What are you an efficiency expert? You need to be more efficient in your explanation, as nobody will want to read all that (i.e. more text does not equal better explanation, to put it in your own terms). And I though Blizzard reduced raid size requirements with Burning Crusade content. Am I misinformed? Not a raider, just thought I read about it. And unless you're a Dev, how can you know how Blizzard or any other Devs think? A pretty grand assumption.
If you don't like it, don't read it. I was responding to Pappy.
If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly. If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.
What are you an efficiency expert? You need to be more efficient in your explanation, as nobody will want to read all that (i.e. more text does not equal better explanation, to put it in your own terms). And I though Blizzard reduced raid size requirements with Burning Crusade content. Am I misinformed? Not a raider, just thought I read about it. And unless you're a Dev, how can you know how Blizzard or any other Devs think? A pretty grand assumption.
If you don't like it, don't read it. I was responding to Pappy.
If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly. If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.
If your going to take the time to write a wall of text and try to sound like some expert on whatever it is your getting at. Spell check it . http://www.spellchecker.net/spellcheck/
I am generally not to picky and have been known to be pretty bad with typo's and grammar myself. But if you want people to read a wall of text as mind numbing as that at least attempt to present it well.
Originally posted by gestalt11If you don't like it, don't read it. I was responding to Pappy.
If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly. If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.
I read all of it, even understood the vast majority.
You are indeed a very intelligent person, yet the presentation may need a little work
And the best part is, you're right.
To (try) and sum it up for others (and please correct me if I'm wrong) :
1. 25 person raid should NOT = 5 person dungeon X 5
Why? Different set of challenges, just multiplying the health/damage by 5 doesn't make it 5 times more challenging.
2. Throwing more people at a problem isn't neccessarily the best idea. In fact, it can make things a lot worse, a lot less efficient, and just plain wasteful
3. To use a more.... reader friendly example....
In American Football, you have 11 guys on each side. 22 players on the field at once. Right?
If you doubled that, would it make the game twice as hard? No. It's make the game too complex and awkward without adding anything to the game but confusion and disorder.
Complexity for the sake of complexity is NOT challenge... it's complexity.
4. Smaller groups of people have to be more specialized, and specializing in a task is more challenging then having a great many people who are generalists.
The same is true of 5-person dungeons vs. raiding. In the smaller group setting, each person's role is more important, and thus the encounter is more challenging because each person has to contribute more.
What did I miss.... ummm... I'll have to read it again!
What are you an efficiency expert? You need to be more efficient in your explanation, as nobody will want to read all that (i.e. more text does not equal better explanation, to put it in your own terms). And I though Blizzard reduced raid size requirements with Burning Crusade content. Am I misinformed? Not a raider, just thought I read about it. And unless you're a Dev, how can you know how Blizzard or any other Devs think? A pretty grand assumption.
If you don't like it, don't read it. I was responding to Pappy.
If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly. If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.
Great post mate, best read I've had on this site in the last 12 months. What do you do for a living if that's not too personal a question please?
What are you an efficiency expert? You need to be more efficient in your explanation, as nobody will want to read all that (i.e. more text does not equal better explanation, to put it in your own terms). And I though Blizzard reduced raid size requirements with Burning Crusade content. Am I misinformed? Not a raider, just thought I read about it. And unless you're a Dev, how can you know how Blizzard or any other Devs think? A pretty grand assumption.
If you don't like it, don't read it. I was responding to Pappy.
If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly. If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.
Great post mate, best read I've had on this site in the last 12 months. What do you do for a living if that's not too personal a question please?
I am a software engineer, but not in the game industry. The game industry is a slave market.
That is a strong statement I know, and perhaps slightly exaggerated but not much.
Originally posted by gestalt11If you don't like it, don't read it. I was responding to Pappy.
If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly. If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.
I read all of it, even understood the vast majority.
You are indeed a very intelligent person, yet the presentation may need a little work
And the best part is, you're right.
To (try) and sum it up for others (and please correct me if I'm wrong) :
1. 25 person raid should NOT = 5 person dungeon X 5
Why? Different set of challenges, just multiplying the health/damage by 5 doesn't make it 5 times more challenging.
2. Throwing more people at a problem isn't neccessarily the best idea. In fact, it can make things a lot worse, a lot less efficient, and just plain wasteful
3. To use a more.... reader friendly example....
In American Football, you have 11 guys on each side. 22 players on the field at once. Right?
If you doubled that, would it make the game twice as hard? No. It's make the game too complex and awkward without adding anything to the game but confusion and disorder.
Complexity for the sake of complexity is NOT challenge... it's complexity.
4. Smaller groups of people have to be more specialized, and specializing in a task is more challenging then having a great many people who are generalists.
The same is true of 5-person dungeons vs. raiding. In the smaller group setting, each person's role is more important, and thus the encounter is more challenging because each person has to contribute more.
What did I miss.... ummm... I'll have to read it again!
Well the tricky part is the gray areas in between the obvious examples.
But the general idea itself it an important and actually very well known phenomenon when looked at from a distance or generalized vantage point.
To me there are two aspects that really are the most important to understand:
The inherent increase in entropy/choas. I think most people agree that random chance is not really a challenge. Although not the same thing they are similar enough for people to grab a hold of and evaluate . Initially this may seem like part of the challenge. However that would imply there is a solution, a way to decrese the entropy. You can mitigate this entropy to some degree, by being organized, but you can never reduce it to equivalence of a small group style thing. Because the process you do to mitigate has its own overhead. Its just not possible. There is always something tacked on top.
Secondly as the organization gets larger it is LESS able to effectively deal with entropy.
So you have two related factors causing a probably exponential effect. An increase in entropy and a decrease in the ability to deal with entropy.
I think most of use can agree that small organizations deal with unknowns quicker and more effectively than large ones. So hopefully that is not controversial.
I think it will also not be controversial that more people causes more entropy. You could call it chaos but that is not entirely the point it is really just stuff lost to the system. Could be someone running around doing stupid stuff, could be someone doing nothing.
The key aspect and the reason this misleads so many people is that there is no solution to this. You can mitigate to some degree. That is the best you can do. People see this as a burden that can be surmounted. Yes it is a burden but no it can't and won't be surmounted and eventually will make some tasks so top heavy they are impossible. Like trying to walk through hip deep mud.
It really is not a conincidence that the larger the organization the more it seems like people with an IQ of 10 run the place. Even though often they have very high IQs or MBAs or whatever. Its not just that there is a sort of size appropriateness to things. That is important don't get me wrong.
But the subtle part is the larger the group the more that even smart people are reduced to sometimes doing things in a way that would seem to make them raving dumbasses. And further these people may even be doing the appropriate thing even if it makes them look like a raving dumbass. Or even where thinking is just the wrong thing to be doing.
There is a reason that most armies do not want their enlisted men to think. It seems stupid but it serves a purpose. There is a reason for this being consistent in all armies across the globe for millenia. Part of it has to do with getting them to perform in deadly situations but a lot of it has do with executing the overall strategy. If everyone is a general, there is no army.
But at the same time many Spec Ops types ( many of whom are enlisted ) are encouraged to think and to be as innovative as possible and they almost exclusively operate in small teams, except the army Rangers and the army Rangers tend to think other Spec Ops guys are reckless/cowboys/rebels because of it. Its a subtle thing often attributed to culture instead of functionality. You can see this if you read the novel version of "Black Hawk Down". There is always tension between Delta and the Ranger officers because of this dynamic. The thing is they are both right. You could go on an on about that sort of analogy and about the tasking those various organization have etc. And it would be very enlighting most likely. But I am no expert on Spec Ops.
For specilization I think you may have it backwards for individual but perhpas correct for the group. Larger organization tend to specialize people, smaller groups tend to have more generalized individuals. But a small organization tends to be a specialist at a certain domain.
And in the end the challenge is implementing the solution. I don't really think challenge translates to specilization or even complexity. Its like the A-team. It is about the plan coming together. That is the challenge. But how and why and what you plan is the real varying factor not anything else.
I think that everything I have said here is something you can draw a line directly to the common complaints about raids.
For example they say things like there is no challenge for the normal people just the guild leaders. That is because you are an enlisted man. You aren't payed to think. You see where I am going with this.
Does that mean raiding is not challenging. No it doesn't. It means the way you plan/execute is different and has different challenges. I think when you consider a decent real world analog it is hard to say that being a sergeant in the army is easy. At the same time the complaint itself is not only valid but echoed by those very same enlisted men in the real world.
The worst thing that ever happened to raiding was that people believed the simplistic notion of difficulty. The current analysis is completely black and white as well as missing the point. It has stunted the growth of the raid game in a horribly perverse way.
Every argument about raiding eventually boils down to this idea of challenge and what you wind up with is 10 arguments on both sides that are all true and then people try to find a black/white yes/no answer to which one is more challenging.
Sadly this won't change.
You know why I say so? Because I have seen a variation of your Football analogy before, on the AoC boards. You know what happened? The raid proponents insisted that Football was inherently more challenging than basketball becausse it had more people. I think that is right about when I gave up on that thread.
I do not believe 5-man is more challenging than 40-man (I know its obsolete, but its a larger difference ot illustrate the point) in any circumstance (assuming some scaling etc). It is really about what is appropriate for the situation. A 5-man is simply better suited to a single boss fight.
Either way under ideal circumstances there will be a plan. Everyone will have something to do. And they will do it. By ideal I do not mean perfect execution. I mean when all 40 people are talented and competent. those 40 people will still have a far more imperfect excution than an ideal 5-man, but since they are competent they will know this and plan ahead with redundancy. Again we find overhead. And I think almost raiders will be forced to agree it is necessary. Because relying on perfection is a fool's game.
But when you make a 40-man attack a single boss and you have a system like WoW with 3 basic "roles". You are baiscally making the encounter extremely redundant for most people. Healing rotations, mass groups of DPS, one tank and off tank. Now divide by 40. People like to say this makes it more challenging because there are more points of failure. That is wrong. Any decent leader of a large organization ALWAYS plans around points of failure. Because they ALWAYS happen. Because that is the nature of large organzations.
At the same time if we change the encounter to have 3 bosses and say a large group of normal mobs. Then this obviously causes many problems for the 5-man and the 25-man or 40-man is suddenly far less redundant. In this case it is the 5-man that is far more likely to run into a point of failure. Even worse they are most likely not able to plan around that point of failure. I mean if they have the mage take the group, have the rogue evasion tank one boss, and have two tanks take the other two, well obviously the margin of error is pretty slim.
Both can be made "challenging", if we use a very broad sense of the term, for either type. But the point is that clearly they have different abilities to respond to different situations.
And really what most of all the complaints about raiding are is because many raid encounters are just designed to be a 5-man *5 or *8. But then you see a few encounters that aren't and then they are held up as the golden example of why raiding is really not boring or really is very challenging.
Unfortunately people then go back to simply arguing about what is better chocolate or vanilla. Rather than examining these things. The fact is both sides have an intuitive understanding of these issues and they express it in their complaints, but people are so invested in saying my way is the good way that they beleive any counterpoint must somehow be wrong or qualified when in fact both are actually right when you apply them to the correct thing. But due to this idea that "There can be only one!" there is never any progress made. Well this isn't Highlander even if we really want Sean Connery to do some voice acting.
Look Molten Core sucked. Everyone knows it. Further it was not that hard. Even most heavily invested raiders admit that now. But Blizz made some more raids and changed things up a bit. Some of those raids are considered more fun and more challenging, even at the 40 man size. These better raids almost always consistently take better advantage of the large size of the raid. Either with waves or complex scripting requiring vraious groups to do thing in coordination etc.
When you get to the stuff most raiders considered examples of better or more challenging raids they are encounters that actually make very little sense to even try in a 5-man. When comparing the good 5-mans to the good 40-mans, what you find is they are not comparable. They are apples and oranges, chocolate and vanilla.
