The Fatal Flaw of Public Quests
In most of the opinions about Warhammer Online I’ve seen so far, people have commented about how amazing Public Quests (PQs) are. They talk about how every traditional MMO from here on needs them because they are so ridiculously fun in WAR. What I haven’t seen mentioned is how incredibly unfun they are going to be shortly after release.
I know what you’re thinking. “WAAAGHT?!”
First, for those who don’t know what a public quest is, this is how they are described in the beta manual:
Public quests are quests that everyone in the area can participate in at the same time. For instance, in the first public quest for Chaos, “Ruinous Powersâ€, the Sorcerers of Tzeentch are performing a dark ritual to summon a great beast of change. To finish the quest, players need to kill 25 meddling Thorshafn Militiamen. Each Militiaman that is killed advances the counter. Your reward when the quest is completed is based on how many of the 25 Thorshafn Militiamen were killed by you.
Many of the public quests are done in stages. For instance, in “Ruinous Powersâ€, once you have killed the 25 Thorshafn Militiamen, players will need to harvest souls from tombstones to bolster the power of the dark ritual. When you’ve harvested the correct amount of souls, a demon of dark power emerges, and you must prove the Raven Host’s supremacy over all other ruinous powers by defeating the denizen of rage.
When you enter an area where a public quest is underway, a message is displayed in the center of your screen. Progress of public quests is displayed in the top right of the UI.
PQs are great. They are fun. They add an additional element of fun to dynamic events, and they reward you pretty well for participating in them. They also foster social gameplay much better than most systems I’ve encountered.
I know what you’re thinking now, too. “Then what’s their fatal flaw? How could they be incredibly unfun shortly after release?! Greenskins rule! WAAAGH!”
Two words: Critical Mass. In order to complete every public quest I encountered in the WAR Preview Weekend, you needed at least 6+ people (usually seemed to need more) to defeat the Hero at the end. I know, it makes sense, right? Public quest implies you need several people. That doesn’t make it right, though.
There are 7 public quests (that I know of) in the first Chaos zone alone. That means you’d need 42 to 70 people in that zone working on public quests to do them all at once. I even ran into one completely empty PQ over the weekend even though almost every Chaos player was in that zone.
Will there ever be that many people working on PQs in the same low level zone after the first week or two after launch? Probably not.
I suspected that they would dynamically scale public quests based on the number of players currently participating. When I found a PQ that nobody else was doing, I worked my butt off and completed the first stage alone. Then Champion mobs spawned in stage 2, and I was screwed. So, it looks like they aren’t doing any sort of scaling.
Unfortunately, even though public quests are extremely fun, I fear they won’t even be doable throughout the majority of the game for those of us who will get behind the curve. As soon as I fall behind the pack, which inevitably I will, I’ll be unable to do any PQs until the end game. And that sucks, because they’re enjoyable.
Fortunately for Mythic, there are several potential solutions that they can implement to ensure this doesn’t happen. I don’t expect them to do anything to alleviate the issue before launch, but I do think they’ll address it shortly thereafter to ensure that one of their big features gets utilized and, more importantly, as many players as possible can have fun doing them.
Oldfashioned LFG + newschool Open Groups = No problems!
Also, with enough skill and determination, a tank+healer+random 3man setup should be able to handle most PQ encounters all the way. It may be a lot harder, but it ain’t impossible.
No worries! You will always find people to do a PQ, since it’s only small time commitment (like 10-15 min with a minimum group) and it is, as you say, insane fun.
Don’t worry, be happy!
I agree this could be an issue later on when fewer new players are starting up. Scaling could solve the issue, or perhaps some code that could detect how many players are doing the quest and spawn NPCs to aid them if there are too few?
I hope they make some effort in making PQs accessible at all times, it would be a shame for players to miss out on them.
The big argument against this is the fact that players will level out of each Tier. From what I’ve experienced, I’ll probably be heading back to Tier One again and again. And even if players don’t want to participate in the PQ you don’t need them to grind the rewards. Each mob in a PQ zone in the first section is worth 100RP, so it’s easy to earn the gear even if you never reach the end of a single PQ.
They’ll work out that balance as things go on, and your point is valid, but I don’t think it’s as big of a problem as you state.
