Gave a few searches and came up empty handed. If this is mentioned anywhere else would really appreshate you pointing me in the right direction.
I understand this is the nature of MMO's and less looking for to why this happens or "you cannot stop the nature of the beast" etc.
Wondering if VR has taken into account the issue that MMO's after many years run into, number bloating. Example level 50 you sustain around example 400 damage per second, three expantions later, 5000 damage per second etc. This also translates to itemization on gear, health pools, spell abilites, traps etc.
I bring this up for case in point referance only becuase not many MMO's live long enough to see this day; however, sometime in 2011-2013 WoW went through this issue and it required them to compeletely restructure there combat systems and abilities, which had the concequence of changing the way some classes functioned. They had mentioned if they had the forsite of this issue they would have from day one planned things out differently. To my knowledge no other MMO's have really dealt so seriously with this issue, or decide to completely ignore this becuase there customer base didnt really mind.
Question for you guys the coolest fan base in the entire universe, does number bloating pose an issue for you? The best real life example that really pants the picture if your not sure what Im takling about is a clerics complete heal will top off a player or tank at level 50 with one cast. Thirty levels later the spell of the same designed potencey of that level "super complete heal" for example will only heal 25% of tanks life and 80% of regular dps health pools, and require a fraction of the mana cost.
Question for VR if they are lestening ;) know your still in the early stages but is this on the table for discussion or, mentioned in your top secret table top discusstions?
Thanks for your time and attention guys
With respect,
Cleeze
Hey Cleeze,
I believe the conversation you looking for is more around, how does Pantheon scale? Is Pantheon progression more Vertical or more Horizontal? Things like this factor into the bigger picture.
Short answer, yes its been mentioned but not so much to deal with bloating numbers, but to more so deal with long term meaningful game play.
I'll try to find some links for you once able to later :)
Just a few streams back they talked about how they lowered stats from +30 to +5 I believe. They are well aware of stat inflation. It has been discussed a few times at least. They have directly addressed number bloat.
I can't say anything for sure, but from my PoV, VR team has many people that saw MMO grow and wither. While EQ was not thought to have a lifespan, expansions and stat inflation (nothing negative, but it seems like it was released as a standalone in vertical progression), the teams could learn much from EQ's fate and other mmorpgs similar problems.
The first thing that might guarantee a low inflate in numbers, is the fact gear is not mandatory neither the focus of the game. Gear will be here, thought scaled (remember, weapon damage has been said to be the maximum you can obtain with this specific weapon. Strength, weaponskill, ennemy armor will only work toward the odds of you getting close to the maximum weapon damage, but not work multiplicatively. Ie : Weapon with damage of 40 hits for 40 at max, even if you are twice the level of your target, and the odds of that maximum are where the stats will come to play).
However, we don't know how haste and critical hits will play with theses, as they end up as multipliers of the weapon damage. No idea on skill damage either (% of weapon damage rolled ? minimal damage cap ? flat bonus ? Stat scaling bonus ?).
What I'm trying to explain, is that the Wow phenomenon where a max level will do 300 dps in entry gear and 6000 in high end gear will not be, and damage will remain more controllable. If wow hadn't increased the range, disparity, and ultimately the whole ladder of their Ilvl, they wouldn't be squishing numbers one expansion every two. Remember they ran the classic game and 4 expansions, rhoughly 11 years, before they were forced to squish number, and now they have gone wild.
The problem might still appear, somehow, especially because you cannot use low number from the start. Low level players hitting for 1 damage results nothing except some odd binary where every skill ends up rounded to the minimal damage of 1. But the game beeing less about "upgrade your gear every 5 levels", we still have much time to see it happen, and I'm sure they have plans for that due to their experience.
I tell you, I HATED, and I mean HATED it when EQ2 went through their gear overhaul and changed EVERYTHING. It was nice in some terms, but i prefer the other method that they had, which required you to decide if you liked stats more, like ones that affected DPS values, or if you like to be more tanky.
Before the overhaul they had gear that would be like HP+500 and then do all your other stats, then after the overhaul everything had nothing but stamina and the DPS stats, which changed builds bigtime, and don't get me started on their crit resistance, there was one point where a raid boss would have like 100% crit resistance, and you needed 200% crit chance in order to constantly crit. I don't think a 100% crit rate should be accessible, but you can build toward crit rate, maybe like 60% max kinda thing assuming you ignored other stats such as HP.
