SWTOR

[Mrbloodworth]

I know, that's just my take on why things like instancing and such have taken hold. Yes, they're less world-y than seeing other players as you explore. But I can't think of any way to scale an MMO without either hard capping server populations at something stupidly low, eliminating levels and skills and gear entirely so the entire world is non linear and you can do anything at any time to prevent player concentration, or instancing the fuck out of things.

With enough landmass you could conquer it. But that would be a huge empty world for 5k+.

[Merusk]

Forgive me for ruining the theorycrafting by constantly bringing up an actual game but EQ2 has a load of non-instanced dungeons and no camp checks, corpse runs, finding that other people have every single monster spawn camped or anything like that. You don't camp, you run around killing things.

Non-instanced dungeons doesn't mean a game is a clone of EQ1. You had non-instanced dungeons before EQ1 too, in Ultima Online, and no camps there either (except maybe for the PKs camping the entrance to Covetous)

You're just going to totally ignore that population density thing, aren't you?

EQ2's "overland" dungeons are just as instanced as any other part of the game, you just don't have enough players to ever see it happen.

EQ2 and WoW before the random dungeon finder thing was about perfect. In WoW, their prior-to-random tool was fantastic. I rarely took more than 5 minutes to find a group. I'd fill out the dungeons I wanted, watch the chat, and it was easy. In EQ2 it was the same, only there it was entirely by the level based chats. And I met people and grouped with them or others in their guild again and again if we got along. And there were some guilds I'd never group with because I'd had multiple bad experiences with them. And all that wasn't so much about success or failure, but just about who was fun to game with.

It was fantastic IF you were the right class or flavor of the month tank.  The reason they went to random was too many of their customers were getting left out of groups because of the conventional "wisdumb" meant "don't pick up an xyz, that class sucks" or "<tank/healer> if you get another <leather/plate/cloth> wearer I'm quitting group."  Customer service trumps worldliness every day in my preferences.

[Sjofn]

In WoW, their prior-to-random tool was fantastic. I rarely took more than 5 minutes to find a group.

This was absolutely not my experience at all. And I say this as someone who was doing most of her pugging on a heavy pop server, as a tank. I can't even imagine the nightmare that was trying to get into a PUG as anything other than a healer (the other class I would PUG as, and it would also take a while).

[kildorn]

I don't remember any non instanced dungeons with good gear drops.  I couldn't stand EQ2 very long though so how the hell does that work?   They just clone the same boss everywhere?

From glancing around wikis, the open dungeon named mobs all seem to be quest spawns. You walk up, interact with *object* or enter *room* and the named spawns if you're on that quest step.

I haven't seen any quickly glancing through that were your *item of desire* droppers for camp checks, though I did see a few that said if you were on the quest but someone else was also on the quest and kills the target, you have to leave the zone and come back for the trigger to work. Hopefully fixed by now.

edit: found some non quest spawns with 15-30 minute respawns. Still seems camp-checky to me, unless gear no longer matters much in EQ2.

[eldaec]

EQ2 had instanced dungeons for serious business loot raiding.

For random xp / quest dungeons, they weren't instanced, but shit respawned *fast*.

[palmer_eldritch]

Forgive me for ruining the theorycrafting by constantly bringing up an actual game but EQ2 has a load of non-instanced dungeons and no camp checks, corpse runs, finding that other people have every single monster spawn camped or anything like that. You don't camp, you run around killing things.

Non-instanced dungeons doesn't mean a game is a clone of EQ1. You had non-instanced dungeons before EQ1 too, in Ultima Online, and no camps there either (except maybe for the PKs camping the entrance to Covetous)

You're just going to totally ignore that population density thing, aren't you?

EQ2's "overland" dungeons are just as instanced as any other part of the game, you just don't have enough players to ever see it happen.

EQ2X has lots and lots of players, and I recommend it! Have I ever mentioned my review on YouTube? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he46vWHxWLk

It also has lots of content, which helps a lot.

