User:Quizzical/Dynamic Events

Today ArenaNet announced a dynamic event system for Guild Wars 2. There has been a fair bit of excitement over this. Allow me to throw on some cold water.

First, the good news: ArenaNet will deliver more or less what they promised. It will be rather buggy at launch, but it will get essentially fixed eventually. The problem is that even then, it won't be terribly similar to what the people excited about the system have in mind.

There are good reasons why the quest system is traditionally done the way it is. One big one is that it allows a given player to readily do all or nearly all of the content. If an event branches into several possible subquests, a player only does one branch, and misses most of the content for the quest line. If he stays in the area to redo the dynamic event repeatedly to see the various branches, then maybe he has to slog through portions of the event many times, but will still never see some of the rarer branches that can happen. It's like reading a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, except that instead of getting to make a choice at the various forks in the road, someone else makes the choice for you. Sometimes one choice will be taken 90% of the time or more, not letting you see the other options unless you slog through from the start many, many times.

The holy grail of online game design is to make a game that doesn't run out of content. The dynamic event system will basically force players to skip a lot of the content--even the completionist players inclined to do everything. That means a given amount of content doesn't last nearly as long before players think they've seen it all, unless players repeat portions many times on the same character.

Let's not forget why the public quest system basically failed in Warhammer Online, and a similar system later failed in Champions Online. The difficulty can't be tuned to the players at hand. Tune the difficulty of a quest to assume that there are ten players present, and if there are twenty, it's completely trivial. If only two show up, it's basically impossible. Rarely will a quest have the right number of players to have the proper difficulty.

Sure, Guild Wars 2 proposes to get around this by dynamically adjusting the difficulty for the number of players. But not all sets of five players are equal, and it will be impossible to tweak the quest difficulty to account for this.

Let's not forget why instancing group content became so popular in the first place. If you know that there are eight party members in a group, you can tune the difficulty to be a modest challenge for a group of eight. Also important is that this also lets players pick which eight party members are in their group. Without the ability to control who shows up, it will be like a PUG in which you cannot deny membership to a player, no matter how awful.

This will create plenty of opportunities for griefers. Want to sabotage a quest? Get a few friends to show up and not fight. The game tunes the difficulty higher because there are more people, but the group isn't stronger because some people aren't fighting. Now mobs come in much bigger waves and overwhelm the players trying to do the quest. They quickly figure out what is going on and abandon it.

Do I expect flagrant griefing like this to be common? No. But milder forms of it will be. This differs only in degree from showing up to do a quest and not fighting very well. And that will be very, very common, for the same reasons as in so many other games.

Consider first the tendency of players to like to do content that they are way too low level for. A level 20 player sees that if he kills level 30 mobs, he gets vastly more experience and much better loot than if he kills level 20 mobs. What limits this in most games is that he can't kill level 30 mobs while he's only level 20, or at least it takes him much longer to get each kill than if he fought level 20 mobs.

Not so with public events. If there are ten players in an area doing a public quest, the contribution of each of them is relatively small. One player not doing much damage doesn't slow the group as a whole that much. So what stops a level 20 player from going to a level 30 area to jump in on public quests? He gets vastly more experience and loot than before (the latter due to fully shared loot). Not being able to actually kill the mobs isn't a problem, as that's what the other players around are for. Basically, he gets power-leveled for free. The other players doing the quest are hurt by having someone around who can't contribute much, but they can't stop him apart from abandoning the quest and going somewhere else.

Now imagine half of the playerbase doing this simultaneously. You can't run away from one leecher, as they're all throughout the game world. And why not? They level up faster this way, and get more loot, even if it results in failing the quests. It's not like they could avoid failing the quests by simply doing quests that are their level, as lower level players are sabotaging those quests, too.

There are ways to get around this, of course, but they're draconian measures that much of the community would find distasteful. For example, it could say that you get no loot or experience at all for killing a mob above your level. It could have a hard lockout and say, you cannot enter this zone until you are level 23, in which case the leveling process becomes a guided tour of going to the next zone every time you reach a high enough level for it. That's an even more linear leveling path than what players complain of in other games.

Another issue to consider is bots. Right now, botters have their own instances, so they don't bother anyone. In the dynamic event system, that won't be so.

One of the big things that restricts bots is that they have to be good enough to win battles. In many games, that's quite doable, but it's not a trivial thing that everyone with a macro program can figure out how to do. In a dynamic event system, a bot doesn't have to be able to fight competently to benefit from botting. Show up at a dynamic event, whack mobs a bit here and there, and get full experience and loot, even if you didn't contribute half as much as you'd have done if you were paying attention. It's not hard to imagine a single gold farmer watching 20 computers, and perhaps manually moving each when the fight moves elsewhere.

These aren't merely incompetent players, which one might think of as being the bane of PUGs. This is much worse than that. These are players who know when they show up that they aren't going to be productive for the group. And you know it, too, right when they show up. If you were making a PUG, you could and would exclude them from it. But now you can't stop them from sabotaging your quest progress.

So are you still excited about the dynamic event system?