Iksar said:
It's not. Offering a watered down version with watered down rewards is a slap to players who want to reach pinnacle progression success. It also likely further boosts raid gear beyond group gear because now you have to sqeeze in a middle ground between the two that is appealing enough. The ghost concept would only work fine if the ghosts were the same encounter with the same loot, the only difference being you perhaps get half the loot of a "live" kill and/or all the drops are "No Trade."
How is it a slap? If they want to reach the pinnacle progression success then they can compete for the Hyper version. Putting all the same drops on both versions removes anything special about those Hyper-only items. Everyone gets everything. And I assumed all the raid stuff would be no drop like EQ. Is there something that says they will be tradeable?
Maybe it is a slap ... but it's on the ass, not in the face. It's more like a "Hoorah, get it!" compared to what we have seen in the past where raid teams literally never got a chance to learn an encounter much less master it. You mention you don't want to see a watered down version with watered down rewards ... but isn't that what ghost mobs already are? A watered down version? You take a rare mob from the world that required coordination, awareness and mobility just to get to/engage, and then water down the experience/thrill of the hunt by making it available to everybody.
I'm sure the points you made about P99 are valid ... but they are valid for that game. Pantheon is introducing a wide array of new features/systems/mechanics that will help alleviate some of the troubles that we have seen in games of yesteryear. If someone wants to reach the "pinnacle of success" in an MMO, they need to deal with other players ... and they come in large masses. Learning how to navigate the challenges of a living breathing world, full of other live players should come with the territory. You don't achieve success without overcoming challenges. Having things handed to people on a silver platter is more like an inheritance ... it removes the sense of victory or accomplishment, and this is exactly what I have seen in MMO's for the last 10+ years.
That silver platter has led to a massive sense of entitlement in games now. Like somehow everyone simply deserves to get that stuff. The ghosts allow training for the encounter to be viable competition vs. the Hyper version (and by extension the other guilds going for it) while getting a portion of its loot table in the process. And those wanting the best items can go earn it with that training.
If they want to reach the top of progression they now have to change into playing a PvP game against the rest of the server? That is what lead MMOs into instancing in the first place, most everyone I talked to about the contested hardcore lockdown of content when I was playing on P1999 admit that this is one of those things they had rose tinted nostalgia about that doesn't pan out in modern day. People who were adamantly against instances at the start ending up wishing they had them.
Even in early WoW the raiding filter was very successful, seeing people in Molten Core gear was uncommon, Tier 2 armor rarer still, and seeing T3 was like seeing a ghost. Why? Because the raids were difficult and required gear planning/resist gear, coordination/mechanics that are seen as simple now but were entirely new to raiders of that time, but the biggest roadblock is that it is hard to get 40+ other players together consistantly to raid on the same schedule let alone getting them all to perform well for progressing. Now make that content contested with one spawn every few days to a week at random hours robbing 98% of the population the content, all so some extremely limited few can feel extra superior to their peers?
Not sure where the silver platter is or how everyone is suddenly extremely skilled with loads of friends that will flood a server with items. Saying everyone can practice and have a shot at the real encounter are being disingenuous at best.
Is all group content also PVP then? Why is the line drawn when it comes to raiding? Would selling goods on the AH also be considered PVP since you have to compete with the rest of the server? That isn't PVP man, it's called playing an MMO.
oneADseven said:Is all group content also PVP then? Why is the line drawn when it comes to raiding?
Because raids have extremely long respawn timers compared to the rest of the content in the world? 3 days to a week per spawn, 121 to 52 spawns per year. A rare mob that spawns every 4 hours in comparison spawns 1,440 times a year. There are generally alternatives/near equivalent drops from group mobs but the same can't be said about raid gear, and they tend to be tradeable far more often than raid drops. You can still be making progress toward the items you desire even if you can't get into whatever dungeon/camp you want, so long as you are putting in the time and effort to make it happen. Can't do that with glass ceiling raids.
