Alternatively you could design a game environment to be a "vast dangerous unexplored wilderness". In other words, you don't plan to design the map to "just fit" server population. You design it to always be pretty much empty even at peak population. You set the expectation that if players moved far away from civilization they'd be in land that was pretty much empty unless they purposefully chose to travel into the wilderness with others...and then you give them a reason to want to travel into that wilderness together (danger, interdependance, etc).
Then a player will essentially be playing a SP game except at peak population. Why would they want to play a MMO for that?
MMO is about grouping. Nothing make grouping easiest and more assessible than hitting a button and form an instant group.
Alternatively you could design a game environment to be a "vast dangerous unexplored wilderness". In other words, you don't plan to design the map to "just fit" server population. You design it to always be pretty much empty even at peak population. You set the expectation that if players moved far away from civilization they'd be in land that was pretty much empty unless they purposefully chose to travel into the wilderness with others...and then you give them a reason to want to travel into that wilderness together (danger, interdependance, etc).
Then a player will essentially be playing a SP game except at peak population. Why would they want to play a MMO for that?
MMO is about grouping. Nothing make grouping easiest and more assessible than hitting a button and form an instant group.
You missed several aspects of what I described...
- WHEN players get out away from civilized areas and off the beaten track they get out into areas which are largely deviod of other players. Being in more civilized areas still allows you to be around lots of other players. Just as in the real world, individuals have the ability (for the most part) to self-select how many others they encounter by choosing where they will go.
- Nothings stops players from players from PURPOSEFULLY choosing to travel together. In fact I suggested to make it desirable to do so by making the wilderness dangerous and the mechanics require interdependance for players to achieve maximimum effectiveness/interdependance.
- Nothing, save the players themselves, dictates the size of the expidition they choose to organize to go off into the wilderness.
- Nothing stops other groups of players (hostile or not) from purposefully arranging to travel to the same area as the players.
- Even though the size of the map means that the likelihood of encountering other player groups at random out in the wilderness is small, it is not impossible that you will encounter one by chance...for good or ill.
Clearly, if the SOLE goal of an MMO is to get a random number of players into a group in a quick, easy and accessable fashion....then you are correct. I submit to you that not only is that not the SOLE goal for any given MMO, it need not even be a goal AT ALL for an MMO.
Narius, you clearly have a VERY SPECIFIC style of play which you seem to prefer. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, I'm happy for you that you have that preference and seem to have a plethora of games to choose from. However you seem to project your specific preferences into every single thread here and every single discussion of alternate styles and preferences. I think you need to accept that there is nothing actualy wrong with gamers that have preferences different from your own and with discussing how those preferences might work in a game, on a site dedicated to the hobby as a whole.
The OP suggested that he thought the use of instancing could be really great and could be used to achieve a specific end (lower player density in desolate/wilderness areas) that he found desirable. I agreed with him and tried to clarify the suggested mechanic that I believe he was stating. I pointed out that it had some very specific advantages as a mechanic, but also several disadvantages and then I went on to describe a different way to achieve his stated goal that offered a different set of advantages and disadvantages.
How is that not pertinent to the discussion here or a valid expression of how an MMO mechanicaly can work?
Clearly it may not be an MMO that offers an experience you would enjoy. That's fine....but what Narius would/would not enjoy is not neccesarly a measuring stick for what makes a valid MMO or a valid topic of discussion.
I'd be happy to discuss mechanisms that fall directly within your personal preferences in some topic devoted to that. However, as that happens to be mechanisms which are well understood and are in common usage in many games today...I'm not sure what more fruitfull ground is to be breached there.
Then a player will essentially be playing a SP game except at peak population. Why would they want to play a MMO for that?
MMO is about grouping. Nothing make grouping easiest and more assessible than hitting a button and form an instant group.
You missed several aspects of what I described...
- WHEN players get out away from civilized areas and off the beaten track they get out into areas which are largely deviod of other players. Being in more civilized areas still allows you to be around lots of other players. Just as in the real world, individuals have the ability (for the most part) to self-select how many others they encounter by choosing where they will go.
Which is no different with a LFD button. You choose to be in a city and see lots of players. You choose to click a button to go into a small group adventure.
- Nothings stops players from players from PURPOSEFULLY choosing to travel together. In fact I suggested to make it desirable to do so by making the wilderness dangerous and the mechanics require interdependance for players to achieve maximimum effectiveness/interdependance.
Nothing prevents that in today's MMO either.
- Nothing, save the players themselves, dictates the size of the expidition they choose to organize to go off into the wilderness.
That, i am not sure is a good idea. There is a reason why instances are designed for specific number of players. It is very difficult to have fun, special combat mechanics that can scale to a variable number of players.
- Nothing stops other groups of players (hostile or not) from purposefully arranging to travel to the same area as the players.
- Even though the size of the map means that the likelihood of encountering other player groups at random out in the wilderness is small, it is not impossible that you will encounter one by chance...for good or ill.
Seems like a very minor payoff for taking so much pain to avoid instances.
Clearly, if the SOLE goal of an MMO is to get a random number of players into a group in a quick, easy and accessable fashion....then you are correct. I submit to you that not only is that not the SOLE goal for any given MMO, it need not even be a goal AT ALL for an MMO.
Clearly, getting into a fast group is a POPULAR play style in many MMOs. Do you disagree that many WOW players would just click and choose their prefer dungeon, and wait for it to pop?
It seems to me that it should be a goal of developers to support popular play style.
