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Good PVE group content will require randomly generated content that is good.
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,499
Early MMORPG grouping content got ignored by most gamers, as before WoW, MMORPGs in general got ignored by most gamers. The problem wasn't merely that players had to get a group. The problem was that the games didn't provide a practical way to get a group.
Some people accepted that when you log on, your first half hour or so is spent trying to get a group. That doesn't work very well if you're only going to be on for half an hour. Others scheduled their lives around a game so that they could consistently group with the same people. The reasons why only the hardest of hard core players will go so far as to schedule their entire lives around a game should be obvious.
And so, the critics of that approach were right. Even if the group content was fun after you had your group, actually getting a group was such a nuisance that most people wouldn't bother. Even if you liked the early MMORPGs, wouldn't it have been better if you could have just gotten exactly the same groups whenever you wanted without the fuss?
That led many MMORPGs to move mostly toward soloing. Those that did stay with group content commonly moved to queues. You pick your content, you join a queue, and once enough other players want to do the same content, you have your group and away you go.
But that led to other problems. In order to fill your group, there had to be enough other people who wanted to do the same content at the same time. If it takes an hour of sitting in a queue to get a full group, then the problem isn't solved. In order for groups to fill quickly, you need a lot of players trying to do each piece of content all at the same time.
And that means that the game can't have very much group content. If players could sign up for a queue in any one of a hundred dungeons, and there are 300 players looking to queue, that's not going to be enough for very many dungeons to fill their group. If queues move along fast, hundreds of players in queues requires thousands of players online concurrently doing group content at all hours of the day. Few MMORPGs have that sort of playerbase, and one that needs it in order to survive will probably end up very dead, very fast.
But it's actually much, much worse than that. That assumes that players do all dungeons evenly. That can kind of happen if the game gives very strong incentives to do so. Elsword is by far the best effort at this that I've ever seen. But what often happens is that players figure out which dungeon gives the best loot and loop that one dungeon endlessly. Or maybe which handful of dungeons give the best loot for each level range and ignore all of the rest. If a game has ten thousand players online concurrently at off-peak times, 9900 of which are crowded into a handful of popular dungeons, then the rest still can't get a group.
So what happens if a game only has ten dungeons that players actually do? If you're going to play the game for a long time, you end up running the same dungeon a zillion times. That leads to players knowing exactly what is coming and the game turning into speed runs. There's no communication and no strategy, as everyone already knows what to do. People may even get mad and kick you from the group if you dare to try to do a dungeon for your first time.
The critics of that approach are also right. Good group content isn't supposed to be about a bunch of people soloing while connected to the same server, or even in the same instance. You get thrown in with some random people you'll never see again, play your usual part, and leave without so much as saying "hi", let alone having to coordinate with your teammates. Surely that's not what group content is supposed to be about.
Thus, in order for group content to be good, it has to be varied enough that you expect to predominantly group with people who haven't done it before. That way, you have to communicate and figure out who should do what. Maybe it would become common to wipe a time or three until you figure out what some mobs are doing and how to counter it.
But simultaneously, people trying to get a group for content must not be split into so many different queues that yours doesn't fill. It isn't fun to sit in a queue for an hour before giving up and logging off. That means that the game can't have very many group queue contents.
So how do you do both at once? One way is to have a ton of group content, but don't let players choose which content they do. Have one common queue, then pick randomly which content the players do. FFXIV does something kind of like that, but it doesn't work very well, as you end up with high level players running low level players through the content. You'd really need for the game to have little to no progression for this to work well.
The other problem with picking content randomly is that players know that this dungeon gives better rewards than that one. If they roll a "bad" dungeon, they'll leave and try again. Trying to punish players for leaving groups creates other problems.
The real fix is what I said in the title. If the content is randomly generated, then players can't know the strategy ahead of time. They can't know that the loot is good or bad ahead of time, or that the dungeon is easy or hard. You can stick everyone in a common queue so that it fills and starts very quickly. And then you can have your good group content.
Of course, that requires randomly generated content that is good. Not just good as compared to other randomly generated content, but not massively worse than a hand-designed dungeon. And that's hard to do. That's why MMORPG grouping is not in a good state today.
