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How will progression and balance work in this game?
Telandras
Member
I'm sure there have been discussions of this topic before, but given that the project has been so much in flux for such a long time, and because the question is so far-reaching, I thought I might just throw it out there as a refreshed topic. (Bump.)
I'm curious what schedule the developers might intend to release new content for the game, e.g. new world raid bosses that drop new gear of higher power. This seems essential, to me, as a mechanism to keep players engaged in the game. I will grant that the devs have said they intend to release a huge amount of content at launch (by industry standards), and I will grant that this and other "we will break the mold" sorts of statements by Intrepid are sincere and that, with skilled programmers and diligent art / lore / balance engineers they will be able to fulfill this to some degree. If there are going to be, say, thirty world bosses that can be summoned at different times, in different order depending on prior world events, that's an ambitious amount of content--about three World of Warcraft raids' worth of bosses. If we take the epic Wrath of the Lich King expansion as a ruler, there were (correct me if I'm slightly wrong) three bosses in the PvP / supplemental raid (Vault of Archavon, released one at a time with each patch 3.0 - 3.3), the retuned Naxxramas (15 bosses), retuned Onyxia's Lair (one boss), Obsidian Sanctum (three bosses), Eye of Eternity (two bosses), then Ulduar (another fourteen bosses, including a bonus boss for the pros), Trial of the Crusader (five bosses), and finally Icecrown Citadel (twelve bosses) and finally finally the Ruby Sanctum (one boss and two mini-bosses). If we only give partial credit for the retuned content, then WotLK included 40-45 new encounters over its two-year release. Also perhaps important, both Naxx (in its original incarnation) and Icecrown Citadel were released in stages but, once content was out, permitted nonlinear progression through the encounters. WotLK was about par for the course in terms of new raid content. In contrast, the following expansion Cataclysm released only 31 new bosses, which many found initially too tough and (later) too easy (except for Spine of Deathwing, lulz). Blizzard course-corrected a bit more by Mists of Pandaria, which saw the return of actual world bosses (rather than easy-access raids in PvP zones) and a total of 47 new bosses.
I've included some of the player experience and notes about optional bosses to lead into the next question, how will the developers handle balance so as to ensure that the game is challenging but also fresh and interesting? In the context of the above, it seems to me that Intrepid's proposal is basically to release one massive nonlinear raid as the world. Of course, there are other systems including PvP, dungeons, crafting, and node governance, but the backbone of an MMO and a primary driver of the progression is the many player encounters with the big dragons. If Intrepid does release 30-40 world bosses that can spawn at different times, perhaps even in different locations, this will naturally create a huge variability in the difficulty of each one. That will be challenge to balance and tune, and while I'm not sure that Intrepid will be successful at it I'm going to suggest that success is not a binary thing--sure, some bosses will be too easy and others too hard, but this happens even with a massive company like Blizzard beta-testing everything and then fine-tuning or even hotfixing it when they see a guild pulling the boss outside of its arena or bringing enough healers to keep the angry dinosaur in Phase 1 until it's dead on heroic (for those in he know, Thok the Bloodthirsty came out before "mythic" anything). Success should be measured in aggregate, in terms of how often bosses provide a satisfying challenge and whether more skilled players can see faster unlocking (more progression) but not be done so fast that they're bored.
To solve this, I would theorize that Intrepid might use the unique format in such a way that, while any given realm (server) has the same bosses that can spawn, the order in which they spawn determines what in WoW was the "item level" of their loot. Let each item be, say, 2% more powerful for every previous boss that has been unlocked, or 12% more powerful for every five previous bosses. Intrepid can work out the numbers, and the right shape of the function (linear, exponential, or tiered exponential) is up to them. But this would help keep the content fresh because, throughout the release cycle, the game becomes "replayable" in the sense that each realm has a different ordering of boss unlocks and therefore a different ordering of the strengths of their loot. Different environments in which each boss may appear, even different seasons that make certain strategies more appealing or not, would add further challenge and uncertainty. For the late-game nerf (that is, supplemental content), Intrepid could release 5-10 additional bosses which are much easier to spawn and drop loot from higher on the progression scale.
