want to do something of an outpost idea. One where it benefits the guilds involved, not just those in the area of the Outpost.
I brough up and idea somewhere about player driven outposts or rest areas, they are upkept based on if people bring suppplies bakc liek wood, food items etc and if not they fall into ruin. I was kind aplaying off the bonfires in darskouls for when peopel are traveling and need a safe spot to afk or log out etc.
I hope VR seriously reconsiders doing open world housing. Granted, I'm part of a community that views player housing as a creative outlet instead of purely functional. My primary housing outlet (WildStar) is going away, and the housing in that game is so. damn. perfect.
Open-world housing has a number of downsides:
- Limited access. There is only so much space in the open world. In my opinion, housing should always be available to everyone.
- Potentially becoming an eyesore aesthetically, with wildly divergent constructions alongside one another.
- Very limited customization. Due to the strains on server demands, open world housing is universally restricted in how much you can customize and how much decor you can place.
My ideal instanced housing system:
- Easily accessible to everyone. Housing is a fun, flavor feature, and while certain aspects of it can be status symbols (such as rare decor items; think like the head of a dangerous dragon you could display after killing it), simply owning and decorating a housing plot should be readily available to every player.
- A wide variety of decor with a high placed item limit. In WildStar, housing plots have an exterior decor limit and an interior decor limit - both of 2500 decor. Decor should not just be standard housing decorations, as well. Include building block style decor of various types (wood, stone, etc planks/blocks/spheres/squares; plant assets; water assets; particle effects; as many little random items as possible).
- A fully customizable placement system that includes the ability to manipulate decor on XYZ axes, rotate in all directions, and resize. This allows for creative use of decor in ways one may not initially think about. For example, a chair can be placed to serve as a chair. However, many people in WildStar's housing community enjoy creating "custom builds" - that is, manipulating the placement of seemingly unrelated decor into entirely different structures. Here's an example that someone made of a custom bed: the quilt part is made of a number of pillows overlapped with one another; the posts are I think Osun pillars shrunk down reeeeaaally small and sunk into the floor a bit (and dyed a pink hue lol); the base of the bed looks like it might be an enlarged Tales From Beyond the Fringe poster; the little cloth decorations on the front posts are window drapes resized to tiny; even the wall here is built out of custom parts with the baseboard structure made of aligned window decor. In this imgur album are pictures of a completed Community build my husband, a friend, and I worked on for a housing competition. EVERYTHING is custom built out of smaller components. In all, it includes over 15,000 placed decor items.
- Customizable terrain, lighting, and sky! With instanced housing, you can allow players to unlock and use different skyboxes and different ground/ground clutter textures. This dramatically increases immersion in a build and is just fun to play around with. I loved using the Northern Lights sky on one of my housing builds in WildStar, as when I placed certain lanterns around, it really made the warm light they cast pop in a cool way and created fun shadows.
In short, treat housing as a space for your players to flex their creative muscles. We are extremely dedicated players and well-worth catering to - just take a look at the housing communities that developed around Rift Dimensions and WildStar's Skyplots. What's more, it doesn't hurt the folk who want to treat their housing plot in a more simple fashion, as they're perfectly free to just set down a few items here or there and call it done. (Having some pre-built homes players can by with in-game currency and lay down can help with this.)
As someone who played both EQ2 and Vanguard extensively I enjoyed both instanced and actual. But instanced was way too fantastical to ever be really applied to Pantheon.
Instanced always goes over the top and allows ridiculous functionality
Actual 'physical' in-game housing adds to the immersion, making you feel as you have become more a part of the actual game.
And if done well, non-instanced housing can expand functionality for others in the game creating reasons for crafting and specialized skills.
Using the Unity engine opens more possibilities to allowing creative in-game physical housing than past MMOs have had.
But housing is a LONG ways off. I would not expect it until a year after actual release. It would be an added feature to re-excite the userbase.
While I quite disliked EQ2's implementation of housing, I can see the draw of in-world housing. For me the issue is less about having a creative outlet but more of making the city around which the housing is spread appear to be a real living town/city. This loops back into my opinion that NPCs that inhabit the towns and villages of the world engage in actual activities. Villagers moving from shop to shop, merchants not just standing stock-still behind their counters, horse/mule drawn carts bringing in produce from the surrounding farms, etc. These NPCs need places to live, they need housing, so have that interspersed amongst the player housing. So while you might have your house on a little corner lot with another player to one side of you, the other side might have an NPC house. That way there is always at least some activity taking place even in the housing neightborhoods.
