test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
The playerbase is too small for group content to be viable.
quotable
Posts: 29 Arc User
I just did Moreau's Lab. It took 44 minutes from the time I started recruiting until I had a full group. From the time the group filled to the time we were done with the lair was 20 minutes. See the problem? Today was a bit of an outlier; more typical is 20 minutes to fill a group. But that still means that in order to do group content, I have to spend half of my time just trying to recruit people to join the group. And that's even with time spent sharing quests, waiting for people to come to the lair, and trying to convince 40s to sidekick down counting as part of the "good" half, not the recruiting half.
It used to be that about half of the lair runs that I'd participate in would be in groups that I organized myself. That still leaves about half being organized by someone else. Naturally, only 1/5 of the players in any group organize the group, so I organize a lot more groups than "average". Since I returned a little over a month ago, I've done 16 lair runs in groups that I organized. I've done 0 in groups that someone else organized. Zero. Not one. Less than epsilon.
It's not that I don't want someone else to put in the work of organizing a group. In fact, I'd prefer it. It's that hardly anyone organizes groups anymore. I've only seen two people recruiting for a Moreau's Lab group in that time. In one case, I had to log off soon enough that I wasn't sure I'd be able to finish. The other didn't know how to organize a group, so I joined his group, and after seven minutes, he hadn't sent a single recruiting message nor gone to another zone to recruit, so I suggested that it would help if he did recruit, and he responded by kicking me.
What changed? It's not that hard to figure out. At peak, it used to be about four zones in Canada, three in Desert, and two in Monster Island. Now those zones are lucky to get a single zone half full. A much smaller pool of players to recruit from means it's much harder to find four people willing to group.
Part of the problem is just the playerbase getting smaller. That's not a trivial problem to fix, of course. But look at Millennium City: while the other zone populations have collapsed, Millennium City has gone from 8 zones at peak a year ago, to 8 zones at peak today. What happened?
Alerts happened. A lot of the players in Millennium City aren't doing Westside, City Center, or Downtown. They're doing alerts. That means they aren't available to do normal content. For purposes of trying to recruit for a group, such people might as well be offline.
The problem is that alerts siphoned off most of the playerbase. For purposes of doing other content, moving 2/3 of the players to alerts is equivalent to having 2/3 of the players quit the game. I don't know how that will play out with Cryptic's game revenue. But I can't see it making sense from a game design perspective.
The problem is that repeatable content largely kills all content in its level range that gives worse rewards than it. People who want to level as quickly as possible will go for whatever content gives the best rewards and ignore the rest. Repeatable content implicitly gives slightly better rewards here than it would otherwise, because you don't have the learning curve of figuring out what you're doing.
And what about repeatable content that scales to your level? If the rewards are good enough, that can nearly kill all other content in the entire game. Cryptic started on this path over a year ago with adventure packs, but those weren't available to free players, so they didn't have the hugely noticeable effect on the playerbase size available for lairs.
I will at least give Cryptic credit for avoiding some of the traps that other games fall into that destroy the possibility of group content. 90% of the playerbase isn't automatically disqualified from grouping with me on the basis that they're on a different server and can't switch. Nor is 90% of the playerbase automatically disqualified because they're the wrong level; rather, they can sidekick. Nor does it take an hour to cycle through the various zones and get a recruiting message in front of nearly everyone with zone chat. Nor does it take half an hour for people to reach the lair once the group is full.
There's another problem with encouraging players to loop the alerts endlessly. Repeating content too many times in a row is boring. Games need more variety to be fun. There are players like me who will go out and do a variety of content for fun, even if it isn't the fastest way to level. But those who want the fastest way to level should be encouraged to have fun on the way, not to grind until they get sick of it and quit. Or to put it another way, the means of getting in-game rewards should coincide with the means of having fun.
The solution is simple: rewards should be calibrated to encourage players to do a variety of content, not to just loop alerts endlessly all the way to the level cap. And the easy way to do this? Nerf the rewards from alerts.
It used to be that about half of the lair runs that I'd participate in would be in groups that I organized myself. That still leaves about half being organized by someone else. Naturally, only 1/5 of the players in any group organize the group, so I organize a lot more groups than "average". Since I returned a little over a month ago, I've done 16 lair runs in groups that I organized. I've done 0 in groups that someone else organized. Zero. Not one. Less than epsilon.
