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Question about scaling and bads/griefers in Dynamic Events
DannyGlover
Member Posts: 1,277
So I was wondering how this is going to pan out. Lets say you're doing a DE with 5 or 6 people when suddenly another group of 5 or 6 shows up. I'm under the impression that the number and difficulty of mobs will grow right then and there. So if you were fighting half a dozen semi normal mobs it may get bumped up to say ten with possibly an elite sprinkled in there.
My question is, if those 6 people tuck tail and run after 10 seconds, do those additional mobs just vanish? What if you're AoEing all of them and half your group runs away? Are we going to see mobs constantly phasing in and out on the fly too? Is Goonsquad gonna roll through the game with 100 people and just mass grief dynamic events all day?
How is Anet going to do this without events looking too scripted or superficial? If I'm playing with some friends and a group of bad players show up, then suddenly my workload has increased because these guys brought in a bunch of more mobs and possibly tougher ones at that but their skill level is poor and it just made the event an autofail. How am I supposed to be happy to see people coming to auto group with me if their skill level just makes my task impossible?
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
Comments
They have to actively participate in the event for it to scale up. I'm not sure about the lag time on the scaling but it isn't a question of just showing up, they have to participate.
So is participating just swinging your sword a few times? Does it know if you're not pulling your weight? What if a ton of people show up and just occasionally tap on mobs and dodge their attacks? Does the game know you're doing minimal effort somehow? Whats going to stop someone from doing that while standing on top of another player that is actually trying?
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
Yes; GW2 will know if you're not pulling your weight. They have rewards scaled to participation, so that metric can be used to tell difficulty scale.
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There will be griefing, that's for sure, at least at first. Like everything new and innovative it'll have some growing pains, all depends on how and how fast arenanet adapts to it. Still, the system is supposed to give the rewards depending on how much you contribute to it, so I guess there must be a way to actually track how and how much someone is participating. Also, you have to take into account that unlike other MMOs, losing an event doesn't mean you lost your time and have to do it all over again until you finally manage to do it, losing an event means it still goes forward, just on a different branch that it would have if you had won it.
What can men do against such reckless hate?
So is participating just swinging your sword a few times? Does it know if you're not pulling your weight? What if a ton of people show up and just occasionally tap on mobs and dodge their attacks? Does the game know you're doing minimal effort somehow? Whats going to stop someone from doing that while standing on top of another player that is actually trying?
Yes; GW2 will know if you're not pulling your weight. They have rewards scaled to participation, so that metric can be used to tell difficulty scale.
How is a tally of participation after the fact going to scale difficulty as its actually happening?
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
Well we don't know how much participation will have to be iniated in order for the event to scale. I imagine just going in there and swinging your axe once and leaving won't do it.
And we also don't know the lag time between when additional players come in to participate and when the event actually does scale.
I suppose you can always try to grief the event but I think it would be a lot of work for them for very little payoff. It's not something I'm concerned about really.
I know there are no classes, but what if someone just enjoys healing or buffing players. Does it recognize you've used skills on others that participate and base rewards off that? Or direct combat is the only thing it records to measure?
Any type of support will be actively participating, so it will recognize that.
I think there's a multipart answer to the OP's question.
ArenaNet has said DEs react instantly if people stop contributing, but we don't know exactly what that means. Probably that a boss will instantly stop using abilities and respawns of normal mobs will be slowed. I don't think mobs are going to vanish into thin air.
First, regarding problems with other people at DEs; each player has instant teleportation, you scale down to any lower level event, and you get rewarded with generic currency. If you're having an problem due to incompetence or malice, it's really easy to just leave. There's also a very minimal death penalty. I think these provide strong disincentive to grief because you're less likely to get a reaction.
If someone is just really bad, there's ways you can compensate for that. You could focus fire their target, or take advantage of their skills to do combos, or really just talk to them and say they can use your fire wall to shoot through or something. If they die (or there's multiple people and they all die) the event will probably scale back down quickly. Hopefully you survive the mobs that are there, and then who knows, they might not come back because they just got destroyed.
As far as people intentionally griefing is concerned, it does seem kind of hard. Mobs in GW2 can hurt people, so a griefer just sort of attacking them to stay active is putting themselves at risk. Unless they're attacking your target, which is kind of like badly assisting you.
I'm also kind of speculating here, but griefing doesn't really seem like a social activity. To get 5-10 people together who want to try to grief some stranger instead of all rocking DEs together or going to gank people in WvW PVP, it just doesn't seem like something people would do. Maybe I'm just underestimating the dedicated grief squads out there.
I think it's definitely a valid question but it just seems like something which might be a problem here or there, but probably not widespread.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Wish I could remember which panel covered this. It might've been gamescon 2010....maybe 2011 (someone help me out).
Anyway, ANet explained that when they initially think of a new dynamic event, they think of how it can be griefed. If it can be griefed, at least in an obvious manner, they will scrap that idea and think of something new. Once they get to an idea that isn't obviously griefable (and I say obviously, because I'm sure the masses will come up with a way), they move forward.
