I fully explained everything I was saying. If you have questions about what I've said in this thread Beau, things you're unclear about, go ahead and ask and I'll answer. Noaani wasn't trying to get to the bottom of anything and refused any explanation I made.
And he just decided to start being insulting because he knew he couldn't beat my points in debate. It's a common tactic. A tactic of the weak.
I fully explained everything I was saying. If you have questions about what I've said in this thread Beau, things you're unclear about, go ahead and ask and I'll answer. Noaani wasn't trying to get to the bottom of anything and refused any explanation I made.
And he just decided to start being insulting because he knew he couldn't beat my points in debate. It's a common tactic. A tactic of the weak.
If others are reading what you have said and are coming to the same conclusion as me (that you don't really have a nuanced and considered opinion on the matter), then you can't really point at other people.
Perhaps you do indeed have a well thought out opinion on the matter, but you have not committed that to this thread at all. All I know is what you have typed - I know I have had thoughts while writing a post and forgotten to include them, realizing later of my absent minded omission (I did this just a few days ago with Beau).
Again, all we know of your opinion is what you commit to the thread and what you have committed to the thread has left both of us with the assumption that you have no nuanced, well considered opinion on the topic.
If this is not the case, if you believe you do indeed have a well considered opinion here, it is on you to communicate that to us, not the other way around.
If indeed you had posted your nuanced, well-considered opinion on the matter somewhere in this thread, every time someone asked you foe it, you would be able to either direct them to it, or quote youself - much as I was able to direct people to the first post on page two for my thoughts.
Everything I have said is just what it is. I never intended it to be nuanced, what I said didn't require a whole lot of nuance. It was just opinions, some of which you don't like. You may not agree with them, but they were well considered enough for the purposes of this forum.
Beau no I'm not hopping in discord, I'm pretty busy right now. But if you have any questions about what I said, shoot. I don't mind answering them. Just tell me what you're unclear about. Just as confused as Noaani is about what I've said, I'm confused why he's confused. Not sure if he's reading too much into what I said, or thinks I'm talking in riddles or something. But I am down with the idea of you being able to clear it up as a middle man.
Works for me! I think the crux of it comes down to Noaani proposing his "4 content types", and then your arguments for why you don't think they're good, and then Noaani's arguments for the underlying "reason" backing each of the content types. I'll try to summarize because a lot got lost in the walls of text.
1) Large, open-world, non-linear dungeons (that contain 8-man content boss content and 40-man boss-content). These bosses are easy enough to be interesting while contested but boring when uncontested.
The dungeons may also include instanced-off rooms for difficult heavily-scripted encounters like shiva extreme in FFXIV. This allows the ashes team to design complicated fights and then the players to attempt those complicated fights, but then get camped and killed when they leave for their boss mats.
The PvP in these dungeons are subject to the corruption system, so if you don't want to flag, you may lose extra mats and go into more XP debt. If you kill someone not flagged, you gain corruption, but might be able to take their hard-earned boss mats, or secure a boss kill for yourself.
2) Open-world bosses that spawn in a PvP-enabled zone. These bosses essentially act as a PvP objective like Baron Nashor in League of Legends and give something for the players to squabble over. They're easy enough to be interesting while contested but boring when uncontested. Since they spawn in a PvP zone like what happens with caravans, then everyone is flagged as a "combatant", and no one has to worry about becoming corrupt. Bonus points if the game detects when there's no PvP happening and makes the fight harder somehow to keep it interesting.
On the PvE-PvP gradient, this is similar to the bosses in type-1 content, just more PvP centric.
4) There's a PoE-style (atlas there) system where you can farm/buy items to spawn/modify bosses. (editor's node: I don't actually think this is strictly necessary, but it provides a lot of procedurally generated novelty in PoE which extends the life of the game a lot.)
Then, the critiques:
1) Worries about making sure that the number of bosses in dungeons are correct. Valid and easy enough to tune when players are actually playing in dungeons. There are also concerns about how lucrative the instanced-off rooms within the dungeons are relative to other activities. May I point you to Degenerate Economic Efficiency?
Hopefully, the notion that the instanced-off rooms are deep within the dungeon itself, and the folks leaving the instanced-off rooms will have to travel through the dungeon filled with other players will be enough to create risk and redistribute some loot. Valid concern though!
2)
This is the same idea that Paradox Gaming Network had in tandem with his idea of changing instancing from an 80/20 open/instanced split to a 20/80 open/instanced split. It nullifies the corruption system for this encounter type, so no one can steal a portion of anyone's loot. It's basically a last guild/alliance standing gank box until everyone else is dead and the last guild standing can finish off the boss. I mean it sounds fun, but goes against some design principles. It'd probably be argued that it's unfair somehow for pvers. I'm kinda just neutral on it.
I think this gets a couple of things wrong on a factual level, so I felt it was worth quoting it directly. First, even if you're a combatant, you can still steal loot! https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Corruption
A non-combatant (green player) who dies suffers normal penalties, which include:[14]
Experience debt (negative experience).[51]
Skill and stat dampening.[14]
Lower health and mana.[14]
Lower gear proficiency.[14]
Reduction in drop rates from monsters.[52]
Durability loss.[53][54][14]
When players die and they take durability loss, our durability loss isn't like other games where it's a gold sink so to speak. It's a combination of both a gold sink and a material sink. So in a sense, even if you only have completed items, when you take that durability loss you are losing out on materials. It's just a debt to the materials that you are losing instead of the active loss of that material in your inventory. So now you are accruing a material debt if you want to repair and increase again the performance of those particular items that take that durability loss.[53] – Steven Sharif
Dropping a percentage of carried gatherables and processed goods.[49][14]
This also includes a percentage of the certificates a player is carrying.[50]
If a player dies there will be a period of time before their mule despawns. Other players must kill that player's mule to be able to loot it.[55]
If a player's mule dies its corpse will contain the same percentage of lootable items as the player.[55][56]
A combatant (purple player) who dies suffers these same penalties, but at half the rate of a non-combatant.[14]
So, this sort of system still creates XP debt, still creates skill and stat dampening, and folks will still lose durability and all of that stuff, it's just that the risk of accidentally killing a non-combatant and becoming corrupted is gone. No one can "karma bomb" you as they can in BDO.
3) The cage match is basically just fighting over rights to access the instance, which is better than instancing
4) The McGuffin thing could be done in the open world.
So, starting from there with that as the background here are my questions:
It took the best guild in the world at the time, Method, 638 attempts to beat Garrosh Hellscream. Take a gander at this video to get an idea of how meticulously crafted and complex this encounter is.
Would you like to see boss encounters that are remotely as complex as Garrosh in Ashes? I think it's completely reasonable if the answer is "no" here - Ashes doesn't have to be every sort of game.
If yes, do you think that an encounter like that is a reasonable thing to ask players to attempt in an open-world setting (where you become less powerful after dying) like the type-1 or type-2 content? Or do you think it would make more sense to put it in an instance or what I wrote about here?
Keep in mind that there are mechanics where if a single player does a single thing incorrectly, it wipes your whole raid. If a single rogue stuns a single player during that single moment, that would wipe your whole raid.
Next, does the clarification about how folks that are flagged as combatants still risk losing their stuff and going into debt and all that help alleviate your concerns there?
Would you like to see boss encounters that are remotely as complex as Garrosh in Ashes? I think it's completely reasonable if the answer is "no" here - Ashes doesn't have to be every sort of game.
All up, that is a decent summary.
Answering "no" to this question is the only real way to support the stance that this poster has taken.
The only way their opinion could be considered is if they simply do not want the segment of the MMO population that enjoys top end encounters like this from being able to find a home in Ashes.
Even then, in order for the opinion to actually be well considered, there would need to be a reason as to why they think this - and the notion of content and/or rewards being contested in Ashes simply isn't appropriate, as the suggestions I made all specifically add in additional means to contest any content that can't be contested directly while fighting the encounter proper.
A considered opinion would then also need to account for Intrepids, statements that they want a raiding scene that is tiered, and that has encounters that are difficult to the point where only a single digit percentage of the population would be able to kill them, and also square that opinion with Stevens comment that they will instance off content for the specific purpose of limiting how many people can participate.
I am personally fine with people having an opinion and not going in to too much detail (not going in to the level of detail that I did). However, if someone wants to state they have a well considered opinion, I don't think it is too much to ask that they answer a few questions about it - which has not happened here at all, hence my not letting it go.
