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Role Playing (Games)

MMOG Designers Throw Down Over Instancing 76

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

MMOG Designers Throw Down Over Instancing

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  • Brad is clueless. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01, 2005 @10:06AM (#14156261)
    Brad needs to wake up and smell reality. There are many people who love instancing. Having played in an EQ raid guild it was a job, on the contrast WoW raiding is awesome, you no longer have to mold your life around a game. EQ was a PvP game disguised as PvE, thanks to the "great vision" of Brad. His desire of players having competition and accomplishment is nothing more than who has more time to put into the game. His design ideas for V:SoH are nothing more than rehashed EQ design ideas that failed miserably. No instancing. Camping. Lot of travel. Yay! Tedium, boredom, retarded racing with another guild to kill raid mob X. Skills needed: pulse and lot of time!

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

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

    • Re:Brad is clueless. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Pxtl ( 151020 )
      I think this is a very good point - the instances are there because they're needed. Imho, the problem is that the "real world" + RPG as an MMO model is fundamentally flawed.

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

      At some point you have to admit that MMOs aren't really the "single massive world" they admit to be - they're a group of small
      • Yeah, one of the "hooks" of a game in a fantasy setting like WOW and most other RPG's is that it lets you play as a "hero". It's all about doing epic things. Real life is generally brief moments of excitement/adventure/stress/challenge seperated by longer periods of mundane activity, not the sort of thing you really want to spend $15 per month to recreate on your computer screen. So people who are playing are going to want to do all the good stuff, and if you make it too hard to do that, then people are goi
    • Did you even try to read his article?

      My god, it's the worst excuse for writing I've ever seen from an "industry visonary" (or whatever they call him) - it's a big series of disorganized lists with no real connection & half-assed prose spread between them.
    • I don't know what RAIDs you are referring to buy many are long and convoluted. Everyone has a job and I have seen people banned from RAIDS for making simple mistakes or not doing their job fast enough. All because sweatshop_farmer_9412 or should we say nolife_liveinbasement_9472 is just a jerk with no life but a penchant of blaming anyone else for problems? WOW is all milk and honey. Numerous RAIDS are out door affairs that are subject to intense griefing. Having a RAID over 10 people even in an instanc

  • Autogenerated content? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Vo0k ( 760020 ) on Thursday December 01, 2005 @10:20AM (#14156371) Journal
    Instances are plain unnatural. Two guys go through the same door, they both land in identical environments but they are separate from each other.
    What about approach that was present in some long-forgotten games like Elite 2: Frontier? Just pseudorandomly (randomizing with a fixed seed, so it looks random in space, but doesn't change in time) create a huge game universe, with some overriding "specials" locations/events, and vast "generic" terrains, specific to given area somehow, but without having each tree in the forest placed by hand or c&p'd from neighbouring square, but placed in somewhat random pattern.

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

    Effect: Development cost and time cut in half or more, gameplay area expanded almost indefinitely, possibly also vastly reducing the download/install size (Frontier would fit on a floppy, with billions of stars and advanced universe), because most of the world can be generated ("spawned") just from the fixed random seed and formula, instead of having to be read from database.
    • The vast majority of the galaxy was uninhabited, you couldn't even get to it without exploiting bugs in the game as there was nowhere to get your ship repaired. The original Elite was better, it had random galaxies, but they were fairly uninteresting other than a couple of missions that were hand-coded. Randomly generating an interesting, challenging world is really, really hard, and you would just find masses of players congregating around the scripted areas or the most interesting random bits.
      • "Randomly generating an interesting, challenging world is really, really hard"

        I agree. But instead of iteratively creating the world bit-by-bit, why not enter another spectrum and spend the same time and effort on tweaking the parameters of the random creation (or not so random, but macromanaged - say, you draw the world of the map, with one pixel relating to half a mile square of gameplay terrain, then generate the world with terrain made corresponding to the map). Then once the method of rapid creating th

        • The game would NOT be very ballanced, but still fun, and realistic. A newbie faces a randomly spawned enemy of some 60th level? Yay! Run for the city gates and yell for help! That completely generic cave a few paces from the capitol, thousands of players went through, but one bothered to pick up a rock and found a note with a hint for a hidden cave, not really far, but quite well hidden.