It's not that I don't want someone else to put in the work of organizing a group. In fact, I'd prefer it. It's that hardly anyone organizes groups anymore. I've only seen two people recruiting for a Moreau's Lab group in that time. In one case, I had to log off soon enough that I wasn't sure I'd be able to finish. The other didn't know how to organize a group, so I joined his group, and after seven minutes, he hadn't sent a single recruiting message nor gone to another zone to recruit, so I suggested that it would help if he did recruit, and he responded by kicking me.
What changed? It's not that hard to figure out. At peak, it used to be about four zones in Canada, three in Desert, and two in Monster Island. Now those zones are lucky to get a single zone half full. A much smaller pool of players to recruit from means it's much harder to find four people willing to group.
Part of the problem is just the playerbase getting smaller. That's not a trivial problem to fix, of course. But look at Millennium City: while the other zone populations have collapsed, Millennium City has gone from 8 zones at peak a year ago, to 8 zones at peak today. What happened?
Alerts happened. A lot of the players in Millennium City aren't doing Westside, City Center, or Downtown. They're doing alerts. That means they aren't available to do normal content. For purposes of trying to recruit for a group, such people might as well be offline.
The problem is that alerts siphoned off most of the playerbase. For purposes of doing other content, moving 2/3 of the players to alerts is equivalent to having 2/3 of the players quit the game. I don't know how that will play out with Cryptic's game revenue. But I can't see it making sense from a game design perspective.
The problem is that repeatable content largely kills all content in its level range that gives worse rewards than it. People who want to level as quickly as possible will go for whatever content gives the best rewards and ignore the rest. Repeatable content implicitly gives slightly better rewards here than it would otherwise, because you don't have the learning curve of figuring out what you're doing.
And what about repeatable content that scales to your level? If the rewards are good enough, that can nearly kill all other content in the entire game. Cryptic started on this path over a year ago with adventure packs, but those weren't available to free players, so they didn't have the hugely noticeable effect on the playerbase size available for lairs.
I will at least give Cryptic credit for avoiding some of the traps that other games fall into that destroy the possibility of group content. 90% of the playerbase isn't automatically disqualified from grouping with me on the basis that they're on a different server and can't switch. Nor is 90% of the playerbase automatically disqualified because they're the wrong level; rather, they can sidekick. Nor does it take an hour to cycle through the various zones and get a recruiting message in front of nearly everyone with zone chat. Nor does it take half an hour for people to reach the lair once the group is full.
There's another problem with encouraging players to loop the alerts endlessly. Repeating content too many times in a row is boring. Games need more variety to be fun. There are players like me who will go out and do a variety of content for fun, even if it isn't the fastest way to level. But those who want the fastest way to level should be encouraged to have fun on the way, not to grind until they get sick of it and quit. Or to put it another way, the means of getting in-game rewards should coincide with the means of having fun.
The solution is simple: rewards should be calibrated to encourage players to do a variety of content, not to just loop alerts endlessly all the way to the level cap. And the easy way to do this? Nerf the rewards from alerts.
Quaternion from the previous forum
Post edited by quotable on
0
Comments
If the latter, what are the chances of (given the Alerts system and the PVE queues system before it that's still technically there) that changing?
Also, that's a lot of words and meandering about before getting to your eventual point (nerf Alert rewards and/or buff other content rewards).
EDIT: And before my quick-summary gets eye-rollingly claimed to have not read the thread - you're using one problem (how hard/long it takes to get groups for Lair content) and inferring that it's entire problem is caused by something else (Alerts) with a subjective personal bias (you find the Alert system boring and repetitive), and that by nerfing that content you can somehow magically 'fix' the alleged problem.
Didn't see a lot of attempting to lay out alternatives behind that, and frankly, I find the 'end result' of the entire post kind of boring as a result.
[SIGPIC]Also, this poster rambles.[/SIGPIC]
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
That goes into a whole 'other rant I have about this post in general...
The problem with getting groups for lairs is due more likely to the fact that they're somewhat buggy (Destroyer Factory), strewn across level ranges that cause them to be ignored later on (anything but the few End-game ones), and the reward content isn't worth it. On top of that, the PVE Queues system just kind of sits there in the corner going 'Now what?'.
