Open world raids

Tragnar

There is not much information about this, but it seems that there is no limitation for the amount of raid groups inside open world raids.

Do you think it is plausible that people will just take every guild member that is online and divide them into 40m raid groups to cheese all bosses by the sheer number of people?

Warth

won't be efficient but yes that might happen

Vhaeyne

"We're very cognizant of the fact that we don't want to see zerging be a mechanic that's utilized by guilds to accomplish content or just to steamroll over sieges... There are specific mechanics that we are working on that will be seen through the testing phases that relate to a degree of understanding of certain systems that can't just be overrun with numbers.[56] – Steven Sharif"

When I read that I imagine that there will be a wall or debuff that prevents players outside of the raid from touching the boss. Not much is known yet, but they are probably floating ideas around. I am betting the raids are going to be more like lineage 2, and less like WOW:Mythic or FFXIV:Savage. I don't think we are going to be wiping the raid until we get it right. It is seems like it is going to be tag, the boss and stay alive until the boss is done. Maybe have some teams of smaller raids focused on PvP defense to keep other players from wiping the raid. I don't think we will be cheesing anything for sure though.

Tragnar

What I mean if there is going to able to have 2 40man raids then what is the raid going to be tuned for? To have the 2 raids in or just one? So far I have not given any thought to this issue and if it is implemented poorly that would mean a deal breaker to not play at all. Why bother with a game that you want to raid in when raid is laughably easy just, because it has no number scaling and you can just double the amount of people there.

I would just prefer to have negative scaling, if there is more than 40 people than there will be aggressive scaling to inflate hp without any change in loot table

Warth

Tragnar wrote: »

What I mean if there is going to able to have 2 40man raids then what is the raid going to be tuned for? To have the 2 raids in or just one? So far I have not given any thought to this issue and if it is implemented poorly that would mean a deal breaker to not play at all. Why bother with a game that you want to raid in when raid is laughably easy just, because it has no number scaling and you can just double the amount of people there.

I would just prefer to have negative scaling, if there is more than 40 people than there will be aggressive scaling to inflate hp without any change in loot table

considering that they already expect multiple raids to attack a boss within the loot distribution systen i'd expect that they think multiple raids attack it at the same time.

Abominatus

Abominatus wrote: »

The lack of instanced dungeons and raids is the reason I hesitated to buy into Alpha, and I'm still not convinced I made the right decision. Making all PvE content uninstanced creates a fundamental imbalance in the game, in that it becomes impossible to tune for difficulty.

While I get, and support, the idea of having some world bosses and broadening player engagement in the open world, I also think that if you want to attract a stable raiding community, you need to provide an environment in which they can be challenged by the PvE content and also one in which they can control to some degree their raiding time.

Most raiding guilds want, and need, to be able to schedule their raids. If a guild finds that it cannot do the content it wants to do, when it wants to do it, then this will lead to frustration. If raids are facing challenging content, and are disrupted while doing it (either by being griefed, or by others joining in and making the content easier than it is "supposed" to be), the value that players assign to the achievement of completing that content is diminished.

If you make all PvE content non-instanced, then effectively all content becomes PvP content. The balance does not swing the other way. I enjoy a bit of PvP, and I don't see any reason why open-world PvP should be discouraged. Getting involved in contested areas while trying to farm or gather materials or do quests is fine. But there needs to be a point at which I'm entitled to engage challenging PvE content for it's own sake without that content being either trivialized or gated by it being in the open world.

Ultimately, I see enough value in this project that I'm willing to spend money to support it in pre-alpha because giving this vision an opportunity could result in something great. But if we get to a point where there's no meaningful PvE progression because everything is open world, then that will alienate a lot of potential long-term players (myself included), and an opportunity will have been missed.

