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Scalable dungeons would not be difficult to implement. Just scale them depending upon how many people are in the group. Rather than have 5/10/25 - scale it as such [dps output of mobs would also scale]: 5-9 - 5 man [typical 5 man loot drops] 10-19 - 10 man [better loot drops] 25 - no change [high end loot drops]
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Originally posted by Unrivaled1 Our definition of MMO isn't - our definition of MMORPG is however. The name of the Website you are posting on might also give you a clue to this. WoW is (according to the label anyway) a Role-playing game. Methinks you want to be playing a MMOFPS or a MMORTS (if such a thing exists). While I admit the amount of RP in most MMORPG's is not large it is where there origin is and where they try to be. Individuals filling a role in a team has been the basis for RPG's since they were invented 35years ago. We're supposed to be playing a role (tank, dps, healer, comedy sidekick, whatever) - not all the roles. Also : The basic point is effort & risk vs. reward - if you scale everything perfectly (which I doubt is possible) then a scaled instance that give one item to the soloer should give one item each to the raiders (and more or better due to the extra effort required to organise a raid). If it doesnt then why even bother with any group content?
Back to scaling :) I think scaling would be very hard to implement - its more than just ramping up damage and HP - just look at the one scaling system they already have in place - Tenacity - you want something similar in instances & raids?? Never found anyone who is happy with Tenacity.
Scaling up is probably doable. But scaling down will lead to a point where single target abilities overpower the players. The point of some boss abilities is to temporarily remove one player from the fight (sheep,sleep, web, freeze etc) - or to do that and require other to go rescue him (snobolds, webs, ice blocks etc). How do you scale that to 1 or 2 players? Plus it trivialises, overpowers or negates other abilities - (as I mentioned before) - look at the difference between the "keep your distance" issues in Emalon10 and Emalon25 And how do you scale a fight so that one non-healer clothie dps can kill an entire pull without dying? That isnt doable without making it laughably easy for hybrids. My mage can do far more dps than my holy pally - but theres a ton of things my pally can solo that my mage cant. And don't mention CC as the balancer - its not 100% reliable and only works on certain types of mobs. Scaling down to 1 (or 2) would require re-balancing all the classes for it - which I don't think is possible (without making them all far too similar and dull) or worth the effort 
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This is what I meant earlier by posting your thoughts without having read or at least understood the posts that came before. It would be a completely different fight for a "clothie" as it would be for a hybrid. When a solo cloth-wearer enters the instance the instance reorgs into clothie-friendly mob sizes and when said clothie initiates combat with a mob they are then adjusted in difficulty based on the player's Level, Class, Gear and Talent Spec. During the fight the player cannot swap out armor or talents so there is no chance of "cheating" the system. As I said earlier, it will have to be an elaborate formula to account for all of this but it's by no means impossible. I get the impression that most of the angst concerning this proposal has more to do with "I had to do it the hard way, so should everyone else!" than anything else. Based on what Blizz has done before I'd wager there will be an option to toggle "dungeon scaling" on or off for the party leader. Want to do it the old way? Be my guest. |
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I hate to start off any post with "well back in the days of EQ" but I am going to anyway. You can argue if you like which game was the start of the MMO genre but there is no denying that EQ brought the MMORPG to main stream gamers and SOE did it with grouping. As many have stated in previous posts, the whole game centered around the group and that was what made the game as popular as it was at the time. Not just because of the group but because of what happened when you grouped. You made friends! You came back day after day to play and interact with people you met while grouping. Anarchy Online came around and changed that in a way. It was the first game to allow for real soloing based on scalable missions. You had the ability to scale your instanced mission by level and thereby alllowing for solo or group play based on the level of the mission. It wasn't dynamic like EQ2 Splitpaw Saga or the skirmishes coming out the the next LOTRO expansion but it still allowed you to group and interact with people and the difficulty and loot was determined by the level of the mission you selected. In my opinion, as MMO's have evolved they have moved farther and farther away from the group and more toward the solo player in order to cater to the casual gamer and I don't fault any company for wanting to provide themselves a greater revenue stream but I still think that groups are the way to go, it is after all called an MMORPG for a reason. Point is, scalable group instances are possible and if it is going to get more people to group then I am all for it. Just rambling but thats my 2 cents. Felnor Retired from - EQ, AO, DAoC, EQ2, WoW, AoC, War, Eve, LoTR |
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Originally posted by Unrivaled1 I'm guessing that you meant "without having understood or at least read" rather than the other way round but I'll put that down to a typo or translation error :) I didn't realise that your comment on class,level and gear was a suggestion to scale based on them rather than a simple mention to show the vast scale of variance within simple numerical scaling. As we can already see scaling a single dungeon so it works at two different numbers (10 and 25) isn't easy and all the 10/25 raids have had numerous tweaks and nerfs post Test Server. So it can't be that easy to balance. The idea that they can scale to fit 1-40 players in a single instance seems an enormous amount of effort when two scales takes repeated tries to get reasonably close right. So the mere thought of scaling based on (at a very conservative estimate) 40 (number of raiders) * 10 (classes) * 3 (specs) * 11 (+/- 5 levels) * 25 (gear, average iLevel rounded to nearest multiple of 6) = 330,000 variants.... did not occur to me. An only slightly less conservative estimate would be 40 * 10 * 5 * 21 * 50 = 2.1 million options. Go playtest that :p And you want it to do this as every fight starts??
A few secondary thoughts : I'm also guessing you want to remove that capability to swap weapons during fights to avoid a rush to buy iLevel 1 weps for starting combat with? Not sure how that would effect things, I don't weapon swap during fights but I know that some people do for certain abilities. Doubt it would unbalanced things to remove that.
