f13.net

Link (http://www.nerfbat.com/2008/09/11/public-quests-are-antisocial/)

Lots of good points, and also things i am seeing now when i log on.

After chapter, say, 3, that's not the fastest way to get influence. Because soloing a PQ means you have to wait out phase 2 or 3 (depending on the PQ and how uber you are) and let it fail and reset. The fastest way since early beta has been Tank + Healer + Mage and just AE PQs down.

And his point about "get the tank killed, you get more influence if he dies!" on the hero is flat out stupid. The influence for killing the mob will go up by jack shit (one less person to split it with), but the influence reward for killing phase 3 is the phase completion bonus, which has nothing to do with amount you helped or who else is around, it's a static XP/Influence gift to everyone involved. It's the entire reason PQ grinding is good xp: No matter how much the trash mobs are diluted by other people, the phase switch bonuses stay huge.

The "go interact with item X" phases of some PQs are, however, retarded about influence splitting. Though for laughs, you usually get influence for killing the guys guarding the object, too.

edit: Just to be fair, the ways to "rig" PQ rewards are to either be a damage spiker and steal most of the influence on things tanks are hitting, or to be a healer and just HoT everyone for the massive contribution bonus at the loot reward roll.

My personal tactic was to hit every mob in the area before anyone else does, from what i can tell first hit gets full credit.

First hit gets full _XP_

Influence is divided by contribution (taking damage from it, healing people involved, dealing damage)

If you're in a group, it's an even split based on what everyone involved would have gotten.

The trick for stealing influence is to be an ungrouped DPS class, and burn the crap out of things someone else is killing. You'll get the lion's share of the influence since you did most of the damage.

Kind of a strange article.  I've noticed all the things he's mentioned, but while I was reading that I was just thinking the whole time, "that's just an implementation detail, not inherent to the idea of public quests."  But then at the end that's basically what he said as well.  At the beginning it sounded like he was going to make the case that the idea of PQ's is inherently antisocial, when in actuality he just ended up saying that WAR's PQ's have some implementation problems.  It's just kinda weird because it really doesn't invalidate any of the "singing PQ's praises" stuff he mentioned in the beginning.

Quests that random people group and do together are antisocial...  He has a good future in Republican spin doctoring.

The PQs combined with open grouping are great.  The only ones that are empty are those that are badly placed or don't have any quests that point you in that direction.  Or he was outlevelling everyone and doing empty tier2 stuff.

Exactly, it's what I said in the comments.

Good idea that maybe needs work in the execution. Same as always with Mythic.

You just made part of his point, everyone is working VS. everyone else. I was trying to get first shots on everything, you were trying to get max damage...purely for personal reasons. That would be antisocial.

I'm no psychology buff, but wouldn't that be more sociopathic than anti-social?  Does everyone engage in that kind of behaviour, or is it just a few "ruining it" for everyone else?

The closest I got to social(ness?) in a PQ during my playtime was when someone said "hey you fucking asshole" then kicked me from the public group I was when I hit max influence and ran 100 yards away to buy my influence reward after the PQ completed.

Otherwise we never said a word to one another throughout any PQ I did, nor did anyone do anything that resembled helping you.

Well, technically sociopathy is termed anti-social personality disorder. But if you want to go ahead and make grand sweeping psychological generalizations from a videogame, the term that immediately comes to my mind is 'douchebag'.

Well, I was really more getting at whether or not it was a practice everyone participates in, or if it is just a few douchebags.  But I think Cevik's post described it well enough.

Oddly, I've mostly seen a order/destro split on PQs in OB. The Destro ones people work together, there's group chat, people asking for heals, and the boss mobs go down fast. Order ones no one talks, healers just nuke the boss, people die, all in silence. Or one/two guys talking in /party and everyone else ignoring them.

Little hint: Cohesive groups do better.

So many people play MMO as a single-player game with other people around.  PQ are continuing this tend.

Small groups will get much more out of a PQ than a soloist no matter how douchebaggie they are.  They will get more stage bonuses and better rolls at the end.