An opinion - whether well considered or not - that the person in question can not consolidate with what Intrepid have said about the game, is about the same as someone posting the opinion that they don't want the corruption system in the game.
I think Intrepid could hit all of their design goals (tiered raiding system, open-world bosses, content that only a small percentage of the player base can defeat) without having any bosses that are mechanically more interesting than anything we saw in classic world of warcraft.
As in, all they'd need to do is crank up health pools and damage, and suddenly less and less players can defeat them. If they're open world, then as you know only the controlling guilds and their allies can attempt them in the first place. If you make Tier-1 bosses spawn at the same time as Tier-2 bosses and make them spawn very far away from each other and make tier-2 bosses more difficult and drop more valuable materials then more powerful players in more powerful guilds will contest those and leave the tier-1 stuff to the mid-tier guilds. Boom, all of the goals were accomplished.
The bosses themselves are still basically a glorified Baron Nashor and are mechanically uninteresting for the folks that have been doing high-end raiding for 15 years, which I think is unfortunate
That said, I don't think Steven's list of games he's played includes games with lovingly crafted difficult raid encounters, so I don't have my hopes set too high here
I think Intrepid could hit all of their design goals (tiered raiding system, open-world bosses, content that only a small percentage of the player base can defeat) without having any bosses that are mechanically more interesting than anything we saw in classic world of warcraft.
As in, all they'd need to do is crank up health pools and damage, and suddenly less and less players can defeat them. If they're open world, then as you know only the controlling guilds and their allies can attempt them in the first place. If you make Tier-1 bosses spawn at the same time as Tier-2 bosses and make them spawn very far away from each other and make tier-2 bosses more difficult and drop more valuable materials then more powerful players in more powerful guilds will contest those and leave the tier-1 stuff to the mid-tier guilds. Boom, all of the goals were accomplished.
The bosses themselves are still basically a glorified Baron Nashor and are mechanically uninteresting for the folks that have been doing high-end raiding for 15 years, which I think is unfortunate
That said, I don't think Steven's list of games he's played includes games with lovingly crafted difficult raid encounters, so I don't have my hopes set too high here
A small 16 person guild had gotten their hands on an exclusive rare item, the Soul lantern, from defeating a notorious monster out in the node. They managed to light the lantern by doing a previous dungeon and were now looking to use that lantern. The door to the dungeon has been sealed for 8 in game days since the last attempt was made. No one appears to be around. So all 16 go in once the door opens. The door remains open.
The Soulfire Labyrinth has a few forks and misdirection. The mobs inside tend to be a decent challenge. Many of the Soul Wraiths and Soul Eaters respawn behind the party a little bit after defeating them. Turning straight around would be costly.
The party finds themselves getting squeezed into single file lines at times due to the narrow hallways and player collision. The party manages to find and avoid some traps and disable a few others thanks to their party rogues. They make their way through a few miniboss monsters and get some decent loot and a sense that they are getting closer to the boss room.
Finally they arrive at the boss chamber. Turns out they still need the lit lantern to open it's door. Once they do the light goes out of the lantern, the soulfire lighting up the ruins on the large stone door granting the party access. Thirty seconds after the party enters, the door closes and the node receives a message 'you think you hear the sound of a weeping ghost.' Now anyone in the node knows what's going down.
However the dungeon itself changes a bit. There were three possible routes to the dungeon boss. The shortest one is now closed off and a new one opens. The mini bosses of the dungeon now emit soulflame and a lantern bearer who manages to last hit the miniboss can light an unlit lantern. Additionally there are slightly more soul wraiths in the corridors, and a few more miniboss 'minion' soul eaters and planar beasts to make the fight slightly harder without just flatly padding the minibosses health and attack.
One of the big guilds in the area was paid a tribute before this to not go Zerg the dungeon. But the other somewhat smaller big guild in the area was not. They therefore start gathering anyone they can to rush the dungeon. Being a larger guild they have someone who has an unlit lantern. But they have not yet lit it for various reasons.
So now you have 40-50 people making their way through the longer paths in the dungeon. It's new enough content so no one has made a stage 2 map and is therefore not that straightforward to navigate. However one of the guild members has managed to do the dungeon before 'the hard way' and so they take the longer path.
The toughest part for the 40ish person rush is the various narrow path ways and the miniboss that are now about twice as strong, empowered by the soulfire and they are emitting a burning aura that causes a burn status on physical attackers, so it's a bit trickier to manage the last hit requirement. Because the item is exclusive they weren't able to just 'give it to the highest level tank'. But since they have a small numbers advantage they manage the fight.
Meanwhile the fight for the 16 man guild is going well. The boss has gotten down to 1/3 and the fight is intensifying.
The 40ish person rush is getting closer now, needing to get the lantern last hit slowed down the progress. However the group is making fairly good progress. Going through the longer path much faster than the smaller group.
Meanwhile back at the node, the remaining guild members of the 2nd largest guild in the node start scouting out the different exit points. It's not an exact science since they don't really open until the boss is defeated.
The 2nd largest guild finally arrives to the boss door. They are now met with the complicated question, 'Is the boss dead yet?' No message shows up to inform them. They have to choose to burn the pop item to rush the group after all their hard work only to find an empty room and try to rush the group at the exits, or try to make their way back out (a somewhat easier task now that there aren't minibosses in the way.)
One of the guild mates confirms that they think they see one of the exits opened. The raid leader tells their guild mate with the pop item to open the door. As the door opens the node receives the message 'you only hear echoes of howling in the distances'. The front door closes. There is now only two ways out for opportunists who were making their own way through the dungeon. Death, or quickly getting to the boss chamber before it too closes.
The rival raid group enters to find the corpse of a dead boss. The experienced guild mate tells the group to go to the center of the corpse and that they will need to prepare for some fall damage. It's not a small hole but the underground escape tunnels number about 8. There is about 5-7 guild members on the other side of each hole so the raid boss tells them to split up into groups of five as best they can. The hallways begin to narrow the groups to a single file once again. Some don't have a tank meaning the fighter or bard tend to be in front.
Our 16 Man group knew that they would probably have some competition at the exit due to the boss door message and are grateful they didn't decide to split the party. As they exit they are bum rushed by 2 fighters a cleric and a ranger. However the fight is 3-1 so they manage to take on the slightly better geared party without too much issue, taking some heavy hits to their mp and hp. This bought the pincer group enough time to find the party just before their weapons were sheathed and they could escape on mount. Luckily for them this was one of the groups with yet another fighter in front. Had it been otherwise they would probably have gotten away. They manage to down a couple of the 16 man groups members, but the rest get away safely.
The main consolation prize for the counter raiding guild was that they had managed to get another unlit lantern off of one of the fallen 16 man group members. A heavy loss for the smaller group. But not a huge consolation prize for the larger guild either.
There's a ton here, so I'll see if I can abstract it a bit to see if I understand where you're trying to go.
The idea is that you want to make sure the dungeon:
Has limited access (like through a rare item)
Has multiple, limited use entrances
Has one-way exits
Has ways to tell the node / server about what's going on to incentivize conflict
First, let me say that the way you described the dungeon is super cinematic and very exciting. If a game could reliably make players play like that somehow, they'd have my money. My general concern is that the players will take the path of least resistance / path of most economy at the expense of fun / cinema
Here are my general concerns:
Designing stuff to be fun before it's figured out is really cool, but has low staying power / replay value. Better is that it works long-term! Eventually, the guilds know roughly how long it takes from when they see the messages until the boss dies, and then they know to either camp the exits or to try to race to the boss, right?
If gaining access to the dungeon requires an exclusive item, what are the chances that you and someone else happen to have the exclusive item at the same time? By requiring that there's this item and these separate paths, it reduces friction, and reduces the amount of players that are able to interact with the content. I think long-term, there will be a rotation on who has the lantern, and that latern gets passed around the controlling alliance and the place gets farmed uncontested.
Logistically it's really tough to imagine the scenario where this smaller group triggers the node message, and then the bigger guild is able to muster folks to travel to the area and then contest in time. It seems much more likely to me that what would actually happen is that either the groups are already there (because of shared information about respawn times), or one group gets it uncontested because they're able to clear it fast enough and leave before other folks can group up and contest.
That said, I think the abstractions are all really solid (if I'm understanding them correctly), and the principles can be iterated on to produce a really, really cool dungeon design. This is sick.