In the end it is quite simple. You have a margin of error for your situation. If you execute your plan well and have a good plan you will surpass that margin of error and should be rewarded commensurratly. If your margin of error is extremely demanding then its challenging. Otherwise its easier.
Combine these two things and what you have is raiding is not harder. Grouping is not harder. But they do actually have a fairly similar metric for difficulty. But what changes is the plan. Sometimes radically, sometimes not much at all. One of the tricks is that when the plans are not that much different one of them is probably either not suited for the encounter or the encounter itself needs some work.
What your margin of error will be depends on the demands of the scenario and what you use to accomplish it.
Look at the plan for some Molten Core bosses. They are almost exactly the same as a plan a 5-man would come up with just with more people healing and more people DPSing and maybe some rotations or something. The only difference is that you slightly alter your organization to deal with the inherent problem of 40 people. You put in redunancy and things like that to deal with the inevitable problem of not being fully coordinated. There is no inherent difference in challenge. Depending on how they tweak that encounter you could have exactly the same margin of error for a 5-man or a 40-man. Because raiding is not intrinsically harder it just makes you plan for the inevitable and unavoidable incompetence that the 40-man environment itself generates even in otherwise competent people.
But when you consider some of the Black Wing Lair encounters you could not even come up with a plan that made sense to execute for a 5-man to succeed. And if we slightly altered the numbers in some of them the margin or error for that 5-man might still be pretty crazy hard. In the case of the Molten Core encounter you simply make the boss do 8 times less damage and have 8 times less HP to achieve equivalence. That is why the couple straight up tank and spank fights in Molten Core make the claim that raiding is hard look completely ludicrous to the people who have tried them. But look at some of the BWL encounters. To scale them down is not anywhere near so simple.
And that is the kicker. This is what makes it completely obvious. If you actually scaled some of those BWL encounters to a 5-man you would essentially have a completely different encounter. Because its not just about HPs or Roles or DPS, its about what you can and can't do with what you have. Anything that needs 3 tanks is obviously gonna present problems for a 5-man. Anything that is a simple tank and spank is a complete snooze fest in a raid, because it is filled to the brim with overcompensation and waste due to the inherent problems of 40 people working together. Huge over healing was often common in the 40-mans. And modest overhealing was expected even for good priests/druids.
This doesn't mean a 5-man can't have very complex scripting in an encounter. You could make the scripting extremely complex, you simply can't have 10 things happening simultaneously like you can in raid. But at the same time a 5-man may be able to react to multiple things going on much quicker and more efficiently than a raid, but at the same are easier to overwhelm. Especially if it involves say the group needing to move to a random location quickly. There is almost no way a 40-man would all simultaneously react as quick as a 5-man. It would not be hard to make a situation with multiple random location changes that a 5-man could complete but a 40-man almost never would.
And so we are left with two situations where only one of the two options can perform that situation and signifncantly altering that situation such that the other may perform it may drastically alter it to the point of being unrecognizable and therefore nothing was really accomplished in the first.
And that is why the difficulty difference is a complete myth. Because they are simply not comparable when applied correctly and when you shove them both in a situation either could perform they are obviously equivalent and only vary in their planning, and that is only to a small degree. This is about as close as you can get to a proof of the situation. They both have things neither one is capable of. They must be different. It is inescapable. Even more compelling is the overlap of the two has essentially been recognized by both sides a push.
Its not about who contributes more per person or whatever. All of that is always considered in your plan. When you design a 5-man you are going to expect certain efficiencies from a healer and a different over all efficency in a 40-man and a different one in a 25-man when each one fight a single boss. They simply balance the fight around those expected numbers. It really doesn't matter if the 5-man healer is 95% efficient and the 40-man average is 60% efficient. What matters is how much does your group needs to be a cracker jack group to get to those numbers. And when people tackle stuff, once they do it a few times, they have basically guesstimated these things and that is part of their plan.
Any raid that relies on close to 95% healing efficiency is really just making an impractical plan. That is just highly unlikely not just because of averages in ability but because of the scaling of mobs damage and hps etc. Its just safer to overheal in a raid sometimes. But also it can be safer to simply tab target and cast a heal or cleanse over and over and if you mis-cast a few on people who didn't need it oh well. You can rely on a 5-man to be able to remove the right thing at the right time and quickly because doing a quick scan is possible. This may not be possible in some raids, you may be forced to sacrifice accuracy in favor or speed or vice versa.
It is not a good measure to have efficiency or importance of an individual role be what determines challenge. However you are on the right track because a role can be much more imporant. This comes into your planning and whether you are able to even make a decent plan for a situation. It has a huge effect on your margin of error in some situations. In other situations it may not matter much at all. In a tank and spank scenario you may not have a second tank to step in, but at the same time your healer may not be in huge danger so that roles failure (in this case the failure would be dying) is not such a concern. But when you are in a more chaotic situation where your tank can't hold all aggro then you this concern taking on vastly different scope.
The key point is that it may be that a 5-man's healer can operate at 95% efficiency and will need to have at least 90% efficiency to succeed but that is what their job is and their environment makes it a reasonable thing to expect. That is their target. A raid healer may have a target point of, say, 60-70% and that same healer may achieve 95% in a 5-man. And may in fact consider both to be similarly challenging. This is often because their jobs are slightly different. But even if they had exactly the same job the fact that spot healing from others is highly likely to increase your overhealing and there is no way you can reliably account for that without losing out on spot healing. So you must choose between efficiency and safety, and choosing efficiency will nullify one of the inherent advantages of being in a large group.
In both cases their jobs roles whatever may be equally challenging. Even in the bad Tank and Spank single boss encounters of Molten Core. Their jobs might be boring, but performing them well may still be challenging. Fun and challenge are not always the same, although they can be related.
So yes it is true that often losing one healer is not the devastating blow in a raid that it is in a 5-man although in the case of a tank it can be. But that does not really mean the healing task in any harder for the individual. What it comes down to is the extra robustness of roles in a raid makes it more appropriate for certain situations. At the same time you can make a raid where roles are close to as important if each group had to operate on their own or whatever. One could imagine a domino effect when a healer or two died and a second group had to take on two groups instead. In the end the ecounter will be designed such that a certain amount of attrition is acceptable. So if 5 deaths are acceptable per AoE then probably its not great for a 5-man, but maybe ok for a raid.
It may seem like I am saying there is less risk in a raid because a dead healer in a 5-man is often a wipe and one dead healer in a raid is usually expected and has little negative effect. Therefore less risk. But the risks are different. A large raid necessarily dilutes using death as a measurement and this is shown in the mentality of raiders. Death means very little, only a wipe is what matters. Death in a 5-man is often an "Oh snap" moment, in a raid people laugh when the rogue dies and everything else is going ok. When you look at the encounters the death of one group member in a 5-man is about as common as things that cause total wipes in Raids.
Basically individual death has had its value changed. But this says nothing about the challenge. However this is confusing because it is so often the case that individual death IS the measure. This again underscores the fundamental differences. The fact the it radically changes people's conception about a fundamental mechanics should be rather telling. It should be an "Ah Ha" moment when parameters change to such a large degree.
That is the key. They couldn't reduce the challenge so they had to change the meaning of death to preserve the challenge due to the effect of this phenomenon of greater role importance you mentioned. It should, hopefully show just how different the two really are. It should show how easy it is to design around something to achieve an intended result without actually knowing what you are designing around. Because it is not until you then go back and try to make death mean the same thing in a raid that it used to in a group that you will find yourself running into a paradox. You then run into an "Um hold on" moment. Because the equivalence model starts to break down and putting the pieces back together just plain don't make sense when you try to also maintain a similar amount of "risk". By risk I mean, you need your plan to go well to succeed and when it does not go well you don't succeed. Because when you succeed even in the face of vast incompetence there was obviously no risk because no plan is that good. If it requires a large degree of competence then it was risky since your margin of error is high etc etc. People often identify death with "risk" and is usually the justification for death penalties.
Thus this hold over causes even more confusion. And incidentally also shows how some death penalties are actually rather poorly designed. Strangely a debuff Guild Wars/LOTRO style death penalty may actually be more appropriate for raids. Imagine if a death applied a raid wide debuff like the Dread debuff in LOTRO. Then individual death would re-acquire risk because it could contribute to a wipe, which is the real measure of success/failure in WoW. Repair bills are just part of the farming anyway. But anyway that just illustrates the kind of thinking you would need to go through to even get back to some semblance of where you started in regards to death when raiding is involved and the importance of unavoidably roles changes.
The only thing left is that organization is a pain in the ass and therefore 40-mans must be harder. Well first off you always have to organize. Second off, a developer can put in whatever pains in the asses they like to balance it out so that is really moot to begin with. A pain in the ass in not a challenge its busy work. I think we all know about consumable farming and the like. A good plan is challenging to come up with whether its big or small. And execution is execution, the margin of error depends on the the type situation and the balancing. How big or small affects that is entirely situational.
As to presentation. The presentation is fine when you consider I wrote this by request for one person and if they didn't understand it I simply would have tried again. Plus I wrote this while taking a dump and had to finish before I went to work out so I was rushed. I really don't care if people don't like the typos. If this had been an starting post for thread then whatever. When I responded to your post initially I tried to be concise precisely because of this.
But when people put in a TLDR that is only saying TLDR using 4 sentences and those other 4 sentences are meant to invalidate the post through attacks with no arguments then yes I will say something. If that had simply been TLDR I would not have responded.
So yeah I wrote it while I was taking a dump. So sue me . Since people complained I wrote an even larger wall of text ahahhahahahahahahahahahahahah.
If you write code like you write responses and explanations, then you are no better then the raid designers you criticize. And you still didn't answer my question in regard to BC. Are raid sizes not smaller? Take your own advice and be more eloquent and less complicated.
And I did bother to read your wall of text. At least the first less mocking one.
I'm gonna agree with the OP on this one. I would be considered a hardcore gamer, merely by the number of hours I log per week, yet because of my rotating work schedule it makes it very hard to commit to raids.
I think making content that only 2% of the playerbase will see is wasteful. 98% of the playerbase should not be funding content for the 2% that basically looks down on them as lesser players.
One possible solution might be to have these instanced raids with scaleable difficulty and rewards. Not sure if anyone has ever tried this before.
People who can express themselves like Gestalt11 understand far more than the typical, "Raids are easy because I beat MC" garbage that gets posted here weekly. If you don't have the patience to read what he wrote, no wonder you don't "get it".
I'm gonna agree with the OP on this one. I would be considered a hardcore gamer, merely by the number of hours I log per week, yet because of my rotating work schedule it makes it very hard to commit to raids.
I think making content that only 2% of the playerbase will see is wasteful. 98% of the playerbase should not be funding content for the 2% that basically looks down on them as lesser players.
One possible solution might be to have these instanced raids with scaleable difficulty and rewards. Not sure if anyone has ever tried this before.
I love the scaleable difficulty idea. Good idea. Along the same lines of having a heroic raid or a regular raid. Its a game...you should be able to experience the whole game. Scaling the difficulty or making a heroic/regular raid solves the problem. The elitists get their loot and can brag they did it on "heroic" but at least everyone has a chance to be like "yeah we beat it on regular and its a cool fight". My plea is that everyone get to experience the whole game.
There is enough to do for both the 5-man guys, the 10-man guys, and the 25-man guys... the challenge is different in their special regards, since it's all about the 25-man theme i'll gladly try make it short and hopefully agreeable.
The challenge with 25-mans runs down to these following points:
Getting 25 people together for one thing.
Getting 25 people together for a set time at the day or evening.
Getting 25 people to work together and comunicate.
Getting 25 people to do each their own role as they should, could be an easy task, could be a hard one, the important thing is that they do it as they were told to, as showed before, here comes a perspective of the army to mind, because the more "freely thinking people" you get the more chaos and the more stupid questions you could get such as "why should i do that? Rather do xzt!".... So basicly you want 25 people to work together and stick to their role, and do it well, having one panic and try to save his own skin could end in a wipe.
