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Raiding
Amathe
Member LegendaryPosts: 7,630
What do we know about raid content for Pantheon? I briefly went looking and what I found was:
A. There will be raid content, albeit the focus will be on group encounters;
B. Some or all of the raid zones will be open (non-instanced) and contested; and
C. I read somewhere about being able to return to some benchmark? I may have that one wrong.
I'm having trouble reconciling B and C, which makes me think I am off on one of them.
Is there better info? Raid sizes, for example? Is anything known yet about what raiding will be like?
If there is nothing more known, what do you want it to be like?
A. There will be raid content, albeit the focus will be on group encounters;
B. Some or all of the raid zones will be open (non-instanced) and contested; and
C. I read somewhere about being able to return to some benchmark? I may have that one wrong.
I'm having trouble reconciling B and C, which makes me think I am off on one of them.
Is there better info? Raid sizes, for example? Is anything known yet about what raiding will be like?
If there is nothing more known, what do you want it to be like?
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Comments
Prior to this, all old world raids were open world, and this resulted in unbelievable server drama. I'm not into PVP and griefing drama between guilds.
Every classic EQ server has nasty server drama early on, until the server approaches expansions that allow for instanced content, one of the reasons I won't play on them. I'm not into PVP or server drama.
When a new classic server opens, 2 things happen because content isn't instanced yet.
either
A: There is non-stop drama because guilds fight over naggy and vox
B: There is non-stop drama because one guild has naggy and vox on lockdown
Both these scenarios always end with many players leaving the server.
I cannot remember where, but I am fairly certain Kilsin has discussed open-world raiding with lockout mechanics as being one possibility they may use. If you kill an open-world boss, that character gets a lockout timer so they cannot interact with or possibly even see the boss for 3 days. Then they can respawn the boss every hour and not worry about people monopolizing the boss.
They need to make sure the lockout timer applies to interaction with folks engaging the boss too, else you could make a healer that just heals folks there at the raid site, even though they are locked out.
A lot of EQs problems were exacerbated by poor content design (PoP is a perfect example of how not to design contested content).
At the end of the day, contested content should be... "contested", but abusers should be banned with complete hostility by VR. If they have a no tolerance policy on abuse, and administer it with force, you can shut down offenders quickly.
Imagine if Fires of Heaven was taken care of by such? They were massive abusers, unethical players, and a guild leader who was a child tantrum thrower. If the ban hammer would have been swift, and unforgiving to him and his guild, those occurrences would have been uncommon.
I think there are ways with technology today though to avoid the conflicts we had in the past, but make no mistake, abuse needs to be hit upside the head with a massive bat rather than pussy footing with political touchy "feely" "investor worry" based management of the game or it is all pointless. Either VR serves gaming or it serves investors, after all.... the former is what they are selling this game on, it is only reasonable that this would be their focus.
Addressing each of those issues, I would make sure 1) each spawn had variance of several days (on non-PvP servers), 2) the area around the boss would be extremely dangerous, preventing a single player or small force from running in and checking whether a boss was spawned, also preventing characters from camping in visual range of the mob, 3) the raid target would not show up on track and 4) every so often there would be server resets that would guarantee every raid boss in the world respawned, allowing multiple guilds a chance to down targets.
These things would make locking down multiple bosses extremely problematic, as a guild would have to take a force in just to see if a mob was spawned.
Ultimately, the most motivated guilds will get the most raid targets, but at least this system requires a guild to devote time and manpower to checking raid spawns, affording other guilds with the opportunity to check different spawns. Server reset days also provide a chance for less organized guilds to pick a target (just like patch day on EQ live servers).
The truth about drama though, is that it didn't cause most players to "leave the server" in EQ. It was the nature of the game, and was accepted as such. People have to realize that, if they don't actually want competition in their MMO, they should avoid that aspect of the game or even consider the possibility that such a game is not being created for them.
To me, the competition and drama was much of the reason EQ was so memorable. You had your allies, your true friends and your villains. Those politics are part of what made the world come to life.
Restricting the locations where people can log-out, automatically return to home if the character camps in a 'contested raid area'. That would also prohibit some meta-game tactics where the raid has one character 'camped' in zone to facilitate recovery (drag corpses, rezzing, buffing, etc.). It is a bit more extreme solution. Some may not even acknowledge the meta-gaming issue as a problem to be resolved, but to me, that is as big an issue as many guilds use these out-of-game mechanics as a standard operating practices.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I mean, considering visual range in the game, how far you can see in games like EQ, how do you purpose to keep people from checking on such without making the entire area for large distances essentially "raid only enter"?
At that point, wouldn't it not be better to just make it a "raid zone" and then make it like breaking Fear where only the committed of a raid group will be able to survive?
However, in a place like Sebilis with Trakanon (or outside of Naggy or Vox's Lair), imagine if the dragon was not trackable and all the content leading up to the lair (from the first Golems to Tolapumj) was raid caliber, without any safe spots in the lair itself. It would be an hour process just to find out if he was up. Even a large guild could only muster so many people for such expeditions, meanwhile allowing their competitors to check other places.
Same goes for all nameds and even dungeon nameds.
That's the best way to prevent excessive camping.
Ancient Cyclops in south Ro and South Karana nameds like Quillmane are good examples, popular mobs but you couldn't claim camp because of the spawn system.
For raids some additional measures might be needed of course and it's good to hear that devs are thinking about it.
I care about your gaming 'problems' and teenage anxieties, just not today.
Ok, I like some difficulty in MMO, but I have a life too.