They seriously need to get around to actually doing Lair reviews and making the content scalable, in addition to making the rewards worth it, before we can really say that the 'population of the game is too small' is truly the core problem for lairs.
It's not the population - it's the interest level of the population for this content that's the bugbear. In it's current implementation, there's not a lot for it.
NemCon is the only real exception, and I have to wonder just how much of that is due to the fact it's a bit easier to get Nem-Tokens that way and one of the primary (only?) ways to get Heirlooms as a result...
EDIT: I mean, come on, guys. Before we go nerfing Content B to make Content A more attractive, how about we start with making Content A not suck and then maybe nerf Content B after that's happened.
again EDIT: Left a thought-string unfinished, fix'd now though. Stupid heat.
[SIGPIC]Also, this poster rambles.[/SIGPIC]
I noticed this. I've also STILL to this date not found one single person interested in Bronze King. I've given up even asking.
Would love to find people interested in doing runs on lair for particular objectives - ie. repeat runs to get the perks in Demonflame and Resistance, it just seems that Alerts killed what little teaming there was left (say what you like about it, but CoX is a VASTLY superior team based MMORPG).
Even started a thread to see where to take it next.... didn't get a great response, and it languishes here: http://co-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=149341
This has nothing to do with population, and everything to do with bad game design I'd say.
I agree with everything ukatoenasni said. OP is just doing bias confirmation and not really looking at the root of the problem, which IMO is lack of proper rewards and lairs being fixed to specific levels, which means that if you're not playing/don't want to play a character of the appropriate level, the lair is out of bounds to you. And even if you were willing to bring a level appropriate toon, there's little reason to go through the trouble.
A more viable and smarter solution would be to do a lair review to make them more attractive as content--making scaleable and give better rewards for playing them. Or in other words... everything ukatoenasni aready said
In terms of giving players the tools to get a group together, Champions Online is probably the best at it of any MMORPG that I've ever played. But tools to contact players don't help if there aren't five players online who want to do the lair in question.
But that isn't really my main point. The post is more about diagnosing what happened than demanding particular changes.
Then why didn't Moreau's Lab or any other lair have the same problems 14 months ago?
If there is one new thing that gives rewards out of line with everything else in the entire game, then which is easier to do: nerf that one new thing, or rebalance everything else in the entire game around it?
Or let's take a different example. Suppose that one particular power dealt double the damage of anything else in the game. (I'm using this loosely; let's suppose that cutting the damage in half would make the power balanced.) Which would be the better fix for that: nerf the one power, or leave it alone and try to rebalance everything else in the entire game around it?
How many players are there online at a given time interested in doing normal content? Maybe 100-200, depending on the time of day? In order to merely have one group trying each lair at any given time, you'd need to use up 45 of those players. There just isn't enough interest in lairs to have that many players in lairs at all times. That would still mean up to a ~20 minute wait to get a group for a lair. And it also assumes that all lairs are equally popular; if not, then the less popular ones are harder yet.
Quaternion from the previous forum
I realize those quotes are out of context, but I think you're both proposing the same thing: making lairs scale to your level.
I say that's moving in the wrong direction. The reason to have content that is different levels in the first place is so that the most efficient way to level isn't to pick one thing and grind it endlessly all the way from character creation to the level cap. You can't do the content so well when you're 10 levels too low for it, and once you're 10 levels too high, it's more efficient to do other, higher level content.
If alerts didn't scale in level, they could kill content near their level, but that's it. The rest of the game's content would be left intact. But because they scale in level, they can kill content of all levels. That's the fundamental problem.
Let's suppose that alerts, adventure packs, and comic series were removed from the game entirely. And then let's suppose that lairs were changed to scale in level. It's entirely plausible that one particular lair would be discovered to give the best loot. People would figure that out and do that one particular lair endlessly. That would cause exactly the same problem that alerts cause today.
It's possible that you didn't mean to make lairs scale to level, but rather, only to group size. That would effectively mean removing the group content from the game, and making it a single player game that requires an Internet connection for DRM purposes. I hope you don't actually want to go there.
Quaternion from the previous forum
If your entire point is research (effectively), why suggest a 'fix' for something when you're not entirely certain that it's the primary problem in the first place...?
While having an idea of what can/should do in that instance is fine, professing it's necessity without certainty that it truly is the problem (or the primary problem amongst a series of others) is a little strange.
