hamlet

Dynamic content still becomes a time sink. Those that still did the same parts of D2 were still just farming an area. People would complain that it isnt varied and just developers being lazy. Kinda like just changing the color of the skins on mobs. Even in pvp you tend to end up doing the same thing each time. AV/WSG/AB all end up being just a grind even with a dynamic and unique opponent.

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b3...mai_hime37.gif

 

subscience

I've been a die-hard proponent of a system like this since the first time I ran into a BoP rare with a random stat mod.

This would probably help a lot of itemization issues as well (where's the pre-raid plate armor with +Holy? Or mail with +Nature?).



But regardless of whether one timesink is preferred or another doesn't escape the fact that timesinks are still required, in my opinion. And of course we still have the issue of the light-speed character development from 1-60 versus the slow-as-molasses character development post 60.

 

Axil

I kind of just sifted through these posts, but i noticed something important the OP unintentionaly pointed out. The parts of the game you have enjoyed most have been the most 'humane' parts. The ones where you are interacting with people, setting a goal and accomplishing it, exploring new areas with friends, or even PVP. Basically anything where you were intellectually challenged or interacted with others and weren't doing anything repetitive and monotounos(sp?) like a machine, but rather a person.

http://wow.theorderls.com
Haxil

 

phyra

Fun stuff. I probably won't be able to address everything at once since a discussion like this has the tendency to spread out quickly and consume such a broad scope quite quickly. Regardless I'd like to try and continue, I want to stick on the timesink thing one more time since it's still what most interests me, this will hopefully be the last time I beat on this issue. (Sorry I can be out of touch with reality with my ideology at times, all I can hope for is that it helps people think.)

What I initially had in mind when I used the term 'empty timesink' was a mindless, boring, repetitive grind that poses no amount of challenge, excitement, or 'fun' for me, but is instead a dry input of man-hours in exchange for some sort of in-game tactical advantage. I like to add the word 'empty' when I use the term 'timesink' negatively, because any old activity is by definition a 'timesink' in that it requires a nontrivial investment of real-world time in order to perform. But as many pointed out to me, this becomes a highly subjective term - what's an 'empty timesink' for me might very well be a 'timesink filled with fun' for you, and vice versa. After all, I know many people that absolutely love the ritualistic activity of farming mobs and instances, and would love for nothing more than to be so happily engaged. Many people enjoy WoW because playing nonstop around the clock allows them to be quite successful and in a position of power and recognition. And for all my expressed aversion to repetitive drudgery, I can often enjoy mindless grinding myself from time to time to clear my head. What I've gathered is that the notion of fun (and the notion of the empty timesink as its antithesis) is subjective. Some (many!) people want what I might deride as mindless entertainment and I shouldn't fault them for that. As Slug mentioned, even cultural bias can affect what one might consider a 'fun' game.

Accordingly, game-playing experiences are also highly subjective and diverse, and the same exact objective game system is in fact any number of separate game-playing experiences for players with different dispositions. So, when you're dealing with a commercial, massive-scale game project such as WoW, the target audience is incredibly broad and varied. One man's empty timesink always inevitably becomes another man's fun factor, and you are then faced with a dilemma and several possible resolutions:

1. Favor one type of game-playing experience over another for economic or whatever reasons, and tell the rest to deal with it or get out.
2. Strike a compromise and leave both game-playing types only partially satisfied, risking losing customers to more targeted games on either end.
3. Release separate versions of your game catered to each game-playing type.
4. Add an alternative, parallel timesink to your game so that each game-playing type is balanced, equally viable and independently satisfied.

The latter two are the more desirable approaches in terms of maximizing appeal but they're also the most difficult in terms of design and development effort. WoW has elements of both. Pvp/pve/rp servers as sort of an attempt of #3. The balance of items and parallel advancement systems via PvP honor/PvE raiding/farming reputation and crafting is a good attempt of #4. I like this way of accomodating different playstyles but it will always be hard work (and plenty of complaints from all sides - 'World of Raidcraft' jokes anyone?) to get that sort of balance right.

So my lingering question is: Would it be possible to create a parallel advancement structure that bypasses timesinks requiring the application of autonomous, repetitive effort so fundamental to the RPG genre? Could such a game still retain what we know and love about MMORPGs, or would it be doomed to failure or relegated to another game genre? Is a gratuitiously large time investment simply a necessary break-off point for balanced competition of divergent playstyles? These are all open questions.

