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Thoughts on Dragon Timers
pointsman
Member Posts: 2,327 Arc User
So a lot of people complain about having to spend so much time waiting for dragons to appear. I understand, that can be quite frustrating. But the way I see it, the dragon timers are a direct response to player complaints about the unpredictability of HE's in IWD. People want to farm the Epic HE's in IWD but do not know when they would spawn, and so waste a lot of time just sitting around waiting for them to appear. Now in Mod 4, everyone knows when each dragon HE is going to occur in every instance. From this point of view, I think the dragon timers are a step in the right direction.
But of course they could be improved upon. So if we are going to have Dragon HE's as a part of daily campaign progression (and if you don't, well, that's another discussion) - how should the timing of these encounters be managed?
Please offer constructive suggestions and not just random "I hate ToD" complaints.
But of course they could be improved upon. So if we are going to have Dragon HE's as a part of daily campaign progression (and if you don't, well, that's another discussion) - how should the timing of these encounters be managed?
Please offer constructive suggestions and not just random "I hate ToD" complaints.
Post edited by pointsman on
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Kind of funny how things work out in the end, eh?
Actually, the timer is not an issue for me at all. The biggest issue is the amount of time consuming grinding required for the last two boons in ToD. That is a bit ridiculous and does not allow the casual gamer much "fun" time - just a lot of grinding.
myles08807 said, "Back in my day, we didn't have any of this fancy Mulhorand gear while we were leveling . . . we walked uphill both ways while dying once every five seconds while leveling, and we liked it fine!" . . . Now, get off my lawn, you kids!"
pointsman said, "I don't rue the game. In fact I don't feel any regret for the game at all."
looomis said, "I don't like people changing to alts and then bragging about their mains like schizophrenic role players."
One problem with making the timer only 10 or 5 minutes is that, currently, they are designed to be able to be completed by a minimal team composed of at-level players within 20 minutes. If you reduce the timer, you either have to (a) also scale down the dragon, making it even easier than it is now, or (b) give up on the idea of at-level players being able to complete a dragon HE before time runs out.
I don't see how having all the dragons respawn at the same time would be an improvement; currently if you zone in and you face a long wait time, you can hop to an instance with a shorter wait time and get your daily done quicker. If they all respawn at the same time, you wouldn't be able to do that. Could you elaborate on that?
People complained about the unpredictability of the IWD heroics because these were tied to obtaining gear. You needed to find specific encounters to get the best shot at this elusive gear, but these were random and unpredictable, and map-hopping was made very awkward due to the PvP environment. Any wait time in IWD is based around hoping that somebody would put out the call to zerg a Beholder, but you don't need to bother with that if you're just trying to get the daily done as quickly as possible. Time spent is very much player-directed.
In ToD, campaign progression itself is tied to repeatedly doing specific heroic encounters day after day, either on multiple maps or slowing down progression by a large factor due to the sheer amount of sigils and secrets required and the slow rate at which they are accumulated. The timers are useful because you know that the dragon(s) you need will spawn, and you can try to find a timer that accommodates you, but some downtime is inevitable, not short enough to avoid getting bored of waiting, but also not really long enough to permit doing much else. Time spent is only player-directed to the extent of making a conscious decision to progress the campaign very slowly, perhaps on fewer characters than one would like, etc.
Prior campaigns have always offered a way to minimize time spent on dailies while impeding progress only moderately. Dread Ring allows you to do just the lair, and never touch the dailies if you opt to obtain scrips some other way, of which there are several available. Sharandar sparks can be obtained weekly in reasonable quantity, the trade-off being tacking another month or so onto completion, but not needing to visit on a daily basis; other dailies here can be completed at a leisurely pace, as you're spark-walled anyway. IWD can be completed by doing the rep quest regularly and other quests as time permits. All of these campaigns have some form of time-gating, but if you analyze their interfaces, you can see clear and achievable goals.
ToD suffers from, "I have to do this *how* many times?". The artifact weapons are grinding out currency coupled with RNG. The final two boons are grinding out huge quantities of currency as an alternative to what appears to be a massive RNG wall. Nothing looks like it's possible to complete before the next module hits, particularly if you play multiple characters. Looming behind all that is the fear that the next module is a direct tie-in to the current one and may be structured in exactly the same way.
I can't say that the timers are a bad thing of themselves at all. The structure of the campaign that introduced them is problematic.
Another thing I will note that relates a bit is that events operate similarly. If the timing is player-directed and you can put in as much or as little time as you desire, right when you log in, it's friendly to all schedules and to alts. The Siege was great for this because heroic encounters spawned constantly and if you could catch the end of one and zerg through another, you were done. Archers for everyone! Compare that to the new treatment of Lliira's Night with the firework contest being every half hour. You only had to do it once per day per character for daily credit, but you had to be in PE at the right time. Likewise if you wanted a bell, you had to do the contest 15 times or something like that, but that adds up to quite a few cumulative hours of not getting so involved elsewhere that you couldn't go wait out a contest timer to get your tokens.
With the original Midsummer event, you could do the celebration daily without having to participate in contests on a timer. That still took about 10 minutes each, give or take, but it was at player discretion. This year, you had to do two contests for the celebration daily, which was a minimum 20-minute commitment per character you wanted to run, if you logged in at a good time, just barely catching the end of one event and waiting out the second, getting your flowers somewhere in there... or you could do other stuff and hope to catch the end of a different event than you'd already done. But no point herding a couple of chickens without the feast event running because it wouldn't help you.
