The queuing times for dungeons are absurd. Either no one is running them because of the time or they’re too busy pressing dailies. If SWL wants to be more than a solo-story game with some random online chat, it’s gotta work a lot harder on making group content more desirable.
Here’s what I’d do the dailies to that end:
everything regenerates instead of deadline + reset (eg. sides regen @ 1 per 3H)
main story tiers count as and regenerate 1 main mission
Regen over deadline has identical limits to the current setup, but removes deadline anxiety and the never-complete issue for peeps logging in near reset-time. Main story really needs to be included as daily progress and strongly incentivized rather than penalized. No more dichotomy between story progress and mof progress. Story is good.
Dungeons are good, but waiting hours for a tank is bad. There obviously aren’t enough tanks to go around. So, incentivize the ones we have to run more than the normal daily quota. Ah, everyone jumping on tank? Queue adapts and rewards heal or even dps. FFXIV uses that kind of dynamic system. It’s still about 70/30 on tank/heal getting an incentive bonus.
Assuming a large budget, I’d also redo the elite tiers – compress it down to 1~3 by mech differences and then scale the players to match the dungeon. Soft-cap/DR on stats, not hard. Better geared should do better, it just shouldn’t be so unfun as it is now to have wildly different gear levels mashed together (no carrying or being carried). Reward goes by personal IP+tier rather than tier alone. The chests are already individual – scaling that would be trivial.
Why compressed and scaled? Broader population for queues; 10 variants of each dungeon means 10 separate queues with everyone only wanting their personal progress maximum. Cross-grouping vets and newbees in such a way that the newbee isn’t carried is great for teaching content, too.
Many good points. Actually TSW had 3 difficulty levels and would be slow at times but far more active then the 10 tier method. There should certainly be incentive for tanks and healers. They might want to make healers feel needed in the game first though. A large issue is that they tried to double dip so to speak in both the MMO community and the solo player experience. Relaunching as a shared world action RPG but introducing a multi layered gearing and group content over 10 difficulty levels gave some people a very mixed impression of what type of game this was. If playing purely for the MMO experience then shortly you find yourself running out of things to do. I wouldn’t expect any sort of major overhaul to the dungeon system as their lucky if they even have one person coding away at any given time but a slight modification to incentivize certain roles as well as daily challenges for queuing for the group finder ( as also existed in TSW) might go a long way.
It’s not all the problem but it is difinitely not helping. To understand the effect simply, just imagine a game pushed to the extreme with 50 000 different difficulty tiers and 500 players. How likely are you to get a queue pop at tier 27 within your typical 2 hours session (granted that like in SWL most players don’t indiscriminately queue in all tiers at the same time).
But as you said, roles are also a problem, making it mandatory to have a tank and a healer role in the queue reduces the frequency too. Because now not only do you need those roles but you need them in the specific tier in which you queued.
Also, if we push your idea of an ideal design where healers are removed. We should also completely remove tanks and get the queue system like normal mode where 3 dps can go in and play. It would definitely make the queues shorter.
Do you mean challenge = reward?
Because while the game definitely feels like punishment, I don’t think it is intentional.
For examples:
1, Reward is the very punishment to the person who gain it.
Those who has more daily keys tend to spend more time to grind out that additional “free” keys every day.
Those who can get “free” daily cache keys are more likely to force themselves to log in every day.
2, Rewards are the punishment to others.
Everyone wants better rewards with limited resource (time, gear, money). Thus, efficient strategies are developed. Thus inefficient facts are to be removed. Thus, we have sustain tanks. Thus, we do private groups. And in general, it’s a punishment to those who are not “efficient”.
For example: group contents have better reward → story and PVP are punished.
If elite dungeons don’t give reward → You will not have the desire to do them → you will not even bother to complain the queue.
You are struggle to gain the reward from dungeons, it’s your punishment
Then why people have daily keys, daily missions, daily login rewards, weekly NYR, weekly agent mission?
Those are the objective set to compel people to accomplish everyday.
It’s a common practice as nowadays mobile games, online games, even some RPGs apply.
It’s not a bad design. It at least makes user data looks nice for marketing people and investors. Like how many people are retained. How many CCU…
And marketing…is all about build up faith and religious-like work.
It’s a common retention technique so people feel rewarded for logging in daily. If people percieve it as punishment, it’s not intentional. It is even something they want to avoid; people tend to leave games in which they feel punished (more si if it’s for the mere action of logging in).
If fact “reward” is an antonym for “punishment”.
When I see your examples it seems that you are talking in relative perspectives, though you can’t assert equalities from that.
For an analogy; we can say that the increase of oil demand is bad for some and good for others. Although you can’t take from it that “good = Bad”.
Back to SWL, the original purpose is to generate gratification. But the way it is implemented makes it feel (involuntarily) like a punishment indeed.