Some people accepted that when you log on, your first half hour or so is spent trying to get a group. That doesn't work very well if you're only going to be on for half an hour. Others scheduled their lives around a game so that they could consistently group with the same people. The reasons why only the hardest of hard core players will go so far as to schedule their entire lives around a game should be obvious.
And so, the critics of that approach were right. Even if the group content was fun after you had your group, actually getting a group was such a nuisance that most people wouldn't bother. Even if you liked the early MMORPGs, wouldn't it have been better if you could have just gotten exactly the same groups whenever you wanted without the fuss?
That led many MMORPGs to move mostly toward soloing. Those that did stay with group content commonly moved to queues. You pick your content, you join a queue, and once enough other players want to do the same content, you have your group and away you go.
But that led to other problems. In order to fill your group, there had to be enough other people who wanted to do the same content at the same time. If it takes an hour of sitting in a queue to get a full group, then the problem isn't solved. In order for groups to fill quickly, you need a lot of players trying to do each piece of content all at the same time.
And that means that the game can't have very much group content. If players could sign up for a queue in any one of a hundred dungeons, and there are 300 players looking to queue, that's not going to be enough for very many dungeons to fill their group. If queues move along fast, hundreds of players in queues requires thousands of players online concurrently doing group content at all hours of the day. Few MMORPGs have that sort of playerbase, and one that needs it in order to survive will probably end up very dead, very fast.
But it's actually much, much worse than that. That assumes that players do all dungeons evenly. That can kind of happen if the game gives very strong incentives to do so. Elsword is by far the best effort at this that I've ever seen. But what often happens is that players figure out which dungeon gives the best loot and loop that one dungeon endlessly. Or maybe which handful of dungeons give the best loot for each level range and ignore all of the rest. If a game has ten thousand players online concurrently at off-peak times, 9900 of which are crowded into a handful of popular dungeons, then the rest still can't get a group.
So what happens if a game only has ten dungeons that players actually do? If you're going to play the game for a long time, you end up running the same dungeon a zillion times. That leads to players knowing exactly what is coming and the game turning into speed runs. There's no communication and no strategy, as everyone already knows what to do. People may even get mad and kick you from the group if you dare to try to do a dungeon for your first time.
The critics of that approach are also right. Good group content isn't supposed to be about a bunch of people soloing while connected to the same server, or even in the same instance. You get thrown in with some random people you'll never see again, play your usual part, and leave without so much as saying "hi", let alone having to coordinate with your teammates. Surely that's not what group content is supposed to be about.
Thus, in order for group content to be good, it has to be varied enough that you expect to predominantly group with people who haven't done it before. That way, you have to communicate and figure out who should do what. Maybe it would become common to wipe a time or three until you figure out what some mobs are doing and how to counter it.
But simultaneously, people trying to get a group for content must not be split into so many different queues that yours doesn't fill. It isn't fun to sit in a queue for an hour before giving up and logging off. That means that the game can't have very many group queue contents.
So how do you do both at once? One way is to have a ton of group content, but don't let players choose which content they do. Have one common queue, then pick randomly which content the players do. FFXIV does something kind of like that, but it doesn't work very well, as you end up with high level players running low level players through the content. You'd really need for the game to have little to no progression for this to work well.
The other problem with picking content randomly is that players know that this dungeon gives better rewards than that one. If they roll a "bad" dungeon, they'll leave and try again. Trying to punish players for leaving groups creates other problems.
The real fix is what I said in the title. If the content is randomly generated, then players can't know the strategy ahead of time. They can't know that the loot is good or bad ahead of time, or that the dungeon is easy or hard. You can stick everyone in a common queue so that it fills and starts very quickly. And then you can have your good group content.
Of course, that requires randomly generated content that is good. Not just good as compared to other randomly generated content, but not massively worse than a hand-designed dungeon. And that's hard to do. That's why MMORPG grouping is not in a good state today.
Comments
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
1) you scheduled your life around the game so that you can meet people at fixed, pre-planned times, or
2) you cared only that you grouped with your guild, not what you grouped for
If the problem is that there aren't enough people in the entire playerbase who want to do what you want to do, then restricting to the small handful of people in your guild doesn't make it easier.