I made the same point in my preview weekend impressions too, as I see it public quests will be the new lvl30-60 dungeon content ala WoW, where after the initial first year or so and the masses of players outlevel the lowbie areas and avance to the higher content you won’t have enough people interested in or doing the public quests. I suggested scaling as well, it would fix the problem without too much work on their end.
This occured to me at the late 3-4am PST hours as I tried out other races and would be the only one at various PQ’s, I could solo the first couple stages, but would always die to the end boss. So it is possible to grind some rewards from them solo, but not worthwhile as other activities would net you more.
It’s interesting that WoW’s elite quests and leveling dungeons were criticized for the exact same reason: Getting a group will be hard, because there simply aren’t enough interested players in the appropiate level range. Blizzard’s response was to make areas populated with elite monsters (like Stromgarde or Jintha’alor) soloable. But that sparked criticism that the game didn’t teach people how to work in groups. It’ll be interesting to see whether Mythic manages to avoid these pitfalls and if they do, how.
I suspect Bowman is close to the truth. I think there are enough elements in the overall game design encouraging “alt-aholism” that there should be no shortage of new characters moving through the early tiers. Add to that the fact that PQ’s are tailor-made for leveling and equipping new alts…
Should they have a fall-back mechanism? Probably. But I don’t think they’ll really have to worry about that for many months. This is no Age of Conan.
Hmm but won’t new players constantly be cycling in and taking the place of those that move up and out? That is assuming the game keeps drawing in new players.
There will be new players, yes. But the growth will eventually slow down and after some time, the vast majority of players will be at the level cap and won’t concern themselves with “obsolete” (to them, at least) content. Thus the available pool of players is smaller and thus probability of having enough players for a public quest in a reasonable timeframe goes down. If the pool of players is small enough, those few players will reach the threshold where it’s more worthwhile to skip the public quest and keep soloing than to wait for the group to gather.
Public quests do avoid the problem of having 3-4 half-full groups each waiting for the final members, but if there isn’t enough players to even form one group, public quests won’t do any good. That’s why there’s been calls to scale content to the number of players all the way down to soloing, so you aren’t “locked out” of public quests at any time. Another way would be to equalize levels and make rewards propotional. The low-level player gets something appropiate to his level and the high-level player gets something that’s not worthless compared to the stuff he could get from high-level quests. I understand that the City of Heroes/Villains does the level-scaling with the sidekick system. That would eliminate the need for scaling down public quests to soloable quests, because the pool of interested players would always be large enough.
Most of the PQ’s I’ve run into are doable by a single solid group. 2 groups would be able to handle ‘em easily. With the open-grouping, the fact that PQ’s are the best way to level and equip an alt, and the plain fact that WAR’s design practically screams “Alt-holics Welcome Here!”… well, I don’t foresee the issue arising anytime soon.
This isn’t AoC.
CoH/CoV has two types of level-scaling, one is the sidekick/exemplar system where a character can either be scaled up or scaled down in level in relation to another character. Another system is the Giant Monster/Rikti Invasion system where mobs have a level that is relative to each individual character. E.g. if a character is level 10 a mob might appear as level 12 effectively and for a level 30 the very same mob would appear as level 32 effectively.
It feels strange that any level-based MMO today would not include any level-scaling option. I have not followed Warhammer Onlione though, so I do not know if they have anything in that area or not.
Yes, there will theoretically always be new players (and existing players who reroll) cycling into newbie areas as well as below-max areas. Remember, though, that there are 6 armies. You would need 252 to 420 people using my guesstimates from the original post below level 10 to be doing all the PQs at the same time. That’s 252 to 420 people between 1 and 10 who are online and want to do the public quests at the time.
That will be rare even at launch when everyone is in Tier 1. And, come to think of it, that first Chaos zone isn’t really even up to 10, since there is a higher level Tier 1 zone just after it as well, so you’d need even more.
The main potential solutions that I hinted at in the end were already stated: Dynamic scaling of mob difficulty is one possible solution. I also like the concept of having a baseline of friendly NPCs that will contribute to the completion of a PQ, and the more players there are in the PQ area, the fewer of the friendly NPCs are around. So, you could technically complete it with one player even against a Hero NPC, but that one player would have a lot of help from NPCs.