I've found that the random people in PQ's just piss me off.  Take for instance the Chapter 3 PQ in the human lands.  You kill a bunch of mobs and then have to flame 5 wagons.  Well, each wagon spawns a champion or two.  Every time my group does this PQ, some idiot runs around and caps all 5 wagons spawning like 10 champions, the main hero boss, and his two champion minions.  Solos and small groups that have no clue what they're doing essentially wipe the encounter for others.  I think this type of scenario has too much grief potential to be an effective social tool. 

Well if you have a group of people and don't want to bother with hordes of mouth breathers coming in, taking your kills and nabbing the very nicely random loot that wouldn't have been won without your groups effort you can always go do a dungeon....oh, wait.

I like PQs. I think these complaints are superficial. It's a neat structure. F13 is already antisocial, PQs aren't going to change anything.

There is 2 other PQ in that chapter and 6 others in the allied chapters.  You have plenty of choices but I am sure people just want to bitch.

You missed the point completely.  In a PQ, ONE PERSON can ruin a PQ for LOTS OF PEOPLE.  This is a bad mechanic.  It's not about my group wanting all the loot or xp.  It's about one idiot making it hard for everyone to complete the PQ.

I like the concept behind PQ's.  I just don't think that they thought out some of the implementation thoroughly.  As PQ's get harder, there are new mechanics introduced that allow a single player to spawn multiple champion/heroic mobs.  This has potential to cause lots of grief issues. 

The problem with this mentality is you are essentially saying "look, if you are willing to work at it, there is fun to be had, you just need to put in the effort to find it."

That doesn't work in a mmog.  I keep seeing iterations on the above statement said about everything that people have complaints about, for example, every time someone complains that the queue times are long they are told "gah, just go to the Empire/Chaos land and queue there!"  That may be good for the die hard supporters of the game that are going to like it no matter what and are going to put in the extra effort to FIND the fun, but it isn't going to work for Joe Schmoe who just happens to want to log in and have fun.

This is why the game is going to be stillborn.  There may be fun to be had, but there are plenty of unfun things that tend to get in the way.  And expecting people to work around those unfun things isn't a valid solution.  Saying "ohh so what if this PQ is broken?  Just do another one" isn't going to work for the average guy, in my most humble of opinions.

As you rank up the PQs get harder, and I'd rather get a shot at the rewards when you finish it than max out my influence.

Just in case it wasn't clear in the article itself...

I'm being hard on Public Quests not based on their concept, but based on their implementation. They have more potential than any new PvE system I've seen in years, so I'm being very critical of them. In the latest patch, it seems they made it so you gain Influence for killing anything in the PQ even if they aren't directly related to the stages. This is a major fix to the antisocial bent they seemed to take on due to players be asses.

I have zerged PQs.  I have soled PQs.  I have done PQ in a small group.  These are all viable ways.  You're choice.  Only in Cevikland does giving people options equal work.

>This is why the game is going to be stillborn.
So you join Grunk in doomcasting WAR.  

And only in tazelbainland is giving people 3 broken options and 1 working option anywhere near acceptable.

There's a lot of things worth directing hate at in WAR, I don't think PQs is one of them.

PQ's are an example of something I see in academia daily; great concept, lousy implementation.  In their current form they will be AFK abused, used as griefing tools, and min-maxxed constantly.  You're right though, compared to crashes, UI concerns, mob pathing, pet pathing, and various other bugs and balance issues... PQ's aren't high on the bitch list. 

You can choice to drive a thousand different cars.  Just because you would prefer not to drive a minivan doesn't mean cars or minivans are broken.

Okay, and that's a valid opinion you have.  However, I think PQs are a gimmick that were implemented because not enough time was allotted to design real group content and are just tacked on with very little design consideration, some pretty big glaring holes in both the design and implementation that will quickly grow dull and rarely be used in a month.  See, we have different opinions.

You don't understand what I'm saying by broken.  I'm not saying that it's a car I didn't choose, I'm saying that queue times for pvp instances other than Empire/Chaos were literally 4 hours and growing.  That's not a "you chose a minivan" thats "as broken as a fucking gremlin."

Same thing for PQs, there are PQs that are flat broken.  Some are so hard to find that there are literally no one doing them, some are exploitable in serious ways to grief people, some are exploitable by AE classes to always steal the most contribution, and a few work.  Those aren't "zomg you didn't pick the minivan but it's still a valid type of car", those things are broken.  For every 5 things you find in the game, 1 works and 4 are broken.