Those who think that instanced content eliminate the open world aspect of the game are overstating the problem. From the perspective of a veteran WoW player, I can say with absolute certainty that instances didn't hurt the open world in classic or TBC. What started to diminish the open world experience was the addition of features like being able to teleport into dungeons from the city, and being able to engage in that kind of instanced content without ever having to interact with the world inbetween. It became possible at some point to level to about 10, and then just sit in a city and spam dungeons to maximum level from then onwards. Obviously that's a terrible deterrent to having a great world environment, but there's no automatic slippery slope that takes you from "everything is open world" to dungeon-finder without the ability to find a middle-ground along the way.

This is what I posted in the other thread about there being no instanced content. I don't believe the lack of instanced content contributes to the longevity and broad-spectrum appeal of the game. Most of the discussion on this subject I see in these forums involves people coming up with convoluted ways to make raid content feel instanced while not actually being instanced. I look forward to seeing what the Intrepid team comes up with for this problem, but at this point I'm still concerned that this game won't cater to those who want a PvE progression path.

Tragnar

I bought in to the ideas for socialization and build paths and many other amazing ideas, but it didn't occur to me that raids might have literally no challenge to them at all - and yeah solutions to address that usually simulate the raid being instanced.

Maybe if the raid mobs had active hp scaling if there would be more than 40 players to counteract it. It had to disproportionate to discourage stacking people. Like 80 people would triple the hp instead of double it, because essentially you would have minimal amount of tanks and you are just adding another dps classes

Noaani

Tragnar wrote: »

I bought in to the ideas for socialization and build paths and many other amazing ideas, but it didn't occur to me that raids might have literally no challenge to them at all - and yeah solutions to address that usually simulate the raid being instanced.

Maybe if the raid mobs had active hp scaling if there would be more than 40 players to counteract it. It had to disproportionate to discourage stacking people. Like 80 people would triple the hp instead of double it, because essentially you would have minimal amount of tanks and you are just adding another dps classes

The problem with this is that if your guild is trying to kill a boss, my guild can just get together along with all our alts and friends and add 160 people to that scaling system.

Best of luck killing it now.

Any system the developers make to deal with this will be cheesed either by a guild trying to kill the content, or a guild trying to stop the kill.

There have been exactly three mechanics that I have seen to deal with this situation; instancing, phasing and encounter locking.

Abominatus

Noaani wrote: »

Tragnar wrote: »

I bought in to the ideas for socialization and build paths and many other amazing ideas, but it didn't occur to me that raids might have literally no challenge to them at all - and yeah solutions to address that usually simulate the raid being instanced.

Maybe if the raid mobs had active hp scaling if there would be more than 40 players to counteract it. It had to disproportionate to discourage stacking people. Like 80 people would triple the hp instead of double it, because essentially you would have minimal amount of tanks and you are just adding another dps classes

The problem with this is that if your guild is trying to kill a boss, my guild can just get together along with all our alts and friends and add 160 people to that scaling system.

Best of luck killing it now.

Any system the developers make to deal with this will be cheesed either by a guild trying to kill the content, or a guild trying to stop the kill.

There have been exactly three mechanics that I have seen to deal with this situation; instancing, phasing and encounter locking.

Very much this.

As I said, there's nothing wrong with having some world-bosses in the game. Even some dungeons that are open-world. But I cannot imagine a way to build genuinely challenging PvE content without some means to restrict who can access it concurrently.

Noaani

Abominatus wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Tragnar wrote: »

I bought in to the ideas for socialization and build paths and many other amazing ideas, but it didn't occur to me that raids might have literally no challenge to them at all - and yeah solutions to address that usually simulate the raid being instanced.

Maybe if the raid mobs had active hp scaling if there would be more than 40 players to counteract it. It had to disproportionate to discourage stacking people. Like 80 people would triple the hp instead of double it, because essentially you would have minimal amount of tanks and you are just adding another dps classes

The problem with this is that if your guild is trying to kill a boss, my guild can just get together along with all our alts and friends and add 160 people to that scaling system.

Best of luck killing it now.

Any system the developers make to deal with this will be cheesed either by a guild trying to kill the content, or a guild trying to stop the kill.

