Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

I am a total fan of open world but I saw first hand how different Phinigel became compared to other EQ Servers because of the changes EQ made with instancing. You can still raid open world and get much more loot for your guild since they accelerated spawn timers without lockouts. You can also have your little own version of Western Wastes to take your time on your schedule to do the same content we killed in open world. The instanced version did give a lockout but only for instanced raids for a week. So really anyone could have raided open world for more loot or you can stick to scheduled instance only if that’s your thing. Both were available.

The positive impact having both open world in addition to instanced was good for raiders also. The server was packed with happy casuals who finally got to raid in EQ. You can easily find groups, raid guilds have more of a pool to recruit from, items for sale were plentiful, and it just feels better to be on a server with a big population.

Korrupt said:

Open world raiding is dead and gone I wouldn’t even give it a second thought about coming to Pantheon. Even EQ the last bastion of open world raiding now is instanced on their special snowflake servers. It is better for the overall community to have more people engaged, happy, and wanting to play more by giving everyone access to all content.

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I'd argue that there were more people engaged by the competition of contested content, than there have been since they went with instancing.

Everything should be open and contested. If they cave by instancing raids, dungeons and group content will follow.

On Phinigel we went at least 95% of the time uncontested from classic through Luclin when I played in open world raiding. On Ragefire it was more 50% of the time depending on whether or not we could manipulate the respawn to be in offhours EU hours.

qwertyqweqwertwqert said:

If Pantheon caters to raiders in any way, it has failed.

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You're a fucking pussy. I'm glad Trump took your choice of bathroom usage away.

Zaide said:

After a yearish of poopsocking it on the last TLP I was definitely bored, but I'm looking forward to running things on Pantheon.



You already know the drill w/ this kind of launch. We're looking for people with ultra high playtime on launch (if not always). The goal is people who are like unemployed, retired, work from home or are willing to burn some vacation time for an MMO launch. Exact specifics will flesh out as we get more details about the game but I expect to have 10-15 static groups premade with predefined leveling paths at launch. If the raid content is uninstanced and PvE involves competition then we'll just run it exactly like a TLP guild and batphone, etc. I figure most of our members will be TLP dudes rather than random apps.

I look forward to facing off against hardcore guilds from other MMO's with members who aren't used to waking up at 3am for a dragon spawn or people who have never stood at a raid boss spawn point for 12 hours socking before. It's going to be a real treat to read the forums.

Also another promising idea, with all the servers MMO's have at launch we probably won't have to deal with Dima. R.I.P petitionquest.

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Fear not by the time this game launches most people on this board will be retired.

I think there can be a solid middle ground with the raid content. These guys seem ultra opposed to the word instancing which is why Kilsin is pushing for the VG solution so I will just pretend that the Phinny style system is off the table for now.

Imagine Luclin but everything has their VG esque sharing system except Emp/VT. That provides a good bit of Tier 2 (and even some T1) raid content for players but leaves the pinnacle of the expansion completely open for competition. This system works pretty easily with any EQ expansion you think of except maybe classic since raiding was a side dish there. In Kunark you'd have Trak/VP, in Velious you'd have Ntov/ST.

I think that this system would satisfy like 99% of the players in a brand new game where a lot of players may not reach the max level or complete all the raid content during any given expansion. In the end you'd probably end up with two or three guilds on a server fighting over the top targets, and with that ratio chances are that the second and maybe third place guild would snipe those targets a time or two per expansion anyway.

The fact is that if you want to raid without outside factors/interference/competition you can play pretty much any MMO. If you want to do competitive open world raiding then you have either one or zero choices at the moment.

Not going to get into a debate over how retarded it is to want competition in PvE. Racing/DPS racing for raid targets is the most fun I've had in an MMO. Losing feels terrible but winning is awesome.

