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Ideal group size
Adamantine
Member RarePosts: 5,094
What do you think would be the ideal group size for a MMO, if network traffic etc was basically unlimited ?
Mind - normal group size. Not raid group size.
I think it would be 12.
1. Thats the "natural" group size, the group size a human still can manage.
2. It should be enough to allow all kinds of more complex strategies.
3. It should be enough that a group doesnt automatically wipe because single people lose network connection.
4. It should simplify grouping - you only need one tank per 12 people, one healer per 12 people. That should be easy !
5. Theres plenty room for fun classes, like pure support, as mentioned in another thread here.
Comments
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Right group size is determined by those things. I would like to add something else to your list. Group sizes also is determined by number of classes and how many different roles there are as well.
If I had to have a preference on group size I would go with the traditional 6 slot groups. This number works well if you have a variety of roles like tank, melee dps, caster dps, healer and support roles.
Big group sizes won't work well in this modern age of solo gameplay. Group content is minimal and would be very difficult to find/make groups with a solo oriented mind set.
From personal experience my two favorite group sizes where 6-mans from Rift and 20-mans from vanilla WoW
Rift 6-mans I like because of the composition- 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps and 1 support. I really liked the idea of a required support class it's just too bad it turned into "LAWL DPS K" instead of actual support.
As for 20-mans in WoW I think it was a nice sweet spot before managing a group turns into herding cats. later 25-mans weren't too bad but 40-mans were just way to much
Something that might be interesting for very large groups would be a dedicated group commander who wouldn't be participating in the fight directly but instead their job would be to coordinate the rest of the group, and then making the fights significantly more complex.
Actually, I kind of like the way Asheron's call did it, but not so starkly. In Asheron's Call you had the biggest benefit at 6 or 7 people but you could have 8 or 9 if you wanted, you just got somewhat less exp for it.
If a group size were flexible, then you could say have 6 be the optimal number, but 7 or 8 (or 4 or 5) wouldn't hurt much, but say 9 to 12 could be doable with increasing penalties(or loss of bonuses if you run that way).
So a dungeon would be tuned for 6 players. If you went in with 7 players, it would give similar rewards, but if you went in with 9 players, your rewards would be reduced. The exp in a 6 person group would be optimal and would drop off on either side. It would be such that if you had 2 players coming in as replacements for your party hunting in some zone somewhere, they could join your group bringing you temporarily to 8 without causing too much of a loss.
Group comp should be:
1) Tank
2) Healer
3) Buff/Support
4) Debuff/Control
5) Melee Damage
6) Ranged Damage
Six people and everyone has a specific role.
12 people in a group would simply make it impossible for anyone to solo anything
EQ had the right balance, 6 per group,and certain classes could solo
if you use 12, the mobs would be so powerful that not a single person could solo
"don't try to fix what isn't broken"
this sounds very nice on paper. But in practice this is just the tank spamming taunt, the healer spamming heals to the tank, and everyone else spamming damage after applying some cc. That is not fun.
Now, apply that same list to a different playstyle where tanking is not necessarily required to hold aggro then yeah, it would make the fight more active, dynamic, teamwork based, and just more fun. Sure tank is there to defend the group, but it needs a better mechanic than aggro/taunt to make it entertaining again.
All the MMO where you take away the tank have far less teamwork. Games like Vindictus and all upcoming Korean action MMO like Black Desert without traditional trinity roles have no teamwork.
What you're arguing is different from reality, action MMO without aggro have far less teamwork, not more.
The group size is irrelevant in those MMO, since everyone is a DPS class dodging, bunny jumping and spamming attacks.
You have this tunnel vision that agro is ALL about taunt.. and it's not.. Agro is all about the numbers, and back in the day a lot of spells, skills and abilities effected those numbers.. Christ, sitting down to med pulled agro if you were too close to the mob.. LOL WoW combat should NOT be the poster child why role combat (agro) shouldn't be used.. As a druid in EQ, I could spam "snare" and gain agro that NO TANK in the world could ever taunt away from me.. He He He..
Or that dot, flame lick or something. I don't know why that pulled so much aggro, it just did.
