A method to approach open world dungeon resetting.

This is related to the question thread Dungeon Spawn Rate. Where as that thread is a question on spawn rates, this one is more of a discussion on a potential approach that the game could take with dungeons.

Traditional approaches to open world content isn't very well suited for open world dungeons. Usually MMORPG games will have a world boss spawns and do no world dungeons at all. Why bother create an obstacle that players could just camp or log out at to check for a respawn? This kind of leaves Ashes of Creation in an experimental position. Another game that I feel was rather experimental with open world content is the game Guild Wars 2, particularly Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns. They had several zones throughout the world added in that expansion. Each one had their own unique approach to world bosses. One of those zones was like a traditional instanced dungeon, but open world in the context of how the game treated open world content.

Dragon's Stand is a zone where all players are rounded up in a single camp, waiting for their opportunity to strike the stronghold of an elder dragon. When that opportunity comes, because enough time has passed and enough players are present to trigger the opening event, the next step begins. Three lanes open up. Each lane requires enough players to participate in, so that the defenses of the final boss are weakened. Once weakened, all players in the zone then meet up at the final boss to defeat them. After the boss is defeated, players have a little bit of time to gather all of their rewards, talk with NPCs and get out of the zone before it needs to close. People cannot spawn camp this boss and players must work together from start to finish to reach their goals. All obstacles, including the sieged gates that were blown up, get reset for the next time players wished to encounter it.

This is basically how a normal dungeon and raid instances work in many MMORPGs today, but it allows for all players to join in. Players start at the entrance, end at the final boss, and eventually the dungeon gets reset. Would something along the lines of this approach work for AoC if it had a longer reset timer?

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Damokles

Here are two things, that i would think can help open world dungeons:
1. If you defeat the last boss in the dungeon, you then have 1min to loot it. After that 1min you get teleported to the beginning of the dungeon. (This is to prevent groups from spawn camping bosses)
2. If there are multiple boss monster in a dungeon, then increase their respawn timer with the amount of groups inside of the dungeon.

Wandering Mist

The meta events (like the Dragon's Stand event described in the OP) work very well in GW2, but there are a few things to keep in mind, the first being the large number of players required to complete them. Generally speaking you need anywhere from 30-50 players actively participating in the meta event in order to successfully complete it. GW2 infrastructure makes this possible by allowing players to temporarily swap to different server worlds by grouping up with someone from that world to participate in events (known as a "taxi"). I doubt Ashes will have that kind of functionality at all.

On top of that, in GW2 you can fast travel pretty much anywhere you like. Once you visit a Waypoint you can travel to it at any time unless it is contested. This means even if you are on the other side of the map when a meta event starts you can still get there in time to participate. In the case of Dragon's Stand, the waypoints have another function of controlling the flow of gameplay. As noted in the OP, when the meta event starts, players that enter the zone are put at the beginning of the map and have to work their way through it. There are many Waypoints in the zone but apart from the one at the beginning of the map, these are all locked off when the meta event starts. As the players progress through the map, they unlock more Waypoints allowing joining players to jump in and quickly get to where the action is rather than having to run through from the beginning.

Since Ashes won't have any kind of fast travel it will be hard for players to participate in events like this.

Noaani

EQ2 had a large number of open world dungeons - most expansions for the first 5 years included at least 2.

Spawn camping (which seems to be the issue people want to prevent) is only really an issue when bosses are needed for quests, or if they drop specific desired items.

The first of those is simple - just don't make quests that require boss mobs. There are other things that can be done.

The best way to deal with the second issue seems to me as if it would be to not have bosses with unique loot, but rather have all bosses in the dungeon share the same loot table that consists of materials for crafting gear.

If all bosses have the same loot table, there is no value in waiting for one specific boss to respawn. You are better off moving on to the next boss. The thing with open dungeons as opposed to instanced dungeons is that they don't really need to have a "final" boss - although I would love to see a single boss instance at the end of each wing of a dungeon, seems as good a way as any to make use of the limited instancing that they have given themselves room to use.

The question now becomes one of making sure the dungeon is large enough to hold 3 or 4 full groups who are all going from one boss to the next.

That's what I'd do, at least.

While the example from GW2 does sound interesting, I don't really see it being feasable with the dynamic content style Ashes should have. It sounds to me like it could make a really good event though.

Hartwell

Wandering Mist wrote: »

...
Since Ashes won't have any kind of fast travel it will be hard for players to participate in events like this.

