Liav said:Oh look, it's this thread again.
The number of people willing to tolerate cancerous, poopsocking gameplay with 4am batphones is at an all time low. We just recently ended the era of batphone-style raid content on the Phinigel server and there is nowhere near the required population to sustain a brand new game.
Of all the people on the server, less than 200 actually have the ability or desire to do it. Unrestricted, contested open world content is a relic of the past. It's time to let it go. Encounter locking, lockout timers, and rapid respawns are the way of the future. It's either that, or instancing. Pick one.
"Dynamic" open world conten that scales to accomodate infinite players only serves to reward slackers. You can not make challenging content that serves 200+ simultaneous consumers, and that's not even considering the performance ramifications of that number of players participating in a single event in a relatively small area.
Vanguard's raiding model is the way of the future for a game like Pantheon. Either that, or instances. I personally like instanced raid content, but I know how most people feel about that despite the fact that 95% of the posters here likely do not have the means or desire to participate in actual open world racing in 2017.
You are quite passionate about this, Liav. It's a new thread to me, as a new supporter and follower of Pantheon, so I guess I don't have the fatigue you display in reference to this topic.
While, yes, racing is something from the past, I thought that that is what this game is trying to do. Go back to the roots, the past, of these MMOs and bring those things back. Especially the social and community aspects. This is one of those things. For good or ill, those races were something that made raids special, at least to me, and incredibly social. Not just with your own guild, but with any others you raced or with whom you worked out deals. The weekly timers were also a good restriction on the introduction of powerful items into the playerbase. And I don't think I ever participated in a raid that utilized 200 or more toons. I don't think any of the guilds on the Tribunal could even field that many people. The largest raids I participated with were 60-70 people perhaps.
Liav said:Oh look, it's this thread again.
The number of people willing to tolerate cancerous, poopsocking gameplay with 4am batphones is at an all time low. We just recently ended the era of batphone-style raid content on the Phinigel server and there is nowhere near the required population to sustain a brand new game.
Of all the people on the server, less than 200 actually have the ability or desire to do it. Unrestricted, contested open world content is a relic of the past. It's time to let it go. Encounter locking, lockout timers, and rapid respawns are the way of the future. It's either that, or instancing. Pick one.
"Dynamic" open world conten that scales to accomodate infinite players only serves to reward slackers. You can not make challenging content that serves 200+ simultaneous consumers, and that's not even considering the performance ramifications of that number of players participating in a single event in a relatively small area.
Vanguard's raiding model is the way of the future for a game like Pantheon. Either that, or instances. I personally like instanced raid content, but I know how most people feel about that despite the fact that 95% of the posters here likely do not have the means or desire to participate in actual open world racing in 2017.
Yep. Been there; poopsocked that for EQ2 contesteds on a Motorola Razr.
Remember it in those games that did it, and never wish it upon others. Let's be more creative and realistic now because we have the technology.
arcsbane said:You are quite passionate about this, Liav. It's a new thread to me, as a new supporter and follower of Pantheon, so I guess I don't have the fatigue you display in reference to this topic.
While, yes, racing is something from the past, I thought that that is what this game is trying to do. Go back to the roots, the past, of these MMOs and bring those things back. Especially the social and community aspects. This is one of those things. For good or ill, those races were something that made raids special, at least to me, and incredibly social. Not just with your own guild, but with any others you raced or with whom you worked out deals. The weekly timers were also a good restriction on the introduction of powerful items into the playerbase. And I don't think I ever participated in a raid that utilized 200 or more toons. I don't think any of the guilds on the Tribunal could even field that many people. The largest raids I participated with were 60-70 people perhaps.
The guild I'm in on Phinigel has 60-70 mains alone, and that is less than some other competitive guilds. As early as the beginning of this year, there were well over a hundred players racing for mobs in Vex Thal during U.S. daylight hours. That's not necessarily bad, but the fact is that the guild in question still managed to monopolize 99% of open world raid content. If not for the instances on this server, it's likely we would have been the only guild on the server with more than one piece of loot.
While I have the playtime to make it happen, most do not. I want Pantheon to succeed, and having a single guild monopolize all of the raid loot on a given server is not going to make the overwhelming majority of players very happy.