We’ll see what they do, if anything. I imagine if they do nothing, people will try to form PQ groups and go hit each one in succession. That might work, I just not to think it will and would prefer that they built in another solution.
As for level-scaling systems: City of Heroes originally only had the sidekicking system. This system allows players to scale up to the same more-or-less effective level as their higher level friend.
This is where my original idea for the EverQuest II Mentoring system came from. EQII Mentoring is the exact opposite, in that it scales a high level player down to the effective level of their lower level friend.
I proposed that solution because I really don’t like players scaling up for PvE purposes. They will be experiencing content that they should be experiencing later in their careers, which both diminishes the cool factor of that content when they legitimately reach that level and makes it unlikely that they can even accept or complete quests for that area. They also won’t be getting rewarded with items and gear that they can use, most likely.
Scaling a higher level player down makes a lot more sense to me logically and for gameplay purposes. The higher level character is the Mentor, the lower level character is the Apprentice. The higher level character can logically teach a thing or two to the lower level character. The lower level player will be rewarded with usable loot from mob kills, they will be able to do quests at that level, etc.
It works fairly well in City of Heroes in part because, let’s face it, their max level areas are about the same as their newbie areas, all the engaging content is instanced, their loot system is completely different than a traditional MMO, and on and on. I still don’t like it that much, and I’m glad they added the exemplar system after EQII added mentoring (which I take credit for the idea for, but not the implementation).
Oh, and the reason I qualified my statement about disliking scaling someone’s level up with “PvE,” it’s because I like it in certain PvP situations. It’s something I’ve had in my bag-o-fix for quite a while in regard to World of Warcraft’s battlegrounds.
If I worked at Blizzard, I would have implemented level scaling in battlegrounds a year or two ago when I first thought of it (in a level 20-29 BG, only level 20-29 players can enter. All get scaled up to effective level 29, though with gear and more spell selection, the 29 will still be a bit better). This is one of the things that made me write my post about there being no original ideas, because I didn’t know WAR had that until I read their manual. Booo!
I certainly see your point but I don’t entirely agree with the numbers.
On the Order side I completed many of the public quests with a healer, a tank and a dps. Most seemed like it would be possible other than the ones marked “difficult.” My hours sometimes have me playing at odd times and we made due. More or less I think that won’t continue as we level though. At the higher end, once people pool there, you probably won’t have as hard of a time doing them.
Will they be as easily done once the horde blows past? No, not really. Will they lose their fun and appeal? I honestly don’t believe so.
A solid point, but I also think that the game makes it pretty easy to start up alts, so folks who want to test different classes will do so in order to possibly gain further edges in RvR (always helps to know what a class can and can’t do).
I suppose it depends on the incentives to play low levels. If the low levels are contributing to your guild ranking and city ranking then that may be enough to get people to roll alts to take keeps for your guild, etc.
City of Heroes has that mechanic where low level players generate points for the guild more than high level players who have to choose between guild points or finding money on mobs. This is one of the many ways that game helps to keep people generating alts, and seems to be similar to how a low level can contribute to guild rank in WAR.
A question about public quests: From what I can tell, it sounds like they’re essentially an evolution of the “zone event” and “giant monster” MMO styles with the addition of multiple stages. In City of Heroes, for example, Steel Canyon often has “arson” incidents where the Hellions set an old building on fire. Everyone in the zone gets the alert. While some take out the hellon mobs, others put out the fire. If I changed the event to have multiple stages (one you succeed at putting out the fire, the police issue an APB, initing all to track the the hellions to their source…. once enough are defeated, their headquarters is located…etc).
That’s not bad, really, but is there more to public quests that I’m missing? I haven’t been in the beta and most people limit the description to saying its “new” and then describing somthing that seems so familiar…
Chas, that’s basically it. The additional aspects are loot bags for highest contributors (and lucky rollers), individual influence points for influence rewards, and influence on the wider war. Some of them also have pretty good stories, and even voice-acting, but the story text usually gets lost in the action. The last stage usually involves a monster or hero. What really takes it to a level beyond stuff in other games is the PQ’s connection to a greater cause: the war.
