Why are MMOs so boring now?

>>376564281
Low quality dungeon design means developers can add more dungeons faster, which is more important to most people than complex dungeons where most of the content is ignored most of the time anyway in favor of a single optimal raiding path so that dungeon might as well have just been linear in the first place.

>>376564281
You think any big group iws gonna put up with that bullshit?

People don't play MMOpgs to explore, it's a pull on the slot machine. They want efficiency.

>trying to co-ordinate 3 random people to do something like that

It's streamlined because people are literally retarded, SP dungeons should be like that though.

>>376564806
This, leading four other retards in a maze is not fun or rewarding.

>>376564281
Here's why the OP image won't work; people will always end up finding the most efficient way to turn dungeon #2 into dungeon #1. They're only going to bring the right classes to get the free loot, look up where all the trap tiles are on the internet, and skip absolutely everything that isn't 100% required for completion.

WoW has for many years been at the point where people won't even deviate off the straightest possible path to the end of the dungeon to kill an optional boss for more loot, since it's always more efficient to complete the dungeon faster and queue up again.

>>376565446
So? Finding the meta is fun, when the meta has been learned that's when you release a new dungeon

>>376564281
>now

>>376565529
Yes. Of course, that's exactly as applicable to finding the best setup to deal with the boss mechanics in dungeon #1 as it is to dealing with the dungeon mechanics in dungeon #2, except dungeon #2 was explicitly designed to give you less options (only the mage can open the secret door, for instance)

Because every single MMO devolves into a grindfest with you running the same shit over and over and over and over again to get better gear to run something over and over and over to get better gear.

>>376565446
Even after you find out the perfect way to do dungeon #2, it will still be a hundred times more fun than dungeon #1.

The egg boss in UBRS, and most of BRD is a good example of why OP's dungeon won't work.

>>376565724
Relatively few MMO players agree with you.

>>376565446
What if there isn't necessarily a defined dungeon "completion" state? People go in for specific objectives and are done when they feel like it, there's no bonus reward for killing a particular boss, or all bosses. How about daily quests where players are given a list of random bosses and need to kill at least 5? How about each boss having a unique loot table, with no generic "battle currency" to farm? How about random objectives or mechanics which prevent it from being completed in the same way every time?

Get some imagination.

>>376565825
MMO players are fucking brain dead, all they want is another chance at the slot machine so they want the most straightforward possible dungeons

Is there a way to make an MMO be about you taking a role in a bigger world or will it always devolve into loot grinding?

>>376564281
>what you think will happen
>cool now people will take a much larger variety of classes
>what will actually happen
>anyone but one of the classes that gets special content/skips? denied

>>376564281
Dungeon #3 is the real answer.

Lots of random elements that make you alter your route each time.

>>376565825
MMO players can suck my dick, they ruined MMOs. Guild Wars was the only fun MMORPG, because it didn't fall for the gear-check meme.

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>>376565446

>WoW has for many years been at the point where people won't even deviate off the straightest possible path to the end of the dungeon to kill an optional boss for more loot, since it's always more efficient to complete the dungeon faster and queue up again.

WoW has been like that since vanilla raiding, pic related. If you needed a Jailbreak run you just did that, if you wanted to kill the Emperor you'd spend hours or more likely days trying to find a party that wouldn't get bored and quit out by the time that you hit the tomb. If you wanted MC attunement, you jumped through the lava with a priest and a druid.

The requisite attention span for interesting dungeons has been lost to time.

>>376564281
BUT I DONT WANT THAT, I PLAY VIDEO GAMES TO RELAX, NOT TO PROVE HOW GOOD I AM.

DELETE THIS. SORRY I HAVE A LIFE AND YOU DONT.

>>376565107
Leading four other retards in a straight line is not fun or rewarding.

>>376566405
You could just jump through the lava for an emp run too. Took less than 30 minutes.

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>>376564281
>Top
Typical modern MMO dungeon design. Is used because it is straightforward and easy to understand.

>Bottom
BRD, Dire Maul, Sunken Temple and a few other places. Players complained that they were too large and confusing, and that it was easy to get lost. Many players ended their runs early because they were not given a set goal by the dungeon and thus were confused as to what to do next.

Play a single player RPG if you want dungeon #2.

>>376564281
Because years ago being able to see and play with so many people at the same time was a novelty now it's common and expected even in nonmmo's but mmo's haven't developed any new mechanics to draw you in. Which really isn't surprising, what mmo's should have evolved too was/is large dynamic worlds, but that's incredibly expensive to develop and not likely to see a pay off.

>>376566405
>The requisite attention span for interesting dungeons has been lost to time.
Interesting dungeons aren't interesting after the novelty of the first couple of runs. 99% of the time a player spends in a dungeon is spent for work (grinding) not fun, so why bother making it complex if the novelty will wear off so fast?

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>>376565529
>datamined before release

>>376564281
If you understand game design so much, why don't you design games?

>>376566461
No, but it's more bearable because there's less variables for them to get distracted by

>>376566595
Not with a group of morons

>>376566739
You aren't supposed to grind dungeons a hundred times. That's the first mistake WoW did.

>>376566867
Grinding dungeons for exp and loot has been a staple of MMO gameplay since forever.

>>376564281
some dungeons in legion have class specific secrets.

>>376566070
Exactly what I was thinking

>group looking for mage or paladin for anon's dungeon

Or even worse votekicking classes that can't unlock shortcuts

>>376566758
>MMOs wouldn't be playable without the internet
>the internet is also what killed MMOs
Pottery!

>>376566946
Dungeons are supposed to be special, in the early days it took a whole day to get through one. WoW just has nothing else to offer besides dungeons, so it gets boring.

>>376564281

They don't have any of the mechanics that would make a diverse dungeon enjoyable. Runescapes dungeoneering features skillchecks on bonus room doors which is nice, and any DND-like game is going to feature traps, or require skills to open doors/chests. But if the only thing keeping players from the bonus loot is more enemies who themselves don't offer anything, it's not going to be enjoyable.

>>376564281
I think that if you want to make dungeons fun (a content that you're going to repeat ad nauseam), you should include a lot of random elements so that every time you do a run, the kind of enemies or strategy you apply will be different and with that in mind, the devs will have to add new random elements every month or so.

It's something like Left 4 Dead, you don't know what kind of shit you'll have to go through and that's part of the fun (even though you know you're just playing the same maps over and over).

Even then these random elements could be noted down and guides (which in turn will make dungeons a chore to do) will be made for so it really relies on how often you can revamp said elements or add new random elements.

Basically this. >>376566213

>>376565107
>>376566461
It's almost like MMOs aren't fun or rewarding.

Yet you idiots keep playing them.

>>376567173
data mining barely gives you any meaningful information, it's not like you can data mine the source code
PTR access and meta guides killed MMOs

>>376564281
Because the people they are trying to sell to nowadays have a very short attention span and anything goes beyond the usual combat is deemed too complicated and not worth the time. People want to run down hallways, get their rewards, leave, then do it all over again.

>>376567526
Meta Guides was a third of what I was getting at, though I stand by data mining being a large dampener on the fun of MMOs. Even just seeing what all the items are can take the fun out of shit. I always try to go as long as possible without finding shit like that out so when I stumble on that perfect piece of gear in any type of game it's like a magic moment.

they used to cater to an audience that had nothing to do but play MMORPGs all day, every day

now they're trying to appeal to the audience that only plays MMORPGs for 3-4 hours total a week, because it turns out they need money to be sustainable

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>>376564281
In RuneScape, dungeons are randomly generated with maps that reward you for completion. If you only follow the critical path, you receive much less experience. Parties have to coordinate to try to open every door possible.

Name one MMO with good gameplay.

>>376568031
Name one game with good gameplay

>>376568120
Pong

>>376564617
First post best post

>>376568120
Name one game

Never enjoyed paying money to intentionally waste my time away from other things. There are other hobbies and enjoyment I have in life. Most of the game is pointless, tiny rewards that keep weak willed people hooked.

>>376566739

I had a lot of fun with my guildmates in BRD. Not because BRD was the pinnacle of dungeon design, but because it required a bit of thought and traipsing through the whole thing required a load of time even when you knew what you were doing. It was just something to do whilst spending time together. Even outside of my guild, I ended up making a few decent friends out of complete randoms or got to know people from the other raiding guilds on the server.

I'm not going to say MMOs are completely antisocial these days, but the solo content to group content ratio doesn't really help.

>>376567947
Also dungeons are tied to a skill so shit that you'll find people willing to pay millions to rush through them.
That's not even counting the hand-made dungeons in quests (or unlocked as quest rewards) and the like that serve as training grounds and loot farms, with most of them containing content for a wide range of players to take advantage of.

>>376564281
DDO was figure two. Regardless, it's another case of "what would be best is not what the majority of people will want and consume" and you've just outed yourself as an underage.

>>376564281
Whats the point of doing any of that in the modern world were playing a MMO without reading the wiki or whatever is unheard of? "secret" passage? Dont make me laugh. The real solution is to mercykill the genre.