I enjoy competition in the form of server firsts, world firsts, etc. Not sacrificing my health through sleep loss to ensure that my guild maximizes their loot intake. If this is the route that Pantheon takes, then I will no doubt be answering 4am text messages to come slay pixels, because that's how I play. The problem is that I would rather not stop playing Pantheon as a result of burnout because the devs are married to an antiquated raiding model.
Call me selfish, I don't really care. Part of my lack of patience on this subject is that most people posting here asking for this crap either don't understand what they're in for, or they're fine with what I would describe as really terrible gameplay. Either way, it bothers me.
Liav said:The guild I'm in on Phinigel has 60-70 mains alone, and that is less than some other competitive guilds. As early as the beginning of this year, there were well over a hundred players racing for mobs in Vex Thal during U.S. daylight hours. That's not necessarily bad, but the fact is that the guild in question still managed to monopolize 99% of open world raid content. If not for the instances on this server, it's likely we would have been the only guild on the server with more than one piece of loot.
While I have the playtime to make it happen, most do not. I want Pantheon to succeed, and having a single guild monopolize all of the raid loot on a given server is not going to make the overwhelming majority of players very happy.
I enjoy competition in the form of server firsts, world firsts, etc. Not sacrificing my health through sleep loss to ensure that my guild maximizes their loot intake. If this is the route that Pantheon takes, then I will no doubt be answering 4am text messages to come slay pixels, because that's how I play. The problem is that I would rather not stop playing Pantheon as a result of burnout because the devs are married to an antiquated raiding model.
Call me selfish, I don't really care. Part of my lack of patience on this subject is that most people posting here asking for this crap either don't understand what they're in for, or they're fine with what I would describe as really terrible gameplay. Either way, it bothers me.
I don't know you, but I doubt you are selfish. Maybe it isn't that they don't understand, but that their experience is/was different from yours. I never did the 4:00AM thing, but then again I intentionally wasn't in a guild that required something like that. I was always a generation behind in loot, but I was okay with that. I consumed the content a bit later than they did, but I followed, more or less, the same progression path and was able to enjoy the same thrills as them. Just a bit later. There was no monopolization on my server (too many bosses and everyone more or less knew when something died so within the +/- timers could still compete) and it was pretty self-regulating. The top guilds moved on to bigger things, while the other guilds started doing the things those top guilds no longer needed to farm. A daisy-chain of content being consumed. And between expansions, when several guilds would catch up to each other, there were schedules agreed upon for the most popular things i.e. Sleepers Tomb, NToV, etc.
Honestly, I think it really sucks that your experience has been so bad with that sort of thing, like I feel like you missed out on something. There were some very compelling elements in the guild to guild communication and competition. But there weren't really any game mechanics in the way. The players dealt with it on their own, and I think that is something major. Something incredibly important. The more mechanics in the game to regulate things that the players can do on their own, the more that is lost imho. I believe that it is the sum of the experiences (in EQ for me, perhaps DAoC for others) that is so important. The good as well as the bad. The bad made the good so much better in contrast and vice versa. Break them apart and you may not have something special, but rather something dumbed down enough to not satiate that hunger no other MMOs could fulfill.
I don't claim to know what the best answer is going to be. These experiences are way too personal; too subjective. I just want a game that gives me that "something" nothing else has since EQ. I do think that by making these things with lockouts and fast respawns will make the awesome loot feel less special, because it'll get flooded into the players' inventories at a prodigious rate. But, perhaps that is simply the price to pay to make the game more appealing to the masses.
The only way I could have a better experience is by caring less, and that isn't something you can just turn off.
I was 7 years old when EQ first launched. I legitimately have no idea how things worked out then, but I don't think it's particularly relevant. The belief that players will "work things out" and be cooperative is demonstrably untrue, though. Maybe it was a thing back in the day, but it would not work today. All I see on the horizon is toxicity, and sleepless nights if Pantheon takes this route.
You've said as much yourself that you weren't willing to join a guild that had 24/7 contested calls, and that you were okay with experiencing content long after its expiration date. My perspective is that of a competitive player with way too much time on their hands.
I haven't had "bad" experiences necessarily. I enjoy the loot, and I enjoy racing and competition. I don't enjoy a game that requires a 24/7 investment to be #1.
IMO having to fight over contested mobs is a form of PvP, which has no place in a game that claims to be PvE. With that in mind, I would prefer that Pantheon will go a route similar to VG's raiding with lockout timers and fairly quick respawns.
