Kaplan at GDC09, mistakes made in quest design.

[pxib]

The open groups in WAR were probably the only thing they did right. Even though nobody was necessarily doing exactly what you wanted to do, you could be guaranteed that you'd find a group doing something that required a group to do. I'll have to look up the Toontown system.

I agree that the experience issue was likely why the 'gather X' model was created, but just like it was a bad idea fill folks' bags with pages of the Green Hills of Stranglethorn even though it created a zone economy, I think it's a bad idea to make people feel (accurately or no) like grouping with their friends (or new, potential friends) is slowing them down. Just like the low drop rate on certain quest items did guarantee that people would get more experience grinding quest mobs than if two infected pheasant lungs dropped off every pheasant. Not knowing other than the vaguest estimate of how long you have before you find those last three lungs appeared doesn't make the experience more exciting. Especially when you know that grouping with that jerk poaching your pheasants isn't going to make lung-gathering go any faster.

[Kitsune]

The thing that's kinda torqued me about quests in WotLK is the uneven applications of the whole zone phasing system.  They were going on and on about how their super new technology let them have quests that made permanent changes in a zone for people who had done quests, but they still had TONS of zones where there'd be no change at all.  Big quest chain, involved the death of a giant god thing.  But the giant god thing is still just chilling in the middle of the zone whenever I go by.  Was it really so hard to just make me not able to see the stupid god NPC after witnessing its dramatic death?  Another zone, same deal, big quest chain, led to the killing of a huge undead construct, huge undead construct promptly respawned and went back to wandering around.  Meanwhile the whole super-uber cutscene quest that people are talking about did change things to fuck up the Alliance camp by the gate where the massacre happened, which is fine, but weeks later it's STILL on fire, and still full of screaming NPCs, which are annoying as hell whenever I'm flying overhead and shrieks start blaring out of my speakers.  Maybe someone could possibly have set things to stop the screaming people after the conclusion of the quest?  Just an idea.

[Ironwood]

It is annoying.  Also, no phasing mechanism for groups to help you out.

However, it is, whatever the criticisms, quite a large leap forward in the tech of online games.  I expect that the game that actually kills WoW (and it could be blizzards next one for all I know) will use this comprehensively to finally give us at least the illusion of a changing world.

Here's to hoping.

[Triforcer]

So the next big thing is to pay a monthly fee for 100% instanced single-player games with a chat client?  That incredible breakthrough is already here, its called "Play Baldur's Gate with IRC open."  Pass. 

[Ironwood]

I'm fairly sure that's not what I said.

You really have a massive reading problem.  Or you're actually that retarded.

Also, candlekeep was much the same when I went back the second time.  Except full of Dopplegangers.

Fucking Dopplegangers.


Edited to add : 

Further, by bringing up 100% instanced you seem to be ignorant of the difference between the two.  Phasing is an entirely different application of technology and has a lot more to offer than instancing.  In terms of 'World Change' Instancing is fucking useless since, by the very nature, it's totally static.  You can NEVER have world change with instancing.

However, you could combine the two.  Imagine two portals, one to Strat and one to Burnt-to-fuck Strat.  Now you run quests that use phasing where you attach strat to 'get in' to the first instance.  On completion, every time you come back, the portal takes you to 'ruined strat' where you can find the treasures you missed the first time or the bandits that have now moved in.

It's different and, actually, fairly exciting.  It's what phasing could have been in WotLK, except that my view is not only did it get rushed, but they didn't have time to really think on it.

Or they're saving it for the next step.

[Sheepherder]

That's really only scratching the surface.

Effectively phasing is the same technology as stealth/invisibility, except you can make the shit that's flagged completely non-interactive with the player.  Assuming they are using a relatively powerful OO programming language (correctly), you could pretty easily set it up so that each player/group/raid has their own small world subspace, and even do tricky shit like make it so that heavily farmed quest mobs are instanced to be player or group specific, so that you don't have problems with them being over-farmed and don't have to enable exceedingly short spawn timers.

One of the biggest advantages I could see is mining/herbalism.  You could fairly easily make the nodes player-specific and put them on a 24 hour (or greater) respawn cycle to keep people from just running laps in Wintergrasp and fighting over nodes and force them to spread out more.

[Ironwood]

Oh, I know.  That's why the limited useage of it in WoW actually bugs fuck outta me.

It's a real leap forward, but it's not being used properly.  It's like taking a helicopter down the shops.

[WindupAtheist]

If quest mobs are phased to be group specific, and I don't have that quest, what do I see? If I already killed the undead giant, how many groups of people fighting air am I going to have to walk past? Or won't I be able to see them at all? Because finding out I couldn't help my friend run the initial Icecrown quests because he hadn't "built" Crusader's Pinnacle yet and was invisible to me was annoying the other night.

