Group -or- Solo: Why Public Dungeons?

Velocinox

If the game already satisfies your need for group, solo, or mixed content... What do public dungeons bring to the table?

What is the trade off between an instanced dungeon or public dungeon in an otherwise open world MMO mean to you?

Pepeq

A public dungeon just means anyone can enter it... thereby griefing you in the process by aggroing everything, killing everything, looting your kills, what have you.  It's why most games don't have public dungeons, just instanced ones.

Picture walking into Icecrown to kill the Lich King as Alliance only to find the Horde waiting inside for you, stealthed, just as you pull the boss?  Believe me, this is exactly what would happen if they were public and not instanced.

Sovrath

Velocinox said:

If the game already satisfies your need for group, solo, or mixed content... What do public dungeons bring to the table?

What is the trade off between an instanced dungeon or public dungeon in an otherwise open world MMO mean to you?

Have you ever played a game with a public dungeon?

It's very "alive". While instanced dungeons are about you/your party, a public dungeon is about "place" and community.

Depending upon the game, a public dungeon can be a source for enemy players to try to attack you/take away your area.

You can sometimes find immediate groups and even trade in public dungeons.

I remember areas in cruma tower (Lineage 2) where players hung out, traded, made groups, conversed. It was very social. I also remember having to fight our way up the Tower of Insolence to get at an enemy clan/alliance that attacked our clan mates.

It was a lot of fun and definitely cemented in game friendships.

MadFrenchie

I enjoy the idea of a public dungeon so long as the dungeon is large, multi-tiered (especially as far as mob levels go) and complex.  The delves you see in ESO might as well be instanced to me, as they're pretty much a one-off deal and you're done.  Even ESO's group dungeons, for the most part, corral you from one boss to the next.

These types of dungeons might as well be instanced.  Then, at least in my opinion, there should be dungeon like Darkness Falls.  It had multiple levels serving a wide range of player character levels, contained unique drops not only in terms of gear but crafting materials, and I personally enjoyed the way it tied into RvR.  Those types of dungeons fit well with non-instanced, open access.

As far as what it brings to the table..  Well, there's nothing like pushing further and further into one of these massive, layered dungeons seeing how far your group could get (and obviously, the deeper you went, the better the general rewards).  DF really highlighted the difference between groups of players that worked well together and those who were unable to recognize and/or fulfill their role in the group.  Instanced dungeons feel canned by comparison, like TV dinner instead of a home-cooked meal.

Iselin

Pepeq said:

Picture walking into Icecrown to kill the Lich King as Alliance only to find the Horde waiting inside for you, stealthed, just as you pull the boss?  Believe me, this is exactly what would happen if they were public and not instanced.

Sounds like more fun than the current system to me

-----------------------------------

I think DAoC did public dungeons best. They tended to be massive and catered to different ranges of levels all in the same dungeon and I'm not just talking about the one that had PVP, Darkness Falls, most of the PVE dungeons were also open.

They're just more realistic than private instances and feel like an underground extension of the open world. Instanced dungeons are just too "gamey" if you know what I mean.

Sovrath

Pepeq said:

Picture walking into Icecrown to kill the Lich King as Alliance only to find the Horde waiting inside for you, stealthed, just as you pull the boss?  Believe me, this is exactly what would happen if they were public and not instanced.

You say that like it's a bad thing?

Aelious

Public dungeons like those in EQ, were about a focal point of group content and were so vast they could handle multiple groups at the same time. Would the instanced version of dungeons seen in newer MMOs need to be public? No, they are too small.

As @Sovrath said, it's about environment and still feeling like you are playing in another world with other people, even those outside your group. Also, in comparison to modern dungeons public ones have a greater sense of permanence and cohesion. Continuously queuing for 20 minute dungeons could get tedious after a bit, just as camping in an open dungeon can after two hours .

It depends on your preference I guess. Both have validity as long as people enjoy them.

NomadMorlock

I agree ESO public dungeons are too small for the best effect of the benefits. I really enjoyed the public dungeons in Vanguard. You never knew if you were going to run into anyone down in some massive underground complex and I made several friends and had many impromptu adventures with other players and groups met when delving.  There is definitely a place for this however I think it requires a massive size and a certain difficulty to be effective. 

MadFrenchie

Pepeq said:

A public dungeon just means anyone can enter it... thereby griefing you in the process by aggroing everything, killing everything, looting your kills, what have you.  It's why most games don't have public dungeons, just instanced ones.