The downside for all this is that there needs to be physical space for all these houses, enough space to cover the player population of a server. To keep the allocated space under control, faction can play a huge part in determining who can build where. Thronefast might not mind that Gnome plunking down their house but would have a serious issue should a Skar wish to do the same.
So while I can see the draw for housing, I would hope that VR would first expend resources ensuring everything else about the game is working as intended, is well balanced and as bug-free as possible before turning developers loose on less important 'wouldn't that be nice' piece of game fluff.
I'm not a big fan of housing for the following conditional reasons:
If: it's to provide more storage, then I would prefer more bank space
If: it's a means to show-off things/put things on display for others to see, then How am I going to encourage others to come and see them? I think they would be out adventuring and getting their own stuff.
If: it's to provide additional game play, like attacking/robbing houses, inviting people in, making communities, individual expression- I think that game has already been created and it's called "Rust"
If: it's a place to go home to and camp out for the night, there can be finite empty rooms in towns where players can do so.
If: it's for the sake of immersion, then have inn's charge a fee to spend the night with associated rest buff, and have some inn's be full to alert players coming to the town for the first time that wow- there's alot of people here, could get groups, look at all the inns that are full.
If: there are limits to houses that can be built, for instance like only guild halls, that could be interesting provided its for a fee and there is maintenence required but I think they would have to be instanced to prevent a land rush.
zewtastic said:As someone who played both EQ2 and Vanguard extensively I enjoyed both instanced and actual. But instanced was way too fantastical to ever be really applied to Pantheon.Instanced always goes over the top and allows ridiculous functionality
I'm curious about what you mean by over the top and "ridiculous functionality".
Here's another example WildStar housing plot. Tell me you are not immersed by this creation, I dare you!
Naunet said:Here's another example WildStar housing plot. Tell me you are not immersed by this creation, I dare you!
It looks pretty good. Does it get a lot of use by the community? I never played Wildstar.
My issue with housing is that I have never played a game where I would consider it very useful. Displaying some trophies or decorations seems like the only real benefit is to stroke the ego of the designer.
The standard bit of extra storage or vending or rest benefits can always be added in other, easier, ways that take less time to develop and bring with it less issues than housing.
I'm all for housing it we can find a way to make it unique and useful. Maybe it interacts with the environment somehow? Like it has to defend against NPCs or some such thing? Maybe players have to build it up to gain some sort of benefit? Though I guess that seems like a different style of game...and sort of minigame-ish. I don't have a good solution.
philo said:It looks pretty good. Does it get a lot of use by the community? I never played Wildstar.
Depends on what you deem use. Lots of folk like to visit peoples' plots to see their creations, kinda like a museum. It's also HEAVILY used by the RP community. The housing community in WildStar is a significant chunk of the playerbase, and those of us who engage in it will frequently wander around peoples' creations, share ideas, marvel at ingenuity, etc. Many of my friends in the housing community have a dozen+ alts and even multiple accounts just so they can keep creating new builds. It's all about creativity!
There are also ways to make the housing plots more functional, if enjoying things for arts' sake or for RP isn't up your alley. You can place certain decors that have portals to specific zones, for example. There are also interactive FABkits that are like premade set-ups you plop down in a specified location. Many of these FABkits come with fun challenges you can activate and playthrough to earn fun rewards. Some even contain entire mini-dungeons within them (my favorite is one where you have to sneak through a ship that's overrun by super creepy monsters, avoiding combat at all cost). Others provide combat dummies, a dueling arena, personal bank access, etc.
I guess I will soon be talking about all this in the past tense, though. :( One of the reasons I'm hopeful another MMO will take up WildStar's housing mantle...
I played a lot of games including Wildstar that used instancied housing and going a bit further than the initial "It's cool I can furnish my own flat" the benefits hide the major offset : It's removing a huge portion of the community from the actual shared world in favor of instanced and only half accessible areas. This is more than just a fact on roleplay servers, as it tend to catter players in zones they have little to no chance to pass by.
In the end, it's a "cool feature" for non roleplayers but basically some kind of self building/chilling area, and while it would come as a big benefit for roleplayers, it's simply overshadowing the main goal of an MMO : Sharing the same world.