Of course in an open world everything is sort of contested, but at least with most stuff, you have other options. Your favorite exp spot is already camped, or someone is harvesting the area you wanted to? No problem, go somewhere else. But with raid mobs which require so much more "setup" to fight effectively, and which are more rare (both due to long respawns and the simple fact that there aren't as many of them), this model of "go somewhere else" breaks apart.
Also the question of entitlement. If every every player (who can muster enough support and prepare correctly) can just go and fight all raid mobs, then raid rewards aren't exclusively anymore only to those "pro players", right? But again, isn't it sort of the point of a game that claims to be a cooperative PvE game, that the game should put limits on what you can or can't do, and not other players?
I recognize that the contest that existed in EQ is a source of "drama" which may be a driving force to build a great community, instead of having just a number of guilds who merely co-exist in a game world. The question is just, does the positive that comes from it outweigh the negative?
Sorry for the rambling...I think I need to get some coffee now :)
In the case of EQ, the only "positive" I see of the old school contested raiding model is the exclusivity. What is the source of that exclusivity though?
Being able to invest the time is 90% of being "good" at EQ. Having free time is the only thing that is really required to succeed in a game that demands so little physical ability, and hardly any mental ability. Once you've met the burden of knowledge and understand how to exploit things like zone geometry and the very simplistic AI, all that is left is having an abundance of free time so you can show up and auto attack things to death.
I would hope that Pantheon's gameplay in general requires more physical and mental investment to succeed at. With this increased physical and mental demand, you can thin the herd sufficiently. It is unnecessary to exclude those unwilling to invest their mental energy into a game 24/7 if the burden on the player can be increased elsewhere.
I would like to have to exert mastery over a class/role as opposed to simply showing up and doing a trivial job. I want people to ask me what they can do to optimize their gameplay, and I don't want my answer to be "quit your job so you have more time". We have the technology.
Sarim said:IMO having to fight over contested mobs is a form of PvP, which has no place in a game that claims to be PvE. With that in mind, I would prefer that Pantheon will go a route similar to VG's raiding with lockout timers and fairly quick respawns.
Of course in an open world everything is sort of contested, but at least with most stuff, you have other options. Your favorite exp spot is already camped, or someone is harvesting the area you wanted to? No problem, go somewhere else. But with raid mobs which require so much more "setup" to fight effectively, and which are more rare (both due to long respawns and the simple fact that there aren't as many of them), this model of "go somewhere else" breaks apart.
Also the question of entitlement. If every every player (who can muster enough support and prepare correctly) can just go and fight all raid mobs, then raid rewards aren't exclusively anymore only to those "pro players", right? But again, isn't it sort of the point of a game that claims to be a cooperative PvE game, that the game should put limits on what you can or can't do, and not other players?
I recognize that the contest that existed in EQ is a source of "drama" which may be a driving force to build a great community, instead of having just a number of guilds who merely co-exist in a game world. The question is just, does the positive that comes from it outweigh the negative?
Sorry for the rambling...I think I need to get some coffee now :)
I disagree with the PvP thing. Taking that train of thought means that essentially anything that puts you in direct competition with other players could be considered PvP. Maybe Vanguard's model is the way to go. I don't know. I dislike limiting numbers, because then you very likely will have to decide who gets left out and that kinda sucks.
As to the "go somewhere else", maybe a compromise? Some sort of global lockout, but don't mess with the timers perhaps. If you kill boss A then you get locked out of boss B and C. You can't sweep the world of bosses and the game doesn't get tons of what is supposed to be rare stuff dumped into it.
I think I worded myself poorly by saying players limited each other. It isn't so much that players limited each other as they respected tenets put in place by they themselves. There was a code of honor and respect for self-imposed rules unseen in modern MMOs. The loss of that, in conjunction with fast respawns, is why "camps" ceased to exist after WoW released.
And you didn't ramble. That was very coherent. Enjoy your coffee.
I've deprived myself of some sleep because these boards are interesting. Especially the level of respect the posters show for one another. This is a nice community I think. Wish I didn't need to crash.
In fairness, the reasons camps ceased to exist in WoW and beyond is because they were unnecessary.
The mechanics of WoW and the games that came after it did not necessitate pulling, as there weren't static camps. I see irony in this considering that the dungeon crawling type of gameplay displayed in WoW is actually closer to the core mechanics of DnD that EQ was heavily inspired by.