There have been exactly three mechanics that I have seen to deal with this situation; instancing, phasing and encounter locking.

Very much this.

As I said, there's nothing wrong with having some world-bosses in the game. Even some dungeons that are open-world. But I cannot imagine a way to build genuinely challenging PvE content without some means to restrict who can access it concurrently.

Indeed.

In my opinion, there are four types of raid content that a game like Ashes should attempt to have.

1, open world encounters like the red dragon from Archeage, which essentially functions as a PvP beacon. This kind of encounter should spawn in an area where corruption is turned off, and it should literally be a free for all.

2, open world encounters where the competition is the PvE, not the PvP. To me, this is what open raid dungeons should be. PvP shouldn't be turned off, but the consequences for it should be higher (respawn location placement and such) in order to discourage it - and there should be some form of penalty to attacking a raid that is fighting an encounter (guaranteed corruption to the entire attacking raid for each kill seems appropriate).

3, event encounters such as the rifts from Rift, or wtfever those portal things in ESO were - just much rarer than in either of those two games. This type of content should be all about the community coming together to defeat a challenge, and should very much be open to all players to join in.

4, the kind of raid content that is found in many other games. The kind of content a top end guild can plan a few nights worth of activities a week around. The kind of content that guilds don't just kill the first time they take it on, but may in fact take weeks of trying to finally kill.

All four of these are valid content types, all four serve a different purpose in a game, and all four should be present in Ashes.

Because of the requirements of that last type (guilds need to know they will have content, player count needs to be capped), I have yet to see any content type that would work for that other than instances.

Tragnar

Noaani wrote: »

4, the kind of raid content that is found in many other games. The kind of content a top end guild can plan a few nights worth of activities a week around. The kind of content that guilds don't just kill the first time they take it on, but may in fact take weeks of trying to finally kill.

I very much doubt that this is content that Steven wants to have in the game. As I understand it, instances are supposed to be utilized only for story content - not PvE content. Everything from the disapproval of meters and all the talk how raiding was great in old MMO's is making me think that this is unwelcome toxic content.

Please change my mind, because I honestly don't believe that this is not the case

Xenotor

The open world dungeon they showed, had a separate boss room.
I expect that to be the case for all open world bosses.

All they need to do is to add a buff on the boss depending on the number of players in the boss room.
Maybe add special powerful AoE Ability's if the number of players exceed a certain number.

Tragnar

I've played Classic wow and let me tell you it is so toxic when someone dislikes your guild for whatever reason and wipes you over and over, because of exactly these mechanics. My guild everytime just gives up on open world bosses, because even though they have great loot it is just so cancer to try to kill them

Sylvanar

Not having instanced raids is equivalent to fixing whats not broken.
Entering a raid with your raid group consisting of friends & guildmates and going through encounters together is fun. Enter random peeps. Well time to log off.

Noaani

Tragnar wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

4, the kind of raid content that is found in many other games. The kind of content a top end guild can plan a few nights worth of activities a week around. The kind of content that guilds don't just kill the first time they take it on, but may in fact take weeks of trying to finally kill.

As I understand it, instances are supposed to be utilized only for story content - not PvE content.

What's to say the story can't be tied to some raids?

Tragnar

It definitely can and even will, but I doubt that these raids will be anything else than just an exception to the open world raid rule

Noaani

Xenotor wrote: »

The open world dungeon they showed, had a separate boss room.
I expect that to be the case for all open world bosses.

All they need to do is to add a buff on the boss depending on the number of players in the boss room.
Maybe add special powerful AoE Ability's if the number of players exceed a certain number.

If that is what they go with, I WILL see to it that I can get 100+ players in to any such room in a moment's notice. Alts are fantastic things, and family summons means it isn't even that much work to park alts in these rooms, ready to be logged in at a moments notice.