Most games with similar systems present those login rewards as a “bonus” like “double loot on your next 3 dungeons” instead of SWL’s “punishing” hard locking keys.
Yes, if it is necessary. Tanks shall be removed as well.
Ultimately we shall have no roles predefined. We shall only have challenges and obstacles left to people to decide how to overcome, what gears/skills they need to bring shall totally up to players. That’s how things naturally happens in human history. (Yet…it’s a shame things get too simplified nowadays…)
Why do we even need to push an idea? People simply adopt whatever idea they see fit. It’s natural selection.
I have seem quite a few people dump their daily dungeon keys in story after they found themselves unable to dump those keys in elite. Did I tell them to do that?
[snipped comments by Mashmellow]
I think you were there in that Cotsg lair which tank was totally not needed.
Yet, you still refuse to adopt people’s choice.
Do you think there is any difference?
People will feel bad when they failed to do that. It is a lose that once they can gain. It’s a punishment deep in their hearts.
Just my vague impressions as someone who usually queues E4-9 but it feels like there’s exponential losses, 1/2 as many people queued at each level. I assume because every +100 IP represents enough more grinding that most people never do it.
Also since nobody mentioned it yet, story mode queues are dead, for the pretty obvious reasons - everyone who wants group content just spends the couple hours leveling to 50 and does E1, because everyone else is there. The game doesn’t have the kind of player turnover to keep low level dungeons busy with at-level characters. Any stats the devs mention about 90% of characters not getting to 50 is mostly people who have no intention of running group content, just treat it like a single player game.
That’s exactly why scale is not a problem.
Nobody makes people unable to queue all the dungeons they can queue.
However, if they chose to not queue some dungeons. Then they are responsible for the outcome.
500 players who are all willing to queue for all 50000 tiers. They can meet together.
Scale is merely an illusion. People de-scale that all the times by the real scale in their mind.
Some queue e1-4. Others queue for e5-10.
They have already make it less scaled by their own choices.
However, by having 10 different tiers, it actually helps to get the “best common” outcome people chose.
It’s like an negotiation process between players.
Some don’t mind queuing time, so they queue only their favorite level.
Some just want to do a dungeon without even bother which tier it is, they can queue all of them.
The queue combine them all and matches their common interests. (But, it requires people at least have some interests to be there.)
What was your thoughts when made this decision, @Nirvelle ?
There used to be a game where you could tackle any group content with any set of people you could find. You didn’t see “LF tank” or “LF for healer+2 dps”, only “LF 3 more”. It was fun that you could play any character you wanted and could do all the group stuff (*) you wanted to do as long as you could find people. Just people, not roles.
Sure, the system has to be properly designed, but that this game existed is proof that the trinity is not the answer to everything and that “total non trinity” is NOT stupid like you say.
Incidentally, the demise of that game made me play TSW in 2012, because I figured that if I couldn’t play any character at any time, playing a character that could do everything with 525 different things was the next best thing.
Guild wars 2 (and guild wars 1 to some extent*) is like that. Though it is by design and not because of poor balance like in SWL.
Same for a lot of modern MMO ARPG’s (like BDO) and it is also quite common for hack&slash.
But if SWL wants to go that way, they will need to do a lot of work. And I don’t think it’s the intended design of the game. Especially with the removal of the ability wheel and the cross-weapon abilities and passives and the now much more vertical and specialized progression system.
*guild wars 1 used to have a tremedous variety of builds with extremely different gameplay. It was the old TSW on steroids in build design; there were over 1000 different skills (that you could freely mix like in tsw) and most of them had powerful intricate synergies. But by the end all of that got ruined by a similar thing as the sustain tank. There was a single “type” of build (called the perma shadow form build family) allowing players to become a sort of “dps sustain tank” and people ended up doing all content in the game as split solo famining.
I don’t see how someone who is IP locked under E4 can “choose” to queue in other tiers where they could find a group. If there is not enough people in E1-4 there is no option.
Sadly in SWL we have one cookie cutter build that doesn’t need much change to overcome most challenges in the game.
If we really want “ideal” circumstances, we should first demand content that exploits more build variety.
The sustain tank wouldn’t be so dull if it was just a gimmick for a handful of bosses.
So… we shall allow people to queue e9 even they are level 2 new character just out of tutorial?
Even we only talk about tanks, cleanse tanks works much better than sustain tanks in HE and HR.
Now let’s see dps, there are still lots of variations.
But, BiS is Bis, Meta is Meta. There will always be some specific build good at most situations. And some even more specific builds to be the most efficient builds in some specific situations.
Still people will prefer a common build works in most situation. It’s because build change costs are too high.
Surely, we can have a belt with maxed bio signet specifically build for Dr Klein.
