Originally posted by fischsemmel

So now he gets together a crew of 10 to raid the place.

Crew of 10 isn't a raid. 40-80 people is a raid.

Seriously, you don't know what a raid is until you've done a PoP raid with 80 players, 10 officers and 10 class leaders.

10 people..

Originally posted by paulscott

Play a PnP game. 

edit:  Or should I say that's what a PnP game should be.

yeah, I have to agree with this, it seemed like a dungeons and dragons scenario.

I can't say I disagree as some games use raids as just a large forward zerg. It would be nice if it was more than just taking down a boss and that if you didn't have the correct classes, traps might not be noticed or secret doors not found, etc.

Originally posted by Waterlily

Originally posted by fischsemmel

So now he gets together a crew of 10 to raid the place.

 

Crew of 10 isn't a raid. 40-80 people is a raid.

Seriously, you don't know what a raid is until you've done a PoP raid with 80 players, 10 officers and 10 class leaders.

10 people..

I raided EQ since teh beginning, more or less, up through and beyond PoP. I have very, very fond memories of that game.

However, it isn't the number of people that you bring along that makes a raid a RAID.

Originally posted by Sovrath

yeah, I have to agree with this, it seemed like a dungeons and dragons scenario.

I can't say I disagree as some games use raids as just a large forward zerg. It would be nice if it was more than just taking down a boss and that if you didn't have the correct classes, traps might not be noticed or secret doors not found, etc.

Did you play DDO at all? I didn't get to the endgame before I gave up on it, but regular groups and dungeons had a lot of the kinds of things that I would like to see in MMO dungeon-crawling/raiding. Traps, secret areas, rewards beyond the stuff that drops when you kill a boss, etc.

DDO was instanced, however, and tended to be quite repetitive. But the dungeons in that game did feel quite a bit more alive than most others I've experienced.

When it all comes down to it, that is what I want to see in an MMO. Life.

some reason reminds me of runescape quests :P

THIS IS HOW I WOULD DO RAIDS

*Server message*  beware raid boss X has spawned!

ARGGH! raid monsters are HUGE hell spawned demons or roaming dragons that stumble on you. this spawn basically is like say a weekly/daily event, maybe some are GM controlled some spawns not predictable. the idea is that it literally just goes around killing everything it sees until it eventually dies, not just sitting in a cave waiting for YOU to find it, IT finds you. that includes destroying any clan cities it comes across. no you can't out heal it. many people are garenteed to die, it will cause unstoppable havoc until enough heroic people stop it. some would only really die from castle defences so unless your in a keep best option is run for one ASAP.

its kind of like a pve siege than a raid, say your guild is in your castle you see this huge monster comming unluckily for you. you need to defend your keep or it will rip down your hard earned walls. oh and never would these things drop any useable items. if they do drop anything it would be extremely rare crafting materials to make l33t items, just as dragon horns which make the best bow in the game when conditioned and crafted by an expert.

so a raid is more like an area of the map getting hit by a hurricane/disaster, than a party traveling to a place for bounty. alot of people are gona die but a few might get lucky.

Originally posted by Consensus

alot of people are gona die but a few might get lucky.

I think that coming right out and saying that is not exactly a good marketing strategy for your idea... unless you really DON'T want your idea to ever become reality, ever.

CCP is starting to do something like this now.

Just read up on the wormhole mechanic.

You need a pilot into exploration to find it, its never in the same place.

You then need a group to deal the the mobs inside and anyone else could find it while your in it or after you've left.

Its not exactly what you ment but it shows that MMO devs are trying.

Personally I've wanted a dungeon experience like that since I started playing MMOs.

The closest game to ever make me feel like I found something epic through exploration have been the Elder Scroll games.

With bethesda reporting a 300 million budget for its new MMO lets hope they take the exploration and dungeon mechanic from Morrowind and Oblivion and bring it to the MMO genre.

I don't think your dream is too far off to be honest.

Edit: now that I think about it how large would a game world have to be to even have the ability to hide a freaking raid dungeon? We maybe behind the times in Tech to do something like that.

Originally posted by Z3R01

CCP is starting to do something like this now.

Just read up on the wormhole mechanic.

You need a pilot into exploration to find it, its never in the same place.

You then need a group to deal the the mobs inside and anyone else could find it while your in it or after you've left.

Its not exactly what you ment but it shows that MMO devs are trying.

Personally I've wanted a dungeon experience like that since I started playing MMOs.

