This is what I meant earlier by posting your thoughts without having read or at least understood the posts that came before.
It would be a completely different fight for a "clothie" as it would be for a hybrid. When a solo cloth-wearer enters the instance the instance reorgs into clothie-friendly mob sizes and when said clothie initiates combat with a mob they are then adjusted in difficulty based on the player's Level, Class, Gear and Talent Spec. During the fight the player cannot swap out armor or talents so there is no chance of "cheating" the system. As I said earlier, it will have to be an elaborate formula to account for all of this but it's by no means impossible.
I get the impression that most of the angst concerning this proposal has more to do with "I had to do it the hard way, so should everyone else!" than anything else. Based on what Blizz has done before I'd wager there will be an option to toggle "dungeon scaling" on or off for the party leader. Want to do it the old way? Be my guest.
I hate to start off any post with "well back in the days of EQ" but I am going to anyway.
You can argue if you like which game was the start of the MMO genre but there is no denying that EQ brought the MMORPG to main stream gamers and SOE did it with grouping. As many have stated in previous posts, the whole game centered around the group and that was what made the game as popular as it was at the time. Not just because of the group but because of what happened when you grouped. You made friends! You came back day after day to play and interact with people you met while grouping.
Anarchy Online came around and changed that in a way. It was the first game to allow for real soloing based on scalable missions. You had the ability to scale your instanced mission by level and thereby alllowing for solo or group play based on the level of the mission. It wasn't dynamic like EQ2 Splitpaw Saga or the skirmishes coming out the the next LOTRO expansion but it still allowed you to group and interact with people and the difficulty and loot was determined by the level of the mission you selected.
In my opinion, as MMO's have evolved they have moved farther and farther away from the group and more toward the solo player in order to cater to the casual gamer and I don't fault any company for wanting to provide themselves a greater revenue stream but I still think that groups are the way to go, it is after all called an MMORPG for a reason.
Point is, scalable group instances are possible and if it is going to get more people to group then I am all for it. Just rambling but thats my 2 cents.
This is what I meant earlier by posting your thoughts without having read or at least understood the posts that came before. It would be a completely different fight for a "clothie" as it would be for a hybrid. When a solo cloth-wearer enters the instance the instance reorgs into clothie-friendly mob sizes and when said clothie initiates combat with a mob they are then adjusted in difficulty based on the player's Level, Class, Gear and Talent Spec. During the fight the player cannot swap out armor or talents so there is no chance of "cheating" the system. As I said earlier, it will have to be an elaborate formula to account for all of this but it's by no means impossible. I get the impression that most of the angst concerning this proposal has more to do with "I had to do it the hard way, so should everyone else!" than anything else. Based on what Blizz has done before I'd wager there will be an option to toggle "dungeon scaling" on or off for the party leader. Want to do it the old way? Be my guest.
I'm guessing that you meant "without having understood or at least read" rather than the other way round but I'll put that down to a typo or translation error
I didn't realise that your comment on class,level and gear was a suggestion to scale based on them rather than a simple mention to show the vast scale of variance within simple numerical scaling.
As we can already see scaling a single dungeon so it works at two different numbers (10 and 25) isn't easy and all the 10/25 raids have had numerous tweaks and nerfs post Test Server. So it can't be that easy to balance.
The idea that they can scale to fit 1-40 players in a single instance seems an enormous amount of effort when two scales takes repeated tries to get reasonably close right.
So the mere thought of scaling based on (at a very conservative estimate)
40 (number of raiders) * 10 (classes) * 3 (specs) * 11 (+/- 5 levels) * 25 (gear, average iLevel rounded to nearest multiple of 6) = 330,000 variants....
did not occur to me.
An only slightly less conservative estimate would be 40 * 10 * 5 * 21 * 50 = 2.1 million options.
Go playtest that
And you want it to do this as every fight starts??
A few secondary thoughts :
I'm also guessing you want to remove that capability to swap weapons during fights to avoid a rush to buy iLevel 1 weps for starting combat with? Not sure how that would effect things, I don't weapon swap during fights but I know that some people do for certain abilities. Doubt it would unbalanced things to remove that.
