Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
im assuming by competitive you mean tournaments, and pareto doesnt apply because people who arent good enough do not participate in tournaments. if thats the case, you are still incorrect.
but first, let me explain something. competitive doesnt mean tournament. i can play basketball vs michael jordan or lebron and its a competitive activity. im not as good as them and i will defininitely get destroyed, but it's a competition, nonetheless, perhaps a boring one that no one would pay to watch.
lets go back to your claim. even if you remove everybody and only leave the top 1% of players who participate in tournaments, their skill still follows a pareto distribution. not all teams and players are equally skilled. some teams are better than others and some players are better than others, even on professional play. the top 0.1% players is much better than the top 1% players. if not, then why are some players / teams regarded as the best of all time in their respective games? is it because they are equal in skills to other players and teams, or is it because they are superior?
The thread is about dungeons. The discussion I jumped in on to (in my arrogance) help NiKr was about dungeons as I understood it.
If you want to claim that your point is valid because one can't talk about just dungeons, that's fine, but I am not buying into this one.
High levels of skill do not directly correlate to high levels of competition, particularly when it is possible for large skill gaps to exist. Designers who think these two things are the same in games with potentially high skill gaps are failures. This is a really harsh and cutting statement, but I stand by it, which (for at least some people left here, I hope) shows you how directly factual I perceive it to be.
This claim in particular implies to me with my apparently weak understanding, that you don't understand the principle you're attempting to apply. Pareto by definition is neither recursive nor 'exponential' if you try to apply it as a statistical model (it's a effort-power law approximation what are you even doing?)
NOW I'm open to PMs and such from anyone who definitely understands this better than me. No word limit, I read fast.
Also my error, then. I definitely was viewing it from the perspective that was already put forth. That 'more people does not equal more competition'.
You seem to be arguing that 'more competitors automatically by definition is more competition', going against the spirit of what Noaani was saying definitionally. And as Mint Mobile Owner Ryan Reynolds says "I am gonna stay the HELL out of the legal department".
Have fun.
maybe im wrong. but clarify this for me. lets say you take the top 100 league of legends players (or any game really) and you remove the rest of the population. is it possible to rank order them in terms of how good they are? can you find out who the best adc is, the best mid, the best support, the best jungler and the best top?
can you do the same for teams and regions?
will the players at the top have many more accomplishments than the rest?
so is skill in video games equally distributed or not amongst the top players / teams?
Oh man, I hardly even dare give this answer, I for once cannot predict where it will lead.
Yes, you're wrong. Yes, you do in fact run into serious trouble ranking them at that point. And certainly 'Pareto' would not apply (if I am understanding how you are applying it, since again, the Pareto 'distribution' is not necessarily valid for this subject, but I will leave that to a statistician to say).
Pareto distribution in layman's terms basically means a small percentage of the group produces the most output.
look at lol teams. you have 1 team that has won more worlds than any other team, then the top 2-3 teams have won as many as all the other teams combined. the top region has more wins than all other regions combined, etc
this is also true for rl sports and im not arguing there, im just arguing video games since you said they are different.
Why do I feel like your clarification moreso made my original point, than anything else?
If you're gonna make my 'argument' for me, I'm happy to accept that I've misunderstood you all along. However you spin it, it sounds like you're now the one positioned to explain to NiKr and Mag what I was trying to point out.
I thank you for it.
ughh. you said skill in video games is distributed differently than skill in real life. i said no it isnt. it follows a pareto distribution. both video games and real life do.
then you said it doesnt because the lower bounds, aka the players who arent tournament players, do not count. then i said it doesnt matter, because if you take only the top players who are tournament players, their skill isnt equal and there is still a pareto distribution.
@_@
Friction comes when a 5th group comes along and wants to run the dungeon for the quest(s). Or one really good group is pulling 2 wings (they started when the dungeon was partially empty) and alternating between them, then a 4th group comes along and thinks they deserve one of those wings as a camp.
The thing is that anyone camping a dungeon for a level or two is likely to have killed the boss many times and gotten all of the possible loot from it (I'm assuming a ~15 min respawn). We'll see if the dungeon design and rewards are going to support fighting over every single boss kill (from a xp/hour perspective, skipping bosses is usually best), or skipping.
Open world dungeons are terrible as group skill checks, because they just get zerged. But this is a problem with instanced dungeons below the level or gear cap. You can just get someone overleveled or overgeared to carry you so it doesn't really matter.
This is the part we don't agree on.
Ah the ironic competition, i might aswell compete and still add to the main point.
While i do understand that the game design in terms of its competitive aspects is possible the greatest competition generator/meter of a game, i also do understand a competitive community taking a liking for a game and creating competition in it can break through the game design, even for non-competitive casual single player games, through things like speedrunning.
While it is true that "more players isn't necessarily more competition" if you consider games with different competitive designs, if you take in consideration games with similar competitive designs "more players" becomes more likely "more competition" due to the higher number of competitors for the similar competition.
Lineage 2's greatest competition generators was Scarcity, of the best exp spots, of the gear quantity, of the specific materials from specific monsters/bosses, of the low drops rates and etc.
With Open World Dungeons instead of instanced dungeons you can't simple spam instances evading all other players in the competition where there is no scarcity conflict unless you have to fight over the rights for the instanced dungeon.
Aren't we all sinners?
But to bring this back to the direct dungeon example from EQ2.
There's dungeon A, that has 5 rooms (just for example). One party can clear the five rooms in 10 minutes w/ 0 competition.
If there's 2 parties trying to farm dA - they'll need 10m x 2respawns, because while group1 was clearing roomA, group2 cleared roomB, so now if g1 wanted to clear rB they'd need to wait for mobs/boss to respawn.