It depends largely on the class makeup of the game. 6 works well in games with a lot of class diversity, smaller is probably better in games with a very simple class design.
My dream MMO would scale content dynamically and intelligently for the group size and makeup. The key word there being intelligently. Add more players to a group and the encounters become more complex and require more coordination but the rewards grow as well. The same content could be played by 1-2 players up to 30+ with different mechanics and rewards depending on the scale.
This would require a totally different approach to encounter scripting with them being more dynamic in nature and less static scripts with mobs using behavior models rather than fixed scripts.
Not sure I feel there's just one sweet spot, since most of the other game elements trump group size in terms of fun factor (if that wasn't true, I'd never raid at all.)
Once you hit the ~4 player range, you have a team. I love teamplay! It makes fights dynamic and generates friendships.
Once you surpass the ~10 player range, your personal contribution is watered down. This causes success or failure to progressively be less about whether you play skillfully. And as group size increases your success or failure becomes more about whether you join with the right guild (and ditch your old bad guild) and that's generally a pretty bad mechanic I find, because I liked my last guild (whichever it was), it had my friends and they were great people, and it sucks that the game is basically telling me "ditch these people or you can't advance."
But it all varies based on gameplay. In PVP games like Planetside, a 50vs50 fight involves just as many screw-ups on the opposing team as yours and so you feel like that much more of a hero when you carve through 5-20 players per life and make a huge impact on the battle.
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I think around 4 or 5. Allows for group content without making getting a group together a quest in and of itself
I self identify as a monkey.
It's not tunnel vision. The tank as it exists in most MMOs ( UO and a few others are the rare exception) is created specifically for MMO PvE. In any other scenario - real or fictional, PvE or PvP - it is useless to the point of ridiculous. His description of the trinity is extremely similar to Bartle's assessment of it:
"The tank takes all the damage issued by the opponent, the healer reduces this damage, and the dps gives damage to the opponent. This doesn't make a great deal of sense in gameplay terms: the healer is redundant (they're basically just armour for the tank), the premise is unrealistic ("I'll hit the guy in the metal suit who isn't hurting me, rather than the ones in the cloth robes who are burning my skin off"), it doesn't work for player versus player combat (because players don't go for the guy in the metal suit) and it doesn't scale (a battle with 1,000 fighters on either side — how many tanks do you need?). Don't get me wrong, it can be a lot of fun, but it's a dead end in design terms."
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Maybe I might be wrong but isn't playing in a group meant to be playing as a team, .work together?
I am abit confused about the red highlighted part.
On topic: Personaly I would say 3+ till 20. but I do want group size to define the challenge and not just be about mobs having more HP.
I was assuming that whatever group size you're prefering, the game would be designed for it. So a game with 12 people groups would have a lot of different classes, and would have more synergy between classes.
About finding players: thats IMHO the beauty of it.
A game that has 12 people groups doesnt automatically force you to find 11 more players.
You can make 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 people groups as well.
Especially if the players are competent above average, smaller groups would be possible, for the same content.
My idea would be that lowlevel groups can be rather small and still be efficient, while the hardest non-raid dungeons of the game would require a near full group, without any slacker.
100% agreed. At least 6 would be a lower limit for me. Below that its getting just stupid.
My ideal MMO (and I'm the first to admit this idea might be hard to implement) would behave like this: at higher levels, if a player who has really spent a lot of work on their gear and really knows how to play their class very well, then they should be able to solo areas in which full groups of unskilled players will wipe.
Mind that doesnt mean you could ever solo the really hard dungeons, just the easier ones.
Other than that I support solo content at all levels, but it should be inferior content, and group content should dominate.
Interesting, but thats refering to WoW specifically. I have heard from people who loved 60 man raids from other games. So probably WoW just wasnt designed for larger raid forces.
Well, of course you should get less xp if you kill the same mob with more people, or with higher level.
If you are only playing with a fixed number of friends, you can design a group this way, yes. Thats what I like about larger group sizes: many more variance is possible, at least if the game offers said variance.
Thats actually one of the things I dont like about EQ - certain classes could solo, while others - not so much.