I do not believe that "camping" was the style of gameplay that the devs of EQ actually aimed for. I believe it emerged as a result of the mechanics of the game. Fast respawns as well as higher individual mob difficulty made it more efficient to camp than to just crawl your way through an entire zone. Long periods of downtime to regen mana and such made it easier to stay in one place and pull to a static location. Having your group standing in a static location where mobs don't spawn is safer than crawling through a dungeon where spawn locations are unknown.
It's a lot of factors combined that made EQ this way, but I'd be happy to be corrected if I am incorrect.
None of the points in this argument matter when put in context. Simply adding multiple types of any given raid encounter with weather, elemental, or any other randomizing effect, or spawning a regional event with a handful of descended gods, destroys the basis of each and every contention or exclusion. And long term shared events destroy the idea of the 4AM spontaneous raid. So does an algorithm that checks for server population and spontaneously spawns events. You can make P compete with each other against the E, or not. It really means nothing either way.
All that matters, is A) players feel like the world is happening, and real, even when they are gone from it, and B) there is some measure of risk that determines the possible rewards when they are participating.Every other constraint is imaginary. The options for delivering large scale content are fantastic in Unity. Building the motivations to drive community involvement starts with bringing the community together, not with segregation. Competitive Raiding guilds are exclusionary, and represent a tiny minority. That leaves a great many options open for inclusion that can still inspire competition.This is a new stage, and a fresh scene. Why assume the same old problems matter? They don't.
You speak in absolutes far too much for me to take you seriously. While you indulge in fantasies I'll be over here in reality encouraging Pantheon to be a game that is actually fun to play.
What does Unity have to do with anything? Attaching the name of a game engine to a discussion about raid content models is simply drivel. Not sure why I even bother responding to this nonsense anymore.
I'm sorry that your arguments don't hold up to my "fantasy"
I am still not persuaded that the existence of open-world, contested raid spawns necessarily leads to poopsocking and batphoning as the only or primary means to have a chance at raid targets on a server. In EQ, there were other mechanics that contributed to the playstyle you've described Liav: (1) ShowEQ, (2) Feign Death that lasted forever, (3) poorly protected raid targets (very little trash, trash on long cooldowns), (4) unlimited CoTHs; CoTHs to the boss's doorsteps. One of the reasons that your guild on Phinigel could lock down 99% of open-world content is that the guild always knew immediately when the target spawned, due to #1. Many times other guilds would be mobilized sooner (perhaps because it was Oceanic prime time), but #4 allowed your guild to close the gap. And poopsocking can only be a thing if the raid target is poorly protected, a la VS.
It's all relative, though. The factors that you mentioned simplify things a lot, but everyone else has access to the same thing and fails to get the same result either due to incompetence or unwillingness.
Regardless of how many trash mobs stand in the way, someone will do it better and it will snowball from there into a situation that breeds toxicity as well as an unhealthy style of play. If a guild has to pay dkp for nolifers to manually watch spawns so they can monopolize content, it will happen.
At the end of the day I'm probably a party that benefits from this style of gameplay, at least in terms of loot volume and the ability to show up and murder the things. I just don't want to see it in Pantheon. Call me a casual but I'm asking for the ceiling to be lowered on exactly how little of a life you need to have to be successful at raiding in this game.
I want to be the best because I play better than other people, not more than other people. Any warm body can log in to the game and press autoattack. Not everyone has what it takes to compete at world firsts by being mechanically skilled enough to execute plans better than others.
In EQ, five people can carry an entire guild through intelligent decision making. I don't want to be a drone.
Everything in the game will be open world and technically contested. Unless I imagined that detail. Mob density, item distribution, lore consideration, and a host of other issues rank much higher on the white board than trying to protect specific elements of content from being trolled by people who have been bored years. It will be years down the road before that matters, if it ever does at all.
When you have a sense of what is known, and work from there up to create something possible, you can make anything work. Then you can inject fun anywhere you want on the white board based on your new ideas. Instead of trying to constrain the idea of fun to past experiences.
Endorphins come from many sources. Fun is not the most potent.
ZennExile said:Everything in the game will be open world and technically contested.
Shut it down boys and girls, this one has all the answers.
All dungeons are open world. There are no plans for instanced dungeons at this time. The dungeons will be very large to handle multiple groups of players. More shards/servers will be added if overpopulation becomes a problem.
