MMOG Designers Throw Down Over Instancing

jkdove writes "On November 29, 2004, Slashdot featured an article with Brad McQuaid, CEO of Sigil Entertainment and his stance on Instances in MMORPG's. Raph Koster, Chief Creative Officer of Sony Online Entertainment and Scott Jennings, Server Programmer for Mythic Entertainment quickly entered into the ongoing debate at GamerGod, offering their own contrasting viewpoints. From Raph Koster's entry: 'Brad cynically points out that the more common reasons are because there wasn't enough time or budget to develop sufficient content to keep spawn points from being contested or overcrowded.' From Scott Jenning's reply: 'I'm not really sure where he's going here. Players know when they're going through the same instance for a thousandth time, so I'm not really aware of any game that can claim this as a wedge against the Content Demon.'" Update: 12/01 17:12 GMT by Z : Updated to keep Scott out of trouble. Sorry Sanya!

Comments

Brad is clueless.

[Anonymous Coward]

Brad needs to wake up and smell reality. There are many people who love instancing. Having played in an EQ raid guild it was a job, on the contrast WoW raiding is awesome, you no longer have to mold your life around a game. EQ was a PvP game disguised as PvE, thanks to the "great vision" of Brad. His desire of players having competition and accomplishment is nothing more than who has more time to put into the game. His design ideas for V:SoH are nothing more than rehashed EQ design ideas that failed miserably. No instancing. Camping. Lot of travel. Yay! Tedium, boredom, retarded racing with another guild to kill raid mob X. Skills needed: pulse and lot of time!

Instances allow immensly more rewarding and immersive content. You no longer have to watch out for sweatshop_farmer_9412 to train you, ruin your scripted event or steal your kill. You no longer have to race a guild of college dropouts who got nothing better to do than play games 24h a day, you can assemble a group of friends, schedule the raid and do it at your own pace. Same time the hardcore guilds can easily enlarge their ePeen by competing with other guilds who kills mob X before or who has the most players on the PvP ranking board. Instancing is a win-win situation. Well no, it's a bad system for griefers, for everyone else it's a winning system.

Unfortunately Brad is clueless or he still thinks that we are still in 1999. Vanguard is dead before being released because Brad is ignoring that MMOGs brings out the griefer in many assholes. And since his game has no "anti-griefer" mechanism (instances) it will be a paradise for griefers, all in the name of competition and accomplishment. Welcome to EQ pre Planes of Power.

Re:Brad is clueless.

[Pxtl]

I think this is a very good point - the instances are there because they're needed. Imho, the problem is that the "real world" + RPG as an MMO model is fundamentally flawed.

The designer wants everybody to be able to play through all the same quests, but at the same time wants there to be only one existing version of each quest in the game world. Those are mutually exclusive goals.

At some point you have to admit that MMOs aren't really the "single massive world" they admit to be - they're a group of small single-player, co-op, and deathmatch games that happen to use the world map as a game browser. The fact is that real life has a lot of gameplay flaws, and the interest of real-life primarily comes from the obscene amount of content.

Unless the designers of an MMO want to make hundreds of in-world quests in a giant overlapping mess of the game world individually for each player, the "real world as MMO" mentality is fruitless.

Autogenerated content?

[Vo0k]

Instances are plain unnatural. Two guys go through the same door, they both land in identical environments but they are separate from each other.
What about approach that was present in some long-forgotten games like Elite 2: Frontier? Just pseudorandomly (randomizing with a fixed seed, so it looks random in space, but doesn't change in time) create a huge game universe, with some overriding "specials" locations/events, and vast "generic" terrains, specific to given area somehow, but without having each tree in the forest placed by hand or c&p'd from neighbouring square, but placed in somewhat random pattern.

Instead of drawing the world from scratch, let the machine generate just a "generic world" , whole map of rivers, forests, mountains, caves etc (or whatever fits given universe...) from some basic "brick" elements, without cities and roads, but with monster spawning points, completely random caves, some low-value treasure, some very generic low-paying quests/missions, possibly even with some completely random villages. Then populate it by hand, using artists and mappers' skills, add custom quests, custom enemies, custom buildings. Remove architectonical nonsenses, add roads, transportation, special places - generally add sense of order to the world.

Effect: Development cost and time cut in half or more, gameplay area expanded almost indefinitely, possibly also vastly reducing the download/install size (Frontier would fit on a floppy, with billions of stars and advanced universe), because most of the world can be generated ("spawned") just from the fixed random seed and formula, instead of having to be read from database.

Re:Autogenerated content?

[will_die]

Can you have a almost completly random MMORPG, SWG kind of does.
Once you leave the cities, and if there is no other player around to lock down the area things will change.
For instance I once went far outside of town and left the game. When I left it was a plains. Log in hour later, an empiral stronhold. hour later plains and a few spawn points, later a small rebel camp, later mountains.
That type of randomness is not good.

Re:Autogenerated content?

[Vo0k]

If you know in real life they are 24-level... Otherwise, well... The challenge is even cooler.
As for spell backfiring, true if it's a lvl1 magic missile you use two times a minute, it would suck. But if you're up to a great ritual you've never done before in your life, very risky and very dangerous, you know what you're doing. And screwing up in a creative way may be just as fun (or even more) than succeeding.