The silver platter are those 1,440 spawns. It's putting the best gear on something that spawns every 4 hours. It's the mindset that everyone gets to get the best gear by simply showing up. And it will flood the server with those items; by your numbers at over 10-20 times the rate they otherwise would have. I think you are undervaluing that practice by a large margin. There's nothing disingenuous about it. You get to test yourself and your guild against a ghosted version of the hyper version of the fight. Master that and you can compete for the hyper version. And if you don't you still get raid-equivelant gear. Just not the best. And I just don't get how P99 is relevent here. When was their last major content update? They don't have a new expansion to spread out to, so of course they are fighting over the same crap, and I imagine spewing more and more vitriol at each other. They have nowhere else to go.
Iksar said:oneADseven said:Is all group content also PVP then? Why is the line drawn when it comes to raiding?
Because raids have extremely long respawn timers compared to the rest of the content in the world? 3 days to a week per spawn, 121 to 52 spawns per year. A rare mob that spawns every 4 hours in comparison spawns 1,440 times a year. There are generally alternatives/near equivalent drops from group mobs but the same can't be said about raid gear, and they tend to be tradeable far more often than raid drops. You can still be making progress toward the items you desire even if you can't get into whatever dungeon/camp you want, so long as you are putting in the time and effort to make it happen. Can't do that with glass ceiling raids.
The respawn timer on something is what makes it PVP? Using your logic, I would think group content would be even more PVP based since there are 10-20x more spawns available to compete for. I'm sorry but I find that aspect of your argument very weak. Competition is not PVP. You use it as an angle when it's convenient ... which of course, is when we're talking about the most prized/exclusive mobs in the game. It sounds like someone trying to explain why they deserve to win the lottery. With the hyper/ghost concept, you can still "make progress toward the items you desire even if you don't get the camp you want" (hyper version.) The drops from the ghost version would be considered an "alternative /near equivalent drop" ... but that isn't good enough. You don't want something "near equivalent" because you want the pinnacle ... with no competition.
@oneADSeven Not sure how you don't see that it's a form of PVP... and in a way the worst kind. The only thing stopping me from killing the raid boss is another player, but I can't do anything directly to that player. I would much rather PVE content be about the skill and difficulty of the content rather than the skill of out-DPS my fellow players. Sounds like a lot of you want a PVP server without the danger of actually being attacked by another player. A lot of what you're throwing at him applies to you as well.
My opinion, if it's not a PVP server then there should not be heavy competition for the spawn. There's a reason I chose the PVE server to begin with.
The FAQ seems to suggest that competition is just a reality of playing an MMO:
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.
Overcrowding and too much competition are indeed problems that have plagued both MMOs with and without instancing. If there are not enough players around, it can be hard to group and socialize. But if there are too many people around, the world feels crowded and people have to wait for encounters or spawns, or even compete for them. Our answer to this issue is twofold: first, primarily during the later phases of beta, we will determine how many people online at one time in our game world feels right -- neither under-crowded nor overcrowded. Second, if and when a servers/shards population grows too large, we will launch a new shard with incentives for players to spread out. And with our harnessing of cloud hosted servers/shards, this is actually something we can do dynamically, easily, and quickly.
From the sound of it, they plan on handling the "issue" or "problem" of too much competition over resources by managing server populations, having a broad range of content to choose from, or implementing possible rules/systems for specific servers. Saying I want a PVP server without the chance of being attacked by another player is ridiculous, as it would imply that I want to be able to attack other characters without them being able to attack back. It makes no sense whatsoever. I have made my stance clear. I embrace competition for raid spawns just like I do group spawns, or competition in the market place. PVP is when players literally try to kill each other. Competing for resources is not the same thing ... not even close. Then again, some people think buying pledges is also considered an "investment" ... I think it's fair to say that we just define things differently, and that's okay.
I think we're making a lot of assumptions about the number and difficulty of potential raid targets. Maybe we should be talking about what the right mix is so that raids don't get devalued, while still being accessible to the people that want to put in the time and effort?