Yes, there will be Raid content in Pantheon. That said, the majority of content is being designed for grouping, with the remainder for soloing or raiding.
By creating plenty of content, a large world, not allowing shards to become overpopulated (for example, by quickly launching new shards), possible systems and rules within specific shards, and if things get out of hand to involve Customer Service (GMs). Above all, we want to use positive reinforcement by making sure that there is enough content and an epic enough world to minimize these issues.
We also want to make sure there will be plenty of great items and choices for adventuring all over the world – for example, we want to avoid there being just a single sought-after item for a specific class at a specific level. Similarly powerful and valued items will be available elsewhere in the world.
Want me to copy any more examples from the FAQ? These are just the first few that came to mind.
How can anyone truly expect people to run hot for raids with all this mumbo jumbo that surrounds this?
Raids are so *overraided*.Players assess themselves,raiding and the endgame way too highly. I detest endgame and the desire for it
Baffling what some would consider fun.
I haven't played any MMO past months and reading here now reminds me why I don't enjoy those games any longer and don't miss them to be honest
Its repulsive
Heck,we are at the point that eating battery acid would be more fun and entertaining than all this same-old same-old
Kilsin said:Remove the personal references and be more respectful please or your posts will be removed. Keep in mind thousands of people read these forums and they do so looking for information and friendly community discussion/interactions, not two people arguing over opinions.
Rock on ! :") Thanks kils
Liav said:It's all relative, though. The factors that you mentioned simplify things a lot, but everyone else has access to the same thing and fails to get the same result either due to incompetence or unwillingness.
You are right that the same tools were at everyone's disposal, but the factors I mentioned create a different set of incentives for the dominant guild and the non-dominant guilds. They make it possible for a single guild to lock down content all over an entire server, which eventually just demoralizes the other guilds into either joining the dominant guild or giving up. If you take away these factors, a single guild would have a harder time dominating all content, which could make it worthwhile for other guilds to participate in the competition for raid targets.
Regardless of how many trash mobs stand in the way, someone will do it better and it will snowball from there into a situation that breeds toxicity as well as an unhealthy style of play. If a guild has to pay dkp for nolifers to manually watch spawns so they can monopolize content, it will happen.
You are probably right that some guilds will pay DKP to no-lifers to watch a spawn. But I am still open to the idea that VR can design zones to make that kind of poopsocking less worthwhile. For example, if it takes 10-12 people (or more) just to survive in an area of a zone from which you can observe a spawn, the cost of spawn-watching becomes very significant, perhaps even prohibitive. Then if you prevent CoTH'ing to the raid target's doorsteps, you also majorly diminish the payoff of spawn-watching in this way, since the raid would still need to clear down/up to the group of 10-12 people who have been watching the spawn. This would all take time, of course, and meanwhile another guild may be working their way down to a different raid target.
Then there is the possibility of raid zones. Consider a VexThal difficulty instance where you cannot use ShowEQ to identify spawns and cannot pull bosses to the zone-line using shadowknight FD mechanics. Now what if the spawn locations for bosses also varied, and the respawn timers for trash were increased, so that the entire raid had to move together through the raid zone, looking for named raid targets. The FFXI folks talk about a few raid zones that seemed to have worked fairly well.
Or there could be raid zones that only open at certain times of day. I'm sure a lore-based mechanic could be worked out, along the lines of Brad's hill giant / storm giant scenario. So at 10:00pm server time each Thursday, or whatever, the gates of a raid zone open, and the competitive guilds rush in. They pick targets within the zone dynamically and DPS race as necessary. But no poopsocking is involved. Everyone knows the gates are going to open at 10pm server time. Oh, and while this raid event is going on, the other raid targets in other parts of the world are spawning as normal, so the guilds that don't usually compete with the server's dominant guilds have a great window of opportunity to go take out those regularly spawning raid targets.
Oh, and maybe corpse runs are a thing again, so if your raid wipes at any point during any of this, you can expect to be doing a 30-minute or longer corpse recovery while other guilds are making their way to the raid target.
Look, I'm not saying your viewpoint is wrong. I just don't think we have seen a game that has taken a sophisticated approach to the challenge of making open-world non-instanced raid competition that doesn't devolve into poopsocking and single-guild domination. EQ is a very bad test case due to the factors I listed above (and others, such as the relative ease of the game's mechanics in general).