What convinces me that it is possible is the success by which Blizzard was able to implement its encounters, particularly in terms of flexible raid sizes and break points for the various encounters (if you take on this boss with progression-level loot and get hit by its ability, it will kill you, but if you have a bit more gear power then you will eventually reach the break point whereby the same mistake will take you to 10% health but you can still recover). What makes me think that this will not be easy is the degree of course correction and constant tuning that it took, even in a somewhat more rigid format. The best guilds would consistently solve each new raid in 4-7 weeks. If I were leading it, I would be shooting for a 6-9 week period before the first guilds killed the final boss on the hardest difficulty, but because of alts and loot funneling it would probably just come down to the number of hours in a day for "professional" players and make the 4-7 week metric pretty hard to move without some artificial mechanics like the various progressive nerfs that Blizzard introduced in each expansion.
But, that's the question: how to keep the content fresh without engineering insurmountable barriers. And, once that's answered, I'm curious to know how often Intrepid plans to make the world bigger.
I'm curious what schedule the developers might intend to release new content for the game, e.g. new world raid bosses that drop new gear of higher power. This seems essential, to me, as a mechanism to keep players engaged in the game. I will grant that the devs have said they intend to release a huge amount of content at launch (by industry standards), and I will grant that this and other "we will break the mold" sorts of statements by Intrepid are sincere and that, with skilled programmers and diligent art / lore / balance engineers they will be able to fulfill this to some degree. If there are going to be, say, thirty world bosses that can be summoned at different times, in different order depending on prior world events, that's an ambitious amount of content--about three World of Warcraft raids' worth of bosses. If we take the epic Wrath of the Lich King expansion as a ruler, there were (correct me if I'm slightly wrong) three bosses in the PvP / supplemental raid (Vault of Archavon, released one at a time with each patch 3.0 - 3.3), the retuned Naxxramas (15 bosses), retuned Onyxia's Lair (one boss), Obsidian Sanctum (three bosses), Eye of Eternity (two bosses), then Ulduar (another fourteen bosses, including a bonus boss for the pros), Trial of the Crusader (five bosses), and finally Icecrown Citadel (twelve bosses) and finally finally the Ruby Sanctum (one boss and two mini-bosses). If we only give partial credit for the retuned content, then WotLK included 40-45 new encounters over its two-year release. Also perhaps important, both Naxx (in its original incarnation) and Icecrown Citadel were released in stages but, once content was out, permitted nonlinear progression through the encounters. WotLK was about par for the course in terms of new raid content. In contrast, the following expansion Cataclysm released only 31 new bosses, which many found initially too tough and (later) too easy (except for Spine of Deathwing, lulz). Blizzard course-corrected a bit more by Mists of Pandaria, which saw the return of actual world bosses (rather than easy-access raids in PvP zones) and a total of 47 new bosses.
I've included some of the player experience and notes about optional bosses to lead into the next question, how will the developers handle balance so as to ensure that the game is challenging but also fresh and interesting? In the context of the above, it seems to me that Intrepid's proposal is basically to release one massive nonlinear raid as the world. Of course, there are other systems including PvP, dungeons, crafting, and node governance, but the backbone of an MMO and a primary driver of the progression is the many player encounters with the big dragons. If Intrepid does release 30-40 world bosses that can spawn at different times, perhaps even in different locations, this will naturally create a huge variability in the difficulty of each one. That will be challenge to balance and tune, and while I'm not sure that Intrepid will be successful at it I'm going to suggest that success is not a binary thing--sure, some bosses will be too easy and others too hard, but this happens even with a massive company like Blizzard beta-testing everything and then fine-tuning or even hotfixing it when they see a guild pulling the boss outside of its arena or bringing enough healers to keep the angry dinosaur in Phase 1 until it's dead on heroic (for those in he know, Thok the Bloodthirsty came out before "mythic" anything). Success should be measured in aggregate, in terms of how often bosses provide a satisfying challenge and whether more skilled players can see faster unlocking (more progression) but not be done so fast that they're bored.
To solve this, I would theorize that Intrepid might use the unique format in such a way that, while any given realm (server) has the same bosses that can spawn, the order in which they spawn determines what in WoW was the "item level" of their loot. Let each item be, say, 2% more powerful for every previous boss that has been unlocked, or 12% more powerful for every five previous bosses. Intrepid can work out the numbers, and the right shape of the function (linear, exponential, or tiered exponential) is up to them. But this would help keep the content fresh because, throughout the release cycle, the game becomes "replayable" in the sense that each realm has a different ordering of boss unlocks and therefore a different ordering of the strengths of their loot. Different environments in which each boss may appear, even different seasons that make certain strategies more appealing or not, would add further challenge and uncertainty. For the late-game nerf (that is, supplemental content), Intrepid could release 5-10 additional bosses which are much easier to spawn and drop loot from higher on the progression scale.