Edit : Typo, very weird sentence xD
MauvaisOeil said:I played a lot of games including Wildstar that used instancied housing and goig a but further than the initial "It's cool I can furnish my own flat" the benefits hide the major offset : It's removing a huge portion of the community from the actual shared world in favor of instanced and only half accessible areas. This is more than just a fact on roleplay servers, as it tend to catter players in zones they have little to no chance to pass by.
In the end, it's a "cool feature" for non roleplayers but basically some kind of self building/chilling area, and while it would come as a big benefit for roleplayers, it's simply overshadowing the main goal of an MMO : Sharing the same world.
I disagree, and my experience with WildStar since launch backs it up. Not once have I felt like instanced housing removed people from the open world - unless you're just counting those who want to spend on of their play sessions working on a housing build. Even then, we're generally chatting in the housing zone chat and interacting with one another, offering help, responding to calls to come, "Check out what I'm working on and tell me what you think", etc. But in the end, housing is only one component of gameplay in WildStar, and so it would be in any other game. And even the most serious housing addicts have to regularly venture out into the rest of the game to earn plat for decor, or farm up certain decor that drop off particular mobs. It has no significant negative impact on player population in the open world.
Naunet said:zewtastic said:As someone who played both EQ2 and Vanguard extensively I enjoyed both instanced and actual. But instanced was way too fantastical to ever be really applied to Pantheon.Instanced always goes over the top and allows ridiculous functionality
I'm curious about what you mean by over the top and "ridiculous functionality".
Pretty much any incentive for use tends to fall into that I'd say. But usually things like bank/mail/AH/tradeskill access and really any other convenience.
Instanced player housing takes a significant and continuous amount of development resources for what amounts to next to no payoff for the vast majority of players.
Naunet said:philo said:It looks pretty good. Does it get a lot of use by the community? I never played Wildstar.Many of these FABkits come with fun challenges you can activate and playthrough to earn fun rewards. Some even contain entire mini-dungeons within them (my favorite is one where you have to sneak through a ship that's overrun by super creepy monsters, avoiding combat at all cost). Others provide combat dummies, a dueling arena, personal bank access, etc.
That is the type of thing I'm thinking of. The dungeon thing sounds like it has potential to be useful. Did those players have the option to build a dungeon in their house? That seems like it is getting into a minecraft/Landmark type of build game that would be a good tie in with housing. I'm just not sure if it fits with the goal of Pantheon? Couldn't these type of dungeons be implemented differently in a way that ties into the world more instead of being in someones house?
Combat dummies/arena/bank access etc. is how most games utilize housing and it seems like there are better ways that all of those functions could be implemented that doesn't come with some of the drawbacks of housing.
Naunet said:MauvaisOeil said:I played a lot of games including Wildstar that used instancied housing and goig a but further than the initial "It's cool I can furnish my own flat" the benefits hide the major offset : It's removing a huge portion of the community from the actual shared world in favor of instanced and only half accessible areas. This is more than just a fact on roleplay servers, as it tend to catter players in zones they have little to no chance to pass by.
In the end, it's a "cool feature" for non roleplayers but basically some kind of self building/chilling area, and while it would come as a big benefit for roleplayers, it's simply overshadowing the main goal of an MMO : Sharing the same world.
I disagree, and my experience with WildStar since launch backs it up. Not once have I felt like instanced housing removed people from the open world - unless you're just counting those who want to spend on of their play sessions working on a housing build. Even then, we're generally chatting in the housing zone chat and interacting with one another, offering help, responding to calls to come, "Check out what I'm working on and tell me what you think", etc. But in the end, housing is only one component of gameplay in WildStar, and so it would be in any other game. It has no significant impact on player population in the open world.
As I said, it comes from different game sharing this principle, Wildstar included (Which I played for a few months). EQ2 < SWTOR < Wildstar < FFXiv would be my "best disease to worst disease" classment.
-To me, EQ2 made it the best because it had an ingame currency Upkeep cost you couldn't ignore. If you didn't use your personal house much, you would save a lot of income by not subbing for it.
-Swtor made it really bad because personal plot had no real entrance or crossway to meet anyone, where EQ2's houses had strict entrance depending of what size of house you chose, meaning you would at least meet people on the porch. It however had a big cost but with no upkeep at all.