I'm not quite sure if a system of advancement not based on the extended application of time would fit cleanly within the same monthly subscription economic model as WoW, but I wouldn't write it off immediately. After all, Blizzard still makes the same amount of money whether you play one hour a week or 80. They key is to get you to keep playing every month, not to play as often as possible. On the issue of the problem of generating 'infinite' content I'll just say for now that it's much, much easier than most seem to believe to generate truly engaging dynamic content without reverting to the grind, particularly in a massively multiplayer game. Not only special seasonal events or even Nethack-style random dungeon generation but think regularly scheduled tournaments/ladders, performance feedback, high score rankings, dynamically-tuned scalable risk/reward encounters, rewards for low-manning zones and encounters, a more participatory economy, etc - the possibilities are endless. After all, despite its quite simple ruleset the game of Go has managed to generate fresh and engaging dynamic content for thousands of years. Some other time, I can try to go into this in more detail on the ways these sorts of systems could possibly substitute for or exist alongside farming, levels, random loot drops, etc.

I really love the Vanguard mantra that I quoted last time, so I'll mention it again: The path of least resistance should also be the path to the most fun. This is really what it comes down to: how to eliminate the not-fun paths of least resistance (aka 'empty timesinks' in whatever form) for as many different people and play-styles as possible.

 

Flameweaver

In before someone ruins this thread.

 

XI-

This is one of the unique qualities of MMO's that is distinctly different from other subscription services. Usually with a subscription service you want your consumer to continue to pay, but use the product as little as possible to keep costs down. For MMO's they NEED at least some percentage of the population to play as much as possible. These are the "hero's". These are people like you and me, running through town in full epics, pushing through content first. Why do they need us? Because for 90% of the population it isn't about "I want to advance my character". Thats bullshit, plain and simple. Its because they look at us in town and go, "Fuck, I wanna be like that dude." I know I sure do whenever I start playing a new MMO that's been out for a while.

That's what keeps people playing. The true casual people will float from game to game, activity to activity, they don't truly have any ties to the particular game. We have time invested in the game, and in our characters, we'll continue to play long after an activity is "fun". And thus there will be tons of people playing to be us. WoW has made the ability to be the "hero" easier than any game ever. Leveling is easier, and the bar for raiding is so low that its open to virtually anyone who seeks that path. This is the true success of WoW, and why the subscription numbers continue to increase, and the populace continues to grow, and I really don't see it slowing any time soon.

 

phyra

Certainly, aspirations to be the 'hero' are a strong incentive to continue playing, I know the first legendary-wielders and rank 14's on my server drew plenty of attention. But does this fame necessarily have to be tied to a long and extended time investment? Plenty of people look at Rank 14's and legendary carriers and don't think 'gosh that guy is amazing' or 'gosh that guy must be a great player', but 'gosh that guy must do nothing but play this game all day' or 'gosh that guy must have been really lucky on his loot drops.'

If I started drooling over some prize PvP gear the winner of a Best of the Best PvP tournament is running around with, or over some prize trinket everyone in a raiding team won off their first 10-man Onyxia/5man UBRS/2-hour Molten Core clear, would that be so wrong? Would it lessen the impact for those aspirations to shift from some mix of random luck and incredible time investment to some more substantial qualities?

Perhaps it would, because random luck and time investment are two things that the truly casual player will never exhaust as long as he continues playing, and so he is always working towards that advancement and recognition whenever he plays. I don't know, I personally would prefer to respect and recognize someone for achievements of skill, mastery and artfulness, by virtue of something other than simply 'being there', but maybe that's just me fighting an uphill struggle against the masses.

 

XI-

No I certainly don't think that shifting them would diminish the allure of them because I don't think the concept of time, skill or difficulty pops into most people's minds when they see someone with Sulfuras or Ashkandi.

Its an awe factor that this person seems so much more powerful than you, but yes it also breeds a certain jealousy factor, and this is where the concept of "wow he played for a long time, or wow he got really lucky came in." (I know myself and plenty of other people are guilty of this PARTICULARLY with regard to TF -_-) But I think these are only from those actively involved in the struggle to get these items, for most people I don't even know if they can comprehend what's going on.

I've played plenty of other games where I was the clueless noobie wandering around, and the first thing I thought of when I saw someone glowing flying across the screen while I was still walking around wearing drab grey clothing was "Wow thats cool I wonder how I can get that stuff". If you're dedicated eventually you'll find out.