Your assertion that this is the only problem, or the biggest problem at the least, is false for reasons previously mentioned. The full issue is:
1) Lairs are dated content and haven't been given a proper, serious review. There has been talk of it for a long time but no actual motion from what we can really tell on that. The biggest change to the content was part of a blanket change to itemization, and even that seemed mostly to consist of drop table updates and little else. A lot of the bugs and general encounter issues are still present and indicative of design issues that content going forward has iterated on (Resistance, both Comic Series, and Alerts all show far more interesting/varied/dynamic content then generally available in Lairs; Therakial's Temple was the last one that seemed to show any real breakout in design). They need an update at the least, even if it's just bugfixes and streamlining.
2) There is no meaningful way to, quickly, make teams for this content. You highlight that problem, but didn't seem to really follow through on the logic behind it. The reason that Alerts are doing so well is because a) you can find a team for them incredibly quickly and b) you can do so from anywhere you really want to, and often while doing other content. As you highlight, you do not have the same luxury with Lairs at present - one personal generally has to dedicate time to that, and the rest of the team plus the 'recruiter' have to spend time waiting, often significant. For the general time it takes to clear the lair, it's not worth the effort (20 minutes to run a full lair doesn't sound bad - you want the content to be long enough to be interesting, but not so long that it drags on forever; A better time-period would probably be closer to 35-40 minutes).
3) Even with the drop tables having been updated, there aren't any real, meaningful rewards for doing Lairs outside of a few costume pieces that can't be gotten elsewhere. I'm not even 100% sure that you even can get better quality gear in Lairs then if you instead focused entirely on Silver Champions Recognition (one primary/day if you're running UNITY and UNITY2) and Questonite. Given that these are currently two of the better avenues to get gear, why bother wasting time with Lairs? Alternatives exist, and gosh-be-golly, two of those (Silver Champs Recog and Questonite) use older content (Questonite can be gained from APs/CSs) as well. They can also be run solo and similarly have no build up time before you can do the content.
The population may be a contributing factor, but the biggest problem is lairs freakin' suck compared to all other forms of progression at this point.
What other serious, meaningful group content did we have 14 months ago? Frankly, I saw more people advertising for Adventure Packs/Comic Series then I ever did lair advertisements that weren't Therakiel's or NemCon.
The problem isn't solely Alerts, here. There's bigger issues that maybe we should look to addressing before forcing people to deal with the situation.
EDIT:
You misinterpret the intent there. The reason for pushing for scalable content is so that it's more meaningfully accessible for a broader spectrum of players then just a small, select group.
Building content for just one level range, regardless of what that one range is, is idiotic. You are forcing the obsolescence on the content itself and insuring it's demise, particularly in ranges that generally don't see a lot of people sitting at for all that long of a period. Even content at the end game is eventually going to be obsolete when one raises the level cap. It's demonstrable in many older MMOs - look at WoW and how often people do Legacy raids in that game (read: Outside of achievement-hunters and nostalgia, most people don't, and a lot of people in the latter category just solo them or run them with limited groups for the experience of seeing the content once and then don't even bother). It's happened in other MMOs as well (how often, outside of 'upgraded' Elite versions of dungeons along a level curve, do you even care about that content? Most people don't - again, a lot of people just do it to see it once, overlevelled, and then never care about it again).
I (as stated) think that's freakin' stupid. Make it scale so that you make it more accessible, provide people with more options and reason for doing it, and thus save yourself the headache. It's clearly something they can do, and understand that there's at least some necessity in doing - otherwise, APs/CSs wouldn't have scaled, and in the case of pre-On Alert Serpent Lantern, been the best place to get gear.
Learn from mistakes, don't keep repeating the same stupid crap.
As you indicate, people are going to do that anyway. That being the case, I don't see how making as much content scale as possible is exactly going to be the problem. People are going to do what they're going to do, and forcing people to run a limited set of content when you can instead give the option of playing a wider range (so that they can run something else if they decide they're tired of the repetition) is a far better use of time and resources then putting something out that's then going to be ignored the second you release something better (or make your new thing ignorable because it's not functionally better in the first place - which happens with some frequency in MMOs anyway).
[SIGPIC]Also, this poster rambles.[/SIGPIC]
Plus, alerts are the new thing. Before that, resistance ate all the players. Before that? Lots of people were busy farming serpent lantern. If the lairs get a revamp, everyone'll probably complain that nobody's doing alerts. Fact is the newest content tends to get the most love.