You make a good point that new instances of dungeons will be created if they get too crowded (if that's what you're talking about). Still, you can get a lot of groups into one dungeon before that happens.

I don't remember any non instanced dungeons with good gear drops.  I couldn't stand EQ2 very long though so how the hell does that work?   They just clone the same boss everywhere?

The bosses have pretty short spawn times and you get AA xp (special XP which lets you buy special abilities a bit like WoW's talents) for killing each boss - but you only get the AA xp once per boss on each character. So there's a motivation for running around killing everything you can, rather than camping the same boss over and over. You also get good loot from quests which involve going into a dungeon and killing bosses, so people are often keen to go in and kill one of the bosses near the end, but then they are happy because they have a good loot piece and don't feel the need to kill it over and over hoping for a cool item.

Also, most of the dungeons have lots of bosses.

[Numtini]

I'd forgotten EQ2s dungeons weren't instances up through, I think Kunark? The loot was fine to get yourself into raiding if that's what you wanted. Then with TSO they went to the WoW-style token grind for tiered armor thing.

[Ice Cream Emperor]

Seriously, new MMOs have time grinds and such that are annoying as shit. But compared to EQ's era? Keying? Corpse runs? Trains? Camp checks? Who the fuck would play that game on anything but the most unpopulated 50 person server? Walking into a cave and running into someone else clearing it is fun, it's neat. It feels like a living world. It's also completely unworkable once you walk into a cave and find that 60 people have every single monster spawn camped and the list can fit you in sometime around next month.

A lot of the things we find compelling that pulled us in to our old MMOs were either new gimmicks that we remember far too fondly (pretty much everything DAOC did, imo), or things that simply don't scale in a game with thousands of people playing in the same level range simultaneously.

I agree with most of this, but I also find it strange that you seem to feel like the game designers/developers have ZERO control over the population density of their servers. If something is really fun with X number of people but then gets enormously un-fun with X+2000 people, why not just manage server population so that you usually have close to X people? If there was a sweet spot in open-world, EQ-style gameplay, and that experience brought something to the table that is no longer present in instance-focused games, then it seems possible that there is some valuable tradeoff to be made between having a gajillion people on each server (with instances so nobody notices except when they're in town?) and letting players have this open-world experience (without wanting to tear their hair out because everything is camped 24/7.)

I mean, is a server with 1000 players that much worse than a server with 5000, if the gameplay is designed with the former in mind? Are the community/social aspects undermined, etc.? Seems like a question worth asking.

[Ingmar]

How do you manage server populations to the exact number you want without running into the "my friends are on this server but it won't let me make a character there" issue?

You could do GW/CoH style zone cloning... what else?

[Ice Cream Emperor]

Well, since the exact number is presumably fairly inexact (a hundred in either direction being fine), I would imagine there are a lot of ways to do it. Friends tend to join in groups, but for example it would be fairly simple to allow players on a server to give out 'invites' to that server, even if it is closed to the general population. So if your friend wants to play with you, you use one of these invites, and the invites are dispensed at a rate commensurate with the overall population-management strategy.

I mean, I can only assume there is already technology (in the sense of 'a group of techniques' not in the sense of 'machines', though that also) for this sort of thing, since all MMOs have to manage server populations on at least the broad 'is it alive or is it dead or is it overflowing' scale. Obviously, if your sweet spot is ultra-finicky, that means more resources, but I don't really think the sweet spot for EQ-style play is THAT hardcore specific. And of course you can have a mix of content styles to account for temporary overflow, etc.

[eldaec]

Wtb invite to maxpop server, 1plat, pst.

Overpopulation servers are bad, but being stuck on underpopulated servers is worse.

[kildorn]

Well, since the exact number is presumably fairly inexact (a hundred in either direction being fine), I would imagine there are a lot of ways to do it. Friends tend to join in groups, but for example it would be fairly simple to allow players on a server to give out 'invites' to that server, even if it is closed to the general population. So if your friend wants to play with you, you use one of these invites, and the invites are dispensed at a rate commensurate with the overall population-management strategy.

