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A game can't have very much group content available at a time.
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,507
Let's suppose that an MMORPG wanted to be purely group content. So it made 100 group dungeons, and that is the entirety of the game's content. It didn't want to segregate players, but wanted to give them choices of whatever content they wanted to do. So all 100 dungeons allow cross-server grouping and will scale by level. If you get enough people together for a group to do the dungeon, you can do it, without regard to class or build combinations or player levels.
Question: how many dungeons does this game have that players can do?
If you said 100, you're wrong, or at least misunderstood the question. It's not a reading comprehension question. The game has 100 dungeons, but that doesn't mean that players can do all of them.
What will inevitably happen is that some dungeons will give better rewards than others. This could mean more gold, better gear, more experience, or whatever. People will figure out which dungeons give the better rewards and will ignore the ones that give worse rewards. Maybe which rewards are "better" could depend some on your level or class, so it's entirely plausible that the game will have several dungeons actively played.
But it will inevitably be the case that players pick out at most several dungeons that give the best rewards and run those only, while it's impractical to find a group for anything else. Instead of 100 dungeons being playable, there might be 4 or 6 or some other small number. Sounds like a rather repetitive and grindy game, doesn't it?
In order for all 100 dungeons to be viable, you have to give players good reasons to do all 100. Level requirements can do this to some degree, as a higher level dungeon gives "better" loot, but you have to be higher level to do it. Maybe you can split players into ten distinct level ranges, but 100 is quite a lot. Prerequisites in which you have to do this dungeon before that one can do it to some degree. Though eventually, the playerbase becomes fairly top-heavy and the low-level content is mostly deserted and most people have done the prerequisites.
But it's important to realize that the problem with the unplayed dungeons isn't that the rewards aren't good enough. Redoing the loot payouts could change which particular dungeons are actively done, but not that a handful are looped endlessly while the rest are ignored.
Even if all dungeons give theoretically identical loot--both on a per hour and per run basis--you'll still have this problem. Some dungeons will be more familiar than others, so players will be able to do them faster and more reliably. Some will be more popular, so you'll be able to get a group faster for them, and less time waiting for a group means more loot per hour. Balancing the rewards properly is important, but far from sufficient to make all of the dungeons viable.
A larger playerbase helps, to be sure. But even a WoW-sized playerbase isn't enough to fix this problem on its own. How many times do you think a raid has completed Molten Core on the live servers without any players over level 60 since the arrival of Burning Crusade? I'm guessing zero.
In order to make all group content viable, games have to actively give players reasons to do all of the dungeons. Or perhaps rather, it isn't necessary to push every single player to do every single dungeon, but it sure is necessary to give players reasons to individually act in ways to ensure that all dungeons are done by someone.
There are a variety of ways to do this. One of the simplest is to make only one dungeon available at a time. If you want to do do a dungeon right now, your only option is #36 on the list. Maybe the one available will change in an hour or a day. This introduces other problems, however, such as getting better rewards if you play on a day that a good loot dungeon is the active one than on a day when a bad loot dungeon is the active one. And that some people might just really hate dungeon #36 on the list for their own reasons.
This can be done with a little lighter touch by saying that, rather than all other dungeons being closed today, the daily dungeon gives double rewards. The bonus for being the daily dungeon rather than some other has to be very large, as it needs to be large enough that the least rewards dungeon plus the bonus is clearly better than the best rewards dungeon without the bonus. But it still has the effect of making all or nearly all dungeons but the highlighted dungeon of the day impractical to get a group for.
Another option is auto-balancing rewards, such that the dungeons that go unplayed have their rewards steadily increased, while the dungeons that are played have their rewards decreased. Make sure the effects of this are large enough that if a dungeon is left alone for long enough, it gives clearly the best rewards in the game, and then people will do it. This is a more organic way to move your restrictions around, but it can also have unpredictable effects. It could end up that particular dungeons tend to only give good rewards at particular times of day, and so many players never get to see a lot of the dungeons.
Another possibility is completion bonuses. If you've done ten distinct dungeons, you get a bonus. Do twenty distinct dungeons and get another bonus. And so forth. Make the completion bonuses big enough that doing every dungeon exactly once gives clearly better rewards than any other combination of dungeon completion with the same amount of time and you get players to do everything. Eventually. But you'd better make the completion bonuses repeatable, or otherwise, once most of the playerbase has done the completion bonus once, you get the same problem as before.
