MMOG Crowd Control

[Arothel]

Turbine has actually rennovated the entire level 1-50 line of Epic Quests. There's now a scaling buff that will allow players with the group quests to get increases to damage and health, and reduce incoming damage, effectively making them 'elite' players for the duration of the quests. It will also apply to some non-instanced quests, but there's more of a restriction there.

More information about the new system can be found here: http://www.lotro.com/gameinfo/devdiaries/628-developer-diary-volume-1-revised-edition

Edit: This rennovation occured with the latest content update that launched this week.

That seems to be a rather elegant solution to the problem. I wonder how it will fare. WoW has been on a campaign to make the game more accessable to new and casual players since Burning Crusade, so I'll bet it's just a matter of time before they do something similar.

 

[bjj hero]

I guess, approximately as much fun as you could have running a chat program and minesweeper at the same time. But my personal bias against MMOs aside, it isn't just some "jackhole", its a great many people. And when a significant number of people beginning ruining their lives, whether because of sinister marketing or some seriously lacking self-control, its time to either regulate or restrict. Gambling, is an excellent example.

In that case we'd better ban alcohol, drugs (good to see that worked), smoking, fatty foods, sugary foods, sunbeds, all videogames, the internet, infidelity... I could go on. There are people out there who are dying for an excuse to self destruct due to whatever charecter flaw. You can't ban or control everything. Even regulation doesn't work, look at drugs, gambling and alcohol. There are still people with problems.

You have to accept that adults are responsible for their own actions.

I mean back when I played WoW and one of my guild mates would complain about being bored in Tanaris or Felwood, I'd tell him to keep leveling in a few week he'd be in Northrend anyway... and it was true, so... what's the big deal?

You make it sound like a job. I work doing shit I don't want to do (if you knew my job you'd know it involves dealing with people I really don't want to talk to) so I can have fun on the weekend. One job is enough for me...

OT. The only MMO I've ever tried is EVE. There it is open world which would fix the empty world thing. People go where there is stuff to do, safe areas, shops etc. The dead areas... well its space, the clue is in the title I guess. I never got past a few trial sessions. I have friends who play and the thought of spending hours mining, my eyes glazed over, is not my idea of fun.

 

[benoitowns]

I remember back in....whatever year Burning Crusade came out...my guild destroyed part of the horde economy by farming the Blood Elf Bandit Masks in the Draenei starting area and selling them. After that I gave up my merchanting abilities while my friend made 1000s of gold buying and selling cross AH items to different places. I wish I kept trading in that game.....

 

[tetron]

After thinking it over I'd say this problem goes into the same category as the problem of class balancing. It's a problem that's impossible to fix and thus is a complete waste of time trying to fix it. However people do feel better knowing that somebody's trying to fix it.

 

[DTWolfwood]

EVE Online doesn't have a problem with having a barren environment. <.< the principles behind that can work for any MMO. the risk of dying where u lose everything on u, this should keep the economy pretty healthy when everyone has to replace what they owned from time to time.

Just make it so everyone is the same lvl always but progress is based on skills and skill points (like FPS now, new player can still kill like a veteran, but the vet will have all the nice skills and gizmos that help him do it better)

u spend your time on professions and crafts etc. All endgame stuff, raids right off the bat and such.

 

[Shjade]

I'd have to agree that the most recent update to LotRO seems like a good way to deal with the group-quest-bottleneck issue. It's no cure-all for population problems across the board, but for specifically combating that feeling of "Come /on/, why did you make me do all this work only to drop a huge troll-shaped roadblock on the story that I can't beat alone?" the Inspiration buff idea works wonders.

Problem is, it only exist for the Epic questline, not all group quests. This is why my burglar, recently turned 58, still hasn't beaten Maethar back in Angmar, because he's an elite-master who is immune to crowd-control. That last detail is important as I've been able to solo a ridiculous amount of group quests with my burglar simply by abusing the hell out of Riddle.

(For the WoW Rogue-savvy who haven't played LotRO, Riddle is...well, you know how Blind works? Okay, picture Blind. Now imagine it lasts 30 seconds. And has a 30 second cooldown. Yeah. It's nice. Unless it gets resisted. >.>)

Basically, it didn't matter how badass the elite-master guy at the end of the quest chain was - as long as it wasn't something immune to Riddle, I could (eventually) kill it. Oh, and as long as it was alone. Burglars...they don't do so well against groups.