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>>376568180

>>376568180
Name

>>376568769

>I don't want to coordinate with other people
>I just want my rewards maaaaan
>Get in, get out, I want to spend as little time playing as possible
>What's the point maaaaaan
Damn y'all are fucking miserable

>>3

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MMO's as a genre stagnated and died because innovation and creativity were scared off by the pile of skulls stacked outside of WoW's cave. Instead rewarding and encouraging community, teamwork, and adventure, MMO's have become about quality of life, soloing, and a daily grind. Blizzard killed the industry with their design philosophy of instant gratification, that anyone should be able to jump into a game and have fun right away.

>>376564281
They were always lacking but everyone tries to be WoW so they also feel too redundant.

the base reason for all of it is that people are more impatient now and have less time to play. Less of the game is left up to the players in order to streamline the experience, making the game feel less "alive" in some ways

>>376564281
>What is Dungeons and Dragons Online

>>376569169
People still have the same amount of time, devs just learned that casualising a game and targeting everyone makes more money that just going after the old core mmo audience

>>376568896
I'm okay with coordinating with people. It's just that everyone else's issue is doing it with random people you don't know, which is something else that's never been an issue for me.
I'm one of those solo players you hear about, by the way.

>>376568263
Took me like 10 years to figure that shit out. My friends keep pestering me to play diablo 3 with the, but I don't see the point. The game itself isn't fun, it's 100% about the dopamin rush the lizard part of our brain produces when we find a good item.

>>376564281
see
>>376564806

MMOs are basically the predecessors to mobile games where they hook you on a more complicated skinner box to drain you of all the dosh you're worth.

>>376569352
If you don't enjoy dopamine rushes then you might literally have a disorder.

>>376568263
They're worth as much as the player sees them to be, mmo's are one of my biggest hobbies and I've made some good friends in them that I still play with today

>>376569545
You can have dopamin rushes in a game thats actually fun and not just a skinner box.

>>376564281
People don't have the patience to spend ten minutes with one another, much less two hours.

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>>376564281
But the current raid in WoW is nothing like that.

MMOs have lost any sense of exploration and discovery these days.
It's partially thanks to easily-accessible guides and shit making everything public knowledge, I suppose.
Minimaps in particular handhold you through exploration. Dark caves aren't any fun if you can't get lost in them.

>>376570035
Nighhold is pretty much a hub that lets you go in straight lines to the boss you want to fight, its pretty much like how EN was

>procedural
>dungeon
>generation
>with
>random
>bosses

Good luck making a meta now, fags.

>>376565796
I thought BRD would be an example of why it would work.
You could find groups to do different routes. The dungeon felt like an actual fortress. it was fun but could take hours upon hours if you wanted to do the whole thing with a new group and the reason developers dont do it anymore is they are making mmos to not require you to no life them to accomplish a dungeon anymore.

>>376570329
That sounds like absolute shit because you could get lucky and have the easy bosses and someone else could be shit out of luck but your reward and bragging rights would be the same

>>376569230
dying

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you literally can't name one fucking mmo that does that second type of dungeons.

i played a lot of mmos and those types never happened.

>>376564281
>he thinks people play this genre for the gameplay
It's for gay rping and social interaction for autists

>>376570058
I played an online RPG that had at most 60 people playing at a time, and there were no guides. To get to the final town you had to solve puzzles and find secrets, and it was hard as fuck. Best experience with an online game ever, desu. It's a shame they stopped updating it, but it's still online at least.

>>376570421
There would be different rewards. And you might as well finish the dungeon instead of canceling and trying again for the boss roulette.

>>376570552
Only of you're a casual anime tranny nigger

The only fun of MMOs is toppong meters and crunching numbers in sims

>>376570329
Thats also bad because now you cant have good design. The only way I can see a good MMO being made is if it dropped the PvE focus and then took notes from how EVE handles player interaction.

>>376570329
>fix level design by removing level design
Has this ever worked?

>>376564281
>its the pleb shitter who thinks overly convoluted kitchen sink approach is better than tailored and streamlined

>>376570329

>look for patterns that mean a fast run
>If you don't get them, everyone leaves for a different instance
>If you do get them it's still a fast as fuck run from the beginning to the end while ignoring irrelevant shit
>Random bosses and mechanics mean some teams are screwed from the outset due to no fault of their own

It's a good idea, but if there's a way to predict or mitigate randomness, people will do it. Also there's only so much complexity you can reasonably add- people will see the patterns and figure out how things are generated sooner or later. You can't stop people from using their time efficiently. You can only make it so that people going through shit as fast as possible doesn't detract from their experience in playing the game.

>>376564617
This is true 99% of the time unless the side-loot is worthwhile. Most people who play modern MMOs are in it for the grind and nothing more. Nonsensical turns and backtracking just means it takes longer to do a single cycle instead of just having a linear path to get from loot-dump to loot-dump.
Now if the side-content is actually worthwhile, for example the unique materials in OP are part of a side-boss and the Auction House doesn't have them on the cheap, people would go out of their way for this. Or if the Chests strewn about had loot comparable to a boss without some bullshit hassle, they'd do it. But nobody does this anymore because every MMO has the only loot anyone wants tied to the last boss of a given Dungeon nowadays and it's just about the mad dash to get there.

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>>376564281

As a game dev, I might be able to explain this.

We attempt to design around a good loot treadmill (grind4gear2grind4gear), because people consume content faster than we can produce it. We don't like making dungeon 1, but there's one big problem:

>All of our content competes with all of our other content

Our long time players tend to enjoy grinding over everything else.

Why? As a rule, anyone playing at the endgame of an MMO is there because either they're playing with friends, or because part of human brains really like big numbers. The end game players all want new numbers to push against and, MOST IMPORTANTLY:

>Will optimize their strats around number maximization over all other things.

So what does that predict about our core players?

>They don't want to fuck around, they want to grind for good gear.
>If we release the two OP dungeons, if the loot is at all comparable, they will ALWAYS play dungeon 1 and ignore dungeon 2, it's harder and therefore in-optimal.
>If the loot is good enough to actually do dungeon 2, players will do everything in their power to beeline for the good stuff, so balancing is a nightmare.
>When you try to do weird shit (Say I want a dungeon where bosses are more integrated into a 'dungeon narrative' where they fuck with you on the way, and killing them meaningfully alters the dungeon, or real life phases of the moon alter the accessible paths in ways that require improvisation, or players have to solve rangen complex puzzles) players will skip it because it's fucking hard compared to old content we're not gonna just throw out.

If you want dungeon 2, the only way we could give you that is a lot of data showing you all are playing the shit out of an in-optimal gear dungeon because it's fun (none of this data exists, you objectively play for gear), or that you pay more sub money so that we can justify superfluous dev time. You get what you pay for.

In short,
>The way you play and what you say you want don't match.

>>376570912
Wildstar Dev Anon, is that you?

>>376566405
I full cleared BRD plenty of times in Vanilla, the real challenge was finding anyone that gave a fuck about LBRS.

>>376570556
Heck, I guess someone did eventually end up making a guide for some of the quests

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hq6PPSii9Y35kGC1IRkOQdEAHh6FsH9yHdrzmQ2xnYY/edit

Looks like shit, but it was so fun finding this stuff. I loved how there was just a trust among the players to not trade the quest items since nothing was ever BoP or anything. You had to do some backdoor shady deals to get someone to get it for you.

>>376570912
As an MMORPG dev have you ever felt that you're exploiting people who have serious problems?

>>376570912
Then you should just force people to do the more complex and randomized design. Fuck them. Drones playing only for loot don't deserve to have fun.

>>376571230
Its always been about the loot and being able to flaunt it around plus be thr guy who does big numbers

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>remembering all the shit it took to get keyed for the temple of veeshan
>remembering all the shit it took to see the entirety of velious
>remembering the agonizing progression through the planes of power
>remembering the skull fucking gates of discord

You are all like babies and know nothing of the trials and tribulations everquest asked of it's players.

>>376564281
you realize once people find the the optimal route to farm the "dungeon should be made" then it becomes a straight line right? you do realize this?

>>376571385
I was about to post a map of temple of veeshan and say 'do this thing'.

>>376570912
>>>If we release the two OP dungeons, if the loot is at all comparable, they will ALWAYS play dungeon 1 and ignore dungeon 2, it's harder and therefore in-optimal.

So spend 5 minutes on dungeon 1 for the loot babbies and make an actual fun dungeon like dungeon 2 for actual human beings.

>>376571385
>Everquest
That's what we call masochism.

>>376566597
Nice fag opinion millennial

>>376564281
Your second example fails when more than one of a class can enter a dungeon.

Ideal comps will start to form for premades and duty finder groups will kick classes that don't contribute towards an 'ideal' clear, punishing players for playing the class they like.

>>376571385
>Dude, a boss in which if anyone says anything in local chat, the entire party instantly wipes
Everquest was designed to torture you. It wasn't made to turn a profit like modern loot treadmills.

>>376571430
So you add randomized features that prevent it from being run the same way every time. Random locked doors, random bosses, random spawn locations, random objectives. You also give each boss a unique loot table so that you only need to do the ones the group wants to do. No battle currency rewards just for farming, no "dungeon clear" state.

