User talk:Quizzical/Dynamic Events

Still am. Why? Because I'm interested to see how it works out, not if it works :P

Most interested in the "lv20 vs. lv30 mobs" issue you pointed out, to be honest. --- -- (contribs)  &emsp;(talk)  09:22, May 13, 2010 (UTC)


 * Still am. Because you have one big flaw in all of this: you assume that anyone just standing around in the middle of a quest gets the reward as if he was fighting, and that is not true. They've said multiple times that there is a contribution threshold for getting the reward. They didn't elaborate, but it sounds like a minimum damage cap. If you're fighting monsters 10 levels above you, I doubt you'll be able to damage them enough to "earn" the reward, thus no XP for you, no power leveling for you, no point in leeching this way. Also, if they can tell who is not meeting the requirements for the reward, they can exclude them from the scaling algorithm, thus the dynamic scaling is based on the active players, not people standing around afk. Also, the bots must meet this threshold, so essentially they have to be helpful to be able to earn anything for themselves. Also, in a persistent environment, if I ever spotted a bot, I'd aggro everything I can see around me and try to get him killed. OMFG it would be so epic to be able to grief bots! :D People do this in D2 already when they see the 90-something Baal runners who run people for free in order to max the party size and get more XP, but they are bots, and "bot hunters" will join these games and kill the botter. At that level, that is seriously painful, as they lose a lot of XP, which is their only point for botting in the first place.
 * This is all speculation, same as your article, except that it at least doesn't contradict the information released so far. I'm certainly very optimistic about it, and I can't wait to see how it all turns out. RoseOfKali [[Image:RoseOfKaliSIG.png]] 08:58, May 14, 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, Rose already said what I thought after reading this about the reward scaling. That's the main flaw in your rant.--[[Image:El Nazgir sig.png|Talkpage]]El_Nazgir 10:50, May 14, 2010 (UTC)
 * You are both overestimating Anet's design capabilities. 71.57.38.104 12:00, May 14, 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, they say they have it like that atm in the alpha/beta/whatever build. That's not overestimating it at all. It has already been designed and even put to use in the designer's own testing.--[[Image:El Nazgir sig.png|Talkpage]]El_Nazgir 13:18, May 14, 2010 (UTC)


 * It won't be hard to make a C-space macro that fires off some other skills periodically and uses a self-heal a lot. That's not good enough to fight intelligently, but it's good enough to do a fair bit of damage, which is all that it takes for the contribution threshold.
 * And you don't think we'll be able to do significant damage to mobs with ten levels on us? Ever fight a boss in hard mode?  Most of them have around 10 levels on you.  And that's out of only 20 levels now; ArenaNet has implied that the leveling portion will last a lot longer in Guild Wars 2.
 * I'm not necessarily claiming that it will be a gap of ten levels exactly. But people will find the optimal gap that lets them usually meet the contribution threshold, even if they're not being particularly useful.  And that's where they'll go.  By claiming that you'll never have to worry about kill stealing, ArenaNet has implied that the contribution threshold will be pretty low.  A predominantly support character would often miss the contribution threshold if it were set at dealing half as much damage as the average for the rest of the group.
 * Internal testing doesn't do a whole lot of good in social engineering problems like this. It's like trying to get people to not give their password to a phishing e-mail.  The software can be perfectly fine, but humans don't necessarily do what you want them to.  People don't necessarily worry about botting or powerleveling in beta or shortly after release, but they sure do long after release when they just want to level up faster.
 * The history of public quests like this is one of working just fine in early testing, and then falling apart not long after release. In beta and at launch, people do them a lot just for the novelty, and they likely work just fine.  Warhammer Online had public quests work just fine in beta and for a bit of time after launch, and then eventually most of the playerbase was too high level, so the low level zones didn't have the population needed, and the public quests became undoable.
 * Champions Online learned from the mistakes of Warhammer Online, by having a variable number of instances. Shortly after release, there could be a zillion instances of the low level areas and few of the higher level areas.  As the player base gets higher level, the balance can shift to more of the higher level areas.  But the public quests still don't work, because given the choice between a public quest that probably won't work because others won't join in, and a more traditional quest that will work, which would you choose?
 * So yes, Guild Wars 2 can learn from the mistakes of the other games that have tried something similar. But they're not just trying to make public quests work.  They're trying to make public quests also have various branches as to how the quest can proceed, in addition to making it work.  That makes things an order of magnitude more complicated--and hence much harder than something that other games already tried and failed to pull off.  Quizzical 00:16, May 15, 2010 (UTC)