How much phasing can you do before 75% of the playerbase can't see each other because they're on the wrong part of a quest chain, or until everyone sees something different and nothing makes sense?

[K9]

All the Icecrown group quests are all in the last instance of the zone phase. It does mean that you can't boost people, but frankly that's a tiny annoyance which is balanced out by much better content.

The implementation could stand to be improved, but I definitely wouldn't want to see it removed.

Something that would be interesting to see would be back-and-forth phasing. So you could see Crusader's Pinnacle be built, and then later overrun by undead, then rebuilt. This might be better applied to a pvp zone like Wintergrasp though.

[Paelos]

I do wish WoW would embrace/steal WAR's public quest node system. I think if they added that part to the game instead of making group quests they way they are now, you'd have a lot better system in play.

[Lantyssa]

The only downside I see to phasing is if you don't watch your zone sizes.  Even if you can't see all the other players and assorted mobs, they're still there, and a peek_a_boo() check has to be made for every item interaction.  They'll have to balance not making the zone feel empty with "cool shit happens here!" across seventeen different phases, and which groups can see what if people are on different steps.

[March]

I do wish WoW would embrace/steal WAR's public quest node system. I think if they added that part to the game instead of making group quests they way they are now, you'd have a lot better system in play.

Yes, I could imagine Bizzard doing PQ's intelligently... like one per faction.

A place where you could go to gain faction/xp... join public groups and then sally forth to a dungeon or raid if the group mix is fun.

Better than standing in Dalaran spamming /4 for groups while you wait for the guild event.

Throw a couple quest hubs nearby... allow for branching in and out of the PQ with directed quests... golly gee, might be fun.

I would shed a single tear for Mythic if a WoW refined WaR PQ/Open Group system was their [Mythic's] single $65M contribution to the advancement of MMO gameplay.

[Phred]

I do wish WoW would embrace/steal WAR's public quest node system. I think if they added that part to the game instead of making group quests they way they are now, you'd have a lot better system in play.

Yes, I could imagine Bizzard doing PQ's intelligently... like one per faction.

A place where you could go to gain faction/xp... join public groups and then sally forth to a dungeon or raid if the group mix is fun.

Better than standing in Dalaran spamming /4 for groups while you wait for the guild event.

Throw a couple quest hubs nearby... allow for branching in and out of the PQ with directed quests... golly gee, might be fun.

I would shed a single tear for Mythic if a WoW refined WaR PQ/Open Group system was their [Mythic's] single $65M contribution to the advancement of MMO gameplay.

I was going to point out the fatal flaw as I saw it in public quests that made them a waste of time for development but your idea solves it. Brilliant.  If the next QD isle quest/daily hub to go in featured public quests, the whole "what happens when the levelling rush is over?" problem with public quests disappears. This idea should be presented to Blizzard, IMO.

+rep.

[Margalis]

"We should never say something's wrong in Elwin forest, go figure it out," he elaborated. "We can unveil a mystery story, but at the end of the day, in the quest log it needs to say, 'Go kill this dude, go get me this item.' The mystery can't be what to do [on the quest]."

Ugh.

[UnSub]

I would shed a single tear for Mythic if a WoW refined WaR PQ/Open Group system was their [Mythic's] single $65M contribution to the advancement of MMO gameplay.

I was going to point out the fatal flaw as I saw it in public quests that made them a waste of time for development but your idea solves it.[/quote]

Open groups and PQs are both good ideas and WAR served as a good test bed for how they can go wrong. Ultimately PQs need to scale dynamically and reward those players who stick with it (not just any moron who wanders into the area at the right time) and open groups require some sort of benefit for teams sticking together.

[Sheepherder]

If quest mobs are phased to be group specific, and I don't have that quest, what do I see? If I already killed the undead giant, how many groups of people fighting air am I going to have to walk past? Or won't I be able to see them at all? Because finding out I couldn't help my friend run the initial Icecrown quests because he hadn't "built" Crusader's Pinnacle yet and was invisible to me was annoying the other night.

How much phasing can you do before 75% of the playerbase can't see each other because they're on the wrong part of a quest chain, or until everyone sees something different and nothing makes sense?

You can make it so that an enemy is visible but doesn't respond to selection or mouse-over, shifting from "invisible" to "render only" is somewhat better than seeing people fighting invisible enemies and is no worse than mobs respawning in front of you.

[Triforcer]

Again, how is this different than a single-player game?  That's the ultimate in phased content...everything you do changes the game! 

