Instanced vs Open World dungeons

Was reading an interesting discussion on discord regarding instanced vs. open world dungeons/bosses. By the time I got around to throwing my 2 cents in, the discussion had moved on to something else, so I'm posting it here on the forums.

People were discussing the split of 20 percent instanced and 80 percent open world. Opinions on Pro's and Con's etc. (apologies if this has been discussed ad nauseam in other threads. My quick search wasn't super exhaustive.)

That said, when it comes to dungeons, the most important thing for me is boss/mob difficulty. I want interesting and complex mechanics. Mechanics that take weeks or even months to learn and overcome (even with yt walkthroughs). I want plenty of bosses so difficult they would be near impossible with even a hint of open world competition. I want bosses that require lots of focus and many wipes with subsequent strategy adjustment/discussion/coordination between those wipes. After all, it's those moments...when your group finally overcomes a difficult boss (and the pursuant sense of accomplishment and elation)...that have made some of the best gaming memories for me. It makes me wonder if a raid group can get that level of focus, get the required time and wipes on any given raid night, to satisfy that level of PvE difficulty on open world dungeons? That might be difficult to achieve. That might mean the devs choose to tone down boss mechanics.

I don't want the main difficulty for any given boss to be whether or not it's being contested by another group...and then the actual boss fight is mediocre at best from a mechanics standpoint. That or having to worry that your carefully planned and organized designated raid night goes to shit, because some other guild has gotten there first or is pestering you from the perimeter. At least not 80% of them.

Don't get me wrong, open world contests are fun in their own right for sure. I'm huge on PvP. If open world dungeons can be done without sacrificing PvE difficulty then great. If not, I just wonder if 80% open world dungeons is a bit too high. Maybe 50/50 is a better split?

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Mag7spy

These numbers are rough as well, 20% could end up turning into 10%. It is still in development things can can change you can take fair guesses as 100% bible fact.

Arguing the exact meaning to people on grinding and farming sounds like an infinite argument. Even more so if someone only sees it in the way AoC does things and not other games and will refuse to see it or accept anything else.

Mag7spy

Grinding feels more like a eastern mmorpg term and farming is more western, you do different things in those types of mmorpgs and there is more bias related to each word. Even if ay the end of the day it is literarily the same thing you are grinding a mob or boss, you are farming a boss or mobs. Arguing your bias and preference of words is kind of pointless just accept what someone else is saying and you both mean the same thing.

Dygz

Elder wrote: »

Are the terms farming and grinding not easily interchangeable in most situations? It's a bit of a strange discussion, but in my opinion, they appear to be for the most part synonymous.

Not really. Grinding cannot really be a subset of Farming. If you wanted to try to use "a grind" to mean tedious...anything could be tedious, but it's stretching what Grind is intended to mean in an MMORPG.
So, there is a way to have Farming as a subset of Grind.
And Farming, again, is intended to be about specific boss with rare/lucrative loot. While Grinding is more generic and could be a bunch of things that are not particularly worth the effort - you just need to do it until you Level and better stuff for you to do opens up.
By 2010 some people drifted the meaning of Grinding to entail the stuff you do while Leveling to Max Level because Endgame is the real game and Leveling is just a time-synch until you hit Endgame. I've never heard anyone refer to that as Farming.

Elder wrote: »

I do agree though that farming may imply a greater gain or profit than grinding depending on the context.

Yes.
Farming is for greater gain or profit... and typically with a specific boss and rare/lucrative drop as the goal.
With Grinding, it's typically any mob that will provide some xp. And that xp is only going to be, like Jeffrey's example, 1/4 of a bubble in 16 hours and the loot is going to be trash loot.

If you are repeatedly killing specific bosses and the mats are worth it, like BiS gear, it's Farming.
If it's low level trash mobs and only going to reward trash loot, it's Grinding.
Farming is worthwhile due to the rare/lucrative loot.
Grinding is not particularly worthwhile - it's something you are stuck doing while waiting to do the stuff you actually want to be doing. And it's typically so excrutiatingly tedious that you feel it should not be part of the game. Like "hell Levels" in vanilla EQ and vanilla WoW. Or, Leveling period, for those who believe that "Endgame is the real game."

https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/6uynex/farming_vs_grinding_how_do_you_define_the/

Farming is killing mobs for a chance at drops whether they be rare or needed for making money. Grinding is for xp.