ZennExile said:Everything in the game will be open world and technically contested. Unless I imagined that detail. Mob density, item distribution, lore consideration, and a host of other issues rank much higher on the white board than trying to protect specific elements of content from being trolled by people who have been bored years. It will be years down the road before that matters, if it ever does at all.
When you have a sense of what is known, and work from there up to create something possible, you can make anything work. Then you can inject fun anywhere you want on the white board based on your new ideas. Instead of trying to constrain the idea of fun to past experiences.
Endorphins come from many sources. Fun is not the most potent.
There are a ton of things on these boards that aren't as important on your whiteboard, though. Bards, housing, there's even a post about having farmville-esque aspects in the game. These people aren't trolling; they're excited for something special and until more details are given the sky is the limit in their imaginations. And it's all subjective, isn't it. I doubt anyone here has, objectively, the single best answer to anything. They are indeed, as you say, trying to protect elements of what they found enjoyable in their past experiences. Because this game is trying to grasp those older elements, no?
I think your last sentence is on the nose, though. Those older games had a lot of opposite-of-fun times, but those made the rest so much better.
Fluffy said:How can anyone truly expect people to run hot for raids with all this mumbo jumbo that surrounds this?
Raids are so *overraided*.Players assess themselves,raiding and the endgame way too highly. I detest endgame and the desire for it
Baffling what some would consider fun.
I haven't played any MMO past months and reading here now reminds me why I don't enjoy those games any longer and don't miss them to be honest
Its repulsive
Heck,we are at the point that eating battery acid would be more fun and entertaining than all this same-old same-old
I can respect that, in your opinion, the end-game (defined as raiding in this instance, I think) is detestable. But, let me ask you this question: How does its inclusion affect you personally? Everyone's "fun" is different, but they aren't mutually exclusive. A game can contain what you consider fun as well as things that someone else might consider enjoyable. Many people that I personally know (and am harassing to pledge since I discovered this project) loved the raiding and played exclusively for that in the end. But, I did have a couple friends who disliked and, therefore, didn't participate. And it was fine. They weren't really inferior in a dungeon or anything. But its exclusion could remove something that many would consider to be their penultimate goal and what they find fun. VR's FAQ says it'll be minor in comparison to the group content anyway. Even if it is just a few encounters, it's something many may be looking forward to and I (and I do not intend to invalidate your experiences with this statement, so no disrespect intended) don't understand why it would make you not enjoy an entire game that has so many other facets.
I shared my thoughts on this topic awhile back, here: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/5495/optional-hardmode-encounters/view/post_id/99373
I think our best bet for Pantheon is to utilize the hyper/ghost concept. It's the best of both worlds from multiple games. You want contested content because it creates a sense of exclusivity, which is very important for those who compete at the highest level. The biggest issue with fully contested content, though, is that most players never get an opportunity to experience it. (Slap in the face to the development team who pour their hearts and souls into creating amazing encounters.) This is where the ghost concept from Vanguard comes into play. It's a lockout mechanic that allows guilds to kill raid targets, even if they were recently killed by another guild. It prevents total monopoly. In another sense, though, it removes the sense of competition/exclusivity to be had. My understanding is that we'll see a blend of raid targets in Pantheon where some will respawn as ghosts, while others will be considered truly contested. I think a blended approach of hyper/ghost for every raid boss encounter makes the most sense for all parties involved.
Here is a big part of my reasoning ... let's say an uber hard boss is purely contested. These fights are incredibly tough, but also set the stage for the highest level of cooperative gameplay that can be achieved in an MMO (outside of world events) -- if these mobs are fully contested, only a select few guilds will ever experience this content while it's relevant. The idea I proposed is to allow all raid bosses to have a mixed spawning pattern of hyper/ghost. The hyper version would be more difficult, drop more loot, etc ... which offers the exclusivity that is ever important. Once killed, the hyper version wouldn't respawn for another 3-5 days or however long is determined as appropriate. In the interval, though, it can still respawn as the ghost version. This allows any other guild with an interest in the mob an opportunity to do battle with it. They can learn the ropes of the encounter, earn some good loot, and put themselves in a great position to actually compete for the hyper version the next time it spawns.
