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Nice overview write-up on Repop
Muerte_X
Member Posts: 104
Anyone looking for introductory info on the Repop should check this out; it is the most comprehensive write-up I've seen. Unfortunately mmorpg.com missed them at PAX. I would have liked to see their take on it too.
http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/03/25/pax-east-2013-hands-on-with-the-repopulation/
Often lurking, rarely posting
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They are accepting beta keys starting tomorrow right?
oops that's malu >.> Forgot been signed up for repopulation beta
Often lurking, rarely posting
I have a feeling they will be similar to GW2, but less common. Here's what JC (Repop Dev) said on thier forums:
"As it stands right now in testing they are pretty similar. Mainly because we don't have a ton of them and we need to test them all. The goal at launch will be to have them everyplace, but for each of them to only have a small chance of occurring and they will only occur when players are in the appropriate areas.
Some engagements are also more rare than others, where others require certain circumstances to occur.
For example let's say you have a spawner region in the wilderness and it can spawn one of several engagements. It might spawn a form of ambush along a road 0.5% of the time (when there's players in the area), it might spawn an escort 0.1% of the time, and it might spawn a camp in the wilderness somewhere away from the road 0.75% of the time. These get tied together by a parent engagement where nothing is happening (your all is well engagement) which will end in a few seconds. Once it ends it will trigger the cycle which will determine which of those three will be the next event to pop. Let's say it choose the ambush. It will then have a 1% chance to spawn that engagement whenever there are players inside when it ticks.
So let's say that players get the ambush and they complete it. What happens next depends on the template for the ambush. If there are no changes based on the failure or success then it will reinitiate the cycle, start from the parent engagement and choose a new one which will then spawn at some point later. Or if it is a chain then it could either go directly into a new engagement, or set a new engagement that wasn't in the original chain to be the next one to pop. It can also alter the spawns in an area so new NPCs or missions appear, or if the template specifies it can also modify parent or child engagements nearby. So it could trigger an engagement in the next area over on failure if that is what is desired.
...
I do feel part of the quick burnout that players often feel nowadays is because they are doing these activities so much more often than they were in the games of yesteryear. In Everquest for example, you usually weren't questing. It wasn't as easy to notice that you were basically doing the same activities repeatedly with a slightly different storyline, and it was hidden by the fact that most quests were multi-step. By the time WoW came along you were constantly doing quests, it drove your gameplay, and most of those quests were very simple one or two step goals. Kill X NPCs, return to me. They often turned into quest series though, so you now had 4 quests in place of what would have been 1 quest in the older games. That allowed for more frequent rewards, but it also added to the "great another kill 10 quest" mentality because the strings were so visible. I love the events in GW2, but I think they suffered from that same problem, repeatable situations, but without the storyline. And because some things aren't as easy to pull off in a shared event system, it wound up becoming even more repetitive. Then because of the scaling being balanced for events to be winnable most of the time they were seldomly challenging.
These are not easy problems to solve. What we'll be trying to do is to dress things up (hide the strings), make them more rare, design them to be more challenging, design some things to be longer lasting (permanent until players react to, and make it difficult to change), and then add some repercussions to players actions. By repercussions I'm referring to NPCs reacting differently to you or giving you different opportunities in missions, and by hidden flags being set based on how you performed in engagements, which will also tie into that system. So that's the approach on paper, we've got a long way to go from a content standpoint before we have reached that goal. Should be a fun ride."
TLDR: like GW2, but rarer with more effect on the world. And not completely implemented in game yet (alpha)
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Thanks for quoting me! Anyway, thing is Guild Wars 2 WAS quest (dynamic events) driven which meant they could not afford to space their events, because there was nothing else to do in those zones otherwise. This meant events restarting too soon, thus erasing that sense of consequence that ArenaNet so desperately tried to sell. My hope is that since The Repopulation is a sandbox, their engagements can be indeed far more rare and therefore can have a much more significant effect on the world. Fingers crossed.
Executive Editor (Games) http://www.wccftech.com