Narius, you clearly have a VERY SPECIFIC style of play which you seem to prefer. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, I'm happy for you that you have that preference and seem to have a plethora of games to choose from. However you seem to project your specific preferences into every single thread here and every single discussion of alternate styles and preferences. I think you need to accept that there is nothing actualy wrong with gamers that have preferences different from your own and with discussing how those preferences might work in a game, on a site dedicated to the hobby as a whole.
It is not like i do know there are other preferences. But at the same time, if other preferences are discussed, i do not see why MY preferences should't be one of those being discussed.
Clearly it may not be an MMO that offers an experience you would enjoy. That's fine....but what Narius would/would not enjoy is not neccesarly a measuring stick for what makes a valid MMO or a valid topic of discussion.
I make it clear that i enjoy the diablo style of online ARPG .. there is no hiding of it. But wouldn't you agree that MANY MMOs support the same style of play? If you go in WOW, how many are waiting for their dungeon to pop while doing auctions?
I would argue my play style is as popular as other play styles being discussed here, and since it is popular and supported by MANY MMOs, it should be discussed in a MMO focused site.
I'd be happy to discuss mechanisms that fall directly within your personal preferences in some topic devoted to that. However, as that happens to be mechanisms which are well understood and are in common usage in many games today...I'm not sure what more fruitfull ground is to be breached there.
This thread is about the use (or not the use of instancing) .. so i view all my comments as on topic.
Indeed, I think your prefered style of play is popular with many players today and is worthy of discussion on an MMO site (though I'm not sure if there is much fresh ground to break there).
At the same time, I'm not sure how it relates to this particular discussion thread (or frankly quite a few of the threads your reply to). I see it as akin to a discussion on the nuances of the designated hitter rule in baseball where a person pops on to interject "I like football, football is popular. Alot of people like contact sports." That's all well and good...but what does it have to do with the designated hitter rule...or even baseball in general? .... and does the fact that contact sports are popular suddenly make baseball not a sport?
Will address your on theme points in a follow up post.
Alternatively you could design a game environment to be a "vast dangerous unexplored wilderness". In other words, you don't plan to design the map to "just fit" server population. You design it to always be pretty much empty even at peak population. You set the expectation that if players moved far away from civilization they'd be in land that was pretty much empty unless they purposefully chose to travel into the wilderness with others...and then you give them a reason to want to travel into that wilderness together (danger, interdependance, etc).
Then a player will essentially be playing a SP game except at peak population. Why would they want to play a MMO for that?
When things are instanced they already essentially are playing a SP game.
"Which is no different with a LFD button. You choose to be in a city and see lots of players. You choose to click a button to go into a small group adventure."
It's VERY different in that you have a preset size group, that you are actualy JOINED TO by some functional mechanism....and you are instantly set of to do the same static preset tasks. In a Public Instance....which is essentialy what the OP discussed (did you ever try Tabula Rasa...you would understand the mechanic).... you have effectively a ZONE with a population cap limit. The people are not neccesarly in a group together and are not neccesarly working on the same or even related tasks. The same condition holds true for my alternate proposal.....save that you are not utilizing "instances" as a mechanism...you are just using a sufficiently large map that it allows for a gradation of player density. Your suggestion is actualy changing the end goal of what the OP stated they were interested in achieving.
"Nothing prevents that in today's MMO either"
True...if we discount preset group sizes which, if used in conjunction with instances can prevent players from traveling with one another if they don't happen to fit into one of the pre-set buckets that the game considers a "group" (i.e. Game considers the "standard" group size 4 but you've got a play group of 5 who all want to play together...someones getting left out or they are getting forced to split up and not all play together). But that's beside the point, you claimed that my suggestion turned things into essentialy a "single-player game". This point was a direct rebuttal of that comment.
"That, i am not sure is a good idea. There is a reason why instances are designed for specific number of players. It is very difficult to have fun, special combat mechanics that can scale to a variable number of players."
It wouldn't neccesarly make for the type of game you are used to or enjoy. This would be open world...you wouldn't be worrying about scaling the encounter difficulty to match the number of players brought along. An Elephant would be an Elephant, it wouldn't get stronger or weaker depending upon the number of players you had facing it. So gameplay simply isn't a matter of "what buttons do I press to preform my role well in combat to defeat this beast"....it would also involve anticipating the type of dangers one might encounter out in the wilderness and organizing an expedition of sufficient strength and ability to deal with them. Really this is not much different then the kind of level based open world adventuring you see in most MMO's today....or the way Tabula Rasa handled "Public Instances".......except in most MMO's today you have this artificial mechanical object called "the group" that certain effects are mechanicaly applied against.
"Seems like a very minor payoff for taking so much pain to avoid instances."
Point I made earlier is that there really is not much "pain" to doing so at all.... it's a different way of doing things, but not any more expensive resource wise with todays technology. The technical bottlenecks that would have made it more expensive to do in the past have all been eliminated with advances in technology. You are essentialy saying it's much more expensive to go hunting with a rifle then a bow....might have been true 200 years ago...not today. They are equivalent expense and each has thier own set of advantages and disadvantages.
Alternatively you could design a game environment to be a "vast dangerous unexplored wilderness". In other words, you don't plan to design the map to "just fit" server population. You design it to always be pretty much empty even at peak population. You set the expectation that if players moved far away from civilization they'd be in land that was pretty much empty unless they purposefully chose to travel into the wilderness with others...and then you give them a reason to want to travel into that wilderness together (danger, interdependance, etc).
Then a player will essentially be playing a SP game except at peak population. Why would they want to play a MMO for that?
When things are instanced they already essentially are playing a SP game.
How is anyone playing a SP game when they are in a group of 5? They are playing online MP games.