Short of the fact people don't work together and there's no real way to force them to outside of controlled scenarios, they seem to be at least in tier 1 and 2, the best way to get guaranteed rewards (either by winning a roll in a PQ or through influence points) and experience. The reward for trudging through what everyone is calling "bad implementation" seems to me adequate. That said, I've done somewhere around 100 PQs and while yea, some morons can fuck it up, I don't suck at the game so I've had a good time and have done reasonably well.

In fact, I do very very well when playing my Shadow Warrior winning more often than not winning.

Will they be used in a month? No doubt, an organized group of 6 can take down an entire PQ. That's one group. Failing to see the whole problem itt.


I have never had this problem. Perhaps your server was shitty, entirely possible, but 4 hours? Not buying it, sorry.

So, what you're saying is that the playerbase should overcome bad implementation with skill AND be happy about it if the rewards are proportionate to the annoyance?  I want to have fun playing the game.  For me the rewards are not the fun, they are a byproduct of the fun process.

I posted about it when it happened to me (in the Greenskin/Dwarf area) and the answer was "queue in Empire/Chaos and/or switch servers".  I could go dig up the post.  It was back just before the first preview weekend on Destruction side during the CE beta period.  Perhaps it was a low population problem because they overestimated the number of players coming in CE beta, but I suspect that if I saw the problem then, it will be much much worse in a month or two.

My annoyances with PQs are no greater or lesser than any annoyance involving other players. I already don't like other players. They're bad at games and suck most of the time. They also make things harder more often than not. But at the same time, Mythic can't fix other players being Bad At Organization. It's a sad reality of MMOGs. But the actual implementation doens't effect my playstyle too much.

With 7-8 people not even working well together, you can come in and sweep up a PQ with as little as a DPS and a Healer with nominal effort. The other people just have to be bodies slamming any ability at all. Better than regular questing imo.

Cevik was Destro, and that's the problem.   It's like when WoW had server-only BG queues.  The Alliance queues were 2-3 hours while the horde-side were nearly instant.  I had the same problem when I was destro, but never saw it on Order.

As for PQs.  They're a return back to oldschool "open" dungeons instead of Instances, so they're going to have the exact same problems those open dungeons did.  One random asshat with grief on his mind will make life miserable for everyone involved.  "D'vinn to zone!"

On the scenerio queue, the only time this ever been an issue when I leveled into T2 DvG before everyone else.  The problem lasted a day.  Same problem must exist on new servers in WoW.
On PQ,  now you are switching your argument from a criticism of PQs as a concept to Nebu's some pq are bugged/griefable and need to be reexamined.  

I've played nothing but Destro and I can only remember once where scenarios weren't popping fairly regularily. I only played in the evenings and weekends though, so maybe that's it?

The advantage of PQs is they are of smaller scope so the impact of griefing is very minor.  It's not like Lower Guk where you practically live there.

I am skepital of the "Bad Impemtation" argument.  Basically you are saying you could armchair design a better PQ System.

This is true. I've seen it already even in lowbie PQs in open beta - someone 6 or 7 levels above everyone else can suck up so much influence vs everyone else that it's pointless to even bother participating, and several guilds had people doing exactly that (powerlevelling guild groups, probably). The only influence I got was the stage complete bonuses - I might as well have not even bothered actually doing anything.

And yeah, it's not so much armchair design as something that should (and probably will) be fixed in live once the grief potential is demonstrated.

As order, I found it difficult to get a scenario pop, even in order/chaos areas. This may be because the server I chose was listed as medium/full in population disparity. There just weren't a whole lot of order on most of the time.

Any time ANY of us is critical of a system, it does suggest that we know a better way.  Often we don't.  It's easier to spot flaws than it is to offer a solution.  I'm guilty of this on occasion since I have little knowledge of coding games.  My hope is that if enough of us recognize a problem, that someone with the technical expertise will appreciate our input and apply some sort of solution.  Hell, a compromise is often as good as a solution.  

I was tier 1 at the time, though in the post I original made I did posit the possibility that I was one of the few remaining teir 1 people and that was part of the problem.  Of course I also believe that there was a strong possibility of it just being a bug; however, I continue to assert that when WoW had BG queues that operated nearly identically to WARs bg queues the overpopulated side had a terribly long wait for pvp, and WAR has not in any way addressed the problem.  So I suspect that while my problem may be isolated during beta, it will be a major problem at release and an even worse problem a month out of release.