Events are also scaled on the fly, to a degree. If you are fighting 10 centaurs with 10 people, and then another 10 people show up and start participating, then more centaurs will spawn during the next spawn wave. The game has hidden metrics to determine if someone is participating. If you're just standing there doing nothing, the game completely ignores your presence. If you just randomly hit a mob, or drop an aoe heal, or perform some action, the game will recognize you, but based on how much you are participating, it might not spawn more mobs, or as many mobs as it would if you were fully engaging. The metric theoretically determines participation at set intervals, so things won't scale immediately all of the time.
I also don't believe mobs get all that more elite with more people. They described that during a phase of an event, you might need to kill 10 harpies to push to the next phase if there's 1 person there, but if more show up, that metric will increase to like 40 harpies. However, it won't show you a set number, but rather a percentage for a progress bar, so it's dealt with in percentages.
For events like The Shatterer, instead of him becoming more difficult artificially with more participants, instead he'll be able to use more of his abilities. So 5 people fighting a giant dragon might have to deal with claw and breath attacks, but 20 people there will have to deal with claw, breath, tail, magic, etc. Which will again scale up and down during certain intervals.
Of course, all of that planning could go out the window once the masses get their hands on it. If there's one thing we've learned over the past decade is that people as a group will find new and interesting ways to break anything.
I think this year old video is a good example of how the scaling works. What started of as an event with only 2 people ramped up to one with about 10 people. Mobs didn't just phase in as soon as more people arrived. It took some time for their participation to even be registered and for more mobs to spawn in. Even if half of those people just upped and ran away, I doubt the remaining ones there would be so overwhlemed that they couldn't complete it.
Sure you can theory craft all of your worries about the game, but in the end it is the gameplay that matters.
Might be this thing
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013691/Designing_Guild_Wars_2_Dynamic_Events
Tons of info on the subject here
This pretty much hits everythying. Concerning instant teleportation, I don't think you will be able to while in combat. I could be wrong though.
I would like to add, however, that even failing a dynamic event opens up a new event in the opposite direction. From a story telling perspective, this is actually a positive thing. You get to see more content. One of my fears for the game thus far is that the vast majority of DEs will prove to be too easy, leaving a danger that most events will perpetually linger near the winning end of their chain set. I for one will actually welcome any time an event proves to be so difficult that we fail. Grief away! (even though, for reasons pointed out above, griefing DEs won't be an easy task.)
That looks like the one, thanks!
Sorry, I didn't mean in mid combat, but just that people have a lot of options for going other places. It's not like someone can keep you from finishing that quest you need to do.
It does appear, based on this video at least http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=STsjcWT4XSA#t=599s that you can map travel after only a short delay after being attacked or using skills, but I don't know if anybody has said this is the way it will be upon release.
The short delay makes sense if DEs do scale pretty rapidly. Imagine the griefing that would happen if you had 10 people spawning a bunch of mobs and then 9 of them ported away at the same time.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Let's design a Griefer Group. It is comprised of several Thieves and a couple Mesmers (6 or 7 total) and they spend their day looking for regular DEs where only 1-3 people are fighting to retake a fort or village. The couple people already fighting will be facing 4 or 5 baddies at a time or something. Let's say Griefer Group (GG) is smart about how they grief the event and slowly add their help so the event starts to spawn more baddies, but at the same time being careful not to actually kill too many of them. They participate but play defensively. The event sees 10 active participants and generates a challenge for that many players.
Once they think the event has scaled up as high as it will go, GG stealth and sneak away. Do the remaining horde of monsters not all turn on the original 2 or 3 players and mop the floor with them pretty quickly?
There isn't much point to doing that, as people have pointed out, because respawn is so painless. Still, it's a form of grief.
Charr: Outta my way.
Human: What's your problem?
Charr: Your thin skin.
Thanks for the replies. Just wanted to clarify for a couple folks that this is just a query. Im not yelling doom or omg griefers! Speculatively, it sounds like it will pan out ok. Realistically, i could see entire guilds made for the sole purpose of pissing in peoples corn flakes. Time will tell how anet handles these issues.
Another question is if you are say level 50 and you travel to a level 20 area de, do you automatically go down in power or do you have the choice to remain your current level and proceed to wipe the floor with low level mobs?
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
You automatically go down in power, when you enter a significantly lower level area and start beating on this. There will be no avoiding this, as ArenaNet want to prevent as many forms of griefing possible, in their PvE world. I believe there's a vid of a dev saying this, right here.
I don't think it's optional least that would defeat the purpose of wanting a decent challenge at least for any one who "out leveled" the content.
Which brings in replayability.
I might get banned for this. - Rizel Star.
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Common Sense Logic = P2P logic is no better than F2P Logic.
It is true, if someone just dodges around they will add difficulty so you could theoretically grief someone that way.
But I don´t really see the practical in it. You need to be a bunch of people coordinating that without dying, I mean at least 1/3 of the people must be doing it to make it hard for someone that plays resonably good.
While it might happen I think it will be rare, ANET have covered as much as they can against griefers, but it ain´t possible to stop it 100%.
It wont be more annoying than the high level people who kills the mobs in front of you that you need for a quest just to upset you.