Scaling with gear also brings another question - why bother with new gear? If an instance scales with gear then you have removed the point of getting better gear.
If my new gear doubles my dps but scales the dungeon to have double the HP then its exactly the same fight just with bigger numbers floating above my head.
Some of the issues here come down to one basic flaw in WoW (and one of EQ's greatest strengths) - lack of focus.
EQ stated they were a group game and balanced for that. Very well once they had got their feet. Solo wasn't balanced, nor was raiding to a large degree (esp. early on)
WoW doesn't focus and suffers numerous balance issues because of it.
How many times has your class been nerfed in PvE because of a PvP issue? (or vice versa).
How many ongoing "x is underpowered" problems are not fixed in PvE because it would overpower in PvP? (or vice versa).
How many raid balance changes have nerfed solo play?
Until WoW either focuses or properly delineates PvE and PvP these issue will continue to crop up.
I am a great fan of the saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it"
but Blizz constantly "fix" issues with one aspect while breaking/nerfing the abilities in other aspects while leaving broken bits unfixed.
I think the problem is guilds just don't want to help gear up members you have to be on par with them or you don't get in which is why they struggle to get a 25 man off the ground. In classic WoW we never had a problem filling all 40 spots we did not just run current content we helped gear new players but we also farmed. So I'm not sure how current raids are but if guilds are not helping gear up new level 80's it might be because of the no farm aspect. But even with PUG you must have certain achievements or you don't go so me I'm forced to PvP and stuck not being able to raid thus results in me quitting due to lack of play.
I would love to join a raiding guild but most are new that will end up disbanding shortly after being made the older guilds want you at their level so these guilds that want and need to fill 25 plus backups need to run the older dungeons they have cleared.
Excellent idea and easily implemented in spite of Kaplan's BS pontificating @ Blizzcon about raid instances needing the appropriate 'pacing'. 'Pacing' just means tedious timesink mechanics that are a useless holdover from his EQ days.
Blizzard's clustered servers are just another attempt to try to force people to play the way Kaplan thinks they should play instead of the way they want to play. The same thing happened at the first Blizzcon where people were asking for casual endgame content and developers told them they expected people to join large raid guilds.
Blizzard is finally seeing that many players are not putting up with that anymore. That's why there aren't any 40 man raids, that's why they're clustering servers. All of these are just work-arounds that scaled instances would immeadiately solve once Blizzard realizes they have to stop trying to force all of their customers into one playstyle.
Now if this is an issue over gear (and what isn't in WoW) just lower the chances of getting gear drops when you're in an instance with less people so you end up with the same probability of any individual of a large group getting the gear. The elistist snobs won't be able to swing their epeens around as much, but wouldn't that be a shame.
There are SOOOO many things wrong with this article....
/sigh...
isn't it just wonderful how so many people in these days actually thinks and believes that their meaningless "opinions" are actually "facts"...
See the issue isn't that they think what they think is a fact. Its that the "fact" or conclusion they have drawn should be the one the game they play does as well. I wonder if these same people go out and buy a Corolla or some 4 cylinder car and then go onto forums and bitch and complain that the engine doesn't have the pickup or the seats aren't shaped the right way and as such the company should change the car to meet their needs. The company set out with a vision and implemented it - of course as a business they want the most customer's possible - but I doubt any company has visions of grandeur that their product is going to make everyone happy. If that were the case - why would any other game exist. I mean kudos to these people for having an issue with a game and a possible solution they have come up with - at least its not full blown QQ fix it posts. But I really don't understand why people seem to think they can just buy something and then expect the company to change its vision and apply their new one. I mean when someone comes up with a game, they sit there and create THEIR game with THEIR rules - the people bitching about it are the kids that were never "it" in tag because "you didn't make contact with all 5 fingers" or never got shot when playing guns because "you were aiming at the tree" its just silly - they just don't wanna play by someone elses rules.