You made some great observations and I really have no clue what to do. I want grouping activities in an MMORPG, like dungeon crawling or big special bosses, yet want to be able to play the game if I can't find group. I'd like to feel that "sense of danger" from old that had me seeking a group to help with an Orc camp.
I just don't know what will ever work, considering the playerbase today. It has grown astronomically dream-like for businesses, yet not in a good way for players.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Procedurally generated content could be adaptive to the actual group composition and gear level.
I play to progress, be it in killing the boss, completing the dungeon or getting rich, and I like to measure my success against pre set goals or against others.
The gods of the 'Random' have rarely been kind to me, so I serve the 'Purpose' when gaming, so randomly / procedurally generated content is of little interest.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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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
There are two things that cross my mind.
1. Is it possible to deliver a compelling story procedurally? I have yet to see a meaningful procedural system. They either are too random - i.e. No Man's Sky, where everything ends up being too dissimilar that it, paradoxically, feels completely generic. Or the procedural system consists of stitching together pieces of well crafted content. In this case, you soon get the sense of what the individual puzzle pieces are, making each play-through incoherent.
2. Would this ruin the sense of persistence? There is a lot of intrinsic value in occupying the same world with other players. Most MMOs I played had an infamous area or encounter that players like to reflect on. This may be in part because it is a good encounter, but also because it's sort of a folk lore - a challenge that many people try to overcome at different periods in time. If your online world has a volcano in the middle, with the same big dragon guarding a treasure, it adds to the feeling of belonging. If you move to a fully procedural system, you might lose this sense of travelling towards a specific famous obstacle and conquering it.
It is interesting to think that we may have to wait for the iAI (tm) to be developed before games can handle the grouping complexities that the OP talked about, I am not sure that randomly generated content will cut it.
Given that lack of choice, the majority choose a spec style that allows them to power through the bulk of the game which is typically questing in easy overland areas. That means DPS with just enough but not too much mitigation or healing.
But that's not how most modern MMOs work. Most of them have easy ways to have two or multiple specs with easy ways to swap between them. Funny thing though... most will still want to DPS even though they could easily tank or heal and even though you always have a much longer wait.
The main reason for that is that everyone is aware of group content drama where it's the healers and tanks that get blamed for anything that isn't a flawless speed run.
That is the real problem with grouping in MMOs. It's not uninspiring content or imbalanced drops. It's that group content with random strangers seems to bring out the inner dickhead in a lot of people.
People always talk about toxic PVPers but the ugly truth is that on a per hour played basis I have seen way more toxicity in MMO PVE groups than PVP. You need a thicker skin to do MMO PUGs than you do for any other thing you can do in them.
What @Scorchien said is closer to the real problem.
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But, I've given up on that idea. I think, while it might be interesting and provide more gameplay options, that it would only further segregate the player base. It's enough hassle to build a group without having to factor in differences between similar classes with different specializations of group skills. Asking players to play their characters differently between solo and group content may also be asking too much for some players.
Good synopsis, @Quizzical. Group-oriented games require incentives to group, and rewards to grouping, otherwise people will attempt to solo.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
In MMO's the premise of having a story at all somewhat contradicts the nature of an overarching living world, where every encounter and random situations contribute to the PLAYERS story, rather than the story being predestined from the start.
In that regard, randomly generated encounters, while necessary, mean nothing without an intuitive AI opponent.
That's one major issue we have with the way content is currently presented, it all has an ending to it. Difficulty is also finite per encounter. World Bosses are in the same place, their goal is simply to be beaten, they have no underlying drive to complete anything. AI is never given a purpose only a set of actions, and because of that, repetitiveness is only a matter of time, even if randomization is utilized.
It's like the famous question from an actor, "What's my motivation?" if NPCs only motivation is to be fodder, with simple actions and simple solutions, it will never provide the right kind of challenge for players that think "questing" isn't enough.
Imagine that an MMORPG has four dungeons for players levels 30-39. Gear comes in tiers, and all gear in all four dungeons has a minimum level requirement of 30. If all players in the group are in the 30-39 level range, the strength of the mobs will be scaled to the average level of the group; if not, then the mobs will all scale to the highest level in the group, or 30 if everyone is below 30.