"Which is no different with a LFD button. You choose to be in a city and see lots of players. You choose to click a button to go into a small group adventure."
It's VERY different in that you have a preset size group, that you are actualy JOINED TO by some functional mechanism....and you are instantly set of to do the same static preset tasks. In a Public Instance....which is essentialy what the OP discussed (did you ever try Tabula Rasa...you would understand the mechanic).... you have effectively a ZONE with a population cap limit. The people are not neccesarly in a group together and are not neccesarly working on the same or even related tasks. The same condition holds true for my alternate proposal.....save that you are not utilizing "instances" as a mechanism...you are just using a sufficiently large map that it allows for a gradation of player density. Your suggestion is actualy changing the end goal of what the OP stated they were interested in achieving.
The only difference is that the membership of the group can. A zone with a pop cap limit, is no different, in principal, to a dungeon with a team member limit. Whether the cap is 5, 25, or 500 is just a number. (Yes, i use to play Tabula Rasa when it was dropped down to $5).
In fact, this limit pop idea is no different than a Diablo MP game where players can drop in and out. The players are not constrained to stay together .. you can run off (and often people do) to another part of the dungeon. The only difference, once again, is the size.
I do agree a 500 limit probably will provide a different experience than 5.
"That, i am not sure is a good idea. There is a reason why instances are designed for specific number of players. It is very difficult to have fun, special combat mechanics that can scale to a variable number of players."
It wouldn't neccesarly make for the type of game you are used to or enjoy. This would be open world...you wouldn't be worrying about scaling the encounter difficulty to match the number of players brought along. An Elephant would be an Elephant, it wouldn't get stronger or weaker depending upon the number of players you had facing it. So gameplay simply isn't a matter of "what buttons do I press to preform my role well in combat to defeat this beast"....it would also involve anticipating the type of dangers one might encounter out in the wilderness and organizing an expedition of sufficient strength and ability to deal with them. Really this is not much different then the kind of level based open world adventuring you see in most MMO's today....or the way Tabula Rasa handled "Public Instances".......except in most MMO's today you have this artificial mechanical object called "the group" that certain effects are mechanicaly applied against.
I personally don't feel an open world encounters without tighter gameplay experience control would be very fun. Sure an elephant would be an elephant. However, if the game world generate 100 elephants, and turn out only 2 players show up, the players would have no hope of killing the elephants.
On the flip side, if 100 players show up, killing the elephants would be too easy.
Thus, it is very unlikely (unless some scaling mechanism is used) that the encounter would be of the right difficulty. And combat with the right difficulty is one of the core gameplay elements. In addition, even if you use some scaling mechanism, the system would not be conducive to specific scripted combat mechanics, which will be difficult to scale (for example, the "vampire" mechanics in the blood queen encounter in WOTLK).
"Seems like a very minor payoff for taking so much pain to avoid instances."
Point I made earlier is that there really is not much "pain" to doing so at all.... it's a different way of doing things, but not any more expensive resource wise with todays technology. The technical bottlenecks that would have made it more expensive to do in the past have all been eliminated with advances in technology. You are essentialy saying it's much more expensive to go hunting with a rifle then a bow....might have been true 200 years ago...not today. They are equivalent expense and each has thier own set of advantages and disadvantages
That i disagree. Resources going into game dev is NOT just technology. We are also talking about testing design. It is much harder, and more time consuming to test a 100 player encounter, than a 5 man encounter. It is even more hopeless to test encounters that accomodate variable number of players.
Now of course you can just make the ecounter without any play testing .. but that, i believe, would not make a very good game.
I can't speak for Diablo MP, as I have no experience of it. However, I think you realize the practical difference between zones and instanced dungeons in most of todays MMO's (WoW, LOTRO, TOR, etc) and I think you are being a bit disingenious if you say that there isn't a difference in what players do in instanced dungeons/raids in WoW or LOTRO and zones with population caps such as TOR had or LOTRO "layering effects". I've yet to experience a single group/raid in such a game where people got into the instance and then went off on thier own to work on completely unrelated tasks.
In terms of "scaling" I think you are still viewing things through the lens of your own personal preferences and the style of games you are used to. Under this paradigm there is no such thing as "right difficulty" that scales to what you show up with....you need to drop that thinking if you want to understand this style of game play. In Civilization what is the "right difficulty" for a hostile civilization that you encounter (Player or NPC)? If you've only managed to build up 2 cities, should the computer trim down the other civilization to 2 cities so you get a "fair fight" even if it had built 5? The thing you are getting hung up on, I think, is that the beggining and end of the gameplay is the combat encounter itself. In this style of game, it's NOT. The combat encounter is just one aspect (probably the smallest) of gameplay. A significant portion of the gameplay is involved in marshalling the resources to bring to the encounter in the first place. In this style of play (much as in RTS titles), the player wants nothing approaching a "fair fight" in the encounter itself, they want to show up with overwhelming odds....which means the excelled in the marshalling portion of gameplay. If they show up with too few resources to do the job, it means they already failed in the marshalling phase of gameplay....and thier goal in this phase is simply to extract themselves from the situation with minimal loss.
In terms of QA, I think you are misunderstanding some dynamics. The number of combatants swinging at a target really doesn't have any effect (outside resource utilization) on the testing you need to do. What has an effect is the number of different effects (e.g. debuffs) that can be placed on the target in conjunction with one another. That is really determined by the number of different classes and the number of different abilities given to those classes....not the number of combatants involved. If you believe that todays MMO's are in any way exhaustive in thier testing of those combinations, before exposing the system to the public, then I think you are in for a rude surprise.