That one could be seen as "breaking the lines of defense", there's a reason why the army do it the way they do and as expected it's mostly also seen in WoW or any other mmorpg that has same large scale raiding ability ect.
Each role might not be hard or challenging at all, the hard part is making the 25 people work together and do each their role, as they should. The boss might never really be hard than a heroic boss, the margin for errors is simply bigger in the 25-mans because there are 25 people to make a simple mistake that can cause a wipe, while the 5-man "only" has 5 people, also ofcourse with 5-mans it's more easy to notice a bad player since each player is 20% of the grps performance, while the 25-mans is 4%, so a "slacker" is easier to spot in 5-mans and in the end it's more important to have 5 people who know what to do, yet also one player being better than the others does achieve more, in the sense of few people, one hero, while 25-man, one hero might just do like 10% performance, which in it's own right is over the double of what his/hers actual percentages were set at while the 5-man, the "hero" could be at 35%, still high but only that high because they are fewer and yet also not twice the performance of the other.
You could go on with all these aspects of 5-man and 25-man in the end they are almost the same, the challenge with 25-man lies in the very through getting 25 people, with each their own beliefs to work together, which isn't an easy task, since we live in a time and age where freedom is important and many want their "own views" acknowledged.
It's easier to controle 5 units, than it is to controle 25 units, especially if each unit is a freely thinking creature..... such as humans.....
Why these kinds of discussions still arise, i can't understand...... it's only logical that places that require 25 people to work together instead of 5, should give a little better gear.
Blizzard tries to please all and IMHO they do it very well giving both 5-man people and 25-man people some very nice stuff, and if all fails, go do arenas there you can get near high tier raiding gears as only 2 people , if having the same "cool" gear is your problem. ;-)
once again you think "cool" gear is what im talking about. Its not getting the best gear in the game im concerned about. I really dont care. Im saying that I actually want to complete the whole game. Go to Black Temple or Hyjal and experience it, not just get "leet loot". And I feel all players who pay 15 a month for this game should be able to experience the full game.
And I feel all players who pay 15 a month for this game should be able to experience the full game.
You might feel that way, but you'd be wrong. There will always be an upper tier of content in every game that will be reserved for those who have the patience, fortitude and time to conquer it. There's really no other way to design these games (in order to keep the hardcore players more or less happy) and it will necessarily exclude you. (and me as well).
I've learned to accept it and play the game until its no longer fun, then I move on. (always another game out there) No point in shouting at the devil.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Originally posted by Kyleran There will always be an upper tier of content in every game that will be reserved for those who have the patience, fortitude and time to conquer it.
I thought the same until Gestalt11 corrected me regarding City of Heroes
Originally posted by Kyleran There will always be an upper tier of content in every game that will be reserved for those who have the patience, fortitude and time to conquer it.
I thought the same until Gestalt11 corrected me regarding City of Heroes
Yeah, but who really thinks CoX is a proper MMORPG and how many hardcore players does it draw?
Who the hell are you, and why should I care? Congrats! You are a victim of Trollstar!
I could write a 20 page post explaining exactly why they do this and why they are wrong but instead I will summarize it. Basically they, and almost all MMORPG game designers, do not understand the difference between a large organization and a small organization. This is rather ironic given the medium. They basically believe that large = harder. Of course they seem to completely forget that smaller groups tend to be much more efficient and skilled. Ever heard the expression "An amry moves on its belly"? Yes well there are many layers to that very true expression. Anyway they have no real understanding of the difficulties involved in large scale operations and why they do not translate into smaller scale operations and basically believe the clusterfucks that happen in a large scale operation basically make it always harder. This is false on many levels. Unfortunately it affects their conception of diffculty. For them a raid is as hard as it gets because frankly they do not fully understand "hard" or even understand that a large scale operation is just fundamentally different. This applies to 80% of the MMORPG devs not just WoW devs.
I really like your analysis and yet at the same time I'm having a hard time understanding your conclusion. Your analysis indicates that larger groups are fundamentally different. How does that tie into the fact that larger instances do not have Normal/Hero type functionality? You lost me somewhere.
Yes I suppose the connection is lacking there. So I will explain a bit better and try to connecto the two concepts.
...
I didn't want to quote all that, but I think I understand now where you are coming from and to an extent I agree with you. However if we take your analysis and try to apply it to WoW, I'm not really certain how it could be implemented. It's one thing for us to talk theory, it's completely a different thing to be able to program it into meaningful functionality.
Do you have any ideas on how this would be accomplished? And I think some encounters, like perhaps Netherspite in some ways addresses what you are talking about because in essence there's a lot more going on than simply makeing a pot of coffee. In fact most of that fight is really all about controlling the 4 beams while at the same time killing Netherspite. It takes several small groups each focused on a different aspect of the fight to complete it. That's maybe a step in the right direction?
Edit: Read your second wall of text and I think we are on about the same page. You suggested possibly have 3 bosses and supporting mobs to deal with which sounds interesting and possible. I have not had the pleasure of attempting BWL and can't really relate to how it compares with Molten Core which I have attempted.
I could write a 20 page post explaining exactly why they do this and why they are wrong but instead I will summarize it. Basically they, and almost all MMORPG game designers, do not understand the difference between a large organization and a small organization. This is rather ironic given the medium. They basically believe that large = harder. Of course they seem to completely forget that smaller groups tend to be much more efficient and skilled. Ever heard the expression "An amry moves on its belly"? Yes well there are many layers to that very true expression. Anyway they have no real understanding of the difficulties involved in large scale operations and why they do not translate into smaller scale operations and basically believe the clusterfucks that happen in a large scale operation basically make it always harder. This is false on many levels. Unfortunately it affects their conception of diffculty. For them a raid is as hard as it gets because frankly they do not fully understand "hard" or even understand that a large scale operation is just fundamentally different. This applies to 80% of the MMORPG devs not just WoW devs.
I really like your analysis and yet at the same time I'm having a hard time understanding your conclusion. Your analysis indicates that larger groups are fundamentally different. How does that tie into the fact that larger instances do not have Normal/Hero type functionality? You lost me somewhere.
Yes I suppose the connection is lacking there. So I will explain a bit better and try to connecto the two concepts.
...
I didn't want to quote all that, but I think I understand now where you are coming from and to an extent I agree with you. However if we take your analysis and try to apply it to WoW, I'm not really certain how it could be implemented. It's one thing for us to talk theory, it's completely a different thing to be able to program it into meaningful functionality.
Do you have any ideas on how this would be accomplished? And I think some encounters, like perhaps Netherspite in some ways addresses what you are talking about because in essence there's a lot more going on than simply makeing a pot of coffee. In fact most of that fight is really all about controlling the 4 beams while at the same time killing Netherspite. It takes several small groups each focused on a different aspect of the fight to complete it. That's maybe a step in the right direction?
Edit: Read your second wall of text and I think we are on about the same page. You suggested possibly have 3 bosses and supporting mobs to deal with which sounds interesting and possible. I have not had the pleasure of attempting BWL and can't really relate to how it compares with Molten Core which I have attempted.
If just simpify things and say there is solo(1),small (5), medium(10), and many (20+).
As simple and general rule I think that many on solo fightsare mostly crap. I think you need many vs. small or larger and should mostly make many vs medium and many.
Those sizes for the purposes of the enemy encounters may be affected by environmental things as well. This can be richer than it initially seems. Imagine if Alterac Valley were turned into PvE raid for example. Who says everything must be a Dungeon crawl?
However if I were running a design department I would also sketch out various guidelines for what fits for a particular size of group. And what kind of things are genuinely hard for a large sized thing versus a small sized thing.
For example let me use Guild Wars GvG as an example even though it initially seems highly unrelated. GvG teams are 8 people large. GvG has two major areas of importantace the flga stand, control of which give buffs, and the Guild Lord who must be kept alive.
At one time in GvG some teams would create teams which were designed to be able to do a split. This meant they could split into two self-sufficient teams one of whom would occupy the flag stand while the other team went and tried to gank the guild lord for a quick win or at the least eliminate the his NPC guards.
Now some teams made a team that was a cohesive 8 man unit where you really could not split it into 2 units that were all that great. Some teams tried to find an happy medium. But it was always something you need to consider when making your team. Some teams simply went for a 6 man cohesive team and sent back some monks to heal the Guild lord. Of course the variations are endless since these are real people in a very robust system.
So why does this matter for PvE raiding? Well how often do raids make you do this sort of thinking about the division of labor in an encounter beyond healing rotations and where the dpsers go? Yet even in a size of 8 team when its a major concern.
In fact this concern has different concerns for 8 versus 80. The 8 man team can change and split almost instantaneously. Some GvG you have no clue when they are gonna split they can do it at any moment and almost always do it at some tricky point where you thought they were retreating but in fact just tricked you/ Soem GvG guys would fake with on split and actually split different people.
Now imagine the 80 man. This sort of instantaneous split just seems highly unlikely right? It would be a huge trainwreck if it was done on the fly. Now usually the 8 man GvG teams tend to plan stuff out and waht not but this sort of maneuver is going to take much more planning and a ton of practice for an 80- man group.
This is not because raiding is hard, its because such a maneuver is not well suited for an 80-man. Thus it is important as a design to get a good idea of what kinds of designs fit which sizes well. This does not mean that you never add some kind of split to an 80-man it simple means that you need to weight it right.
Also it is important to understand that in order to make it much much harder for a raid versus a group it would need to be something you cannot plan. One of the hugest weaknesses of a large organization is that without a plan they are essentially completely useless. This make operating in one kind of boring unless you throw a lot of action their way. But it is also one of the things one would need to be aware of for scaling.
Really if you made a raid with scaling difficulty you need to NOT change things that can't be planned for. It is tempting to say well since needing a plan is a large organizations weakness then we should exploit the weakness. This is wrong because this has far more to do with the system these people are operating in than any amount of competence.
So if there was some sort of random event that was avoidable but needed a decent reaction time. You should NOT increase its number of occurrences as part of the difficulty. However for a small group you could consider such a thing.
While the WoW devs have done more than many to aleviate the problem. I doubt they fully understand the issue.
They understand that when you have a lot of people around you need to occupy them. But i doubt that they fully understand the issue in the example above. Ie. the differing nature iof various problem and that somethings have nothing to do with skill and competence and are actually artifacts of the systems.
Just by going through a decent analysis and coming up with about 10 different types of mechanics and their characteristics for an organizations size they could make much better raids.
Of course they would also be forced to realize that better rewards for raiders is actually completely wrong.
Also they will not get away from many on one because of they believe in the pyschology of it. Personally I think its the stupidest thing ever created in all of computer gaming. But a lot of people want to fight some kind of huge dragon and say they one. There are other psychology issues as well.
In a sense WoW's methodology will probably lead them to exactly what I have said. You could call it rapid prototyping although its not that rapid. But they will always put in large single boss battles probably not matter how stupid they seem. Its a relic of EQ1 and it does a disservice to WoW's RTS roots but that is the way it is.
Blizzard has great QA and they will eventually come up with stuff, but the fact is they believe raiding is harder. They can't actually make that list.
Its a rather simple solution. Nothing flashy it really just a good analysis of what works and what doesn't and why. But like i said in the first post they can't make that list until they grab a hold of the key concepts. Their reward models and various explantions of their design themes (see Pardo at the AGC for an example) show that this is the case.
They cannot make this list becasue they think various mechancis don't work well in raids because raids are hard. But that is actually completely backwards. But then they actually ignore the fact that some things are actually EASIER in a raid. Their current method of a sort of rapid prototyping with good QA will not fully expose this.
In reality they have all the mechanics already in place in multitudes of dungeons and raids. They are simply fooling themselves about what is "hard" and what is not. In fact they actually hurt their own raid design by putting things into them that are ill-suited to the design to make them "harder".
Even some of the cooler mechanics like the BWL class callout that Nef does are actually kind of hard for a raid to deal with due its unpredictability, although its also difficult for a group to deal with because each class is more important as Heerobya mentioned above.