>>376570329
Good luck ever finishing a raid when nobody knows what fucking bosses, and therefor what abilities and shit are going to be employed. Spend a week learning a few boss fights, raid resets and you need to learn different fights. Yep that wouldn't get fucking old fast.

>>376570912
And you never thought that maybe you're designing them wrong and you think you understand your players but you don't? If you work for wild star like the other anon said, it would explain why the game is failing so much if that's the mindset that the developers have

I would never trust the word of an mmo developer unless they worked for guild wars, wow or maybe ff

>>376571638
It was masochism, it was also something magical at a time before the internet and gaming went main stream and extreme corporatization, the quests were interesting as fuck and the design of the game encouraged interacting with your community.

The grind though, jesus christ.
It's why i can't play that p99, aint nobody got time for that.
>lmao hope you have the time to camp in one spot for LITERALLY a week to get this one item you need for your epic weapon!

>>376571752
The cost of making an mmo was lower then and developers simply weren't studied in how to design content and services to manipulate players in an mmo.

Wow it's almost like MMOs are made for human garbage that hate fun and love doing the same bullshit hundreds of times for slightly better weapons.

>>376571735
So you make the idea of an "ideal clear" variable. Give players random objectives that only require them to target specific bosses or rooms. Give each boss unique loot so only the ones the party wants need to be killed.

All of you have been so indoctrinated and browbeaten by the shitty current system you can't even imagine something which breaks it.

>>376564281
Because the sad fact of like is that they need to churn out that shit by the annual quarter now. All that extra jazz is great but are just more resources to become obsolete by next patch.

A single player RPG can should use that design and can be played over and over.

MMOs have and always will be a skinner box for people who have a LOT of time and are made to be experienced ONCE. Anything more and it is repetition or waiting for the next skinner box. Even if you do the bottom pictograph EVERY time it will get old because it's being released twice a year.

>>376571752
That sounds like a great idea actually. Gives the boss some identity besides "wahhhhh, AoE damage".

We need an MMO with unannounced/unhyped patch releases so that not everything there is in the game is datamined and posted on the internet before it's even out

Ironically the big thing that made MMOs special is what subsequently killed them

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>tfw the mmo genre is dead and will probably never return because the current generation only knew wow as it's only comparison to what a mmo could be
The late 90's and early 2000's were the golden period of internet gaming. I don't know if i should feel happy i got to experience it or sad that i got to experience it and will never see it's like again.

>>376571346
what if they add cosmetic shit? isn't that how the final fantasy mmo does it?

or some bragging rights type thing like whoever cleared the entire dungeon the fastest this week gets some shiny aura

>>376572328
We need an MMO that is actually like D&D, not diablo in 3d.

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>>376572358
>people who started playing WoW in Cata have now been playing longer than someone started in vanilla and quit in wrath

>>376564281
nobody wants to play another fucking rpg and technology hasnt advanced enough to allow true mmofps, mmorts, etc.

>>376572293
Oh I agree, it's an interesting mechanic, however, it's definitely intended to torture you when you gotta ensure an entire 40-man (I think) raid says fucking nothing for the span of like 10 minutes.

>>376572416
WoW has that too to a lesser extent

>>376572293
Everquest had bosses that would leave the raid zone and go on a fucking rampage across the entire current expansion map and kill everyone and was intended to be unkillable.

Look up the sleeper some time, everquest had a ton of great fights. They had a class that was entirely centered around crowd control and not much else.

The council of rathe fight was fun.


Man you kids missed out on some great shit.

>>376572416
Thats how guild wars did it. You can grind dungeons if you want a cool looking armor, but it's not going to be better than the normal armor everybody can wear.

>pvm as the end goal of a mmo

this is why DAoC was and always will be far superior to WoW

>>376572435
A world of diablo with original art direction of diablo and diablo 2 would be fucking amazing. There's a lot of potential for a diablo mmo, but not with current blizz.

>>376572552
>Everquest had bosses that would leave the raid zone and go on a fucking rampage across the entire current expansion map and kill everyone and was intended to be unkillable.

So kind of like deathwing during cataclyms?

>>376572525
You forgot to mention this was before ventrillo and shit was a thing. I think i had a few guild mates that used it, but everyone communicated via chat.

Most mmos these days are of the theme park variety where the end game content is just grinding instanced dungeons (which defeats the point of mmo in the first place) so you can get the same cookie cutter end game build. Once you're done grinding you're stucking waiting for new content.

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I'll probably get shit on of this, but XI is (almost everything an MMO should be. It hit that perfect middle ground between themepark and sandbox, and absolutely forced you to play with others to get anywhere. Easily the most dedicated and tight knit community I've ever seen, so much so that it's -still- a pay to play MMO today and making money

It had flaws, namely the dated UI, japanese only servers and wonky class balance, but it did everything else so fucking right

>>376565446
This. People want efficiency and don't want other people wasting their time. After a dungeon is released there are already guides for optimal paths. If anyone attempts to do the dungeon suboptimal they will immediately be exposing themselves as being a scrub and no one will want to group with that person. Those days of exploring a huge nonlinear dungeons are over and they will never be coming back unless they change the way the loot grind works in MMOs.

>>376564281

My favorite WoW dungeon was dire maul north. It wasn't a maze, but the tribute run was a really unique type of experience. I ended up making so many ogre suits.

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>tfw i played everquest when it was owned by verant and the devs would do live in game lore moving events and my guild got to be a center piece in it constantly
>and then verant got bought out and the entire plot line got dropped with the new company

>Come to a raid to get loot
>Have to spend hours on mobs before you can reach the bosses
Who gives a shit, just make great bosses and that's it

>>376572837
I was so proud of finishing my warlock mount quest and having my tier 0.5.
Then stuff i had worked months on were replaced by greens in the next expansion and they just gave away my hard earned mount to new warlocks.

>>376565446
Solutions:
-non instanced dungeon. You're no longer doing a dungeon "run", you're going into a dungeon for a specific reason.
-don't give the dungeon an end goal. The loot from the bosses shouldn't be the defining draw. Depending on who you are, and what you are going for at a given time, there will be a defining draw for your specific need. eg. Mining, obscure npc vendors, regular mobs that are good for exp, lockpicking chests, means of character progression, profitable endeavors.
If people aren't searching for a #1 style dungeon experience, they won't try to make #2 fit the mould. Fuck the "endgame/raiding/geartreadmill" design and subsequent mindset.

>>376571230
Anon, you are the loot drone.

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>>376571201

I think about this a lot.

I think for a lot of people that have addictive personalities, it's not a question of 'if' they're going to be exploited, but by whom, and how badly. I think that MMOs, relatively speaking, are more innocuous then a lot of alternatives, and while a lot of people are negatively affected by them, I've heard a lot of stories of people who have found a source of comfort and support from other players. It probably doesn't balance out on the net, but I like to believe we're trying to help you enjoy your time and most people, if it ever got too bad, could just quit.

Modern day F2P mechanics as a game dev scare me though, because at least with a subscription, we can honestly say we are only providing a (theoretically fun) service. As far as I can tell, F2P is the MMO alternative for these types of individual, and those makers are just out for cash.

>>376571230

There is no "force" unless it's all there is, otherwise you're competing with yourself. Try to avoid it and people get mad that there isn't enough content in our releases.

>>376571631

We try, anon, but a single dungeon 2 requires the work of like 5-15 dungeon 1's, and then once we release a 2, people usually ignore it and instead focus on the piñatas. Balance is hard.

>>376571889

We do understand you, anon, that's our job.

Big data is beautiful, scary shit:

>Your every position is logged, and what we think you're doing there,
>What you focus on in new areas
>How much you chat and what you chat about

(and, oh yeah, we're running sentiment analysis on how you talk about our dungeons in chat before, during, and after a raid; it's decent candid feedback),

>what you focus on killing,
>what you don't,
>how you traverse dungeons,

And pretty much everything else you can think of. Maybe there's some intangible to measure "I secretly yearn for a dungeon that's going to kick my shit in", but all our tangibles seem to tell us you want loot.

>>376572986

Felt that way with my druid epic bird form was one of the first on my server.

>>376573105
Everquest had non instanced dungeons. It was a competition to who got what. Shit got very very very cut throat when it got to end game shit and only 5% of the community got to see all the content.

>>376573239
>only 5% of the community got to see all the content
It's called end-game content for a reason, not "every babby on this server can beat it content".

>>376573105
Interesting idea. From what I hear, Chronicles of Elyria may have something a bit like that.
>If you want valuable minerals and shit, you'll have to hire a band of fighters to protect you
>Just so you can dig up some shiny rocks that you'll sell to a Smith for a sizable sum more than regular crap miners
>Who will then turn it into better gear
>Which will benefit a specific faction and give them an edge over some other faction they may be at arms against or threatening conflict with
Although there are no "dungeons" from what I've been reading.
And the game overall sounds like trash.

>>376573239
>caring about the percent of players who get to see certain content
Hi blizzard

>>376573129
Do you think you are making a fun game?

>>376564281
Too much focus on gameplay instead of the experience. Cross-server grouping and multiple difficulties were the beginning of the end, Cata onwards was just the nail in the coffin.