What convinces me that it is possible is the success by which Blizzard was able to implement its encounters, particularly in terms of flexible raid sizes and break points for the various encounters (if you take on this boss with progression-level loot and get hit by its ability, it will kill you, but if you have a bit more gear power then you will eventually reach the break point whereby the same mistake will take you to 10% health but you can still recover). What makes me think that this will not be easy is the degree of course correction and constant tuning that it took, even in a somewhat more rigid format. The best guilds would consistently solve each new raid in 4-7 weeks. If I were leading it, I would be shooting for a 6-9 week period before the first guilds killed the final boss on the hardest difficulty, but because of alts and loot funneling it would probably just come down to the number of hours in a day for "professional" players and make the 4-7 week metric pretty hard to move without some artificial mechanics like the various progressive nerfs that Blizzard introduced in each expansion.
But, that's the question: how to keep the content fresh without engineering insurmountable barriers. And, once that's answered, I'm curious to know how often Intrepid plans to make the world bigger.
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Comments
This will take an extensive time commitment to achieve.
People who put more into the Game - a.k.a. their Node - will apparently NOT be nerfed so that People who do less can catch up or even succeed them. This is a Balance that some People can not come to terms with.
Why i am mentioning this ?
Because some People - a "few" People - on YouTube, can not stop whining and complaining about it. And don't even go to Reddit.
Smol' Apologies for this little Rant here, but since how many Years has Sir Steven announced the competitive Nature and Spirit of the Game ? It "WILL" be balanced. It also takes so long because it is supposed to work nicely. Yes some People feel they will be "left behind" if Others who put in twice ot three Times the Amount of Effort and Time into the Game, will have a Advantage against them in Node-Conflicts.
I am so glad and thankful this Forum is so refreshingly different all the time ... ... 🙄
[ Aszkalon, reading your reply as I type this... I would never expect players to find their power diminished for the sake of letting newbies become competitive with them. However, I would expect certain mechanics, systems of gear availability, and various crafting systems to offer new players quicker routes to success over time. This is simply part of adding new content: it is nice to leave the old content more or less intact, but to make it easier to bypass so that players can get straight to the new stuff and join everyone else. ]
One other thing I would add, that if they have some system for bosses to scale in difficulty as they are discovered in different orders, the developers might make things easier on themselves by making a modular system of boss abilities and mechanics. Every MMO has the usual totems, adds, tank swap debuffs, and other mechanics, and various abilities may appear in lower-level content or on trash mobs as a preview of the next boss encounter. And, WoW itself has re-used various mechanics in addition to re-tuning entire fights, but I'd suggest that with all the boss encounters they do pretty well to give every boss a unique story and encounter. There are also examples, e.g. Yor'sahj the Unsleeping or Halfus Wyrmbreaker, both from WoW: Cataclysm, where players are challenged to choose from various mechanics. There are many possibilities, and I think that with a reasonable degree of engineering Intrepid could achieve a reasonable balance of challenge and progression, even when "the loot pinyata" on one server is not the easiest boss on another.
By design, the available content changes as Nodes rise and fall - and as different Races overtake the government of Villages, Towns and Metros.
The available content also changes as Seasons and Weather move through individual Biomes.
The available content also changes through the World Events system.
We can also expect Ashes to introduce new content via Battlepasses.
not really. that's a magic number. there's no reason for that number. that might make things interesting to you, or hardcore pve raiders, but the game isn't focused at hardcore pve raiders. for example, I might find it more interesting to have more different pvp modes than to have 39457475 different raids.
new areas to farm mobs, new regular 1 party dungeons, etc. are more interesting and fun to me than raids with 40 players.
anyways I think steven said that they plan to release patches every 6 months or every year (tbd) and there will be seasonal stuff as well. i suppose it depends on the money they get. more money = more content
The core difficulty in previous interactions on this topic has been having the argument about what form and importance Raid Boss type enemies should have.
So, specifically, your comment on how it seems essential to you, sets a general precedent for the thread as a whole. Basically, the number of vocal forum people who agree with your 'essential' is not always high enough to have a discussion that isn't 'an argument over how essential it is'.
I'd have ignored the topic altogether based on that, but for some reason I felt like I should comment on it...
Sorry if it's useless.
are you the bot or the human?