So yeah, after going through two or three group quests back to back on this chain, solo, I finally got stuck at the end when the last guy just said "Bahaha, immune" to my tactics. -.- Not cool, guys. Not cool.

Anyway, I drifted. Back on point: applying a variable buff based on group size to make quests manageable for everyone up until endgame seems like a good solution to me. Raids are still raids, leave that alone, obviously, but the non-raid stuff? That can slide. Alternatively you could do it the other way around and have all the quests start off as "solo" and have the baddies beef up if there's a group doing the quest. Of course people would try to exploit this - multiple people doing a hard quest together but not grouping to buff up, for instance - so you'd have to find workarounds (baddies get buffed up to compensate for the number of incoming damage sources...I dunno, something), but I like the base idea behind it.

Now if only Turbine would apply it to quests beyond the Epic questline...

 

[Sephiwind]

I think that despite it being completely designed for forced parting after level 10 Final Fantasy 11 did a good job of keeping populations balanced with it's job system. Generally people will try differant jobs and see what they are like, plus you need to work on your sub class.

Unfortunately as far as economy and clustering to fight over mobs, I think you will all ways have that as long as MMOs maintain having rare items being dropped by rare mobs. I remember how insane Asura server's economy was by the time I left the game completely. Prices were so ridiculous that a new player, that just happend to be at the right place; at the right time, could get a low level rare that would net you almost 100k gill. When I started playing 3 years earlier that same item was worth about 15k.

 

[Shujen]

Simple solution:

Get rid of leveling.

The idea that the wolves in THIS forest are ten times as deadly as the wolves in THAT forest is ridiculous. The idea that Villager #4 in Town #2 can beat up everybody in Town #1 one-handed, including the huge bully you needed a group to tackle, is insane. A top-level player can kill everybody else endlessly without breaking a sweat.

Forgetting what it means for group quests, it means also that 99% of all content in an MMO, no matter how huge the MMO is, is totally pointless to visit by a top-level player - especially if his equipment never gets lost, loses durability or is otherwise impermanent.

All zones should have something worthwhile for a top-level player, be it resources to exploit (trees that only grow in one area) or politics and commerce to exploit (logs that fetch a good price in one area).

There should be a plateau that is easy to get to, and that plateau should be extremely difficult to transcend, except by politics (clan/guild effort), and the rewards of such should be communal, not individual (a support network, not better gear).

I'm thinking UO, EVE and the upcoming MO. We need more sandbox MMOs.

I've been thinking along these lines as well.

Another similar alternative, that keeps the levels in for those of us who enjoy seeing numbers go up, would be to make it so that your character isn't twice as powerful every couple of levels. The power progression in these games is nuts... level 1 you have like 100 health and hit for 10 damage, and by max level you have 50000 health and hit for 5000. If the progression was more gradual and didn't end at such an extreme, you'd still be able to enjoy a broader range of content for longer.

Also your point about resources is good, I think it's the best way to keep a mix of people active in all areas of the world at all times. With dynamic resources, you could even have places that become over-harvested or under-harvested, which would encourage mobility in returning to previously tapped out areas, or exploring for new resource-rich places.

To go the CoD way of doing it, everybody is viable from the outset: Yeah, you may have basic equipment and whatnot, but you're still human and your skill still accounts for the vast majority of your abilities in-game.

What differentiates you, the hardcore veteran who's done this for years, from the newbie scrub, is not the gear but the experience and the support network. You have a clan that supplies you with important intel, comes when you call, and coordinates better than any pick-up group can ever hope to attain. That your abilities are barely 20% more than the average player should not compute.

MMOs should reward grouping, not require grouping in arbitrary scenarios. You should want to band together because it means you may guarantee survival during the reprisal against some annoying bastard - played by a real person, no less! - who stole your prized possession yesterday, NOT because this particular NPC happens to have ten times more hitpoints than your average NPC.