In games that I've played recently, average PCU (concurrent player count per server) tends to max out somewhere in the low 1000s, depending of course on the size of the game world and so on. Of course every game is a little different in this regard but based on observation and anecdotal evidence that seems to be about the standard. Megaservers don't count :) But for the sake of argument let's say that there's 2000 players logged on during peak time on a single server in PRF. Again for the sake of argument, let's assume that 75% of them are going to be doing something solo/group/social/crafting/not-raiding or might simply not be ready for raiding.
How do you provide that remaining 25% (500ish people) with enough potential targets that they all get to do *something*, even if it's not the thing that *everyone* wants to do? How many raid targets or zones should there be? How long should the respawns be? How do you account for days where more people will generally be able to log in (Thursday/Friday/Saturday) and insuring that enough spawns happen that those guilds have something to do?
I'm honestly asking because I think the real answer here may not be in how the game handles respawns and drop rates and so on (although that's definitely going to be important), but in how much raid content is envisioned. If you try to cram 10 raiding guilds into a single raid zone, nothing you do is going to prevent people from getting shut out and getting super frustrated by it. On the other hand, if there's enough different content to go around, then the guild that missed their chance at one target can switch to something different for that night.
PS: My numbers are totally just there to help us think about the problem. I think VR would need to tell us what they envision in terms of max/peak population per server in order for us to have the real numbers, but even so, we should be able to think through proportionally what it would take to insure that people who want to raid actually get the chance to, without making everything accessible to everyone all the time and thus devaluing it into oblivion.
arcsbane said:The silver platter are those 1,440 spawns. It's putting the best gear on something that spawns every 4 hours. It's the mindset that everyone gets to get the best gear by simply showing up. And it will flood the server with those items; by your numbers at over 10-20 times the rate they otherwise would have. I think you are undervaluing that practice by a large margin. There's nothing disingenuous about it. You get to test yourself and your guild against a ghosted version of the hyper version of the fight. Master that and you can compete for the hyper version. And if you don't you still get raid-equivelant gear. Just not the best. And I just don't get how P99 is relevent here. When was their last major content update? They don't have a new expansion to spread out to, so of course they are fighting over the same crap, and I imagine spewing more and more vitriol at each other. They have nowhere else to go.
This hold true ONLY if the raids aren't actually tuned to be extremely difficult AND if the items they drop are tradable. In EQ at least most all the raid drops were no-drop, save for the items from the dragons which generally only filled a slot or two of a character at the most. You are going into this assuming that anyone and everyone will be able to muster up 40+ players AND complete such challenging content every time their lockout (if applicable) is done. I'd bet of the 1440 spawns in this scenario that less than 300 would be used. Maybe 3 "uber" guilds on a server, 52 times a piece for 156 deaths then a couple more casual guilds get through the challenge for 260 deaths in a year, assuming each guild gets every done in a year span. Make 90% of the drops no-drop and these items aren't filtering to the general populace. Lots of assumed loot pinata participation trophy arguments floating around "get the best gear by simply showing up", frankly I don't want to raid (or even play at all) if things end up as easy as you are assuming.
It's disingenous because only the hardcore honestly have a shot at the live version. The rest of us with other things going on in our lives will have a better chance of winning the lottery when going against those with "batphones", 20 runners throughout the world, streaming spawn locations to see a pop at any moment.
These are some of the reasons that I'm interested in this game. Again, I would not complain if they chose to add some instancing. I think that there is a benefit to some content being addressed this way. I've done plenty of instanced raids that I've enjoyed. However, I miss the old days in which a dungeon had an area that you didn't go into without a guild, because a Raid mob would just oneshot you and you'd have some hell of time getting that corpse back. I hate the on rails feeling of a lot of instanced content in most games nowadays. So, all contested, open world raids will be a breath of fresh air.