Anyways, what I'm getting at is there should be a trade, if I'm a Rogue and need Dexterity for my main dps stat, plus crit chance, i should be trading HP for it. Or maybe i don't care about crit chance and want to focus more on my main dps stat, there should be some kind of trade, it shouldn't be i can get good at everything but my build should focus around what i want to be good at.
I also think for classes like enchanters and things that focus on debuffs should be around an Accuracy % and the enemies have a resistance %, basically if the mob has more resistance chances are you aren't going to be landing that debuff. I think things like this would take some amazing kind of gameplay and you should see many different types of builds.
Thanks for the feed back guys; Saicred, appreshate the effort man <3
From everything I keep coming across it seems like the only way to avoid this issue is number squishing ever so often. This is the moment when we all complaned in math class "when am I ever going to need this in real life?"
Cleeze said:Thanks for the feed back guys; Saicred, appreshate the effort man <3
From everything I keep coming across it seems like the only way to avoid this issue is number squishing ever so often. This is the moment when we all complaned in math class "when am I ever going to need this in real life?"
Still trying to dig through my notes to find that information I'm looking for but I disagree with "Number Squishing".
Properly planning out the course of the next 15 years allows you to do a mulitude of things. Here are a few highlights I can think of that I'm certain the team is aware of as well.
(Let's assume the level cap is 50 to start with)
- Items obtained pre level 50 should be viable at level 50 for a good while. This is a hard concept for most as people tend to think WoW. Where there would be 7 sets of items at level 50 all better then any lvl 49 item you could get. Also the issue with WoW and others was that the stat increase from each set of Max Level gear was so much better than that of none max level. As stated before you should not go from doing 100 healing at level 50 to doing 1000 healing at max geared level 50. Instead you should see a max cap at 150 healing at level 50. These numbers are made up of course, but the idea is you have a much smaller more managable increase in stats vs 10x increase just do to gear alone.
- Another example is Health. Let's say at lvl 49 I have my base HP at 735hp and with gear I have a total of 100 extra Hp to equal 835hp unbuffed. Then I ding. My Base hp goes up 15hp which puts me at 750hp before gear, or 850hp with gear on. Now let's say I get BIS gear for all my slots and instead of each item increasing my HP by alot they focus more on AC... I should only see a 100hp-150hp increase on Health with BIS gear putting me at around 1000hp total unbuffed, but with the extra AC I should see my damage taken be much lower. The same could go for DPS as well. Instead of focusing everything on INT to improve a Wizards nuke, maybe level 50 gear has a bigger focus on AC to increase the damage you can take during encounters. Or maybe the gear has better "Chance to hit" or "Resist" for different climates and such. Point I'm trying to make is if you spread the need and focus on stats out you decrease the amount of bloating. Making it so that a Tank needs to focus on how to tank less damage vs how to get more health, and making it that a Wizard is focused on ensuring there spells land as much as possible vs making them as big as possible is just little things that help keep the overall bloat lower IMO.
- As for expansions. I believe if an expansion comes out that allows players to go from level 50-60 then you would want to see those Epic items obtained at 50 still viable at 60 at least until well into harder content. So with this thought most raiders won't be getting "new" gear to use off random mobs as they level. Instead they will be focused on new abilities, increases in skills, and there newer gear may be very similar in stats but provide better resist for certain mob types, climates, and/or atmosphere. Also they might have a Part for for Epic quest items that give small stat increases as well with the expanision. End result a lvl 50 tank (850hp without gear, 1000hp with gear), and lvl 60 tank (1000hp without gear, 1300hp with gear). Again the focus is not on how much Health you have, but how much damage you can avoid taking, what aditional skills you can learn, and how much resistance you can overcome from the mobs you face. Same for DPS as well. Focus on new abilites, better hit chance against certain mobs, and reduction in damage taken to survive long enough so you can do damage.
These are just my ideas and my theories, and I know its long winded but I didn't know how to shorten it up any more without missing my overall point :). I hope this helps!
I think the original plan for everquest was that level 50 wouldn't be attainable. Adding more levels spreads to population and means everything has to be re engineered. Imo they should make level 50 take double the time as vanilla everquest and try not to increase the level cap.
