Open world raids

Grievousness wrote: »

bigepeen wrote: »

Having instanced areas basically does destroy the overarching open world. What happens is people start treating the open world as a waiting lobby for their instanced PvE content. Then it'll go down the route of WoW, with a mostly empty open world with people standing around cities waiting to join their sequestored dungeons. Finally, a gigantic portion of this player-base will realize how unfun this is, and yearn for the classic WoW's open world and will literally be willing to play an outdated version of the game just because the partitioned instance PvE carebears ruined the open world.

That might come as a surprise to you but classic WoW also have instances.
Also Cities in AoC will have exactly the same effect that people are not in the actual world.
You always will not have all people out there in the world doing stuff.

This problem exists on a spectrum.
If you instance everything there is no open world.
If you instance a few things like a couple of boss rooms there are still people in the open world because:
1) You need to get there by walking in the open world.
2) It is impossible to spend all the time inside if you for example can just make each instance once a week.

Cities are part of the actual world. There is no special rule set for Cities. PKing is allowed, griefing is allowed, hell, you could even attack people why they fend off the Monsters attacking the town.

You are right, everything is based on a spectrum. Shifting it a bit to the left or the right won't make a difference though. As you are said, creating challenging open world bosses is very difficult, but so is their general ambition of the game. I don't think moving away because its a challenge is the correct way of solving the problem. Make the open world bosses difficult, make them hard to kill in a PVE sense. I'm all for that. If that means, that the first guild to down them needs 15 days after reaching max Level, then so be it.

Also, they already said, that 20% of the dungeons/raids will be instanced. So how would you know, that there isn't the challenging PvE Content you are asking for already? The once a week type of instance. The competitive type of PvE Instance. In the end, we don't know how exactly their vision will unfold. There certainly is the possibility, that challenging pve instances already exist. What the reward structure, the rights of entry and the requirements to join will be is a whole different Question.

Grievousness wrote: »

bigepeen wrote: »

Having instanced areas basically does destroy the overarching open world. What happens is people start treating the open world as a waiting lobby for their instanced PvE content. Then it'll go down the route of WoW, with a mostly empty open world with people standing around cities waiting to join their sequestored dungeons. Finally, a gigantic portion of this player-base will realize how unfun this is, and yearn for the classic WoW's open world and will literally be willing to play an outdated version of the game just because the partitioned instance PvE carebears ruined the open world.

That might come as a surprise to you but classic WoW also have instances.
Also Cities in AoC will have exactly the same effect that people are not in the actual world.
You always will not have all people out there in the world doing stuff.

This problem exists on a spectrum.
If you instance everything there is no open world.
If you instance a few things like a couple of boss rooms there are still people in the open world because:
1) You need to get there by walking in the open world.
2) It is impossible to spend all the time inside if you for example can just make each instance once a week.

Yeah, I'll concede that a lot of retail WoW's problems came from things other than instancing, mostly being the removal of open world PvP. But this change was precipitated by catering to the PvE crowd that wanted a removal of all PvP content, in favor of focusing on PvE instanced content. The open world was completely watered-down by letting these people influence the game. All WoW players will admit that is very little open world interaction in WoW anymore, and I believe that the root cause of that was instanced PvE content.

@Warth
"Instancing is only going to happen in certain dungeons where the desire is to have greater narrative appeal."
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Dungeons#Open_world

Current plans for instancing only seem to apply to lore related dungeons and arenas.

Grievousness wrote: »

@Warth
"Instancing is only going to happen in certain dungeons where the desire is to have greater narrative appeal."
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Dungeons#Open_world

Current plans for instancing only seem to apply to lore related dungeons and arenas.

That can apply to WoW styled raids tho. All of their raid areas tied into the lore.

Grievousness wrote: »

@Warth
"Instancing is only going to happen in certain dungeons where the desire is to have greater narrative appeal."
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Dungeons#Open_world

Current plans for instancing only seem to apply to lore related dungeons and arenas.

WoW Raids have a great lore related appeal. They still have a varying degree of difficulty (Normal HC and Mythic). Literally no statement entails, that there won't be challenging pve content tied to these.

@Warth
So you assume they gate the ingame lore behind your ability to PvE?
Is there any statement saying those will be challenging?

bigepeen wrote: »

Yeah, I'll concede that a lot of retail WoW's problems came from things other than instancing, mostly being the removal of open world PvP. But this change was precipitated by catering to the PvE crowd that wanted a removal of all PvP content, in favor of focusing on PvE instanced content. The open world was completely watered-down by letting these people influence the game. All WoW players will admit that is very little open world interaction in WoW anymore, and I believe that the root cause of that was instanced PvE content.