No, I'm really not.  I'm saying 2 things:

1)  That PQs as a concept suck.  They are, as Merusk said above, nothing but "old school" non-instanced dungeons.  They were only designed as a "cheap" way to implement group content because WAR did not have the resources do design well thought out instances like WoW.  They look all unique and cool to you now, but in a month they will be a worthless grind that no one does.

2)  Not only is the idea shitty and the design bad, but they are poorly implemented, bugged and griefable.  So not only did they have a bad idea, they failed to implement them in a way that works.

You see, I'm not changing arguments, I'm arguing two things at once.  The idea sucks, but not only that, the implementation of the bad idea was bad.

Actually it would be trivially simple to tweak PQs to minimize griefing:

- normalize influence rewards, and cap out-of-level-range contributors (dampens PLing - they still contribute by making the actual encounter trivial)
- set a minimum influence award per contribution which scales on count of players in an encounter (will have some minmaxers doing one-hit-and-move-on, but will better reward casual players, and minmax behavior would move away from trying to dominate an encounter)

Those two fixes would cap most griefing that I witnessed.

Also, I disagree with Cevik. PQs are a good idea *because* they return to open-world encounters vs. instancing, while addressing many of the problems with open-world encounters. It's a fantastic way for casual players to see content normally reserved for high level groups.

This is a silly argument.  In no way am I even remotely implying I know how to fix the PQ system.  I do not in any way need to know how to fix the system in order to tell you it's currently broken.

I don't get paid to make games.  I am not required to know a better way to approach the problem in order to tell you that the current approach is not good.  Your argument lacks any merit and I honestly can't believe I've wasted this much time addressing it.

My main grief with the PQs that I've seen to date, which happen to all be in WAR, is that they are a cheap way of doing open-world encounters.  There is no real design, it's just

"Everyone click on 10 objects"
"GOOD JOB!"
"Okay now everyone kill 10 things"
"GOOD JOB!"
"Okay now everyone kill the big thing!"
"GOOD JOB!"

Then.. wait 2 minutes and repeat.

It's fun because it's a unique carnival atmosphere orgy of killing that we haven't seen in awhile (kinda like how Crushbone was fun the first couple of times we went there for much the same reason) but the ideas are all cheap.  There is no real nice design, it just repeats those 3 basic steps for pretty much every PQ that I've seen.  And once people get tired of those basic things and the griefing inherent in it and stop doing the PQs they will be less and less fun because they won't have that same atmosphere.

Get it straight, man.  Typically you kill ten things, and THEN click ten objects.

The 'Defend these X Squishies against incoming Mobs' PQs are quite fun too

I'm not bashing them, i found them fun. But what i found was, they are the  manifestation of the rule "Playing alone together". So much so, that no one is doing it "For the WARRRGGG!", they are doing it for the individual rewards and completely selfish reasons (Driving what the blog was about). The "Scoring a point for our side" is a side affect, and a mask as to whats really going on,. if anything, mythic should be commended on such a clever ruse/masking of the reality.

It an improvement from waiting, usually to long, to get the "right" group to get start some content.  One can solo the start of most PQs even.  MMOs biggest constraint is scheduling two or more people and it helps solve that problem.  Not have a "right" group does make it easier but also more accessable.  Tradeoffs are everywhere in design.  Every game\sport can be broken down into do something, get a reward, and repeat from 1 stage to N stages.  Balancing is going to come later as they need to get the content in and working enough to get from start to finish.  Many zones had broken PQs that could not even be finished a few weeks ago.  They have months of work balancing work to do which they have been blocked on.

FIFY

Also Cevik, you're being dumb.  Quite screaming at everyone.  You think the game is awful, thank you.  I think the PQ system is the best evolution in DIKU PVE since instanced raid zones.  I enjoy them for what they are.  I don't have to prep for them, or wait around for them, or search for a group with them I just show up for a while play and then move on.  That's why they're good.  I think you're playing the WOW fanboy a little strong here.  WAR deserves criticism, I agree, but it's not terribad like you say it is the you  try to convince others of that fact.

Also have you played the game since the first PW?

Not thinking PQs are the bees knees is dumb?