I think something like this could be used for the upper echelons of type-1 content: the stuff that drops the materials to make the best gear. That way it has a lot of eyes/attention on it from the upper-end players.
There's a ton here, so I'll see if I can abstract it a bit to see if I understand where you're trying to go.
The idea is that you want to make sure the dungeon:
Has limited access (like through a rare item)
Has multiple, limited use entrances
Has one-way exits
Has ways to tell the node / server about what's going on to incentivize conflict
First, let me say that the way you described the dungeon is super cinematic and very exciting. If a game could reliably make players play like that somehow, they'd have my money. My general concern is that the players will take the path of least resistance / path of most economy at the expense of fun / cinema
Here are my general concerns:
Designing stuff to be fun before it's figured out is really cool, but has low staying power / replay value. Better is that it works long-term! Eventually, the guilds know roughly how long it takes from when they see the messages until the boss dies, and then they know to either camp the exits or to try to race to the boss, right?
If gaining access to the dungeon requires an exclusive item, what are the chances that you and someone else happen to have the exclusive item at the same time? By requiring that there's this item and these separate paths, it reduces friction, and reduces the amount of players that are able to interact with the content. I think long-term, there will be a rotation on who has the lantern, and that latern gets passed around the controlling alliance and the place gets farmed uncontested.
Logistically it's really tough to imagine the scenario where this smaller group triggers the node message, and then the bigger guild is able to muster folks to travel to the area and then contest in time. It seems much more likely to me that what would actually happen is that either the groups are already there (because of shared information about respawn times), or one group gets it uncontested because they're able to clear it fast enough and leave before other folks can group up and contest.
That said, I think the abstractions are all really solid (if I'm understanding them correctly), and the principles can be iterated on to produce a really, really cool dungeon design. This is sick
It being logistically difficult is technically the point. Noaani and I both arrived to the 'race' solution from different approaches and angles. But the concept is the same. In order for one to design difficult content, you need some control over those variables. I want there to be 'a risk of a race' so that way the encounter can still be fun and challenging but also have a PvX element to it that doesn't necessarily interfere with the Boss room itself (unless you weren't fast enough and the opposing team was.) It allows for the dungeon to not be instanced, but 'heavily in favor of whoever has first contact'.
As for the exclusive pardon my FFXI lingo, but EX means that 'only whoever took it out of the treasure pool is capable of having this item, it's not tradeable'. In ashes due to there being PvP drops this is slightly more difficult to execute in the above scenario. Perhaps there is some sort of effect of it losing it's 'ex' status after use on the boss door? I'm less sure about the 'contested' part. And again I don't necessarily see 'universally uncontested' as a bad thing. But 'the threat of guilds attacking other guilds' dungeons' has the potential for some real organic drama I think would make the scenario you are worried about not really happen.
I agree on the staying power factor. I would hope that the increasing player skill on a server would make this less predictable and fine tuned. But that's not a guarantee. This is partially why there is the ability to light the lantern inside the dungeon. To incentivize the race itself as it provides its own 'consolation prize'. A big enough team to 'bust the dungeon fast enough to catch the other team' would therefore by nature of minimal fast travel mean that mustering a large enough group to perform both tasks would be harder. Not impossible though as I am sure Noaani will love to point out. But it would 'always have that risk'. Which is the part I would be betting on in keeping the game moist instead of dry. I tend to view raids as content prone to drying and more about 'execution' and 'thrill of the skill' rather than 'solving unknown problems' to begin with, so I'm less worried about it 'drying out' in the sense you are talking about than you may be.
However I still think this is better than any other noninstanced design schema in terms of serving multiple game purposes. Node population and traffic levels will definitely be integral to making such a thing work as well as properly designing the various proper 'circuits' for the dungeons to encourage travel and minimize clumping. It's the ebb and flow of the availability of the available pop items that I think would make this type of content to be designable for 16-24 people rather than the 30-40 that usually gets thrown around when discussing raids and is an indirect intention of why I wrote the scenario the way I did.
I think Intrepid could hit all of their design goals (tiered raiding system, open-world bosses, content that only a small percentage of the player base can defeat) without having any bosses that are mechanically more interesting than anything we saw in classic world of warcraft.
As in, all they'd need to do is crank up health pools and damage, and suddenly less and less players can defeat them. If they're open world, then as you know only the controlling guilds and their allies can attempt them in the first place. If you make Tier-1 bosses spawn at the same time as Tier-2 bosses and make them spawn very far away from each other and make tier-2 bosses more difficult and drop more valuable materials then more powerful players in more powerful guilds will contest those and leave the tier-1 stuff to the mid-tier guilds. Boom, all of the goals were accomplished.
The bosses themselves are still basically a glorified Baron Nashor and are mechanically uninteresting for the folks that have been doing high-end raiding for 15 years, which I think is unfortunate
That said, I don't think Steven's list of games he's played includes games with lovingly crafted difficult raid encounters, so I don't have my hopes set too high here
Vanilla WoW shouldn't really be the aim - though it wouldn't be a bad place to start out (assuming content grows from there).
However, just adding to a mobs HP and damage output doesn't reduce the overall number of people able to kill a mob - it just means people need slightly better gear. When gear isn't directly tied to content completion (as is the case in an economic centric game as opposed to an itemization centric game), you have to always assume players can get better gear.
On the other hand, if you make an encounter actually harder, more mechanics, tighter mechanics, people can't just overhear it. This is how you have encounters thst a limited number of people are capable of killing.
I think Intrepid could hit all of their design goals (tiered raiding system, open-world bosses, content that only a small percentage of the player base can defeat) without having any bosses that are mechanically more interesting than anything we saw in classic world of warcraft.
As in, all they'd need to do is crank up health pools and damage, and suddenly less and less players can defeat them. If they're open world, then as you know only the controlling guilds and their allies can attempt them in the first place. If you make Tier-1 bosses spawn at the same time as Tier-2 bosses and make them spawn very far away from each other and make tier-2 bosses more difficult and drop more valuable materials then more powerful players in more powerful guilds will contest those and leave the tier-1 stuff to the mid-tier guilds. Boom, all of the goals were accomplished.
The bosses themselves are still basically a glorified Baron Nashor and are mechanically uninteresting for the folks that have been doing high-end raiding for 15 years, which I think is unfortunate
That said, I don't think Steven's list of games he's played includes games with lovingly crafted difficult raid encounters, so I don't have my hopes set too high here
Vanilla WoW shouldn't really be the aim - though it wouldn't be a bad place to start out (assuming content grows from there).
However, just adding to a mobs HP and damage output doesn't reduce the overall number of people able to kill a mob - it just means people need slightly better gear. When gear isn't directly tied to content completion (as is the case in an economic centric game as opposed to an itemization centric game), you have to always assume players can get better gear.
On the other hand, if you make an encounter actually harder, more mechanics, tighter mechanics, people can't just overhear it. This is how you have encounters thst a limited number of people are capable of killing.
Say that there's a boss that currently has 800 guilds capable of killing it. What happens if you raise the health or damage by 10%? Maybe all 800 guilds can still kill it, but maybe the guild that was just barely scraping by now is unable to, and now it's just 799.
Then raise the health and damage by another 10%. Maybe those 799 guilds are capable of still killing it, but only if they spend their money on better gear or switch to more optimal builds. Maybe the guilds that are the closest to failing are now unable to clear it. Repeat. Eventually, the lower-end players start running out of money, healing throughput, or dps.
Boom, proof by induction
Note: I don't think this is a particularly good way at all to design or balance encounters. But it's objectively true that a boss that has more HP and does more damage is more difficult and can be killed by fewer players than the same exact boss with less HP and who does less damage.
Oh, @JustVine forgot to ask - what level of fight complexity do you imagine will take place in the final room of the dungeon you're imagining? Let me grab some options:
Say that there's a boss that currently has 800 guilds capable of killing it. What happens, if you raise the health or damage by 10%? Maybe all 800 guilds can still kill it, but maybe the guild that was just barely scraping by now is unable to, and now it's just 799.
If you raise the health by 10%, nothing happens unless you have a time limit on the encounter (which is a very "WoW" centric mechanic, and I do not support at all as a gener mechanic).