The general problem with talking about WoW is that the game is around for a long time.
Things that apply to current state WoW may not apply to other expansions of it or even the base game.
I personally disagree with some things you are connecting here:

1) Open world pvp:
If you are a PvE only player and don't want to be affected, you can and always could just play on a PvE server.
On a PvP server you can attack everyone of the enemy faction without any drawback, not even a corruption system or aynthing like that.
On a PvE Server you simply can't.
As a result reducing the involvement in the open world in wow cannot cater to any PvE crowd since they just played on a PvE Server and never had that issue to begin with.

2) Watering down of open world:
While this happened, it did not happen because of instanced dungeons.

The major system that "removed" the open world was the introduction of the "dungeon finder" in Cataclysm.
It was a literal Cataclysm and killed the open world.
With the "dungeon finder" you could queue up for dungeons and raids, once a party was formed people were teleported into the instance.
I personally would say I was part of the PvE crowd at that time and left the game because of this new feature, if they catered to me with it they did it wrong.

Another problem in WoW's open world is that they started to instance parts of the open world.
If you made certain quests that changed the region.
For example if you made a quest chain to conquer an area for some NPCs you had one instance before and after that.
So if a player was in the area before finishing the quest you could not see any other player that had finished the quest.
That concept started getting used in Wotlk I think.

I personally would say that current state WoW is a good example of bad instancing while vanilla WoW has a good implementation, but too few things going on in the world that makes you go out there.

Grievousness wrote: »

@Warth
So you assume they gate the in-game lore behind your ability to PvE?
Is there any statement saying those will be challenging?

Nah, i believe this to have a variance of difficulty based on their planned dynamic difficulty scaling system. Going through them for the story: easy.
Going through them with the highest tier of the reward structure? Very Hard.

That's all just based on assumptions though. We will see about that.

I did bring the suggestion of utilizing the already designed bosses into much harder but instanced variants of themselves. With a competitive type system and a reward structure, that doesn't affect progression (as that would go against the core principles of the game), but is mostly designed around cosmetics, titles, prestige, trophies etc.

This wouldn't interfere with the core principles of the game.
It would create incentive for PvE Players to get into the open world and gear up, participate and stick to the game.
It would create challenging PvE Content, where you not only fight against the contents of the instance, but also against other players on the leaderboard.
Is rather easy to implement, as the base for these bosses/boss rooms... is already within the game.
It creates a competitive setting.
It's easily alterable from "season to season", which provides the possibility to keep it interesting.
People wouldn't be taken out of the open world for too long, as it is merely a couple of attempts each week.

You can read more about that here in case you are interested @Grievousness

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/46352/different-types-of-dungeons-and-raids/p1

I can't link you directly to the post, just "CTRL-F" and search for Warth.

Noaani

Warth wrote: »

Lineage 2 has a lifetime revenue of more than 1 Billion USD. Pretty sure Steven would be a very very happy man if he could just copy paste the success of it.

If that was the metric to consider, then surely they would look at WoW, not L2.

Noaani wrote: »

Warth wrote: »

Lineage 2 has a lifetime revenue of more than 1 Billion USD. Pretty sure Steven would be a very very happy man if he could just copy paste the success of it.

If that was the metric to consider, then surely they would look at WoW, not L2.

They designed the game taking heavy inspiration from L2 tho.

Noaani wrote: »

Warth wrote: »

Lineage 2 has a lifetime revenue of more than 1 Billion USD. Pretty sure Steven would be a very very happy man if he could just copy paste the success of it.

If that was the metric to consider, then surely they would look at WoW, not L2.

Read the context. He brought up that copy pasting L2 wouldn't be a great idea as it failed. I just pointed out that he wasn't just wrong, he was talking about things he knows nothing about. Claiming L2 wasn't successful is just a poor joke. If AoC could copy the success of L2, i'd estimate that Steven would be more than happy as that would mean a XXXX% return on investment for him.

Also yeah, better try to copy a game that is still alive in a completely over-saturated corner of the market (MMORPG with a focus on instanced PvE Content). Great idea, that worked splendidly for all the WoW Clones we have seen over the past 15 years.

Grievousness wrote: »

bigepeen wrote: »

Yeah, I'll concede that a lot of retail WoW's problems came from things other than instancing, mostly being the removal of open world PvP. But this change was precipitated by catering to the PvE crowd that wanted a removal of all PvP content, in favor of focusing on PvE instanced content. The open world was completely watered-down by letting these people influence the game. All WoW players will admit that is very little open world interaction in WoW anymore, and I believe that the root cause of that was instanced PvE content.