I think WoW's success comes from the fact this this is attainable to the common populace. You could have gotten WoW for christmas and wandering around staring at people with ashkandi/etc. I have no doubt within 3-4 months a truly hardcore player could reach that same level that we are at now. This isn't true of many other games out there. My games of choice pre-WoW were smaller Asian MMO's like Knight Online, and MU. If you had joined those where we are now, and I was similarly geared to WoW it would be virtually impossible for you to catch me, or even come close.

In MU it would be levels, that would take you so drastically long to catch up to, and even then I would be gone, further ahead in the endless stream of leveling. In Knight Online it would be time played and money. To upgrade your gear to the same level as mine you would have to pour countless millions and millions of coin and luck to try and produce the same tier of items, and because I would have nothing better to do, I would have poured more money into my items, and still be better than you. I'm sure you can equally apply these to L2, or AA's in EQ, etc, etc.

 

◊ Praetorian

Random tangent inspired by recent events:

Psychologically, the difference between "Kill 1000 of X." and "Kill an unspecified number of X until you get a 1/1000 drop." is an interesting one.

Contrast farming Silithid carapaces with farming for a nightmare fragment.

As always in an MMO, time investment should yield some tangible reward. The problem with farming for the very rare drops is that I can spend 4 hours farming with a large group and leave not one iota closer to my goal than if I'd never farmed at all.

Rather than a single 0.4% drop, why not require 10 4.0% drops? Getting all 10 will still take a while, but you're still almost ensured at least one or two every so often as you farm. A trail of little carrot-crumbs leading to the big juicy one at the end makes the path far more appealing.

 

phyra

QFT. I'm very surprised Blizzard hasn't learned from their past mistakes on incredibly low percentage drops. Did they perhaps think that the consistent farming of the carapaces would offset the luck-based farming of the fragments?

Tuning the drop rates to mitigate the luck factor is one option. As an alternative option, what about if we combine different amounts of luck into a hybrid solution?
Like, require completion of one of any of the following:
1 x 0.4% drop (avg. 250 kills)
10 x 3.5% drops (avg. 286 kills)
300 kills

This way, luck is still the dominant factor (ie, statistically speaking you're still more likely to get the single low-rate drop or even all 10 mid-rate drops before you finish the entire 300 kills), but the luck factor will only ever be a positive bonus rather than a necessary (and possibly negative) requirement. The maximum number of kills would be hard-capped at 300, equivalent to below-average luck but still better than indefinite unluckiness. We've seen plenty of kill grinding quests and single rare drop quests alike, but a hybrid solution could foster an interesting psychological mix of hoping for that ultra-rare drop while not depending entirely on it.

 

XI-

I've said since WoW came out that I'd rather kill 1000 of X, then kill X for a .01% drop. In killing 1000x of X, you know where you're going, you know how long it takes, and you know your making progression. The other way just sucks.

 

hamlet

The biggest thing the very low percentage drop does is creates a sense of uphoria that kill a certain number of something doesnt do. It is that winning the lottery type feeling. Not saying it is perfect or anything but I have been more excited each time I have gotten a world epic drop even though I never use em then I did outside of my first ef glove drop.

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b3...mai_hime37.gif

 

genjuro

I look at this a different way. Farming for a one-time very rare drop where you have no visible progress towards your goal can make the time pass faster because you eventually stop thinking about each kill. I remember doing the aged gorilla sinew quest in STV, and spending like three hours farming those damned apes. It got to a point where I didn't notice the time passing since each kill was blending into the next. Then when I finally got the drop, it was like a shot from the dark. Compare this to a quest where you have to kill 200 gorillas, the fact that each kill gives you a definite step towards the goal prevents this from happening. Your mind focuses on each kill as it's one closer to finishing the quest. The last 10 kills might seem to take forever, because you're so close and each second of your casting time or swing delay seems like an eternity since you're ALMOST THERE. Sort of like putting something in the microwave for 30 seconds when you're really hungry. Or telling someone to do 100 pushups as opposed to telling them to do pushups until they're told to stop (and you stop them at 100 anyway).

Of course it's not always this way, and it depends on the individual. For me, it usually takes a good while before I get in the rhythm where the kills blend together on a rare drop quest. I think both types of quests are important, because they add variety.

 

◊ Praetorian

Every gorilla you killed gave you experience at the time. That's different. You have something to show for your time, even if that particular quest drop never dropped.