-Wildstar isn't much better, same problems with a negligible cost. While their system opened a lot of freedom, the "everyone has it's own instanced area" made capitals empty, draining people to be afk or casually chatting to guilds from their own plots. Many tried, many wanted to build taverns or inns. But what happens when 50 people are doing a meeting area for 100 people ? Well, nothing happens, at best one or two of them is filled once a week but not much more.
-FFXIV is, well, I'd say FFXIV is capitalizing around 50% of their income and subs with housing. There is no upkeep cost but there is a (long) decaying timer that can end scorching you really nasty if you loose your plot. The district concept seems great as you have neighbours, but in the end, it's scattering people even more. FFXIV currently offer a "limited" housing in quantity but in the end it's 18 double wards over 4 housing areas ends up beeing 144 more areas in which a total of 4320 houses by server are gravitating. Each beeing another instanced area. That means 4464 areas are added to the game which only contain 40 overland areas. 110 more zones, which means in fact you only share 8.9% of the world in open areas, and everything else is in housing areas. (And yes, every house is taken, even with account limitations.)
The same calculation can be done in any game with instanced housing, except it will depends of the number of house created and not of a fix amount. Now I will just ask you to ponder beyond your likeness of the issue. I, too, liked the idea of housing. Especially in Ultima online where it was NOT instanced (but areas were cluttered with houses, yes), but the more I delved in it, the more it raised problems. And the game where problem raised the more were thoses which chose to make it more a gimmick of the game than a feature at all.
Another sub problem it cause is that it make world builders less likely to design open space interiors, like inns, taverns, shops, as it costs some dev time, CPU usage and is easily replaced by instanced housing where people choose what they want instead of fitting the world. That was especially true in FFXIV, but wildstar took the same path, making the cities only exteriors like surface themeparks, and Swtor, well... that game had already little to no interior before launching housing... the problem is somewhere else for that game.
Outside of that, can you ignore the scattering issues it cause to a game ?
MauvaisOeil said:Outside of that, can you ignore the scattering issues it cause to a game ?
Look, dude, you may have played it for a few months, but I've been playing it for 4+ years. You're simply wrong in your assessment of housing's impact on player population. Thayd has ALWAYS been super busy with people (Illium less so, but the Dominion always had the smaller population). None of the things you need to interact with daily and regularly are on housing plots. And the housing community - and the RP community - have flourished quite well making use of the housing system. There are dozens of RP hubs that get regular use (well, they got more before the game was announced closing T_T); there are also people who construct entire housing plots to play out a given story.
Naunet said:MauvaisOeil said:Outside of that, can you ignore the scattering issues it cause to a game ?Look, dude, you may have played it for a few months, but I've been playing it for 4+ years. You're simply wrong in your assessment of housing's impact on player population. Thayd has ALWAYS been super busy with people (Illium less so, but the Dominion always had the smaller population). None of the things you need to interact with daily and regularly are on housing plots. And the housing community - and the RP community - have flourished quite well making use of the housing system. There are dozens of RP hubs that get regular use (well, they got more before the game was announced closing T_T); there are also people who construct entire housing plots to play out a given story.
As I stated, this is a more global problem than solely wildstar. I summed up the negatives of four games in my post and they all shared the same weakness on this point. On the opposite scale, games with no instanced housing (or even no housing at all) have public areas and meeting places crowded. Cities are flowing with players on a constant base, and again this is a fact from my gaming experience.
Housing tend to be even worse if they make crafting station avaliable (Guild halls in EQ2, no reason to get out of them at all) in them.
And I pointed out that you are incorrect in your analysis.
WildStar - You claim instanced housing pulled people away from the main cities. This does not play out in reality. The cities are quite busy (given the game's small population). What's more, you can easily interact with others through the housing Zone chat, or Nexus chat (the global chat channel), even if you do happen to be on a housing plot.
FFXIV - Yes, this game's decay timer necessitates maintaining subscriptions. I severely dislike that about their housing system. However, in my experience, very few people hang out in the housing zones. Most players accumulate in the given expansion's "main" city/hub. So again, housing is not removing people from the open world.
I cannot speak to EQ2 and SWTOR, as I never played those. But I can speak of another game with instanced housing.
Rift - Another MMO with an extremely robust housing community and highly customizable housing (close to being on-par with WildStar). But again, most players in Rift do not spend the majority of their time in the Dimensions. If they're not running zone invasions or doing dungeons or whatever, they mostly gather in the main city hub.