The only place I would like to see instancing is with certain group dungeon content seperate from public ones. Even then I'd like to see it "phased" for the group at the entrance so you don't experience a loading screen as you walk through the doorway, cave entrance, etc. This, to me, would be an emmersive use of instancing.
I can't speak for Diablo MP, as I have no experience of it. However, I think you realize the practical difference between zones and instanced dungeons in most of todays MMO's (WoW, LOTRO, TOR, etc) and I think you are being a bit disingenious if you say that there isn't a difference in what players do in instanced dungeons/raids in WoW or LOTRO and zones with population caps such as TOR had or LOTRO "layering effects". I've yet to experience a single group/raid in such a game where people got into the instance and then went off on thier own to work on completely unrelated tasks.
I am not saying there is absolutely no difference .. there is obviously a numerical different. And sure, the whole group has to work together to down the boss because it is how MOST encounters are designed .. but that is not a fundamental feature of an instance.
And there are certainly examples that part of the group starts to kill adds while other part of the group are still buffing and stuff. In fact, in DCUO, you *can* and often people do go off in different directions to kill adds (not unlike D3). In DCUO missions, you need to kill a certain number of adds to advance to the next stage .. and you don't need to coordinate or anything in such a stage .. you can go off and do your own killing.
In terms of "scaling" I think you are still viewing things through the lens of your own personal preferences and the style of games you are used to. Under this paradigm there is no such thing as "right difficulty" that scales to what you show up with....you need to drop that thinking if you want to understand this style of game play. In Civilization what is the "right difficulty" for a hostile civilization that you encounter (Player or NPC)? If you've only managed to build up 2 cities, should the computer trim down the other civilization to 2 cities so you get a "fair fight" even if it had built 5? The thing you are getting hung up on, I think, is that the beggining and end of the gameplay is the combat encounter itself. In this style of game, it's NOT. The combat encounter is just one aspect (probably the smallest) of gameplay. A significant portion of the gameplay is involved in marshalling the resources to bring to the encounter in the first place. In this style of play (much as in RTS titles), the player wants nothing approaching a "fair fight" in the encounter itself, they want to show up with overwhelming odds....which means the excelled in the marshalling portion of gameplay. If they show up with too few resources to do the job, it means they already failed in the marshalling phase of gameplay....and thier goal in this phase is simply to extract themselves from the situation with minimal loss.
Of course i am, as you are seeing things from your own lens. For example "game difficulty" or "challenge" is a pretty universal concept in gaming (not even specific to MMOs) and your view is to ignore it .. or at least view it as unimportant.
In fact, in Civ .. there *is* a right level of difficulties. If any hostile civ will overwhelm you and kill you in 2 turns, you think the game will be any fun? It is not only about combat encounter, but roadblocks and frustration (or the flip side, running through with no challenge).
I think you overestimate the desire for "unfair fights". The fact that LOL, and arena type PVP is so popular, is that people WANT fair fights. In fact, is it fun if you are kill 100 times, every step, whenever you try to walk from point A to B? Of course not. I doubt ANY game would be fun without *some* tuning of difficulty (or the ability just to stay alive and play without being respawn at a spawn point).
In terms of QA, I think you are misunderstanding some dynamics. The number of combatants swinging at a target really doesn't have any effect (outside resource utilization) on the testing you need to do. What has an effect is the number of different effects (e.g. debuffs) that can be placed on the target in conjunction with one another. That is really determined by the number of different classes and the number of different abilities given to those classes....not the number of combatants involved. If you believe that todays MMO's are in any way exhaustive in thier testing of those combinations, before exposing the system to the public, then I think you are in for a rude surprise.
Of course it does. Different combatants have different abilities (unless you have a universal damage model, which NONE of the existing MMO is that simple ... you have melee, range attack, channeling attack, and so on ...). And all these abilities interact with abiltiies of the NPCs.
And MMOs are tested ... while it may not be exhaustive, at least it is possible. In fact, Blizz tested all their dungeon/raid encounters. These kind of testing (even rudimentary ones) is going to be difficult at best with an open world system.
"I am not saying there is absolutely no difference .. there is obviously a numerical different. And sure, the whole group has to work together to down the boss because it is how MOST encounters are designed .. but that is not a fundamental feature of an instance."
No it's not a fundemental feature of an "instance" but it IS a fundemental feature of a WoW/TOR style "instanced" dungeon as opposed to a "public instance" of the manner that the OP was talking about (and the way Tabula Rasa implimnted Zones or LOTRO impliments public instances through "Dynamic Layering") which is what we were actualy discussing.....e.g How "pressing the LFD button" is not actualy achieving the same end that the OP described he wanted to achieve with his model.
With the WoW/TOR "instanced dungeon" all players are "grouped" together with the built-in assumption that they are all there working toward a common related goal... "defeating the dungeon" and the instance is designed around that assumption. So if Johnny is just there to sight-see/explore and look around the dungeon and has no interest in participating in defeating the mobs and performing the other tasks neccesary to "defeat the dungeon", he is actualy harming the rest of the people there and they, rightfully, will be upset with him for not doing so...because the very act of his being there creates an implied contract for his participation. A "public instance"/zone is completely different. It is a multi-use area with no implied assumption about what the players will be doing there or that thier uses will be related or work toward some common goal. So Johnny could be in the Zone just to explore and sight-see. Bobby and Jill could be there to Role-Play. Ben could be there gathering materials from nodes so that he can craft. George, Jane and Bill could be there working on one quest and Mike could be there working on another completely unrelated quests. All these activities could be taking place within the same play space without any dependancy on each other and without any implied obligation upon the players that they must work toward some common goal....and without any negative effect for any player choosing to leave at any time. That's a critical difference between what you were describing and what the OP was describing.