If you're going to let a player have power over another player such that the latter can never hope to overcome the former, you'd better have a damn good reason for doing so, and it should be inextricably tied to the MM aspect of the MMO.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

Spoiler: Spoiler Box for space

Yes, the real answer is to just let MMOs stagnate, and with any luck, die. I've sounded off on this before, so you guys I know have nothing against the players in MMOs. You guys have your reasons, and that's fine. But the fact is that the entire business model of MMOs is reprehensible and from a game design standpoint it is completely intractable. WoW, as you might've heard in the last 5 years, is great at making MMOs less of a chore.

WOW is right. LESS of a chore. WoW. A game that a lot of gamer would never touch.

Think about that for a second. Think about that guy you know, who plays ten times as much as you do, gets angry at you if you miss a raid and pours over FAQs and loot tables. Every gamer knows someone like that. That MMO-addict who is pissing his life away on what constitutes a very mean trap designed to catch anyone with any number of a dozen different weaknesses, from gambling, to poor social skills, to "pull lever" reaction to completely empty accomplishment that nearly every person on earth is addicted to.

And if you don't know that guy I'm describing, guess what?

... I shouldn't have to finish that sentence, but this is the internet and emphasis is hard to recreate. YOU are that person.

So don't "fix" MMOs. Kill'em off. Honestly, these days I long for the afternoons I whiled away with 12 other guys on my N64, playing Perfect Dark or Diddy Kong Racing all in the same room

No.

Just because some jackhole can't moderate his own gaming habits - whether he's playing WoW, CoD4, the Sims, or obsessively cornering the market on eBay - doesn't mean that the millions of people who enjoy games like these in moderation aren't having a good time.

He does have something of a point, though. I don't agree with him entirely, but if you can pretend to not notice how shallowly MMOs are designed to force you to play longer, then you're in denial. Even WoW, the supposedly least-grindy of the MMOs out there is very blatantly designed in such a way that it can take months to get geared from an raid... at which point they release a new raid with better gear.

After about 4 years with WoW, spending probably hundreds of hours playing through what's probably only about 10-hours of gameplay, I plan to drastically cut-down on my WoW time after Cataclysm. Namely, I won't be raiding, and there's something to be said about the fact that it feels like I'm quitting a job, because I'm suddenly going to have so much more free time than I currently do. It's not that I don't enjoy WoW, it's just that in order to experience anything in the game you have to be married to a group of 9 or 24 other people. It's less about the fact that I "can't control" my gaming habits, and more the fact that I feel guilty enough ditching-out on some friends when the expansion comes out, much less wanting to do it now in the middle of a raid cycle.

I don't agree with his cynical "kill all MMOs" mentality, but I do feel that they should at least try to hide the fact that they're blatantly extending the gameplay to force you into more monthly subscription fees. Which is to say nothing of the fact that it requires a part-time job's commitment (and that's if your group is more casual about raiding) to see the game's content. And it's not like you're even seeing that much content. Most of that ~20 hours a week is spent killing the same 4 or 5 bosses over and over again so you can have a shot at trying to kill the next boss. Imagine playing Final Fantasy 7, except that your memory card wipes itself like clockwork every week (which wouldn't be surprising for approx 15-year-old tech). Then one week Barret doesn't show-up in the intro because some IRL issue came-up, so you're a day behind getting started on attempting to get to Sephiroth at the end of the game that you've started and re-started countless times the past number of months.

Bleh... but I'm getting-off on a tangent here. Long-story-short, MMOs don't really need to go (as mentioned before, I have fun with WoW), but I hate how blatantly dragged-out they are for the sake of more subscription fees.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

In LOTRO, many quest chains end in a group quest. So, you'll do five missions solo and suddenly an NPC will tell you to sod off and find some friends. (And I do hope you read the quest text, or you might charge in alone without realizing you're committing a very humorous form of suicide.) You've just spent the last forty five minutes trying to find and save poor Gerebert, and now you realize all your work was for naught. You can't do it alone and good luck finding help.

**Confused**.. My Elven Hunter is level 30 now, has done most of the deeds/achievements/quests and hasn't ever had to run a group quest. Or if she has, she's aced it with relative ease.