>>376572635
>On November 17, 2003, after a nearly 3-hour battle, Kerafyrm was defeated. He had between 100 million and 400 million hit points, likely around 250 million (most EverQuest bosses have 2 million at most), was immune to all spells except wizard's manaburn spell and Shadow Knight's Harm Touch, possessed two death touch abilities (abilities that automatically killed players), and attacked players for 6999 damage per swing. By using the cleric's epic weapon and other resurrection spells, the players were able to bring their dead characters back into the battle faster than Kerafyrm could kill them all.

it took about 200 people apparently

it was triggered if players killed the 4 guys keeping him asleep apparently

only happens once per server

>>376573390
>>376573357
I think if your team is skilled and works hard enough it should be able to see all the content. Not the way blizzard does it, but another guild denying you out of ever having a chance at even doing the content kind of sucks. Guilds would intentionally pull shit into your raid group to wipe you, would keep a raid boss flagged to their group only *first hit mechanic + some other malarky* for content they didn't even do any more, they would make you pay a ransom, etc etc etc.

P99 has the exact same problem where a guild basically cock blocks everyone else from doing the content so they can hold it hostage.

>>376573593
I'm in love. Sounds a bit like Eve Online in terms of cut-throat shit being pulled.

>>376573539
>only happens once per server
pretty gay boss.

>>376573593
>multiple worlds you can swap between a la runescape
problem solved

Previously:
- no party finder. This forces people to talk to eachother to group up. Crowds of people in front of every relevant dungeon and raid area
- less dungeons. This forces devs to increase the longevity of a dungeon, multiple bosses, reasons to return at later levels, etc.
- less/no instancing. Devs had to design areas with large player occupancy in mind. No linear 100% hallways allowed
- more NEETs. Game can be geared towards people who will play the game all day every day 24/7

Now:
- party finder. Nobody has to talk to do anything in the game.
- more dungeons. Everything is either short and/or a one-and-done thing where there is no reason to go back to a dungeon after you've beaten it
- more instancing. Everything is designed around the party finder, for short and small groups, and now we've got hallway dungeons in every game because they can be rushed easily by small groups
- less NEETs. Servers need more money to stay afloat than they used to, and people don't have as much time to play vidya anymore. They continue to converge on short-term satisfaction in order to keep the game profitable.

>>376573593
>I think if your team is skilled and works hard enough it should be able to see all the content.
That kind of policy kills a game's mystique.

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>>376571752
>Chaotic monsters appearing in packed areas
Why not just bring it back?

>>376564281
>>376564617
>>376565446
>>376572828

I'm having flashbacks of trying to convince UBRS runs to do the Father Flame event so I had a chance at the Devout Shoulders for my Priest.

Never got them.

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>>376564281
desu

>>376573747
I swear to God I can't think of anything other than rs when it comes to mmo design. I can only suggest things here that resemble my first mmo.

>>376571492
Please, post maps.

>>376573961
There's a lot of stuff applicable to many games that runescape got right. There's a stigma associated with it for whatever the fuck reason though.

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>>376573957
honorable mention

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>>376564281
This looks like the Taverley dungeon in Runescape

Also, the Dungeoneering skill sucks shit

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>>376573719
apparently he doesn't even drop anything

only his guardians did

once he wakes up they never respawn

seems to just be there for story reasons

The problem with modern MMOs isn't dungeon design, it's game design.

These shitty games are designed to squeeze as many hours out of you as possible, through repeated grind on grind on grind.

And the retards who play MMOs nowadays are too stupid to actually interact and worldbuild, they just want their next shiny.

I say we crash and burn the MMO market for a decade or so and reboot, then we get a chance of having an MMO geared towards people with a functioning brain.

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>>376574106

>>376573129
Loot is the objective, so you can make the barrier anything you want and people will do it. Yeah, no shit people gravitate to the easy/simple stuff. I'm pretty sure if you mailed them free loot every day they'd never touch a dungeon again.

But you can control what they need to do to get loot. If they go for the path of least resistance, then just make that path MORE resistant. A game that simply hands players loot isn't fun, even if the loot is ostensibly what they want. The entertainment of a loot-based game is what you have to do to get the loot, not how much you can get and how quickly.

Well, maybe that's how it works for braindead morons who play shit like freemium phone games.

>>376574118
The stigma is that cheap-looking game coating along with the grind for certain skills like Agility's annoying grind, Farming's time-gated grind and Runecrafting's extremely dangerous grind along with the money-sink grinds like Herblore and Fletching.

Other than that it's a great MMO.

>>376574118
The stigma probably comes from the formerly strict (and forced) censor, as well as all the youngsters from miniclip. This led some to consider it an immature game.

>>376574139
>>376573957

TAKE ME BACK TO RUBI-KA

TAKE ME FUCKIN BACK RIGHT NOW

You know what is worse then dungeon design? Limiting the amount of timed you can do a instance/dungeon/raid or whatever in a set amount of time.

The reason they do it though is because they gotta pad out their shit game to force you to play for longer then you would need to. I know a friend who played WoW for 2 years to try and get an item from this one instance that he could only do once or twice a week i think it was. He never did get that item

>>376574252
This. Mmos are no longer virtual worlds.

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This one was fun.
Basically a wizard was dabbling in forbidden shit and caused an entire capital city to collapse into the earth, leaving giant fucking hole that no one could see the bottom of, and anyone who ventured into never returned.

If i remember right the wizard had basically made contact with the plane of earth, nearly everyone in the city had died. You had to skirt around the giant fucking hole to find a hidden door behind waterfall. That being the entrance on the map all the way to the right. You would descend and discover what happened to the city, fight it's ghosts, find earth elementals, and ultimately at the very very bottom would be a portal to the plane of earth.

It's super fucking atmospheric and was one of the most intriguing dungeons to explore back in the day.

>>376574194
thats a seriously homo boss.

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>>376564617
>Low quality dungeon design means developers can add more dungeons faster, which is more important to most people

What? No its not you fucking clown. Its this way because plebs who still paly mmos dont fucking care on way or the other. They dont play mmos for a good dungeon crawl or to figure shit out they play it to mindlessly grind while reading guild chat between the 2 none autists in their guild. People want dungeons set up so they can go in and get out without talking to fucking anyone much less actually have to coordinate anything. The amount of people who play mmos yet don't want to interact with anyone is mind boggling.

And this is all before we factor in just how dumb and incapable people who play games nowadays are and MMOs are the biggest fucking normi magnet outside of bejeweled. You have no idea what the fuck you are talking about.

>>376568169
Fucking neck yourself you dumb fuck

>>376574931
>"What? No its not you fucking clown."
>Literally everything after that says that yes it is

>>376574836
There was a portal to earth? Our earth? How does that work?

I just want a fun multiplayer dungeon crawling video game

>>376573757
Neets got driven out by an increasingly awful game they didnt get older and stop playing you autist, people never stopped having kids there will forever be new neets.

>>376564281
Because you're old and you've played them for a long time.

>>376574194
Sounds to me like he was never supposed to be killed, since he was only vulnerable to two things and drops nothing.

>>376564281
>>376574252

Because MMOs today are catering towards an audience that will literally tear a game down to ones and zeroes to figure out the most optimal strategy for anything. Sure they could spend 3 months making a giant, interesting dungeon with really nifty class specific mechanics and replayability.

Why though? As soon as it's available to the general public people will run that shit until their eyes bleed, make spread sheets showing the most efficient time to loot ratio, and everyone will hold to that shit like its a gospel. Class specific mechanics? If anything provides more than an extremely token advantage then groups will simply mandate someone be of that class, making it less of a fun nifty thing and more of a completely mandatory pain in the ass.

The simple fact is that it's the player base's fault that every fucking instance in MMOs anymore are 20 minute haunted house rides that give candy at the end. Could you fucking imagine if old school scholomance popped up in wow again? A dungeon that took 10 people, dropped exactly 3 pieces of loot worth a shit, took 2-3 hours per run, and had lots of little side quests/bosses that added even more time and only offered a quest completion?

>>376575262
Where did the neets go, anon? How does one attract the up and coming generation of future neets?

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>>376573398

I do think the game is fun

I say "theoretically fun" because while I personally fucking hate grinding, I love large numbers too; it feels good to whomp something that was a challenge before. Ideally, if I had true freedom, you get your gear fast, have to wreck a really hard boss, get even better gear instantly, and immediately head for the next harder fight.

That, unfortunately is not how things work because the game has to be developed on a continuing basis and real life is slow. We compromise on a lot of fluidity to make sure content will last till next update by gating content behind bad drop odds and grindwalls.

As a super rough guesstimate, with all art assets made and ready,

>(And we will assume the art team is constantly churning out stuff we can use, this is NOT a guarantee in real life because you'd be fucking shocked how much art is needed in an MMO),

then every minute of dungeon 1 style content takes like 3 hours of coding, testing, and balancing.

>It's more like 10 hours for dungeon 2 style content, which is why you get less of it.

What's there is fun, but I wish we could make the gating softer.

>>376573795

Remember those end-game social players I mentioned? They are still around because they like talking and trading with other players. We do our best to let them do that (mostly) in peace.