I'm not saying that these are the only ways to do it. But if you just create a bunch of group content without putting in mechanics to push players to actively seek out all of it, much and possibly most of your group content isn't going to be practical to group for. And so, you might as well save some money and not create all of that unused content. Because an MMORPG can't have very much group content viable at a time.
Question: how many dungeons does this game have that players can do?
If you said 100, you're wrong, or at least misunderstood the question. It's not a reading comprehension question. The game has 100 dungeons, but that doesn't mean that players can do all of them.
What will inevitably happen is that some dungeons will give better rewards than others. This could mean more gold, better gear, more experience, or whatever. People will figure out which dungeons give the better rewards and will ignore the ones that give worse rewards. Maybe which rewards are "better" could depend some on your level or class, so it's entirely plausible that the game will have several dungeons actively played.
But it will inevitably be the case that players pick out at most several dungeons that give the best rewards and run those only, while it's impractical to find a group for anything else. Instead of 100 dungeons being playable, there might be 4 or 6 or some other small number. Sounds like a rather repetitive and grindy game, doesn't it?
In order for all 100 dungeons to be viable, you have to give players good reasons to do all 100. Level requirements can do this to some degree, as a higher level dungeon gives "better" loot, but you have to be higher level to do it. Maybe you can split players into ten distinct level ranges, but 100 is quite a lot. Prerequisites in which you have to do this dungeon before that one can do it to some degree. Though eventually, the playerbase becomes fairly top-heavy and the low-level content is mostly deserted and most people have done the prerequisites.
But it's important to realize that the problem with the unplayed dungeons isn't that the rewards aren't good enough. Redoing the loot payouts could change which particular dungeons are actively done, but not that a handful are looped endlessly while the rest are ignored.
Even if all dungeons give theoretically identical loot--both on a per hour and per run basis--you'll still have this problem. Some dungeons will be more familiar than others, so players will be able to do them faster and more reliably. Some will be more popular, so you'll be able to get a group faster for them, and less time waiting for a group means more loot per hour. Balancing the rewards properly is important, but far from sufficient to make all of the dungeons viable.
A larger playerbase helps, to be sure. But even a WoW-sized playerbase isn't enough to fix this problem on its own. How many times do you think a raid has completed Molten Core on the live servers without any players over level 60 since the arrival of Burning Crusade? I'm guessing zero.
In order to make all group content viable, games have to actively give players reasons to do all of the dungeons. Or perhaps rather, it isn't necessary to push every single player to do every single dungeon, but it sure is necessary to give players reasons to individually act in ways to ensure that all dungeons are done by someone.
There are a variety of ways to do this. One of the simplest is to make only one dungeon available at a time. If you want to do do a dungeon right now, your only option is #36 on the list. Maybe the one available will change in an hour or a day. This introduces other problems, however, such as getting better rewards if you play on a day that a good loot dungeon is the active one than on a day when a bad loot dungeon is the active one. And that some people might just really hate dungeon #36 on the list for their own reasons.
This can be done with a little lighter touch by saying that, rather than all other dungeons being closed today, the daily dungeon gives double rewards. The bonus for being the daily dungeon rather than some other has to be very large, as it needs to be large enough that the least rewards dungeon plus the bonus is clearly better than the best rewards dungeon without the bonus. But it still has the effect of making all or nearly all dungeons but the highlighted dungeon of the day impractical to get a group for.
Another option is auto-balancing rewards, such that the dungeons that go unplayed have their rewards steadily increased, while the dungeons that are played have their rewards decreased. Make sure the effects of this are large enough that if a dungeon is left alone for long enough, it gives clearly the best rewards in the game, and then people will do it. This is a more organic way to move your restrictions around, but it can also have unpredictable effects. It could end up that particular dungeons tend to only give good rewards at particular times of day, and so many players never get to see a lot of the dungeons.
Another possibility is completion bonuses. If you've done ten distinct dungeons, you get a bonus. Do twenty distinct dungeons and get another bonus. And so forth. Make the completion bonuses big enough that doing every dungeon exactly once gives clearly better rewards than any other combination of dungeon completion with the same amount of time and you get players to do everything. Eventually. But you'd better make the completion bonuses repeatable, or otherwise, once most of the playerbase has done the completion bonus once, you get the same problem as before.
I'm not saying that these are the only ways to do it. But if you just create a bunch of group content without putting in mechanics to push players to actively seek out all of it, much and possibly most of your group content isn't going to be practical to group for. And so, you might as well save some money and not create all of that unused content. Because an MMORPG can't have very much group content viable at a time.
