Funcom should really look into letting us queue for story mode dungeons even if we’re past the cap and just scale us to the max level of that dungeon if it pops.
It would really help fill out the group finder and let newer players actually play the content.
Past the levelcap you still can private group.
Not that there is much point to running storydungeons when you can do elite.
Many people solo story mode dungeons as a private group once they approach level 50.
Really it is not a big challenge, perhaps good for practice.
It’s not really about having issues beating dungeons myself. More for the new players.
I just returned to the game since relaunch and my character can set in group finder for an hour before Polaris pops. Can’t imagine new players having a good experience their first run to 50 if they don’t want to solo or get carried through everything. Most will probably just see the game as dead and move on.
Maybe offer rewards for people that’s been scaled down such as more distillates or another drop at the end.
I can’t imagine that a statistically significant number of people would go for that option. Unless the rewards scaled to the character’s actual IP, which would be completely unbalanced compared to the lack of challenge in story mode dungeons.
Any other suggestions so that dungeon queues while leveling isn’t completely dead? This all stemmed from a conversation in Kingsmouth last night of people complaining that dungeon finder isn’t popping after trying all day.
If more than one person complained about the dungeon not popping, why didn’t they do the dungeon together?
IMO, the early story mode dungeons aren’t worth doing to begin with, unless you absolutely just want to do them for the story/lore. Less than halfway through the main story you’ll be able to queue up for E1 anyway.
It wasn’t more complaining at that time it isn’t popping, just in general waiting for an hour or longer for it go through.
Saying you can just solo it later isn’t good advice for newer people and robs people from enjoying the game as it’s meant to be IMO.
It’s a tricky one really. Part of the problem is that the story mode dungeons main purpose is telling the story. They don’t give great xp, and the distillate rewards are limited by the fact that you can’t fuse gear to epic until level 50. That means that you don’t want levelling players to advance their gear too fast, or they’ll hit the level roadblock too soon, and won’t get any more gear progression until they reach 50.
Story mode dungeons only needing 3 people without any roles is a good way to help speed up queues. There’s an issue with a low population of levelling players, but even if everything were downscaled, people at the top of a dungeon’s bracket will still rip through it fast. If it was incentivised with rewards, there’d then be the problem of experienced players doing speed runs, skipping cinematics etc where newer players would be wanting to watch stuff (as was seen with some lower elite brackets). The difficulty level of the fights on story mode isn’t high enough to slow people down if they know what they’re doing.
The amount of effort required to create some kind of downscaling would be pretty high too. So it doesn’t do well on the effort:reward ratio for the developers.
It’s hard to balance it, really. It’d be good to introduce more new players to the dungeons so that they can experience the story and be exposed to the mechanics of using keys for loot. I don’t think that there’s a simple answer though (and scaling dungeons certainly wouldn’t be simple).
About the only shortcut I can think of would involve making all story mode dungeons elite 1, and then buffing everyone with equal footing, then have rewards that relate to your personal IP like opening caches does, but capped at a lower amount than elite 1. That way, no one could over gear anyone else, and it’d use existing game systems. I don’t think it’d work well though, because people would still be lacking the incentive to run them.
I didn’t say that you should solo them, I said that you should sing up for E1 once you’re able. That’s the first proper version of the dungeons, anyway.
Connecting the general chat from Kingsmouth to Agartha would probably get a lot more accomplished in terms of low level folks finding groups.
I’d say just reduce the expectation that SWL is an MMO - if you want to run group content, you need to find a group of friends. The game just doesn’t have the population for people to queue everything all the time like MMOs do, it has to be “first find people, then decide what to do”. Letting more people queue for story mode won’t fix that cause there’s noone who wants to do that without knowing if anyone’s in the queue.
Good idea
Dungeon queues killed Wow’s server communities, so I’d hesitate to say that they are required to be ‘MMO like.’ The low population is a bigger issue, but the fixes for THAT are… beyond the scope of this discussion.
The amount of effort required to create some kind of downscaling would be pretty high too. So it doesn’t do well on the effort:reward ratio for the developers.
the cost/benefit ratio is immense because certainly costs much less than paying for new assets and recording voicelines while keeping new players in the game.
it’s just math and there are plenty of examples in other games how it can be done, funcom doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel.
It’s a tricky one really. Part of the problem is that the story mode dungeons main purpose is telling the story. They don’t give great xp, and the distillate rewards are limited by the fact that you can’t fuse gear to epic until level 50. That means that you don’t want levelling players to advance their gear too fast, or they’ll hit the level roadblock too soon, and won’t get any more gear progression until they reach 50.
there are plenty of roadblocks in the game already in form of story progression, expertise and fusing items (having to sell them for shards so you can fuse to begin with puts another dampener of progressing too fast).