Fuck this dimensional shift nonsense.  If the ultimate evolution of the MMO is that everyone runs around invisible to each other in a different quantum state like one of the more retarded Star Trek transporter accident episodes, I'm out.  That is not a "massively multiplayer" game in any way, shape or form.  I might as well call Yahoo chess a massively multiplayer game because there are a lot of people in the lobby before I go in my tiny invisible quantum-locked sanctuary with one other player.

Is the fate of the genre really going to be phased single-player (or 3-4 player) content, with a common bank for everyone to show off their gear?  I guess if devs find enough people stupid enough to pay a monthly fee for that, more power to em.   

[Lakov_Sanite]

I have to agree with tri on this. Phased content is good in some small cases. The deathknight starter areas for instance are essentially a newbie island tutorial for dk's and i'd like to see all starter experiences like this. no different than tortage in aoc or even similar to newbie island in eq2(when it came out) the one thing that is the same is that none of those areas you can go 'back' to and none of them are really designed with grouping in mind. It's a great use of fitting a single player game into an mmo but used to much and it will become a lobby game.

[Margalis]

You can make it so that an enemy is visible but doesn't respond to selection or mouse-over, shifting from "invisible" to "render only" is somewhat better than seeing people fighting invisible enemies and is no worse than mobs respawning in front of you.

That seems to entirely defeat the purpose which is to preserve the fiction of the game world no?

If they are there but you can't click on them that's a purely mechanical change that actually further erodes the sense of world. So now I beat this guy, he's for some reason still alive and kicking, and also for some other reason I can't interact with him any more. What?

[Azazel]

I am STILL waiting for a toontown-like system where if you automatically join a group that's beating on a monster, or one that's on the same quest as you and is nearby, it parties you up.

THAT is the way to encourage grouping. Not some convoluted looking-for-group system that everyone hates and goes out of their way to avoid (Hint: Design FAIL when people still spam LFG in trade)

God no!

When my wife and I are playing and taking our time questing (L80 and most of the quests in WotLK still to do) the absolute last thing I want to do is group with some random fucktard and carry them through the quests with them picking up our loot and so forth. I don't mind helping people now and then with quests, but I do it on my terms.

Maybe as an opt-in system it could be ok, but god damn, I go out of my way to avoid the mouthbreathers in WoW.

[WindupAtheist]

I kinda figured maybe you could reskin and rename Krognorp the World-Pwner into a generic evil general for a given player after he had completed the Death To Krognorp quest, or whatever. So there's still SOMEONE there to fight, but it's not the dude the game made a big deal out of you heroically killing. But yeah, I don't really want to see phasing EVERYWHERE.

[Azazel]

Thing is, you'd almost need to that for every named boss in every instance.

"Hey there Van Cleef! I cut your head off and presented it to the local militia boss two years ago. I'm mostly here for cloth today, but how's it going? How'd you reattach your head and get alive again, anyway?"

[Margalis]

The graphics in most MMOs barely matter, you could probably replace a super dragon with a crab and it would be fine.

[Ironwood]

There's a fair bit of 'not getting it' in here.

 

[Koyasha]

That's really only scratching the surface.

Effectively phasing is the same technology as stealth/invisibility, except you can make the shit that's flagged completely non-interactive with the player.  Assuming they are using a relatively powerful OO programming language (correctly), you could pretty easily set it up so that each player/group/raid has their own small world subspace, and even do tricky shit like make it so that heavily farmed quest mobs are instanced to be player or group specific, so that you don't have problems with them being over-farmed and don't have to enable exceedingly short spawn timers.

One of the biggest advantages I could see is mining/herbalism.  You could fairly easily make the nodes player-specific and put them on a 24 hour (or greater) respawn cycle to keep people from just running laps in Wintergrasp and fighting over nodes and force them to spread out more.

I don't know if I'd like the 'single player mmo' that widescale use of phasing like this suggests would be any fun.  I don't think I would enjoy it, I don't particularly like Guild Wars' lobby cities and then instanced...everything, which is rather similar to what it would be like if I went out into the world and was in my own private phase with only my group attached.

On the other hand it is the only way to give the player any sense of having affected the world, and some of the phasing quests are very cool.  But does affecting the world really matter to the players that don't care about lore, don't care that the guy they're killing this week is the same guy they killed last week, and the same guy they're gonna be killing for the next six months?  If not, it doesn't matter if you phase them or not, just show them some cool shit.  And what does it do for the player that does care about the lore and likes to roleplay?  Well, he can feel like he was important and the hero when out in his own world, but when he goes back to town....everyone else was also 'the hero' in their world.  So there's no real difference from how it is now.