The closest game to ever make me feel like I found something epic through exploration have been the Elder Scroll games.

With bathesda reporting a 300 million budget for its new MMO lets hope they take the exploration and dungeon mechanic from Morrowind and Oblivion and bring it to the MMO genre.

I don't think your dream is too far off to be honest.

 

Edit: now that I think about it how large would a game world have to be to even have the ability to hide a freaking raid dungeon? We maybe behind the times in Tech to do something like that.

 

We can hope that Bethseda does something amazing. In all honesty though, I wasn't wowed by Oblivion like so many others seem to have been. It was entertaining, but it was only a single step towards being a living world, imo. NPCs interaction with each other consisted of a dozen, half-nonsensical comments. Dungeons looked the same across the whole world. The biggest single thing I have against Oblivion though is this: why the fuck did the entire god damned game have to be a mountain range? If your character wasn't running up  a 45 degree slope... he was going down a 45 degree slope.

Regarding the size of a world necessary to pull off stuff like what I want: yeah, it would have to be (or at least should be) huge. But I don't see how that would be a problem, technologically speaking. Then again, I don't share the hate for zoning/loading screens/times that most people seem to have.

Originally posted by Z3R01

Edit: now that I think about it how large would a game world have to be to even have the ability to hide a freaking raid dungeon? We maybe behind the times in Tech to do something like that.

 

You would pretty much have to use something like the phasing technology WoW is using.  Unless you fullfilled a set of criteria the area would simply not load for you.

You simply could not have something like that be fully in the standard game world and simply hidden by terrain features.   Once players knew something like that existed, they would swarm over the area like flies.  Plus any serious effort to test something elaborate like this, would spring leaks like a sieve.

My other concern is how many players would this type of content 'feed' at a time?  Would you really justify that much dev time for something only a few players would enjoy at a time (or ever)? 

Originally posted by Waterlily

Originally posted by fischsemmel

So now he gets together a crew of 10 to raid the place.

 

Crew of 10 isn't a raid. 40-80 people is a raid.

Seriously, you don't know what a raid is until you've done a PoP raid with 80 players, 10 officers and 10 class leaders.

10 people..

I raid my fridge solo!

Originally posted by fischsemmel

Originally posted by Z3R01

CCP is starting to do something like this now.

Just read up on the wormhole mechanic.

You need a pilot into exploration to find it, its never in the same place.

You then need a group to deal the the mobs inside and anyone else could find it while your in it or after you've left.

Its not exactly what you ment but it shows that MMO devs are trying.

Personally I've wanted a dungeon experience like that since I started playing MMOs.

The closest game to ever make me feel like I found something epic through exploration have been the Elder Scroll games.

With bathesda reporting a 300 million budget for its new MMO lets hope they take the exploration and dungeon mechanic from Morrowind and Oblivion and bring it to the MMO genre.

I don't think your dream is too far off to be honest.

 

Edit: now that I think about it how large would a game world have to be to even have the ability to hide a freaking raid dungeon? We maybe behind the times in Tech to do something like that.

 

 

 

We can hope that Bethseda does something amazing. In all honesty though, I wasn't wowed by Oblivion like so many others seem to have been. It was entertaining, but it was only a single step towards being a living world, imo. NPCs interaction with each other consisted of a dozen, half-nonsensical comments. Dungeons looked the same across the whole world. The biggest single thing I have against Oblivion though is this: why the fuck did the entire god damned game have to be a mountain range? If your character wasn't running up  a 45 degree slope... he was going down a 45 degree slope.

 

Regarding the size of a world necessary to pull off stuff like what I want: yeah, it would have to be (or at least should be) huge. But I don't see how that would be a problem, technologically speaking. Then again, I don't share the hate for zoning/loading screens/times that most people seem to have.

Oblivion was good for a few things, the combat system for one was really good but to be honest If you want to model a MMO after a Sp game it would be morrowind. From fiery mountains to forests to deserts Morrowind had it all.

If i could take oblivions gates mechanic, combat mechanic and graphics and redo morrowind it would be next to perfect.

Also I don't think people have a problem with Zoning or load screens its instancing that kills it for us.

A zone that could only hold 100 people making you have to load in forest 1,2,3 to find friends is a deal breaker for people.

It does seem a very nice idea, and definitely a lot more interesting than the type of raids seen in many current MMOs. I do have a few personal thoughts on it though.