We can have a fist elite CD signet in head and build cleanse tank for HR HE.
We can have eval tanks for PVP or DW or where you receive massive amount of small attacks.
They are all better than those “common” builds in their own situations. However, will you grind another 4 red lv 20 eval glyth just to make that build? No!
Thus, you see the most common build everywhere. Thus, some people may misunderstand them as the only builds.
No, we don’t have 10 tiers in the first place but maybe half of that.
There are “cleanse” tanks that can sustain without a healer. And that’s why I said “most”, not “all” challenges.
Moreover you totally missed the point.
YES there will be a “best way” for each encounter. Though it doesn’t need to be the same everytime.
That’s why I said that we need variety and that sustain tank wouldn’t be a problem if it was only a solution for a few bosses.
That’s quite a basic PvE concept in most MMO’s (there are games where team comps are named after the specific encounter for which they are designed), it’s only SWL that has encounters that are almost always the same, and thus extremely redundant team setups.
MT shouldn’t be an exception, it should be a good design baseline to understand how bosses and team build setups could vary more.
Again what’s the difference between people queue 2 tiers in a 10-tier system and people queue 1 tier in a 5-tier system?
HE and HR took out 40% of dungeons. 60% can be considered as “most”?
To me, I kinda prefer to have things different as Facility is still my favorite dungeon.
But, by thinking of the majority of people, I don’t think that can bring more benefit than harm in current stage of SWL.
Will people even want to play those contents?
For example, some people insist to only heal.
Do they want to fight Facility Computer Boss? (A.K.A, screw tank or healer, everyone just go dps and heal themselves)
Will they be able to learn and enjoy all different encounters?
NYR is a very example of what will happen if people all need to learn those different mechanics while usually they can just stay back pew pew while leave mechanics to tanks alone most of time.
Even groups with average 650+ ip(2 elite level above e5 requirements) may just wipe to NYR e5 not because dps not enough, but because people don’t understand mechanics. The result is usually salty.
Will they be able to afford making different build for different encounters?
MT used to require dps have pistoal+shotgun build for cleanse back in early days of TSW. But now, in swl weapon unlock can be expansive to some people. And only a few can have 9 red weapons of each types with glythes fused on them.
What major changes are you imagining, here? I’ve used every hammer active except Demolish, Seethe, and 1 other (I forget the name, super useless in the 2nd row, have never wanted it in any role) in a mainstream at-level tank build, pulverize is the only mandatory ability. Of course both hammer taunts are worse than any other weapon’s taunt but that’s what diversity gets you.
In case A, you’re assuming that all the playerbase is always queuing for 2 tiers.
But yes, if it becomes mandatory to queue for 2 tiers at a time, it becomes similar.
Pushed to an extreme, having all the playerbase in a single tier, or all the playerbase always queuing for all 10 tiers would be the same. And both situations would result in more groups forming.
Sad but true, I almost cried reading this statistic. Though that’s not all bosses that require cleanse.
indeed
There is a difference between diversity and lack of balance:
lack of balance:
a taunt that generates 10 threat points.
a taunt that generates 50 threat points.
a taunt that generates 1 threat point.
diversity:
you could have (purely as an example not suggestion);
a taunt that shields you team for fights with heavy team aoe’s to help your healer.
a taunt that taunts in AoE for fights with add management.
a taunt that impairs.
a taunt that reduces incoming damage.
a taunt that pulls.
a taunt with shorter CD.
They would all be “best” for different situations if such situations are designed.
But indeed if the situations above don’t exist, it becomes a balance issue.
So:
A rework of the content and/or abilities so they all have a more fair share of “usefulness”. And encounters that promote different types of gameplay (build/team comps).
They kinda did it that way, the Hammer taunt is a dash + small damage reduction, the Shotgun taunt is a large damage reduction, and the Chaos taunt is an impair and purge. (hammer’s 2nd taunt is in a completely different boat - it generates no aggro, only forces the target to attack during the cast)
It’s a little pointless making the button do 2 things though cause you’re not locked into your abilities between fights, and fights that require a taunt need every cast of that ability to be used for the taunt. So at that point you’re picking which one taunts most effectively, which is chaos>shotgun>hammer. If you have the target selected and you’re <15m away chaos will always taunt. If you have the target selected and you’re <5m away shotgun will sometimes taunt. If you have the target selected and you’re between 3m and 15m away hammer will sometimes taunt.
Small damage reductions (eg. most extra talis but also majority of weapon passives) don’t really have a place because healing is an all or nothing game, you either heal/mitigate fully every cast and win or don’t and die in 5 seconds. They’d have to cut back on monster damage and also healer effectiveness to change that dynamic. And that’d be much harder to balance across all the content than the current “healers/sustain tanks can take care of all damage”