I mean, I can only assume there is already technology (in the sense of 'a group of techniques' not in the sense of 'machines', though that also) for this sort of thing, since all MMOs have to manage server populations on at least the broad 'is it alive or is it dead or is it overflowing' scale. Obviously, if your sweet spot is ultra-finicky, that means more resources, but I don't really think the sweet spot for EQ-style play is THAT hardcore specific. And of course you can have a mix of content styles to account for temporary overflow, etc.

Essentially, instanced zones are playing that game for you, but with better control (really talking more instanced overworld than 5 man instance here)

You don't care so much about total server population as much as online server population in a particular level range. I want 50 level 10-20s, 50 level 20-30s, and 50 level 30-40s. Realistically, that will wind up being 150 level 30-40s in a month or two, which won't work. But it also wouldn't work to have 10 level 10-20s, 20 level 20-30s, and 30 level 30-40s to assume I hit 50 30-40s in a month.

5 mans are instanced because some designer decided that it's far easier to tune content if you assume they have 5 dudes. Not somewhere between 1 and 15 dudes (remember when some wow instances let you use multiple groups? Hee!), plus it keeps out the annoying "I we clear to the boss and then some douchebag puts an arrow into him while we're drinking up"

Personally, I'd prefer instances be a little more aware of the fact that they're re-run. So instead of beating up High Lord Soandso 500 times for my sword, I beat up Scarlet Commander or something, and we leave the plot NPCs out of direct combat. But that's just me, I know some people really dig beating up on plot NPCs 500 times.

(I'd also like consistent game worlds, where if rezzing happens at rez points automatically, we have some reason that X npc dying is actually more than a minor setback.)

edit: you'd also need to avoid putting named drops and such on spawners, just to make sure that out of your entire zone the entire playerbase isn't trying to hug the same 5 feet of it.

[Rokal]

Overpopulation servers are bad, but being stuck on underpopulated servers is worse.

Over-populated servers are awesome. As long as you aren't running into a login queue, they are the best way to experience an MMO. The ability to participate in any aspect of the game at any hour of the day, a good economy, and a large enough amount of players that you'll probably find a guild you like.

Usually the 'recommended' servers are the lowest population servers that will give you the poorest MMO experience. The first thing I do when I start an MMO is figure out what server has the highest or close-to the highest population and roll there.

[Ice Cream Emperor]

It's almost like the word 'overpopulated' has no absolute meaning, but is instead relative to one's preferences!

But yeah, I agree that instances are doing this on a micro-scale, but obviously when all the content is instanced you don't get the same sort of experience as in an open-world model. A more high-level implementation of zoning/instancing would certainly be one way to go -- Aion did this with its non-PvP zones, and it worked quite well. (It worked particularly well later on when the newbie zones were nearly empty and you could jump between instances to farm named dudes for low-level drops.)

[Amaron]

If something is really fun with X number of people but then gets enormously un-fun with X+2000 people, why not just manage server population so that you usually have close to X people? If there was a sweet spot in open-world, EQ-style gameplay, and that experience brought something to the table that is no longer present in instance-focused games, then it seems possible that there is some valuable tradeoff to be made between having a gajillion people on each server (with instances so nobody notices except when they're in town?) and letting players have this open-world experience (without wanting to tear their hair out because everything is camped 24/7.)

Managing server population is only really useful when you can create enough content.   Even at the minimum population overcrowding max level content is going to happen.   That's why EQ1 had to pop out expansion boxes regularly and gate the whole system with progression.   That's just not viable now.   Especially when it wasn't really very popular in the first place.

[Lantyssa]

So how hot is she? 

He is kind of dorky looking.  But we've been friends since about sixth grade.

[PalmTrees]

I wonder how much the "story" will reduce grouping. In CoH when I'm on a mission arc I really don't want to halt my progress on the arc and sidetrack myself just doing random stuff with a group. My current character just finished the First Ward arcs and didn't group at all during that time. Since grouping is also much faster leveling, you risk outleveling your story. CoH adjusts things to some extent, but arcs have level caps. I've come back to arcs just to fight greens and grays and it's kinda a letdown.