You could say this mechanic may be equally difficult for a group compared to a raid, but due to different reason. If you changed what Nef was shouting the whole situation could change radically and then they would have no idea how to gauge it. If he shouted out a race instead of class this mechanic would be much harder for a group, since it lacks the robustness of the raid.
But according to their current design philosophy the raid version is ALWAYS harder because making things larger makes them harder and that is just the way it is.
So the biggest hurdle is not really mechanics I think you could make very good raids with a good analysis of the existing mechanics in WoW. But that analysis can't happen. And it probably never will happne in WoW or much of any MMO anytime in the near future. You usually just get blank stares when you say simple obvious things like "some things are easier in a large organization". There are tons of obvious flaws in the theory of bigger = harder. They have been said multiple times by multiple people are never refuted or countered or given any credence.
Every raid in WoW with good appropriate mechanics also contain at least as many ill-fitting mechanics that have really very little reason to even be there. There is nothing in WoW like the Rikti Mothership raids in CoX. Not saying thoser mother ship raids are the be all end but there is nothing in WoW like that, because they are constrained by this lack of understanding.
Large organizations are able to cover far more ground than small ones. Why don't many, if any, WoW raids take advantage of this natural trend? Even when they design a raid like the one you mention they still to some degree are trying to shove 20 people in a phone booth and then when its hard to make a phone call, they pat themselves on the back and say see we made somethign really challenging.
Why not have you guys split up across a vast battle field, require the 4 groups to meet up split into 2 larger groups then split back up to 4 get some other? Then have 3 meet up again and fight a big boss while hold the line at a doorway while his army tries to save his ass.
Why do this? Well for one thing imagine that scenario, but remember WoW raiding is no 25 man so the 5th group could be your scout group maybe they are the ones who tell you where to go and what is heading your way and when. Maybe if you made it so that good intelligence of what is actually going on in the instance itself was ciritical to completion. You could have the group be a stealth group of rogues and druids.
This is the sort of thing that a 5 man can never do. This is the sort of think you need to take full advantage of raiding. Not just what is done poorly by raids but what they do WELL. And then challenge them and let them excel at what a raid can do well.
Is that netherspire example better? Yeah sure, but its still not really taking the strengths of a raids and using them, its just keeping more the raid occupied. They are bogged down by the idea that raiding is harder. Wrong. So completely wrong its tragic. Raiding is easier for accomplishing some scenarios, and those are the things they should be designing. They should focus on what is easier/possible in a raid, because that is usually what is well suited for them. Then they should make those things and adjust the difficulty.
Currently they have gotten to the point where they stick people in a room and make sure there are enough different tasks at least form some kind of division of labor. That is good, that is step in the right direction, but its also clear that they are still trying to shove everyone into a metaphoric phone booth. Why is everyone in the same room working on subtasks of the same task? This is a really important question.
Why aren't we assaulting an entire frigging keep and 1/3 of the raid occupies the guards while 1/3 of the raid lights the place on fire and the last 1/3 of the raid gets revenge on the chief muckiddy muck for calling your momma a ho? People ask these questions in a story based manner sometimes, but really you could certainly make an instance like that. You could even make it grindable by having 8 linked instances where you conquer one keep to get to the next.
Not unitl you start seeing true division of labor like you see in an EVE 0.0 corp will the raids really be robust and interesting. Not until you have a covert ops chief, and a logistics chief etc. Not until you have real jobs that actually apply in a real tactical sense. These might change for each raid of course.
But they don't and won't because all of these raid instances are dungeon crawl one boss after another. They are instrinsically 5-man dungeons and will always be so and will always fail at capturing more than 1 dimension of what raiding could actually cpature. Because if you think about all the large organizations that have ever existed in the real world they do not operate in the manner of a WoW Dungeon crawl raid. Doing so would be incredibly limiting, because what they good at is doing many different things all at once.
Why aren't we assaulting an entire frigging keep and 1/3 of the raid occupies the guards while 1/3 of the raid lights the place on fire and the last 1/3 of the raid gets revenge on the chief muckiddy muck for calling your momma a ho? People ask these questions in a story based manner sometimes, but really you could certainly make an instance like that. You could even make it grindable by having 8 linked instances where you conquer one keep to get to the next.
Well I think you might be simplifying things a bit too much to say they don't do this because they don't understand what really makes a raid hard. I think a bigger reason they don't do this is because it's a lot harder to program this than you realize. The single boss with a couple different abilities that must be accounted for is much easier to program than what you're talking about and it's also a lot easier to adjust the difficulty to get it right for the group size. Doing something like you are talking about has an awful lot of different variables to be taken into account and might make it extremely easy to complete under a certain set of circumstances. It's hard to account for every possible scenario for a situation like that and if they didn't, then it could be exploited badly, so they just simply cut down on the number of possible choices which makes the possible number of solutions a lot less as well which allows them to get the difficulty about what they want it to be which makes it much more difficult to exploit.
Isn't that a possibility as well and isn't that more likely rather then the fact they just don't "get it"?
Why aren't we assaulting an entire frigging keep and 1/3 of the raid occupies the guards while 1/3 of the raid lights the place on fire and the last 1/3 of the raid gets revenge on the chief muckiddy muck for calling your momma a ho? People ask these questions in a story based manner sometimes, but really you could certainly make an instance like that. You could even make it grindable by having 8 linked instances where you conquer one keep to get to the next.
Well I think you might be simplifying things a bit too much to say they don't do this because they don't understand what really makes a raid hard. I think a bigger reason they don't do this is because it's a lot harder to program this than you realize. The single boss with a couple different abilities that must be accounted for is much easier to program than what you're talking about and it's also a lot easier to adjust the difficulty to get it right for the group size. Doing something like you are talking about has an awful lot of different variables to be taken into account and might make it extremely easy to complete under a certain set of circumstances. It's hard to account for every possible scenario for a situation like that and if they didn't, then it could be exploited badly, so they just simply cut down on the number of possible choices which makes the possible number of solutions a lot less as well which allows them to get the difficulty about what they want it to be which makes it much more difficult to exploit.
Isn't that a possibility as well and isn't that more likely rather then the fact they just don't "get it"?
I disagree that what you are saying is the case. Yes it COULD be made this way. But you can make a single boss fight with too many variables as well.
If you are careful it would not be hard to create 3 tasks, rather than 3 subtasks that are all part of just 1 task. And have a similar amount of variables in each. After all they have complete control over the instance.
I was just making stuff up off the cuff. So sure if you actually made a living breathing keep, then sure there could be all sorts of variables. But Blizzard is not making living breathing instances now or ever. So assume that this "keep" is structured and locked down similar to how they have things locked down now.
After all its not like some random guy looking for a midnight snack walks in on you while you are fighting a boss. Its not like an entire instance comes to help any boss like they normally would. These things are all highly/tightly locked down (really to a quite silly degree).
The reason I said keep is more to give a sense of what you would actually do if you assaulted a keep. There are multiple important things that need to be done roughly at the same time. One team secures the gate, another team secures the watch towers, another team goes for the boss in the main hall.
Each of those parts could have exactly the same amount of variables as any currently existing encounter. And coordination is completely up to the designers. They could make have no margin of error at all or make them need to be completed at roughly the same time. They control everything.
Now it is true that some factors that do not exist in current encounters could balloon out the amount of variables, such as generic patrols if there is a lot of running around needed. But that is not an issue for this discussion because Blizzard has complete control over those things. They can certainly make it analogous if they choose.
But the fact that those things do not even exist right now is just another indication that they are not taking advantage of this other dimension. And it is not because of design or technical issues. They could easily simply take away some variables and add others.
Obviously if you have an ecounter that requires 4 different groups to each do a different thing then you can't do my example. So that would have to have some variables removed in order to put the other variables in.
Now if you only want one variable, then yes, you are restricted to a single boss fight with a single task. So one task versus 3 tasks will have a disparity when nothing else is added in. But that isn't the way these things currently work and giving a raid 1 variable is just silly anyway.
Just because there are 3 tasks doesn't mean there are 3 branch points. It could but they could easily just force you to split up and do it and give no other choice. And they could easily have the same problem if they added branch points in a single boss encounter, such as the Onyxia "phases", anyway.
No given that they have complete control they can certainly design in such a way that choice is limited whether its a single boss in one room or 3 different task in 3 separate room or whatever. They control what choices are available. They could conceivably give the single boss encounter no real choice and give the 3 task encounters no real choices and they would all have 0 choices. Just make them all extremely boring tank and spank encounters and you would have parity. If anything the problem would be more because of social concerns about lack of good tanks and good equipment, but then again that would really be of WoW's own making anyway.
Similarly I think Blizzard a has decent enough handle on boss encounters to figure out how 2 encounters with 2 phases matches up against a single encounter with 3 or 4 phases.
Its tempting to think that there is "more going on" in the scenario I sketched out, but really given how fake all these things are anyway, there is actually no reason to think that. Its just based on assumptions and images that the scenario conjures up That keep could be entirely empty except for those three encounters. Now sure it would be really cool if they made a living breathing keep, but by no means do they need to. They could make it every bit as silly and artificial as Naxx was.
I mean I would hope that they give people enough choices to make their stuff acutally worth something, but by no means do any of these things have to have any real choice. Distributed or concurrent programming CAN be more complex than a typical linear program that does not mean it ALWAYS is. You can have a quite simple distributed paradigm that is just as simple as a normal linearly executed program. But even at that realativly low complexity equivlanet stage the distributed design is able to do things the linear one is not. Sure the analysis is somewhat different, I mean it has to be, its a fundamentall different paradigm, but no it does not need to have more variables.
In fact for some problems distributed or concurrent things will have less variables than a linear thing. Just like some problems are vastly more efficient when done by recursion, instead of iteration (Towers of Hanoi as the classic example).
One of the most persuasive argument for why they do not "get it" is that they have never even come close to taking advantage of what a platoon size unit normally does. 25 people is basically a small platoon and 40 people is a fairly large platoon. WoW raiding is basically using a platoon sized organization with I guess smaller "squads". But none of their raid content emulate platoon type activities in any decent way.
Add to that, that they can easily make such a thing and in fact have done so in Alterac Valley then yes I think the conclusion is close to inescapable. They can do so, the have never done so in PvE content, and there are clear advantages to doing so. Add on top of that that both their Lead designer and VP of design beleive that bigger = harder, which basically admits to not getting it.
So I am pretty certain they don't get it. The verbal confirmation of not getting it is enough for me, but the analysis of the content design is a nail in the coffin.
Why aren't we assaulting an entire frigging keep and 1/3 of the raid occupies the guards while 1/3 of the raid lights the place on fire and the last 1/3 of the raid gets revenge on the chief muckiddy muck for calling your momma a ho? People ask these questions in a story based manner sometimes, but really you could certainly make an instance like that. You could even make it grindable by having 8 linked instances where you conquer one keep to get to the next.
Well I think you might be simplifying things a bit too much to say they don't do this because they don't understand what really makes a raid hard. I think a bigger reason they don't do this is because it's a lot harder to program this than you realize. The single boss with a couple different abilities that must be accounted for is much easier to program than what you're talking about and it's also a lot easier to adjust the difficulty to get it right for the group size. Doing something like you are talking about has an awful lot of different variables to be taken into account and might make it extremely easy to complete under a certain set of circumstances. It's hard to account for every possible scenario for a situation like that and if they didn't, then it could be exploited badly, so they just simply cut down on the number of possible choices which makes the possible number of solutions a lot less as well which allows them to get the difficulty about what they want it to be which makes it much more difficult to exploit.
Isn't that a possibility as well and isn't that more likely rather then the fact they just don't "get it"?
I disagree that what you are saying is the case. Yes it COULD be made this way. But you can make a single boss fight with too many variables as well.
If you are careful it would not be hard to create 3 tasks, rather than 3 subtasks that are all part of just 1 task. And have a similar amount of variables in each. After all they have complete control over the instance.