The general problem with talking about WoW is that the game is around for a long time.
Things that apply to current state WoW may not apply to other expansions of it or even the base game.
I personally disagree with some things you are connecting here:

1) Open world pvp:
If you are a PvE only player and don't want to be affected, you can and always could just play on a PvE server.
On a PvP server you can attack everyone of the enemy faction without any drawback, not even a corruption system or aynthing like that.
On a PvE Server you simply can't.
As a result reducing the involvement in the open world in wow cannot cater to any PvE crowd since they just played on a PvE Server and never had that issue to begin with.

2) Watering down of open world:
While this happened, it did not happen because of instanced dungeons.

The major system that "removed" the open world was the introduction of the "dungeon finder" in Cataclysm.
It was a literal Cataclysm and killed the open world.
With the "dungeon finder" you could queue up for dungeons and raids, once a party was formed people were teleported into the instance.
I personally would say I was part of the PvE crowd at that time and left the game because of this new feature, if they catered to me with it they did it wrong.

Another problem in WoW's open world is that they started to instance parts of the open world.
If you made certain quests that changed the region.
For example if you made a quest chain to conquer an area for some NPCs you had one instance before and after that.
So if a player was in the area before finishing the quest you could not see any other player that had finished the quest.
That concept started getting used in Wotlk I think.

I personally would say that current state WoW is a good example of bad instancing while vanilla WoW has a good implementation, but too few things going on in the world that makes you go out there.

There are no PvP servers on retail WoW though, they've been stripped of completely open world PvP.

So how much of an impact do you think instanced dungeons had on the open world of WoW?

I agree that the dungeon finder really affected the open world, and it never should have been implemented. The dungeon finder was made because WoW was changing from an open world experience to a linear co-op content dungeon raid experience. The dungeon finder facilitated this for their changing audience, and it would've never been created if instanced PvE dungeons had never existed in the first place.

Abominatus

bigepeen wrote: »

Grievousness wrote: »

bigepeen wrote: »

Yeah, I'll concede that a lot of retail WoW's problems came from things other than instancing, mostly being the removal of open world PvP. But this change was precipitated by catering to the PvE crowd that wanted a removal of all PvP content, in favor of focusing on PvE instanced content. The open world was completely watered-down by letting these people influence the game. All WoW players will admit that is very little open world interaction in WoW anymore, and I believe that the root cause of that was instanced PvE content.

The general problem with talking about WoW is that the game is around for a long time.
Things that apply to current state WoW may not apply to other expansions of it or even the base game.
I personally disagree with some things you are connecting here:

1) Open world pvp:
If you are a PvE only player and don't want to be affected, you can and always could just play on a PvE server.
On a PvP server you can attack everyone of the enemy faction without any drawback, not even a corruption system or aynthing like that.
On a PvE Server you simply can't.
As a result reducing the involvement in the open world in wow cannot cater to any PvE crowd since they just played on a PvE Server and never had that issue to begin with.

2) Watering down of open world:
While this happened, it did not happen because of instanced dungeons.

The major system that "removed" the open world was the introduction of the "dungeon finder" in Cataclysm.
It was a literal Cataclysm and killed the open world.
With the "dungeon finder" you could queue up for dungeons and raids, once a party was formed people were teleported into the instance.
I personally would say I was part of the PvE crowd at that time and left the game because of this new feature, if they catered to me with it they did it wrong.

Another problem in WoW's open world is that they started to instance parts of the open world.
If you made certain quests that changed the region.
For example if you made a quest chain to conquer an area for some NPCs you had one instance before and after that.
So if a player was in the area before finishing the quest you could not see any other player that had finished the quest.
That concept started getting used in Wotlk I think.

I personally would say that current state WoW is a good example of bad instancing while vanilla WoW has a good implementation, but too few things going on in the world that makes you go out there.

There are no PvP servers on retail WoW though, they've been stripped of completely open world PvP.

So how much of an impact do you think instanced dungeons had on the open world of WoW?

I agree that the dungeon finder really affected the open world, and it never should have been implemented. The dungeon finder was made because WoW was changing from an open world experience to a linear co-op content dungeon raid experience. The dungeon finder facilitated this for their changing audience, and it would've never been created if instanced PvE dungeons had never existed in the first place.

This is the slippery slope argument. That instancing automatically leads to dungeon finder and then to dogs & cats living together.

As a general rule, slippery slope arguments are garbage, and rarely valid. If instancing didn’t cause the problem but Raid finder did (And I think this is a pretty good take on what happened) then the solution is: have instances, don’t have raid finder. And if some idiots start demanding raid finder just say no. The developers have the power to decide what features they want in their game.

bigepeen wrote: »

There are no PvP servers on retail WoW though, they've been stripped of completely open world PvP.