I think pretty much everything you see as being nice about PQs will be dead in a month when the newbie lands are no longer filled with people.  Sure they partially work right now, typically because there are a bunch of people trying to do them at the moment, but when everyone filters out of the starting zones I think you'll likely find that you're going to have to put together a group to do the PQs, and then you won't even have a nicely designed scenario to run through for your effort.  Instead you'll gather 10 things, kill 10 things, and kill big thing, all in the same spot, then repeat it until your tank has enough influence and drops group half way through the 3rd iteration of the PQ because he doesn't need it anymore and you all die to the champion mob spawn.

I'm sorry that I don't agree with you and that makes me dumb.

EDIT:  Even right now, in open beta, there are typically about enough people to have one PQ per area going, and the others I've found have been ghost towns.

Players won't do something in ANY game without incentive.

Was not the point.  :grin:

It's not that you disagree with me but you don't shut up about it.  We know you think the game sucks, can we move on or maybe pick a new thing to hate the game about.

Also, you can't really see how the PQs will work when the game isn't live yet with working populations.  But some PQs will be empty some other won't be but your character development doesn't hinge on them being full all the time, there are other things to do.


Well if you want to pick extreme cases to argue against something, fine by me.  Carry on.

1) Your speculation on Mythic's motives has no relationship on whether or not PQ are a good idea.  Many people don't like instances.  And if they instantized the PQs, people would be screaming about it being single player like Guild Wars. You keep mentioning "in one month".  Nobody knows how it'll take the tier 1 to empty.  It may never empty because all the alt rolling casuals are common these days.

2) Not my experience.  I have never been griefed.  It is a concern but its not a rampant problem plaguing the PQ.  As I mention if there is grieffing going its not very sever.  You are not tied to a PQ.  Bugged PQs suck but so do bugged regular quests and they will get fixed.  You point out how simplistic quest steps are but all quests can be boiled down to their kill, gather, deliver steps.  That's a knock on the concept of quests as a mechanic not just public quests.

It's okay Cevik we know you don't believe anything you say.  It's all just you killing time.

Also, if the PQs were instances instead, there would still be the "ghost town" issue, simply that you'd be unable to find a group to complete them instead of being able to find a mass of random people roughly equalling a group in the area.

How are those BRD instance groups working out for you? At least with the PQ model for this, you can accomplish *something* without a group (getting influence for the first phase mobs, etc.)

I said instances, for the record, not because the PQs should be instanced, but because in WoW the instances are designed chunks of game that have you traveling through a story (of sorts) and not some static location to go and stand and have mobs spawn for you to kill them.

That's my gripe with the way PQs work in WAR, they were a cheap way to make forced group content.  No real effort had to go into designing them and you can tell.  Every one has you go stand in one place for 3 iterations of waves of mobs/waves of gathering things and then you are done.

I'd like to see something like a "raid the castle" PQ.  Hell maybe one exists in the game, but I sure never saw it.  And no, I don't mean the silly greenskin PQ where you gather stuff to get a giant to spawn some waves of mobs running out of the entrance to a castle, then get a wave of boss mobs.  I mean a real, run into the castle help push through the defenses and move into the throne room and finally kill the boss.  Or maybe another one that is something more akin to the Escape from Durnholde event in WoW.

Something other than stand in one spot fighting/gathering waves of stuff.

Which is amusing, considering "vast amount of spawning mobs rushing at you, followed by a boss mob" defines 99% of pre-raid level WoW instances.

Given how closely Warhammer cleaved to WoW's 'inspiration', I'd be very surprised if there were not high level heavily scripted public quests that tried to replicate the scripting of high level WoW instances. Of course, since only up to level 20 is outside of NDA at the moment...

At least in the Tank and Spank pre-raid WoW you don't just stand in one place and wait for the mobs to come to you.

That's the difference, pre-raid WoW may suck, but at least they took the time to design a dungeon around the waves of badguys.

EDIT: In WAR it's "Go stand next to those wagons, we'll send some people to meet you" over and fucking over.

We'd probably know if they'd lift that NDA now wouldn't we?

I'm not seeing a big functional difference, once you strip away all the set dressing, between "stand in one spot, waves of monsters come at you" and "move around to where waves of monsters are standing".