Even with a time limit, all it means is the guild in question needs to find an additional 10% DPS. In an itemization centric game like WoW, that is a tall ask, as that encounter that the guild is trying to kill is also the encounter that drops gear better than what that guild is using now.
In an economic centric game, this isn't the case. There needs to be the assumption (at all times) that better gear is simply a matter of spending more money.
So all that guild needs to do to be able to kill that mob with 10% more HP is spend money on DPS gear. No real issue there.
Same if you just increase the damage output of the encounter - the guild just needs better hear and tank gear, problem solved.
In order to make an encounter where guilds outright stop being able to expect a kill is to tighten the mechanics of the encounter, so that it is the players that are incapable of killing the encounter, not the gear the characters in the guild are using
Say that there's a boss that currently has 800 guilds capable of killing it. What happens, if you raise the health or damage by 10%? Maybe all 800 guilds can still kill it, but maybe the guild that was just barely scraping by now is unable to, and now it's just 799.
If you raise the health by 10%, nothing happens unless you have a time limit on the encounter (which is a very "WoW" centric mechanic, and I do not support at all as a gener mechanic).
Even with a time limit, all it means is the guild in question needs to find an additional 10% DPS. In an itemization centric game like WoW, that is a tall ask, as that encounter that the guild is trying to kill is also the encounter that drops gear better than what that guild is using now.
In an economic centric game, this isn't the case. There needs to be the assumption (at all times) that better gear is simply a matter of spending more money.
So all that guild needs to do to be able to kill that mob with 10% more HP is spend money on DPS gear. No real issue there.
Same if you just increase the damage output of the encounter - the guild just needs better hear and tank gear, problem solved.
In order to make an encounter where guilds outright stop being able to expect a kill is to tighten the mechanics of the encounter, so that it is the players that are incapable of killing the encounter, not the gear the characters in the guild are using
So of the 800 guilds capable of killing the boss, there's a bell curve, right? Some are barely capable of killing it, most are comfortable, and some are blowing it out of the water. If you make it have more health, then now the DPS need to do more damage otherwise the healers will eventually run out of mana. The groups that were barely able to kill it may now be unable. And yeah, this becomes way more obvious if there's also a hard/soft enrage.
If you make it do more damage, then now whatever mechanics it has are more dangerous. Maybe you'd wipe before if half of your raid messed up, but now you'll wipe if 1/3 of your raid messes it up. Maybe your tank needs to be more precise with whatever active mitigation cooldowns the game has.
If 10% wasn't enough to make the worst group fall off, then ratchet it up another 10%. They'll eventually run out of money, right? Yeah, more money can be farmed, but that doesn't mean that they'll have enough money to buy the better gear today.
Say that there's a boss that currently has 800 guilds capable of killing it. What happens, if you raise the health or damage by 10%? Maybe all 800 guilds can still kill it, but maybe the guild that was just barely scraping by now is unable to, and now it's just 799.
If you raise the health by 10%, nothing happens unless you have a time limit on the encounter (which is a very "WoW" centric mechanic, and I do not support at all as a gener mechanic).
Even with a time limit, all it means is the guild in question needs to find an additional 10% DPS. In an itemization centric game like WoW, that is a tall ask, as that encounter that the guild is trying to kill is also the encounter that drops gear better than what that guild is using now.
In an economic centric game, this isn't the case. There needs to be the assumption (at all times) that better gear is simply a matter of spending more money.
So all that guild needs to do to be able to kill that mob with 10% more HP is spend money on DPS gear. No real issue there.
Same if you just increase the damage output of the encounter - the guild just needs better hear and tank gear, problem solved.
In order to make an encounter where guilds outright stop being able to expect a kill is to tighten the mechanics of the encounter, so that it is the players that are incapable of killing the encounter, not the gear the characters in the guild are using
So of the 800 guilds capable of killing the boss, there's a bell curve, right? Some are barely capable of killing it, most are comfortable, and some are blowing it out of the water. If you make it have more health, then now the DPS need to do more damage otherwise the healers will eventually run out of mana. The groups that were barely able to kill it may now be unable. And yeah, this becomes way more obvious if there's also a hard/soft enrage.
If you make it do more damage, then now whatever mechanics it has are more dangerous. Maybe you'd wipe before if half of your raid messed up, but now you'll wipe if 1/3 of your raid messes it up. Maybe your tank needs to be more precise with whatever active mitigation cooldowns the game has.
If 10% wasn't enough to make the worst group fall off, then ratchet it up another 10%. They'll eventually run out of money, right? Yeah, more money can be farmed, but that doesn't mean that they'll have enough money to buy the better gear today.
There is a bell curve, indeed.
The thing is, increasing the HP of a mob isn't interacting with this curve in the way you think it is.while it may raise the level of who can kill it with a specific set of gear, all it takes to overcome that is better gear - which in an economic centric game does not require killing that encounter.
I'm not saying the guilds that were having trouble won't have more trouble, I am saying that all they need to do to overcome that trouble is get better gear, which is an option that is always available.
All you are doing is slowing down these guilds from killing the encounter until they get that better gear, because better gear is the appropriate counter to a mobs HP or damage output.
Player skill is a counter to a mobs script/AI.
If your goal is to require better gear to kill an encounter, increasing HP or damage output is the right thing to do. If you want to make the encounter harder so that fewer guilds are able to kill it at all (as opposed to fewer guilds able to kill it this week), then tightening the mechanics is the way to go.
So, at the bottom of the bell curve are the guilds who are close-to-exhausted, right? They've spent all of their money to buy the best gear they can afford and they can barely kill the boss in its current state. If you make the boss any harder, or require that they have more money to have better gear, they don't have it right now. They might eventually, but not right now. The better guilds already do, so they'll keep killing the boss, or they already have enough cash to buy the better gear or whatever.
If 10% wasn't enough to make the worst guild fail, then raise it by another 10% and repeat the process until some group fails
So, at the bottom of the bell curve are the guilds who are close-to-exhausted, right? They've spent all of their money to buy the best gear they can afford and they can barely kill the boss in its current state. If you make the boss any harder, or require that they have more money to have better gear, they don't have it right now. They might eventually, but not right now. The better guilds already do, so they'll keep killing the boss, or they already have enough cash to buy the better gear or whatever.
If 10% wasn't enough to make the worst guild fail, then raise it by another 10% and repeat the process until some group fails
No, at the bottom of the bell curve, it is more likely to be guilds that are just starting out.
Sorry, I mean the bell curve of the guilds capable of killing the boss currently. As in, there should be some guilds that are just scraping by, and have spent all of their funds on just barely managing that.
Imagine that the skill/wealth of a guild is normally distributed, and killing a boss requires that your guild has, say 1m total gold, and so 800 guilds all have 1m+ gold.
Then, you raise the HP/damage of the boss by 10%, and now you need more gear to kill the boss, so the wealth requirement to kill the boss raises to 1.05m total gold, so the guilds that had between 1.0m and 1.05m gold are unable to kill it. If there were no guilds that had this amount of wealth, then raise the HP/damage by 10% again, and this increases the wealth requirement to 1.1m total gold. If there were no guilds that had this amount of wealth, then raise...
etc
Since not all the guilds have the same amount of wealth, eventually you'll find a HP/damage value where some guilds stop being able to complete the boss but other guilds still can. Thus, you have reduced the number of players that are capable of defeating the boss.
Sorry, I mean the bell curve of the guilds capable of killing the boss currently. As in, there should be some guilds that are just scraping by, and have spent all of their funds on just barely managing that.
That is unlikely.
In your example, the guilds that has between 1 and 1.05 million gold would just go out and get more gold.
Since we are talking about gear here, it isn't like that guild needs to make a million gold a week, they just need to have that wealth in gear. As such, they can go out and increase that gear wealth. It may take a week, maybe even two, but they will get there.
In a game like Ashes, guilds will sort out their income before sorting out raiding.
So again, you haven't STOPPED the guilds killing the boss, you have just delayed it a little.
It has stopped them from defeating it until they have collected more gold, in the same way that in an itemization-based game it has stopped them from defeating it until they have collected more items. They will eventually collect more gold, and be able to defeat the encounter again.
Eventually, you push the HP numbers so high that they have to actually play their class correctly and having BiS gear won't save them. Now beating the enrage timer or killing the boss before the healers run out of mana comes down to playing better, which better guilds do better than worse guilds. Eventually the incoming damage gets so high that BiS gear doesn't save the noob/mediocre players, and only the better players are rotating their defensives properly and the healers are healing efficiently enough (not overlapping heals, not overhealing, etc) to make a difference.