Iksar said:
This hold true ONLY if the raids aren't actually tuned to be extremely difficult AND if the items they drop are tradable. In EQ at least most all the raid drops were no-drop, save for the items from the dragons which generally only filled a slot or two of a character at the most. You are going into this assuming that anyone and everyone will be able to muster up 40+ players AND complete such challenging content every time their lockout (if applicable) is done. I'd bet of the 1440 spawns in this scenario that less than 300 would be used. Maybe 3 "uber" guilds on a server, 52 times a piece for 156 deaths then a couple more casual guilds get through the challenge for 260 deaths in a year, assuming each guild gets every done in a year span. Make 90% of the drops no-drop and these items aren't filtering to the general populace. Lots of assumed loot pinata participation trophy arguments floating around "get the best gear by simply showing up", frankly I don't want to raid (or even play at all) if things end up as easy as you are assuming.
It's disingenous because only the hardcore honestly have a shot at the live version. The rest of us with other things going on in our lives will have a better chance of winning the lottery when going against those with "batphones", 20 runners throughout the world, streaming spawn locations to see a pop at any moment.
You used the difficulty of WoW's Molten Core as an example earlier, so I'll run with that one. World of Warcraft released 11/23/04 on the tenth anniversary of the introduction of Warcraft to the world. Onyxia was downed two months later on 1/30/05. Lucifron was the first MC boss to go down on 1/20/05 to the guild Conquest. Ragnaros died for the first time on 4/25/05 to the guild Ascent. That means that 3 seperate guilds with world firsts in MC (Ascent, Conquest, and Afterlife) not only leveled entire raid forces to max, they farmed enough fire resist to gear their respective forces, and downed the most difficult boss in the vanilla game within five months. That isn't a great filter. So, to be clear, I do not think that any content will "be as easy as I assume". I simply very seriously doubt any game can create an encounter strong enough that it isn't trivialized within a very short period of working out the strategies. That is why that practice ghost is so important. It allows guilds that wouldn't be able to work out those strategies on an otherwise monopolized mob to become competent in that fight and compete for the hyper kill. And mobs spawn at all hours. If people aren't willing to batphone it (and I don't blame them) then they don't get that gear, simple as that. Why should they? What entitles them to be able to get it at all times with no competition? That's that silver platter I referred to. Within 9 months (although subject to change based on beta I think they said; it could lower) there will be an expansion release and there are way more spawns to spread out to and compete for.
Arcsbane said:You used the difficulty of WoW's Molten Core as an example earlier, so I'll run with that one. World of Warcraft released 11/23/04 on the tenth anniversary of the introduction of Warcraft to the world. Onyxia was downed two months later on 1/30/05. Lucifron was the first MC boss to go down on 1/20/05 to the guild Conquest. Ragnaros died for the first time on 4/25/05 to the guild Ascent. That means that 3 seperate guilds with world firsts in MC (Ascent, Conquest, and Afterlife) not only leveled entire raid forces to max, they farmed enough fire resist to gear their respective forces, and downed the most difficult boss in the vanilla game within five months. That isn't a great filter. So, to be clear, I do not think that any content will "be as easy as I assume". I simply very seriously doubt any game can create an encounter strong enough that it isn't trivialized within a very short period of working out the strategies. That is why that practice ghost is so important. It allows guilds that wouldn't be able to work out those strategies on an otherwise monopolized mob to become competent in that fight and compete for the hyper kill. And mobs spawn at all hours. If people aren't willing to batphone it (and I don't blame them) then they don't get that gear, simple as that. Why should they? What entitles them to be able to get it at all times with no competition? That's that silver platter I referred to. Within 9 months (although subject to change based on beta I think they said; it could lower) there will be an expansion release and there are way more spawns to spread out to and compete for.
Okay so let's look at this, and completely ignore how easy of a task gearing up was in WoW with instanced dungeons. It took 5 months for the BEST to clear Molten Core, so how long did it take non-hardcore/tight knit raiders? I'd figure closer to twice as long. Two and a half months after the world first of Molten Core, Blackwing Lair was released. This was more mechanically difficult and a steeper hill than MC, while it only took the world first hardcore about two and a half months to clear it took other raiders longer still as many were still climbing Molten Core. Most raiders never finished the following raid of Ahn'Qiraj and far fewer still cleared Naxxramas. I believe only 3000 players total was the number Blizzard put out at some point, otherwise less than 1% of the games total population. After Naxx Blizzard said "We don’t want to restrict raiding again to <1% of the player base." So yes, I would say it was a rather effective filter between the skilled and unskilled, the hardcore and the "casual" raider.