Doford said:I think the original plan for everquest was that level 50 wouldn't be attainable. Adding more levels spreads to population and means everything has to be re engineered. Imo they should make level 50 take double the time as vanilla everquest and try not to increase the level cap.
I don't believe this is needed if you plan for it. Most zones have multiple level ranges in them. So you will want to come back to them from time to time. Planning this out correctly could mean you have a passage that can not be passed for now. Maybe an expansion or two later the Miners finally dig it out enough to pass through and now you have level 60-70 players running through HC for example to get to a new expanision part of the zone. Again though its all in the planning.
Horizontal Progress is exteremly important!
Side note, wouldn't be mad to see max level take 6months to a year either lol :). For me as a 2-3 hour a night player I could see it taking a little time and I'm excited about the thought. For some of those 10-12 hour a day players I know they will do it faster. But hey we can't all be happy, some of us have to have wives too...
Saicred said:I don't believe this is needed if you plan for it. Most zones have multiple level ranges in them. So you will want to come back to them from time to time. Planning this out correctly could mean you have a passage that can not be passed for now. Maybe an expansion or two later the Miners finally dig it out enough to pass through and now you have level 60-70 players running through HC for example to get to a new expanision part of the zone. Again though its all in the planning.
Horizontal Progress is exteremly important!
Side note, wouldn't be mad to see max level take 6months to a year either lol :). For me as a 2-3 hour a night player I could see it taking a little time and I'm excited about the thought. For some of those 10-12 hour a day players I know they will do it faster. But hey we can't all be happy, some of us have to have wives too...
It's not just having players of different levels filling the zones, it's also having 100 levels where alot of players can't effectivly group with players 10 levels above and below them. If theres less levels more players will be able to group with more players.
Doford said:Saicred said:I don't believe this is needed if you plan for it. Most zones have multiple level ranges in them. So you will want to come back to them from time to time. Planning this out correctly could mean you have a passage that can not be passed for now. Maybe an expansion or two later the Miners finally dig it out enough to pass through and now you have level 60-70 players running through HC for example to get to a new expanision part of the zone. Again though its all in the planning.
Horizontal Progress is exteremly important!
Side note, wouldn't be mad to see max level take 6months to a year either lol :). For me as a 2-3 hour a night player I could see it taking a little time and I'm excited about the thought. For some of those 10-12 hour a day players I know they will do it faster. But hey we can't all be happy, some of us have to have wives too...
It's not just having players of different levels filling the zones, it's also having 100 levels where alot of players can't effectivly group with players 10 levels above and below them. If theres less levels more players will be able to group with more players.
Has anything been said about a 10 lvl range somewhere ? In EQ the range was depending of your level, meaning the lower you were, the shorter that range was. Not sure what they choose here, but if the range is, saying, 20% of your level, that means you could team with players down to lvl 80 if there are 100 levels.
MauvaisOeil said:Has anything been said about a 10 lvl range somewhere ? In EQ the range was depending of your level, meaning the lower you were, the shorter that range was. Not sure what they choose here, but if the range is, saying, 20% of your level, that means you could team with players down to lvl 80 if there are 100 levels.
With the mentor system, none of that matters. The higher lvl player will be able to delevel themselves to a similar lvl of the lower lvl player so you will always be able to group with anyone you want and gain exp.
I think you can avoid a lot of number bloating by doing the same thing they did in EQ. Every expansion and level cap increase came with it more stats of course, but it was in low intervals. It doesn't take much to dangle that carrot and make people work for gear that is only a minor step better, and not light years. Another thing I liked was once in awhile EQ threw a curve ball, where expansions contained mobs and bosses with more damage and AC mitigation became more important. I think it was the GoD expansion where AC became prevelant. Until that time it was HPs. Changing the HPs, AC and spell effects on the raid/high end dungeon bosses makes as big of a difference as the gear you're wearing. Some mobs melee weren't nearly as effective on, then strikethrough came about. Slowly introducing these affects on mobs and gear allows for a lot of room for this inflation of numbers game. Instead of putting all these stats directly on gear from the beginning it gives the dev team many expansions to hash out when and where to implement these things. I'm okay with inflation if it's done over a long period of time. In the start of EQ gear would have 10-20 more stats per expansion roughly and towards the end it would go in intervals of 50 or 100. Slowing it down a little gives everyone the essence of obtaining upgrades and furthering their progression without throwing new players to the curb.