In a game with pvp, this situation can be resolved by g1 killing g2 before g2 can even touch a mob in the dungeon. To me this is competition. g1 and g2 are equal in skill, equal in lvl and are fighting for the same content. If this is not competition, please do correct me.
Now, Noaani said that EQ2 would then create dungeon B. It would be the same thing as dA, but just a second instance of it (unless I misunderstood smth @Noaani ?).
So, how exactly is it more competition when g1 and g2 can now just go and farm their respective dungeons w/ 0 other people in it?
Azherae, you mentioned making the dungeon bigger and that this would not lead to more competition, but I was talking about letting more people in, not increasing the amount of content. The OP wants to create the same thing that EQ2 had (again, unless I'm mistaken in understanding). And to me this would decrease competition.
p.s. if Noaani was purely talking about timed farms of bosses or purely the ability to farm a boss, while others couldn't - I definitely agree that those are super competitive and I'm sure that EQ2 was attractive to the super competitive pvers of that time.
But what I was trying to say with my WoW argument was that WoW had way more players in it and it also had world first runs and timed competition. So, as my second sentence in this comment says, I think that WoW could potentially have a higher lvl of competitiveness, because there were more people competing for the same thing (I know that example there was "the same game", but I hope you get my point). And I'm not sure if you agreed with Mag on this point, cause it was difficult for me to parse the intention behind this comment.
You have the basic mechanism correct.
Now, to be clear, I'm not saying Ashes should have this mechanic in the game. It may end up needing it, but only if the dungeons aren't as large as I am hoping for.
The key thing to keep in mind though, is that fewer people simply does not mean less competition.
If it did, I wouldn't be able to explain arenas.
Arenas are competitive on a scale. If there's just 2 people fighting each other, yes it's competition, but it's a small scale competition. But when there's a tournament of 1k people, who just so happen to fight each other one at a time - that's a much fiercer competition.
I'm assuming you're talking about the latter form of competition, where groups in the dungeon compete more with their clear-times and the sheer ability to clear content. While I'm talking about both: the "1v1" interaction and the overall number of competitors in the game.
Or do I still misunderstand your point?
The other people in the dungeon.
It isn't as if we are talking about every group getting their own dungeon here. That is just outright instaning (even I don't want instanced dungeons - just some encounters).
What basically happens is developers decide how many groups the dungeon can support (content definition), and then when there are substantially more than that, they open up a second version.
As such, there is always competition. If you see a mob you want to get loot from, there is probably another group that has seen that mob that also wants loot from it, but only one of you can get said loot. Thus, competition over the loot th mob drops.
If we want to say that the scale of an area fight is based on the scale of the competition rather than the fight - then in terms of a non-faction based open PvP MMO where gear upgrades are in question, the scale is literally always the whole server. You want better loot to increase you standing as a whole. You want better loot for your guildmates to increase your guilds standing as a whole.
Also, I'm not talking about competing in regards to clear times (a notion of PvE competition from someone that doesn't understand PvE).
I for one understand you now, and yes, it was entirely my error.
More competitors implies more competition is happening. The fierceness of that competition is the thing determined by skill types and levels.
The part I'll say I still believe is that because of the time it takes to have a clash, once you've reached a reasonable 'maximum clashes' (where reasonable is 'eventually the winning group actually gets the reward instead of having to fight forever') then adding more no longer matters.
But I know you weren't inflating the concept to make the point, so yep, just me being totally wrong to jump in here.
I assume you did, cause unless I'm yet again misunderstanding this kinda fits that explanation
I think this ultimately comes back to the difference in pve difficulty between L2 and EQ2, which was probably (yet again) the source of my misunderstanding. In L2, even if there was absolute constant pvp, you'd still get mob/boss loot sooner or later (even if at a much worse pace), while, I'd assume, EQ2 simply wouldn't allow that because pve difficulty was way harder.
Yeah, if you had too many groups in a dungeon on a PvP server in EQ2, no one would get anything.
I put it down to a different philosophy bettween the developers of the games in question - generally speaking.
L2 developers wanted players to have fun killing each other. EQ2 developers wanted players to have fun killing mobs.
I like the EQ system when it comes to dungeons one problem is leash lines atleast in EQ1 there was not leash line so you could pull mobs far away to the camp modern games tend to have leashes that prevents this in alot of cases in openworld, maybe they can play around with leashing in dungeons where they wont reset unless they hit a certain barrier in the dungeon say like a safe room where mobs will reset if they hit that room but wont anywhere else, much like zone lines in EQ without the zoning part
I hope Steven will offer also the version were we can have fun killing mobs, also at max level.
The closest experience I had at least was ESO's public dungeons. I liked the ones with cool bosses otherwise it got boring. Please give us cool bosses and encounters and I think it will be great.
I'm not sure what the gear will be like yet but it's possible certain gear is better for PvP than PvE but I also don't think it's separate
If the content is actually good I'm down. I'm a PvE player so my worry is things like this will water down the actual content. If the bosses are cool we're good. I've never played a game that has open world dungeons so we'll see how this goes.
Actually statistically if I have a player base of 10,000 people the 1% will be much lower than having a playerbase of 1 million people. the top 1% is considered to be high skilled in every singe game I've ever played. This kind of shows how few people play actual competitive games.
This is true - but is not quite the situation at hand.
Yeah, some have cool bosses and interesting stories but they are all far too easy. ESO's open world in general is rather boring, honestly. I understand they opted to make the game more accessible to a broader audience and that is fine, but for me personally the only interesting PvE content ended up being veteran content (trials, arenas and pursuing trifecta in dungeons). I was no longer feeling motivated to explore the open world and new zones due to the lack of challenge, and I'm glad AoC doesn't seem to be heading in the same direction. I'm happy with what I've seen so far and look forward to explore Verra.