I am a big fan of the "competitive raiding scene" but in all my years of playing, I can tell you that it isn't very competitive at the top. What ends up happening is you get a couple guilds comprised of mostly hardcore players that race to max level. By racing to max level, they are in a position where they can test boss encounters with little to no competition. This is where "competition" gets thrown out the window for the long haul. They master the encounter while the rest of the server is playing catch-up ... once everybody else catches up, and are finally in a position to fight these bosses ... they never get that same window of opportunity to "learn the encounter" with little to no competition. So they struggle. The guild with experience on the encounter needs only to show up when it spawns and execute a plan that is already proven. And they will ... they will kill it right in front of the "fresh raid group" over and over, every time they show up.
By adding ghosts to encounters, people at the very least get an opportunity to learn how they work. I can't stress enough how important this is. Monopolizing content is infinitely easier to pull off on complex encounters that actually have a learning curve. If people can't learn the encounter, which takes practice, how can they beat it? That's why poop-socking became a thing. Guilds at the top of the food chain will make it their #1 priority to farm these encounters and kill them the instant they spawn to prevent other guilds from having an opportunity to learn them. It's cut-throat. I am a guild leader who has done this for many years and across a variety of games. We don't wake up at 4 AM so that we can kill pixels for fun. We do it because we want to make sure nobody else ever has an opportunity to experience the precious real time practice of fighting the mob.
So again ... make it so all raid bosses respawn as a ghost. Give anybody and everybody an opportunity to fight these mobs and learn how they work. This reinforces competition because other guilds will actually have a chance to lay waste to the hyper version when it spawns. They also get to earn some loot in the process which keeps them in the race. This makes competition more fun because we aren't kicking dust in our enemies eyes, lacing our blades with poison, or getting a 5 minute head start on the race. I must agree with Liav that the old days of taking 4 AM phone calls should be over and done with. It isn't fun. It isn't about skill. I will do it in Pantheon if it's necessary, but I will never feel that such an approach would be "ideal" for the server. I am all for the sense of exclusivity that can be had with contested raiding ... but let's do away with the "are you the first to max level on server" or "can you wake up at 4 AM when it spawns just so we can get a couple practice pulls in" handicaps out of the equation. They are no bueno. Vanguard used ghosts and I hear it worked great. FFXI used hyper mobs (Behemoth/King Behemoth, Adamantoise/Aspidochelone, Fafnir/Nidhogg) and they worked great. Mixing the best of both worlds makes too much sense.
arcsbane said:ZennExile said:Everything in the game will be open world and technically contested. Unless I imagined that detail. Mob density, item distribution, lore consideration, and a host of other issues rank much higher on the white board than trying to protect specific elements of content from being trolled by people who have been bored years. It will be years down the road before that matters, if it ever does at all.
When you have a sense of what is known, and work from there up to create something possible, you can make anything work. Then you can inject fun anywhere you want on the white board based on your new ideas. Instead of trying to constrain the idea of fun to past experiences.
Endorphins come from many sources. Fun is not the most potent.
There are a ton of things on these boards that aren't as important on your whiteboard, though. Bards, housing, there's even a post about having farmville-esque aspects in the game. These people aren't trolling; they're excited for something special and until more details are given the sky is the limit in their imaginations. And it's all subjective, isn't it. I doubt anyone here has, objectively, the single best answer to anything. They are indeed, as you say, trying to protect elements of what they found enjoyable in their past experiences. Because this game is trying to grasp those older elements, no?
I think your last sentence is on the nose, though. Those older games had a lot of opposite-of-fun times, but those made the rest so much better.
Yeah, the good bits shine a little brighter when you have to dig through the grime for them. But what I meant by the whiteboard thing is not so much about importance, it is about relating back to a hierarchy of correlations. So you don't get lost in the fine details. Those things I listed relate to the function of (Raiding and Large Scale Content). Not really any other aspect of the game. Each aspect of the game is the center of its own universe with its own hierarchy of correlations. Or something like that.
I just see a completely different set of limitations that don't have anything to do with some notion of what "can't work" or how other games have done it. And I could punt me a whole orphanage full of disabled Gnome children, every time I see someone trying to end a conversation with "what can't work". Especially when the argument is all semantic and flimsy...
oneADseven said:The biggest issue with fully contested content, though, is that most players never get an opportunity to experience it.
Sorry to poach one sentence, I read it all I just think only this part relates to what I am looking at. And that is, what if... you just stopped caring about this, and build exclusive content just for the ultra minority to find, on purpose. If that is your goal as the developer, there is no slap in the face. You did your job if only a few top guilds manage to clear your content. Right?