Contests have also been adjusted so that you don't get credit if you're idle, and the game notes you as idle and disqualifies you from event credit long before you're actually warned. So if you're hoping to do one thing for participation credit and then go get a drink while waiting out the timer, good luck with that. More than about two minutes without doing anything in-game means your event participation will show as incomplete.
TL;DR - the problem is player-directed vs. game-directed use of time. Players want to be in control of how they spend their leisure time. This also seems to be a major issue with the thing known as "raiding", the lack of which many have said is a positive quality in Neverwinter... that you don't have to show up at a specific place at a specific time in order to do stuff and progress.
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Is joek. Having all the dragons spawn simultaneously so that you fight them at once would definitely keep people from being bored....
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For the first point, while it might be technically true, I have never seen a (campaign) Dragon last even five minutes,let alone ten, so for all practical purposes a 10 minute respawn timer would be fine. And remember that with a 10 minute timer, even in the very unlikely event that the dragon isn't killed in 10 minutes, you still have another chance in the same time it would have taken to wait for the 20 minute timer.
The idea of setting all the respawn to be simultaneous is tied in with lower respawn times, simply to stop everyone having to play the game of 'Lets find the instance with the lowest timer'. Of course as it is a separate idea so can be ignored if it is felt to not be an improvement.
They do if you've only got a small or underpowered group. I've even witnessed failure, showing up not-in-time to help a group of lowbies in Neverdeath. And that's frustrating because it puts you right back to trying to find a dragon to kill for your daily.
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10 minutes cooldown timer would fix this pretty well IMO.
Please no simultaneous dragons everywhere. With 10 min cooldown and still possibility to yell for dragons, the average dragon time would drop to much under 5 minutes, which is acceptable.
That is a good way to frame the discussion, in terms of player-directed vs. game-directed use of time.
Perhaps an alternative to dragon timers would be for the game to just spawn a dragon whenever 6 people show up in the dragon spawn area. (With perhaps a 1 or 2 minute cooldown in between kills.) That way, you and 5 others can just show up and kill a dragon whenever you like.
And also I am glad that they don't have "raiding" here. I have never played a game that had "raiding" but all I have heard about it is that it is very very long and almost a second job just to run one.
This is an excellent and succinct way of describing the issue and not just with dragon timers as the rest of your post highlighted.
This is also the reason I've primarily played Neverwinter as a solo game. I simply didn't want to wait an unknown amount of time in order to do a piece of content, particularly with a random group of people and no guarantee of getting anything 'useful' out of it. ToD changed that since I wanted the artifact weapon and fortunately I've discovered that the Legit channel is full of really cool people and group experiences are much more reliably enjoyable.
In terms of dragon timers I know I was initially happy with them because you at least knew when the dragon would turn up. The problem is now the waiting and that could arguably be because there simply isn't enough other campaign related content in the instance to tide you over until the dragon appears. There's one single quest per day and many of those are poorly designed where you effectively are competing with other players for the quest objective.
I wonder if the whole campaign would have been better structured if you moved from one dragon to the next with more quests centred around a single zone rather than a small number of quests across multiple zones. That might simply not have been feasible in the dev time available though.
Not sure how they'd manage it, if they even can, but have the timer for respawn something like a flat 10-15 minutes from the time the Dragon is killed. No matter if it dies in the first sixty seconds of the encounter or if an under-strength team takes it down to the wire and puts it down with only a single second left on the clock.
I used to play World of Warcraft pretty hardcore. That game has pretty much only raiding available for end game. That said it is a huge time constraint to raid. You have to set aside roughly 3 to 5 hours per day your guild or group schedules the raids and have to always be on at a set time. Getting 10 or 25 people to all show up and be ready at the same time can sometimes be hard. Its fun, by all means its fun, but you can do so much more in Neverwinter in the same amount of time.
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The way I understood it, the idea is that dragon wait timer be reduced to 10 min.
Time to kill the dragon remains the same (atm its 20mins). After dragon is killed (be it 30 secs or 19m59s) another wait of 10mins is implemented.
I do agree with Canis that this sounds like a very good solution.
Although I must state that across my alt I must have helped kill (judging from the number of coins I have collected and spent) over 200 dragons, maybe close to 300 and I have never once had an occasion when the dragon took 10 minutes to kill, and very rarely more than 5.
1 - Dragon spawning trigger. E.g. you go to a specific marked area around dragon spawning point, and once there are enough players, dragon spawns immediately. This way you will wait for players not dragons.
2. Flexible skirmish-like fights. E.g. you want to fight a dragon, queue for that specific skirmish, If there is already a active instance with < 20 players and dragon is > 50% life, you go there immediately. If not, you wait untill at least 10 players queue for same skirmish and then new instance is created.
The rationale for the window of dragon-free time is to allow the other questing to be completed, since it's centered in the same area. While these can be very fast to complete once you only have one daily, there is quite a bit more to accomplish when you're on the intro quest.
Too fast of respawns are also annoying because you don't have time to do anything else close to them (eg. Dwarven Valley idol trolls and adjacent black ice nodes).
General note to above posts, the cooldown timer for each dragon does currently begin at the time of death, so you're not asking for anything different there as far as I can tell. Whether it takes 2 minutes or 18 for a dragon to go down right now, it will then be 20 minutes until the next one in that instance.
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I don't like this, as it precludes any opportunity to challenge yourself when you do stumble onto an impending dragon with few people there. The option is available to call zone for help, but it can be a lot of fun to see how you do solo or duo first.
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Oh and you can't just go AFK because LOL YOU HAVE BEEN AFK FOR TOO LONG LOGGED OUT.
**** this ****ty campaign.