 

Demitrius

Ultimately to me, the only thing that could possibly make and keep an MMO incredibly interesting is player interaction. As awesome as endgame instances are, the aspect they have that really makes them shine is the fact that you're with forty/twenty of your guildmates trying to figure out why you're getting WTFpwned. Nothing tops that.

In that vein, WoW's greatest failing to me is its utter lack of PvP content with respect to the core of the game. BG "battles" isn't actually part of WoW content. You could seriously remove BG's and have them stand as a stand alone entity with its own client. Sort of like WoW: CS.

Why isn't there an epic quest line to kill Sylvannas or capture and hold Darnassus for a set period of time? Why can't contested zones be temporarily taken over by a faction, netting that faction some sort of global bonus for whatever reason? I can understand wanting to prevent a new MMO players first experience be an undead rogue slitting his/her throat but I really think most people who play on PvP servers do so wanting to experience some sort of thrill and danger while leveling.

I don't want PvP just centered around "kill x Horde/Alliance" in [random instance]. I want it to be part of the lore and atmosphere. I want to feel like there's an actual war going on and feel that there's a point for me to dissmount and kill someone other then just ruining his/her day.

 

XI-

Because the server hardware sucks. See any idiot server (SH) who announces they are doing the scepter quest. Cue character select screen.

 

◊ Praetorian

I honestly lack the technical knowledge to know whether to place the blame on the servers themselves. My hunch is that Blizzard isn't exactly running the game on a 8086. Maybe their code optimization sucks, though. It's not bandwidth, because it's all serverside lag, not action happening on the server but not getting pushed out to all the players. Having 300 players standing around was laggy as hell, but mostly client-side. But as soon as 20 NPCs spawn in and start interacting with those 300 players, the server shits itself. Maybe Blizzard's programmers suck and that's why, but I doubt it.

Blizzard really should have done more to design around their hardware limitations rather than playing right into them.

Spawning 20 mobs with 360-degree long-range AoE attacks and then bringing in a dozen NPCs with AoE heals and having them all spam them when you KNOW hundreds of players are going to be there just strikes me as insane design. The lag would've been bad regardless, but that put it over the top.

The world echo is great for atmosphere, but come on, it's obviously going to attract a quarter of the server to the zone within 15 minutes, and the event takes more than 15 minutes.

I'm not entirely sure what the answer is. But it sure does suck having to lie to well-meaning people who've helped farm materials, when they ask me about when I'm going to be triggering the next quest events, just so that it doesn't cause a server crash.

 

XI-

You see this same thing with any number of players on the screen. Remember the first days of azuregos and kazzak when you could feel the server slowly die underneath you as more and more players flooded into the zone. See BWL on packed nites (at least on SH, when you pack 4+ guilds in BWL the entire zone practically lags out), I don't think any of us are correctly informed to be able to diagnose if its bad net code or simply a lack of hardware, but I would be inclined to lean towards the latter.

Look at it this way, hardware costs money. If you need X amount of hardware 99% of the time, why would you spend the money to get the extra hardware 1% of the time, when people won't quit over it.

BTW Gurg grats on the new forum title ;)

 

◊ Maniq

Having some knowledge of large scale, high CPU cluster environments, what happens feels very much like the bottle neck is bandwidth through the CPU/memory.

You suddenly have to figure out how 30 mobs AoE is affecting 500 players, you also have to check their LoS and perform various other calculations.

I don't actually think that blizzard coders suck that much, I mean despite the bugs that we see, everything is kind of smooth, the client has a small network footprint (I was playing over our german VPN all yesterday and only realised about 9pm).

What I honestly think is that running each continent off of one entity(be it machine or cluster) isn't enough, I don't really want to see Loading between zones, but I would imagine that the netcode could be upated to streamline this process, dynamic detection of when you go on a wind rider to $destination for example.

I have no idea what kind of spec the servers are, but I'm willing to bet that they aren't crappy, however I do think the problem is maybe 50% code logic and 50% just plain lacking in CPU/DB/Mem grunt for huge world events.

I'm also willing to bet that if Moonglade was instanced, in such a way to as allow multiple raid groups of both factions (maybe an elaboration on the battle grounds formula) that we woudnt have had the problem.

You also have to remember that the client has to 'know' about other players, I did some rough analysis yesterday during all the lag and found almost a 8 fold increase in the ammount of traffic when the shades were spawned in.