Iksar said:Okay so let's look at this, and completely ignore how easy of a task gearing up was in WoW with instanced dungeons. It took 5 months for the BEST to clear Molten Core, so how long did it take non-hardcore/tight knit raiders? I'd figure closer to twice as long. Two and a half months after the world first of Molten Core, Blackwing Lair was released. This was more mechanically difficult and a steeper hill than MC, while it only took the world first hardcore about two and a half months to clear it took other raiders longer still as many were still climbing Molten Core. Most raiders never finished the following raid of Ahn'Qiraj and far fewer still cleared Naxxramas. I believe only 3000 players total was the number Blizzard put out at some point, otherwise less than 1% of the games total population. After Naxx Blizzard said "We don’t want to restrict raiding again to <1% of the player base." So yes, I would say it was a rather effective filter between the skilled and unskilled, the hardcore and the "casual" raider.
But that is exactly my point, Iksar. Blackwing Lair only two months to figure out and trivialize. I didn't play past that and can't find numbers on anything past that other than world firsts, so I can't say, because I can't prove or disprove anything. So instead of hearsay, I will simply say that once it is done once, it's essentially trivial from then on to whomever did it. Now if more people do it, great, and the ghosts give them the means to try to figure out the mechanics unless the hypers are actually up, in which case I say good luck. But, if they choose not to, that's on them. All they have to do is figure it out once. Then it is theirs to do whenever it is available. If this Naxxramas had ghost versions that were easier, I think that would make it accessible to much more than the 1%. That's the entire point of that idea. To solve issues like that.
If Iksar's post about P99 isn't enough to dissuade, then nothing will.
You don't need open world content monopolization to breed competition. Plenty of racing happens between guilds in instanced games.
I feel like a lot of people are looking at this the wrong way. The argument isn't against competition, it's against a very specific type of competition. The type of competition that burns people out and keeps them awake in the early morning.
Anyone talking about entitlement is missing the point entirely. What is actually gained from contested raiding that isn't available in an instanced or lockout based format? If you compare every facet side by side, they are more similar than dissimilar.
If you want to argue that batphoning is a good game mechanic, I have no more to say to you.
Basically what Liav said. The question is what you want the competition to be based on. Is it guild coordination, class mastery, and encounter knowledge, or is it the willingness to permacamp spawns and log in at crazy hours of the day. If you want the latter, there's no point debating you. But when the bulk of the player base hits max level and finds out that raiding is locked down by no-lifers, you must realize what will happen...
Liav said:If Iksar's post about P99 isn't enough to dissuade, then nothing will.
You don't need open world content monopolization to breed competition. Plenty of racing happens between guilds in instanced games.
I feel like a lot of people are looking at this the wrong way. The argument isn't against competition, it's against a very specific type of competition. The type of competition that burns people out and keeps them awake in the early morning.
Anyone talking about entitlement is missing the point entirely. What is actually gained from contested raiding that isn't available in an instanced or lockout based format? If you compare every facet side by side, they are more similar than dissimilar.
If you want to argue that batphoning is a good game mechanic, I have no more to say to you.