.....................
"In fact, in Civ .. there *is* a right level of difficulties. If any hostile civ will overwhelm you and kill you in 2 turns, you think the game will be any fun? It is not only about combat encounter, but roadblocks and frustration (or the flip side, running through with no challenge).
I think you overestimate the desire for "unfair fights". The fact that LOL, and arena type PVP is so popular, is that people WANT fair fights. In fact, is it fun if you are kill 100 times, every step, whenever you try to walk from point A to B? Of course not. I doubt ANY game would be fun without *some* tuning of difficulty (or the ability just to stay alive and play without being respawn at a spawn point)."
You are conflating "GAME DIFFICULTY" with "COMBAT ENCOUNTER DIFFICULTY", perhaps because you are used to viewing the combat encounter as the entire game. In a game like Civ it's perfectly acceptable to lose any given combat encounter, it's even expected that you'll lose some. It's perfectly acceptable to lose an entire war. Heck it's even perfectly acceptable to lose a game....For most fans of strategy games, it wouldn't be fun if there was no possibility of losing the game. What's NOT perfectly acceptable is loosing the entire game for completely arbitrary reasons that have nothing to do with the players game-play.
The thing you seem to not understand is that the "marshalling the resources" part is every bit as much a portion of the players game-play as the "fighting the fight" part. In Civ...the player isn't doing a good job of building up thier Civilizations resources and infrastrcture, they are playing the game poorly already. If the same player then engages in hostilities with another more powerfull civilization when thier army and their civilization is woefully ill-prepared to do so.... that's a CRITICAL SCREW UP on the players part.... every bit as much as not healing the main tank at all in a major boss fight in an MMO encounter. Same holds true for our hypothetical MMO here..... the marshalling the resources phase is a major portion of the game-play. If a player goes off into a dangerous wilderness area without marshalling sufficient resources and then see's a dangerous animal that really requires 10 level 20 players to take on and decides to engage it with 2 level 12 players.... that's a major screw up, on the players part...not the games. Part of the game-play is figuring out what he can actualy accomplish with the resources he is able to marshall.... and marshalling the resources he needs to take on what he wants to accomplish. If the Level 1 Rogue thinks he can take on Smaug the Dragon with a bronze butterknife....he's got a problem.
"Of course it does. Different combatants have different abilities (unless you have a universal damage model, which NONE of the existing MMO is that simple ... you have melee, range attack, channeling attack, and so on ...). And all these abilities interact with abiltiies of the NPCs."
Which, as I said, has absolutely nothing to do with the raw number of combatants and everything to do with the number of different abilitlies in a game. You have an easier time testing something with 30 fighters all swinging a butterknife at the target then you do with a Fighter, Druid, Wizard and Cleric all using thier own attack forms. The object will react to the 9th iteration of attack form A in the same manner it reacted to the 8th....but Attack form B & C are different stories. The only things you really have to worry about with multiple interations of the same procedure on an object are lag (e.g. how long something has to sit in a queue before being processed), record locking/conflicts and buffer overflows (e.g. what happens when the queue grows to the maximum size allocated for it). Those are actualy pretty simple to test and usualy aren't going to vary for different objects of the same class as another (i.e. it'll work the same for every mob type object). However when you have different types of functions effecting the same object, is when you need to look how those functions might interact with each other.
Please use colors. It is hard to read and remember which part is my quote, which is your answer.
You are conflating "GAME DIFFICULTY" with "COMBAT ENCOUNTER DIFFICULTY", perhaps because you are used to viewing the combat encounter as the entire game. In a game like Civ it's perfectly acceptable to lose any given combat encounter, it's even expected that you'll lose some. It's perfectly acceptable to lose an entire war. Heck it's even perfectly acceptable to lose a game....For most fans of strategy games, it wouldn't be fun if there was no possibility of losing the game. What's NOT perfectly acceptable is loosing the entire game for completely arbitrary reasons that have nothing to do with the players game-play.
No. Combat *is* a part of the game. If it is so difficult that you lose every single combat encounter, you lose the game. And a "possibiilty" != 100%. There is something as a scale. You have a chance of wipe in a WOW raid .. is it the same that the chance is 1% when you make a silly mistake in the easy LFR raid, or 98% back in Sunwell .. it make a difference.
In Civ, it is acceptable to lose some encounters .. may be even a majority, but certainly not difficult enough to lose 99% of them. This is true for ANY game that has combat as a part.
If it is so difficult that you lose 99% of the combat, or so easy that you win 100% without trying, what is the point?
The thing you seem to not understand is that the "marshalling the resources" part is every bit as much a portion of the players game-play as the "fighting the fight" part. In Civ...the player isn't doing a good job of building up thier Civilizations resources and infrastrcture, they are playing the game poorly already. If the same player then engages in hostilities with another more powerfull civilization when thier army and their civilization is woefully ill-prepared to do so.... that's a CRITICAL SCREW UP on the players part.... every bit as much as not healing the main tank at all in a major boss fight in an MMO encounter. Same holds true for our hypothetical MMO here..... the marshalling the resources phase is a major portion of the game-play. If a player goes off into a dangerous wilderness area without marshalling sufficient resources and then see's a dangerous animal that really requires 10 level 20 players to take on and decides to engage it with 2 level 12 players.... that's a major screw up, on the players part...not the games. Part of the game-play is figuring out what he can actualy accomplish with the resources he is able to marshall.... and marshalling the resources he needs to take on what he wants to accomplish. If the Level 1 Rogue thinks he can take on Smaug the Dragon with a bronze butterknife....he's got a problem.