Picture walking into Icecrown to kill the Lich King as Alliance only to find the Horde waiting inside for you, stealthed, just as you pull the boss?  Believe me, this is exactly what would happen if they were public and not instanced.

I understand if instancing is your preference, and I won't knock it.  To each their own, and I've played plenty of instanced dungeons.  However, why act as if aggro trains, ninja-looting, etc. haven't all been solved already by systems that really have nothing to do with instancing?

Everyone gets their own loot bags these days, and you usually need only make a minimal contribution to the kill to do so.  Aggro trains don't exist anymore due to leashing systems (mobs will give chase to their attackers until they give up, at which time they return to their original location, ignoring any other players unless those players attack them).  Neither of these depend upon instancing.

The only issue public dungeons still present is spawn camping, but even that can be discouraged to the point of uselessness (decreasing chances of drops for successive kills on the same mob per spawn is one idea).

Sovrath

Torval said:

Sovrath said:

Pepeq said:

Picture walking into Icecrown to kill the Lich King as Alliance only to find the Horde waiting inside for you, stealthed, just as you pull the boss?  Believe me, this is exactly what would happen if they were public and not instanced.

You say that like it's a bad thing?

It depends on what you want out of a game. If "payback" is what you're playing for then that is exciting. If not, then it is not fun at all.

I like how ESO runs public dungeons. They're fun without all the hassle of making a formal group.

It doesn't really have to be about "payback" it can be about keeping one's enemies from being successful.

In any case, my retort was more tongue in cheek as of course people aren't going to like that type of game play. However, his example is what some people DO want in game play.

Heck, that was a good part of Lineage 2. And, as we also learned, just because you are going to attack them doesn't mean you are going to win.

Velocinox

So after reading all the comments so far, I already think I have an idea of when one is better than the other for you...

If it's massive in scale and the other players are spread out enough that you may see them once in a while public dungeons are better than instanced.

But if they are small and there are many other players making for competition or a assembly line going to the main boss and then out the door you would prefer instanced over public.

Does this sum up your opinions?

Deivos

Robokapp said:

I've watched 4 guilds (3 Alliance 1 Horde) fight Kazzak once. One guild would go down, do a pull, wipe while the other 3 and countless observers were sitting on the rocks. Then the defeated guild would come on the rocks and next guild would go in.

There was none of the griefing described in this quote. It was more of a great social experience to see which guild gets the boss in fewer attempts than the rest while bystanders were watching and cheering.

And I've seen maxed out players camp the lvl 10-20 zones purely for the sake of griefing the lowbies.

It very much depends on what the present community is like as well as the timing. Public zones are open already to all the randomness of player behavior. Dungeons become a focal point of such activity. When it's a location people actively seek out on a regular basis then it becomes a target as much as a destination, and it's a bit of a dice roll to see how the community is going to treat things.

Sometimes it's built into the competitive nature of the game, such as Darkness Falls in DAoC. At other times it's simply a small component of the game as a world boss. How integral it is to the game, how much subsequent traffic it gets, and how players think to capitalize or respond to this element, can very a lot. The problem is that it only takes a few people deciding to use such a hub to grief other players for the situation to shift.

It's not a dungeon, but one such example would be when an outfit in the original Planetside held a funeral for one of their members in-game. Players from their own faction flew into the base and bombed them.

As soon as it's a gathering place, it's a target, and it only takes a few trolls.

Should we not do public dungeons then? No, it just means we account for this. If we know that the location is going to be a destination for many players, then we either build the game to mitigate the ability for players to grief each other, or we build the game to make those things more "natural"(not as in "let them grief", but as in "this game is fundamentally competitive and this location is made for conflict, be prepared"). 

sunandshadow

I generally prefer instanced dungeons - they are better for delivering both story and puzzles, and have the potential to be scalable for different size groups, down to solo players.  But they do have one downside - the difficulty of replacing a lost party member in the middle of the dungeon, made worse by the fact that dungeons in general tend to be grueling gauntlets that take a big chunk of uninterrupted play time to complete.  In some games you can't even chat with people outside the dungeon while you are in it, resulting in a rather claustrophobic or ostracized feeling.  One thing it might be neat to experiment with is allowing passers-by to see into the dungeon and hear what the dungeon party is up to, but not allowing them to enter because they are not part of a group.  An invisible fence, or a terrain fence.  It builds anticipation in an interesting way if you can enter a new area of the game and see a boss roaring and smashing things but you are still 10 levels to low to tackle that boss yourself.  Truly public bosses, though, have a lot of downsides like killing unwary newbies and getting spawn camped.  Invisible instances can fix both of these issues.