I like instancing

[rAiNsT0rm]

I actually prefer instanced quests and common towns... however I think a blend of the two is actually the sweet spot.

Have towns and areas around the town as common areas and then quests be instanced. To me this is something that no one has tried yet and could be the real answer.

I don;t want to have to deal with waiting for rabbits to appear to kill and get their fur when 20 other people are doing the same to complete a quest. But have a nice area around each town that is common and maybe even contains a few high level monsters and a super badass one that require teaming and grouping for decent rewards.

Also I feel that every MMO should have at least a single soloable dungeon that players can enjoy when friends/guildmates are not on. Have it get stupidly tough near then end and ensure that players really will have to continually work to clear it over the life of their character. Also, have every weapon/item that is attainable in the regular quests be able to be had in this dungeon... that way every player has equal opportunity and is not penalized for their style of play.

I also believe that player created quests should be implemented. I know many times when I've been gold rich but really wanted a single weapon I couldn't get either due to skill or time. Instead of standing around saying "WTB - Uber Dragonslayer sword of insight" I could go and post a quest saying "1,000g to the first adventurer to bring me an Uber Dragonslayer sword of insight" and let bored/enterprising adventurers fulfill my request.

I also believe player created villages and towns would also draw peopl ein and lend a sense of ownership. Then when a warring faction comes and raids your village and you have to rebuild... you now have a real sense of hatred and loyalty.

Re:Dupe

[tc]

It's not a dupe, it's just another instance...

Unnatural?

[madeye the younger]

Did you ever see a movie or read a good book where at key points in the plotline anywhere from 5 to 500 OTHER main characters show up, are standing in line, or just exit the conflict the character you were identifying with was headed to? *Thats* unnatural. There's an astoundingly obvious, and good reason why stories don't progress that way. If you want to play one of the random ants in a swarm, be my guest.

For myself, when I pay money to play a game I expect content to generally unfold according to MY character's actions. I don't pay to stand in line. I don't pay to be griefed. I don't pay to watch a herd of 30 d00ds vaporize my archenemy without breaking stride, and be lavishly rewarded moreso than if I had won a hard battle myself.

Address the problem with instances, 'infinite' worlds, or whatever, but please do recall that there really isn't a good reason to take the choice of who you want in your story away from the player.

Raiding in WOW is a job.

[Shivetya]

I don't know what RAIDs you are referring to buy many are long and convoluted. Everyone has a job and I have seen people banned from RAIDS for making simple mistakes or not doing their job fast enough. All because sweatshop_farmer_9412 or should we say nolife_liveinbasement_9472 is just a jerk with no life but a penchant of blaming anyone else for problems? WOW is all milk and honey. Numerous RAIDS are out door affairs that are subject to intense griefing. Having a RAID over 10 people even in an instance is a path to griefing whether it is ninja-looting or clique looting.

Brad wasn't totally wrong but instances are not the anwser either. They are an unnatural solution to a problem. Simply put the worlds are not big enough and varied enough to support the number of people they allow to play. Instancing works better as an anti-asshole system than content promotion. Small instances, in WOW this would be a 5 man raid type, are good mainly because the lack of competition.

Brad's Vision

[dr00g911]

I'm half tempted to start a testy little essay of my own about how the games Brad's designed represent the flaws that all others in the market have been striving to overcome.

His design philosophy seems to take delight in a survival-of-the-fittest gaming approach. Call it MMO Darwinism: only those that are willing to live in these worlds 24x7 are entitled to any rewards at all, and the majority of content post-launch is tailored to the hardcore/uber-guild. If you don't like it, tough... it's the Vision, you see. Most of his fans are the "hardcore" element, and his games are designed catering almost exclusively to them, although they're a tiny fraction of the market. They like the fact that the hardcore heart of the games are exclusionary by design.

Loot from hardcore camps is required to move on to the next tier of challenges, so he's forcing player generated content (camping/kill stealing/griefing in this case) to fill the hole where compelling story and *GAMEPLAY* should be.

Brad's games in general are rat mazes -- social engineering experiments, as opposed to the *game* that is WoW.

Honestly, I'm a gray area between a casual and hardcore player. I go on hardcore PvP binges (yeah, WoW is a sandbox, but a fun one), but after my Everquest and DAoC experiences, I'm sick of guild drama and therefore guildless, so I miss out on the very top dungeon raids in WoW unless on a rare occasion I get asked to fill a slot for a no-show in another guild. It doesn't feel like work, and when it does I get resentful and stop playing for a while.

If I want to solo, WoW lets me. If I have a quest to kill Bob the Evil, no one is going to take Bob the Evil's head from me after he's dead (he'll drop a head for everyone in the group that needs it) If I want to invest 5 hours in a raid, WoW lets me -- and no one else is camping Rend when I get in his room. It feels like a game. I can log on, have fun for an hour... always accomplish something toward a goal... and log out. I don't *need* an enormous time investment or a social support umbrella in order to enjoy the experience. Matter of fact, before the end game, WoW rewards me for taking time off (rest XP).

Instancing in moderation, like WoW, is a perfect mix of MMO social interaction and immersiveness.

I mean, seriously, if I have to fight to keep a spot killing a single skeleton in the northeast corner in the third room of the Dungeon of Doom over and over and over again, sitting on my ass for 5 minutes between each spawn, it's not exactly epic, immersive or story-driven, is it?