My bad they removed them with bfa, in favour of volunatrily being able to flag for pvp.

bigepeen wrote: »

So how much of an impact do you think instanced dungeons had on the open world of WoW?

Kind of hard to objectify it to be frank.
Overall the game world is kind of an underused feature in WoW nowadays but that's mostly because they took away from its importance slowly but steadily over the last decade.
In vanilla major events like the opening of Ahn'Quiraj where happening in the world not in instances.
As a result people came together in the world for this stuff.

Dungeons in AoC will probably more compareable to grinding areas.
That's why a completely instanced dungeon like WoW would be a really bad thing to happen.
Having limited use of instances or gating mechanism for a couple of bosses though seems reasonable.
Major events like the sieges or world bosses won't stop being important because of that.

In the same way some people doing arena won't kill the whole open world pvp scene.
You just need to make sure not to go overboard with it.
Having limited use of instances is not mutually exlusive to a vibrant open world.

Abominatus wrote: »

bigepeen wrote: »

Grievousness wrote: »

bigepeen wrote: »

Yeah, I'll concede that a lot of retail WoW's problems came from things other than instancing, mostly being the removal of open world PvP. But this change was precipitated by catering to the PvE crowd that wanted a removal of all PvP content, in favor of focusing on PvE instanced content. The open world was completely watered-down by letting these people influence the game. All WoW players will admit that is very little open world interaction in WoW anymore, and I believe that the root cause of that was instanced PvE content.

The general problem with talking about WoW is that the game is around for a long time.
Things that apply to current state WoW may not apply to other expansions of it or even the base game.
I personally disagree with some things you are connecting here:

1) Open world pvp:
If you are a PvE only player and don't want to be affected, you can and always could just play on a PvE server.
On a PvP server you can attack everyone of the enemy faction without any drawback, not even a corruption system or aynthing like that.
On a PvE Server you simply can't.
As a result reducing the involvement in the open world in wow cannot cater to any PvE crowd since they just played on a PvE Server and never had that issue to begin with.

2) Watering down of open world:
While this happened, it did not happen because of instanced dungeons.

The major system that "removed" the open world was the introduction of the "dungeon finder" in Cataclysm.
It was a literal Cataclysm and killed the open world.
With the "dungeon finder" you could queue up for dungeons and raids, once a party was formed people were teleported into the instance.
I personally would say I was part of the PvE crowd at that time and left the game because of this new feature, if they catered to me with it they did it wrong.

Another problem in WoW's open world is that they started to instance parts of the open world.
If you made certain quests that changed the region.
For example if you made a quest chain to conquer an area for some NPCs you had one instance before and after that.
So if a player was in the area before finishing the quest you could not see any other player that had finished the quest.
That concept started getting used in Wotlk I think.

I personally would say that current state WoW is a good example of bad instancing while vanilla WoW has a good implementation, but too few things going on in the world that makes you go out there.

There are no PvP servers on retail WoW though, they've been stripped of completely open world PvP.

So how much of an impact do you think instanced dungeons had on the open world of WoW?

I agree that the dungeon finder really affected the open world, and it never should have been implemented. The dungeon finder was made because WoW was changing from an open world experience to a linear co-op content dungeon raid experience. The dungeon finder facilitated this for their changing audience, and it would've never been created if instanced PvE dungeons had never existed in the first place.

This is the slippery slope argument. That instancing automatically leads to dungeon finder and then to dogs & cats living together.

As a general rule, slippery slope arguments are garbage, and rarely valid. If instancing didn’t cause the problem but Raid finder did (And I think this is a pretty good take on what happened) then the solution is: have instances, don’t have raid finder. And if some idiots start demanding raid finder just say no. The developers have the power to decide what features they want in their game.

I think that instanced PvE content is still a contributing factor to the problem, but I agree that dungeon finder is the cherry on top that completely breaks the game. Having lots of content behind a wall of instanced PvE is the root cause of the issue, in my opinion.

It's just simple cause and effect. If there is no cause (PvE instanced content), then there is no effect (dungeon finder). I know that just because PvE instancing exists does not mean that a dungeon finder will follow, but the better option in my opinion is to just not have the instanced content in the first place. In all likelihood, the game catering to carebears would push it towards removing PvP. It's not a slippery slope to claim this because we have enough data from other mmorpgs to see that having a sizeable portion of PvE instanced content tends to push games in that direction by virtue of a large subset of the population that enjoys that content pushing for no PvP.

Grievousness wrote: »

bigepeen wrote: »

There are no PvP servers on retail WoW though, they've been stripped of completely open world PvP.