I can see one particularly interesting case for 'public dungeons' - a passage between 2 cities that players regularly travel through from both sides.  Fighting your way somewhere could be an interesting alternative to a long boat ride or flight, so that not all travel in the game is the same.  There wouldn't be a boss, but there might be a gate that requires players to cooperatively open it.

nariusseldon

Velocinox said:

If the game already satisfies your need for group, solo, or mixed content... What do public dungeons bring to the table?

What is the trade off between an instanced dungeon or public dungeon in an otherwise open world MMO mean to you?

Nothing for me. I prefer instanced dungeons. I really don't want others in my dungeons. 

iixviiiix

Because we talk about MMO here and you need place to hold more than 40 men raid .
Most of bad side you guys said can be fix easy .
But it don't matter cause ... sigh , i don't ready want to use those words . "hater"

Iselin

Velocinox said:

So after reading all the comments so far, I already think I have an idea of when one is better than the other for you...

If it's massive in scale and the other players are spread out enough that you may see them once in a while public dungeons are better than instanced.

But if they are small and there are many other players making for competition or a assembly line going to the main boss and then out the door you would prefer instanced over public.

Does this sum up your opinions?

No. It doesn't sum up mine.

This, to me, is just a variant of the fundamental question about what MMORPGs should be like.

Leaving aside technical limitations and even game play considerations and imagining what an MMO could be (as Tad Williams did in the Otherland series or Cline did in Ready Player One) "open" and "public" are good things that work toward that immersive world goal and "instanced" and "private" aren't.

deniter

If we compare mmorpgs and p&p rpgs the most significant difference is that in mmorpg every player is a hero or an adventurer, while in p&p games your group is (almost) the only group of people who enters dungeons and seeks adventure and loot. Public dungeons mean a set of corridors and rooms filled with more players than mobs and bosses being camped by a line of dozens of weekend warriors.

I prefer games where i can experience dungeons like they were there only for me and my group, like we were the first people in there in 50-100 years. That's part of the mystery of a fantasy rpg. If my group discovers an anchient sarcophagus and finds secret door behind it leading to some dust covered corridor paved with rune-engraved stone slabs, the last thing i want to see is a group of other players yelling lol and telling they just killed the 3rd boss and we had to wait for respawn.

Public dungeons would work only if they were so vast and gigantic places you could wander there for hours and not see other players. I just can't see this happen in modern time with modern graphics and modern game design, so let it be instanced for everyone.

iixviiiix

deniter said:

If we compare mmorpgs and p&p rpgs the most significant difference is that in mmorpg every player is a hero or an adventurer, while in p&p games your group is (almost) the only group of people who enters dungeons and seeks adventure and loot. Public dungeons mean a set of corridors and rooms filled with more players than mobs and bosses being camped by a line of dozens of weekend warriors.

I prefer games where i can experience dungeons like they were there only for me and my group, like we were the first people in there in 50-100 years. That's part of the mystery of a fantasy rpg. If my group discovers an anchient sarcophagus and finds secret door behind it leading to some dust covered corridor paved with rune-engraved stone slabs, the last thing i want to see is a group of other players yelling lol and telling they just killed the 3rd boss and we had to wait for respawn.

Public dungeons would work only if they were so vast and gigantic places you could wander there for hours and not see other players. I just can't see this happen in modern time with modern graphics and modern game design, so let it be instanced for everyone.

That's because the dungeon lack of random spawn . Some MMORPG use random spawn system so multiple "boss" will spawn and player don't need to wait for respawn , they can continue kill the mobs until the boss spawn .

More , if you want to have scripted boss battle , only need instance the bosses and not the whole dungeon .

Kaneth

I loved public dungeons in Asheron's Call 1 and in DAoC.

In AC1, dungeons had some of the best experiences with fast spawns and the ability to get overwhelmed. Often times you could effectively solo or group all in the same dungeons. You could usually just walk in and find a group and be on your merry way. If you wanted to solo, most people would leave you to your corner and move along without trying to compete for kills with you. Some of my fondest memories are being in corner with wave after wave of Olthoi coming at me and a couple of friends, wondering if we are ever going to be able to loot the hundreds of the dreaded bugs at our feet.

DAoC was pretty great too. I remember the feeling of fear and excitement whenever you saw someone yell "TRAIN". If you didn't stop attacking immediately, you knew you and your group were toast. Darkness Falls was great too. I remember sitting in there on my Nightshade, helping to protect the lowbies from enemies as the ability to enter changed hands. Then also playing the stealth vs. stealth game at certain intersections. Knowing full well that there were many sharks in the water, so to speak.