Comments
The reason of why players don't wanna spend their time in old content is not just because the rewards aren't satisfying, it's the sense of familiarity. Devs can scale up the rewards in an old content to be on similar level with newest one, but this act can't erase the sense of familiarity from the old content.
When you don't want the truth, you will make up your own truth.
This ties to @Quizzical's other posts about group formation. I think that we (as gamers) have become somewhat jaded, that if we don't know beforehand, we won't try something. That applies to games, to content within games and even tactics within content. We say we want to explore, but we really want to follow someone else into the unknown areas. We don't want to waste our time, let's see the result when someone else tried it first. Exploration is a form of risk taking, but we choose not to take risks that won't reward us adequately.
As much as I'd love to see 100% individualized dynamic content generated on-the-fly in an MMORPG, I am beginning to think it would actually be a death knell for the industry. No spoiler sites, no guidance, no players willing to try the new.
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To directly address Quiz's points. Limiting the content with a rotational mechanism that makes only 1 dungeon available a day, but it is equally likely to push players away from the game, rather than distribute the players across content evenly. Adjusting the rewards with flat out rewards (2x XP) just pushes the content away from other content. Many, many EQ1 players logged in to do Franklin Teek quests, because they were good experience, then they logged to another character to do more Franklin Teek quests. Auto-balancing and completion bonuses might have similar issues, but the lure of the rewards or bonuses must significantly outweigh the 'same-old grind' in the player's mind. Not enough difference, no one changes. Too much difference, players only do the content with 'heightened' rewards (and the cries of 'too easy' are likely to begin). Ultimately, people are going to follow what they perceive as a path of least resistance to achieve the goal they have set for their characters.
Finally, what is the industry's fascination with 2x? Why not 47.3x experience?
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
With that said....
The "I want to do what I want, when I want it, and this certain way" mentality is for SRPGs and solo-centric MMOs, not group-centric ones. I do think it's smart for developers of group-centric MMOs to develop features to encourage grouping but I think the encouragement, if a special feature, should not be punishing but rewarding.
Have a token system, tied to various NPC faction groups, for players willing to mentor down where there is a n% chance they drop with the other loot and are very valuable. Rotate certain areas or dungeons in a lore sense to drop additional mats or host different bosses that fit evolving storylines that run daily, weekly, and monthly.
Another idea is if there are group related quests offer rewards to the other players in the group upon turn-in.
A big factor contributing to what @Quizzical is describing, is one dimensional power progression. A good number of MMOs follow a very straight forward design. Players complete content in order to get a little stronger, gaining access to more difficult content. Having recently played WoW, this is definitely the case there. With the introduction of item levels, players are literally defined by a single number.
The item level is supposed to provide long-term progression. The idea is to have a single number, easily identifying your progress. In practise, playing to gain levels (or gear) ends up competing with playing for fun. I think this is one of the roots of the problem. I've never been a big D&D player, but I'd imagine people didn't meet in their living rooms to collect levels. In a sense, the streamlining of game design has been a commendable art form, but also the biggest flaw.
If you define dungeons based on the tangible reward, you are setting yourself up for trouble. If your game has a low dimensional progression, you will end up with pockets of completely irrelevant content. If your game has high dimensional progression (let's say each dungeon drops loot for a completely unique crafting discipline), you start running into balancing issues.
Some ideas that cross my mind:
If your game is setup in a non-linear way (with multiple viable disciplines), you may distribute the ingredients in the different dungeons. This should lead to different disciplines benefiting from running different dungeons. This may have the positive side-effect of rebalancing leading to increased demand in a certain kind of dungeon. If your water themed dungeons drop fish, then new fishermen content will reinvigorate water dungeons.
Making the gameplay skill based may make dungeons interesting for the sake of simply playing them. I do not play League of Legends to gain long term progression. Yes, you do get ranking ladders in MOBAs, but I'd argue people play because they enjoy the mechanics. There is not a whole lot of tangible rewards, leading to focus on the gameplay itself. If you allowed for a high skill cap in a MMORPG, with stress on ability interactions and timing (as opposed to gear driven progression) you might see more focus on the content, not the reward.
Grounding the player's character in the story should also help. If your character seems to be part of the whole experience, then participating in dungeons (or any content) should have intrinsic meaning. Defeating a barbarian fort would matter if your character was fighting an anti-barbarian revolution. These deep motives and values are what drives us in real life. You often see people lose their values in real life, perhaps excessively focusing on money, leading to a sense of monotony and non-importance. This sounds very similar to what WoW dungeons feel like. The challenge with story content is replayability.