I was just making stuff up off the cuff. So sure if you actually made a living breathing keep, then sure there could be all sorts of variables. But Blizzard is not making living breathing instances now or ever. So assume that this "keep" is structured and locked down similar to how they have things locked down now.
My point is that we have to assume there's only a certain number of variables that they can realistically throw into the equation, once they reach that point putting in more variables would require a more dynamic engine, more memory, a faster CPU or something. I don't know that they have reached that point with the current instances, but lets assume for a minute that they are close with the current encounters. If that's the case then they can't simply create 3 tasks each with as many variables as the 1 boss encounters they have now. The 3 tasks would each have to have fewer variables such that the total did not exceed the number of variables of the 1 now. But if you do that and you require all 3 tasks to be completed at the same time, which you would have to do otherwise each task would be taken as an individual encounter by the whole group, then what you have effectively done is cut down on the complexity of each person's encounter. No one person in the raid group will see all 3 encounters in 1 visit to the instance, they'll only see the 1 individual encounter they were involved in. In other words what you end up with is merely three 8-man single boss encounters all being done at the same time. That's more complex on the whole, but not for the individual. It's kinda like the Generals perspective of the war as opposed to the individuals perspective of the fight he's involved in. That's not necessarily any better than what we have now, is it?
I think the Netherspite scenario is actually more complex than the above scenario. Think about that fight for a second. You have essentially 4 tasks being worked on simultaneosly, the 3 beams and Netherspite himself. If any task is not properly handled, then that makes another task more difficult. If you're not interrupting one of the beams, then Netherspite becomes more difficult to kill. If your tank loses aggro on Netherspite, then interrupting the beams becomes more difficult. Each task is reliant on the other tasks being accomplished at the same time to complete the encounter. I think that's a very complex and well done boss fight. Illhoof is another example of a very complex encounter. Now both of these are 10 man encounters, I have not done many of the 25 man encounters, so I can't really speak for those instances and maybe they need some reworking, but Karazhan in my opinion has some very fun fights.
What I think you are really wanting is rather than having a few bosses, you are wanting a bunch of near 1 on 1 matchups that are all going on at the same time where the whole group has to assess the situation and adapt on the fly. Something akin to what you have going on in AV, only instead of Horde Vs Alliance, Player Vs NPC. And while I think that's possible as well, I think that could get really difficult to balance. How can you make NPC's smart enough to react to what's happening? They would have to have a sort of AI built into them so they can adjust their tactics on the fly to what the players are doing. In effect what you would have is the NPC's reacting to what the players are doing rather than the players reacting to what the NPC's are doing. Does that make sense? I think that would be very difficult to pull off. It's much easier to simply have a big boss that dictates what the players must do to defeat him rather than vice versa.
Comments
If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly. If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.
If you don't like it, don't read it. I was responding to Pappy.If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly. If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.
If your going to take the time to write a wall of text and try to sound like some expert on whatever it is your getting at. Spell check it . http://www.spellchecker.net/spellcheck/
I am generally not to picky and have been known to be pretty bad with typo's and grammar myself. But if you want people to read a wall of text as mind numbing as that at least attempt to present it well.
I read all of it, even understood the vast majority.
You are indeed a very intelligent person, yet the presentation may need a little work
And the best part is, you're right.
To (try) and sum it up for others (and please correct me if I'm wrong) :
1. 25 person raid should NOT = 5 person dungeon X 5
Why? Different set of challenges, just multiplying the health/damage by 5 doesn't make it 5 times more challenging.
2. Throwing more people at a problem isn't neccessarily the best idea. In fact, it can make things a lot worse, a lot less efficient, and just plain wasteful
3. To use a more.... reader friendly example....
In American Football, you have 11 guys on each side. 22 players on the field at once. Right?
If you doubled that, would it make the game twice as hard? No. It's make the game too complex and awkward without adding anything to the game but confusion and disorder.
Complexity for the sake of complexity is NOT challenge... it's complexity.
4. Smaller groups of people have to be more specialized, and specializing in a task is more challenging then having a great many people who are generalists.
The same is true of 5-person dungeons vs. raiding. In the smaller group setting, each person's role is more important, and thus the encounter is more challenging because each person has to contribute more.
What did I miss.... ummm... I'll have to read it again!
If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly. If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.
Great post mate, best read I've had on this site in the last 12 months. What do you do for a living if that's not too personal a question please?
If you expect a concise explanation of complex topics when I have limited time then you are silly. If you want to argue my points then fine do so, but I see no arguments.
Great post mate, best read I've had on this site in the last 12 months. What do you do for a living if that's not too personal a question please?
I am a software engineer, but not in the game industry. The game industry is a slave market.That is a strong statement I know, and perhaps slightly exaggerated but not much.
I read all of it, even understood the vast majority.
You are indeed a very intelligent person, yet the presentation may need a little work
And the best part is, you're right.
To (try) and sum it up for others (and please correct me if I'm wrong) :
1. 25 person raid should NOT = 5 person dungeon X 5
Why? Different set of challenges, just multiplying the health/damage by 5 doesn't make it 5 times more challenging.
2. Throwing more people at a problem isn't neccessarily the best idea. In fact, it can make things a lot worse, a lot less efficient, and just plain wasteful
3. To use a more.... reader friendly example....
In American Football, you have 11 guys on each side. 22 players on the field at once. Right?
If you doubled that, would it make the game twice as hard? No. It's make the game too complex and awkward without adding anything to the game but confusion and disorder.
Complexity for the sake of complexity is NOT challenge... it's complexity.
4. Smaller groups of people have to be more specialized, and specializing in a task is more challenging then having a great many people who are generalists.
The same is true of 5-person dungeons vs. raiding. In the smaller group setting, each person's role is more important, and thus the encounter is more challenging because each person has to contribute more.
What did I miss.... ummm... I'll have to read it again!
Well the tricky part is the gray areas in between the obvious examples.But the general idea itself it an important and actually very well known phenomenon when looked at from a distance or generalized vantage point.
To me there are two aspects that really are the most important to understand:
The inherent increase in entropy/choas. I think most people agree that random chance is not really a challenge. Although not the same thing they are similar enough for people to grab a hold of and evaluate . Initially this may seem like part of the challenge. However that would imply there is a solution, a way to decrese the entropy. You can mitigate this entropy to some degree, by being organized, but you can never reduce it to equivalence of a small group style thing. Because the process you do to mitigate has its own overhead. Its just not possible. There is always something tacked on top.
Secondly as the organization gets larger it is LESS able to effectively deal with entropy.
So you have two related factors causing a probably exponential effect. An increase in entropy and a decrease in the ability to deal with entropy.
I think most of use can agree that small organizations deal with unknowns quicker and more effectively than large ones. So hopefully that is not controversial.
I think it will also not be controversial that more people causes more entropy. You could call it chaos but that is not entirely the point it is really just stuff lost to the system. Could be someone running around doing stupid stuff, could be someone doing nothing.
The key aspect and the reason this misleads so many people is that there is no solution to this. You can mitigate to some degree. That is the best you can do. People see this as a burden that can be surmounted. Yes it is a burden but no it can't and won't be surmounted and eventually will make some tasks so top heavy they are impossible. Like trying to walk through hip deep mud.
It really is not a conincidence that the larger the organization the more it seems like people with an IQ of 10 run the place. Even though often they have very high IQs or MBAs or whatever. Its not just that there is a sort of size appropriateness to things. That is important don't get me wrong.
But the subtle part is the larger the group the more that even smart people are reduced to sometimes doing things in a way that would seem to make them raving dumbasses. And further these people may even be doing the appropriate thing even if it makes them look like a raving dumbass. Or even where thinking is just the wrong thing to be doing.
There is a reason that most armies do not want their enlisted men to think. It seems stupid but it serves a purpose. There is a reason for this being consistent in all armies across the globe for millenia. Part of it has to do with getting them to perform in deadly situations but a lot of it has do with executing the overall strategy. If everyone is a general, there is no army.
But at the same time many Spec Ops types ( many of whom are enlisted ) are encouraged to think and to be as innovative as possible and they almost exclusively operate in small teams, except the army Rangers and the army Rangers tend to think other Spec Ops guys are reckless/cowboys/rebels because of it. Its a subtle thing often attributed to culture instead of functionality. You can see this if you read the novel version of "Black Hawk Down". There is always tension between Delta and the Ranger officers because of this dynamic. The thing is they are both right. You could go on an on about that sort of analogy and about the tasking those various organization have etc. And it would be very enlighting most likely. But I am no expert on Spec Ops.
For specilization I think you may have it backwards for individual but perhpas correct for the group. Larger organization tend to specialize people, smaller groups tend to have more generalized individuals. But a small organization tends to be a specialist at a certain domain.
And in the end the challenge is implementing the solution. I don't really think challenge translates to specilization or even complexity. Its like the A-team. It is about the plan coming together. That is the challenge. But how and why and what you plan is the real varying factor not anything else.
I think that everything I have said here is something you can draw a line directly to the common complaints about raids.
For example they say things like there is no challenge for the normal people just the guild leaders. That is because you are an enlisted man. You aren't payed to think. You see where I am going with this.
Does that mean raiding is not challenging. No it doesn't. It means the way you plan/execute is different and has different challenges. I think when you consider a decent real world analog it is hard to say that being a sergeant in the army is easy. At the same time the complaint itself is not only valid but echoed by those very same enlisted men in the real world.
The worst thing that ever happened to raiding was that people believed the simplistic notion of difficulty. The current analysis is completely black and white as well as missing the point. It has stunted the growth of the raid game in a horribly perverse way.
Every argument about raiding eventually boils down to this idea of challenge and what you wind up with is 10 arguments on both sides that are all true and then people try to find a black/white yes/no answer to which one is more challenging.
Sadly this won't change.
You know why I say so? Because I have seen a variation of your Football analogy before, on the AoC boards. You know what happened? The raid proponents insisted that Football was inherently more challenging than basketball becausse it had more people. I think that is right about when I gave up on that thread.
I do not believe 5-man is more challenging than 40-man (I know its obsolete, but its a larger difference ot illustrate the point) in any circumstance (assuming some scaling etc). It is really about what is appropriate for the situation. A 5-man is simply better suited to a single boss fight.
Either way under ideal circumstances there will be a plan. Everyone will have something to do. And they will do it. By ideal I do not mean perfect execution. I mean when all 40 people are talented and competent. those 40 people will still have a far more imperfect excution than an ideal 5-man, but since they are competent they will know this and plan ahead with redundancy. Again we find overhead. And I think almost raiders will be forced to agree it is necessary. Because relying on perfection is a fool's game.
But when you make a 40-man attack a single boss and you have a system like WoW with 3 basic "roles". You are baiscally making the encounter extremely redundant for most people. Healing rotations, mass groups of DPS, one tank and off tank. Now divide by 40. People like to say this makes it more challenging because there are more points of failure. That is wrong. Any decent leader of a large organization ALWAYS plans around points of failure. Because they ALWAYS happen. Because that is the nature of large organzations.
At the same time if we change the encounter to have 3 bosses and say a large group of normal mobs. Then this obviously causes many problems for the 5-man and the 25-man or 40-man is suddenly far less redundant. In this case it is the 5-man that is far more likely to run into a point of failure. Even worse they are most likely not able to plan around that point of failure. I mean if they have the mage take the group, have the rogue evasion tank one boss, and have two tanks take the other two, well obviously the margin of error is pretty slim.
Both can be made "challenging", if we use a very broad sense of the term, for either type. But the point is that clearly they have different abilities to respond to different situations.
And really what most of all the complaints about raiding are is because many raid encounters are just designed to be a 5-man *5 or *8. But then you see a few encounters that aren't and then they are held up as the golden example of why raiding is really not boring or really is very challenging.
Unfortunately people then go back to simply arguing about what is better chocolate or vanilla. Rather than examining these things. The fact is both sides have an intuitive understanding of these issues and they express it in their complaints, but people are so invested in saying my way is the good way that they beleive any counterpoint must somehow be wrong or qualified when in fact both are actually right when you apply them to the correct thing. But due to this idea that "There can be only one!" there is never any progress made. Well this isn't Highlander even if we really want Sean Connery to do some voice acting.