Scalable dungeons would not be difficult to implement. Just scale them depending upon how many people are in the group. Rather than have 5/10/25 - scale it as such [dps output of mobs would also scale]: 5-9 - 5 man [typical 5 man loot drops] 10-19 - 10 man [better loot drops] 25 - no change [high end loot drops]
That is not scaling, that is a static change. Scaling applies to the direct strength/amount of mobs per person added/removed. Six players has its own particular level of difficulty as does seven players, eight players etc... True scaling involves extremely difficult and tedious processes to achieve correct mob scaling versus players and added loot drops to reflect said difficulty. True scaling is a fantastic way to allow all players to experience all content and I support the idea of true scaling but what your suggesting is naive and lacks any forethought to the actual meaning of scaling and the hurdles needed to achieve true scaling.
Comments
This is what I meant earlier by posting your thoughts without having read or at least understood the posts that came before.
It would be a completely different fight for a "clothie" as it would be for a hybrid. When a solo cloth-wearer enters the instance the instance reorgs into clothie-friendly mob sizes and when said clothie initiates combat with a mob they are then adjusted in difficulty based on the player's Level, Class, Gear and Talent Spec. During the fight the player cannot swap out armor or talents so there is no chance of "cheating" the system. As I said earlier, it will have to be an elaborate formula to account for all of this but it's by no means impossible.
I get the impression that most of the angst concerning this proposal has more to do with "I had to do it the hard way, so should everyone else!" than anything else. Based on what Blizz has done before I'd wager there will be an option to toggle "dungeon scaling" on or off for the party leader. Want to do it the old way? Be my guest.
I hate to start off any post with "well back in the days of EQ" but I am going to anyway.
You can argue if you like which game was the start of the MMO genre but there is no denying that EQ brought the MMORPG to main stream gamers and SOE did it with grouping. As many have stated in previous posts, the whole game centered around the group and that was what made the game as popular as it was at the time. Not just because of the group but because of what happened when you grouped. You made friends! You came back day after day to play and interact with people you met while grouping.
Anarchy Online came around and changed that in a way. It was the first game to allow for real soloing based on scalable missions. You had the ability to scale your instanced mission by level and thereby alllowing for solo or group play based on the level of the mission. It wasn't dynamic like EQ2 Splitpaw Saga or the skirmishes coming out the the next LOTRO expansion but it still allowed you to group and interact with people and the difficulty and loot was determined by the level of the mission you selected.
In my opinion, as MMO's have evolved they have moved farther and farther away from the group and more toward the solo player in order to cater to the casual gamer and I don't fault any company for wanting to provide themselves a greater revenue stream but I still think that groups are the way to go, it is after all called an MMORPG for a reason.
Point is, scalable group instances are possible and if it is going to get more people to group then I am all for it. Just rambling but thats my 2 cents.
I'm guessing that you meant "without having understood or at least read" rather than the other way round but I'll put that down to a typo or translation error
I didn't realise that your comment on class,level and gear was a suggestion to scale based on them rather than a simple mention to show the vast scale of variance within simple numerical scaling.
As we can already see scaling a single dungeon so it works at two different numbers (10 and 25) isn't easy and all the 10/25 raids have had numerous tweaks and nerfs post Test Server. So it can't be that easy to balance.
The idea that they can scale to fit 1-40 players in a single instance seems an enormous amount of effort when two scales takes repeated tries to get reasonably close right.
So the mere thought of scaling based on (at a very conservative estimate)
40 (number of raiders) * 10 (classes) * 3 (specs) * 11 (+/- 5 levels) * 25 (gear, average iLevel rounded to nearest multiple of 6) = 330,000 variants....
did not occur to me.
An only slightly less conservative estimate would be 40 * 10 * 5 * 21 * 50 = 2.1 million options.
Go playtest that
And you want it to do this as every fight starts??
A few secondary thoughts :
I'm also guessing you want to remove that capability to swap weapons during fights to avoid a rush to buy iLevel 1 weps for starting combat with? Not sure how that would effect things, I don't weapon swap during fights but I know that some people do for certain abilities. Doubt it would unbalanced things to remove that.
Scaling with gear also brings another question - why bother with new gear? If an instance scales with gear then you have removed the point of getting better gear.
If my new gear doubles my dps but scales the dungeon to have double the HP then its exactly the same fight just with bigger numbers floating above my head.