When people want to play the game as a stock-market simulator or play the game as an IRC channel, they don't take too kindly to dying when they're trying to socialize.

>>376574338

Making paths more resistant requires us to alter old content. Because it's old,

>It's probably for lower level players (not the core group of end game players)
>It's less novel, so people don't feel as strongly about it
>We were less experienced when we made it which makes it a bad basis to build on top of, which means...
>...If we're redesigning from scratch old stuff, why not make new stuff instead?

So we are forced to accept we're competing with ourselves.

Nerds stopped being brave enough to talk to internet people. You have to talk to internet people to communicate your need to clear optional parts of dungeons. So nerds just give up and quit.

Nerds aren't what they used to be.

>>376575341
A lot of that is due to the limitations of the RPG genre.

And the only reason rpg's are made into mmos are because those are the only games that scale into 1k+ player servers.

>>376564281
True reason why this isnt anthing now. Nobody wants to deal with the min max autist who wants to do EVERYTHING. They would be the one demanding we have a mage to open that passage, to have a rogue to lockpick. People like that ruin it. Makes it easier to make them go through a single path to shut them up

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>>376567947
man dungeoneering was a trash ass skill
remove the constant ""puzzles"" and it might've been better

>>376574367
>Runecrafting's extremely dangerous grind
shigoleth

>>376575485
Shit, I'm just reading this thread and shaking my head, it's like these guys don't even play MMO's these days, I can barely even do palace of the fucking dead in FFXIV because people are unwilling to take 10 seconds to poke their head into each side room to check for silver chests, they want to beeline for the exit of each floor, this is the sort of people your dealing with in MMO's, the majority of players want the quickest way, dungeon 2 would be fun for the first bunch of people to run it only, older players catching up? won't be able to get a group together, and if they do they'll beeline for the fucking exit and ignore all the side content, I've seen this happen.

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I want more jump puzzles

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>>376574836
That map doesn't convey just how labyrinthine the hole is.

Here's plane of mischief. It was very silly.

>>376575640
How do you grind Runecrafting then besides hopping on a low-pop world and running to the wildy hoping you don't get PK'd?

>>376564281
This entire setup, while interesting, serves no purpose in practice. Groups will continue to clear all enemies out every run, until there is no more loot to collect for group members.

The entire concept of raids needs to be rethought, specifically why you do them and the challenges you face. Clearing an identical dungeon every week is abysmally boring for everyone involved, especially if you're simply going for the achievement of doing so or to see the story. I could grind in a JRPG if I wanted that.

>>376575101
There is a big difference between driving people out of your game until only the ones who dont care remain and giving them what they want, Its not more important to people its the preferred way to design a game for the people who didnt care that you keep trivializing the game and stayed.

>Literally everything after that says that yes it is

How far gone are you that you can read my paragraph and think im agreeing that people WANT Low quality mass produced dungeons? Do you even understand what you typed out and what you insinuated?

>more important to most people
Dont say this shit like you speak for anyone who played vanilla

>>376574142
>dungeon designed so that any player can have a reason for going inside
Why is this approach completely ignored?

>>376575403
Why do you consider gear to be the premier of character progression? And why have you concluded that it is best obtained from bosses? It's a never ending viscous cycle. I would think it would be better for the longevity (and diversity) of your content to spread out the acquisition and types of character progression over multiple nuanced avenues.

>>376575819
>people WANT Low quality mass produced dungeons
To those people they're not low quality, it's exactly what they want and enjoy. You're out of touch and oblivious to the fact that other people aren't you.

>>376575981
>viscous cycle

>>376575790
By doing just that
You're not some dummy that risks getting pk'd by random faggots because you were too lazy to hop, are you?

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>>376564617
>>376564806
>>376565446
>>376565719
>>376565825


Man, MMORPGs are just a really awful genre.

>>376575380
Quality content, gamer neets spend lots of time playing games so they need more and more refined games. Its the same for anything, food, music, etc. Obviously some one who has painted 10,000 paintings is going to be more autistic about the paints he uses then some guy doing his 1st finger painting

>>376575790
>>376576057
how nooby can you be to actually die to rc pkers? even if you die you don't lose shit so who cares

>>376575832

As games mature, your focus shifts to the experience of a player with high levels, lots of money, and too much free time. It's not 2005 anymore. Why cater to newbies if your new player join rate is kinda low and you're entering into your middle phase and final phase of development, your "retain players" mode?

>>376564281
wikias are a thing

>>376576024
Hey don't blame me, I'm laying in my bed posting on my phone.

>>376564281

>tfw miss the public dungeons of Everquest 2, where you had tons of different areas and paths, some even had small instances inside the dungeons where you could tackle a boss encounter with just your group

>>376575226
Plane of earth. Everquest had planes for each of it's gods. And eventually you got to go kill a very large portion of them.

dungeons are bad because of mechanics encouraging them to be run repeatedly

take away the reason to play them multiple times beyond "helping out somebody that hasn't done it yet" and you can make them fun again

>>376564281

I've never played an MMO and I'm nearly 30 years old.

From everything I've seen of them they've always had grindy shit gameplay but at one time people had enough time and were autistic enough to gather in large groups and coordinate so it made missions probably feel way more cohesive. It was a group mentality sort of thing.

Considering most people's attention span is that of a hummingbird at this point especially young people I'd suspect that you don't like them anymore because they lost the core component: a sense of unity and cohesion with people.

>>376566595
I play on a vanilla server and this is what everyone does.

Finding a full BRD group takes an entire day of looking for a group, maybe more.

Same with a full UBRS run, everyone wants to stop at Rend even though it's only 2 bosses short completing the dungeon. I've literally gone a week without finding a group that's doing a full UBRS run.

>>376565446 is absolutely right

>>376576246

I'll also add I loved the social dynamics of big, public dungeons. You have people who might be grinding for exp in just one area, people running around looking for bosses, running into groups that you might save from a wipe, the occasional killstealer or person running trains. Yeah there were definitely some negative aspects, but they made dungeons a constantly changing and interesting experience.

>>376576134
Gee, I wonder why new people are turned off from a game that doesn't offer them anything except barebones content from launch.

>>376575991
yeah, to THOSE people who are still playing not "all people" like you implied. And thats ASSUMING these people actually enjoy it and are not putting up with it for what ever reason.

>You're out of touch and oblivious to the fact that other people aren't you.
yeah dude and you are not doing the same thing by dictating what people like right?

>>376575832
I don't know.
Runescape also used it as the perfect approach to PvP in the form of the wilderness- there were rare items and enemies to hunt alongside other players. There were reasons to enter other than killing other people.

>>376575403
>Making paths more resistant requires us to alter old content.
Why? Isn't the whole point of these games to progress through one tier of content to the next? Why not just make the old content irrelevant, or a transitory stage to get to the new stuff which has better rewards? You can't possibly expect me to believe that players will be satisfied with lower level shit if there's still better shit to progress into.

>>376576134
runescape does both without alienating either low levels or high levels.

there is no reason to cater to only high level faggots who will gladly pay and play no matter what.

>>376575779
Man i might have to play my old account just to see all this old content i never got to do.

>>376576505
Truly a dying genre.

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I think the biggest problem is that modern mmos treat their instanced content like their world content now; that is streamlined and straightforward.

Because instances have high group rewards they'll always be out meta'd, even if complex, by the internet nowadays. So making all the essential content pretty straightforward with some small variance in paths makes sense.

However in the open world where you're either questing or dicking around, there's also a complete lack of major outdoor dungeons due to the same reasons although it wouldn't apply. Taking WoW for example you don't see anything like Durnholde or Sunken Temple's pre-instanced area anymore. All questing areas are now brief scene pieces with little thought in navigation required, and outdoor labyrinths are basically non-existent when they could offer something for you to explore in their own free time, and any cool traversal methods specific to your class would just be icing on top.

>>376567947
Reminder that dungeonering is a mini-game and not a skill. A pretty damn fun minigame, but get stale after a while, since its the same thing over and over again.

>>376575991
Of course, if people didn't like that they wouldn't be playing the games anymore. Which is.... exactly what happened, actually. Sub numbers on WoW dropped to the point they don't even talk about it. Every successful MMO these days either makes money using F2P mechanics to get money out of whales, or survives on a strong story campaign like a single player RPG. The audience of people who don't would much rather have complicated dungeons hasn't disappeared, they don't play MMOs anymore because there's fucking nothing for them anymore.

>>376576397
Old MMOs were about world building. You had to talk to people to get anything done and then pass that knowledge on. These days you can get to max level without ever interacting with anybody and you can use wikis for any information you need.

>>376565796
>The egg boss in UBRS, and most of BRD is a good example of why OP's dungeon won't work
But those are both excellent and incredibly fun. BRD is essentially 5 dungeons in one thanks to all of the varied content and questlines involved which is awesome, and Razergore is a really chaotic and fun boss which first requires clever kiting strategies to defeat and later on can be handled more conventionally once your raid is more geared up.

>>376576604
instanced anything is stupid as fuck. I won't play any mmos with instanced shit.

>>376576134
What we need is a game that doesn't really care about being as popular as possible, just being popular enough to sustain and enough money for the team to live well and produce new content, that focuses on maintaining the integrity of it's game and integrity of it's community.

