Douglas

And I want to throw one more idea out there regarding how to do this: NPCs.

Just think about the General Rajaxx fight. Pretty neat. Part of making the encounter work is keeping an eye on and supporting your NPC allies. They definitely contribute to the feel of the fight.

Sure, duplicating Vaelastrasz as a 5-man would be difficult as hell without destroying the feel of it. But what about making it a 40-man, but only 5 are players?

One danger people might point out of going that route is, you don't want to take the outcome of the fight out of the hands of the players. You don't want to just sit back and have it be NPC-versus-NPC. But you don't have to. Let me elaborate.

Consider the game "Sid Meyer's Pirates!". You play one character. When you board a ship, you do not board it alone. There's a huge fight going on all around you as all of your pirates fight the defenders of the ship. However, your character is in a one-on-one duel with the captain of that ship. As you're doing well, your NPC allies are bolstered and do more damage, and are slower to be damaged. If you do poorly, the reverse is true. You see the fighting going on around you, but you also have a numeric summary of the fight up near the top of the screen ("merde, I've only got 73 pirates left, and the galleon has 126 guards remaining").

There are two ways to win the fight: actually defeat the enemy captain, in which case the other side's NPCs all surrender, or do just well enough that your NPCs whittle their NPCs down below a certain level, in which case the enemy captain surrenders. The outcome in both cases depend on the actions of the individual player, but you get a "mass combat" vibe. Could this be made to work in a 5-man setting?

 

Phlis

Yeah you pretty much couldn't do Mualgar(at least 3 tanks, 1 mage, and either 2 tanks or 1 lock and their healers required), Vashj(god, 8 dps on elementals, 2 tanks on elites, 1 kiter on striders and healers), Kael(4 normal tanks, 1 FR tank, very high DPS requirement), Illidan(2 FR tanks, 1 SR Lock Tank, 1 Warrior Tank, healers, and mad dps), Council(4 interupters on priest alone, mage tank, 2 other tanks and their helaers), Azgalor(try this 5 man, watch doom target your only healer, gg), and Other bosses I'm not thinking of without significantly changing the fights much in the same way Blizzard is going to significantly change 4 horsemen to allow it to be completable by 25 people instead of 40.

 

Douglas

Be careful here -- don't extrapolate from yourself onto the general population. I and several people I know play WoW in spite of it being an MMO, not because it is.

For me, NWN can't be a substitute for even the soloing game in WoW. Where's the continuous stream of professionally written content that's part of a single world/progression? It's not there in NWN. I do not want fan-written modules. Now, if NWN was fully set in the Forgotten Realms setting, and every month the developers put out new professionally-written content that just plugged seamlessly right into the same world you'd already been playing in, that'd be a lot closer.

I think Jaxtrasi has an important insight here:

This is right! There are plenty of players who don't care about the large-scale interactions, and who never will. Exposing them to that stuff turns them off the game.

It's not safe to say "the key to getting these people to like the things I like is simply getting them to try it", no matter what those things are: large-scale raids, guild interactions, participating in the economy, PvP... no! (For my own self, I am quite sure that I will never really enjoy any form of PvP.) There's stuff in the game for folks who don't like that stuff, and folks who don't like that stuff can get to level 70. And many of them won't like that stuff, even after they've tried it.

That's not to say you refrain from getting them to try that stuff -- some of these people will like it. Just make sure that participation isn't ever forced, and make sure there are alternatives.

 

Alici

An elegant example of the raid to 5-man redesign is Harbinger Skyriss. He has almost all the same abilities as Prophet Skeram, toned down to a 5-man setting. Mind Control plus a boss might be too overpowering, so fear is used instead. Spam AE and Earth Shock are removed as it might be too effective against a group with only 5 targets. And to further Douglas's idea, we have Millhouse Manastorm helping us out. Every PUG I've done with newbies all comment on how Millhouse is comical and adds so much to the encounter's feel.

Not every encounter is so streamlined in conversion, but there is precedent on both fronts to how it can be done, and done well.

 

Nezralix

I don't think it's so much the issue that they need to get people to try it; I've seen *tons* of people on other messageboards who *have* tried it, and been turned off to it. Most commonly due to the severe time commitment, occasionally due to guild tyrants or other guild-related dramatics.