Besides leveling it's just a single-mindedness, one thing at a time personality quirk I guess. It's always bugged me when games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age have a story of imminent impending doom, but have "hey wander across the lands, the manifestation of evil will wait for you" game play.

How much this applies to Kotor I dunno, but given my past behavior I expect I'll only be grouping for whatever group only flashpoints they cock-block my story with.

[Lantyssa]

This is actually a very worthwhile set of questions.  You should bring it up again when the NDA drops.

[Zetor]

At least in COH, grouping is pretty much exclusive with story. A lot of the 'story' in COH missions (especially in MA) is fed through briefing text and clues that you have to take a break from combat to read... breaks flow and just doesn't mesh with the usual 'gogogo' gameplay. You can read all you want when you're solo, though.

As much as I'm loath to admit it, the VOs may actually help in this regard?

[eldaec]

A general issue I have with bioware games is that they rarely integrate story telling with actual gameplay. It almost always gets channeled purely through conversation mechanics.

Bizarrely some of the otherwise unremarkable ME dlc is only big example I can think of where story happens in core gameplay (Kasumi especially).

[UnSub]

CoH/V also has the Flashback system, where you can go and replay most of the arcs in the game at the 'right' level.

It is an interesting question about how individual story is (particuarly BioWare stories, since that is their experience base: single player RPGs) yet MMOs are meant to be enhanced by group experiences.

[Furiously]

CoH/V also has the Flashback system, where you can go and replay most of the arcs in the game at the 'right' level.

It is an interesting question about how individual story is (particuarly BioWare stories, since that is their experience base: single player RPGs) yet MMOs are meant to be enhanced by group experiences.

You don't think it could be a single player game you play with others?

[Kageru]

Vanguard was going to have non-instanced dungeons with boss mobs. The idea being that your activity in the zone would trigger a boss event reserved to your party.  In practice they never got it working enough to try it on live. Which then ended up with crawling your way through a dungeon to find the boss spawn was being camped and you might as well have not bothered,

Really if you want to tell a story, even if it's "we killed everything, there was a boss at the end", then it should be instanced. And that also lets you balance the challenge and reward much better. If you want a "place" and player interaction (even if it's going to be negative a lot of the time) then it should be non instanced. I think a lot of players, and almost all the producers, have worked out that the more it is like a game the more mass market appeal it will have. Leading eventually to there being a series of muli-player hubs for forming groups, crafting and preening leading off into raids and instances. WoW is already pretty much there barring a lot of open world content to level up on.

I'd be massively surprised if SWTOR doesn't follow wows lead with more of the levelling done in instances to protect the story flow they've nailed themselves to.

[Samprimary]

'overpopulated' does have meaning, but that's in a measured data sense, as in the point at which the server's quantity of users during peak hours does significantly lessen the enjoyment of the experience for most users. Usually this has nothing to do with too many people standing on roofs in Orgrimmar, as it were, but rather lag, queue times, and full servers. If those don't exist, well, most people don't mind a shitzillion people, and usually tend to like it, because it makes the server feel vibrant!

[Numtini]

I agree about instances and storytelling and I think the dungeons we've seen in EQ2 and WoW are good examples. One of the things I find really offputting about the entire LFD gameplay is that it's so poorly suited to the kind of dungeons we see in most of the games today. I really wish someone would bring back the kind of random missioning system that COH and AO have. It's a lot more suited to the kind of repeatedly running dungeons than the hand crafted ones we are seeing in the major games.

[kildorn]

I would like "story instances" and gameplay centric (grinding/loot/combat whatever) instances to be different. Story being a hand crafted instance of doom. And gameplay being semi random "just go here and beat up *bad guy faction* for laughs"

Didn't AO do semi random, or did I just not play it enough to notice that door missions were always the same?

[Sky]

most people don't mind a shitzillion people, and usually tend to like it, because it makes the server feel vibrant!