          I dunno about anybody else, but I play a game for fun, and to escape reality. Also, balance is very important, or mo

          • Can you have a almost completly random MMORPG, SWG kind of does.
            Once you leave the cities, and if there is no other player around to lock down the area things will change.
            For instance I once went far outside of town and left the game. When I left it was a plains. Log in hour later, an empiral stronhold. hour later plains and a few spawn points, later a small rebel camp, later mountains.
            That type of randomness is not good.
    • Wouldn't a much more appropriate example be Nethack/Angband/etc where you're actually generating dungeons?
      • Similar idea, but not such HUGE world. I mean, what, 99 levels? :)
        (plus they get randomly generated everytime you enter. Same reason I didn't list Diablo. The idea is that the world, though generated, remains pretty much fixed thorough the time.)

    • Unnatural? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by madeye the younger ( 318275 )
      Did you ever see a movie or read a good book where at key points in the plotline anywhere from 5 to 500 OTHER main characters show up, are standing in line, or just exit the conflict the character you were identifying with was headed to? *Thats* unnatural. There's an astoundingly obvious, and good reason why stories don't progress that way. If you want to play one of the random ants in a swarm, be my guest.

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

        That's why the world needs to be big enough. And "respawns" rare enough. So that a team of 5-10 main c
    • Instances are plain unnatural.
      As opposed to the lack of collision detection, the very concept of hitpoints, respawning, and that every quest giver gives the same quest to thousands of people?

      "We congratulate J. Random Playah for bringing Van Cleef's Head no. 1,000,000!" quests are very unnatural.

      MMORPGs and "unnatural" fit like hand in glove. Instances reduce spawn competition and hence helps the game aspect greatly.
  • 2004 eh? Those comments have a long time coming. Jeez, and I thought waiting for WoW 1.9 was taking too long.

  • I like instancing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rAiNsT0rm ( 877553 ) on Thursday December 01, 2005 @10:37AM (#14156498) Homepage
    I actually prefer instanced quests and common towns... however I think a blend of the two is actually the sweet spot.

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

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

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

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

    I also believe player created villages and towns would also draw peopl ein and lend a sense of ownership. Then when a warring faction comes and raids your village and you have to rebuild... you now have a real sense of hatred and loyalty.
    • Have towns and areas around the town as common areas and then quests be instanced. To me this is something that no one has tried yet and could be the real answer.

      Sounds like City Of Heroes [cityofheroes.com] to me.
      • I'll have to claim ignorance here as I've never played COH. I tend to play only fantasy based MMO's.

        Would you mind explaining how this works in COH? Are towns and surrounding area common while quests are instanced?

        Thanks, and if I'm worng here I will fully admit it. I have yet to find a fantasy MMO that does this.
        • In CoH everyone lives in one BIG city (hence CITY of Heroes) of which there are about 15-20 neghborhoods, each neighborhood being a square that is about 5-10 minutes walk wide. Each neighborhood is common, and there are "monsters" in the streets you can fight. Major quests however are all instanced. When a NPC assigns you a quest, they'll typically say something along the lines of "Go to this building in this neighborhood." When you click on that building's door to enter you (and your party) are put ins
          • Yep. Crystal Clear, and exactly what I had been dreaming of in a fantasy MMO. Like all good ideas, someone beat me to it apparently :) Story of my life, day late, dollar short.

            It sounds like you may be a COH player, and if so, may I ask how well this works in practice? It seems like the perfect blend of gameplay for an MMO.