An mmo made by mmo fans for mmo fans.

>>376564281
>Why are MMOs so boring now

Because raids and dungeons being the main form of content became a thing

>>376570329
That's Oldschool runescape raids, and theres still meta guides on it. Hell, you can fucking solo the damn things, granted the loot you get will be shit if you're shit at raids though.

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>>376576639
>still handing out this stale-ass meme
you know you need internet access to play an MMORPG, right, grandpa? gamefaqs was started in 1995.

>>376576717
MMOs are a business. There is no passion for it. If you wanted to create something truly special, then why not make a singleplayer RPG instead? Giving an interesting experience to MMORPG players is like pearls before the swines. They just want skinner boxes where they can make their bars bigger.

>>376564281
Money.

You cant expect people to grind grind grind grind that second dungeon over and over and over. They'll get bored and quit.

>>376576676
Instancing is 100% necessary to create challenging, balanced and accessible content. The alternative is shit that people can just zerg thoughtlessly, which is gated by respawn timers because it's all shared. I agree that MMOs put too much of their content in instances now, but it's not really hard to understand why they do it.

>>376576439
In everquest there were ways to skip key mechanics too. Like in planes of power you could skip nearly all of the content to just focus on the end game content if a guild that had already done it before let a few into their raid group to do the end game content and be flagged for the rest.

My guild refused to do that shit, it was pretty cool that were one of only a few guilds on the entire server that had legit done the entire chain on their own while everyone else skipped it.

>>376576717
"low budget title designed to stick around for years with a constant, but smaller community" is an underrated business model.

>>376576717
It would be impossible to maintain the perfect balance between player volume and sustainability. It would even require you to deliberately make the game worse to chase off players if it started getting too popular to sustain.

>>376576949
I think it's entirely possibly to do, it's just not easy.

>>376576717
There are already MMOs like this, they are not popular for a reason and you're in the crowd that doesn't like those games.

>>376564281
FFXIV does the top version of dungeons the right way though.

>>376577154
What, eve? Eve fits it's niche market, it's just not a niche i'm interested in.
What else is there, secret world? Korean grinding mmo?

>>376564281
>Locking you out of content unless you bring a specific class
>This much shoehorning classes into roles
>The god-awful design

I hope you never ever design a game. Why not throw PvP from enemy factions while at it faggot?

>>376577254
Yeah, you've got your Kmmos, secret world, Haven and Hearth too for your survival thing.

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>>376574581
way ahead of u

>>376577301
None of the content is locked out by classes or roles. Certain classes can make clearing or traversing parts of the dungeon easier or faster, but never allows exclusive access.

I'd ask you to kill yourself, but then the title of "Most grotesquely disgusting retard alive" would have to pass on to someone else.

>>376570498
DDO

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>>376564281
fixed that for you OP

>>376577457
You literally included a part of the map that can't be accessed without a mage.

>>376576858
Nigger we had a thing called MUDs back in the day

>>376577614
whoa shit gotta make sure we bring a mage for that exclusive hallway with nothing in it!

>>376577614
Which does nothing but allow passage to another part of the dungeon that can still be accessed normally.

>>376577527
I can't imagine how sad it must be to be this much of a bitter, miserable faggot.

>>376564281
complex dungeons are stupid in a multiplayer setting coz people just skip everything to get to the end boss

>>376577437
The ui resembles runescape's so much it's scary.

>>376577693
>five main bosses instead of a single end boss
How would modern MMO players even cope with such a labyrinth?

>>376577693
So make it so there is no end boss. All the bosses are equal and have their own loot tables.

I swear it's like trying to teach calculus to a fucking ant on this board. No one can think, just open their mouths and let the constant stream of diarrhea pour over their keyboard.

>>376577527
nigger the mage pathway is literally just a shortcut

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>>376577687
im not saying anything that isnt true

im not being bitter about it either, you're just some fucking queer who thinks mmo games involve a group of friends who spend the day together and have amazing adventures while roleplaying, yelling "BAZINGA" to each other at their 4 STR/ 4 STAM leather belt they found

no
they are not that
they have NEVER been that

>>376577808
Rs3 shitters get off of my board REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

>>376577826
>So make it so there is no end boss. All the bosses are equal and have their own loot tables.
they'd just skip to the boss they need, retard

>>376577687
He's right, you know. This is exactly what would happen. The only way this sort of design will ever work is if we somehow destroy MMO wiki culture and restrict communication.

If it was this easy to make a good MMO dungeon it would've already been done. This design isn't the "silver bullet" of dungeon design or even particularly good.

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>>376577826
>>376577687
>>376577457
>being this much of a baby back bitch because nobody wanted, or never will want, to do this imaginary dungeon

>>376577850
Technically speaking, the "shortcut" passage is notable slower if you're doing a full-clear.
It's considerably faster to start at back entrance, clear boss 2, clear the one up right of it, back out and clear random trash room at lower center, onto 7, clear 6 boss, onto 4 boss, then onto boss at top, presuming there's no natural gating off specific areas with barriers requiring a specific boss kill.

That's a pretty shit design, mmo's have to be tunneled because you can't do much unless everyone is focused on one goal. If the combat/balancing were more like diablo/dark souls a guided procgen would work really well and make mmos more exciting

>>376577923
>MMOs have always been shit
>Therefore they should continue to be shit forever

great argument, dude.

>>376577951
>he doesn't play RS3 AND OSRS
Pleb

>>376577618
nigga if you think 15 people on a DIKU codebase is 'massive' you have no frame of reference to speak of

>>376564281
ogreloads of players want action and be rewarded over it even if they do nothing, they don't want RPG elements or explore anymore (except for a small percentage)

>>376577810
>>376578046
The year is 2013
The game is World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria
The dungeon is the Shado Pan temple

Tanks would queue up for the instance, fight the first boss, if the boss did not drop a tanking belt the tank would just fucking leave. The group would then queue up for another, after 20 minutes another tank would backfill, notice the boss was defeated, and fuck off as well.
the end
that's the story
fuck you for thinking that shit wont happen in ANY game

>>376578046
>five person party
>the healer needs boss A
>the tank and one DPS needs boss B
>one DPS needs A B and also C
>the last DPS speaks russian and you can't tell

And boom interesting and unique dungeon run, with some content left over so when run invariably run it again you see something new.

>>376564281
First and foremost MMORPGs need to stop having that dog shit tab-targeting combat.

>>376578104
Fuck off reddit

>>376578257
that's literally what i just fuckin said fucktard

>>376578257
>queue into dungeon with randoms
>get surprised when they behave like dicks and leave after they got what they need

>>376578273
see
>>376578257

>>376578257
The year is 2004
The game is World of Warcraft
The dungeon is Blackrock Depths

Hand of Justice is the tightest shit and all three warriors (plus one hunter that just showed up) in your group want it. Want to do a boss that isn't emperor? That'll be a no on most attempts

And it was still fucking awesome eat shit

>>376577527
1. The only reason to use that particular entrance is for the friendly NPC quest so it's more likely people will start at the NE corner. Gear requirements and achievements can fuck off too.

2. It means you have to avoid pulling adds, and as the original pic says the boss can have mechanics which make the fight harder or easier depending on where it takes place.

3. Group clearly isn't forced to have a mage, any more than they're forced to have a rogue.

4. Worked fine for the optional boss in Scholomance. Most people won't bother with it unless someone happens to have the mat needed to summon it.

5. Implying this dungeon is easier than an equivalent one? You're just making assumptions at this point.

6. More ways to tackle a dungeon? Fine by me.

7. Sounds like you just play with shitty people. Make some friends and you won't have that problem.

>>376578187
>15 people
Hey man, fuck you, there were plenty of people playing them in the late 80s and 90s. Sure, it never really got into the thousands, but it definitely wasn't 15.

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thing gets popular
thing gets more funding pumped into it
thing becomes too big and expensive to take any chances
thing becomes middle of the road generic garbage that every idiot can play

popularity is cancer to creativity.


>>376577437

what do you think of that place? as far as i can tell it doesn't have the much unique items which are worth millions on the main land, like the old starter zone. but hey they give you a yamaha...

>>376564806
>t. someone who has never played vanilla
maybe play some good mmos?

>>376578162
OP's idea solves nothing either. We've already had these kind of dungeons before. LBRS, UBRS, Scholomance - maze-like dungeons with shortcuts, summonable bosses and rewards lying around.
Guess what, they've got thoroughly analyzed and made into linear grinds for specific loot or quest items.
Perhaps you might be thinking "let's just make the loot random then", but that would solve nothing either - people would just choose the most effective time-to-loot path.

>>376566597
forgetting scholomance my fav dungeon

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>>376577687
If it adds fuck all why bother with it? Already there's an imbalance between classes since certain ones are much more vital for a smooth experience than other ones. The mage isn't nearly as useful as the paladin.


>>376578162
What kind of argument do you need? You basically made a shitty version of a bunch of faggots going after the Simulacrum in Imperial City Sewers in ESO, including
>exclusive materials
>roaming bosses
>enemies spawning at random locations that you want to hunt down because they're rare and have shit you need
>places only accessible with certain classes
>several entrances, pathways and exists
>chest traps and environmental hazards
Only thing missing from your shitty chart is enemy factions invading your little adventure and fucking you up and stealing your loot.