May be in Civ .. but it is "as much a portion", not "the only portion" and you cannot ignore the combat aspect. And this is not very relevant to MMORPG since the "resource" your gain in MMORPG (i.e. levels and gear) are done almost all through combat (since crafting is really an after thought most fo the time).
And in the wilderness example, while certainly it is a screw up on the player's part ... from a design point of view, do you want to challenge him into determining where he can or he cannot go?
Do you want to turn MMORPG into a stealth game and make avoidance of encounter a part of the gameplay? Personally i do not play games that focus on that.
And the idea of "marshalling 20 players" ... given the complaints about long time to get groups up for 5 man dungeons without any tools, it is not practical to expect players to organize 20 players (assuming they know it is needed) whenever they want to travel.
Personally i do not want to play an "organization game", i want to play an co-op adventure game. However, you may argue some may want to spend hours organizing parties just to travel from city A to B. I doubt many would like that, but certainly if you say you do, i won't hold it against you.
Which, as I said, has absolutely nothing to do with the raw number of combatants and everything to do with the number of different abilitlies in a game. You have an easier time testing something with 30 fighters all swinging a butterknife at the target then you do with a Fighter, Druid, Wizard and Cleric all using thier own attack forms. The object will react to the 9th iteration of attack form A in the same manner it reacted to the 8th....but Attack form B & C are different stories. The only things you really have to worry about with multiple interations of the same procedure on an object are lag (e.g. how long something has to sit in a queue before being processed), record locking/conflicts and buffer overflows (e.g. what happens when the queue grows to the maximum size allocated for it). Those are actualy pretty simple to test and usualy aren't going to vary for different objects of the same class as another (i.e. it'll work the same for every mob type object). However when you have different types of functions effecting the same object, is when you need to look how those functions might interact with each other.
No .. you have to look at the combination of abilities in a group of participants and anticipate what can happen. There are already very many combinations in a 5 man group with 3 roles (tank, healer and DPS). If you have 30 people, you have to consider different combinations (what if not enough DPS? what level of healing should hte encounter demand)? What if you have 3 players with good CC abilities instead of 5?
As you said before, not even the fixed number of players type encounters are fully comprehensively tested in today's MMOs (because of resources, because of time?), there is no hope of good testing in an more open design.
My own feeling on instancing is that you could "have fun" with city instancing.
-> a city with 900 players in it, and no collisions between players.
So the server would create e.g. 3 instances with 300 people in each. There are several problems with this - what happens if 290 people leave your instance?, what do you do with 2 instances of 50 people? etc.
But what if you did 'dynamic crowd instancing':
- all 900 people are in the same instance.
- your client + the server decide which 300 of those people "mean something to you".
- you are only sent updates on those 300 people.
- your client renders 'faceless NPC crowds' in the city, AC-style to represent the people there.
- if you interact with another player in the city that you cannot see, or you have less than 300 PCs visible, then a random 'faceless NPC' is recognized as a PC.
Comments
Then a player will essentially be playing a SP game except at peak population. Why would they want to play a MMO for that?
MMO is about grouping. Nothing make grouping easiest and more assessible than hitting a button and form an instant group.
You missed several aspects of what I described...
- WHEN players get out away from civilized areas and off the beaten track they get out into areas which are largely deviod of other players. Being in more civilized areas still allows you to be around lots of other players. Just as in the real world, individuals have the ability (for the most part) to self-select how many others they encounter by choosing where they will go.
- Nothings stops players from players from PURPOSEFULLY choosing to travel together. In fact I suggested to make it desirable to do so by making the wilderness dangerous and the mechanics require interdependance for players to achieve maximimum effectiveness/interdependance.
- Nothing, save the players themselves, dictates the size of the expidition they choose to organize to go off into the wilderness.
- Nothing stops other groups of players (hostile or not) from purposefully arranging to travel to the same area as the players.
- Even though the size of the map means that the likelihood of encountering other player groups at random out in the wilderness is small, it is not impossible that you will encounter one by chance...for good or ill.
Clearly, if the SOLE goal of an MMO is to get a random number of players into a group in a quick, easy and accessable fashion....then you are correct. I submit to you that not only is that not the SOLE goal for any given MMO, it need not even be a goal AT ALL for an MMO.
Narius, you clearly have a VERY SPECIFIC style of play which you seem to prefer. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, I'm happy for you that you have that preference and seem to have a plethora of games to choose from. However you seem to project your specific preferences into every single thread here and every single discussion of alternate styles and preferences. I think you need to accept that there is nothing actualy wrong with gamers that have preferences different from your own and with discussing how those preferences might work in a game, on a site dedicated to the hobby as a whole.
The OP suggested that he thought the use of instancing could be really great and could be used to achieve a specific end (lower player density in desolate/wilderness areas) that he found desirable. I agreed with him and tried to clarify the suggested mechanic that I believe he was stating. I pointed out that it had some very specific advantages as a mechanic, but also several disadvantages and then I went on to describe a different way to achieve his stated goal that offered a different set of advantages and disadvantages.
How is that not pertinent to the discussion here or a valid expression of how an MMO mechanicaly can work?
Clearly it may not be an MMO that offers an experience you would enjoy. That's fine....but what Narius would/would not enjoy is not neccesarly a measuring stick for what makes a valid MMO or a valid topic of discussion.
I'd be happy to discuss mechanisms that fall directly within your personal preferences in some topic devoted to that. However, as that happens to be mechanisms which are well understood and are in common usage in many games today...I'm not sure what more fruitfull ground is to be breached there.