Scaling with gear also brings another question - why bother with new gear? If an instance scales with gear then you have removed the point of getting better gear. If my new gear doubles my dps but scales the dungeon to have double the HP then its exactly the same fight just with bigger numbers floating above my head.
Some of the issues here come down to one basic flaw in WoW (and one of EQ's greatest strengths) - lack of focus. EQ stated they were a group game and balanced for that. Very well once they had got their feet. Solo wasn't balanced, nor was raiding to a large degree (esp. early on) WoW doesn't focus and suffers numerous balance issues because of it. How many times has your class been nerfed in PvE because of a PvP issue? (or vice versa). How many ongoing "x is underpowered" problems are not fixed in PvE because it would overpower in PvP? (or vice versa). How many raid balance changes have nerfed solo play? Until WoW either focuses or properly delineates PvE and PvP these issue will continue to crop up. I am a great fan of the saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it" but Blizz constantly "fix" issues with one aspect while breaking/nerfing the abilities in other aspects while leaving broken bits unfixed. Once again getting a bit off topic but :)
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Originally posted by tmr819
That's why I said: Blizzard choose another solution than the one being discussed by the OP... They are introducing clustered dungeon servers in patch 3.3 (November 2009)... YOUR server will be clustered with around 20 other servers in a global LFGroup tool to do all dungeons. That simply means 20 times the number of people in a zone looking to do a dungeon with. If you have an old zone with around 10 people in it, you create now a general public of around 200 people instead of 10. It eliminates the need for instanced scaling as an active search throughout the lfg tool ... and the one forming the group (group leader) will get some extra loot for putting the group together. With 200 to 600 "clustered" inter-server people in just one zone (depending on the popularity of the zone), you'll get much faster a PUG to do a mid-30 dungeon like the Scarlet Monestry or the examples you cited. I already read the basic number of dungeon servers clustred will be the same as the Battlegoup for the Battlegrounds. If you combine it with the intro of Cataclysm, this new feature will have a tremendous influence on group play in WOW anno 2010. Wotlk put everyone and his dog in hi end Raids and dungeons, Cataclysm will do it for the leveling dungeons tx to the server clusters.
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I think the problem is guilds just don't want to help gear up members you have to be on par with them or you don't get in which is why they struggle to get a 25 man off the ground. In classic WoW we never had a problem filling all 40 spots we did not just run current content we helped gear new players but we also farmed. So I'm not sure how current raids are but if guilds are not helping gear up new level 80's it might be because of the no farm aspect. But even with PUG you must have certain achievements or you don't go so me I'm forced to PvP and stuck not being able to raid thus results in me quitting due to lack of play. I would love to join a raiding guild but most are new that will end up disbanding shortly after being made the older guilds want you at their level so these guilds that want and need to fill 25 plus backups need to run the older dungeons they have cleared. |
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Excellent idea and easily implemented in spite of Kaplan's BS pontificating @ Blizzcon about raid instances needing the appropriate 'pacing'. 'Pacing' just means tedious timesink mechanics that are a useless holdover from his EQ days. Blizzard's clustered servers are just another attempt to try to force people to play the way Kaplan thinks they should play instead of the way they want to play. The same thing happened at the first Blizzcon where people were asking for casual endgame content and developers told them they expected people to join large raid guilds. Blizzard is finally seeing that many players are not putting up with that anymore. That's why there aren't any 40 man raids, that's why they're clustering servers. All of these are just work-arounds that scaled instances would immeadiately solve once Blizzard realizes they have to stop trying to force all of their customers into one playstyle. Now if this is an issue over gear (and what isn't in WoW) just lower the chances of getting gear drops when you're in an instance with less people so you end up with the same probability of any individual of a large group getting the gear. The elistist snobs won't be able to swing their epeens around as much, but wouldn't that be a shame. |
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There are SOOOO many things wrong with this article....
/sigh...
isn't it just wonderful how so many people in these days actually thinks and believes that their meaningless "opinions" are actually "facts"...
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Originally posted by Fr0z1nDuDe
See the issue isn't that they think what they think is a fact. Its that the "fact" or conclusion they have drawn should be the one the game they play does as well. I wonder if these same people go out and buy a Corolla or some 4 cylinder car and then go onto forums and bitch and complain that the engine doesn't have the pickup or the seats aren't shaped the right way and as such the company should change the car to meet their needs. The company set out with a vision and implemented it - of course as a business they want the most customer's possible - but I doubt any company has visions of grandeur that their product is going to make everyone happy. If that were the case - why would any other game exist. I mean kudos to these people for having an issue with a game and a possible solution they have come up with - at least its not full blown QQ fix it posts. But I really don't understand why people seem to think they can just buy something and then expect the company to change its vision and apply their new one. I mean when someone comes up with a game, they sit there and create THEIR game with THEIR rules - the people bitching about it are the kids that were never "it" in tag because "you didn't make contact with all 5 fingers" or never got shot when playing guns because "you were aiming at the tree" its just silly - they just don't wanna play by someone elses rules. |
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Originally posted by epitaxial
That is not scaling, that is a static change. Scaling applies to the direct strength/amount of mobs per person added/removed. Six players has its own particular level of difficulty as does seven players, eight players etc... True scaling involves extremely difficult and tedious processes to achieve correct mob scaling versus players and added loot drops to reflect said difficulty. True scaling is a fantastic way to allow all players to experience all content and I support the idea of true scaling but what your suggesting is naive and lacks any forethought to the actual meaning of scaling and the hurdles needed to achieve true scaling. |
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