Are we playing the same game?

heh during my trial i did group quests with my hunter on my own aswell so i'm kinda confused aswell..

Thing to keep in mind is that he IS playing as a Bard. I don't really know the mechanics of LotRO or how its classes are balanced, but I've played enough MMOs to know that when one class can rip through something like moist paper, another class will feel like he's punching through a brick wall. Heck, having gotten both a Mage and a Paladin to 80 in WoW, they were completely different experiences. My Paladin could easily solo his way from 70 to 80 when the last expansion came out. Meanwhile my Mage would have to pause at any group quest and try to find a tank, or at least another DPS class or two for an attempt at a "Kill him before he kills us" sort of affair. Sure it took a little while for my Paladin to solo those mobs, but he'd still get the quest done faster than it took for my Mage to find a group and then kill the mob at a faster pace.

 

[lluewhyn]

Thing to keep in mind is that he IS playing as a Bard. I don't really know the mechanics of LotRO or how its classes are balanced, but I've played enough MMOs to know that when one class can rip through something like moist paper, another class will feel like he's punching through a brick wall. Heck, having gotten both a Mage and a Paladin to 80 in WoW, they were completely different experiences. My Paladin could easily solo his way from 70 to 80 when the last expansion came out. Meanwhile my Mage would have to pause at any group quest and try to find a tank, or at least another DPS class or two for an attempt at a "Kill him before he kills us" sort of affair. Sure it took a little while for my Paladin to solo those mobs, but he'd still get the quest done faster than it took for my Mage to find a group and then kill the mob at a faster pace.

He's actually playing a Minstrel, not a Bard(believe it or not, there's actually a difference in the game). A Minstrel is the purest "healing" class, much like Clerics are on other games. The reason for this is that instead of Hit Points, you have "Morale", which means that after a certain point of fighting and getting knocked around, you end up getting defeated and run for the hills. The reason for this is to keep true to the in-game lore- although healing magic may exist, it's still a long-term recovery prospect, there are no instant band-aids and almost no one comes back from the dead.

A Hunter can solo pretty well, as long as you can pick your fights on your terms and not get surprised. I'm not sure you'd have traps to help you rescue Gerberet at level 8(is that the fight at the tobacco farmhouse?), and I've always done it with at least 2 so I don't remember it very well. It's also been a long while since I played a Minstrel, but I don't think they are going to be very good against multiple opponents on their own, as they don't have traps, crowd control at those levels, or AOE.

Now, as to the point of the article, a number of "Fellowship" quests can be done solo by a player who's a few levels higher than the quest, but that brings up the point that at that point, the rewards are no longer appropriate. As a side note, there are no "real" Fellowship quests in the low-level starter zones, and there weren't even back when the game started. Unfortunately, "Mini-Fellowship" wasn't a term that got used until much later, and they really didn't go back and change "Fellowship" to "Mini-Fellowship". The difference is that mini-Fellowship quests can be done with 2-3 people, so it's not unreasonable to assume that a mini-Fellowship quest can be done solo by being 5-10 levels higher. However, you're still dealing with the issue of doing a quest where the rewards are junk by the point in time that you complete it.

However, I'm not sure that I agree with the article when it talks about the different starter zones. Those zones don't really go further than level 15, there are very few Fellowship quests and you should be able to solo just about everything there if you're about 3-4 levels higher(the only exception I can think of is the final sortie into Rath Taraig, unless they've made that easier). The gear would still be less useful, but at least the quest should be fresh in your mind.

For me, the problem with a lot of the group quests is where I would not be able to go back and complete them for weeks or MONTHS, and those usually appeared in the Lonelands and beyond. Try completing some of the group quests in the Misty Mountains, or Evendim, the Trollshaws, much less Angmar. Even though it's a full Fellowship instance from the get-go, it's also very hard to find anyone to do Fornost. Finally, my wife and I were never able to complete Volume One(we were on Book 13 or 14), because the quests required Full Fellowships and NO ONE was ever working on them. Not only would no one respond to our requests, we never saw anyone requesting those quest chains either.

 

[Shjade]

I've played enough MMOs to know that when one class can rip through something like moist paper, another class will feel like he's punching through a brick wall.

This.

Two words, people: Death Knights.