Worse players can generally compensate for lower player skill with better equipment, and better players can compensate with worse equipment with higher player skill. If you have worse equipment, you have less margin-of-error to fail mechanics. Eventually, the incoming damage gets so high that only the most skilled players that never mess the mechanics up are able to successfully beat the boss.
Do I think this a good way to make difficult encounters? No, absolutely not. I'd much rather have complex mechanics. Increasing HP and Damage done objectively makes fights harder though. The harder the fight is, whether that's numerically or mechanically, the less percentage of the player base will be able to do it.
It has stopped them from defeating it until they have collected more gold, in the same way that in an itemization-based game it has stopped them from defeating it until they have collected more items.
Yes.
The difference being - in an itemization based game, the mob in question is a gate to better items.
The developers can (and do) limit what items your guild can have when killing a given mob.
If a raid progression has 20 encounters, and you are working on encounter 8, you only have access to drops from the first 7 encounters. Developers can (and do) take this in to account when designing encounters.
In an economic centric game, this isn't really possible.
In Ashes, there is nothing at all to stop any given guild wearing items from any given raid mob the first time they kill that same mob that the items drop from, let alone any drops from further on than that.
It has stopped them from defeating it until they have collected more gold, in the same way that in an itemization-based game it has stopped them from defeating it until they have collected more items.
Yes.
The difference being - in an itemization based game, the mob in question is a gate to better items.
The developers can (and do) limit what items your guild can have when killing a given mob.
If a raid progression has 20 encounters, and you are working on encounter 8, you only have access to drops from the first 7 encounters. Developers can (and do) take this in to account when designing encounters.
In an economic centric game, this isn't really possible.
In Ashes, there is nothing at all to stop any given guild wearing items from any given raid mob the first time they kill that same mob that the items drop from, let alone any drops from further on than that.
It can totally be the case in an itemization-based game that your raid's current items are the best they can be to face the boss you're on - you've farmed all the bosses below it and there's no more upgrades.
Likewise, it can be the case in an economic game that your raid's current items are the best that can be purchased. Then, we increase the HP and damage by another 10%, and of all of the guilds that have BiS gear, now the differentiator is player skill.
I don't think it's a good design at all, but I do think that it technically does check the boxes. You have a host of bosses that are all relatively simple mechanically, and those bosses are grouped into tiers. The higher the tiers, the more punishing the mechanics are when you fail them, the more damage the boss does, the more stringent the DPS requirements are, etc.
Nothing too crazy design or mechanical complexity-wise, basically just precision and gear checks as big HP sponges.
Likewise, it can be the case in an economic game that your raid's current items are the best that can be purchased.
I think this is the disconnect here.
This is untrue.
In an economic centric game, players are not hitting that ceiling.
You will never see a player in Ashes that has the best gear possible - I wouldn't be surprised if it takes several years before even one item that could be considered best in slot is created, and there is a real chance that some servers will never actually see a best in slot item at all.
lets use the two most talked about economic games that Ashes is taking some inspiration from (EVE and Archeage).
In EVE, you only fly what you can afford to lose. Even in large corporations, even the people running them, there is always something else to get. You are never finished.
In Archeage, it was three years after release before I saw a single mythical item be created - and it wasn't exactly a great item. But that was an entire server, taking three years, to make ONE mythical item. A good number of servers went in to the first (and indeed second) round of server mergers before they saw a single mythical item at all.
In an itemization based game, you may well have all the items in progression up to the encounter you are fighting.
In an economic centric game, you can have access to any items before the mob you are taking on, from the mob you are taking on, or from mobs further along in progression - and players will never, ever finish progressing in terms of gear.
Again, what you are talking about works in an itemization based game. A guild has to find a way to get the DPS or survivability they need with the items at hand. In an economic game, the items at hand are literally all the items that exist.
Tighter mechanics make an encounter harder, you can't just out gear that. DPS or survivability though, that is just a matter of spending more coin, which at most may just mean farming more coin.
Likewise, it can be the case in an economic game that your raid's current items are the best that can be purchased.
I think this is the disconnect here.
This is untrue.
In an economic centric game, players are not hitting that ceiling.
You will never see a player in Ashes that has the best gear possible - I wouldn't be surprised if it takes several years before even one item that could be considered best in slot is created, and there is a real chance that some servers will never actually see a best in slot item at all.
lets use the two most talked about economic games that Ashes is taking some inspiration from (EVE and Archeage).
In EVE, you only fly what you can afford to lose. Even in large corporations, even the people running them, there is always something else to get. You are never finished.
In Archeage, it was three years after release before I saw a single mythical item be created - and it wasn't exactly a great item. But that was an entire server, taking three years, to make ONE mythical item. A good number of servers went in to the first (and indeed second) round of server mergers before they saw a single mythical item at all.
In an itemization based game, you may well have all the items in progression up to the encounter you are fighting.
In an economic centric game, you can have access to any items before the mob you are taking on, from the mob you are taking on, or from mobs further along in progression - and players will never, ever finish progressing in terms of gear.
Again, what you are talking about works in an itemization based game. A guild has to find a way to get the DPS or survivability they need with the items at hand. In an economic game, the items at hand are literally all the items that exist.
Tighter mechanics make an encounter harder, you can't just out gear that. DPS or survivability though, that is just a matter of spending more coin, which at most may just mean farming more coin.
I don't think there's a disconnect. What you're describing is a situation in which it takes a really long time for the players to achieve the BiS gear. Maybe even one that, in normal circumstances, would never happen in particular games. Hence "It can be the case".
Further, raising your gear level via coin in MMOs is typically non-linear. If we keep raising the DPS requirements of the boss by 10%, we don't keep raising the total wealth of the DPS by 10%. Rather, each time we raise the DPS requirements, we might be asking the guild to double or triple their total wealth. We might be asking the raid to go from A-tier items to S+ tier items, which cost an absolute fortune. In BDO, the difference between a +14 and a +15 stat-wise was pretty small, but price-wise it costs hundreds of player hours.
Eventually, facing these non-linear asks for gear increases, the group is no longer able to complete the content until they gain more player skill.
I'm not arguing that they won't be able to acquire the items eventually, and that does make this different from particular itemization-based scenarios. In most World of Warcraft Progression Raiding, the races to world first are done severely undergeared, and the bosses are killed in the first ~3 weeks of the raid being open, with the winning guild putting in hundreds of attempts at that time. This means that the raid will only have a few pieces from all of the previous bosses, which means they're severely undergeared, which is part of why those raids are so hard for the prog groups.
By the time most guilds hit the end-boss for the raid, they're doing it with far better gear than the top guilds had when they defeated it, and there will still be a ton of upgrades left to get.
In games like FFXIV, they avoid the whole issue by doing gear item level scaling.
That said, this is all mostly irrelevant to my point. We don't need to block players from defeating the content "forever" or "until they get more skilled". We just need to be able to answer the question:
"What percentage of the player base is able to defeat the Lost Tomb Raid Encounter today?" with a low, single-digit number. If that number is too high, we can raise the HP and damage until that number goes down. You are absolutely right in that that number will go up as players increase their wealth.
Mechanics-based fights also get easier if your raid takes less damage, does less damage, and heals more effectively. You push phases faster, recover from mistakes more easily, and overall have to panic less and can pay attention to the mechanics more. If the fight is designed in such a way that if a single person makes a single mistake then you wipe, then the less amount of times you have to do this (the more gear you have the more dps you do, the less you have to do this mechanic), the easier the fight is.
I think we fully agree on the sort of design we'd like to see: mechanically tight fights. I don't think raising HP/damage numbers on bosses is a fun way to create difficult encounters.
Maybe it'll help if I go really extreme: imagine a mechanically simple boss. Increase it's health by 1000x. If the fight used to take 15 minutes, now it's taking 10 days. In order to defeat the boss, the players would almost certainly need to have multiple people at their houses playing on their computers in shifts. Maybe the most hardcore of all of the hardcore guilds would be willing to attempt such a feat. Longshot.
What about 5 days?
What about 24 hours?
What about 12 hours?