The base version of the map is fairly open, with a number of places that you can go in large loops. However, there are a number of obstacles where the route is blocked. Exactly where the obstacles are is chosen randomly when you enter. You can still access the entire map, but a clear route in one run might be a useless dead end in another.
There are eight types of mobs that can appear in the dungeon. Their prevalence varies wildly from one run to the next. In one run, mages might be an outright majority of your opponents, while in another, there are only two mages in the entire dungeon. What I really have in mind here is a preferential attachment model in rolling which mobs are of which type, so that statistical averages don't push the number of each mob to be about average.
Furthermore, each of those eight types of mobs has three skills. They're always the same skills with the same animations. But one of the skills is extra strong, with a 50% increased potency, while another is weak, with 50% below normal potency. Which skill is rolled randomly when you enter the dungeon, and affects all mobs of that type. That is, in a given run, maybe all of the mages have a +50% fire blast skill and a -50% mana drain skill. In another run, that might be reversed.
The numbers of mobs in each group are mostly fixed, though the particular mobs in a group are randomized. The placements of groups is somewhat randomized, so that a group that is very isolated in one run might be rather difficult to pull away from another nearby group in another. Guild Wars 1 already did the slightly random placement of groups, by the way.
And then there are the roamers. Sometimes. The number of roamer groups in the dungeon is fairly random, as is how far they roam and their particular routes. More roamer groups means fewer non-roamer groups, and thus an easier time pulling the non-roamers. But it also means that if you're not careful, you get hit by roamer adds at a bad time. But sometimes, the dungeon doesn't have any roamers at all. Or just one roamer group late in the run that hits you after you've stopped watching for them.
And then comes the boss at the end. The boss has ten skills available. Except that in a given dungeon run, he only has four of them, chosen randomly from his ten possible skills. One of the "skills" that he could have is calling in adds at some fixed HP threshold that is rolled randomly, but stays the same for an entire run. Furthermore, among the boss's skills, one is randomly chosen to be extra strong, and another extra weak, just as with the non-boss mobs.
The boss's location is also somewhat random. It's set so that it takes a fairly long route to get to the boss. Perhaps the dungeon could have 50 fixed spots where the boss can be, and when the dungeon is generated, compute the shortest route to each of those spots keeping in mind that you can't pass through the obstacles that block routes that would sometimes be open. Discard the 40 shortest and choose the boss location at random from the remaining 10, so that players can't reliably go straight to the boss, and can't get there by luck after only clearing 5% of the dungeon.
The boss drops loot, of course. But the four dungeons in the same level range all drop the same loot, except with different names, color schemes, and flavor text. This means that you can get your loot from any of the four dungeons. Clearing a given dungeon for the first time gives you a large bonus reward from a quest, and the second and third times, a more modest bonus reward from other quests. So you're encouraged to do all four dungeons rather than loop just one until you hit level 40.
The four dungeons have different mobs, different maps, and different stories that lead you there. The mobs have different skills, so it's likely that one dungeon tends to be a little harder or slower than another. To remedy that, the server tracks how much each of the four dungeons is cleared. If one dungeon is being cleared substantially more than the others, the game slightly increases the strength of the mobs there, and hence difficulty. Being cleared less than the others means the difficulty gets lowered. Thus, the dungeons in a given level range get automatically balanced against each other fairly well.
I don't think that that would be impossible to implement. Not everything is randomized here. The storyline isn't random in the slightest. The graphics aren't random at all, at least beyond the random places that the route is blocked. And even there, it can be two options: one for a blocked route and one that lets you through.
But how the mobs fight, and the strategies that you have to use to win? That's going to be pretty random, and intentionally so. Sometimes mobs will do something that surprises you, and you'll have to retreat and regroup, or perhaps wipe and try again. And you'll still run into surprises if you've previously cleared the dungeon without incident. Then you talk about what went wrong, adjust what you do to counter how the dungeon is on this particular run, and come back victorious. And without getting berated for not having watched a YouTube video of the dungeon run ahead of time, because your version of the dungeon is very different from the video that you could have watched.
This is a problem in all systems, solve for one part, create a problem somewhere else, some for the current problem, another area suffers.
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.