There's a reason why few people bother with it.

>>376578604
"easy" content is looting a chest as opposed to doing group content

a lootable chest should NEVER contain anything of value in an MMO, otherwise it will simply be camped or farmed by literally thousands of chinese bots and players

Vanilla Destiny had one cave where monsters spawned faster than others, with the chance of getting good loot.
That was it. Entire server clusters of people just firing into the cave for HOURS to invalidate the rest of the game.
If a treasure chest has anything in it then you have effectively fucked up your own game, so you do NOT design encounters to loot chests.

>>376576858

>Gamefaqs

Mah nigga. Still have my account I started there in 2002. Can't believe it's still going.

>>376578874
All the class-specific stuff is shortcuts, you dumbfuck.
Look at the map.
I'm not even defending it or anything, but that's just blatantly wrong.

>>376564281
DDO has dungeons just like this OP too bad is crazy dead and p2w now.

>>376573757
servers dont need more money to stay online, the extra costs are solely to line the pockets of the devs with pure profit.

in fact its cheaper now to keep a server online than it was 20 years ago.

>>376578883
Oh. Yeah sure I can agree with that much. There should be a boss or something along those lines that needs to be defeated first in that room.

>>376578883
That's why you surround the chest with dragons at the bottom of the hardest dungeon and players drop everything they're carrying on death.

>>376575325
Similar thing in FFXI with a boss called 'Absolute Virtue', the first people to kill it did so via an exploit, and he literally dropped nothing lol. He was killed a few times through exploits over the years, but he was never killed as the devs originally intended. It's been said the devs admitted at the fan festival that even they hadn't beaten him back during his initial release.

Another fun one was 'Pandemonium Warden', which also got news attention for several groups spending over 18 hours fighting it together during its initial form. But before that epic battle, some people tried to spawn it and were met with a random debug NPC because the devs hadn't coded him in yet and didn't think people would get his pop items so fast.

>>376564281
Problem is people don´t fucking care about exploring or having fun. They unlock a new dungeon and the first thing they do is look it up on youtube to find out the right paths and boss gimmicks. What´s worse is that those people shit on or kick players who don´t look shit up because they can´t be max efficient in completing a dungeon. MMOs are fucking shit mostly because of the players and devs know this so they don´t bother trying.

The problem is that playing MMOs takes thousands of hours. When the greatest barrier to someone "beating" a game is the time investment, people naturally gravitate towards the most efficient possible strategy, and with a sufficiently developed community the most efficient possible strategies become common knowledge instantly.

Nobody except speedrunners gives a shit about playing Baldur's Gate or Zelda efficiently, because a playthrough of most singleplayer games takes 100 hours at absolute max. But taking a character from level one to the level cap with the best possible gear is a matter of thousands of hours in some games and a never-ending treadmill in others. When so much time is at stake people start focusing on how to get things done as fast as possible, not to mention that the whole mystique and immersion of the experience evaporates within the first few hundred hours.

I'm not saying MMOs should be shorter, I'm just saying as long as they take so much time people are going to play them like robots.

every raid should be solo-able and you should get more rewards for doing so prove me wrong

>>376579543
Don't you think that the playerbase is like that BECAUSE of the developers? The only endgame content is dungeon raiding, so obviously everyone ignores everything that isn't about pumping up your gear numbers.

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>>376575981

Well, it's an RPG. Killing bosses for loot tends to be the sell we've used historically, because it works, players seem to like it, and it's what all the other game mechanics are currently based and balanced around.

If you've got ideas for what alternative avenues exist that meet the following requirements:

>Funner than NOT doing it
>Take similar or less time to implement than current dungeon stuff

(Don't forget: for mid-tier difficulty work, one minute of playable content is about 6 man-hours of work)

>Either is very replayable or has controllable longevity (loot drop rates are how we do this for monsters)
>Is resistant to wiki rot (i.e, "If someone has a wiki open, can they be smart and finish my 150 hours of work in 20 minutes?)

Then I am all ears, because I'd love to make it. I'd have to convince management all of the above stuff was true though, because your idea is competing with what we've become skilled at making and with giving players what they currently seem to want: More dungeons and loot.

>>376576557

The games are about tier progression, you're right, and that's why we don't want to throw out old tiers.

Do you know the real reason why games like WoW make new characters for their new expansions?

Besides the part where people will restart the entire game to play as them, which is great for experienced player satisfaction and retention, the other reason is because we're atoning for our sins.

New characters and classes provide a way to make our old content irrelevant, without throwing out the work we DID do when that work was still relevant. All the old dungeons we made we can still leave in, and for the boring parts, we can make initial areas more interesting, the quests more compelling, the fights more fun, and make things easier to reach all that end-game content which we now focus our time on.

>And historically, we do make it irrelevant. Maplestory nerfed leveling difficulty by like 1000x for basically the reasons you stated.

>>376580154
reeee you're killing mmos despite the fact people have soloed in mmos since the beginning

>>376580171
Why try to make something good when they know people are just going to look shit up and not even try, it´s a catch 22

>>376580284
solo'ed once they're over geared for them. mmo's are outdated they need to abandon the class system and make it so every single class can tank and heal itself

Blame the shitty inventory management and absolute lack of relevant resources in MMO's other than "Best Loot" and "Worse Loot than Best".

>Bosses have 11 Quadrillion HP and autokill anybody inside of their arbitrary red circles unless you are literally equipped with the most top-level gear aquirable
>You cannot acquire gear that is anywhere near worthy of fighting these bosses without just repeatedly grinding bosses or spending an obscene amount of money on AH
>Gear crafting is either non-existent, or becomes worthless past a very early point in the game to promote ebin raids
>Random items have literally zero value because gear is stronger and more important than anything, and your net-built stats completely erase any form of uniqueness anyways

The only games I've felt like gathering a lot of items in are Ragnarok Online (Tons of cards and the uses for them, lots of means of getting money, daily quests, components for a lot of other crafting or other class members who were specialized for crafting) or PSO2 (Massive influx of money and a nearly 100% open AH means that every tiny item helps, and extra FUN and room decor means that your player room can be spruced up a lot more easily before you even begin to decide to spend real money on it). WoW and other games like it just kill my desire to do anything other than raid bosses, which can get pretty stale pretty quick.

more designed as a treadmill to keep players paying monthly
the road up to endgame doesnt really matter to most players anymore, they care more about the mindless grind afterwards
any mmo that comes out cannot compete with WoW when it comes to endgame mindless grind, and WoW isnt adding content fast enough so even its playerbase is getting bored and dwindling

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>>376568031
Mortal Online

>>376564906
>3 random people

REMOVE DUNGEON FINDER.

>>376580205

how about you make it not tiered so your never cannibalize your own content and instead perpetually extend the experience, you talentless fucking hack? oh great you think studying big data and automation is useful on a personal, human experience level, at all.

end yourself

>>376580604
>mortal online
>good gameplay

i dont think so, tim.

free to play players are totally fucked compared to pay 2 play.

>>376580376
The only MMORPG that I put a lot of time into was guild wars, but in that one there was a ton of fun stuff to do that wasn't solvable by reading the wiki about it.

>>376573105
FFXI had both instanced and open world dungeons.

>>376580663
Eventually you run out of incentives for people to do new content. "Sidegrades" can only go so far.

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>MMOs
>2017

MMOs are shit because for the past decade competitive gaming has been on the rise. MMOs will never appeal to the younger crowd in the same way they did back in the day. So devs have given up. They will release the same dungeons, the same playstyle, all because those autisic chinese gold farmers will continue to play the game.

Ask yourself this: What person 16-25 is going to play an MMO over League of Legends, CS:GO, Starcraft, or fighting games? Who would pass up e-sports and hype to rp with idiots all day? I'll tell you- People who are 30+ who "can't get into competitive games", people with shit mechanics, and people who are in general, just casuals.
MMOs cannot evolve because the people who play them won't.


Wait for the first good VR MMO I guess, since that will at least be interesting.

>>376580948
lol and csgo are garbage, sc and fighting games are too hard to become good at

>>376578883
>almost every single treasure chest, along with crates, boxes, barrels, drawers and cupboards are empty except for the ones with loot you've earned or contain quest items
>most likely because some kleptomaniacal bastard had already taken all the good shit long before you stepped foot in the game
Runescape wins again

>>376580673
>Start Mortal online
>Begin leveling up gathering stuff because I like crafting/gathering
>Constantly get robbed by a thief and I can't do anything about it because he's 3 times faster than me and I didn't gimmick the system with pocket filled with water
>He stole all my money the first time
>earlier some guy who was mining next to me got killed and looted
Yeah, nah. Mortal sounds cool until you start as a new player. If someone wants to fuck you over you will be fucked.

>>376580948
Guild Wars was kind of an e-sports though, you just had a PvE mode to fuck around with when your guild-mates were offline.