Limited use of phasing as they have now is probably the best thing to do.  It gives us the 'cool' factor without being too separating or too useless.  Although admittedly there are a lot of improvements they could make.  The aforementioned mobs - Akali and Thrym in particular - could easily be phased out once the quests involving them are completed.  But most importantly, they need to get the stupid out of the phasing system, by which I mean, let the player control their phase to a certain degree.  Let players pull others into their phase - I don't care that I don't need the help for this quest, I WANT TO PLAY WITH MY FRIEND.  And let players revisit old phases intentionally, because some of this stuff is cool, and we would like to see it more than once.  For that matter, there's an ever increasing number of NPC interactions that are cutscene-like.  Use phasing to allow us to go back, select them from our phasing control UI, and watch them again.  They are cool.

[Sheepherder]

Personally, I think the quest system th

That seems to entirely defeat the purpose which is to preserve the fiction of the game world no?

Respawns.  Fiction headshotted.

I'm thinking along the lines of using phasing as a coping mechanism for extremely high populations concentrated in an area, like Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra on launch day.  Dynamically generating new subspaces for every few dozen players that pile into the zone would make the entire ordeal less hateful.  If they ever add another "Isle of Quel'Danas" type mob holocaust you could do the same phasing tricks instead of having the respawn nodes scripted to trigger abnormally fast if there's a lot of farming going on, which would eliminate the "I just cleared to the portal to do the scrying quest, oops, fives mobs respawned at once and now I get to bend over and take it" phenomenon.

That being said, Blizzzard's approach to creating a fiction is inherently broken.  Randomly scattering mobs around the world with little interaction between them is bizarre, as is the respawn mechanic.  I'm not even going to touch the "everyone is a hero / not everyone should be the hero" problem, because it reeks of grunk.

[Ironwood]

Oh, for fucks sake.

Would people get OFF the idea of a Whole Phased Server ?

That's not what we're talking about.  It's certainly not what I was talking about anyway.  Another mindless derail.


And I'm not talking about it as a way to manage population or fights between the population either.  I'm talking about solving the eternal problem of a Static World.

...

[Tarami]

I'm thinking along the lines of using phasing as a coping mechanism for extremely high populations concentrated in an area, like Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra on launch day.  Dynamically generating new subspaces for every few dozen players that pile into the zone would make the entire ordeal less hateful.

Fragmenting the players was Age of Conan's by far most popular feature.

Yeah, I do green.

[Malakili]

When I got into the WOTLK beta I made a Deathknight (of course), and I had gone out of my way to not read about features in WOTLK etc so that the experiecne would be as fresh as possible.

I was so fucking confused by the phasing.  It took me about 2 phases or so that I realized what was going on.  Its easily my least favorite thing in the WOTLK and one of the main reasons I didn't buy the expansion and cancelled my WoW account.  If that is the direction they are going, I've absolutely no interest.   To me, the fun of MMOs is playing in a virtual world with other people.  If you are going to give us each our own version of that world, or arbitrarily segregate the players into different "times" representing where they are in the story, then it is losing the very thing that attracted me to the MMO space in the first place.  Maybe a lot of people like it, and maybe it makes for good gameplay, but to me MMOs aren't just about the gameplay, they are about the EXPERIENCE.  Good MMOs offer up a really unique experience that is very different than the other games I play, without that feeling, I'll just play something else.

[Lakov_Sanite]

When I got into the WOTLK beta I made a Deathknight (of course), and I had gone out of my way to not read about features in WOTLK etc so that the experiecne would be as fresh as possible.

I was so fucking confused by the phasing.  It took me about 2 phases or so that I realized what was going on.  Its easily my least favorite thing in the WOTLK and one of the main reasons I didn't buy the expansion and cancelled my WoW account.  If that is the direction they are going, I've absolutely no interest.   To me, the fun of MMOs is playing in a virtual world with other people.  If you are going to give us each our own version of that world, or arbitrarily segregate the players into different "times" representing where they are in the story, then it is losing the very thing that attracted me to the MMO space in the first place.  Maybe a lot of people like it, and maybe it makes for good gameplay, but to me MMOs aren't just about the gameplay, they are about the EXPERIENCE.  Good MMOs offer up a really unique experience that is very different than the other games I play, without that feeling, I'll just play something else.

You realize that's only the dk starter area yes? I mean, 95% of wotlk is non phased. I mean I agree, I don't like phasing to a point either but the reaction seems a bit, harsh?

[bhodi]

I don't know about you but landing in a town that is being buttfucked by horde, bolstering the town's defense, defending against a final push, then counter-attacking and creating a beachhead which ends at a little town and flight point was a really fun experience.