But, I agree, moreau's lab also does suck. I've never been able to get a pug for it.
RIP Caine
Also true. It is a bit of a catch-22 situation, but there's no need to shoot yourself in the foot trying to fix it, either.
Fixed levels on lairs would lead to that (eg: why bother running Moreau's Lab when there are better/faster ways to get experience, and the loot from it is going to be replaced by end-game things anyway? The common answer isn't going to change. Thus, why bother even adjusting the content people aren't going to run, when you can design stuff they will?), and wouldn't really solve the problem.
Nerfing rewards on Alerts doesn't really address the problem either. That's similarly stupid.
[SIGPIC]Also, this poster rambles.[/SIGPIC]
EDIT: Or, well, maybe now that difficulty matters little overall.
LIFETIMER since 23/01/2012 || Join Date: Sep 2009
Can be reached in-game as @PoochieHellhound
Support me on YouTube!
The team building tools in this game are a joke. COX had way better lft system.
-You cant use COs search tools to see what role ppl are using.
-Most people don't use it.
-You cant use the request join team function if your not in the same instance, which makes it useless 90% of the time.
-You cant search by people looking for specific activity (pvp,general pve, instanced content, e.c.t.)
Ive never recieved a team invite as a result of the lft tools in this game, and I've been asking for the team search tools to be reviewed for years.
Your better off using the spamming the LTF channel or broadcast channel....
PVP is starving without rewards
1. Please give us Daily PVP missions that reward Questionite.
2. Please give us an exchange rate between Acclaim and Recognition so that PVP has access to all "On Alert" PVE rewards.
I find alerts good fun quick content to break up the normal missions that I have done many times.
If after on alert there are fewer people queueing for lairs may be just maybe it shows how well loved this content was and now there is a different way to team up lairs are shown to be not as well liked.
[SIGPIC]http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd175/Fifer71/mandrakesigmark3.jpg[/SIGPIC]
I been a long time leaving but I'm going to be a long time gone.
Willie Nelson
T.U.F.K.A.S. (the user formerly known as Scarlyng)
Wrong on the CO forums since November, 2008
NemCon is an exception because a decent group can get 8 Q boxes in 10-15 minutes. Tokens are barely on the menu.
But just TRY to find a group that actually wants to fight Shadow Destroyer.
Duly noted. I kind of figured it was something on the non-standard reward track. Knowing the specifics is good, though. o7
[SIGPIC]Also, this poster rambles.[/SIGPIC]
Had no problem getting 3 runs with 3 different FULL teams for Demon Flame last night.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
Tell me about it. I want that silly strands cape so freaking bad...
But sign on for a nemcon raid now and tell the group you wanna fight SD. *punt* out of the group you go. :mad:
Ima going to get that cape and spikey shoulders if I gota randomly mug someone.
Umm anyhow hadda vent. Sorry for the tangent.
On Alert has been out for a long time. The "people are doing it because it's the shiny new thing" effect is long since over. It's still harder to get a group for lairs today than it was the day Serpent Lantern launched. Launch day, not a month later.
I've gotten a group for Moreau's Lab 16 times in the last 40 days or so. It's still possible. The problem is that it takes 20 minutes or so. I think it helps some that I pick up some people who want to do it but had given up on getting a group.
Champions Online makes it possible to quickly get your recruiting message in front of most of the players who are online at the time. I can't think of any other game I've played that did so.
There are other games where it's easier to get a full group of players for PVE content. But that's not because the game has better tools for organizing a group. It's purely because the game has a much larger playerbase.
If Champions Online had 10 times the present playerbase, then getting a group for whatever lair you want would be quick and easy, just like it was a couple of months after Free For All went live. Alerts and adventure packs siphoning off a bunch of the playerbase wouldn't even matter.
Can you give an example in any MMORPG ever made where content sets A and B were equally hard, set A gave significantly better rewards, but set B was more popular? Ever? Even a temporary example where this was broken up in a subsequent patch?
Quaternion from the previous forum
DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!! :O
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
Compared to the alternative solution of 'buff Lairs', I'm inclined to disagree. :U
One possible way (as indicated previously) is 'increase accessibility'.