Farming means you see steady growth and rewards right away. If I am farming for a few hours I can expect to see rewards over the coarse of a farm. You see progression towards your goal fairly quickly and regularly. It means that if your farming for 10 minutes and have to go all the sudden you don't feel your time is wasted.

Grinding means that you don't really see much in the way of rewards on a regular basis. It takes a lot of work and you don't see growth over time but rather in spikes. Often you can spend a long time at a grind and have nothing to show for it.

Grinds in games are bad compared to farms...

Farming is usually enjoyable bit of time where i farm some ingredients, whether from nodes or from Mobs, while Grinding is a soul sucking boring repetitive Mess of Doing the same thing over and over and over, and generally when something is called grinding it usually takes much longer then farming.

Dygz

NiKr wrote: »

Yeah, and that's what Intrepid are trying to do. "Give players more content than they can consume". Except I personally won't believe that's possible until they prove it. Which is literally what I said at the start of this sub-discussion.

Yep. We are pretty much in agreement there, but that's true for a lot of things.
Corruption
Nodes
Hybrid Combat
Classes
Augments
etc...

Liniker

DaffyDux wrote: »

Intrepid. Please, please, please.... don't listen to this guy.

Why not? tbh I wasn't going to give feedback about it since I am ok with the 80/20 but since I see you guys giving feedback...

I'd like to say that 90/10 would be my preference as well, the least instanced content the better imo

Scoots

Dygz wrote: »

But, the quote below did not sound condescending and was empathetic with other views?? ??

Dygz wrote: »

If you don't want to continue discussing it with us... you do you.

I'm chalking our conversation up to a case of miscommunication.

Dygz

Brewskie

Raid Tokens, Instance Tokens, Resource instance tokens, and so on all tagged to the player account, earned and not bought in gold selling hack sites, or sold on the market by farm bots.

If you don't control farm accounts and bots, the game is doomed. Players need to earn their own loot, their own gold, their own tokens, not be able to buy them from gold hack sites.

It's easy to never return to a game, if the only way to compete is to buy from a gold site.

Address this now, or you will create an economy game of cheats, hacks and dupes and gold sellers. Games which i will refuse to police any more in the guise of being a community player.

the only way i will police this game for you is if you hire me and pay me to do so, if not, the first-time bots show up and no action taken, I'm gone never to return.

Ludullu

Brewskie wrote: »

the only way i will police this game for you is if you hire me and pay me to do so, if not, the first-time bots show up and no action taken, I'm gone never to return.

I think it's better for you to never even play. There's gonna be, like, so many bots. I'm one of them right now!

Tatiana

I love the concept of open world dungeons, and I definitely want there to be a lot of them but I would still like them to release instanced dungeons periodically as well, both types have their merits. Instanced dungeons would provide content for people who play in smaller groups and provide a more curated experience. There will be a lot of people who will love the game but be turned off by constantly being outplayed by bigger groups they can't hope to compete with and that will lead to a very frustrating experience for a lot of players.

I also don't think instanced dungeons goes against the goal of facilitating player to player interaction, since you'd still need a party of other players to tackle instanced dungeons. 80/20 may end up being a really good ratio depending on how many dungeons there are in total, but I could also see it leaving many players without much dungeon content that they can realistically participate in. This will also all depend on your server, since each servers node make up can be entirely different, affecting how much of what is actually unlocked in the first place.

KapStoan

I'm just responding to the point here about whether people who can't handle the randomness / risk of open world content but still want to progress will have an option if there is only a limited amount of instanced dungeons.

Yes, this game isn't for everyone. But I think Steven's larger point there is not to exclude people who don't like hardcore PVP, but to say that he is NOT going to do what Blizzard did which is make ALL content accessible to EVERYONE. We must accept that certain experiences will only be available to people willing to deal with the tradeoffs they require. If a certain open world dungeon encounter requires more planning and protection than a casual dad like me can stomach, I'm OK missing out on that.

The mitigation plan Steven has for this is that I will still have plenty of other things to do that will allow me to acquire gear on par with that from the dungeon - this is a sandbox MMO solution to the conundrum of wanting to invite many different types of gamers, but also not wanting to ruin the challenge and rewarding experiences for some just to try to appeal to everyone and give everyone participation trophies. I can work on a craft, or find another way to build up gold via the economy or other content that fits my playstyle and available game time.

Frankly, I'd rather there is a game like this out there for the time period when I will have time to experience some of that more challenging and restricted content, and have something to work toward and look forward to, and look up to those who have achieved those rewards, than to be handed it on a platter, experience it, it mean nothing, and 2 years later the game is shut down.

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