It was by far the best part of the WoTLK expansion and would have been completely impossible without phasing.

More please.

[Malakili]

When I got into the WOTLK beta I made a Deathknight (of course), and I had gone out of my way to not read about features in WOTLK etc so that the experiecne would be as fresh as possible.

I was so fucking confused by the phasing.  It took me about 2 phases or so that I realized what was going on.  Its easily my least favorite thing in the WOTLK and one of the main reasons I didn't buy the expansion and cancelled my WoW account.  If that is the direction they are going, I've absolutely no interest.   To me, the fun of MMOs is playing in a virtual world with other people.  If you are going to give us each our own version of that world, or arbitrarily segregate the players into different "times" representing where they are in the story, then it is losing the very thing that attracted me to the MMO space in the first place.  Maybe a lot of people like it, and maybe it makes for good gameplay, but to me MMOs aren't just about the gameplay, they are about the EXPERIENCE.  Good MMOs offer up a really unique experience that is very different than the other games I play, without that feeling, I'll just play something else.

You realize that's only the dk starter area yes? I mean, 95% of wotlk is non phased. I mean I agree, I don't like phasing to a point either but the reaction seems a bit, harsh?

Well, it isn't the only reason I quit, but it was an important reason. Beside, regardless of the particular amount of phasing, it just shows the game going into a direction that seems antithetical to my conception of an MMO that I want to play.  In any event, I don't miss WoW even a little at this point.  Oh boy, if I still played I could be raiding Naxx content AGAIN with the same people I did it with 2 years ago    Even though I know they are releasing Ulduar soon, the raiding game is meh, the pvp is meh, and the one thing they do quite well, which is leveling PvE is going in a direction I'm less interested in (as I explained already).  I came to the conclusion that WoW just isn't the game for me like it once was.


I just cancelled EVE for lack of time to put into it to do the stuff i really want to do, so I'm actually currently without an MMO sub, but that WoW  + its clones aren't where I'll be going.  Need something different.

[Lantyssa]

I'm thinking along the lines of using phasing as a coping mechanism for extremely high populations concentrated in an area, like Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra on launch day.  Dynamically generating new subspaces for every few dozen players that pile into the zone would make the entire ordeal less hateful.

That won't actually help.

If it's solely on the users end, due to graphics lag, then it would.  When the server is melting under too many people concentrated into a single area it does nothing.  Just because the player can't see all this going on, the server still has to track it.  The more phases, the worse it gets.

You'd need actual, physical instances for it to help.  Even then the server still has to cope with simply being overloaded on launch day, when two weeks later the instances aren't even needed.  Why bother investing in the tech for a couple of weeks out of every two to three years?

[Vash]

I'm thinking along the lines of using phasing as a coping mechanism for extremely high populations concentrated in an area, like Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra on launch day.  Dynamically generating new subspaces for every few dozen players that pile into the zone would make the entire ordeal less hateful.

That won't actually help.

If it's solely on the users end, due to graphics lag, then it would.  When the server is melting under too many people concentrated into a single area it does nothing.  Just because the player can't see all this going on, the server still has to track it.  The more phases, the worse it gets.

You'd need actual, physical instances for it to help.  Even then the server still has to cope with simply being overloaded on launch day, when two weeks later the instances aren't even needed.  Why bother investing in the tech for a couple of weeks out of every two to three years?

Pretty sure he meant to help with the mob camping (etc.) that occurs in places with high player traffic that generally makes questing a royal pain, not as a tool to help server load and the resulting lag issues.  WoW has supposedly had dynamic respawn systems in place since TBC and has made more tweaks to the system for Wrath but it still can't handle traffic as high as you see right after launch.

I'm wondering if they're planning on doing some server tech upgrading anytime soon as the servers still seem to be having some peak time stress issues even this late after Wrath launch and 3.1 with Ulduar probably won't lighten the load.

[Lantyssa]

Pretty sure he meant to help with the mob camping (etc.) that occurs in places with high player traffic that generally makes questing a royal pain, not as a tool to help server load and the resulting lag issues.  WoW has supposedly had dynamic respawn systems in place since TBC and has made more tweaks to the system for Wrath but it still can't handle traffic as high as you see right after launch.

Which means more mobs for the server to track spread across all these phases.  It can only handle so many entities in the area, and PCs have a larger footprint.  Phasing would only make it worse because now you have mobs that exist which can't be touched by the majority of the players.

Phasing is great for story telling.  You can change the scenery.  If there is a special mob the developers want spawned for an event that shouldn't impact anyone else in the area, it's wonderful.

It's just about the worst tool to think about when discussing ways to relieve population burdens.