There are a lot of ways to get items, and a lot of people don't like raiding let alone poopsocking. The best plan would be to split up how you get BiS items at the end game into sixpaths:

--Contested raid mobs
--Uncontested raid mobs
--EQ style camped item (lotto style with RNG)
--long involved quests, like epics
--Goofy in-game currency based item purchases, like many games (predictable grind)
--Trade skills/buying tradeskilled things

Make it so you could get a full set of items from just 1 or 2 of these paths but some of them will be significantly worse than if you complete all 5 paths. Seems like it would keep people busy and happy.

It's always been like this. The pendulum will swing back eventually.

Let's be honest, it is the causal who pay the bill

gugabuba said:

There are a lot of ways to get items, and a lot of people don't like raiding let alone poopsocking. The best plan would be to split up how you get BiS items at the end game into sixpaths:

--Contested raid mobs
--Uncontested raid mobs
--EQ style camped item (lotto style with RNG)
--long involved quests, like epics
--Goofy in-game currency based item purchases, like many games (predictable grind)
--Trade skills/buying tradeskilled things

Make it so you could get a full set of items from just 1 or 2 of these paths but some of them will be significantly worse than if you complete all 5 paths. Seems like it would keep people busy and happy.

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I agree with this right here, especially the multiple items/paths to get items in an open world MMO.

Remember in EQ there was almost always only 1 maybe 2 best in slot choices, and that caused the over-camping of the spots these few items dropped. Spread enough different loot out in enough places and you get people using all your content instead of spending 6 months building Howling Stones then nobody even goes there because there's no enticing reason to.

So you have maybe 5 near equal item choices spread out across 3 camps, 1 long quest, and 1 master crafting recipe. Even if you have to reuse art and assets with slightly tweaked stats on them, create multiple choices with different paths to attain them. This spreads your player-base out and provides shitloads of content without creating population bottlenecks. Spreading the loot out and making every single zone you create worthwhile solves a lot of open world MMO problems.

"Build it and they will come" isn't enough in an MMO. Itemize it and they will come.

Given their emphasis on situational items, BiS may not be so simple as with other games in the past.

For example, in EQ, the Blade of Carnage was the preferred weapon of choice for warriors for a long time given it's ratio+proc. Once word spread of the item, the AoW remained the most contested raid target in the game.

The question is, does that guild mindset change if a) the item is tuned to be more situational and b) there are other weapons fairly close in power (but also perhaps situational) available via other raid targets?

We don't know for sure what exactly VR means when they say "situational". It could just means environmental but it could also be more along the +gooder but also -gooder (I.e., cursed). Frankly, I'd like to see the latter happen because it forces the player to make choices instead of the usual model we've seen.

Again, not sure if this changes the mindset of any hardcore raiding guild but perhaps it means a little less monopolization of certain targets. Maybe?

qwertyqweqwertwqert said:

You can't win both crowds. Raiders want tons of raiding content. Like there needs to be at least several different raid encounters for people to do regularly, and then 6 months later, there needs to be a whole new batch because people will be burned out with the last ones. And they just consume more and more raid content, and it is time consuming to make, and takes the devs away from everything else. To keep raiders happy you really need to just focus on mass producing raid content, and then it screws everyone else who wants to play as a group. If they try to do both, raiders will never be satisfied, and group people will be short changed. This was one of EQ's biggest problems. Kunark got the balance quite good, but by PoP it was basically just a raiders game and groupers started feeling left out, and the expansions just started getting mass produced to cater to the raider parasites eating up all the content as fast as SOE could make it.

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This is right. If the game was being designed primarily for raiding, I'd say they need to make it so everyone can access everything. In a game not designed for raiding, you have to create it in such a way that it can't be easily completed. Making it contested is the solution to that problem. Otherwise, you will spend an inordinate amount of time for something that historically, only 10% or less of the playerbase even has time for.

The other problem is, when raiding is easily accessible to all (instanced/lockouts), it will trivialize group content and the rest of the game in general. Raiding should remain something highly sought after and exclusive, or else it ends up hurting the rest of the game in one way or another.