Now we're getting into do-able territory. If there were 800 guilds that were able to kill the boss when it used to take 15 minutes, and there is some sort of strategy that lets the healers go infinite mana-wise, then I bet if the rewards were good enough, or the bragging rights were high enough, then there would be at least one guild willing to spend 12 hours to kill a boss. If not, decrease the HP. Eventually, you hit a point where previously, all the guilds were able to kill it, and now some guilds can, and some guilds can't. All because of HP.
Then, you can do the same thing with incoming damage, and you can tune that on an across-the-board level, and also ability-by-ability. If you make the boss to 100x its original damage. Everyone just gets 1-shot. If you make the boss do 3x its original damage, you might need your tanks and healers to have nearly BiS items to be able to survive the incoming damage. Maybe the absolute richest guilds on the server will have this, but it'll take the guilds that are just barely killing the boss as it stands 6 months to have the necessary funds to hit this benchmark.
Here are some abstract ideas that I hope we agree are true on a fundamental level:
If we increase the an encounter's health (and there is some sort of thing that makes time matter, like healers running out of mana, dps running out of mana, or an enrage timer, or folks running out of time in real life for an encounter), then this makes the encounter more difficult.
If we increase an encounter's outgoing damage, same thing.
If we add mechanical complexity to an encounter, add individual responsibility, increase the number of different mechanics, decrease the window-of-opportunity to perform the mechanics correctly, make the mechanic more punishing when failed, etc, then these all make the encounter more difficult.
Players can respond to the increased difficulty in three ways, broadly, and each is subject to diminishing returns. They can improve the quality of their builds (play closer to the meta for the encounter), they can improve the quality of their play, and they can equip better gear for their build.
We can disagree on a semantic level about what "able to defeat the content means". You might argue that it means "the players have the skill potential to defeat it eventually with enough gear from the content available and enough practice". I think that's a reasonable definition, and under that definition, then you're correct. It just isn't how I was originally defining it, if that makes sense.
I meant "how many players are able to beat the content at a particular point in time". If they need to practice more, then they can't currently beat the content. If they need to farm more gear, then they can't beat the content. Hopefully, even if you like your definition more, you at least think this is a workable / reasonable interpretation!
Comments
And he just decided to start being insulting because he knew he couldn't beat my points in debate. It's a common tactic. A tactic of the weak.
If others are reading what you have said and are coming to the same conclusion as me (that you don't really have a nuanced and considered opinion on the matter), then you can't really point at other people.
Perhaps you do indeed have a well thought out opinion on the matter, but you have not committed that to this thread at all. All I know is what you have typed - I know I have had thoughts while writing a post and forgotten to include them, realizing later of my absent minded omission (I did this just a few days ago with Beau).
Again, all we know of your opinion is what you commit to the thread and what you have committed to the thread has left both of us with the assumption that you have no nuanced, well considered opinion on the topic.
If this is not the case, if you believe you do indeed have a well considered opinion here, it is on you to communicate that to us, not the other way around.
If indeed you had posted your nuanced, well-considered opinion on the matter somewhere in this thread, every time someone asked you foe it, you would be able to either direct them to it, or quote youself - much as I was able to direct people to the first post on page two for my thoughts.
I can summarize afterwards, get your approval, and post up the info. I’d like to see if the medium makes a difference at all
If so, just shoot me a DM
Beau no I'm not hopping in discord, I'm pretty busy right now. But if you have any questions about what I said, shoot. I don't mind answering them. Just tell me what you're unclear about. Just as confused as Noaani is about what I've said, I'm confused why he's confused. Not sure if he's reading too much into what I said, or thinks I'm talking in riddles or something. But I am down with the idea of you being able to clear it up as a middle man.
1) Large, open-world, non-linear dungeons (that contain 8-man content boss content and 40-man boss-content). These bosses are easy enough to be interesting while contested but boring when uncontested.
The dungeons may also include instanced-off rooms for difficult heavily-scripted encounters like shiva extreme in FFXIV. This allows the ashes team to design complicated fights and then the players to attempt those complicated fights, but then get camped and killed when they leave for their boss mats.
The PvP in these dungeons are subject to the corruption system, so if you don't want to flag, you may lose extra mats and go into more XP debt. If you kill someone not flagged, you gain corruption, but might be able to take their hard-earned boss mats, or secure a boss kill for yourself.
2) Open-world bosses that spawn in a PvP-enabled zone. These bosses essentially act as a PvP objective like Baron Nashor in League of Legends and give something for the players to squabble over. They're easy enough to be interesting while contested but boring when uncontested. Since they spawn in a PvP zone like what happens with caravans, then everyone is flagged as a "combatant", and no one has to worry about becoming corrupt. Bonus points if the game detects when there's no PvP happening and makes the fight harder somehow to keep it interesting.
On the PvE-PvP gradient, this is similar to the bosses in type-1 content, just more PvP centric.
3) Explained here.
4) There's a PoE-style (atlas there) system where you can farm/buy items to spawn/modify bosses. (editor's node: I don't actually think this is strictly necessary, but it provides a lot of procedurally generated novelty in PoE which extends the life of the game a lot.)
Then, the critiques:
1) Worries about making sure that the number of bosses in dungeons are correct. Valid and easy enough to tune when players are actually playing in dungeons. There are also concerns about how lucrative the instanced-off rooms within the dungeons are relative to other activities. May I point you to Degenerate Economic Efficiency?
Hopefully, the notion that the instanced-off rooms are deep within the dungeon itself, and the folks leaving the instanced-off rooms will have to travel through the dungeon filled with other players will be enough to create risk and redistribute some loot. Valid concern though!
2)
I think this gets a couple of things wrong on a factual level, so I felt it was worth quoting it directly. First, even if you're a combatant, you can still steal loot! https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Corruption
So, this sort of system still creates XP debt, still creates skill and stat dampening, and folks will still lose durability and all of that stuff, it's just that the risk of accidentally killing a non-combatant and becoming corrupted is gone. No one can "karma bomb" you as they can in BDO.
3) The cage match is basically just fighting over rights to access the instance, which is better than instancing
4) The McGuffin thing could be done in the open world.
So, starting from there with that as the background here are my questions:
It took the best guild in the world at the time, Method, 638 attempts to beat Garrosh Hellscream. Take a gander at this video to get an idea of how meticulously crafted and complex this encounter is.
Would you like to see boss encounters that are remotely as complex as Garrosh in Ashes? I think it's completely reasonable if the answer is "no" here - Ashes doesn't have to be every sort of game.
If yes, do you think that an encounter like that is a reasonable thing to ask players to attempt in an open-world setting (where you become less powerful after dying) like the type-1 or type-2 content? Or do you think it would make more sense to put it in an instance or what I wrote about here?
Keep in mind that there are mechanics where if a single player does a single thing incorrectly, it wipes your whole raid. If a single rogue stuns a single player during that single moment, that would wipe your whole raid.
Next, does the clarification about how folks that are flagged as combatants still risk losing their stuff and going into debt and all that help alleviate your concerns there?
Answering "no" to this question is the only real way to support the stance that this poster has taken.
The only way their opinion could be considered is if they simply do not want the segment of the MMO population that enjoys top end encounters like this from being able to find a home in Ashes.
Even then, in order for the opinion to actually be well considered, there would need to be a reason as to why they think this - and the notion of content and/or rewards being contested in Ashes simply isn't appropriate, as the suggestions I made all specifically add in additional means to contest any content that can't be contested directly while fighting the encounter proper.
A considered opinion would then also need to account for Intrepids, statements that they want a raiding scene that is tiered, and that has encounters that are difficult to the point where only a single digit percentage of the population would be able to kill them, and also square that opinion with Stevens comment that they will instance off content for the specific purpose of limiting how many people can participate.
I am personally fine with people having an opinion and not going in to too much detail (not going in to the level of detail that I did). However, if someone wants to state they have a well considered opinion, I don't think it is too much to ask that they answer a few questions about it - which has not happened here at all, hence my not letting it go.
An opinion - whether well considered or not - that the person in question can not consolidate with what Intrepid have said about the game, is about the same as someone posting the opinion that they don't want the corruption system in the game.
As in, all they'd need to do is crank up health pools and damage, and suddenly less and less players can defeat them. If they're open world, then as you know only the controlling guilds and their allies can attempt them in the first place. If you make Tier-1 bosses spawn at the same time as Tier-2 bosses and make them spawn very far away from each other and make tier-2 bosses more difficult and drop more valuable materials then more powerful players in more powerful guilds will contest those and leave the tier-1 stuff to the mid-tier guilds. Boom, all of the goals were accomplished.