Either you should have solo content, or you dont. Decide ! Thats what I'd say about that. Of course, you still would have some classes better at soloing than others. I just wouldnt do these differences as drastically as EQ.
A pet has to be uber powerful to be considered a player on its own, though.
Actually the aggro mechanism is not necessary at all for teamwork.
You could just as well have the older Tank-Healer-Support trinity, instead of the newer Tank-Healer-SlackersWhoWillAlwaysBlameTheTankOrHealerForGroupWipes. Then everybody has to think about what they're doing, where they are standing, how to protect themselves, etc.
Dungeons & Dragons (I'm talking version 1-3, havent seen much of 4 and never ever bothered with 5 at all to date) for example has no aggro mechanism (again, 4 and 5 might have, since I dont know much about 4 and zip about 5, except that it exists), but it definitely has tanks (Paladin, Fighter, Barbarian) and healers (Cleric, Druid), and I would never claim that D&D doesnt have or doesnt require teamwork.
PvP gaming obviously will never have aggro mechanisms, thats why I'm not much in favor for them in PvE, either. Its IMHO a somewhat limiting mechanism.
Guild Wars was a great example in this respect as well. I forgot the name of the tank class (Warrior ?!), but it had not only a lot of hitpoint and better defenses, but also dished out a lot of damage (also IIRC some kind of adrenaline counter was involved, pretty impressive considering you have been limited to 8 abilities). But no aggro mechanism whatsoever, if I remember correctly.
Of course tanks should still get some form of guard abilities, I'm finde with that. Meaning they should be able to specify "I'm standing in front of this character and protect him from any attackers". I'm also fine with something like a temporary force, even temporary area force, etc. But they shouldnt just be able to "hold aggro" all the time, with no help from other classes except the occasional "deaggro" ability.
Okay. I dont like games with little variance.
I strongly despise that idea.
TES: Oblivion was one of the games which had that. Consequence:
(a) You never had any sense of progression. All opponents are your level anyway.
(b) If you misskilled your character (easy in Oblivion), you would be screwed. EVERYONE will slaughter you.
I want a seamless world which makes you think about where are you going.
Hmmmm. Sadly I dont see any solution for this problem.
That would depend upon the power of the pet, of course.
I would simply have a nice learning curve ... at low levels, you can solo everything, even dungeons. At highlevel, you need to know your class, you need to have the gear, and you need to get good groups for any more interesting content. You still can solo in some places, though, but if you're still a slacker, you might do so only quite slowly.
I think modern MMO's have destroyed the concept of grouping and teamwork in general, and that's partially why we have seen group sizes drop from the generic 6, to 5 and now even to four. Class diversity is the primary reason, with most games using the four achitype variable build model (Rift, ESO etc) that on paper looked good, but I really feel just ended up with predominately four cookie cutter roles. The only way to get back to good grouping and increase the size is diverse roles like buffers and CC'ers, dual tank, dual healer but diverse abilities (main heal / grp heal type of thing).
This brings about the second reason grouping is dying and that's the action mmo and anti trinity mind set. This works great for PvP and I do enjoy it. However it just doesn't work, (for me at least) in a PvE sense. I can quite happily play two games, one for PvE and one for PvP as I can't find one that does both well.
The last reason for me would be the oversimplified solo gameplay MMO. I'm still not sure why they are heading down the road of such soloable MMO's, but it really just kills an MMO for me now as I might as well just play a standalone game for the most part. The whole idea of MMO was to take what could be done at say a LAN party or group of friends on a "Multiplayer" level, and make it "Massive", and pretty much the only way to do that was "Online
So the ideal group size would be for me, somewhere between 6-8, but I wouldn't be objectionable to up to 12 in area's that supported that size of group with harder content. What I would like to see is something that would run 2, 3 and maybe even 4 groups of 6 as semi associated groups working through a hard dungeon zone. Where consecutive groups could pull a group of mobs and or res a fallen group, like a raid but not hard linked to the same encounters. Area content would be 6man mob groups, with 12, 18 and 24man targets that you could merge into larger groups or a raid for.
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