@lluewhyn: my sympathies for not getting to finish volume one. :| I'm going through it solo at a relatively good pace now that they added the inspiration change (or was - I went ahead to Moria for a while to upgrade legendaries; left off on book eleven, I think), but I couldn't even finish book /five/ before that update. Freaking escort missions. >.<

I'm not sure about whether places like Fornost should be accessible for soloing or not. Dungeons like that really do feel like group territory, unless you're stealthing through it, which isn't the same thing as fighting your way through. It'd probably feel...odd to be able to just solo a dungeon at level. I dunno. It'd be interesting to try it, though. Certainly better than never going because no one is interested in grouping for some mid-level dungeon run.

 

[Valate_v1legacy]

Say what? Maybe it's the server you're on. On Elendilmir you'll ALWAYS be bumping into people of similar level. I just started a month ago, and have never had trouble getting groups together for low-mid level quests.

 

[Credge]

Developers only need to focus on those who will be there a year, two years, three years down the line. Focusing on the short term isn't going to get you anywhere. This is where Warhammer Online screwed up.

Mortal Online has it right so far. They don't care about you. They care about those who care about the game. You build upon your crowd. You don't try to steal it from some other place. It doesn't work.

Here's a simple thought experiment on why:

You've spent 2-5 years playing a game. You've dumped a lot of time and effort in to it. Obviously you have some form of attachment with the world, the game, and your characters.

Suddenly, a game comes out which is very similar to the one you're currently playing but has better graphics. It promises to fix the shortcomings of the game you're playing.

In the long run, what do you do?

You'll go back to WoW, that's what you'll do.

MMO's have to do something different. They can't step on the toes of others without being an INCREDIBLY superior product. It has to be better in every single way. It has to make you look back at your old memories as bad. It has to be earth shattering.

 

[xqxm]

Before the MMORPG Tibia (Yes, I do realize it's in isometric 2D, sod off) started to sink all their power into trying to look and play as much as WoW as they could manage, they always had a very good feel going on. It's honestly the only MMO i've really gotten into, because there was no immersion-breaking quest logs telling you exactly what you'd need and what level you needed to be, and how well you fared in the game was honestly down to SKILL rather how many hours you had grinded to bring yourself to your current set of levels, professions and equipment.

Since that game started out as a university project, there was some stuff like a room full of demons with no way out, where there were a few chests with riches that was placed there for ONE TIME ONLY at the time the server was started. It was a great challenge, and you could acquire a truly unique and excellent item (even though it did not break the game by being overpowered, but the immersive roleplaying of it all made it very prestigious to be the only person to own that certain item).

You could pop in and take them all on by yourself if you felt lucky. Most didn't pull it off, but went in with huge groups of friends with massive coordination and still failed.

Later on, the obscure notes riddling to treasure were replaced by NPC's to be fair to a growing amount of players. The one-time items which only the most clever and skilled of players could locate and acquire was replaced by quest-boxes which held an item for every single player.

Soon the immersion drained out, when the mythical world that really felt like one, was replaced by what is clearly the work of someone who has money to earn.

Um, I've kind of forgot where I'm going with this. Anyway.

If you build your entire game around that the player should NOT be limited by how much time and money he's prepared to sink into the game, and instead focus on skill and wits, you will not only get rid of obnoxious problems with the newbie feeding belt which only serves to put them in linear paths to try and be the best without being a part of the world, but instead can make them -want- to explore and socialize with other players, trying to find solutions to riddles and overcome challenges in a truly challenging world, and grinding for levels and money becomes secondary.

I should make an MMO some day.

 

[lewiswhitling]

I dont think it is possible to the even out the massive disparity of player density across an MMO landscape. As you say, MMOs tend to go through waves or "booms" of players. This tends to happen on occasions of peak time marketing. So for instance, you will have a boom at release, then at the first expansion, and then every expansion or major patch after that. So unless youre bringing out a massive, marketing hungry patch every couple of months, it'll be very difficult (/impossible) to keep the measure of player sign ups at a steady and non-fluctuating rate. Therefore, the situation of perfect player density in any area will be relatively rare to come by in an MMOs life span.