Blizzard definitely has the power to reduce the per-session time commitment of raids. They have less control over guild politics, but could still occasionally work with mechanisms to reduce the issues that people tend to have (like maybe a better in-game loot tracking system).

But I do think that anybody who hits max level and is still enthusiastic about the game at least *tries* to raid, if only for a few sessions. Cooperating with a large number of other players to achieve some goal is a very compelling idea, all other factors aside.

 

Thanaomira

To you. Not to me. I play with probably 40+ people in a guild alliance, most of whom are doing the 25s. I have no interest in the 25s, and similarly in vanilla, the 40s. I've got the MMO part covered -- but the challenging content part is sorely lacking.

To re-iterate an earlier point, it's not how many PCs are running around that makes a fight epic; it's the mechanics of the fight. Ossirian was an epic fight.

Insofar as 5s not being supportable an an epic level, it depends on what mechanics Blizzard introduces. Something I would love to see in the next expansion is an Onyxia-style 5-man.

No lockout. No loot except world drops; only drops a trifling amount of gold. Upon zoning in, there's an NPC who yells STOP! ala the Black Morass NPC. Said NPC has 5 trinkets: a spell interrupter, a +healing trinket, a +threat trinket... not exactly sure what else. There are 3-4 trash pulls and then you reach a boss. Said boss has multiple adds; fortunately, your party gets 2 adds as well. All the elements of a difficult 10- or 25-boss, reduced to a test setting.

This dungeon should be tuned to a very high level of difficulty, as one of its primary purposes is as a testbed for large guilds. Now you don't have to give up a slot to the new mage; you can run them through this and see how they do. And if the night you pick this you don't have any melee dps free, no problem -- bring a 2nd mage, and have them pick up the spell interrupting trinket.

Add Mag cubes or Netherspite portals and this could quickly become very challenging. Anyone who wants to tighten up their game could run this 5 to practice: "man, my multi-target threat generation could be better. Who wants to run House of Pain?" "Me; my situational awareness last night blew."

I would love this. I don't want EZ Mode 5s. I want really challenging 5s and 10s. Lots of my friends get the epic feel from being with 24 or 39 other people: woot! I get the epic feel from being 10% to 20% of the solution.

 

Hypatia

I both suspect and hope that WotLK will have a lot more focus on 10-mans than BC has done. Blizzard was apparently rather surprised by the popularity of Karazhan, and I think they're building on that. It's worth remembering that the lead time for creating a dungeon is a lot larger than we see: Kara was originally intended as a raid for pre-BC, but had poor model scale for pre-BC raid sizes. The first 10-man since then, ZA, was probably in development since not too long after people started raiding Karazhan in earnest.

I don't know that I expect WotLK to have fully parallel progressions of 5, 10, and 25-man instances. But, I would be very very surprised if they don't have a nearly parallel progression of 10s and 25s through the end-game. Since they've known about the popularity of 10-mans for quite a while now, WotLK seems like about the right place for 10-man raids to come into their own—it's when Blizzard will have had time to really develop the content in that direction. (Whereas even the Sunwell area was probably well into development when BC came out.)

 

• Disquette

That's opinion based. I've done Naxx and I've done BT, and with the exception of Illidan, the 40 mans felt way more epic (to me!). Illidan felt epic due to:

time of encounter
complexity and stages
seeing lots of people on the terrace. By having people spread out you get a grander scale of the encounter.

This is a very very different feel from Illidari council, in which (as a melee dps), the thing feels like a 5 man. I'm there with two or three other people whacking away at the paladin the whole time. That whole encounter is literally a 4 man event, tops, when I've done it.

So, while you could make a 40 man encounter feel like a 5 man (as described above), you can't make a 5 man feel like a 40 man if they were both pushed to their limits.

All of this just my opinion.

----- sig ---------------
Discoepfeand - rogue / Disquette - shaman
A stormstrike / shocks /watershield timer-bar addon: http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/9729/
"Moogle has mentioned this in passing a few times but never elaborated on it. Perhaps we can entice him to respond." - Malan

 

Douglas

Again: not even if there are 40 people in the 5-man encounter -- just with 35 (or more!) of them being NPCs that are largely under the control of or influenced by the actual players?