@Narius,
Indeed, I think your prefered style of play is popular with many players today and is worthy of discussion on an MMO site (though I'm not sure if there is much fresh ground to break there).
At the same time, I'm not sure how it relates to this particular discussion thread (or frankly quite a few of the threads your reply to). I see it as akin to a discussion on the nuances of the designated hitter rule in baseball where a person pops on to interject "I like football, football is popular. Alot of people like contact sports." That's all well and good...but what does it have to do with the designated hitter rule...or even baseball in general? .... and does the fact that contact sports are popular suddenly make baseball not a sport?
Will address your on theme points in a follow up post.
When things are instanced they already essentially are playing a SP game.
"Which is no different with a LFD button. You choose to be in a city and see lots of players. You choose to click a button to go into a small group adventure."
It's VERY different in that you have a preset size group, that you are actualy JOINED TO by some functional mechanism....and you are instantly set of to do the same static preset tasks. In a Public Instance....which is essentialy what the OP discussed (did you ever try Tabula Rasa...you would understand the mechanic).... you have effectively a ZONE with a population cap limit. The people are not neccesarly in a group together and are not neccesarly working on the same or even related tasks. The same condition holds true for my alternate proposal.....save that you are not utilizing "instances" as a mechanism...you are just using a sufficiently large map that it allows for a gradation of player density. Your suggestion is actualy changing the end goal of what the OP stated they were interested in achieving.
"Nothing prevents that in today's MMO either"
True...if we discount preset group sizes which, if used in conjunction with instances can prevent players from traveling with one another if they don't happen to fit into one of the pre-set buckets that the game considers a "group" (i.e. Game considers the "standard" group size 4 but you've got a play group of 5 who all want to play together...someones getting left out or they are getting forced to split up and not all play together). But that's beside the point, you claimed that my suggestion turned things into essentialy a "single-player game". This point was a direct rebuttal of that comment.
"That, i am not sure is a good idea. There is a reason why instances are designed for specific number of players. It is very difficult to have fun, special combat mechanics that can scale to a variable number of players."
It wouldn't neccesarly make for the type of game you are used to or enjoy. This would be open world...you wouldn't be worrying about scaling the encounter difficulty to match the number of players brought along. An Elephant would be an Elephant, it wouldn't get stronger or weaker depending upon the number of players you had facing it. So gameplay simply isn't a matter of "what buttons do I press to preform my role well in combat to defeat this beast"....it would also involve anticipating the type of dangers one might encounter out in the wilderness and organizing an expedition of sufficient strength and ability to deal with them. Really this is not much different then the kind of level based open world adventuring you see in most MMO's today....or the way Tabula Rasa handled "Public Instances".......except in most MMO's today you have this artificial mechanical object called "the group" that certain effects are mechanicaly applied against.
"Seems like a very minor payoff for taking so much pain to avoid instances."
Point I made earlier is that there really is not much "pain" to doing so at all.... it's a different way of doing things, but not any more expensive resource wise with todays technology. The technical bottlenecks that would have made it more expensive to do in the past have all been eliminated with advances in technology. You are essentialy saying it's much more expensive to go hunting with a rifle then a bow....might have been true 200 years ago...not today. They are equivalent expense and each has thier own set of advantages and disadvantages.
How is anyone playing a SP game when they are in a group of 5? They are playing online MP games.
@Nariusseldon,
I can't speak for Diablo MP, as I have no experience of it. However, I think you realize the practical difference between zones and instanced dungeons in most of todays MMO's (WoW, LOTRO, TOR, etc) and I think you are being a bit disingenious if you say that there isn't a difference in what players do in instanced dungeons/raids in WoW or LOTRO and zones with population caps such as TOR had or LOTRO "layering effects". I've yet to experience a single group/raid in such a game where people got into the instance and then went off on thier own to work on completely unrelated tasks.
In terms of "scaling" I think you are still viewing things through the lens of your own personal preferences and the style of games you are used to. Under this paradigm there is no such thing as "right difficulty" that scales to what you show up with....you need to drop that thinking if you want to understand this style of game play. In Civilization what is the "right difficulty" for a hostile civilization that you encounter (Player or NPC)? If you've only managed to build up 2 cities, should the computer trim down the other civilization to 2 cities so you get a "fair fight" even if it had built 5? The thing you are getting hung up on, I think, is that the beggining and end of the gameplay is the combat encounter itself. In this style of game, it's NOT. The combat encounter is just one aspect (probably the smallest) of gameplay. A significant portion of the gameplay is involved in marshalling the resources to bring to the encounter in the first place. In this style of play (much as in RTS titles), the player wants nothing approaching a "fair fight" in the encounter itself, they want to show up with overwhelming odds....which means the excelled in the marshalling portion of gameplay. If they show up with too few resources to do the job, it means they already failed in the marshalling phase of gameplay....and thier goal in this phase is simply to extract themselves from the situation with minimal loss.
In terms of QA, I think you are misunderstanding some dynamics. The number of combatants swinging at a target really doesn't have any effect (outside resource utilization) on the testing you need to do. What has an effect is the number of different effects (e.g. debuffs) that can be placed on the target in conjunction with one another. That is really determined by the number of different classes and the number of different abilities given to those classes....not the number of combatants involved. If you believe that todays MMO's are in any way exhaustive in thier testing of those combinations, before exposing the system to the public, then I think you are in for a rude surprise.
@Nariusseldon,
I think you are being a bit obtuse here...