worse, leveling has been always been pretty pointless for over half the game. once you hit SD there’s a good chance you’ll outlevel parts of the zone already, then it takes even longer to enter cotsg now that last train to cairo is part of the story, so when you finally enter the city you’ll be 50 or very close. even before that it’s not like levels have any impact (should’ve been removed with the relaunch anyway, but that’s another discussion)…
It’s hard to balance it, really. It’d be good to introduce more new players to the dungeons so that they can experience the story and be exposed to the mechanics of using keys for loot. I don’t think that there’s a simple answer though (and scaling dungeons certainly wouldn’t be simple).
not really. it’s not like SWL has a complicated setup to begin with. loot comes mainly from chests with their own loottable, gear has no levels either (besides some talisman slot unlocks but adjusting the loottable is hardly difficult, and it’s not like you have to bother with it to begin with). kill xp is hardly relevant and the mission rewards is just another number.
it’s also less about loot or “just run elite, lawl” (which completely misses point), but how it looks to new players and it’s effect. it’s obviously an issue else people wouldn’t talk about it in chat or go out of their way to sign up here and make a post about it.
while the lower zone population cap certainly works for atmosphere, it also makes the game appear quite dead. you hardly ever see anyone, chat is dead silent (new players won’t know about sanctuary, or install the mod so they don’t have to join constantly. funcom at this point might as well put in a global channel), so you couldn’t even find people via chat besides sitting in agartha (if they go through the effort to begin with). sitting in an endless queue certainly doesn’t improve the look of the game, even more so when there isn’t a good reason to not have story mode scale so anyone outside the limited levelrange of the dungeon can participate (which quite stupid from the start considering mmo population over time).
it fragments your playerpool unnecessarily leading to many issues that could be avoided. another nice effect is running elite with people that never have done the dungeon before because it never popped for them…
to give you an example, I started leveling an old alt when I came back. story mode queue pops maybe once a day, so if I don’t use that chance (because I’m doing a story mission etc and don’t wanna restart it) I just wasted the keys and an easy way to progress on my challenge log. it also means there’s zero point in buying keys when you don’t have any chance to use them (and that is funcom’s business model after all. while it’s arguable who might buy keys for SM why reduce the chance they do to zero?).
dungeons are also one of the better parts of the game, the game going out of it’s way to make it a chore to do them or just play with other players is quite counter productive,
About the only shortcut I can think of would involve making all story mode dungeons elite 1, and then buffing everyone with equal footing, then have rewards that relate to your personal IP like opening caches does, but capped at a lower amount than elite 1. That way, no one could over gear anyone else, and it’d use existing game systems. I don’t think it’d work well though, because people would still be lacking the incentive to run them.
you can either buff up or down, it’s not like it has a big effect on the rewards anyway. even simpler would be to simply scale damage/health to your level, or just hardcap it to a fixed level so you don’t even have to mess around with scaling at all. story mode is already easy enough that it won’t make much of a difference, all it would change is stuff taking tiny bit longer to kill.
as for incentive, even at 50 I still run story mode simply to get rid of my keys, progress challenge log and play with other people for a change. as dead as it is it’s still faster than sitting in agartha trying to get a elite group running (while I have not problem with that, I cba to do it every day), not to mention the run itself probably being faster and less prone to fail.
I agree with all but keys bought with mof. No money spent on dungeon keys.
But if you can’t get into dungeons for distills, you buy cache keys with real money for distills.
It’s really easy to say stuff has been done before by other people, and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It’s a bit like saying that there are all kinds of supercars out there already, so building a new one isn’t like you’re reinventing the wheel. Any mechanic can build a Ferrari after all, right?
Getting stuff to work with the SWL code is not the same as just copying it over from another game. There are other games which do similar stuff yes, but there’s no simple, standard way to do it because everything is different. You can use examples of end results, but actually achieveing those results is often a far bigger task than you might think.
Levels were introduced with the relaunch. TSW didn’t have levels in the same way.
Story mode dungeons use fewer mechanics than E1 dungeons. E5 introduces more mechanics. That allows players to gain experience on lower elite tiers before they have to deal with all the mechanics. Making it so that SM dungeons give good enough loot to incentivise players to run them risks removing the incentive to run harder modes. For example, many people in E10 gear don’t bother running E10 dungeons, when they could run E9, slack and get only slightly worse rewards. Make it so that SM dungeons give ok loot and you’ll drop the number of people trying to run harder stuff. The knock on effects are far from simple.
Scaling to only a few tiers removes a lot of the reward mechanism from the game. TSW’s progression were painfully short, which was great for short term benefit, but sucked for long term retention of players. The SWL grind is painfully long. The fix isn’t to just go back to only having story mode, elite and nightmare tiers though, because that just recreates the same problem from TSW.
40% boss hp/damage for 11% increase in rewards specifically. I think it’s mostly a problem for tanks, cause at that point you’re talking about 20k vs. 28k base hp to comfortably do it, which is the difference from “anyone at ip 850 can do it with some dps AA spare” to “E13 gear on the tank”.
Every little bit of distillate helps.
Personally, I like the OP’s idea… especially as I am hoping to bring some new friends into the game.
I didn’t know about Sanctuary! (Can’t remember if it was/wasn’t in TSW, but not that I recall…)