Tragnar

I suppose that will not be so easy, because I expect that raid rooms are not going to be accessible outside of the "open window"

Sylvanar

Tragnar wrote: »

I've played Classic wow and let me tell you it is so toxic when someone dislikes your guild for whatever reason and wipes you over and over, because of exactly these mechanics. My guild everytime just gives up on open world bosses, because even though they have great loot it is just so cancer to try to kill them

If there are only open world raids then I dont think I can even play AoC. I dont like raiding with random people, at least random people not part of which ever guild I will be part of because they dont have any responsibility towards other raid members and are there just to secure some loot for themselves.

Wow, this just killed my entire enthusiasm for AoC.

Noaani

Tragnar wrote: »

I suppose that will not be so easy, because I expect that raid rooms are not going to be accessible outside of the "open window"

I don't need access to the room other than when a guild is fighting the boss.

The funny thing about that system is - if you are a rival guild legitimately wanting to kill the encounter, if you come along and someone else is working on it, the best thing you could do is probably literally nothing. Scaling content can only ever work if the content is designed around community participation.

As I said earlier, any system like this will he chessed by one side or the other.

Tragnar

They would need to create some neural network ai monitoring all offline characters and disable logging them in to prevent such griefing xD

I honestly hope they bring some awesome tech solution to make the raids challenging and to keep the intended number of players to 40.


I wouldn't be even opposed to "claiming" a raid once it is open so only 1 instance can be open at a time with maybe some qualifiers when these raids are about to open up to determine which guild gets to do it

Sylvanar

Tragnar wrote: »

I wouldn't be even opposed to "claiming" a raid once it is open so only 1 instance can be open at a time with maybe some qualifiers when these raids are about to open up to determine which guild gets to do it

Might as well implement a normal tried and true instanced raid then. I only see casual players losing out if this happens.

Tragnar

I think it only helps the game overall, because it works into the notion that raids are these mythical crypts where only the battlehardened adventurers dare to delve in order to kill these mythical beasts.

For PvE raiding be all inclusive for 90% of the game population is on plain sight in WoW now, they have piss easy difficulties just so the player can see the content.

Sylvanar

Difficulty of the encounter itself can be upped, that is not the issue here. But access to the encounter itself being restricted is self-defeating as casual players lose out on the best parts when it comes to PvE.

Lets say I can raid from 9pm to midnight and have assembled a raid of 40 people. But by 9 pm the world boss is dead or some other guild has already hoarded that 1 instance of the raid at 7-8pm. I am straight out being denied the opportunity to raid itself here. Me or my raids capability is not even in the question. Not everyone can wait outside the entrance of an encounter waiting for their turn.

This is like either live for AoC or go home.

Tragnar wrote: »

I think it only helps the game overall, because it works into the notion that raids are these mythical crypts where only the battlehardened adventurers dare to delve in order to kill these mythical beasts.

Mythical crypts and beasts are fine, but let me at least enter them first.

Bricktop

"Ashes of creation is not for everyone". Some of my fondest memories from Lineage 2 are fighting other guilds for control of world bosses. I really hope they dont change the game to cater to WoW raiders.

Noaani

Bricktop wrote: »

"Ashes of creation is not for everyone". Some of my fondest memories from Lineage 2 are fighting other guilds for control of world bosses. I really hope they dont change the game to cater to WoW raiders.

I hope they have both.

The issue with L2 bosses is that they weren't a challenge. They were fun to fight for, but if you got then without anyone trying to stop you, you had an easy time of it.

Ashes needs encounters like that, for sure. But it also needs PvE encounters that are challenging for the PvE aspects of them, not because someone keeps sniping your tank.

Grievousness

"Ashes of creation is not for everyone"
@Bricktop
Maybe it is just me, but that quote seems to be highly overused from my point of view.
If you think Lineage 2 would be a good inspiration for the PvP part of the game,
why can't WoW be an inspiration for the PvE side?
(things that mutually exclude each other aside of course)

Ashes of Creation is a PvX game from what the devs told us it is supposed to have PvE and PvP content.
If they can't deliver on the PvE part they do not only fail to archieve what they wanted the game to be,
but also alienate the bigger portion of the MMO community.
Judging from the population of MMOs it seems reasonable to assume that there are more people playing them for PvE than PvP.