As Yunk pointed out, scaling high-level players down means those players must have an incentive to return. I doubt most newcomers have friends at higher levels who would be willing to play with them in early areas, so the incentive has to be something else. I’d prefer the extra NPCs fix to that. WAR already includes NPC allies in places like Salzenmund, though they’re just environmental… staying in one place to fight the same respawning enemies.
In my beta experience, when one PQ was empty, it was usually easy enough to find another one that had other players there to help. It’s not necessary for all of an area’s PQs to be active simultaneously, provided every PQ is enjoyed at one moment or another, because that provides a dynamic for replayability and keeping gameplay fresh.
The most helpful addition would be to simply add visual indicators for PQ populations on the map. The group tab below the player’s icon does not function in this way now, because the PQ group listed rarely includes everyone in that PQ. Plus, while it gives the name of the PQ location, most players probably can’t link the name to a place on the map. If PQ populations were represented on the map through a simple color saturation system, then a player could see not only which PQs are most populated but also which are closest to his current location.
Yes Chas it’s similar. Except it’s restricted to a certain place on the map so there’s no alert and also they’re always going on. When one finishes a few minutes later it starts up again.
Plus you get rewards for participating – there is a rep vendor nearby where you can purchase things (you only need to repeat it 5-8 times to max our your rep ) and also each PQ has a loot roll at the end that is somewhat random – you get a bonus depending on how much healing or damage you did (a few other things are counted). Because it’s only in a certain area they can count up all that without you needing to be in a group. And I found even if I left if I contributed enough to get a roll (like if I died and was still in town where I rezzed) i’d still see the roll and know if I got something.
whoops i typed that not chas, in response to his question, i must have typed his name by accident.
Keep in mind that you dont need a group of 40 people to do Pq’s. i actually did one with 4 people. we had a tank, 2 healers and 1 dps. It took us about 10 minutes straight on fighting the boss alone, but we did it.
its a good point you bring up, but not as critical as it appears at first glance
I dunno. I think passing judgment on a design after a wee bit of playing in a closed beta is a bit hasty. This would be a good topic to revisit in about 6-8 months. Sorta like a “stump the chumps” call…
Have to agree 100% with Ryan.
As the game ages, the emphasis is placed on the later portion of the game, advancing towards raid and PvP elements at higher levels until new levels and zones are introduced. People who reroll or slow gamers (I’m guilty of that) will more than likely be the most common person you will eventually see in the low to mid levels after a few months, which means that they won’t be spending too much time exploring all of what they already did unless it’s the best way to gain experience.
I love Public Quests, there a very neat concept that focuses on open world content as well as a hub-style LFG meeting place at all level ranges, but in the long run I do believe they will have to implement something that would allow the deteriorating lower level group of people to partake of the content.
I don’t see it as a fatal flaw.
A good example is hero NPCs in WoW. Eventually, after the critical mass had moved to level 70, non-soloable NPCs were removed from 1-60. Blizzard saw a need to speed up the leveling process and that was part of the package. I believe EQ2 did something along the same lines.
Unfortunately, Blizzard didn’t make a dramatic enough move to help out low level dungeons, resulting in the general practice of getting a level 70 to run you through low level dungeons. Dungeons in WoW are sort of like Public Quests. They aren’t required for leveling, but they sure are a hell of a lot of fun. At least part of the PQs are doable solo and can eventually result in a rewad.
It will be interesting to see how Mythic adapts them in the future.
Hrm, again I’m bringing up EVE Online, but the new expansion (Empyrean Age) introduced something called “Faction Warfare”, which makes it easy for younger players to get involved in PvP (as implemented in New Eden).
It’s very similar to these “public quests”, in the sense that there are capture points that show up on the overview of EVERYONE within the system – and you must go complete the objectives at these locations with the help of any nearby allies (or an organized group that you’re with), and do so while under the pressure from the opposing forces (other players in the area who are aligned with the opposing faction).
There’s rescue missions, capture missions, espionage… it’s very similar, but it works really well in EVE, because there’s only one server – 20,000+ are online at any given moment, and it’s really really rare to find an empty solar system. Of course, the other golden thing about it is – if you can handle the heat, you can capture things solo if you so chose.