Firstly, I'd say for something of that size, that is that involving to get to, let alone through, I personally think an instance would actually be better. I know that if I came to something that involving and enjoyable, but due to the time it took, had to leave it for another day to finish, I'd be pretty disapointed if another group had just gone in after we'd done most of the hard work, and then cleared out the last, and maybe best bits.

In an ideal world, hidden places would stay hidden, and players would be courtious to their fellows, and respect their raid. However, it's not an ideal world, so the location of the tower would be on a dozen player made maps a week after the game's launch, if not before. And as soon as a raid enters, you'd have a queue of people waiting to barge in and finish off, if they don't go in while you're there so they can steal the glory from under your nose.

It might be a nice idea for a dungeon that was the centre point of some kind of faction vs faction pvp system though, so your faction can gain dominance, and therefore gain entry to the tower area. However, if the other faction takes over the pvp region, it can switch while you're in there, and then you get a nice pvp fight in the raid. The only way to really make sure it didn't get abused though would be to have some alternative way of getting the rewards, or similar rewards at least, so that the people going there are doing it for the fun of doing it, not just turning it into a "phat lewtz" scenario.

that's just my view on it anyway, but definitely something that I feel could go places.

I think the biggest issue really is the number of people you really need to get into a living and breathing style world, only one game to date has ever pulled it off and I don't think it's net code/engine would be the best suited to a fantasy based MMO (and I'm speaking of EVE).

For a world to have that level of people, you'd probaby need to have 15-20k online at a time to make the world seem full and with most server techs only being able to support at most 3-6k people.

I'm not sure what net code EVE is using to get around this limitation, but I can recall other games that got hit hard by this...  perhaps could use a multiple clusters that could use portals between the different clusters which are all different (rather than the system that WoW uses, which is still a single cluster of machines).  I know this is something Shadowbane wanted to do, but never pulled it off...  BUT...

Something like that should be theoretically possible and in doing so, places could be discovered that people could swear was never there before.  Think of it as a mystical portal to some unknown place that magically appears in a region and only appears every so often (so noone would ever know when it was set to appear, could put it on a random timer even), but you could add different hits that happen at different times as a 'warning'  Propheticly like.  People notice magical disturbances in an area for example and the players have to figure out what is going on, is it a portal to some long lost shard of the world that is benelovant or is it manolvent, but because it would exist as a different cluster of computers, you might be able to bypass some of the concurrent user issues.

Note, I am not an IT person however.

Your idea is not instanced, meaning all this will be is acleared dungeon and a line at the end with 20 groups hoping to tag the boss mob on respawn.

The rest is great, if lacking details.

its a great idea but people always ruins these things.  As soon as the first raid guild has found that tower you will see about 10 guides online showing you exactly how to find that tower (removing the explorer) and 10 guides on how to kill the lich (removing the scholar) then of course everyone will breeze through that content on other servers.

Raids are fun and enjoyable now its just people ruin them.  All it takes is one guy who wants his phat lewtz and has been there before to ruin the experiance for the other players.  Its frustrating and wont change.

could make the raid zone move each time it is beaten, thus making the stuff required again.

A part of my MMO me wants a raid that last 10+ hours but with it you get CRAZY stuff, player titles, mounts, armor, money, weapons, pet, and other stuff i guess.

Originally posted by Waterlily

Originally posted by fischsemmel

So now he gets together a crew of 10 to raid the place.

 

Crew of 10 isn't a raid. 40-80 people is a raid.

Seriously, you don't know what a raid is until you've done a PoP raid with 80 players, 10 officers and 10 class leaders.

10 people..

LOL I agree with lilly here. The guy had some nice ideas but still stuck in the wow realm, should of stayed in the eq man! lol Man I remember class leaders and their own class channel =D. And I when we was doing runs for probation members I would always mess up a heal rotation lol. jk

See look lilly is wrong to an extent,  80 people can create to much lag to do something so if you are in a group of 25 as a small raid. Lag pwns all.

Hear hear, great read. Please pass this on to every MMO developer on the planet.

And for those complaing about the number 10, that's just an example - nothing is written in stone here.  In true RPG fasion the GM can do whater he wants.  But that's missing the point of the post.

And for those of you complain about people farming it, the OP did mention it may just end up a ruin or something. Of course you won't make something like this farmable, that would be missing the point. And yes new ones would have to crop up, that goes without saying.

Reading this really brought me back to old school D&D the way it should be.