I'm largely assuming that the problem of people wanting to do the same content finding each other is solved. If you need a five-man group to do content X and you're the only one in the playerbase wanting to do content X, a group isn't happening.
On the mentality, I think it's thoroughly reasonable for players to expect to be able to play the game when they want, and not to have to schedule the rest of their life around a game. As for which content and how to do it, my immediate concern is that all of the content must be realistically doable. If 10%+ of the playerbase is looking to do content X, then getting a group for it probably isn't very hard. The problem is that I don't want to repeat content X forever until I get sick of it and quit the game.
If you're going to make it an issue of evolving storylines, you'd better make sure that you're not constantly killing off content. Rotating among content is one thing, but you'd better make sure that content comes back into the rotation. The Guild Wars 2 "living world" concept was a disaster, as it meant massive amounts of work put into developing content that was almost immediately removed from the game, with the end result that the game didn't have any more content than before. All that development work was flushed down the drain.
Making different players seek out rewards from different dungeons could increase the number of dungeons that are viable somewhat, but it also has the potential to wreck the game in other ways. If all of the healers want to do dungeon A, all of the tanks dungeon B, and all of the DPS dungeon C, groups are going to be hard to come by in a trinity combat game. You talk about fish, but most players won't do crafting, and those that do can generally buy the materials they need off an auction house. I'm not saying that what you propose intrinsically breaks like that, but there are a lot of ways it could break depending on the details of your game.
You mention MOBAs, but there, there's really only piece of content for the entire game, and so nearly the entire playerbase is queueing for that one piece of content. That relies on varied interactions with your player opponents to keep the content varied and interesting. That's fine for PVP, but probably can't be replicated for PVE.
I really think you are approaching this subject (second such thread) from a soloist point of view and they are very different environments.
I mostly agree with the problem itself, but it's "just" a matter of fine tuning the rewards compared to actually creating the content. It's hard to have everything *equally* viable, but you don't need to do it. It just has to be viable enough. Of course people tend to do the one with the most/best reward per time, though increasingly favouring time over reward once we arrive at *hours*. But as you said, you can switch the rewards around, and if you make the dungeons actually different, there will always be people who prefer to do dungeon x over y because *they* are better there. Not everyone, not the class, but they as players.
I think the original Guild Wars handled that quite well with the Zaishen Mission etc., and Vindictus with the daily battle. Short on time? Do the daily stuff. But it was still worth it doing any or even all of the others.
And regarding that it's not possible to make them all the same - it is. Look at Skyrim's radiant quests. They where almost the same. The biggest difference for me was the boss at the end, because i could deal with most physical types quite well, but had a hard time against casters. And that was IMHO actually a flaw of the game, as the difference in difficulty was way to great for enemies of the same level etc. There is also a huge difference between having only one character, and having several. It's obviously much easier to counter more enemy types as a group, so that wouldn't be an issue.
So it *can* be done that they are all equal, or at least extremely close, or you can make them different enough from each other that it's not simply a calculation of length in meter * enemies per meter = time it takes / reward or some such thing, but that everyone, both as class, maybe down to individual skill, and as player, has a different experience.
Maybe some dungeon also does not offer much in terms of gold/experience, but something you can only get there? People will do dungeon A for gold, dungeon B for experience, and dungeon C to acquire some special skill or pet or whatever.
Of course scaling that (up) is difficult, if every dungeon gives a different special thing people will cherry pick what they need once again, still, if that thing is different for classes or if playing style influences it a lot, it can still mean that 10% of the population prefer doing dungeon a, b and c, another 10% prefer to do c, d and e, next 10% prefer to do e, f and g and so on..
Tl;dr: Difficult to do? Maybe, probably. Impossible? Far from it.
I'll wait to the day's end when the moon is high
And then I'll rise with the tide with a lust for life, I'll
Amass an army, and we'll harness a horde
And then we'll limp across the land until we stand at the shore
"a game can't have very much FORCED group content available at a time" ?
forced group content is group content , but group content isn't all about forced group .
The most limiting factors is power tiering, and other mechanics that separate players (Levels, Item Levels, quest barriers). Many games that rely on in world group content also have mechanics to level players up or down and other similar mechanics.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
Either they will pick the best rewarding content or the easiest, that is how most players work. And of course content people don't play are wasted resources. MMO players tend to be both lazy and greedy if the game encourages them to be that and more then a few MMOs do just that.