Although you addressed this already, it’s simply not something you can just pass over… Public Quests are quests that require multiple people. This is intrinsic to their design. If they could be done solo or in a duo/trio then they would be just like normal quests.
I see no reason to over analyze them, try to dress them up, alter them to meet the needs of a few, or do anything to them. They are what they are… quests that run as events for the public to jump in and participate in. Some of the ideas here are great but let’s not call these other great ideas the fatal flaws of a system which is working as intended – and very well at that.
RE: “Fatal Flaw”
If it wasn’t entirely clear in my original post, the “fatal flaw” wording was entirely to cause a little emotional stir when you read it. I thought I’d disproved myself by the end when I suggested that if it is a flaw serious enough to make PQs unplayable, it can be corrected (which means it is far from fatal, because there is a cure).
Public Quests are fun. We’ll see what happens in practice a few months after launch. My prediction is that they’ll need to be changed, or at least some of them will need to be changed, in order to maximize potential fun. I could be wrong, but if I were the one who designed PQs, I would have planned for some contingencies ahead of time (which, for all I know, they already have).
They (PQ’s) exist as they do to fulfill a need. Events that players can participate in, as much or as little as they please, at any time they please and be rewarded not only for spending the time they spent but also the effort is the foundation of a PQ’s reason for existing. I agree completely that they are not perfect and have room to improve (such improvements are stated to be on the way) but I do not think changing them would be the right course of action. If changed improperly, which would be easy to do and hard to avoid, would more than likely cause PQ’s to cease fulfilling that need.
It’s like trying to fix something that really isn’t broken. In the end you often wish you had left well enough alone.
We shall see, Keen. We’ll call this Keen vs. Blackguard Challenge #1. If they don’t revise Public Quests within 6 months of launch to make them more accessible to smaller numbers of players, I will make a post on my blog indicating your superior WAR prediction abilities. In turn, you must do the same for me. March 18th is the deadline!
Lol, okay Ryan you have a deal.
I wanted to point out too that PQs have the ability to move your control meter for the zone, which could also be enough incentive to do them, if just to move the meter without having to actually RvR.
Fatal flaw or intended consequence? I agree with Ryan about the flaws and how they can be fatal to the public quest system. However, was the flaw intentional? Is it like the local grocery store giving away free eggs on Sunday? Are public quests disposable to the devs? Well, at the lower levels that is? At higher levels, you can do the same PQs again and again and gain influence. If influence is important, I think PQs will remain important, but at the higher levels.
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Not one to be defensive but we have a big design document on PQ’s, one of the jobs of the documents is to pick holes and look at nasty possible problems linked to thinks like player abuse, ganking and low or overly high population changes. The document has this point in it and covers what we want to do about it through live development. Its hardly a fatal flaw that populations migrate through the development of a MMO’s life. Nor is it a flaw that the current system would struggle to be fun with a much lower population. It just places a burden on the live team to monitor, scale and make sensible choices to maintain the best experience for the real population loads of the areas. Just as you have to re-vist raids and downgrade the amount of people required in line with your active level population so too do you have to tinker with all your content. It was highlighted (lemmi check) June 2007.
The early PQ’s for instance have a greater range of loot and more loot drops right now because the influx of players will be higher at launch, that will be dropped back as the population in those areas drops off.
Rather than fatal flaw I would have called it..
Considerations for long term live running of your game…
As for the anit social point, I doubt you can design for mind sets, but we have designed with posative grouping and posative grouping rewards. The mind set thing we leave to the whirling clockwork that happens behind peoples eyes.
Hope that helps give you a bit of comfort on these things.
Paul
When you say “make sensible choices to maintain the best experience for the real population loads of the areas”, do you mean tweaking mob spawn rates and other variables according to population density? Or perhaps something else? Because if it’s the former, I could imagine that the live team would be quite busy. Or lagging behind changing player demands. Making an algorithm to do that would require much more work up front, but it would be low-maintenance.
Most PQs with the right class mix through the first 2 tiers are very much doable with 4 people once you know what you are doing and are level appropriate. Still better with more but at least you won’t be missing out on content.
Like a lot of things in this industry newer games tend to learn from previous releases so it will be interesting to see if WAR abandons older content like WoW when the playerbase has outgrown an area or if lessons were truly learned.
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