Imagine this: you're at the head of a small army. You're a warrior (but not the MT). A task force is fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with you. Whenever you enter Defensive stance, they form a (literal) shield wall and hold their ground; when you're doing this, the NPC healers can reasonably top most of them off. Whenever you enter Battle stance, they use a mixed fighting style, doing more damage on average but also taking more, and moving forward slowly. Whenever you enter Berzerker stance, shield gets slung across their back and both hands go on the axe, and they rush forward in a mad zerg.

You're not controlling them exactly, but they're reacting to what you do. And in any event, you actually are in the thick of mass combat. There's tons of allies around you, doing stuff -- just as many performing "based on" your 4 teammates as are based on you.

(Like, we've all seen metrics from WWS regarding how much a healer spreads their heals out rather than focusing on individual heal targets; imagine if the behavior of the NPC healers roughly tracked your real healer with regard to that behavior. And imagine a squad of bowmen focusing their fire as well as your actual ranged DPS do, on average, or maybe approxiamately copying shot rotation.)

Does the mere fact that, for example, the extras don't engage in banter on Vent, does that actually prevent the epic feel that you claim you got by seeing more people?

 

Slowthar

Yes. Because part of the thrill of bringing down a 25-man boss is the level of commitment it takes from that many people. With 25 actual human beings, there is a bigger sense of teamwork because it takes dedication from more people to accomplish a goal. Raiding is not like doing a 5-man because it's about long-term gratification. A 5-man is about settling in for an evening and chugging through an instance with a few buddies. A 10 or 25-man is about spending weeks learning new boss fights. It's a basic difference in the rewards you get from the experience.

 

Nezralix

Although it would be neat to have NPC's fighting on your side as simulated players, I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that we'll never see that kind of thing in WoW. They can barely pull off an escort mission that isn't impossibly frustrating, and making an NPC act like a semi-intelligent raid member is a major, major AI task. To say nothing of the obvious balancing problem: If you make them too intelligent, you're almost guaranteed to trivialize the player's actual role in the event, and if you make them mindless deadweight, then it's pointless to have them, or even a liability if the player ends up babysitting.

If Blizzard were going to include player-like NPC's in the game, they'd have to start on a far smaller, more restricted scale, and gradually improve them until they were raid-capable. I wouldn't be surprised to see behavior like that take ten years to incorporate and have it actually be *fun*.

And even if they did it, it would be a tremendous amount of work for highly questionable benefit!

 

Redelm

I think having NPC's take the place of actual players is a horrible idea. Rajaxx was a fight that could be done with or w/o the NPC help, if they survived you where rewarded if they didnt the fight became more difficult but not impossible. I would agree with you if the NPC's had a chance to fail the task that they where scripted to do. But at that point it hurts the RL group that is actually doing the encounter.

Lets look at HKM, if you had a certain number of NPC's assist you with all the adds and performed flawlessly it really becomes a tank and spank fight. The challenge of having 25 RL players is that if John forgets to steal the spell shield off the mage hes most likely going to die. Which results in the mage running around and throwing fireballs at everyone.

I personally dont see NPC's being the answer to the task proposed, unless some serious changes where made to the NPC's ai.

 

• topojijo

HKM Maulgar could easily be taken down to a 10 man level with some mechanic changes. You typically already have two tanks anyways that could take care two of the mobs, and you could have the other two controlled by a range class.

 

Redelm

I was using HKM as an example with reference to the NPC's assisting a smaller group of players, thats all.

 

Douglas

Well, that depends on what the "point" is. If the point is window dressing, it may not be pointless.

One of the reactions people have had to the idea of scaling down raid encounters is that they'd "feel" less epic simply because there are fewer participants.

Imagine that we're already talking about trivializing the encounter, such that a random PUG will get it down on the first try or at least first couple of tries.