 * at no point did they say that the only way for the game to register you as participating was dmg dealing, as quiz said support players wouldn't get much off of it. and if whatever system they are using says they have to contribute enough, then they will likely have to have contributed a fair bit. at that point, does it matter if they are botting? sure they wont be quit as effective as a REAL player, but still enough that they will be a significant use. also back to your argument about branching the events, many of the examples (not all) have been, it branches one way if you succeed, and another if you fail, so even if the bots/low-levs are mooching off of us, we may get reduced rewards, but we will also get to other branches of the event that wouldn't be seen at all if we win each time. so i like the idea of pugs without party size limits, or refusing people in, it actually makes it so your not guaranteed success. or given the success rate of normal pugs, a more mixed chance of seeing other branches.


 * also, i am aware they said the conribution threshold would be pretty low, but that still doesn't say how low, if the bot/low-lev takes off 25% of a foes health, that is still "pretty low" and would still make that foe somewhat easier. so then it just comes down to, how much you have to contribute, compared to how much your presence makes things harder, something we can only guess at until they tell us more, or the game comes out. P.S. Still am.Akbaroth 02:07, May 15, 2010 (UTC)


 * Don't forget that having more players around means more mobs come, too. If you have four good players at an event, then maybe you win.  If eight bad players join you, then maybe those eight can contribute as much between them as the original four could.  The public group is then twice as strong as before, but the mobs are three times as strong.  And then you get overwhelmed and lose.  Quizzical 02:24, May 15, 2010 (UTC)
 * i doubt that will be much of a problem, depending on how many players are competent vs incompetent, as well as random chance. but since that one can only hazard guesses and make opinions about for how many skilled people there are, compared to how many unskilled players there are, we can't be sure. and even if there are too many bad players in the game, that would simply mean anet will weaken the mobs in the events until it is more reasonable, without altering the rewards. sure it means those among us who can fight an infant AND win will have less of a challenge, thus more boring, if enough plebes show up things will get more interesting. again this all goes back to a mix of random chance, # of skilled ppl vs # of unskilled ppl, and how good anet staff are at making a game. GW1 became very popular, and i love the game myself, unless anet just blundered onto making a great game, that means anet has some competence worth noting. so, i feel we should wait for the game to be out for a while before we pass our judgment.Akbaroth 03:35, May 15, 2010 (UTC)


 * It's not a competence issue. If you have a level 20 character in a typical MMORPG and try to fight level 1 mobs, you win easily.  Try to fight level 50 mobs and you get slaughtered with no hope of success.  You're not any more competent in the former case than in the latter.
 * And these aren't difficulty issues that you can inflate your way out of. If players are going to areas ten levels above them and ArenaNet decreases the difficulty enough for that not to be a problem, then they'll go to areas twenty levels above them and the problem will be the same as before--except that now players within ten levels of the cap will have no content suitable for their levels.
 * The easiest solution that I see is really harsh content gating. For example, each zone except the starting ones could have a corresponding instanced mission that you have to clear to get access--and in that mission, everyone in the group has his level set to match the lowest level player in the group, to avoid getting run through by high levels.  But again, this is the sort of thing that will annoy many players.  Quizzical 05:46, May 15, 2010 (UTC)

In the end, the question is "What's the highest monster level I can survive", not "What's the highest monster level I can find". If they re-implement the ~good AI from GuildWars 1 (rather, aspects of it) a player that is an arbitrary number of 10 levels lower will be targetted by mobs much more often than the tanky level noob+10 Warrior with a rocket launcher. Without some hard protting/healing, the low level is likely to die. His self-heals are suited to soften the blows of monsters his level, but higher-level mobs deal more damage more consistantly. Most players will notice him being fairly inconsequential to the whole thing so they ignore him. Bot dies.