It's true that the lack of fast travel can interfere with players banding together. Doesn't matter what open world content is being referred to here. If a larger world event of any nature were to occur and only five people were to know about it, I could see it being an issue. AoC won't have the on-demand player availability that a game like GW2 has. The only solution I can think of for that would be to inform the players in advance that some big event is coming, like how they plan to do so with player run sieges and declarations of war. The bulletin board system comes to mind, but I wonder how used such a system will be.

noaani wrote: »

...
If all bosses have the same loot table, there is no value in waiting for one specific boss to respawn. You are better off moving on to the next boss. The thing with open dungeons as opposed to instanced dungeons is that they don't really need to have a "final" boss - although I would love to see a single boss instance at the end of each wing of a dungeon, seems as good a way as any to make use of the limited instancing that they have given themselves room to use.
...

I'm not sure about this approach. I suppose it would depend upon boss difficulty. If all bosses dropped the same loot, but some were harder than others, people could cherry pick the easy ones and dance around the rest. I do think a global loot table is the answer for the overpowered items that cause groups to skip bosses just to get straight to the good stuff. I'm not certain if the best solution is to make all bosses share the same loot table for everything, but I do think you've got a point. That would be a more liberal approach towards dungeons.

Noaani

hartwell wrote: »

I'm not sure about this approach. I suppose it would depend upon boss difficulty. If all bosses dropped the same loot, but some were harder than others, people could cherry pick the easy ones and dance around the rest. I do think a global loot table is the answer for the overpowered items that cause groups to skip bosses just to get straight to the good stuff. I'm not certain if the best solution is to make all bosses share the same loot table for everything, but I do think you've got a point. That would be a more liberal approach towards dungeons.

In my experience with open dungeons, there isn't usually much of a difference in terms of difficulty of bosses.

To be fair, this is because those games also make good use of instances (both single boss instances usually at the end of open dungeons and instanced dungeons). Without exception, the hard content is in an instance of some form.

This remains my hope for Ashes - open dungeons with a fairly large initial area, opening up to multiple wings, each wing large enough to support two full groups simultaneously, and each wing having access to a single boss instance with a 20 hour lockout.

With this, they could put the entirety of the dungeon on the same loot table, give the boss in the instances better loot, and have players leaving the instance end up out in the open world, a good way away from the dungeon entrance (possibly randomized like respawn locations will be to prevent camping players here).

My theory is that this would see most groups that head to the dungeon running through one wing, spending a bit of time farming bosses as they respawn, then after a while they will go for the real prize, kill the biss in the instance and then have no real need to go back to that zone for the day (though could if they wanted).

I know this isn't the only system that would do this, and I know there would he anlot of people that would dislike this kind of thing, but to me it makes sense with the restrictions and requirements specific to Ashes.

Gimlog

Personally what i imagine with what we currently have, is labyrinthiques like dungeons with multiple pass that need a utility ability from a specifics archetype to be open.

Withings it there could be let's say 10 room where could randomly rotate 5 bosses and 4 army and 1 empty room.

And let's add that the pass that need to be open could be clues to what archetype are very helpful for the boss. Like the fastest way to a room is throw 4 pass that determine half of you group.

Plateau

Noaani

leonerdo wrote: »

I think the major issue is making the dungeons scalable to the number of attending players.

This is something EQ2 (possibly EQ before it) solved over 15 years ago.

Each non-instanced zone (dungeon or overland) has a player cap assigned to it, and any players attempting to zone in to that zone if the cap is reached or surpassed will simply be placed in a parallel version of the zone.

The developers may design a dungeon and think that it is a good fit for 4 active groups of 8, but as they are happy for a bit of competition to be had, they could set the player number of this zone to 40 (5 groups of 8). Should that zone then have 40 people in it, and another group (or even just another player) wants to enter that zone, then they will be in the second version of that zone.

If you are in that zone, and invite another player in to your group that is in a different version of that same zone, then it is a simple action (right clicking in the group window in EQ2) to select to be moved to the same version of the zone as another party member. This is why the target number of players for the zone can sometimes be surpassed.

This is by no means the only way to deal with this specific issue - but as Intrepid do have a good number of ex-SoE/Daybreak employees, I wouldn't be surprised if a slightly improved version of this is the option they take.

Plateau

Noaani

leonerdo wrote: »

@noaani I agree that's a possibility, but just call it what it is: Instancing. Although it's not one instance per party like most people are used to, it's still creating new instances to fit unlimited numbers of players in.

If the transition between instances is mostly seamless, it can still meet the goals of being immersive and open-world-like. But is it true enough to the sandbox vision? From a purist perspective, you should never be able to create new resources or zones by spawning extra instances. There should only be one true version of the world (per server).

I honestly don't know if AoC should go that far or not. I know at least that I could enjoy the game either way.

Purity is always trumped by pragmatism.

Nothing in an MMO is more important than making sure players have content to run.

With the way Ashes content is being delivered, there will likely be times early on in the games life where the servers are full, but there is only 1 dungeon active on a given server due to node status.

If you have 5% of the servers online characters wanting to run a dungeon, that is 500 players in one dungeon.