The bosses themselves are still basically a glorified Baron Nashor and are mechanically uninteresting for the folks that have been doing high-end raiding for 15 years, which I think is unfortunate
That said, I don't think Steven's list of games he's played includes games with lovingly crafted difficult raid encounters, so I don't have my hopes set too high here
Did you have any thoughts on my own proposal btw?
The idea is that you want to make sure the dungeon:
First, let me say that the way you described the dungeon is super cinematic and very exciting. If a game could reliably make players play like that somehow, they'd have my money. My general concern is that the players will take the path of least resistance / path of most economy at the expense of fun / cinema
Here are my general concerns:
That said, I think the abstractions are all really solid (if I'm understanding them correctly), and the principles can be iterated on to produce a really, really cool dungeon design. This is sick.
I think something like this could be used for the upper echelons of type-1 content: the stuff that drops the materials to make the best gear. That way it has a lot of eyes/attention on it from the upper-end players.
It being logistically difficult is technically the point. Noaani and I both arrived to the 'race' solution from different approaches and angles. But the concept is the same. In order for one to design difficult content, you need some control over those variables. I want there to be 'a risk of a race' so that way the encounter can still be fun and challenging but also have a PvX element to it that doesn't necessarily interfere with the Boss room itself (unless you weren't fast enough and the opposing team was.) It allows for the dungeon to not be instanced, but 'heavily in favor of whoever has first contact'.
As for the exclusive pardon my FFXI lingo, but EX means that 'only whoever took it out of the treasure pool is capable of having this item, it's not tradeable'. In ashes due to there being PvP drops this is slightly more difficult to execute in the above scenario. Perhaps there is some sort of effect of it losing it's 'ex' status after use on the boss door? I'm less sure about the 'contested' part. And again I don't necessarily see 'universally uncontested' as a bad thing. But 'the threat of guilds attacking other guilds' dungeons' has the potential for some real organic drama I think would make the scenario you are worried about not really happen.
I agree on the staying power factor. I would hope that the increasing player skill on a server would make this less predictable and fine tuned. But that's not a guarantee. This is partially why there is the ability to light the lantern inside the dungeon. To incentivize the race itself as it provides its own 'consolation prize'. A big enough team to 'bust the dungeon fast enough to catch the other team' would therefore by nature of minimal fast travel mean that mustering a large enough group to perform both tasks would be harder. Not impossible though as I am sure Noaani will love to point out. But it would 'always have that risk'. Which is the part I would be betting on in keeping the game moist instead of dry. I tend to view raids as content prone to drying and more about 'execution' and 'thrill of the skill' rather than 'solving unknown problems' to begin with, so I'm less worried about it 'drying out' in the sense you are talking about than you may be.
However I still think this is better than any other noninstanced design schema in terms of serving multiple game purposes. Node population and traffic levels will definitely be integral to making such a thing work as well as properly designing the various proper 'circuits' for the dungeons to encourage travel and minimize clumping. It's the ebb and flow of the availability of the available pop items that I think would make this type of content to be designable for 16-24 people rather than the 30-40 that usually gets thrown around when discussing raids and is an indirect intention of why I wrote the scenario the way I did.
Vanilla WoW shouldn't really be the aim - though it wouldn't be a bad place to start out (assuming content grows from there).
However, just adding to a mobs HP and damage output doesn't reduce the overall number of people able to kill a mob - it just means people need slightly better gear. When gear isn't directly tied to content completion (as is the case in an economic centric game as opposed to an itemization centric game), you have to always assume players can get better gear.
On the other hand, if you make an encounter actually harder, more mechanics, tighter mechanics, people can't just overhear it. This is how you have encounters thst a limited number of people are capable of killing.
Say that there's a boss that currently has 800 guilds capable of killing it. What happens if you raise the health or damage by 10%? Maybe all 800 guilds can still kill it, but maybe the guild that was just barely scraping by now is unable to, and now it's just 799.
Then raise the health and damage by another 10%. Maybe those 799 guilds are capable of still killing it, but only if they spend their money on better gear or switch to more optimal builds. Maybe the guilds that are the closest to failing are now unable to clear it. Repeat. Eventually, the lower-end players start running out of money, healing throughput, or dps.
Boom, proof by induction
Note: I don't think this is a particularly good way at all to design or balance encounters. But it's objectively true that a boss that has more HP and does more damage is more difficult and can be killed by fewer players than the same exact boss with less HP and who does less damage.
[*] low complexity Nefarian
[*] medium complexity Shiva Extreme
[*] high complexity Operator Thorgar
[*] extreme complexity Garrosh
Even with a time limit, all it means is the guild in question needs to find an additional 10% DPS. In an itemization centric game like WoW, that is a tall ask, as that encounter that the guild is trying to kill is also the encounter that drops gear better than what that guild is using now.
In an economic centric game, this isn't the case. There needs to be the assumption (at all times) that better gear is simply a matter of spending more money.
So all that guild needs to do to be able to kill that mob with 10% more HP is spend money on DPS gear. No real issue there.
Same if you just increase the damage output of the encounter - the guild just needs better hear and tank gear, problem solved.
In order to make an encounter where guilds outright stop being able to expect a kill is to tighten the mechanics of the encounter, so that it is the players that are incapable of killing the encounter, not the gear the characters in the guild are using
So of the 800 guilds capable of killing the boss, there's a bell curve, right? Some are barely capable of killing it, most are comfortable, and some are blowing it out of the water. If you make it have more health, then now the DPS need to do more damage otherwise the healers will eventually run out of mana. The groups that were barely able to kill it may now be unable. And yeah, this becomes way more obvious if there's also a hard/soft enrage.
If you make it do more damage, then now whatever mechanics it has are more dangerous. Maybe you'd wipe before if half of your raid messed up, but now you'll wipe if 1/3 of your raid messes it up. Maybe your tank needs to be more precise with whatever active mitigation cooldowns the game has.
If 10% wasn't enough to make the worst group fall off, then ratchet it up another 10%. They'll eventually run out of money, right? Yeah, more money can be farmed, but that doesn't mean that they'll have enough money to buy the better gear today.
There is a bell curve, indeed.
The thing is, increasing the HP of a mob isn't interacting with this curve in the way you think it is.while it may raise the level of who can kill it with a specific set of gear, all it takes to overcome that is better gear - which in an economic centric game does not require killing that encounter.
I'm not saying the guilds that were having trouble won't have more trouble, I am saying that all they need to do to overcome that trouble is get better gear, which is an option that is always available.
All you are doing is slowing down these guilds from killing the encounter until they get that better gear, because better gear is the appropriate counter to a mobs HP or damage output.
Player skill is a counter to a mobs script/AI.
If your goal is to require better gear to kill an encounter, increasing HP or damage output is the right thing to do. If you want to make the encounter harder so that fewer guilds are able to kill it at all (as opposed to fewer guilds able to kill it this week), then tightening the mechanics is the way to go.
If 10% wasn't enough to make the worst guild fail, then raise it by another 10% and repeat the process until some group fails
No, at the bottom of the bell curve, it is more likely to be guilds that are just starting out.
Imagine that the skill/wealth of a guild is normally distributed, and killing a boss requires that your guild has, say 1m total gold, and so 800 guilds all have 1m+ gold.
Then, you raise the HP/damage of the boss by 10%, and now you need more gear to kill the boss, so the wealth requirement to kill the boss raises to 1.05m total gold, so the guilds that had between 1.0m and 1.05m gold are unable to kill it. If there were no guilds that had this amount of wealth, then raise the HP/damage by 10% again, and this increases the wealth requirement to 1.1m total gold. If there were no guilds that had this amount of wealth, then raise...
etc
Since not all the guilds have the same amount of wealth, eventually you'll find a HP/damage value where some guilds stop being able to complete the boss but other guilds still can. Thus, you have reduced the number of players that are capable of defeating the boss.
In your example, the guilds that has between 1 and 1.05 million gold would just go out and get more gold.
Since we are talking about gear here, it isn't like that guild needs to make a million gold a week, they just need to have that wealth in gear. As such, they can go out and increase that gear wealth. It may take a week, maybe even two, but they will get there.
In a game like Ashes, guilds will sort out their income before sorting out raiding.
So again, you haven't STOPPED the guilds killing the boss, you have just delayed it a little.