            In games like Guild Wars where everything is instanced, you are left with a empty feeling. In WoW it feels too crowded at times and is frustrating (just MHO). This system seems like a per
            • It sounds like you may be a COH player, and if so, may I ask how well this works in practice? It seems like the perfect blend of gameplay for an MMO.

              It works pretty well. Generally you never have to 'street hunt' to reach your next level; instanced quests are readily available and can be soloed or teamed. Nice thing is that the number of enemies and their strength balances against the size of your team, so you're rarely over or under whelmed once you go into that instance, even solo.

              The disadvantage is that
            • I tend to be a pretty nomadic gamer, so I don't play anymore, but while I was playing I really couldn't complain. Only thing that was annoying was people can grief you with "monsters" (only happened to me a few times). Basically "monsters" inside neighborhoods hang out in groups of 10-20, and if you attack one of them (or if you're lower level than them, just walk too close to them) they all go after you. Some people do this than lure the group to a lower level section of a neighborhood and the groups wi
          • When you click on that building's door to enter you (and your party) are put inside an instance of that building, so even if someone else is on the same quest where you have to (for instance) go kill a gang leader, everybody gets their own shot to kill the gang leader without having to worry about kill stealing or lines. When your quest is over, you can teleport out of the instance (back to the entrance) and you're back in common ground.

            How is that any different from WoW's instancing?
            • How is that any different from WoW's instancing?

              Don't know. I've never played WoW.
            • In CoH, 1 instance = 1 mission, so you don't stand around in the door deciding which missions to do. Most instances scale with the party, so you can go solo or with a group and get a similar level of challenge either way. You can also raise your difficulty level in the game, if you want greater challenges and rewards, and the instances will scale accordingly.
      • Actually, that sounds more like Guild Wars [guildwars.com] to me. You can join a party/get quests/buy things in a city, but you will never encounter another character who is not in your party outside of any city or town.
    • "Instead of standing around saying "WTB - Uber Dragonslayer sword of insight" I could go and post a quest saying "1,000g to the first adventurer to bring me an Uber Dragonslayer sword of insight" and let bored/enterprising adventurers fulfill my request."

      Don't most MMOGs have forum marketplaces for this exact thing? You post what you want and the price you'll pay, and you can either monitor the forums, or give your userID for people to whisper you in game.

      Sure, it's not an official quest, but it amoun
      • Guild Wars doesn't, and`there are a number of other titles that dont.
        • There is no way in Guild Wars to post static content that is viewable by other players? Odd.

          Is there a guild directory, where someone could post a guild website with such requests on it?

          Another thought is that people who develop a network of 'friends' in-game, or belong to a guild, have a method of letting people know that they've got something for sale or want to buy something.

          I get whispers several times a day asking if I'm buying or selling X; if it's someone I don't know, I drop the Ignore-hammer
          • Nope, Guild Wars has no mechanism in place at all. For a modern product, it is pretty unbelievable. All you have is the ability to go to a crowded district and yell "WTS - Sword of Uberness" over and over while it gets lost in the 1,000 other people doing the same.

            Then once you get a reply, you have to actually give some clue as to where you are or they can't even find you to come buy your sword of uberness. it is about a silly and cumbersome a system as I have ever seen. I don't play anymore, even with it
    • "Have towns and areas around the town as common areas and then quests be instanced. To me this is something that no one has tried yet and could be the real answer."

      Phantasy Star Online.
  • ...I'm actually a server programmer at Mythic. Our Internet Relations Manager is Sanya Thomas, and if she finds out Slashdot gave me her job she might hit me. Please don't make her hit me. It hurts.
  • It is hard to find anything bad to say about instancing. It addresses two paramount issues in MMOGs. The first being the initial over-population all major MMOGs experience at launch, which guarantees that no matter how much content a game has, there will always be more than one group of players working on the same quest or camp.