PvE doesn't need to be over the top great, but at least decent.

Xenantaya

I understand that Vanguard had open world dungeons and raids. Did anyone here play Vanguard, and could they offer any insight on whether large groups simply overwhelmed bosses? (I played Vanguard briefly in its beta, but not on release.)

Sylvanar

Bricktop wrote: »

"Ashes of creation is not for everyone". Some of my fondest memories from Lineage 2 are fighting other guilds for control of world bosses. I really hope they dont change the game to cater to WoW raiders.

So, dont cater to WoW raiders but catering to lineage is fine? The only word I have in mind for you is WOW, ironic really.

Bricktop

Noaani wrote: »

Bricktop wrote: »

"Ashes of creation is not for everyone". Some of my fondest memories from Lineage 2 are fighting other guilds for control of world bosses. I really hope they dont change the game to cater to WoW raiders.

I hope they have both.

The issue with L2 bosses is that they weren't a challenge. They were fun to fight for, but if you got then without anyone trying to stop you, you had an easy time of it.

Ashes needs encounters like that, for sure. But it also needs PvE encounters that are challenging for the PvE aspects of them, not because someone keeps sniping your tank.

I agree with you, Challenging boss mechanics I expect and hope to be in the game. Instanced raids where you are under no threat besides from mobs? I don't want to see it happen personally. Dungeons will become a place in the world worth fighting over and controlling in the current system. Guilds can promise their citizens that they will keep the node and surrounding dungeons safe for them, while enemy guilds can make the node unsafe for the citizens by running gank squads through the territory. Instanced raids will ruin part of the player driven potential the game has to offer. If your tank keeps getting sniped you need better security for the players on the mob.

Sylvanar wrote: »

Bricktop wrote: »

"Ashes of creation is not for everyone". Some of my fondest memories from Lineage 2 are fighting other guilds for control of world bosses. I really hope they dont change the game to cater to WoW raiders.

So, dont cater to WoW raiders but catering to lineage is fine? The only word I have in mind for you is WOW, ironic really.

Yes basically. I am sorry if this confuses you but Lineage 2 was an open world PvP guild driven game with harsh consequences to death and PKing where guilds fight for control of good spots on the map to level/grind mobs. AoC will be guild driven, guilds fighting for control over areas/dungeons/caravan routes/whatever. Instanced raids completely detract from the guild driven player driven game that AoC is going for. Instead of changing the game to be more like WoW, WoW players can just play WoW imo.

Noaani

@Bricktop

Bricktop wrote: »

Dungeons will become a place in the world worth fighting over and controlling in the current system. Guilds can promise their citizens that they will keep the node and surrounding dungeons safe for them, while enemy guilds can make the node unsafe for the citizens by running gank squads through the territory. Instanced raids will ruin part of the player driven potential the game has to offer. If your tank keeps getting sniped you need better security for the players on the mob.

I agree with your general premise here, but with a different conclusion.

I want to see instanced raid encounters in the game so that there are situations where players can fight PvE encounters in a completely known setting (known to the designer of the content). This allows content to be highly curated, complex encounters.

It also means guilds are able to know there is some content available to them - since raid bosses may have a respawn timer of several days, if there isn't any instanced raid content, guilds will have no content they can plan around - and a guild without content to plan around is a guild that moves to another game.

Now, I am not suggesting all encounters should be like this, but some should.

However, I also agree that the basic ideal of Ashes makes that hard. Guilds and nodes should be able to fight over and control access to this content.

This is why my suggestion for a long while now has been that raid dungeons should have two or three single boss instances in them.

Since there is no instant porting to instances, players wanting to go to these instanced bosses will still need to work through the dungeon. This means any guild controlling that dungeon is also controlling those instances, as you can't get to them unless you pass that guild.