Look Molten Core sucked. Everyone knows it. Further it was not that hard. Even most heavily invested raiders admit that now. But Blizz made some more raids and changed things up a bit. Some of those raids are considered more fun and more challenging, even at the 40 man size. These better raids almost always consistently take better advantage of the large size of the raid. Either with waves or complex scripting requiring vraious groups to do thing in coordination etc.
When you get to the stuff most raiders considered examples of better or more challenging raids they are encounters that actually make very little sense to even try in a 5-man. When comparing the good 5-mans to the good 40-mans, what you find is they are not comparable. They are apples and oranges, chocolate and vanilla.
In the end it is quite simple. You have a margin of error for your situation. If you execute your plan well and have a good plan you will surpass that margin of error and should be rewarded commensurratly. If your margin of error is extremely demanding then its challenging. Otherwise its easier.
Combine these two things and what you have is raiding is not harder. Grouping is not harder. But they do actually have a fairly similar metric for difficulty. But what changes is the plan. Sometimes radically, sometimes not much at all. One of the tricks is that when the plans are not that much different one of them is probably either not suited for the encounter or the encounter itself needs some work.
What your margin of error will be depends on the demands of the scenario and what you use to accomplish it.
Look at the plan for some Molten Core bosses. They are almost exactly the same as a plan a 5-man would come up with just with more people healing and more people DPSing and maybe some rotations or something. The only difference is that you slightly alter your organization to deal with the inherent problem of 40 people. You put in redunancy and things like that to deal with the inevitable problem of not being fully coordinated. There is no inherent difference in challenge. Depending on how they tweak that encounter you could have exactly the same margin of error for a 5-man or a 40-man. Because raiding is not intrinsically harder it just makes you plan for the inevitable and unavoidable incompetence that the 40-man environment itself generates even in otherwise competent people.
But when you consider some of the Black Wing Lair encounters you could not even come up with a plan that made sense to execute for a 5-man to succeed. And if we slightly altered the numbers in some of them the margin or error for that 5-man might still be pretty crazy hard. In the case of the Molten Core encounter you simply make the boss do 8 times less damage and have 8 times less HP to achieve equivalence. That is why the couple straight up tank and spank fights in Molten Core make the claim that raiding is hard look completely ludicrous to the people who have tried them. But look at some of the BWL encounters. To scale them down is not anywhere near so simple.
And that is the kicker. This is what makes it completely obvious. If you actually scaled some of those BWL encounters to a 5-man you would essentially have a completely different encounter. Because its not just about HPs or Roles or DPS, its about what you can and can't do with what you have. Anything that needs 3 tanks is obviously gonna present problems for a 5-man. Anything that is a simple tank and spank is a complete snooze fest in a raid, because it is filled to the brim with overcompensation and waste due to the inherent problems of 40 people working together. Huge over healing was often common in the 40-mans. And modest overhealing was expected even for good priests/druids.
This doesn't mean a 5-man can't have very complex scripting in an encounter. You could make the scripting extremely complex, you simply can't have 10 things happening simultaneously like you can in raid. But at the same time a 5-man may be able to react to multiple things going on much quicker and more efficiently than a raid, but at the same are easier to overwhelm. Especially if it involves say the group needing to move to a random location quickly. There is almost no way a 40-man would all simultaneously react as quick as a 5-man. It would not be hard to make a situation with multiple random location changes that a 5-man could complete but a 40-man almost never would.
And so we are left with two situations where only one of the two options can perform that situation and signifncantly altering that situation such that the other may perform it may drastically alter it to the point of being unrecognizable and therefore nothing was really accomplished in the first.
And that is why the difficulty difference is a complete myth. Because they are simply not comparable when applied correctly and when you shove them both in a situation either could perform they are obviously equivalent and only vary in their planning, and that is only to a small degree. This is about as close as you can get to a proof of the situation. They both have things neither one is capable of. They must be different. It is inescapable. Even more compelling is the overlap of the two has essentially been recognized by both sides a push.
Its not about who contributes more per person or whatever. All of that is always considered in your plan. When you design a 5-man you are going to expect certain efficiencies from a healer and a different over all efficency in a 40-man and a different one in a 25-man when each one fight a single boss. They simply balance the fight around those expected numbers. It really doesn't matter if the 5-man healer is 95% efficient and the 40-man average is 60% efficient. What matters is how much does your group needs to be a cracker jack group to get to those numbers. And when people tackle stuff, once they do it a few times, they have basically guesstimated these things and that is part of their plan.
Any raid that relies on close to 95% healing efficiency is really just making an impractical plan. That is just highly unlikely not just because of averages in ability but because of the scaling of mobs damage and hps etc. Its just safer to overheal in a raid sometimes. But also it can be safer to simply tab target and cast a heal or cleanse over and over and if you mis-cast a few on people who didn't need it oh well. You can rely on a 5-man to be able to remove the right thing at the right time and quickly because doing a quick scan is possible. This may not be possible in some raids, you may be forced to sacrifice accuracy in favor or speed or vice versa.
It is not a good measure to have efficiency or importance of an individual role be what determines challenge. However you are on the right track because a role can be much more imporant. This comes into your planning and whether you are able to even make a decent plan for a situation. It has a huge effect on your margin of error in some situations. In other situations it may not matter much at all. In a tank and spank scenario you may not have a second tank to step in, but at the same time your healer may not be in huge danger so that roles failure (in this case the failure would be dying) is not such a concern. But when you are in a more chaotic situation where your tank can't hold all aggro then you this concern taking on vastly different scope.
The key point is that it may be that a 5-man's healer can operate at 95% efficiency and will need to have at least 90% efficiency to succeed but that is what their job is and their environment makes it a reasonable thing to expect. That is their target. A raid healer may have a target point of, say, 60-70% and that same healer may achieve 95% in a 5-man. And may in fact consider both to be similarly challenging. This is often because their jobs are slightly different. But even if they had exactly the same job the fact that spot healing from others is highly likely to increase your overhealing and there is no way you can reliably account for that without losing out on spot healing. So you must choose between efficiency and safety, and choosing efficiency will nullify one of the inherent advantages of being in a large group.
In both cases their jobs roles whatever may be equally challenging. Even in the bad Tank and Spank single boss encounters of Molten Core. Their jobs might be boring, but performing them well may still be challenging. Fun and challenge are not always the same, although they can be related.
So yes it is true that often losing one healer is not the devastating blow in a raid that it is in a 5-man although in the case of a tank it can be. But that does not really mean the healing task in any harder for the individual. What it comes down to is the extra robustness of roles in a raid makes it more appropriate for certain situations. At the same time you can make a raid where roles are close to as important if each group had to operate on their own or whatever. One could imagine a domino effect when a healer or two died and a second group had to take on two groups instead. In the end the ecounter will be designed such that a certain amount of attrition is acceptable. So if 5 deaths are acceptable per AoE then probably its not great for a 5-man, but maybe ok for a raid.
It may seem like I am saying there is less risk in a raid because a dead healer in a 5-man is often a wipe and one dead healer in a raid is usually expected and has little negative effect. Therefore less risk. But the risks are different. A large raid necessarily dilutes using death as a measurement and this is shown in the mentality of raiders. Death means very little, only a wipe is what matters. Death in a 5-man is often an "Oh snap" moment, in a raid people laugh when the rogue dies and everything else is going ok. When you look at the encounters the death of one group member in a 5-man is about as common as things that cause total wipes in Raids.
Basically individual death has had its value changed. But this says nothing about the challenge. However this is confusing because it is so often the case that individual death IS the measure. This again underscores the fundamental differences. The fact the it radically changes people's conception about a fundamental mechanics should be rather telling. It should be an "Ah Ha" moment when parameters change to such a large degree.
That is the key. They couldn't reduce the challenge so they had to change the meaning of death to preserve the challenge due to the effect of this phenomenon of greater role importance you mentioned. It should, hopefully show just how different the two really are. It should show how easy it is to design around something to achieve an intended result without actually knowing what you are designing around. Because it is not until you then go back and try to make death mean the same thing in a raid that it used to in a group that you will find yourself running into a paradox. You then run into an "Um hold on" moment. Because the equivalence model starts to break down and putting the pieces back together just plain don't make sense when you try to also maintain a similar amount of "risk". By risk I mean, you need your plan to go well to succeed and when it does not go well you don't succeed. Because when you succeed even in the face of vast incompetence there was obviously no risk because no plan is that good. If it requires a large degree of competence then it was risky since your margin of error is high etc etc. People often identify death with "risk" and is usually the justification for death penalties.
Thus this hold over causes even more confusion. And incidentally also shows how some death penalties are actually rather poorly designed. Strangely a debuff Guild Wars/LOTRO style death penalty may actually be more appropriate for raids. Imagine if a death applied a raid wide debuff like the Dread debuff in LOTRO. Then individual death would re-acquire risk because it could contribute to a wipe, which is the real measure of success/failure in WoW. Repair bills are just part of the farming anyway. But anyway that just illustrates the kind of thinking you would need to go through to even get back to some semblance of where you started in regards to death when raiding is involved and the importance of unavoidably roles changes.
The only thing left is that organization is a pain in the ass and therefore 40-mans must be harder. Well first off you always have to organize. Second off, a developer can put in whatever pains in the asses they like to balance it out so that is really moot to begin with. A pain in the ass in not a challenge its busy work. I think we all know about consumable farming and the like. A good plan is challenging to come up with whether its big or small. And execution is execution, the margin of error depends on the the type situation and the balancing. How big or small affects that is entirely situational.
As to presentation. The presentation is fine when you consider I wrote this by request for one person and if they didn't understand it I simply would have tried again. Plus I wrote this while taking a dump and had to finish before I went to work out so I was rushed. I really don't care if people don't like the typos. If this had been an starting post for thread then whatever. When I responded to your post initially I tried to be concise precisely because of this.
But when people put in a TLDR that is only saying TLDR using 4 sentences and those other 4 sentences are meant to invalidate the post through attacks with no arguments then yes I will say something. If that had simply been TLDR I would not have responded.
So yeah I wrote it while I was taking a dump. So sue me
. Since people complained I wrote an even larger wall of text ahahhahahahahahahahahahahahah.
If you write code like you write responses and explanations, then you are no better then the raid designers you criticize. And you still didn't answer my question in regard to BC. Are raid sizes not smaller? Take your own advice and be more eloquent and less complicated.
And I did bother to read your wall of text. At least the first less mocking one.
I'm gonna agree with the OP on this one. I would be considered a hardcore gamer, merely by the number of hours I log per week, yet because of my rotating work schedule it makes it very hard to commit to raids.
I think making content that only 2% of the playerbase will see is wasteful. 98% of the playerbase should not be funding content for the 2% that basically looks down on them as lesser players.
One possible solution might be to have these instanced raids with scaleable difficulty and rewards. Not sure if anyone has ever tried this before.
People who can express themselves like Gestalt11 understand far more than the typical, "Raids are easy because I beat MC" garbage that gets posted here weekly. If you don't have the patience to read what he wrote, no wonder you don't "get it".
I love the scaleable difficulty idea. Good idea. Along the same lines of having a heroic raid or a regular raid. Its a game...you should be able to experience the whole game. Scaling the difficulty or making a heroic/regular raid solves the problem. The elitists get their loot and can brag they did it on "heroic" but at least everyone has a chance to be like "yeah we beat it on regular and its a cool fight". My plea is that everyone get to experience the whole game.
There is enough to do for both the 5-man guys, the 10-man guys, and the 25-man guys... the challenge is different in their special regards, since it's all about the 25-man theme i'll gladly try make it short and hopefully agreeable.
The challenge with 25-mans runs down to these following points:
Getting 25 people together for one thing.
Getting 25 people together for a set time at the day or evening.
Getting 25 people to work together and comunicate.