I didn't say batphoning was a good mechanic. I never even called it a mechanic, it's something players came up with and is somewhat solved with the ghost/hyper thing anyway. A suggestion you gave much earlier is very similar to Iksar's: just decrease the respawn time. Your example was one hour, Iksar's was four. I honestly don't care how often a mob spawns. I do care about the influx of items that will devalue them as something to achieve. Once a guild has figured out an encounter, they can kill that mob every single time it spawns outside of their lockout. Vanguard, for example. I did not care about the items one bit, because everyone had em. They didn't have the mysticism that they would have had in EQ, wihtin which for a few weeks, there may only be several on the entire server. These games are at their core very item-centric and it is important to the culture in the game that wants to breed those old-feely times in a modern incarnation. I remember the lammy, the staff of the serpent, misery and woe, journeyman boots, and so on for hundreds of items. They made the world and its locations feel alive because there were these very specific things of value spread all over. The same applies to raids. I cannot remember one single item name from WoW, EQ II, SWG, SWtOR, or any of the others I have played. But I do remember the ones from EQ, even the ones I was never quite able to achieve. It isn't so much the raid bosses to me (although I have said quite a lot about how I feel about "the race" ), it's the proliferation of the items that people can feel are rare and almost unachievable. They cease to have all value if all you have to do is show up, learn once an hour how to beat an encounter, and fill everyone's inventories with whatever gear is dropped in an exceedingly shorter spawn of time than if they were contestable. We would drive through the content too fast and sit there twiddling our thumbs waiting for an expansion. And if they made some ultra-super-duper difficult raids, then they've effectively locked out most of their playerbase by design and I can't see that as a good solution as it just caters to those hardcores anyway.
What about the thrill of the hunt? You don't get that with instances. Instances feel linear and monotonous whereas open world contested mobs can provide a rush of excitement. There is a certain joy that can only be had from hearing that something spawned, calling OTM (On The Move) and seeing how fast you can muster your force to the proper location. All the while, you know that other guilds are probably doing the exact same thing. "Racing" with instances is just not the same thing. Instead of seeing the accomplishments of others, you read about it on a forum. I miss being in a giant raid zone where a bunch of guilds are running around trying to lay claim to every boss they could find. When someone accomplished something, you could see it ... you could feel it. You didn't have to read about it in the chat channel or on some forum that tracks progression.
Unless someone can convince me that group bosses should be held to the same standard, I think it's stone cold nuts to make all raid bosses universally available. Imagine going through your every day dungeon ... you see a named up ... big deal right? There is no sense of urgency. You don't get to feel "special" because you killed a highly sought after mob. Instead, you kill it ... and then it instantly respawns with a lockout. Every group who passes through can then also kill that same mob. It's the groundhog day effect over and over again. Instead of caring about being in the right place at the right time, you work out a rotation to squeeze every ounce of efficiency out of your playtime. There are no surprises ... you get to kill everything, every week. I honestly compare it to doing daily quests.
I remember farming instances week after week, month after month, killing the same exact encounters over and over and over again, like clockwork. It starts to feel like a chore. You don't get that with contested content. It can spawn at any time ... and that's WHY people started bat-phoning. It's because of the exclusivity of that content that people are willing to wake up at 4 AM to kill it. If you don't have it in you any more to care ... that's perfectly fine ... there are plenty of other people who do. There is no need to rob people from exclusivity because it isn't a priority to you. On another note, these 4 AM batphone calls ... they were the exception, not the rule. It's simple math. I definitely don't miss the 4 AM calls but I would wake up for them if that's when the mob spawned. I didn't care if it was 4 PM or 4 AM, the sense of urgency was the same.
If I had my way, I would increase the respawn timer on group mobs too. That's where FFXI got it right. The most highly sought after mobs definitely didn't spawn every 30 minutes or 4 hours. It might have been once a day or once every few days, which ultimately lead to a very satisfying sense of progression. It wasn't a matter of logging in and doing your routine ... you could do something different every day and hope to get lucky. There was no way to keep a timer on everything ... and even if you could, there was so much to go around, you couldn't possibly kill all of it. That's how you keep a server happy. You embed exclusivity and rarity into the mobs, but have enough of it, across all tiers, to where people aren't sitting somewhere for 6 hours to camp something. There might be exceptions to this on super high priority mobs but for the most part, there was always something to do ... and there would usually be "some" competition along the way.
That's how risk vs reward worked. Do you camp for archer rings with 6 other people in the room, knowing you have a 1/6 chance of tagging something that can drop an item worth 400k? Or do you go with ol' reliable and farm the silk worms ... they spawn faster, but the drop is only worth 50k. You mix it up. Add a variety of risk vs reward factors and let people choose for themselves how they spend their time. At the very top of this risk vs reward spectrum is contested raiding ... the highest demand, and shortest supply. Again, that's why people were willing to wake up at 4 AM. The items were special ... it wasn't a loot pinata I'm entitled to everything bonanza.