However, here are some off the bat solutions (freshly made up) for limiting, or counter-acting the loss of gameplay enjoyment as a result of this.


1) allow some sort of sliding difficulty adjustment to make group content accessible, depending on what the density of players is an a certain zone. i.e. in the quiet "middle" area of the game, perhaps reduce the number of players required to do certain dungeons. This would probably mean reducing dungeon difficulty in terms of enemy health and dps, or perhaps buffing players.

This system would maybe work on a week by week averaging if how many players of a certain level are in a zone for prolonged periods of time throughout that week.


2) Simply create a larger player pool for people to potentially group with - ala WoW's cross server dungeon finder. Pretty simple - although does much mean that you will never do normal world quests ever again. I just went from 16 - 60 without really ever leaving orgrimmar.


3) maybe implement some sort of bot support system? pretty much along the same lines as idea number 1... probably wouldnt work though - dungeons would either become insanely easy or ridiculously hard.


4) Lastly, potentially have variable XP gains depending on server balance? So if there are very few level 30-50s then give a much larger XP boost to those that are in that zone.. just basically by way of saying "sorry for the inconvenience, we'll boost you to an enjoyable part of the game ASAP". This'll probably even further detract from enjoyment to be got from those areas.. but still, perhaps a reasonable sacrifice if we agree that MMO enjoyment is primarily about being with other people...

 

[BloodSquirrel]

This is actually what made me stop paying attention to quest text in WoW. At first, I was actually reading and following the storylines behind what I was doing, but they kept ending in group quests. This was even shortly after launch, and it was still hard to get groups to get them done. So, I stopped caring, and just scanned them for the location info. Now it's all about UI mods that remove the need to read quest text altogether.

They since fixed the problems, mostly, but it's too late. It's hard to start caring again.

Personally, I think the key- and the next big MMO might be the one that does this well- is to allow low level players to play with high level players without eliminating the rewards for leveling. Kind of like Eve, where newer players can still be of some use in battles (although Eve has other things that keep it from going mainstream).

 

[Infinatex]

Man, Shamus stop spying in on my thoughts already! I just finished up my LOTRO trial account about a week ago and I certainly remember how empty the low level areas are. Every time I came across one of those forced grouping areas, I thought, "Why are they making me group when there is nobody around?"

I just signed up for a WoW trial account on the weekend because I am sick of my friends bugging me about how good it is and have I absolutely have to start playing it... and this is exactly right. I felt completely underwhelmed. For a game as MASSIVE as this, there were not very many people hanging around. I assumed the amount of people would be somewhere in the vicinity of MAG x 1000. Needless to say I have stopped playing and will go back to waiting for Diablo 3 to be released.

 

[w00tage]

Long-story-short, MMOs don't really need to go (as mentioned before, I have fun with WoW), but I hate how blatantly dragged-out they are for the sake of more subscription fees.

I have never, ever understood what kind of crack they're smoking about this. The point of a game is to have fun, let off steam, be your mental floss, whatever. The point of paying an online subscription fee is to do the exact same by playing with other people. Which in itself is a different experience from single-player and is the only justification for paying the fee.

So how did game companies get from "make me a fun game and let me play it with other people for money" to "we have to get everyone on a treadmill chasing a carrot in front of them, or we'll lose their sub money"??

As long as I am having fun playing with other people, I will keep paying the small monthly fee for the ability to log in when it's convenient for me. When I am not, I don't pay the small monthly fee. At this moment, I do not pay anyone a sub fee, because they got all crackheady about trying to keep me logged in and I just don't need someone trying to turn my play time into "second job I have to pay for" time.

 

[whaleswiththumbs]

How to balance? Easy. Permanent character death.

Oh wait.. you mean how to balance and keep an audience? Hmm.. that's harder.

Well even that well-puller off could work. Just make it slightly harder to get killed. Like lowering enemy attack points) and raise the health a porportional amount. Bt thats a whole new set of problems.

I would make the world alittle larger. make finding otehrs to team easier. and just making it harder in pockets of gameplay. FOr instance levels 1-10 will be harder 20-30, etc. and make the easier portions, 10-20 etc. scramble up every once and awhile.

Very tough problem to get at.