PVE Queue system (in place, under-utilized) in and of itself seems promising, regardless of any other measures. If, say, lairs were updated (bug fixes, a little streamlining to make the entire experience more cohesive, updated rewards that are actually worth it) in addition to this... There's a possibility of resurgence of interest. I say possibility, because gamer psychology is heavily prone to perceptive issues ( ಠ_ಠ ) and a slew of other variables that make it hard to accurately predict anything but likely trends with any accuracy.
And I do like accuracy.
I honestly don't see nerfing Alerts doing anything positive, at all, nor do I see any reasoning to suggest that it would somehow address Lair group-forming times. I'm also having trouble seeing any legitimate hypothetical basis to make such claims, either.
[SIGPIC]Also, this poster rambles.[/SIGPIC]
My point wasn't about rewards I said I had in the past (before alerts) queued for 40 min to team for lairs so they have never been that popular and now with alerts it may have gotten worse because they just aren't fun or rewarding so why play them.
How to correct this I don't know, but your comment about other mmorpg I can't give an example but that's a comment on society and people putting things before fun and is a social problem not something that can be put right on a game forum. I for one put fun before things in games and real life.
[SIGPIC]http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd175/Fifer71/mandrakesigmark3.jpg[/SIGPIC]
[SIGPIC]Also, this poster rambles.[/SIGPIC]
Dare i say it but they really need to take a look at what CoH did with there task forces they did very little with actual content (other than tidying it up a bit so it wasn't quite as mind numbingly boring) and added in decent rewards.
Though I suppose we would first need a crafting and by extension gearing system that was actually remotely interesting.
Technically speaking, Task Forces were also viable at later levels reward-wise specifically through rewarding things that you can trade-in for end-game things. And through sidekicking, you could them as often as you wanted (by scaling yourself down).
Oh look at that, scalable content with meaningful rewards. A case example for the rhetoric I've been going on about all thread. Of course, AFAIK it's just as obnoxious to get groups together in CoH/V as it is for non-queued content here.
But wait - WoW covered that with the LFG system and revamping older dungeons for the end-game via Heroic modes (and putting them on the LFG queue). Not really the only game to have done that, but the most visible example (TOR has done it as well with Hardmodes, and Guild Wars worked with a similar concept for the entire game). What if we combined these methods?
ಠ_ಠ
[SIGPIC]Also, this poster rambles.[/SIGPIC]
In addition to the response above, I feel it might be relevant to say that the time frames that you describe as necessary to find a group for a lair now tend to match my experience for much of the life of the game except shortly after launch and shortly after FFA launch. What you are describing is normal IMO.
The rewards for time/effort investment in most of CO's lairs has always seemed pretty bad to me. Combine that with a game that encourages people to adopt a soloist mentality and you have content that people are not interested in playing.
All of that said, I do hope that the lair pass, if it ever comes, does provide more incentives to play through such content.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
But I don't want it to turn into a situation where people figure out which lair is easiest and then loop that one endlessly for drops. That would make one particular lair easy to get a group for, and not help at all with any others.
So here's how you fix it. Make it so that everyone automatically sidekicks to the level of a lair, so that you can't have 40s going into a level 30 lair and making everything trivial. Make it so that you can't enter a lair at all if you're more than 5 levels below it. If you finish a lair, you get a random bind-on-pickup blue primary item of your real level. If you finish it on elite, it's purple rather than blue.
That would, of course, just lead players to figure out which lair is easiest and loop it endlessly. So for starters, make it so that you can only get the gear reward for a particular lair once per day. You can do several different lairs in a day and get a reward for each, but not loop one particular lair several times in a day.
Next, make it so that instead of getting a particular item chosen for you randomly, you have a choice of multiple different random items to choose from. How many you get to choose between depends on how many lairs you've completed at the difficulty level in question. If you've done n lairs at the difficulty level in question, then you can choose from among n items.
This way, looping one lair a zillion times while ignoring all of the rest is tremendously inefficient. If you do each lair once, then maybe you loop one for a while after that until you get the gear you want, but that would mean it doesn't take that long to get your gear. It might be optimal to only do 6 or 8 of the lairs before looping one rather than doing all 9 once each, but that would at least get people out doing a bunch of different lairs.
Quaternion from the previous forum
Imagine actual gear sets where the different pieces are available in different lairs.
Or Costume sets whose individual pieces are similarly dispersed.
