How will progression and balance work in this game?
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.
