05-26-2008, 07:26 PM
Quote:It is an inevitable consequence that a ten man that is as hard as a twenty-five man will be harder on each individual if the encounter is equally difficult and time consuming, overall. You can't escape that. And harder individual tasks are going to exclude people who cannot perform them. You can't escape that, either.
Yes, a 10 player instance which is tuned to the relative difficulty of it's corresponding 25 player would be harder on each individual which is a good reason to have the same loot tables. I also don't have any argument over excluding players who can't perform the required gaming challanges. But that is totally different than excluding players based on how many friends they have. If i pick up Super Mario and can't complete world 9-1 because i'm just not good enough, fine. If i pick it up and get to world 9-1 and the game tells me to plug in 3 other controllers and get some friends or else i cannot continue, not fine. The main difference here is that in the first scenario I can practice and improve, in the second it's a hard gateway to progress and unless i'm willing to put up with the social hassles it's a dead end.
I go back to Kaplans point in discussing the rational of making 10 player versions of 25 player content. He says that the only question should be where your social comfort level is. Which I whole-heartedly agree with. But the game design belies this possition. Still, the quesion of character advancement past a certain point isn't "how good are you" or even "how much time have you invested" but "how many friends do you have".
Quote:Nor can Dave Sirlin, and he's a game designer. And neither of you can say because you haven't bothered thinking about the constraints on an MMO design team.
I'm not even going to get into the flamethrowing of who has thought of what.
Quote:Now let's go back to 1.0's 40 man, raid-or-die mentality. It isn't just blindly adopted from EQ. It's a model Blizzard looked at specifically and adopted because of its many advantages. It's highly repeatable - with forty people to satisfy and only a little loot dropping, people have incentives to run it again and again. It's not necessarily difficult at the start, but it's reasonably difficult enough that most players take a week or two to progress on each boss, and then beat it. So its consumption rate is relatively slow, which makes raids more efficient to develop. Raids certainly have a number of time sinks, such as instance timers and consumable requirements. All of these things made 40-man raids a very efficient kind of content for Blizzard to develop. Given that, they would be foolish not to develop it and try to make people play it. It's a very rational decision.
So as I said earlier, people who don't understand this don't understand the purpose of maximum-limit raiding in a fantasy MMO. It's all about efficiency, getting the most player-time invested (and hence, player fees collected) in return for the least amount of development time and money used. Maximum-limit raiding is simply one of the best ways to do it.
I understand this perfectly, I also understand that it is a design philosophy based on a false assumption. That assumption being that the user base of MMO's is not growable and that to maximize profits you need to design to minimize or negate churn. It's a philosophy that is based on MMO populations capping at around 500k and two or three of them nipping at each other for each player. WoW totally sunk that assumption and it didn't do it because it took the EQ philosophy and did it better, it did it because it made 90% of the game using a totally different approach and look at how many subscribers they have. It seems totally absurd to me that after all the evidence of the last 5 years they still can't break free from the old mindset. If the choice is between designing the game to reduce the churn of a couple hundred thousand players or to design the game to bring in a couple million new players that is no choice at all.