WoW PVE is generally better for PVE-focused play (I would bet good money they'll implement PQs or something similar anyway.) In WAR PvE is there to get you in shape for PVP, and the 'drop in and get your work done painlessly' model of the PQ is pretty ideal for that it seems to me.

And I may agree with this if Mythic didn't seem so intent on keeping people out of the end game PvP and grinding PvE content.  They nerfed XP rates for PvP and raised it for questing in the most recent patch.  Not to mention that in the patch before they nerfed XP gain across the board.

They put little effort into the PvE, it's a crappy PvE game where even the dungeons are just "stand in one place and grind until you can't stand it anymore" PQs, and then they appear to be constantly trying to make it take more time to level and require PvE in the leveling process.

EDIT:  And my argument, of course, is that stripping away the set dressing is EXACTLY the problem.  They've turned dungeons into stand in one place with a group and grind.  They likely did it because it was much cheaper than designing actual dungeons, and it ends up being a boring grind fest where you don't even have cool changing scenery to look at while you grind it.  All mmogs boil down to pressing a button, but none of us want the "set dressing" stripped down to the point where there is a big button to press in the middle of the screen and a chat box.

cevik so in your vast experience with Mystic's PvE/PvP design were you ever a member of the Elder server and/or have you ever made it passed rank 10?

I have access to the Elder Server so unfortunately I can't say anything about it right now, other than, perhaps they want to keep the end game sekret to the masses like a giant SPOILER tag so they get to enjoy it themselves?

You are right, if the answer is "there is seeeeeekrit stuff that makes it all better" then there is just nothing I can say.

I'll believe it when I see it (or at least when I read about the astounding success that is WAR!)..

P.S.:  My vast experience with Mythic at least lets me spell the name of the company correctly.

The only reason this thread made it to 65 posts is because 1. I just posted and 2. You lot fed the troll.

He's got good points but right now war is all a waiting game and speculation. Will things feel empty after two months if you are behind the levelling push? is the content post 20 good? how slow will levelling feel when the game is really out and you are devoting many nights to it?

Some outlooks are highly optimistic and some very pessimistic but in the end all i know is i'll be buying the game to find out.

Unless they change the loot bag award mechanic completely it is inherent to PQs. Everybody participating through phase 3 is in competition for a very scarce resource: the blue loot bag. That is the issue.

As far as I've been able to determine, contribution and influence are not the same thing, though. The original author's points all seem to be centered around influence gain, but that's not what determines your roll bonus, your contribution (which seems to be a hidden calculation that doesn't match how influence is awarded) is - and actually those loot bags add incentive for people to stay around through the end of the fight and *not* screw it up for people, because if the encounter isn't completed sucessfully, you don't get your shot at the bag.

The "anti-social" stuff I saw centered around phase 3. There is some stuff that goes on in phase 2 but that's typically a fairly short phase (assuming you have enough to even get past it). For influence farming from what I remember you get the bulk of it doing the Phase 1 stuff so while there is incentive to screw with other people in phase 2 the "bonus" from doing that sort of stuff would seem small, though I haven't played in a while so I don't know what the numbers are like now.

In phase 3 people will do things like ignore the Champions and only beat on the Hero (thinking that'll give them a better ranking), not rez other people (unless it's their only tank), and so on.

But he just looks so hungry. :(

Well cevik has a blue tag, and feeding him is entertaining as a bored person in their office.

I know the early game is important and all... but honestly if you are judging the PQs by the Tier 1... then you just don't have some VERY important information.

1. There ARE PQ instances (they call them "dungeons").  We played in one, it had 3 wings, each with multiple PQs, each of which was "story-line" based, and were different from the "kill this, pick up this" type.  Of course, I am not sure how much more you CAN do in these types of games... its not like "sing this song" is a real option.

2. Even the non-instanced PQs change quite a bit as you move through, and most of that involves ever-increasing story-lines/mechanics for completing them.

3. Do PQs with your guild and forget all the other people... you will have more fun :).  Again, this is not very possible in the early game, but I am betting the PQs will become less populated as you level and the world opens up a bit.  Guild groups running PQs and SCenarios in between... then hitting some RvR to take a few keeps... that is where this game shines.  4 hours of play time in an evening and you don't sit in ONE DUNGEON the whole time.

There is a T2 dungeon in both capitals.