"I am not saying there is absolutely no difference .. there is obviously a numerical different. And sure, the whole group has to work together to down the boss because it is how MOST encounters are designed .. but that is not a fundamental feature of an instance."
No it's not a fundemental feature of an "instance" but it IS a fundemental feature of a WoW/TOR style "instanced" dungeon as opposed to a "public instance" of the manner that the OP was talking about (and the way Tabula Rasa implimnted Zones or LOTRO impliments public instances through "Dynamic Layering") which is what we were actualy discussing.....e.g How "pressing the LFD button" is not actualy achieving the same end that the OP described he wanted to achieve with his model.
With the WoW/TOR "instanced dungeon" all players are "grouped" together with the built-in assumption that they are all there working toward a common related goal... "defeating the dungeon" and the instance is designed around that assumption. So if Johnny is just there to sight-see/explore and look around the dungeon and has no interest in participating in defeating the mobs and performing the other tasks neccesary to "defeat the dungeon", he is actualy harming the rest of the people there and they, rightfully, will be upset with him for not doing so...because the very act of his being there creates an implied contract for his participation. A "public instance"/zone is completely different. It is a multi-use area with no implied assumption about what the players will be doing there or that thier uses will be related or work toward some common goal. So Johnny could be in the Zone just to explore and sight-see. Bobby and Jill could be there to Role-Play. Ben could be there gathering materials from nodes so that he can craft. George, Jane and Bill could be there working on one quest and Mike could be there working on another completely unrelated quests. All these activities could be taking place within the same play space without any dependancy on each other and without any implied obligation upon the players that they must work toward some common goal....and without any negative effect for any player choosing to leave at any time. That's a critical difference between what you were describing and what the OP was describing.
.....................
"In fact, in Civ .. there *is* a right level of difficulties. If any hostile civ will overwhelm you and kill you in 2 turns, you think the game will be any fun? It is not only about combat encounter, but roadblocks and frustration (or the flip side, running through with no challenge).
I think you overestimate the desire for "unfair fights". The fact that LOL, and arena type PVP is so popular, is that people WANT fair fights. In fact, is it fun if you are kill 100 times, every step, whenever you try to walk from point A to B? Of course not. I doubt ANY game would be fun without *some* tuning of difficulty (or the ability just to stay alive and play without being respawn at a spawn point)."
You are conflating "GAME DIFFICULTY" with "COMBAT ENCOUNTER DIFFICULTY", perhaps because you are used to viewing the combat encounter as the entire game. In a game like Civ it's perfectly acceptable to lose any given combat encounter, it's even expected that you'll lose some. It's perfectly acceptable to lose an entire war. Heck it's even perfectly acceptable to lose a game....For most fans of strategy games, it wouldn't be fun if there was no possibility of losing the game. What's NOT perfectly acceptable is loosing the entire game for completely arbitrary reasons that have nothing to do with the players game-play.
The thing you seem to not understand is that the "marshalling the resources" part is every bit as much a portion of the players game-play as the "fighting the fight" part. In Civ...the player isn't doing a good job of building up thier Civilizations resources and infrastrcture, they are playing the game poorly already. If the same player then engages in hostilities with another more powerfull civilization when thier army and their civilization is woefully ill-prepared to do so.... that's a CRITICAL SCREW UP on the players part.... every bit as much as not healing the main tank at all in a major boss fight in an MMO encounter. Same holds true for our hypothetical MMO here..... the marshalling the resources phase is a major portion of the game-play. If a player goes off into a dangerous wilderness area without marshalling sufficient resources and then see's a dangerous animal that really requires 10 level 20 players to take on and decides to engage it with 2 level 12 players.... that's a major screw up, on the players part...not the games. Part of the game-play is figuring out what he can actualy accomplish with the resources he is able to marshall.... and marshalling the resources he needs to take on what he wants to accomplish. If the Level 1 Rogue thinks he can take on Smaug the Dragon with a bronze butterknife....he's got a problem.
"Of course it does. Different combatants have different abilities (unless you have a universal damage model, which NONE of the existing MMO is that simple ... you have melee, range attack, channeling attack, and so on ...). And all these abilities interact with abiltiies of the NPCs."
Which, as I said, has absolutely nothing to do with the raw number of combatants and everything to do with the number of different abilitlies in a game. You have an easier time testing something with 30 fighters all swinging a butterknife at the target then you do with a Fighter, Druid, Wizard and Cleric all using thier own attack forms. The object will react to the 9th iteration of attack form A in the same manner it reacted to the 8th....but Attack form B & C are different stories. The only things you really have to worry about with multiple interations of the same procedure on an object are lag (e.g. how long something has to sit in a queue before being processed), record locking/conflicts and buffer overflows (e.g. what happens when the queue grows to the maximum size allocated for it). Those are actualy pretty simple to test and usualy aren't going to vary for different objects of the same class as another (i.e. it'll work the same for every mob type object). However when you have different types of functions effecting the same object, is when you need to look how those functions might interact with each other.
My own feeling on instancing is that you could "have fun" with city instancing.
-> a city with 900 players in it, and no collisions between players.
So the server would create e.g. 3 instances with 300 people in each. There are several problems with this - what happens if 290 people leave your instance?, what do you do with 2 instances of 50 people? etc.
But what if you did 'dynamic crowd instancing':
- all 900 people are in the same instance.
- your client + the server decide which 300 of those people "mean something to you".
- you are only sent updates on those 300 people.
- your client renders 'faceless NPC crowds' in the city, AC-style to represent the people there.
- if you interact with another player in the city that you cannot see, or you have less than 300 PCs visible, then a random 'faceless NPC' is recognized as a PC.