My main issue with a 'shitzillion' players is that it tends to turn quests relying on contested content into a big waiting/ninja fest. Diku games are almost always better with fewer people outside the social hubs, because they're based on contesting over restricted content. In pvp that may be jazzy, but for pve, it means waiting and frustration.

Few games have truly made mmo worth the first m. UO, Eve, SWG, PS....there's almost a pattern there...With the exception of PS, there's not a lot of reward for short playtimes in those models, though.

[March]

Vanguard was going to have non-instanced dungeons with boss mobs. The idea being that your activity in the zone would trigger a boss event reserved to your party.  In practice they never got it working enough to try it on live. Which then ended up with crawling your way through a dungeon to find the boss spawn was being camped and you might as well have not bothered,

Really if you want to tell a story, even if it's "we killed everything, there was a boss at the end", then it should be instanced. And that also lets you balance the challenge and reward much better. If you want a "place" and player interaction (even if it's going to be negative a lot of the time) then it should be non instanced. I think a lot of players, and almost all the producers, have worked out that the more it is like a game the more mass market appeal it will have. Leading eventually to there being a series of muli-player hubs for forming groups, crafting and preening leading off into raids and instances. WoW is already pretty much there barring a lot of open world content to level up on.

I'd be massively surprised if SWTOR doesn't follow wows lead with more of the levelling done in instances to protect the story flow they've nailed themselves to.

WaR experimented with open, or multi-group, dungeons that instanced just the Boss.

Like all things WaR, there was a nugget of a good idea wrapped in a layer of failure; they never could get tagging right, nor solo players griefing groups, nor did they build on the genius of Darkness Falls with the dungeon being a solo place for gathering critical mass for group content.

My impression was that a new [old] dungeon paradigm that leverages instancing judiciously is certainly possible, just not by those folks (unfortunately).

[Mrbloodworth]

most people don't mind a shitzillion people, and usually tend to like it, because it makes the server feel vibrant!

My main issue with a 'shitzillion' players is that it tends to turn quests relying on contested content into a big waiting/ninja fest. Diku games are almost always better with fewer people outside the social hubs, because they're based on contesting over restricted content. In pvp that may be jazzy, but for pve, it means waiting and frustration.

Few games have truly made mmo worth the first m. UO, Eve, SWG, PS....there's almost a pattern there...With the exception of PS, there's not a lot of reward for short playtimes in those models, though.

IIRCC, SWG spawned the "nest" when you got close, minimizing the the chances of someone killing it all before you got there. But then again, mission terminals were intended to be the 30 minute content system.

I think it was one of the closest we ever came to having a decent system that did not require the downsides of segregating a player base. Someone should apply it to dungeons. But i suppose that would be odd.

[Nebu]

AO also did a nice job with the solo mission terminals and random dungeons.  They were painfully repetitive, but a start in the right direction and far more fun than thew DAoC version.

[Rasix]

Yah, the AO implementation wasn't terrible.  I did most of my leveling through those, although it was more efficient to find a good camp and shoot shit.   

Then the 12.6 patch came and they broke this shit out of the game.  Ahh, memories.

[Shatter]

 

Then the 12.6 patch came and they broke this shit out of the game.  Ahh, memories.

Miracle patch!

[01101010]

I think they should do patch version numbers in Roman Numerals... or letters. That would set them apart fer shurr!!

[sinij]

I would like "story instances" and gameplay centric (grinding/loot/combat whatever) instances to be different.

WoW attempted this once with a "siege of undercity" quest line caper, not sure why they decided to abandon this model, probably because that was too much effort.

[Slayerik]

go solo to level 50, group up for the dungeons or quests that require it.

1) Do we know the difference in gameplay from PVE to PVP servers.

2) Is there a PVP segment of F13 making a guild?

Open pvp? I think the starter worlds are faction-locked. Snakecharmer is bailing on BC for a PvP server, not sure if he has a guild in mind or what. Wonder if it's too rpg-y for Slayerik's crowd :)

Hey Sky! I'm a few days behind, and don't plan on playing this anyway...but glad to see you care