Getting 25 people to do each their own role as they should, could be an easy task, could be a hard one, the important thing is that they do it as they were told to, as showed before, here comes a perspective of the army to mind, because the more "freely thinking people" you get the more chaos and the more stupid questions you could get such as "why should i do that? Rather do xzt!".... So basicly you want 25 people to work together and stick to their role, and do it well, having one panic and try to save his own skin could end in a wipe.
That one could be seen as "breaking the lines of defense", there's a reason why the army do it the way they do and as expected it's mostly also seen in WoW or any other mmorpg that has same large scale raiding ability ect.
Each role might not be hard or challenging at all, the hard part is making the 25 people work together and do each their role, as they should. The boss might never really be hard than a heroic boss, the margin for errors is simply bigger in the 25-mans because there are 25 people to make a simple mistake that can cause a wipe, while the 5-man "only" has 5 people, also ofcourse with 5-mans it's more easy to notice a bad player since each player is 20% of the grps performance, while the 25-mans is 4%, so a "slacker" is easier to spot in 5-mans and in the end it's more important to have 5 people who know what to do, yet also one player being better than the others does achieve more, in the sense of few people, one hero, while 25-man, one hero might just do like 10% performance, which in it's own right is over the double of what his/hers actual percentages were set at while the 5-man, the "hero" could be at 35%, still high but only that high because they are fewer and yet also not twice the performance of the other.
You could go on with all these aspects of 5-man and 25-man in the end they are almost the same, the challenge with 25-man lies in the very through getting 25 people, with each their own beliefs to work together, which isn't an easy task, since we live in a time and age where freedom is important and many want their "own views" acknowledged.
It's easier to controle 5 units, than it is to controle 25 units, especially if each unit is a freely thinking creature..... such as humans.....
Why these kinds of discussions still arise, i can't understand...... it's only logical that places that require 25 people to work together instead of 5, should give a little better gear.
Blizzard tries to please all and IMHO they do it very well giving both 5-man people and 25-man people some very nice stuff, and if all fails, go do arenas there you can get near high tier raiding gears as only 2 people , if having the same "cool" gear is your problem. ;-)
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
once again you think "cool" gear is what im talking about. Its not getting the best gear in the game im concerned about. I really dont care. Im saying that I actually want to complete the whole game. Go to Black Temple or Hyjal and experience it, not just get "leet loot". And I feel all players who pay 15 a month for this game should be able to experience the full game.
You might feel that way, but you'd be wrong. There will always be an upper tier of content in every game that will be reserved for those who have the patience, fortitude and time to conquer it. There's really no other way to design these games (in order to keep the hardcore players more or less happy) and it will necessarily exclude you. (and me as well).
I've learned to accept it and play the game until its no longer fun, then I move on. (always another game out there) No point in shouting at the devil.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I thought the same until Gestalt11 corrected me regarding City of Heroes
EQ2 fan sites
I thought the same until Gestalt11 corrected me regarding City of Heroes
Yeah, but who really thinks CoX is a proper MMORPG and how many hardcore players does it draw?
Who the hell are you, and why should I care?
Congrats! You are a victim of Trollstar!
I really like your analysis and yet at the same time I'm having a hard time understanding your conclusion. Your analysis indicates that larger groups are fundamentally different. How does that tie into the fact that larger instances do not have Normal/Hero type functionality? You lost me somewhere.
Yes I suppose the connection is lacking there. So I will explain a bit better and try to connecto the two concepts.
...
I didn't want to quote all that, but I think I understand now where you are coming from and to an extent I agree with you. However if we take your analysis and try to apply it to WoW, I'm not really certain how it could be implemented. It's one thing for us to talk theory, it's completely a different thing to be able to program it into meaningful functionality.
Do you have any ideas on how this would be accomplished? And I think some encounters, like perhaps Netherspite in some ways addresses what you are talking about because in essence there's a lot more going on than simply makeing a pot of coffee. In fact most of that fight is really all about controlling the 4 beams while at the same time killing Netherspite. It takes several small groups each focused on a different aspect of the fight to complete it. That's maybe a step in the right direction?
Edit: Read your second wall of text and I think we are on about the same page. You suggested possibly have 3 bosses and supporting mobs to deal with which sounds interesting and possible. I have not had the pleasure of attempting BWL and can't really relate to how it compares with Molten Core which I have attempted.
Ah, now it all makes sense. Me too. We need more people like you here Gestalt.
I really like your analysis and yet at the same time I'm having a hard time understanding your conclusion. Your analysis indicates that larger groups are fundamentally different. How does that tie into the fact that larger instances do not have Normal/Hero type functionality? You lost me somewhere.
Yes I suppose the connection is lacking there. So I will explain a bit better and try to connecto the two concepts.
...
I didn't want to quote all that, but I think I understand now where you are coming from and to an extent I agree with you. However if we take your analysis and try to apply it to WoW, I'm not really certain how it could be implemented. It's one thing for us to talk theory, it's completely a different thing to be able to program it into meaningful functionality.
Do you have any ideas on how this would be accomplished? And I think some encounters, like perhaps Netherspite in some ways addresses what you are talking about because in essence there's a lot more going on than simply makeing a pot of coffee. In fact most of that fight is really all about controlling the 4 beams while at the same time killing Netherspite. It takes several small groups each focused on a different aspect of the fight to complete it. That's maybe a step in the right direction?
Edit: Read your second wall of text and I think we are on about the same page. You suggested possibly have 3 bosses and supporting mobs to deal with which sounds interesting and possible. I have not had the pleasure of attempting BWL and can't really relate to how it compares with Molten Core which I have attempted.
If just simpify things and say there is solo(1),small (5), medium(10), and many (20+).
As simple and general rule I think that many on solo fightsare mostly crap. I think you need many vs. small or larger and should mostly make many vs medium and many.
Those sizes for the purposes of the enemy encounters may be affected by environmental things as well. This can be richer than it initially seems. Imagine if Alterac Valley were turned into PvE raid for example. Who says everything must be a Dungeon crawl?
However if I were running a design department I would also sketch out various guidelines for what fits for a particular size of group. And what kind of things are genuinely hard for a large sized thing versus a small sized thing.
For example let me use Guild Wars GvG as an example even though it initially seems highly unrelated. GvG teams are 8 people large. GvG has two major areas of importantace the flga stand, control of which give buffs, and the Guild Lord who must be kept alive.
At one time in GvG some teams would create teams which were designed to be able to do a split. This meant they could split into two self-sufficient teams one of whom would occupy the flag stand while the other team went and tried to gank the guild lord for a quick win or at the least eliminate the his NPC guards.
Now some teams made a team that was a cohesive 8 man unit where you really could not split it into 2 units that were all that great. Some teams tried to find an happy medium. But it was always something you need to consider when making your team. Some teams simply went for a 6 man cohesive team and sent back some monks to heal the Guild lord. Of course the variations are endless since these are real people in a very robust system.
So why does this matter for PvE raiding? Well how often do raids make you do this sort of thinking about the division of labor in an encounter beyond healing rotations and where the dpsers go? Yet even in a size of 8 team when its a major concern.
In fact this concern has different concerns for 8 versus 80. The 8 man team can change and split almost instantaneously. Some GvG you have no clue when they are gonna split they can do it at any moment and almost always do it at some tricky point where you thought they were retreating but in fact just tricked you/ Soem GvG guys would fake with on split and actually split different people.
Now imagine the 80 man. This sort of instantaneous split just seems highly unlikely right? It would be a huge trainwreck if it was done on the fly. Now usually the 8 man GvG teams tend to plan stuff out and waht not but this sort of maneuver is going to take much more planning and a ton of practice for an 80- man group.
This is not because raiding is hard, its because such a maneuver is not well suited for an 80-man. Thus it is important as a design to get a good idea of what kinds of designs fit which sizes well. This does not mean that you never add some kind of split to an 80-man it simple means that you need to weight it right.
Also it is important to understand that in order to make it much much harder for a raid versus a group it would need to be something you cannot plan. One of the hugest weaknesses of a large organization is that without a plan they are essentially completely useless. This make operating in one kind of boring unless you throw a lot of action their way. But it is also one of the things one would need to be aware of for scaling.
Really if you made a raid with scaling difficulty you need to NOT change things that can't be planned for. It is tempting to say well since needing a plan is a large organizations weakness then we should exploit the weakness. This is wrong because this has far more to do with the system these people are operating in than any amount of competence.
So if there was some sort of random event that was avoidable but needed a decent reaction time. You should NOT increase its number of occurrences as part of the difficulty. However for a small group you could consider such a thing.
While the WoW devs have done more than many to aleviate the problem. I doubt they fully understand the issue.
They understand that when you have a lot of people around you need to occupy them. But i doubt that they fully understand the issue in the example above. Ie. the differing nature iof various problem and that somethings have nothing to do with skill and competence and are actually artifacts of the systems.
Just by going through a decent analysis and coming up with about 10 different types of mechanics and their characteristics for an organizations size they could make much better raids.
Of course they would also be forced to realize that better rewards for raiders is actually completely wrong.
Also they will not get away from many on one because of they believe in the pyschology of it. Personally I think its the stupidest thing ever created in all of computer gaming. But a lot of people want to fight some kind of huge dragon and say they one. There are other psychology issues as well.
In a sense WoW's methodology will probably lead them to exactly what I have said. You could call it rapid prototyping although its not that rapid. But they will always put in large single boss battles probably not matter how stupid they seem. Its a relic of EQ1 and it does a disservice to WoW's RTS roots but that is the way it is.
Blizzard has great QA and they will eventually come up with stuff, but the fact is they believe raiding is harder. They can't actually make that list.
Its a rather simple solution. Nothing flashy it really just a good analysis of what works and what doesn't and why. But like i said in the first post they can't make that list until they grab a hold of the key concepts. Their reward models and various explantions of their design themes (see Pardo at the AGC for an example) show that this is the case.
They cannot make this list becasue they think various mechancis don't work well in raids because raids are hard. But that is actually completely backwards. But then they actually ignore the fact that some things are actually EASIER in a raid. Their current method of a sort of rapid prototyping with good QA will not fully expose this.
In reality they have all the mechanics already in place in multitudes of dungeons and raids. They are simply fooling themselves about what is "hard" and what is not. In fact they actually hurt their own raid design by putting things into them that are ill-suited to the design to make them "harder".
Even some of the cooler mechanics like the BWL class callout that Nef does are actually kind of hard for a raid to deal with due its unpredictability, although its also difficult for a group to deal with because each class is more important as Heerobya mentioned above.
You could say this mechanic may be equally difficult for a group compared to a raid, but due to different reason. If you changed what Nef was shouting the whole situation could change radically and then they would have no idea how to gauge it. If he shouted out a race instead of class this mechanic would be much harder for a group, since it lacks the robustness of the raid.
But according to their current design philosophy the raid version is ALWAYS harder because making things larger makes them harder and that is just the way it is.
So the biggest hurdle is not really mechanics I think you could make very good raids with a good analysis of the existing mechanics in WoW. But that analysis can't happen. And it probably never will happne in WoW or much of any MMO anytime in the near future. You usually just get blank stares when you say simple obvious things like "some things are easier in a large organization". There are tons of obvious flaws in the theory of bigger = harder. They have been said multiple times by multiple people are never refuted or countered or given any credence.
Every raid in WoW with good appropriate mechanics also contain at least as many ill-fitting mechanics that have really very little reason to even be there. There is nothing in WoW like the Rikti Mothership raids in CoX. Not saying thoser mother ship raids are the be all end but there is nothing in WoW like that, because they are constrained by this lack of understanding.
Large organizations are able to cover far more ground than small ones. Why don't many, if any, WoW raids take advantage of this natural trend? Even when they design a raid like the one you mention they still to some degree are trying to shove 20 people in a phone booth and then when its hard to make a phone call, they pat themselves on the back and say see we made somethign really challenging.
Why not have you guys split up across a vast battle field, require the 4 groups to meet up split into 2 larger groups then split back up to 4 get some other? Then have 3 meet up again and fight a big boss while hold the line at a doorway while his army tries to save his ass.