This might not be attributable to poor network bandwidth at the blizzard side, but for such an increase in data sent to clients, I'd predict maybe a 50%-60% rise in CPU on the server, due to the literal number of clients that the server has to serve, this is always going to cause problems, I guarantee that the blizzard servers are not top or bottom of the line, I'd also guess due to economic reasons that they dont run idle in normal operation. There is simply no reason why you would massivley over spec hardware for occasions that happen very rarely, its just not good bussiness sense.

Overall, I'd like to see some changes in how zones are handled and the load distrubuted between servers :)

Fake edit: ! Slug post.

 

XI-

I'd just settle for an NPC in BRM called The Bone Collector who cleanses the bones every 15 minutes or so. Probably improve the lag there by 100%.

 

◊ Praetorian

Yeah, pure technological limitations are a major hurdle that definitely ties into game design.

I think the Eranikus event would be, hands-down, one of the coolest and most memorable MMO experiences out there if it could support smooth play with 300 people present. The idea behind it is excellent. Visually, it's awesome. The lore, the writing, everything, are great. But when it plays like a slideshow and heals take 20 seconds to cast and it freezes completely at least once every minute, it's sad, and leaves the player feeling "Ugh, this would be so cool, if only."

I lack much depth of MMO experience, but have other 3D rendered game engines been able to handle 300+ people interacting with the environment at the same time?

 

◊ Maniq

Not having played an MMO on this scale before, I'd think that this many players in one space hasn't ever been sucessfully achieved.

My guess would be that for this to work, an adaptation to the engine that they use for WoW would have to be made, my speculation is that this lag is caused when multiple events affect multiple players at the same time and all of the events affect all players.

In effect you have the server working out whats happening to 300 players, then trying to calculate the effect that every player, is having on every other player, every few milliseconds.

One possible (maybe not feasable) solution would be to disregard the players outside of a certain range and just update their data on a less timely basis, for example,

Player A is 150 yards away from player B.

Each player can effect something 40 yards away, so you have a cutoff, whereby the interveining ground is just not considered for 2 seconds, as no action from either player will be able to be seen/affect in that time. Obviousley you have to check in such a time that the player could have moved in range, but this could be less of a problem (yay for Unknown Entity and the healing the so often give.)

This wouldn't work in game and it wouldnt be a 100% perfect solution, but for the one off events such as these, it could be the difference between a crash/slide show and a workable encounter.

Another way would be to do away with information on disk, it costs a lot more, but if you have everything living in fast memory, instead of in a DB lookup, you do gain performance there, I know Eve Online made this move some time ago and they saw performance increases.

I could be wrong, but I do honestly believe that if a "Large instance server" was made, so that everytime an event like this happens, the players and whatnot were moved onto this server, things would be a lot better than they currently are, the current WoW engine just isnt designed to cope with that number of people in close proximity and, for 95% of the time, it shouldn't have to.

I'm not a programmer, so I dont know if anything like this is feasable for the blizzard client/server architecture, but I really don't think it is "Blizzard buys shitty hardware" it more a case of "Well, no-one has done things on this scale before, lets try this and see if it works and see if we can improve upon it as we go."

To coin a phrase: Six of one and half a dozen of another.

 

XI-

To some extent to differing degrees of success. One method of doing this is dynamically scaling the view distance. So that it closes the render distance based on the number of people, you know they're there, you might be able to tab target them, but you can't see them.

 

◊ Praetorian

It's got nothing to do with view distance though. I honestly was running 15 FPS during most of the Eranikus event, with countless people on my screen. I run 60 FPS in Orgrimmar and 40ish while clearing the BWL hatchery.

It's not graphics that are the problem.

As Maniq outlined, it's data calculations regarding the relative positioning, pathing, and interaction between dozens and dozens of entities simultaneously. Every time a Nightmare Phantasm casts a Shadow Bolt Volley, it has to query every player within a large radius, check distance, calculate the vector between the origin of the volley and that player, emit a bolt in that direction, calculate damage, check resistances, modify target HP, check for death and other related effects, and so forth. It has to do that hundreds of times. Each mob is also checking the aggro of the hundreds of people on its aggro list every fraction of a second, assimilating every hostile action they have taken, every bit of healing done or damage done, every tick of an ability like bloodrage or a HoT, and so forth. Each mob has to path towards its current target and figure out the most direct route over the topography. Now add 20 NPC Nighthaven Defenders into the mix. They all have their own aggro lists and pathing, and they are taking and dealing damage. It's all about scaling and just crunching numbers.

 

Graham

I wonder how much a difference it would make if they just made the Nightmares have an AoE DoT and made the buildings give you immunity to it.