I do enjoy the scripted events of instanced dungeons, those can be a lot of fun. WoW had a lot of very fun dungeons especially when they added more interesting mechanics to the fights as well. I do feel WoW would've felt a little more "alive" if they also had a public dungeon area for their instanced dungeons (maybe even some raids) that were filled with elites. Especially if they were to use the open tagging option that was available in areas like Timeless Isle for the rares that spawned. I think it could've help solidify the in game community more.

This is also an area I feel GW2 is lacking. Since they've effectively nerfed the dungeons from regular use (trying to filter people into Fractals and the Raid), they should at least make the story mode for each dungeon more like a public dungeon. Give folks who haven't completed them a better chance to at least get to experience the story for each dungeon. Making them public with a smallish player cap before a new room is created would be a good way to prevent just a total zerg too.

nariusseldon

Robokapp said:

nariusseldon said:

Velocinox said:

If the game already satisfies your need for group, solo, or mixed content... What do public dungeons bring to the table?

What is the trade off between an instanced dungeon or public dungeon in an otherwise open world MMO mean to you?

Nothing for me. I prefer instanced dungeons. I really don't want others in my dungeons. 

Alone in the dungeon, you say...

yeah ... i suppose small group may be ok too. But certainly not a public dungeon. 

sunandshadow

iixviiiix said:

Because we talk about MMO here and you need place to hold more than 40 men raid .

Not all MMOs need to have raiding.

sunandshadow

Robokapp said:

nariusseldon said:

Robokapp said:

nariusseldon said:

Velocinox said:

If the game already satisfies your need for group, solo, or mixed content... What do public dungeons bring to the table?

What is the trade off between an instanced dungeon or public dungeon in an otherwise open world MMO mean to you?

Nothing for me. I prefer instanced dungeons. I really don't want others in my dungeons. 

Alone in the dungeon, you say...

yeah ... i suppose small group may be ok too. But certainly not a public dungeon. 

We've been over this. That's not a dungeon, that's a basement.

*Contemplates the half-outdoor mountaintop solo dungeons in Skyrm*  No, can't really call that a basement...

waynejr2

Iselin said:

Velocinox said:

So after reading all the comments so far, I already think I have an idea of when one is better than the other for you...

If it's massive in scale and the other players are spread out enough that you may see them once in a while public dungeons are better than instanced.

But if they are small and there are many other players making for competition or a assembly line going to the main boss and then out the door you would prefer instanced over public.

Does this sum up your opinions?

No. It doesn't sum up mine.

This, to me, is just a variant of the fundamental question about what MMORPGs should be like.

Leaving aside technical limitations and even game play considerations and imagining what an MMO could be (as Tad Williams did in the Otherland series or Cline did in Ready Player One) "open" and "public" are good things that work toward that immersive world goal and "instanced" and "private" aren't.

But people say a lot of things and I suspect a lot of it is BS.  I am pro-world but see a value in instances but have to admit they through the baby out with the bath water.   There are good reasons for both types of situations.  Will both work with today's sensitive new age gamer? Perhaps not.

BTW:  As to the open world, for me it is for the exploration of it not for the other people.

nariusseldon

waynejr2 said:

BTW:  As to the open world, for me it is for the exploration of it not for the other people.

In that case, you don't need a mmorpg. Fallout 4 has a nice open world, with instant travel too.

I find single player open worlds much better than mmorpg open worlds, for me, of course. 

syriinx

You know what game did it right?  EQ2.

It had a mix of public dungeons and instanced dungeons.  And the instanced dungeons were often a little less straightforward than what we are used to, requiring getting keys or solving minor puzzles to get to a new area.

waynejr2

nariusseldon said:

waynejr2 said:

BTW:  As to the open world, for me it is for the exploration of it not for the other people.

In that case, you don't need a mmorpg. Fallout 4 has a nice open world, with instant travel too.

I find single player open worlds much better than mmorpg open worlds, for me, of course. 

AH, I was talking about the OPEN WORLD IN 'context' what I was referring to in response.  See, nari, you have to something think a bit.  Just because I said not for the other people, doesn't mean I don't want other people in the game.  DID YOU TAKE A SECOND TO THINK BEFORE YOU RESPONDED?

Selling things on the AH isn't an open world factor.  Grouping isn't an open world factor (unless pvp factors are in play).  Raiding isn't an open world factor.  Those require other people.    Perhaps I should have spelled it out for you since you miss these things too often.