My bad they removed them with bfa, in favour of volunatrily being able to flag for pvp.

bigepeen wrote: »

So how much of an impact do you think instanced dungeons had on the open world of WoW?

Kind of hard to objectify it to be frank.
...
Having limited use of instances is not mutually exlusive to a vibrant open world.

I just think that we have fundamentally different opinions on how much of an effect instancing content has on the open world. It's not mutually exclusive, but highly disjoint in my opinion.

Archaeon

Interesting discussion, read quite a bit of the thread. My thoughts:

So I've played a variety of MMOs over the years, currently on WoW and do some Mythic tier content. I think the issue here is that we want 2 things that contradict each other. PvP meaningfully affecting PvE and PvE that is not trivial.

These two just don't work together. As it is, its hard enough getting people to focus for a high difficulty instanced raid. The last thing you want is the complexity of PvP interaction 'screwing things up'. To some this may sound 'fun', but from a PvE perspective all it does is create a frustrating experience. People intentionally griefed each other as well e.g. leashing bosses/getting them to reset, pulling mobs on the raid, etc. That is not fun gameplay for the party being assailed.

In a FFA PvP flagging type of game like Ashes, this sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Sure this worked back in the L2 days, people even had fun. But in 2021/2022, the audience for that is niche at best. The majority of MMO players are in their 30s with responsibilities and limited play time. People aren't going to log on and play for a few hours each night to get ganked on bosses their guild wants to kill. The players give up, the guild gives up. People get frustrated and leave the game.

FYI WoW Classic had open world bosses that were contested over. Yes it attracted players in massive numbers and was a laggy zerg fest. No 'fun' was had. Eventually most guilds gave up, since even if they helped larger guilds through e.g. coalitions, they never worked out. In the end only the largest guilds dominated these world bosses. Everyone else stuck to instanced content.

I think there are 2 ways to reasonably handle it.

1.) Have open world dungeons / bosses with valuable items for e.g. the node building aspects of the game. E.g. you clear these raid elite mobs in the 'mystic forest' so that you can cut down magical trees used to build some node building. Then have instanced content for getting materials to craft your personal armor upgrades.

2.) Have open world / instanced dungeons/bosses both drop the same kind of loot. The loot in both would be equal in power. Have open world bosses be harder to get to (they are already due to PvP), but mechanically easier. Instanced PvE encounters would be the hard PvE content people want.

Archaeon wrote: »

Interesting discussion, read quite a bit of the thread. My thoughts:

I think the only reasonable way to handle it is have open world dungeons / bosses with valuable items for e.g. the node building aspects of the game. E.g. you clear these raid elite mobs in the 'mystic forest' so that you can cut down magical trees used to build some node building.

@Archaeon

This is a fantastic way to go about things and I'm betting it will work very similarly to this. High Level dungeons and areas with difficult mobs inside that you can grind and drop great recipes/materials/whatever. Guilds will be able to fight for control over these areas and player driven interactions will come from it. World bosses are most certainly going to drop legendary crafting materials however. This is almost certainly how the game is going to function I believe. It worked very similarly in Lineage.

Archaeon wrote: »

FYI WoW Classic had open world bosses that were contested over. Yes it attracted players in massive numbers and was a laggy zerg fest. No 'fun' was had. Eventually most guilds gave up, since even if they helped larger guilds through e.g. coalitions, they never worked out. In the end only the largest guilds dominated.

I would also like to point out that world bosses will be much easier to handle as a guild in Ashes for the sole reason that WoW's close-by respawn and flight path system makes it very easy for large groups of people to move around the world quickly, and that will not be the case in Ashes. If you wipe an enemy guild that is challenging you for a world boss, it is going to take them a very long time to get back to you. They will have to Respawn at a pretty far away place, regroup all their members back together, get morale back up to try again, rebuff, run all the way back to where the world boss is, and by that time it's been 25 minutes (Or longer) and the boss is long dead and your guild is laughing all the way to the bank.

bigepeen wrote: »

I just think that we have fundamentally different opinions on how much of an effect instancing content has on the open world. It's not mutually exclusive, but highly disjoint in my opinion.

Instancing certainly doesn't add to the open world in a positive way if that is what you are playing at.
If they can archieve truely challenging PvE content in the open world, it is fine as well.
The only reason why it is a topic is that there are obvious pros to instanced content hence why they announced 20% of the dungeons to be instanced anyway so they can have a better lore telling in them.

@Bricktop
You always state that respawn will be far away from the location.
Do you have any source for that?
I looked through the wiki but didn't see it anywhere, might have overlooked it though.