Some of the issues here come down to one basic flaw in WoW (and one of EQ's greatest strengths) - lack of focus.
EQ stated they were a group game and balanced for that. Very well once they had got their feet. Solo wasn't balanced, nor was raiding to a large degree (esp. early on)
WoW doesn't focus and suffers numerous balance issues because of it.
How many times has your class been nerfed in PvE because of a PvP issue? (or vice versa).
How many ongoing "x is underpowered" problems are not fixed in PvE because it would overpower in PvP? (or vice versa).
How many raid balance changes have nerfed solo play?
Until WoW either focuses or properly delineates PvE and PvP these issue will continue to crop up.
I am a great fan of the saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it"
but Blizz constantly "fix" issues with one aspect while breaking/nerfing the abilities in other aspects while leaving broken bits unfixed.
Once again getting a bit off topic but
I think the problem is guilds just don't want to help gear up members you have to be on par with them or you don't get in which is why they struggle to get a 25 man off the ground. In classic WoW we never had a problem filling all 40 spots we did not just run current content we helped gear new players but we also farmed. So I'm not sure how current raids are but if guilds are not helping gear up new level 80's it might be because of the no farm aspect. But even with PUG you must have certain achievements or you don't go so me I'm forced to PvP and stuck not being able to raid thus results in me quitting due to lack of play.
I would love to join a raiding guild but most are new that will end up disbanding shortly after being made the older guilds want you at their level so these guilds that want and need to fill 25 plus backups need to run the older dungeons they have cleared.
Excellent idea and easily implemented in spite of Kaplan's BS pontificating @ Blizzcon about raid instances needing the appropriate 'pacing'. 'Pacing' just means tedious timesink mechanics that are a useless holdover from his EQ days.
Blizzard's clustered servers are just another attempt to try to force people to play the way Kaplan thinks they should play instead of the way they want to play. The same thing happened at the first Blizzcon where people were asking for casual endgame content and developers told them they expected people to join large raid guilds.
Blizzard is finally seeing that many players are not putting up with that anymore. That's why there aren't any 40 man raids, that's why they're clustering servers. All of these are just work-arounds that scaled instances would immeadiately solve once Blizzard realizes they have to stop trying to force all of their customers into one playstyle.
Now if this is an issue over gear (and what isn't in WoW) just lower the chances of getting gear drops when you're in an instance with less people so you end up with the same probability of any individual of a large group getting the gear. The elistist snobs won't be able to swing their epeens around as much, but wouldn't that be a shame.
There are SOOOO many things wrong with this article....
/sigh...
isn't it just wonderful how so many people in these days actually thinks and believes that their meaningless "opinions" are actually "facts"...
See the issue isn't that they think what they think is a fact. Its that the "fact" or conclusion they have drawn should be the one the game they play does as well. I wonder if these same people go out and buy a Corolla or some 4 cylinder car and then go onto forums and bitch and complain that the engine doesn't have the pickup or the seats aren't shaped the right way and as such the company should change the car to meet their needs. The company set out with a vision and implemented it - of course as a business they want the most customer's possible - but I doubt any company has visions of grandeur that their product is going to make everyone happy. If that were the case - why would any other game exist. I mean kudos to these people for having an issue with a game and a possible solution they have come up with - at least its not full blown QQ fix it posts. But I really don't understand why people seem to think they can just buy something and then expect the company to change its vision and apply their new one. I mean when someone comes up with a game, they sit there and create THEIR game with THEIR rules - the people bitching about it are the kids that were never "it" in tag because "you didn't make contact with all 5 fingers" or never got shot when playing guns because "you were aiming at the tree" its just silly - they just don't wanna play by someone elses rules.
That is not scaling, that is a static change. Scaling applies to the direct strength/amount of mobs per person added/removed. Six players has its own particular level of difficulty as does seven players, eight players etc... True scaling involves extremely difficult and tedious processes to achieve correct mob scaling versus players and added loot drops to reflect said difficulty. True scaling is a fantastic way to allow all players to experience all content and I support the idea of true scaling but what your suggesting is naive and lacks any forethought to the actual meaning of scaling and the hurdles needed to achieve true scaling.