Eventually, you push the HP numbers so high that they have to actually play their class correctly and having BiS gear won't save them. Now beating the enrage timer or killing the boss before the healers run out of mana comes down to playing better, which better guilds do better than worse guilds. Eventually the incoming damage gets so high that BiS gear doesn't save the noob/mediocre players, and only the better players are rotating their defensives properly and the healers are healing efficiently enough (not overlapping heals, not overhealing, etc) to make a difference.
Worse players can generally compensate for lower player skill with better equipment, and better players can compensate with worse equipment with higher player skill. If you have worse equipment, you have less margin-of-error to fail mechanics. Eventually, the incoming damage gets so high that only the most skilled players that never mess the mechanics up are able to successfully beat the boss.
Do I think this a good way to make difficult encounters? No, absolutely not. I'd much rather have complex mechanics. Increasing HP and Damage done objectively makes fights harder though. The harder the fight is, whether that's numerically or mechanically, the less percentage of the player base will be able to do it.
Yes.
The difference being - in an itemization based game, the mob in question is a gate to better items.
The developers can (and do) limit what items your guild can have when killing a given mob.
If a raid progression has 20 encounters, and you are working on encounter 8, you only have access to drops from the first 7 encounters. Developers can (and do) take this in to account when designing encounters.
In an economic centric game, this isn't really possible.
In Ashes, there is nothing at all to stop any given guild wearing items from any given raid mob the first time they kill that same mob that the items drop from, let alone any drops from further on than that.
It can totally be the case in an itemization-based game that your raid's current items are the best they can be to face the boss you're on - you've farmed all the bosses below it and there's no more upgrades.
Likewise, it can be the case in an economic game that your raid's current items are the best that can be purchased. Then, we increase the HP and damage by another 10%, and of all of the guilds that have BiS gear, now the differentiator is player skill.
I don't think it's a good design at all, but I do think that it technically does check the boxes. You have a host of bosses that are all relatively simple mechanically, and those bosses are grouped into tiers. The higher the tiers, the more punishing the mechanics are when you fail them, the more damage the boss does, the more stringent the DPS requirements are, etc.
Nothing too crazy design or mechanical complexity-wise, basically just precision and gear checks as big HP sponges.
This is untrue.
In an economic centric game, players are not hitting that ceiling.
You will never see a player in Ashes that has the best gear possible - I wouldn't be surprised if it takes several years before even one item that could be considered best in slot is created, and there is a real chance that some servers will never actually see a best in slot item at all.
lets use the two most talked about economic games that Ashes is taking some inspiration from (EVE and Archeage).
In EVE, you only fly what you can afford to lose. Even in large corporations, even the people running them, there is always something else to get. You are never finished.
In Archeage, it was three years after release before I saw a single mythical item be created - and it wasn't exactly a great item. But that was an entire server, taking three years, to make ONE mythical item. A good number of servers went in to the first (and indeed second) round of server mergers before they saw a single mythical item at all.
In an itemization based game, you may well have all the items in progression up to the encounter you are fighting.
In an economic centric game, you can have access to any items before the mob you are taking on, from the mob you are taking on, or from mobs further along in progression - and players will never, ever finish progressing in terms of gear.
Again, what you are talking about works in an itemization based game. A guild has to find a way to get the DPS or survivability they need with the items at hand. In an economic game, the items at hand are literally all the items that exist.
Tighter mechanics make an encounter harder, you can't just out gear that. DPS or survivability though, that is just a matter of spending more coin, which at most may just mean farming more coin.
I don't think there's a disconnect. What you're describing is a situation in which it takes a really long time for the players to achieve the BiS gear. Maybe even one that, in normal circumstances, would never happen in particular games. Hence "It can be the case".
Further, raising your gear level via coin in MMOs is typically non-linear. If we keep raising the DPS requirements of the boss by 10%, we don't keep raising the total wealth of the DPS by 10%. Rather, each time we raise the DPS requirements, we might be asking the guild to double or triple their total wealth. We might be asking the raid to go from A-tier items to S+ tier items, which cost an absolute fortune. In BDO, the difference between a +14 and a +15 stat-wise was pretty small, but price-wise it costs hundreds of player hours.
Eventually, facing these non-linear asks for gear increases, the group is no longer able to complete the content until they gain more player skill.
I'm not arguing that they won't be able to acquire the items eventually, and that does make this different from particular itemization-based scenarios. In most World of Warcraft Progression Raiding, the races to world first are done severely undergeared, and the bosses are killed in the first ~3 weeks of the raid being open, with the winning guild putting in hundreds of attempts at that time. This means that the raid will only have a few pieces from all of the previous bosses, which means they're severely undergeared, which is part of why those raids are so hard for the prog groups.
By the time most guilds hit the end-boss for the raid, they're doing it with far better gear than the top guilds had when they defeated it, and there will still be a ton of upgrades left to get.
In games like FFXIV, they avoid the whole issue by doing gear item level scaling.
That said, this is all mostly irrelevant to my point. We don't need to block players from defeating the content "forever" or "until they get more skilled". We just need to be able to answer the question:
"What percentage of the player base is able to defeat the Lost Tomb Raid Encounter today?" with a low, single-digit number. If that number is too high, we can raise the HP and damage until that number goes down. You are absolutely right in that that number will go up as players increase their wealth.
Mechanics-based fights also get easier if your raid takes less damage, does less damage, and heals more effectively. You push phases faster, recover from mistakes more easily, and overall have to panic less and can pay attention to the mechanics more. If the fight is designed in such a way that if a single person makes a single mistake then you wipe, then the less amount of times you have to do this (the more gear you have the more dps you do, the less you have to do this mechanic), the easier the fight is.
I think we fully agree on the sort of design we'd like to see: mechanically tight fights. I don't think raising HP/damage numbers on bosses is a fun way to create difficult encounters.
Maybe it'll help if I go really extreme: imagine a mechanically simple boss. Increase it's health by 1000x. If the fight used to take 15 minutes, now it's taking 10 days. In order to defeat the boss, the players would almost certainly need to have multiple people at their houses playing on their computers in shifts. Maybe the most hardcore of all of the hardcore guilds would be willing to attempt such a feat. Longshot.
What about 5 days?
What about 24 hours?
What about 12 hours?
Now we're getting into do-able territory. If there were 800 guilds that were able to kill the boss when it used to take 15 minutes, and there is some sort of strategy that lets the healers go infinite mana-wise, then I bet if the rewards were good enough, or the bragging rights were high enough, then there would be at least one guild willing to spend 12 hours to kill a boss. If not, decrease the HP. Eventually, you hit a point where previously, all the guilds were able to kill it, and now some guilds can, and some guilds can't. All because of HP.
Then, you can do the same thing with incoming damage, and you can tune that on an across-the-board level, and also ability-by-ability. If you make the boss to 100x its original damage. Everyone just gets 1-shot. If you make the boss do 3x its original damage, you might need your tanks and healers to have nearly BiS items to be able to survive the incoming damage. Maybe the absolute richest guilds on the server will have this, but it'll take the guilds that are just barely killing the boss as it stands 6 months to have the necessary funds to hit this benchmark.
If we increase the an encounter's health (and there is some sort of thing that makes time matter, like healers running out of mana, dps running out of mana, or an enrage timer, or folks running out of time in real life for an encounter), then this makes the encounter more difficult.
If we increase an encounter's outgoing damage, same thing.
If we add mechanical complexity to an encounter, add individual responsibility, increase the number of different mechanics, decrease the window-of-opportunity to perform the mechanics correctly, make the mechanic more punishing when failed, etc, then these all make the encounter more difficult.
Players can respond to the increased difficulty in three ways, broadly, and each is subject to diminishing returns. They can improve the quality of their builds (play closer to the meta for the encounter), they can improve the quality of their play, and they can equip better gear for their build.
We can disagree on a semantic level about what "able to defeat the content means". You might argue that it means "the players have the skill potential to defeat it eventually with enough gear from the content available and enough practice". I think that's a reasonable definition, and under that definition, then you're correct. It just isn't how I was originally defining it, if that makes sense.
I meant "how many players are able to beat the content at a particular point in time". If they need to practice more, then they can't currently beat the content. If they need to farm more gear, then they can't beat the content. Hopefully, even if you like your definition more, you at least think this is a workable / reasonable interpretation!