Hey, who knows :P I guess it's fun to think of ways to make it all work at least to some degree. --- -- (contribs)  &emsp;(talk)  07:00, May 15, 2010 (UTC)


 * Quizzical, you seem to miss some points here: A-net never literally said that the difficulty scales up to the amount of people. Akbaroth had a great point with his "so then it just comes down to, how much you have to contribute, compared to how much your presence makes things harder, something we can only guess at until they tell us more, or the game comes out." And personally, I believe that scaling the difficulty on the level of the participants should be employed (and I have faith in A-net because, even thought they made some blunders in the gw1 balancing, the game itself was more that just "pretty good"), like, the total level of all of the people there and make the monsters match that. The leechers will barely get any exp because they're way too low level to be of much use, and the little use they have balances the little bit more difficult it gets.--[[Image:El Nazgir sig.png|Talkpage]]El_Nazgir 16:22, May 15, 2010 (UTC)


 * My argument is not that they're going to implement it in this particular way, and it will fail because of these particular problems. Rather, my argument is that it will be a mess there isn't a good way to implement it, and no matter what they pick, it will be beset by glaring problems.  There are no good solutions here, but only trade-offs.  Quizzical 16:36, May 15, 2010 (UTC)


 * What makes you know this with such utmost certainty, oh wise one? What if they prove that earth isn't flat? Will it take you 500 years to agree? RoseOfKali [[Image:RoseOfKaliSIG.png]] 09:24, May 16, 2010 (UTC)


 * If it were easy to do it right, then why hasn't some other game already done it? It's not for lack of trying.
 * Also, the flat earth thing is a remnant of silly propaganda. People knew in ancient times that the earth was more or less round.  Quizzical 13:49, May 16, 2010 (UTC)


 * I used to be one of the "they will fail because they are Anet" type of people. But a single sentence in the Nine GW2 Follow Up Questions with Eric Flannum changed my mind. To the very first question ("We’ve read some concerns about limitations of a 10-slot skill bar. Some players feel that it’s inflexible and doesn’t allow for enough creativity in making a build. What say you?"), Eric answered "If you use the CCG paradigm to explain our skill system, we went from a system with almost no deck building restrictions in Guild Wars to one that has some necessary and sane deck building restrictions in Guild Wars 2."
 * This single quote instantly restored my faith in Anet and made me realize, yeah, maybe they do know what they're doing. That sentence made me a full supporter of the weapons skill system, and I have high hopes for the rest of the game as well.
 * tl;dr version: You sound like one of the "they will fail because they are Anet" type of people. --Macros 18:33, May 16, 2010 (UTC)


 * I think the Guild Wars 2 skill bar system will work just fine, and quite possibly better than how they set it up in this game. This page is about dynamic events, not skill bars.  And my argument isn't that they'll fail because they're ArenaNet; it's that they'll fail because they're trying to do something that is nearly impossible.  It's like reading that some company plans on offering daily flights to Mars within the next decade and thinking, they'll probably fail at it because it's just too hard.  Quizzical 19:29, May 16, 2010 (UTC)

It's going to be worse than you think
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013691/Designing-Guild-Wars-2-Dynamic

A little after the 50 minute mark, someone basically asks about the question of players not participating enough and getting full rewards. At first, they interpret it as a question of players coming in as too high of level, and they say that your level will scale down to the event. The questioner more explicitly says, what about people who aren't helping very much. They dismiss it as something that won't happen, because players aren't going to be in a rush to level fast. Their answer finishes around the 56 minute mark.

Uh oh. This sounds ripe for a huge "Gresham's Law" type of thing, in which the "good" players who would try to beat events for real try to avoid them as much as possible and focus on dungeons and personal story whenever they can, further diluting the pool of players taking events seriously. I just hope they fix it in a timely manner when the dynamic events are overrun with a combination of players who aren't being terribly useful and those who are way too high level for the event (but get scaled down to only somewhat too high level), and don't take a year to get around to it like they did with Ursanway and perma-shadow form. Or never, like pain inverter.

They do talk as though the idea is that players should nearly always win events, though. The major way that events fail is if there aren't players around. Quizzical 02:33, September 9, 2010 (UTC)


 * They talked about participation criteria around 34 min, and a little during the question/answer. Players have to deal enough damage to be counted for difficulty scaling, and I'm willing to bet that also goes for rewards. If you really barely help in a fight (i.e. if you deal 5 dps vs 2k dps of a random other player), I doubt you'd get the full reward, if any at all. If they are counted but are useless, players might fail the event, and thus still get nothing/very little. This also implies I didn't get the "players win period" feel (atlhough the whole Harpy Morale thing seemed like something you can't lose, but that's because there's no stage beyond that). Also, "aren't concerned" != "know it won't happen". --Vipermagi 14:00, September 9, 2010 (UTC)