The alternative is playing the tracking game, something casuals have no chance of competing in.
There is a middle ground, but of the MANY many downsides to modern MMOS removal of spawn camp trains and the addition of instanced bosses is a good one.
I still remember leveling my THF in FFXI.. that was the game that made me appreciate that some content belongs in an instance. There are many things from old MMOs to harken back to, the feeling of being in a world, the lack of quest indicators, the sense of adventure the challenge, the grouping and social aspects.
But spawn camping is not a mechanic I want to see return personally.
Does that mean no one else who is capable or willing to play a game more than us should be able to experience what we once had with EQ? I think not. Those kinds of changes take away from that exclusivity that made EverQuest as compelling, or dare I say as addictive, as it once was.
But that's ok by me. Because although there was a lot of EQ content I never got to experience, all of the pieces to that game added up to something that was exciting to be a part of.
Once you start removing pieces, you begin down a road that leads to EQII. And while that game has its own merits, it never, ever felt like EQ to me. I don't want that to happen again.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Agreed with both, and it's comparable to RL examples of overcoming challenges as well.
The challenges that are the most difficult are always the most rewarding, memorable, and satisfying whether it be career, education, relationship based or simply individual personal milestones.
The reoccurring problem with most modern MMOs is the chase (journey) is gone, and you start right at the reward. EQ had mastered the dangling carrot (chase) of having something that seemed attainable that was just out of my reach, but, if I did obtain it, it was all that much more rewarding because I had to earn it.
And, it was much more realistic knowing that there was parts of the world I may never experience, or might not experience until much later - it forced me to delay gratification.
I think the idea here is how it can work in today's setting, not necessarily what worked in the past because though the ages may be roughly the same, the mentality may not be. If you look at the forums for the recent TLE severs you do see this drama played out.
I think spawn variance is a good idea but unless it's the intent to close out certain content to those who only have the greatest amount of time to play (spawn trackers and then a force large enough to take it down) there may need to be a kill tracker with a timer to engage it n time after. I assume that players are smart enough to figure out the most efficient way to do things for the most gain, especially the "hardcore" crowd that has a lot of time. You'd most likely see guilds composed of those who have the most time to play, theoretically closing out content no matter how variant the timers are.
However, if you pair a variant timer with a "kill cooldown" timer this would seem to solve the problem. Those who were registered as tagging the boss would incur a timer if the boss died and would have to wait a certain amount of time before being a part of that encounter again. This would foster greater organization within guilds of who should go when and may even keep the encounter from becoming a faceroll zerg since loot would not be available to all.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
With raid instances, every guild gets their own special instance of encounters which means the number of items introduced to the world is directly related to the number of instances ran.
With rotation schedules, the number of bosses killed doesn't increase. It is the same regardless. So, there is no increase of items into the game world.
I thought it worked quite well when I played. All the cock blocking went away, all the fights, and poop socking disappeared leaving you with just rotation of guilds doing various tiers of content that they had qualified for.
I realize this takes away from the whole "competition" thing some people like which is why something like this would be better fit for a rules specific server.
Even so, there were servers in live where the guilds formed an alliance to achieve similar results. /shrug
edit:
Another thing to consider is that his solution may not work well until there is enough content to support it.
The legends server was not released until I think after Velious or SoL If I remember right and that was a lot of tiers of raid mobs by that time which made having a rotation system work quite well. For Pantheon, such a solution may need to wait until it reaches a certain level of content.
I would think this would be the case for many in this day and age, as we've all grown since then. SO if we can't play such a game, who will? The usual answer to this is, "they don't need huge numbers"... yet that isn't exactly the truth, they do need a lot of people playing to justify being an MMORPG. I'd go as far as to say any healthy MMORPG population is rather huge.. Without that healthy population such games suffer, the more community driven they are, the more they suffer.
While it's a different game, that wasn't well executed (seemingly) Pantheon is starting to look like Wildstar to me as far as interest goes. There just aren't many talking about it, much like it was for WS before it released. I hope that at least changes as more info comes out. Comparative to CU, Crowfall as well as a couple others (which of those Pantheon has more appeal to me), there just isn't a lot of people looking in this direction yet. I wonder if that's because of the focus or something else.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Well, we know they are only making around 15-20% of the content for raiding with most of the focus on group game, so if the game is as hard and slow as it was in EQ, most of the people who don't have time to competitive raid won't even be at the end game anyway.
Casual guilds will likely have to wait for new content to come out and spur the players who do have the time on into new goals. If content is released in a timely manner like it was in EQ, then you will likely find that there is a ton of content for you to experience while the top end guilds chasing the end game raids are off doing the latest content.
Question is, can people wait or will the throw tantrums demanding they be able to do the latest content with all those who have massive amounts of time? This is where I see the "going down the mainstream path" problem come about. In EQ, those of us who had careers and families didn't have the time to put in for the whole contested raid content, so we took what we could get when it was available and this took time.
As long as people are willing to accept such, then there shouldn't be an issue other than the other things brought up which are due to systems.
As far as how popular the game has to be, I'd say it doesn't have to be that popular to sustain it. If they had even 10 servers with 3k players on each, thats almost half a million a month. While that might seem like peanuts to a triple A studio, to a small indie crew with ~25 people, I'm guessing that would be more than enough to keep the lights on and fund further development. This is a lot of guesswork though.
Personally, if they deliver the game they are advertising, I don't believe popularity will be an issue. The real question is how long, how much ($) and how well they deliver on this intended design.