There are several ways to solve the problem. Timers we seen before but they often mean players will stay away from the game doing something else when their few favorites are on cooldown.
You could do like GW2 does with it's fractals and randomize the content players will face, but this method is made to run several small dungeons in a row instead of a single massive, in that case people would just abort and try again until they get a specific one.
You could also have specific drops at each dungeons that people needs, particularly crafting mats unique to that instance. That means that rarely done dungeons will rise in price and people who want to maximize profit will run whatever have the most expensive drops which will be the one least run lately if the mats and gear are balanced. You could go so far that certain armorpieces just will drop at a few dungeons at the rarity people need.
Other methods are something smaller you can add to another model to make it attractive to at least run all dungeons once. Achivements are the easiest to add but it can be anything from learning a skill or feat for each dungeon to titles and specific looking gear or even cosmetic changes to your character like unlocking a hair color or similar.
And you certainly can add a boost to experience and magic find the first time you run a dungeon and to ones you have not done in a while.
Whatever model you choose a game should encourage but not force people to play as diverse content as possible. You do not want a game where people just stay in a small portion of the game or there really would be no point to most of it. And players that stay in a small area of a game all the time will tire of it faster.
What a game needs is to form a group to kill most anything that offers xp and if there is no experience rewarded for utilizing your skills and weapons then i want no part of the game because the dev to me is clueless.
A game should NEVER experience up a character class unless it is directly related to the skills/spells/abilities.
As well the constant design to feed instances really turns me off and that is where 99% of game's grouping content happens.If you claim to b making a MMO then it should be a MMO ,open world and yes players can help each other,no FAKE locked combat.
99.9% of the mmos right now are nothing more than single player designs with no sense ideas all bundled behind a login screen.
If a dev can\t make a REAL mmo then imo don't bother pretending.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
And no, relying on tuning the fixed rewards properly by itself will not work, unless there is some mechanism to actively encourage players to do all of the content. Even if every dungeon gives identical loot and experience, they don't all take identical time or have identical difficulty, so they don't give the same rewards per hour. Even if they did the same there, some would happen to be more popular than others, meaning it takes less time to get a group, and you thus get better rewards per hour of playing the game because more of it is doing content proper.
Tuning rewards so that different players need different dungeons could make it so that instead of only 5 dungeons out of the 100 in the original example being played, 30 or 50 of them are actively played by some subset of the playerbase. But you're not going to get anywhere near all of them unless the game doesn't have very many dungeons.
You mention Guild Wars 1, but that's kind of a special case. Especially before Eye of the North, you reached your maximum power very quickly and then the game basically didn't have progression. That meant you could go do whatever you wanted without worrying about loot. I'm not aware of any other MMORPGs that have taken that approach, and even Guild Wars 2 pretty explicitly rejected it.
And even then, the Guild Wars 1 way to get a group was loading up on henchmen and heroes, not finding other players. I don't think I ever did any group content in that game with more than three players in my group, as opposed to henchmen or heroes. And I did literally several hundred mission runs in which I tried to group with other players.
In ESO for the past few months there has been a tremendous increase in the use of 4-man group dungeons.
The only thing that changed was that each dungeon now drops bind on pick-up pieces (previously the drops were bind on equip) for three sets that are near BIS for a lot of builds. Even though they're BOP, they can be traded with the other 3 players in a dungeon run for one hour.
The vast majority of players care much more about gearing up than any fun the dungeon run might provide... and they act like it, skipping anything that can be skipped and running it without any social interaction just as quickly as humanly possible.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
You can go fishing alone , but hey , it's more fun to do it with group . Let try to be friend with the nearby fisher.
Same with that logic , you can beat a mob alone ,but you can have more fun with more friend .
Good group is a group where people want to join with other , not because you are forced to do it .
When you create an content that force people to group for the reward then your design is fail
BTW , while i do think we need some forced group for epic activity , but 5 or 20 forced is lame and only make thing worst .
Forced is rule . same , free to chose one of the option also a rule.
Most people are friendly and social and likely to chit chat with strangers in right environment . Human's natural is social animal , but depend on the environment they behavior my change .
This is relevant to when the group content is a secondary thing while the game is primarily solo-play, but the games that embed group play within the core of their gameplay, it's when it simply works.
It's a matter of MMO's to make the concept primary instead of secondary to gameplay.
I think you need to edit this post, or perhaps rewrite it entirely. I think you said something, and I think I might agree with you. But I am completely confused by the syntax.
<scratches ear>