My personal favorite would be to just ensure that each individual lair has a unique and desirable reward. Not every reward will appeal to every player of course, but they would still be pursued.
Have a cycle of bonuses where each week (or day perhaps) a given lair has either an increased drop rate for its reward, or a chance to drop a special reward. In this way you increase the likelihood that an individual lair will get player attention. The worst that happens is a player has to wait for Mandragalore Monday in order to find teams to go after the specific reward he seeks.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
How about... they make it scale to level, drop Recognition that's already in game in addition to adjusting the loot tables to be a bit more interesting, and/or include special costume rewards on separate, Lair-specific drop currency (we know they're not opposed to that idea - Drifter Salvage comes to mind), and use that to include other flash and glitz?
If they don't want to use the 'Tough' mob system that's already in place for seasonal events, they can try the Alert forced-leveling system (which is about as well balanced as a broken see-saw, and went over about as well when Alerts launched; Losing 40% power effectiveness for being one level over the forced bar is still ridiculous, IMO). There's also whatever system they use to determine how an AP/CS loads up.
The only thing that would really need work is making more dynamic drop tables (for Recognition and gear) to keep things that drop in the content meaningful. The big thing is the majority of the code-work is in the drop tables, and uses pre-existing systems as much as possible here. Drop table coding adjustments here can lead to improvement across the entire game.
Feels a bit cleaner/efficient, mentally. Most of it is reusing resources and any new code generated can be used across a wider section of the game.
There's a lot of variation they can work with on similar design patterns with differing levels of efficiency. I'm not quite pretentious enough to suggest I have a perfect solution in this matter.
I personally think adding junk-code in the form of draconian loot limitations is also pointless, as it's punishing people for making an efficient play-time choice. We should be encouraging diversity of enjoyment. If Lair_A is more popular because of rewards, a more fluid/dynamic loot table allows Lair_B to produce enough additional rewards that it is, equivalent to time and effort, equal to Lair_A. Both can be adjusted to produce the desired Loot_per_Time scale.
In this model, Lair_B can just drop more Lair_currency then Lair_A (on the assumption that you're going for that kind of thing - lair-specific, scaled rewards can be on the Lair_currency vendor to encourage this as well). Adjust up/down until people are running Lair_B as much as Lair_A over time, or at least close enough that it's clear Lair_B is a viable alternative. Doesn't require that much additional code beyond introduction of a new currency and the rate at which it drops on a specific case.
(DISCLAIMER: This post pretty much became a dart-board of random thought. I have no illusions over how readable it is, or how much sense it makes - it's thought-vomit, after all.)
[SIGPIC]Also, this poster rambles.[/SIGPIC]
If you need a complete set in order for the any of the pieces to be optimal, then you've just killed customization. That's fine in a game like WoW where the goal is to be identical to everyone else. But that's no good in a game like CO that is based on heavy customization.
If it's random chance, then you get the problem that you end up having to do a particular lair a bunch of times in a row to get the particular drop you want. That's been done in a lot of games, and it's horrible every single time.
And then all of the healers want to go to this lair, and none of them want to go to that lair.
That would make any lair other than the bonus one harder to get a group for than it is now. Today, I can grab people who want to do a lair and haven't happened to find a group for it. Under that system, those people often wouldn't come because they'd want to wait for the bonus day.
Any in-game dependence on real life day or time of day is an irredeemable, unmitigated evil. No exceptions. Ever. I'm aware of the hourly events. Those aren't an exception. A game needs to be playable all of the time, not just during the occasional windows when the game gives a bonus to what you want to do.
Quaternion from the previous forum
when we had few levels to hit the higher content
Code ranger would set
up and magic contact to gear us to test things until it was sure it worked for the gear balance and team sizes. A Special GM alert would go out the DEV TM would ask us for help
Please focus on this tonight if you have levels for it.. We are really excited about these new Lairs The team has made..
Today i don't think with the changes in mats for crafting and the disappearance of some old rewards.. I'd ever see the inside of Monster Islands Viper lair again.
IT was impossible to get a Team for Stronghold. so i had to wait.. I made levels in some old missions and alerts were nice.. But traffic in these areas was slim to none where i was used to a long wait cause everyone was stacking Super Group Raids.
Now its too easy to Alert and Que up.. its hurting the core game experience in bigger lairs.