So, we're not trying to re-create the experience of learning the encounter over weeks -- the audience this is targeted at has no interest in that. We're not trying to re-create the skill-check required -- the audience this is targeted at has no interest in that. What we're trying to do is, make it so that if, say, a novelist who doesn't understand the game-mechanics at all watched a YouTube video of a successful kill, without any access to the guild's vent channel, they might describe the raid encounter and the 5-man encounter in the same terms. "And then a bunch of guys swarmed up its leg, and..." That way, even if they get no loot or rep or anything for it, a bunch of folks could still say "yeah, I actually got to fight Ilidan!" or something. Lore access.

Some encounters are easy to scale down from 25-man difficult raid encounter to 5-man PUGable instance encounter without losing their vibe, but some aren't (it is asserted) just because of the number of participants. Can NPCs be a way to create that vibe?

 

Phlis

I guess I should ask this straight up, have you really raided with a good group of people? Not just a random guild, but a group of people who over time became your friends, with good attitude and the same goals? A team, even when it takes you a month to get to and down Kael, and theres drama, but you stick it out and you kill that loud mouthed son of a bitch. Have you ever really felt what it's like to down Ragnaros or Vael or Nefarion, or C'thun, or Kael for the first time with a guild? Been through the trial and error, made the strategy postings on what can be fixed? I'm not talking about the first time YOU killed a boss that a guild had already been farming, Do you know what it feels like, after weeks, for it to actually click for the first time?

Honestly, thats what raiding is about. My team, my friends, the time we spend together. If you can get that from a 5 man, good for you, but you'll never know what it's like, and you can't recreate it with this piddly shit. Sorry.

 

Rajaat9

I don't think you understand the point he was trying to make. Spending hours a day playing the game with the same 24 guys, learning encounters, etc. is NOT what 5 manners are trying to do. They don't have the time to play that much WoW. But, just because they have actual lives, work, family, doesn't mean the game should just end for them at level 70 5 mans. He's suggesting a way to get them involved in encounters that APPEAR similar to raid encounters. NOT getting them into the raid game, or really even something like the raid game. After all, everything you just said wasn't WoW. That same teamwork and drama can apply to any co-op team activity. He wants to make the WoW 5-man game look and play kinda like the raid game, not make the 5 man dynamic feel like a raid dynamic. Do you understand?

Edit: Spelling

 

Alici

As a former raider and avid 5-man PUG-er, I'd have to say that while I agree that one of the goals is for epic encounters to be more widely available, I would very much be saddened if all we got were empty shells for fights that were no more engrossing or difficult as your normal 5-man instance run.

There are two facets to the issue. First, you run instances for the experience. After the experience has been had, such as defeating an epic boss, the second point is where your character goes from there. It does nothing for the player if everything was on the same level of difficulty, and there wasn't anything that truly challenged them.

So if in implementing 25-10-5 stepdowns, I must still feel, as a solely 5-man type of player, that going from 5-man to 5-man to 5-man there is a feeling that the next is more challenging than the last. I have a 70 warrior and 70 priest, both in all instance blues, and yet I'm tanking and healing heroics in my sleep. Giving me Melchezar or Gruul or Vashj in a 5-man, but with no more difficulty than Murmur, would be very disappointing.

My point is this: I would absolutely love to see the content that I missed when I quit raiding because of time commitments. However, it would absolutely defeat the purpose if there is no sense of building challenge, no matter how epic. After all, a portion of the epic pie is difficulty.

 

Phlis

My point was that what he wants he cannot achieve. It has nothing to do with Lore, or amount of time spent. I raid 3 nights a week, 5 hours on those nights. I have a job, and a life. I've killed Illidan. One has nothing to do with the other. You cannot get the same vibe from a PuG 5 man that you get from Raiding. Ever. It has nothing to do with difficulty of encounters, number of people, or time spent. It's about forging a team from random people, those people become your friends, sharing their frustration and joy. Honestly, open the link in my guild tag, Militiae Templi, our Illidan kill shot is right up top. I'm in the back of that picture, surrounded by totems, next to the tree. Every person in that picture I consider a dear friend. If you don't want the MM from an MMO, you will never feel that. I'm sorry. Go play different games. This isn't for you.

 

Nezralix

It's interesting that you should equate the "MM" part of "MMO" with raiding. The huge, non-instanced part of WoW defines it much more as an MMORPG than the raiding segment, which might as well be a large Quake server. I could just as easily say that WoW isn't for you.