    The second is the eventual crunch that happens as the casual player base evaporates and moves onto other games. With server populations dwindling, and the bulk of active characters o
  • It's kind of sad to see instancing take over. To me it feels like the popularity of MMORPGs has climbed such that the players are almost all terrible now. Hardly any of them want to roleplay. What I used to call competition they call griefing. PvP is rarely allowed or otherwise it is utterly nerfed (eg. you don't lose lots of levels and equipment when you die). Some people spend all their time levling as if it actually mattered. Oo

    Why are these people playing MMO if they just want instances? Go play a

  • Brad's Vision (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dr00g911 ( 531736 ) on Thursday December 01, 2005 @01:23PM (#14158225)
    I'm half tempted to start a testy little essay of my own about how the games Brad's designed represent the flaws that all others in the market have been striving to overcome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I mean, seriously, if I have to fight to keep a spot killing a single skeleton in the northeast corner in the third room of the Dungeon of Doom over and over and over again, sitting on my ass for 5 minutes between each spawn, it's not exactly epic, immersive or story-driven, is it?
    • First off, I am a EQ player and part of a high end raiding guild (Anguish+ leve). Contrary to popular belief, being part of the high end game does not take away your life. Instancing changed this since now you know you can log in at a set time, have a set raid, and know it will go for a given amount of time.

      I constantly hear from EQ players who are going to move to V:SoH when it comes out. Many of these are players who have played EQ since it's early days. In response to them, I remind them of what the
    • as opposed to the *game* that is WoW
      Not knowing the names in the industry (and not having read the article) I thought you were describing WoW prior to the statement I quoted above. You mean there are MMOGs that focus more on 24/7 gameplay and raid grinding for equipment?
      • As a person who's played EQ1 (and the first 3 expansions for it), DAoC, SWG and a few other obscure MMO's, I can say in all honesty that World of Warcraft is as close to a "casual gaming" experience as I've seen.

        First off, the 24/7 gameplay (PvP or loot farming I assume you're talking about) and raid griding are endgame passtimes. I mean, you could (in theory) kill 500 spawns of the exact same Murloc camp to get from levels 20-30, but WoW gives you a much more enjoyable progression through the levels. I hat
  • should try FFXI. It's horrible to try and get good loot. At least it was when I left it to play WOW. You can tell where the mobs with the good drops spawn, because of the 20 or so people around it all the time. I mean 24/7/365. Even mobs that spawned as rarely as once every 24 hours or so... It was really getting to be irritating. So I'm glad WOW came along. It's much more fun to at least get a chance for an uber item, even if it drops .01% of the time.

  • Wake Me Up (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by Shihar ( 153932 )
    Someone wake me up when someone builds a MMO(ha ha)RPG that doesn't involve camping, hunting, dungeons or anything of that matter. Would I jump at the chance to join a game where I can play a member of a mercenary company, train up by sparring within the company, then go out on missions that have meaning? Hell yes. Would I love to play a game where you can join the kingdom's army and go on military campaigns? You betcha. Can I even begin to stomach the thought of another game where I play generic fanta
    • Damn right. I'm sick of all these happy, flowerly, fun-land MMORPGS where everyone wins and everyone gets to live. I'd rather play MUDs where NO-ONE GETS TO LIVE!

      Here's are a few MMORPG facts:

      1. Unrestricting PKing is the only way. Sink or swim, survival of bad-assest. If some group of high levels come and kill your level 1 craftsman: TOUGH. You weren't bad enough to survive. And who the hell plays a craftsman anyway? The only available classes are: warrior, assassin, mage and bad-ass.

      2. There's no such thi

      • Re:Wake Me Up (Score:1, Flamebait)

        by Shihar ( 153932 )
        I am more then a little confused about how got "make a MUD where everyone dies" from stating that killing NPCs for l00t is boring. I think your problem is that MMORPGs have rotted your mind to the point where you are convinced that there exists only three types of online games; games where you do nothing put PK, and games where you do nothing but kill NPCs, and games where you get to do some of both.