>>376580205
Every item (or a majority) is crafted from crafting materials, and every boss in a dungeon drops the same crafting materials. People will gravitate towards the easiest one, but if the combat mechanics are tuned such that certain party compositions will do better with one while a different party will have less trouble with another then players will tackle all parts of a dungeon over multiple runs. Like if you have a group with two characters that can remove debuffs, a debuff-heavy boss will be a much easier target than one that just deals huge damage. Meanwhile a group with a solid tank and some defense spells will have a much easier time with the latter.

Positives
+multiple uses out of the same dungeon content
+Less linear overall
+everybody gets the loot they want in a reasonable amount of time
+any given dungeon run will be different based on party composition, difficult to write a wiki article for.
+people eat this shit up, just look at fusion mechanics in gacha games.
+crafting material drop rates and amounts can be easily tuned to ensure content lasts long enough

Drawbacks
-Dungeons and bosses have less "personality"
-Dungeon runs overall become shorter since in a single run most bosses get skipped
-heavily reliant on being balanced correctly, one boss being significantly easier than the rest destroys the whole concept
-class design needs to be flexible enough to allow for multiple group configurations

It's not perfect but it's different.
inb4 hate

>>376581151
this is one of the many reasons why 'open' pvp games are trash. all of them. every single one.

open unrestricted pvp brings out the absolute worst in people, and does nothing but ruin the experience for everyone. pvp should be consensual only, period, end of case.

>>376581451
while we are at it, fuck those games that have 'wars' between guilds. you know, those mechanics where one guild can 'declare war' on another guild and then the members of those two guilds can freely pvp on each other.

FUCK that mechanic.

its so fucking completely abusable and perma war decs are so goddamn annoying and do nothing but incentivize NOT EVEN BEING IN YOUR ACTUAL GUILD BECAUSE HURRR I WANNA GANK PPL AND BE A PUSSY LITTLE BITCH PERMADEC PEOPLE.

>>376581451
EVE/Runescape had the best pvp systems. Safe areas where players can learn the ropes and in Runescape's case where all the main content is, then the outskirt areas that have some rare resources.

currently playing BDO and it's the shit, literally everything you could need in an MMO, stay pleb

>>376581451
Seeing an entire boat load of max level alliance players arrive in front of me is one of the only cool memories I have of my short time playing world of warcraft. Open world PvP should be encouraged, not brushed aside. Conquering entire cities is fun.

>>376581451
>I can't handle losing my precious virtual items
Maybe multiplayer games are just not for you.

>>376570421
>Muh item level per hour
This is the cancer that killed the RPG part. Glorified mobile games.

There is no pros to play an mmo over a single player rpg anymore.

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>>376581451
>pvp should be consensual only, period, end of case.

Yeah, just like real life? It's about creating a virtual world and the more you limit it the more you are failing at doing so. In real life if somebody picks a fight you can't just hit 'ignore' so grow a pair you bitch

>>376582032
In real life you have something to lose when you pick a fight, even if you win you're likely to end up injured.

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>>376578703
>popularity is cancer to creativity.

>>376578703
it's alright i guess

the tutorial quests are alright the first time but holy shit they are annoying afterwards, but at least it doesn't run at fucking 15fps on everything like the old island did

tfw forgpt to get the yalm

>>376566064
Play single-player games or only play with close friends who have similar goals.

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>>376580663

>Make a game with years of tiering not tiered

We call this making a new MMO, anon, and that's not going to happen.

>perpetually extend the experience

We are doing this, anon. That big data and automation stuff informs us how our players actually experience the game and lets us save time NOT making the stuff you don't give a shit about and instead only making the stuff you (or at least somebody) does.

>>376580917

Content dilution is a real thing too. When you have a ton of side grades, because there tend to be limits on the extent you can play with core game mechanics.

>(especially in MMOs: if you're wondering why your MMO has uninteresting tank-dps-healer mechanics, its because real-time mechanics don't play nice with the latency you get with a world-wide game)

So that means there aren't actually all that many sidegrades we can do that are enjoyable before we start making things that feel same-y.

And you can either accept your same-y-ness and cop to it and just skip straight to building a fun loot treadmill, or pretend you're not being same-y and by the time you realize it you've made a hodgepodge of mechanics that no one likes or will care enough to learn.

We choose the former.

>>376580948

This is true as well. Right now, E-sports and mobile are eating the gaming world, and people in high places are having a hard think about whether we should just chuck it all, make everything free-to-play, and cram microtransactions up the wazoo.

I fear where our industry is going. Please spend money on games made both by indies and professionals that you want to see more of; the alternative is we all end up making more crass flappy bird clones

>>376581372

Firefall tried it and we watched it carefully to see how people felt.

They struggled with retention because people like the crapshoot of getting something good more than they like the idea that the game they're playing is fair or balanced. The idea is good, but not as effective for business metrics.

>>376568948
So WoW is for casuals and EVE is for insane people?

>>376566064
Go back in time and play Starwars Galaxies. Thats your best option.

>>376570342
>it was fun but could take hours upon hours if you wanted to do the whole thing
It also took hours upon hours to find a group for the part you needed.

>>376564806
>You think any big group iws gonna put up with that bullshit?
they would if the whole game was like that
of course if you add something like that in wow, the wow player base wouldnt be able to deal with it

>>376574931
You do dungeons because it's fun and interesting. The most fun and interesting parts are the fights.
If you have a corridor full of cool and interesting fights, that's better than some complex design dungeon filled with boring enemies.

This isn't D&D, your interactivity with the world is very limited in MMOS, so battles are much more important.

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>>376564281
When you are doing the dungeon for the 20th time the first one is better.

>>376582572
>When you have a ton of side grades, because there tend to be limits on the extent you can play with core game mechanics.
make them cosmetic or some consumable that makes your life much easier, but you will want to go back to get more eventually

>>376582572
>Firefall tried it and we watched it carefully to see how people felt.

Completely fair, and while I think firefall's retention problems are because of significantly more than just that it's hard to ignore it being a contributing factor. I still think it could be a good stand-in for optional bosses in a more traditional system. Spiral knights did a similar thing with some success by having the crafting recipes be effectively random drops after doing a pre-determined number of dungeon floors, but you've got better data than I do as to how that turned out.

>>376577687
You know we're on 4chan right? We're all bitter, miserable faggots.

And he's also right, that fun feeling of exploring a dungeon with your friends will be replaced by mindless grinding.

>>376577923
>tfw no girl will like you enough to put up with your autism

How about MMO with worldspace that factions that could be modified by the various play factions. The endgame would be trying to invade each other through the death trap dungeons that the factions designed/modified?

>>376566213
WoW did this, see "the arcway" 5 man dungeon in legion

it's stupid and punishes you by making you backtrack. great.

>>376565446
Proof that MMO players are retards
>so addicted to their skinnerbox that they will ruin an interesting idea to maximize their lever pulling efficiency

>>376584198
The basic issue is that you are designing levels that are going to be run many times. So while it might be interesting the first time when you explore, that ain't happening on run #15. So spending time working on the player's first run is kind of wasted

>>376568180
Jackie Chan

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>>376564281

If they were designed the second way, retarded players would complain.

You have to appeal to casuals to make money or your game dies, that's just the way it is.

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I'm working on a game right now that tries to replicate the dungeon experience from WoW release date 20never

The basic concepts are
>Dungeon is made of randomly generated levels (built from predefined room shapes that get attached to eachother)
>To move onto the next level, you need to defeat the final boss from the previous level.
>To access the final boss, you need to complete 3 events (may be puzzles, minibosses, or quests)
>Character progresses as you complete 3 primary events+final bosses, so you basically get 4 levels each floor, but really you only are numerically rewarded 1
>Floors get more complicated as you continue. Events may require you to beat other events (increasing the total number of events on the floor)
>As you progress in floors, the theme of the floor, the bosses, and the events available change
>Goal is to make it to level 10, but you can keep going, and the realistic ending is at level 20 (with everything above that following an algorithm for generation)

The way I want to encourage entertainment is a large selection of random content that can be used for generation.
On one floor, there may be a group of bandits who made a base, and you need to defeat a bunch of them to get their boss to come out who's a miniboss. You might need to steal artwork from around the dungeon and trade it to a thief. There may just be a straight miniboss encounter.
Enemy encounters can be determined by floor region, so some areas can be infested with different types of enemies.
Enemy levels are whatever floor they are on plus a letter (E,D,C,B,A,S,SS,SSS) so you can tell who is strong and who isn't.

The general theme I'm going for is "Minor questing" + "Impossible Bosses"

My plans for other things like classes also includes randomly generated talents from a pool of abilities, plus a defined talent tree for each class so that each run is unique.

Of course, I'm no where near that. As of right now, I'm building 3D rooms

>>376573807
I actually got the full Malown's set for my priest and was practically uncatchable in battlegrounds because of the unique buff. Had to explain how to trigger it to every single group I took in to Stratholme.

>>376564281
Not just MMOs but FPS and RPG games too. They are all either open world garbage or linear hall way garbage.

>>376565446
>They're only going to bring the right classes to get the free loot,

Except you can't do that when your game uses a random dungeon finder, which every MMO uses now.

>>376565825
The people who play MMOs now are not MMO players since the games are little more than glorified single player RPGs.