Why do this? Well for one thing imagine that scenario, but remember WoW raiding is no 25 man so the 5th group could be your scout group maybe they are the ones who tell you where to go and what is heading your way and when. Maybe if you made it so that good intelligence of what is actually going on in the instance itself was ciritical to completion. You could have the group be a stealth group of rogues and druids.
This is the sort of thing that a 5 man can never do. This is the sort of think you need to take full advantage of raiding. Not just what is done poorly by raids but what they do WELL. And then challenge them and let them excel at what a raid can do well.
Is that netherspire example better? Yeah sure, but its still not really taking the strengths of a raids and using them, its just keeping more the raid occupied. They are bogged down by the idea that raiding is harder. Wrong. So completely wrong its tragic. Raiding is easier for accomplishing some scenarios, and those are the things they should be designing. They should focus on what is easier/possible in a raid, because that is usually what is well suited for them. Then they should make those things and adjust the difficulty.
Currently they have gotten to the point where they stick people in a room and make sure there are enough different tasks at least form some kind of division of labor. That is good, that is step in the right direction, but its also clear that they are still trying to shove everyone into a metaphoric phone booth. Why is everyone in the same room working on subtasks of the same task? This is a really important question.
Why aren't we assaulting an entire frigging keep and 1/3 of the raid occupies the guards while 1/3 of the raid lights the place on fire and the last 1/3 of the raid gets revenge on the chief muckiddy muck for calling your momma a ho? People ask these questions in a story based manner sometimes, but really you could certainly make an instance like that. You could even make it grindable by having 8 linked instances where you conquer one keep to get to the next.
Not unitl you start seeing true division of labor like you see in an EVE 0.0 corp will the raids really be robust and interesting. Not until you have a covert ops chief, and a logistics chief etc. Not until you have real jobs that actually apply in a real tactical sense. These might change for each raid of course.
But they don't and won't because all of these raid instances are dungeon crawl one boss after another. They are instrinsically 5-man dungeons and will always be so and will always fail at capturing more than 1 dimension of what raiding could actually cpature. Because if you think about all the large organizations that have ever existed in the real world they do not operate in the manner of a WoW Dungeon crawl raid. Doing so would be incredibly limiting, because what they good at is doing many different things all at once.
Well I think you might be simplifying things a bit too much to say they don't do this because they don't understand what really makes a raid hard. I think a bigger reason they don't do this is because it's a lot harder to program this than you realize. The single boss with a couple different abilities that must be accounted for is much easier to program than what you're talking about and it's also a lot easier to adjust the difficulty to get it right for the group size. Doing something like you are talking about has an awful lot of different variables to be taken into account and might make it extremely easy to complete under a certain set of circumstances. It's hard to account for every possible scenario for a situation like that and if they didn't, then it could be exploited badly, so they just simply cut down on the number of possible choices which makes the possible number of solutions a lot less as well which allows them to get the difficulty about what they want it to be which makes it much more difficult to exploit.
Isn't that a possibility as well and isn't that more likely rather then the fact they just don't "get it"?
Well I think you might be simplifying things a bit too much to say they don't do this because they don't understand what really makes a raid hard. I think a bigger reason they don't do this is because it's a lot harder to program this than you realize. The single boss with a couple different abilities that must be accounted for is much easier to program than what you're talking about and it's also a lot easier to adjust the difficulty to get it right for the group size. Doing something like you are talking about has an awful lot of different variables to be taken into account and might make it extremely easy to complete under a certain set of circumstances. It's hard to account for every possible scenario for a situation like that and if they didn't, then it could be exploited badly, so they just simply cut down on the number of possible choices which makes the possible number of solutions a lot less as well which allows them to get the difficulty about what they want it to be which makes it much more difficult to exploit.
Isn't that a possibility as well and isn't that more likely rather then the fact they just don't "get it"?
I disagree that what you are saying is the case. Yes it COULD be made this way. But you can make a single boss fight with too many variables as well.If you are careful it would not be hard to create 3 tasks, rather than 3 subtasks that are all part of just 1 task. And have a similar amount of variables in each. After all they have complete control over the instance.
I was just making stuff up off the cuff. So sure if you actually made a living breathing keep, then sure there could be all sorts of variables. But Blizzard is not making living breathing instances now or ever. So assume that this "keep" is structured and locked down similar to how they have things locked down now.
After all its not like some random guy looking for a midnight snack walks in on you while you are fighting a boss. Its not like an entire instance comes to help any boss like they normally would. These things are all highly/tightly locked down (really to a quite silly degree).
The reason I said keep is more to give a sense of what you would actually do if you assaulted a keep. There are multiple important things that need to be done roughly at the same time. One team secures the gate, another team secures the watch towers, another team goes for the boss in the main hall.
Each of those parts could have exactly the same amount of variables as any currently existing encounter. And coordination is completely up to the designers. They could make have no margin of error at all or make them need to be completed at roughly the same time. They control everything.
Now it is true that some factors that do not exist in current encounters could balloon out the amount of variables, such as generic patrols if there is a lot of running around needed. But that is not an issue for this discussion because Blizzard has complete control over those things. They can certainly make it analogous if they choose.
But the fact that those things do not even exist right now is just another indication that they are not taking advantage of this other dimension. And it is not because of design or technical issues. They could easily simply take away some variables and add others.
Obviously if you have an ecounter that requires 4 different groups to each do a different thing then you can't do my example. So that would have to have some variables removed in order to put the other variables in.
Now if you only want one variable, then yes, you are restricted to a single boss fight with a single task. So one task versus 3 tasks will have a disparity when nothing else is added in. But that isn't the way these things currently work and giving a raid 1 variable is just silly anyway.
Just because there are 3 tasks doesn't mean there are 3 branch points. It could but they could easily just force you to split up and do it and give no other choice. And they could easily have the same problem if they added branch points in a single boss encounter, such as the Onyxia "phases", anyway.
No given that they have complete control they can certainly design in such a way that choice is limited whether its a single boss in one room or 3 different task in 3 separate room or whatever. They control what choices are available. They could conceivably give the single boss encounter no real choice and give the 3 task encounters no real choices and they would all have 0 choices. Just make them all extremely boring tank and spank encounters and you would have parity. If anything the problem would be more because of social concerns about lack of good tanks and good equipment, but then again that would really be of WoW's own making anyway.
Similarly I think Blizzard a has decent enough handle on boss encounters to figure out how 2 encounters with 2 phases matches up against a single encounter with 3 or 4 phases.
Its tempting to think that there is "more going on" in the scenario I sketched out, but really given how fake all these things are anyway, there is actually no reason to think that. Its just based on assumptions and images that the scenario conjures up That keep could be entirely empty except for those three encounters. Now sure it would be really cool if they made a living breathing keep, but by no means do they need to. They could make it every bit as silly and artificial as Naxx was.
I mean I would hope that they give people enough choices to make their stuff acutally worth something, but by no means do any of these things have to have any real choice. Distributed or concurrent programming CAN be more complex than a typical linear program that does not mean it ALWAYS is. You can have a quite simple distributed paradigm that is just as simple as a normal linearly executed program. But even at that realativly low complexity equivlanet stage the distributed design is able to do things the linear one is not. Sure the analysis is somewhat different, I mean it has to be, its a fundamentall different paradigm, but no it does not need to have more variables.
In fact for some problems distributed or concurrent things will have less variables than a linear thing. Just like some problems are vastly more efficient when done by recursion, instead of iteration (Towers of Hanoi as the classic example).
One of the most persuasive argument for why they do not "get it" is that they have never even come close to taking advantage of what a platoon size unit normally does. 25 people is basically a small platoon and 40 people is a fairly large platoon. WoW raiding is basically using a platoon sized organization with I guess smaller "squads". But none of their raid content emulate platoon type activities in any decent way.
Add to that, that they can easily make such a thing and in fact have done so in Alterac Valley then yes I think the conclusion is close to inescapable. They can do so, the have never done so in PvE content, and there are clear advantages to doing so. Add on top of that that both their Lead designer and VP of design beleive that bigger = harder, which basically admits to not getting it.
So I am pretty certain they don't get it. The verbal confirmation of not getting it is enough for me, but the analysis of the content design is a nail in the coffin.
Well I think you might be simplifying things a bit too much to say they don't do this because they don't understand what really makes a raid hard. I think a bigger reason they don't do this is because it's a lot harder to program this than you realize. The single boss with a couple different abilities that must be accounted for is much easier to program than what you're talking about and it's also a lot easier to adjust the difficulty to get it right for the group size. Doing something like you are talking about has an awful lot of different variables to be taken into account and might make it extremely easy to complete under a certain set of circumstances. It's hard to account for every possible scenario for a situation like that and if they didn't, then it could be exploited badly, so they just simply cut down on the number of possible choices which makes the possible number of solutions a lot less as well which allows them to get the difficulty about what they want it to be which makes it much more difficult to exploit.
Isn't that a possibility as well and isn't that more likely rather then the fact they just don't "get it"?
I disagree that what you are saying is the case. Yes it COULD be made this way. But you can make a single boss fight with too many variables as well.If you are careful it would not be hard to create 3 tasks, rather than 3 subtasks that are all part of just 1 task. And have a similar amount of variables in each. After all they have complete control over the instance.
I was just making stuff up off the cuff. So sure if you actually made a living breathing keep, then sure there could be all sorts of variables. But Blizzard is not making living breathing instances now or ever. So assume that this "keep" is structured and locked down similar to how they have things locked down now.
My point is that we have to assume there's only a certain number of variables that they can realistically throw into the equation, once they reach that point putting in more variables would require a more dynamic engine, more memory, a faster CPU or something. I don't know that they have reached that point with the current instances, but lets assume for a minute that they are close with the current encounters. If that's the case then they can't simply create 3 tasks each with as many variables as the 1 boss encounters they have now. The 3 tasks would each have to have fewer variables such that the total did not exceed the number of variables of the 1 now. But if you do that and you require all 3 tasks to be completed at the same time, which you would have to do otherwise each task would be taken as an individual encounter by the whole group, then what you have effectively done is cut down on the complexity of each person's encounter. No one person in the raid group will see all 3 encounters in 1 visit to the instance, they'll only see the 1 individual encounter they were involved in. In other words what you end up with is merely three 8-man single boss encounters all being done at the same time. That's more complex on the whole, but not for the individual. It's kinda like the Generals perspective of the war as opposed to the individuals perspective of the fight he's involved in. That's not necessarily any better than what we have now, is it?
I think the Netherspite scenario is actually more complex than the above scenario. Think about that fight for a second. You have essentially 4 tasks being worked on simultaneosly, the 3 beams and Netherspite himself. If any task is not properly handled, then that makes another task more difficult. If you're not interrupting one of the beams, then Netherspite becomes more difficult to kill. If your tank loses aggro on Netherspite, then interrupting the beams becomes more difficult. Each task is reliant on the other tasks being accomplished at the same time to complete the encounter. I think that's a very complex and well done boss fight. Illhoof is another example of a very complex encounter. Now both of these are 10 man encounters, I have not done many of the 25 man encounters, so I can't really speak for those instances and maybe they need some reworking, but Karazhan in my opinion has some very fun fights.
What I think you are really wanting is rather than having a few bosses, you are wanting a bunch of near 1 on 1 matchups that are all going on at the same time where the whole group has to assess the situation and adapt on the fly. Something akin to what you have going on in AV, only instead of Horde Vs Alliance, Player Vs NPC. And while I think that's possible as well, I think that could get really difficult to balance. How can you make NPC's smart enough to react to what's happening? They would have to have a sort of AI built into them so they can adjust their tactics on the fly to what the players are doing. In effect what you would have is the NPC's reacting to what the players are doing rather than the players reacting to what the NPC's are doing. Does that make sense? I think that would be very difficult to pull off. It's much easier to simply have a big boss that dictates what the players must do to defeat him rather than vice versa.
That's just my opinion. I could be wrong.