That will lead to amazingly negative first month write ups, which in turn will put Intrepid in damage control mode right from the start.

The way I suggested isn't the only way to do it, I'm quite sure (phasing is another option, or a combination ofthe two). All I know is, something with a similar end result will be done.

Plateau

Noaani

leonerdo wrote: »

noaani wrote: »

With the way Ashes content is being delivered, there will likely be times early on in the games life where the servers are full, but there is only 1 dungeon active on a given server due to node status.

Ah, yeah I hadn't considered how much worse the problem is likely to be during the first couple of weeks. So instancing will probably be necessary for a while at least. Or rather sharding (like from the WoW Classic launch), where whole zones are duplicated. They just need to sync the nodes between each shard and it should be fine. And if they have that, then maybe they won't need any dungeon-specific instancing.

I'm not 100%sure how this works in WoW (why would I go back to play a game that is less good than it originally was, and was originally subpar anyways?), but from what I've been told, it is basically Blizzard copying what EQ2 did 16 years ago. I know Blizzard limits it to 3, where EQ2 had no limit - if the zone was designed to hold 120 players and 1200 players were in it, there would be 10 versions of that zone. What I don't know is the transition between different versions/instances/shards (they all mean the same thing) of the same zone.

It's worth pointing out that it would be perfectly possible to implement it without the need for a zone transition (or loading screen), and so from a player perspective it should go totally unnoticed. The only time players would need to be aware it is there is in the edge case where you invite someone to your group that is already in the zone.

What ever they come up with wouldn't just need to be for the first few weeks, either. It would need to persist.

There is no guarantee that some alliance hell bent on destruction won't find a way to destroy nodes faster than players on that server can rebuild them - so a server may well end up with a dearth of dungeons years after launch.

consultant

Was thinking of spawn timers for world bosses. Since the world is so big and no fast travel would be kind of unfair to the person on the other side of the map but if they had time to get there. Or lets say a world boss spawns in a certain area maybe it could respawn lets say 30 min after it was killed for lets say some amount of time giving more players the opportunity to kill it. Of course there will be people logging in just as event expires but that is why it is called and event. Be cool if people could be sent an alert when certain rare mosters spawn maybe by toon that notices it first.

Ravudha

consultant wrote: »

Be cool if people could be sent an alert when certain rare mosters spawn

For the love of all that is good, no. The last thing we need is for game play to devolve into a routine mini-game of players being conditioned to passively wait for announcements, then descend upon bosses in droves.

I'd much rather people simply discover rare monsters through active exploration and combat them by actively organising themselves and others.

Gimlog

Don't worry you will know when a world bosses is spawning and where because they going to send notifications for those kind of event.
I guess 7days before it occurs to allow those who like to participating, to move at the location of the event.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Bosses

Noaani

Gimlog wrote: »

Don't worry you will know when a world bosses is spawning and where because they going to send notifications for those kind of event.
I guess 7days before it occurs to allow those who like to participating, to move at the location of the event.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Bosses

That notification only applies to legendary world bosses (and other things that affect nodes, generally speaking), not to all world bosses.

We have no way of knowing what makes a world boss legendary, but if they are sending notifications, I think it's safe to say they would be exceedingly rare events.

Gimlog

Well for now the only boss we know are from dungeons and those who attack nodes 3 to 6.
I'll guess that legendary one will be those who attack metropolis.
I can't imagine with the world mechanism other bosses.
Regional boss that destroy all nodes of the region if not stop?

Noaani

Gimlog wrote: »

I can't imagine with the world mechanism other bosses.

Why not?

It would be harder havingthe base population of an area completely changing than it would be to have one boss mob change.

Not all overland bosses need to go on a destructive rampage, attacking nodes and such. Those kinds of things will be rare.

Most bosses will probably simply be found within the bounds of the area assigned to their group. If a particular node state says that a specific area is populated by lions, there is no reason a boss tier (group or raid) lion couldn't be included in that.

WizardTim

I'd like to see dungeons as randomly spawned affairs that last for a period of time (a month or two) before basically dying and disappearing forever.

It might be much harder to accomplish this, but dungeons have some pretty significant built in weaknesses to the experience simply by being static places. Open world or instanced makes no real difference, once you go there once you've pretty much finished it off.

Hartwell

wolfwood82 wrote: »

I'd like to see dungeons as randomly spawned affairs that last for a period of time (a month or two) before basically dying and disappearing forever.

It might be much harder to accomplish this, but dungeons have some pretty significant built in weaknesses to the experience simply by being static places. Open world or instanced makes no real difference, once you go there once you've pretty much finished it off.

I think that cycling dungeons would help keep things interesting, but I think one thing I remembered hearing was something about node development coordinating with dungeon unlocking and their development. At least that was the plan.

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