Racing against another guild to secure a world/server first is a thrill. How is killing the same mob 2-3 times per week in an instance a "groundhog day" scenario compared to killing the same mob 2-3 times per week in open world, except you have to wake up at really stupid hours to do so?
How about contested open world content only spawns during the daylight hours of whatever server you play on?
Most servers will be NA, I would hope Euros would have their own server. If they choose to play on NA, they have to deal with late night spawns. Same goes for Oceanic.
This still seems unnecessary. There is no "thrill of the hunt" in open world races. You're just drop dead tired, burnt out, and bored. Designing raid content in such a way that a mere 100-200 people per server actually want to participate, to me, seems ridiculous. Just don't make raid content at all at that point.
Games with instances generally have 5 or more guilds with decent progression per server, let alone at the world scale. Bottlenecks should be a thing, just not in the form of "sacrifice your sleep and health to raid or find another game to play".
The difference, Liav, is you aren't guaranteed the kill. With instances, it's 100% certain. Once you kill a mob the first time, you add it to the farm rotation. It's just another mob that you will kill every single week until it's no longer relevant. By making mobs contested, you only have a chance to kill it. That's what made it feel special. Again, not all contested bosses spawned at weird hours. More mobs would spawn during standard "awake" hours than what could spawn during your "sleep" hours. As a compromise, I would be okay with mobs only spawning during daylight hours or whatever. Again, I don't miss waking up at 4 AM. I am not looking at this from the perspective of "Hey, I know I'll have a guild who will wake up at 4 AM so I will desperately cling onto that advantage." Sleep means way more to me now than it did when I was younger.
To be honest, I really liked how FFXI handled their contested raiding. There was a science to spawn patterns. If you killed a mob at exactly 3 PM, it would then respawn a few days later with 6 possible respawn windows. The first would be at exactly 3 PM, and then exactly every half hour after that until 6 PM. You could predict spawn timers down to the minute, but there were 6 half hour variables. There was still some randomness to it but it definitely allowed people to plan better. This allowed people to continue playing the game when they knew something wasn't due to spawn. Instead of being 100% focused on a blank screen and having no idea when something was going to spawn, you could prepare your "spam engage" abilities and really only have to pay close attention when one of the potential spawn windows was close.
Liav said:Racing against another guild to secure a world/server first is a thrill. How is killing the same mob 2-3 times per week in an instance a "groundhog day" scenario compared to killing the same mob 2-3 times per week in open world, except you have to wake up at really stupid hours to do so?
How about contested open world content only spawns during the daylight hours of whatever server you play on?
Most servers will be NA, I would hope Euros would have their own server. If they choose to play on NA, they have to deal with late night spawns. Same goes for Oceanic.
This still seems unnecessary. There is no "thrill of the hunt" in open world races. You're just drop dead tired, burnt out, and bored. Designing raid content in such a way that a mere 100-200 people per server actually want to participate, to me, seems ridiculous. Just don't make raid content at all at that point.
Games with instances generally have 5 or more guilds with decent progression per server, let alone at the world scale. Bottlenecks should be a thing, just not in the form of "sacrifice your sleep and health to raid or find another game to play".
This is a great idea. They've already said they can create new servers easily, and implied they can apply specific rulesets to each server. There. Your batphone is a non-issue and the open world mobs are still contested. Give it a broad range between noon and midnight and we have the best of all worlds.
Liav, the idea to have raid targets spawn during a server's prime time is one that I can get behind. I'm not sure whether that was sarcasm, though. The idea of spawns during prime time is in the same vein as the idea I was trying to put forward about entire raid zones that open at a predictable time, which would give competitive raiding without instances and without 4am batphones. You didn't seem to like that idea though :)
Onead, Is there a way to have competitive raiding, like you describe, where you only have a *chance* to get the kill, without batphones usually dictating who wins the race?