[edit] You're trying to make generalizations about games, some of which you're only passingly familiar with, while I'm telling you - as someone who has been directly engaging with these players/communities and personally knows the folk involved - how it actually is.
Just a few quick things before I disappear again for moar work meetings :(
In my mind, SWG set the bar for "useful" housing. I don't have time to go into detail but that system hit everything that Naunet talked about, and did it in-world. No instancing. The ability to collect houses into player cities, which could then place special service buildings such as mission terminals, hospitals, cantinas, and shuttleports really helped make housing more than just a collection of individual homes and shops.
If we're talking ideals, here's what Neph wants:
Marry Vanguard's idea of housing areas with SWG's player cities, and add EQ2's internal customization (and all the yummy housing items you could find in the game). Then take it even further by allowing player cities/towns to act as content generators for their regions.
I have a bunch of posts back on page 4 or so that say more. I'd restate it, but... I have another stupid meeting in 15 minutes :(
Edit: On decay timers (or anything that can remove inactive houses from the game) - I find that this is a necessary evil in any game where housing plots are limited in any way. FFXIV (for example) didn't have a decay timer for a long time. The result of that was that on all servers, the largest/best house plots were simply never available to purchase. On some older servers, it got to the point where no housing plots were available for purchase AT ALL - even though more than half of them were sitting essentially abandoned. The day they implemented the first decay timer (which was christmas eve), my guild officers and I stayed up all night to secure a better housing plot for our guild. There was such a land rush of people who had been waiting for years to get houses on our server, that all the plots which got freed that day were gone again within an hour.
LOTRO had similar issues with wards when I was playing it - although LOTRO did a bit better by simply dynamically spawning new wards when the old ones got too full.
Both FFXIV and LOTRO wall off housing in separate instances (wards/neighborhoods), but the problem exists regardless of instancing. Example: As Vanguard (in-world housing) was entering year #2, it got to the point where there were no more guild hall plots available on the Xeth server. My guild there just barely managed to snag a plot, by purposely going way out to one of the less popular housing areas in Qalia, and we had formed at launch. Ironically, in year #3 our housing area got a lot more popular, because some new high level content got added relatively close by.
Naunet said:And I pointed out that you are incorrect in your analysis.
WildStar - You claim instanced housing pulled people away from the main cities. This does not play out in reality. The cities are quite busy (given the game's small population). What's more, you can easily interact with others through the housing Zone chat, or Nexus chat (the global chat channel), even if you do happen to be on a housing plot.
FFXIV - Yes, this game's decay timer necessitates maintaining subscriptions. I severely dislike that about their housing system. However, in my experience, very few people hang out in the housing zones. Most players accumulate in the given expansion's "main" city/hub. So again, housing is not removing people from the open world.
I cannot speak to EQ2 and SWTOR, as I never played those. But I can speak of another game with instanced housing.
Rift - Another MMO with an extremely robust housing community and highly customizable housing (close to being on-par with WildStar). But again, most players in Rift do not spend the majority of their time in the Dimensions. If they're not running zone invasions or doing dungeons or whatever, they mostly gather in the main city hub.
[edit] You're trying to make generalizations about games, some of which you're only passingly familiar with, while I'm telling you - as someone who has been directly engaging with these players/communities and personally knows the folk involved - how it actually is.
I can just offer datas right now : - FFXIV's current expansion main "city", 32 players. Housing associated to this city : 113.
Desert city : 37 players, housing associated : 104
Forest city : 57 players, housing associated : 108
Island city : 105 (prefered player hub), housing associated : 139
Snow city : 10 (no housing, and irrelevant due to expansion moveout)
That's what : 241 players in a city and 464 in instanced housing. Close to 2/3 of players not busy doing dungeons or such (can't get advanced datas for everything, even thoses were a pain to gather).
Of course you could say "That's FFXIV", and that's probably partially true. The game is heavily headed toward either Fast trashless raids for very optimized players, or casual social interactions for players devoted to a second life style of play. I can't get datas for every game I played, even if some of them I played for years, I can however argue that in any game with no instanced housings, 100% of non busy players are in the wild. I will even add that in any game with no instance at all, 100% of all players will be in the wild, and I think that's up to what VR is aiming here.
I don't think you will agree, but I think I made my point here.