        I don't want any of the above. I just want a game with meaning. Yes, MMORPGs have proven that they pwn3 at
        • unfortunately any game where you do something that has meaning, implies that it's a choice other ppl can make and yur either on the win side or the lose side. There is no dynamic push/pull when one side has to feel like they can win or it becomes pointless farming. I would love to hear about any other kind of repeatable experience other than PvE, or PvP, or Merchant vs Economy (which is really Player Time v Player Time with attrition), and how you would possibly implement this mystical 4th kind that doesnt

          • Re:Wake Me Up (Score:1, Flamebait)

            by Shihar ( 153932 )
            The capacity for interesting and dynamic content DOES exist. Some MUDs have already done this. It is just going to take an MMORPG maker some guts to break the mold. They are going to have to build an MMORPG that likely will hold little appeal to their traditional target market (spread sheet addicts). Sure, such a move would be risky, but as more then one MMORPG is learning right now, the market for addicts is limited.

            If you want to see what I am talking about done in practice, try www.armageddon.org It
            • The key phrase is "Some MUDs have already done this." Of course some (small) MU*'s can do dynamic content. You can characterize Armegeddon as a traditional RPG MUD with heavy GM interaction...which is only possible in a world where (text) content is easy to create. While Armegeddon has some interesting implementations of basic game mechanics, there doesn't seem to be anything special about it from a game design standpoint. There's nothing original about their model, a model which is well-known. It's not lik
  • Better news:

    In 2004 Slashdot featured an article that wouldn't be written for another year. They hail this as the end of dupes, as by the time the dupe comes out, the real article will be a year old!

    I, for one, welcome our time-traveling new overlords.

  • Instancing the whole world, as Guild Wars does, makes the world (outside cities) seem empty and basically one is playing a single player game with perhaps some friends. However, with no instancing, such as in Everquest (before Lost Dungeons and others) there are serious problems. Players compete for rare "camps" where the good mobs spawn and can negatively interact with others: people who could take down a dragon simply cannot because that dragon is not "up" - and in reality prime targets had waiting list
    • that wont work, for 2 main reasons.

      1. people will no longer have any competition for the unique items. thus the unique item will be more attainable, making that unique item less valuable.

      2. more unique monsters will obviously have to exist, 1 unique monster per each instance, increases the number of unique item drops from that monster. The rarity of that item is then increased linearly with whoever seeks that item.

      To remedy #2, the chance of drop could be lowered, but that would just frustrate gamers more
      • " that wont work, for 2 main reasons...1. people will no longer have any competition for the unique items. thus the unique item will be more attainable, making that unique item less valuable."

        Your reason #2 just repeats #1, that it makes the item less unique.

        What I would say is that it allows big raids to all "do" a certain raid mob at any time they like. They can all be raiding the Orc King at 9pm EST if that is when they are all online. There can be 30 copies of the Orc King at once, but none at 3AM EST
  • I'm not really aware of any game that can claim this as a wedge against the Content Demon.
    I am. EvE-Online is such a game. The goal in the game is not to gain EXP rather it all about the isk (money). And they best way to get it is control of 0.0 (lawless) space. The problem? Well you need to fight for it defend it and get people to come work in it in order for it to all work. This makes the game as dynamic as the people that play it.
  • Most of the comments on this thread agree that they are for some instancing and some non-instanced content. If people would bother to read the Vanguard boards, they would quickly realize that some of the content is in fact going to be instanced.
  • One thing that people seem to forget in the discussion concerning immersion (after all, immersion is the real problem with instancing, no?) is the player being immersed. I am a casual WoW player, and a long time pencil-and-paper roleplayer. I agree with those who say that pencil-and-paper roleplaying is more immersive than MMORPGs, but that has a lot to do with players wanting to become immersed and making an effort to become immersed. I got to the point of being really tired of WoW after realising the hu

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