Those places were mean on big teams of good geared heroes.. and a real time investment..
and you get rewarded for trying having an OP Kodiak as Mentors slave if you try.
That's not in Wiki. .the brute accolade for stronghold and the old advise is out the door like so many other great things here. IF you cant block and get one or two shotted why bother doing it.
i'm thinking Necruls the same.. often we;d beg a lvl 40 to tank him to have a chance and Val scarlets part of the old cathedral was hard enough with a DEV TM of lvl 40s with me to beta test that.. its just less heroic feeling and more space invaders mean less time sinks then heroic victories that could hurt long time enjoyment for new members
Does a lazy and shy person expend the effort to hide from attention :biggrin: ?
Queues for 'dungeons' seem to be the way the industry is going, probably for a good reason. Cant argue with your point (and sorry for the joke
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
You'll never get me to admit it in such a way as that it can be used as proof in court.
It truncates the issue of forming groups by happily performing matchmaker across a wider population pool then you would otherwise have had access to without it's implementation. It's insidious in it's efficiency, and in it's utter lack of discrimination.
One of those damnable necessary evils these days. It's hard to objectively argue against it.
[SIGPIC]Also, this poster rambles.[/SIGPIC]
Some really good points there. Thank you for the responses.
My take as well.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
At any given time, there might be 100-200 people online looking to do normal content. The game has about 1000 quests, but only 9 lairs. So the overwhelming majority of the people looking to do normal content aren't going to be looking for a lair. If there are 20 people looking to do a lair, and they're spread across 9 lairs, some queues aren't going to fill up.
Quaternion from the previous forum
a team of 5 Superheroes went after a big evil inside a Dungeon.
The closest is maybe something like "Justice League : Crisis on two Earths", but thats inside
the Space Station and also again 5 against 5.
But thinking about maybe the Fantastic Four said : Oh today we pickup Spidey and then we
go into that Dungeon.. wade through masses of trash .. and then confront finally Galactus :biggrin:
So for me Dungeons fit more the typical Fantasy MMO Genre, but Alerts fit more the Superhero genre.
Quite heroic. But the "dungeons" aren't always inside a location. Could be an island fortress or many other things like that, or another dimension entirely. Saying it isn't heroic that a super team goes after a baddie or a group of baddies seems to be missing a lot of comics.
In fact, the super teams or super hero team ups generally are combinations of heroes, that are up against some more lethal foes for that very reason.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
I can make a new toon now and level up to 40 in a week or so because of Smash XP. Also, the Q awards are fast and easy, especially when a Nemesis or Baron alerts comes up.
Most of the lairs don't have much to offer players who are looking for loot and XP. The toughest ones do offer Silver Champ Recog, but that's it.
To fix this conflict:
1. Lairs need to give better rewards.
2. Alerts need to give lesser rewards, especially Smash.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
i was once Nisshoku-san
My characters[SIGPIC]http://co-forum.perfectworld.com/image.php?type=sigpic&userid=91878665000&dateline=1359356700[/SIGPIC]
Im not arguing against the rest of your point, but people could do this before Alerts.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
Yeah .. but i meant more the typical Dungeon setting where you are in some kind of cave
and first have to kill hundreds of trash mobs before you finally meet the Big Boss.
True, but now, one can level to 40 in a week of casual play, rather than furiously trying to hit 40 with massive play sessions. You can get, in 2 min, double the XP of a major mission that normally takes 10 min. That's a factor of x10 increase.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
simply put, the rewards do not hold equal to the effort put in anymore in lairs, and thats the other half of the problem.
Intstanced Missions like "Help a Citizen" mostly take maybe 5 minutes, also a Smash with
the wait time from the Queue is also more around 4-5 minutes.
Also there are a lot of Questlines in the open World where you can collect 10 quests and do
them all in one session .. like maybe the Paintball Camp .. or the quests at Officer James Candy.
A good way is however to mix that all now .. make a smash for the Exp Bonus, then finish
some Quests. Or make some more smashes when you see that there is one available with
a low fail chance and you just have only quests that you don't like that much
And avoid VB .. try to go not before 31 to MI .. make all the quests in the first Area, since they
give more Exp than later quests .. also do the first part of Lemuria and late Canada .. and then
maybe again some smashes now and then, so that you can reach 40 just on MI.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!