Unpopular Opinion: Dungeon design has been bad for a long time

[Hawklaser]

It will only take a few runs to determine which is the most efficient/easiest. No one designs a dungeon to be run only once.
What you've written here, though, makes me wonder how long you've been playing MMOs. People will skip as much as they can to make a run faster. It doesn't take long to figure out what to skip. Within a week it would be clear which path would be the best.

The way you're approaching this is by focusing on what the current design is and how to change from that. That's the wrong way to approach it and that causes what you're accusing me of.
You have to consider how the players will consume the content you create. Players will always find the most efficient path to the end. That is why I said you could have a dungeon with ten different paths. Players will ignore nine of them. First time through is irrelevant because that's not how the dungeon will be handled for 99.99% of its life in the game. People in this thread have already pointed out examples from other games that alternate paths are ignored in favor of the most efficient/easiest. You have to have an open mind to find creative ways to engage people in what you know will be a linear dungeon, regardless of how many paths you offer.

Why can't a dungeon be designed from the perspective that it might only be ran a handful of times by any one individual? Why do they have to be designed with the intent of being glorified hamster wheels that occasionally give us loot to keep us running on the hamster wheel? Give me one reason for the hamster wheel's continued existence other than to slow down content consumption. Just one.

When the goal is to keep us on the same hamster wheel as long as possible, by all means we are going to find the best way to be as lazy as possible about getting that wheel to turn just enough to hand out the rewards.

You mention you have to have an open mind to find creative ways to keep people engaged in the linear repetitive dungeons, aka the beloved hamster wheels, you also need an open mind to find the creative ways to encourage people to get away from the hamster wheels that so many MMO's have conditioned people to crave as well.

Going back to the RPG roots of pen and paper, one of the first things any GM/DM learns is players will do something you won't expect and never even thought to plan for. When that happens, one of two things happens... the GM/DM essentially crashes ending the session/hard vetos the player's choice, or they roll with it. The ones that roll with it, also tend to be the ones that are fun to play with as they can handle people going off script. The other ones, good luck as unless things go how they planned it... things can get dicey for everyone quickly. But you also have to think about what beyond just wacky unexpected player choices let them do this kind of stuff. Its all the tools they have available to them.

This was said in regards to CC earlier in the thread.

They cant put more than one of those every so often, because they "cant require" you to have specific dps, so they can only count on you having a tank.

I guess Repose doesn't count as CC anymore. All healers have that. Tanks have two. A stun and an interrupt. Melee DPS all have a Stun. Ranged DPS all have a Bind and an Interrupt. BLM has an AoE sleep. Only ones left out are RDM and SMN, but those also have the added utility of being able to back up heal and raise instead which are just as valuable.

Where the problem comes in, is some players got clever and figured out that certain dangerous enemies could be kept CC'ed for extended periods of times, and some devs didn't like this. Which resulted in a lot of CC immune mobs, in addition to gradual resistance buildup, out side of very, very specific ones. Essentially taking away part of our problem solving toolkits.

So that left us with essentially two options, avoid the mobs or kill the mobs. People went with the avoid the mobs first. Devs didn't like that either so they put up gates that would not come down unless we killed the mobs first. So now we got a singular tool left. Kill the mobs. We have one tool with which to approach the problem, so we found the most effective way to apply it.

This stripping of us players to one effective tool is what resulted in the current design. We adapted to having one tool. Unfortunately, for more involved dungeons, we will need more effective tools available to us. And unless we get more tools, and dungeons developed with the consideration that we might do something unexpected, all we will ever get are hamster wheels.

[CazzT]

Why can't a dungeon be designed from the perspective that it might only be ran a handful of times by any one individual? Why do they have to be designed with the intent of being glorified hamster wheels that occasionally give us loot to keep us running on the hamster wheel? Give me one reason for the hamster wheel's continued existence other than to slow down content consumption. Just one.

I would be fine with a dungeon designed this way. However, as a business, this is a bad investment of resources into the product. I wish the business side didn't have to be a factor, but it is a factor and thus dictates that resources be spent in the most beneficial and efficient way. So, in short, the one reason is: Money. You can disagree all you want, but it's still reality.

You mention you have to have an open mind to find creative ways to keep people engaged in the linear repetitive dungeons, aka the beloved hamster wheels, you also need an open mind to find the creative ways to encourage people to get away from the hamster wheels that so many MMO's have conditioned people to crave as well.

And they have. But this discussion is about dungeons.

Going back to the RPG roots of pen and paper, one of the first things any GM/DM learns is players will do something you won't expect and never even thought to plan for. When that happens, one of two things happens... the GM/DM essentially crashes ending the session/hard vetos the player's choice, or they roll with it. The ones that roll with it, also tend to be the ones that are fun to play with as they can handle people going off script. The other ones, good luck as unless things go how they planned it... things can get dicey for everyone quickly. But you also have to think about what beyond just wacky unexpected player choices let them do this kind of stuff. Its all the tools they have available to them.

This is not a pen and paper RPG, though. Our choices as players are limited by what is allowed in the coding. I want to join the Ascians with my WoL. I cannot. Why? Because it's not programmed/written to allow for that. In a P&P session, however, I could, because it's not constrained by what is coded. Even the most open, most freedom-allowing video game RPG still has limits due to the limitations of coding. It's a limitation the gaming industry has been trying to break free from since the first RPG was coded.

[Hawklaser]

This is not a pen and paper RPG, though. Our choices as players are limited by what is allowed in the coding. I want to join the Ascians with my WoL. I cannot. Why? Because it's not programmed/written to allow for that. In a P&P session, however, I could, because it's not constrained by what is coded. Even the most open, most freedom-allowing video game RPG still has limits due to the limitations of coding. It's a limitation the gaming industry has been trying to break free from since the first RPG was coded.

You might have missed the point. Instead of rolling with us, the players, doing something the Devs didn't expect, they decided to restrict our options instead. Players coordinate their CC to manage a difficult boss or encounter in an unexpected way? Mass CC immunites and gradual resistance buildup popped up shortly after. Players started skipping mobs via unusual ways such as tanks sacrifice pulling or just flat out skillfully avoiding agro? We got doors and walls thrown up to block progress until mobs are dead. In short, removed problem solving tools to force us to do the dungeons their way.

A bad GM/DM will forbid players from having some of the miscellaneous tools like a rope and grappling hook if players keep using them to break their script. A good one finds a way to use those tendencies. So instead of finding ways to take advantage of players tendencies to cooperate and coordinate their skills in effective and unusual ways, it was chosen to make it not worth the players time to do so. So instead of trying to find ways to take advantage of players tendencies to try and find ways to potentially avoid mobs that might not have to be fought, it was chosen to force us to fight them instead.

There were other choices that could have been made instead of taking away tools from the players problem solving toolkit.

[CazzT]

You might have missed the point. Instead of rolling with us, the players, doing something the Devs didn't expect, they decided to restrict our options instead. Players coordinate their CC to manage a difficult boss or encounter in an unexpected way? Mass CC immunites and gradual resistance buildup popped up shortly after. Players started skipping mobs via unusual ways such as tanks sacrifice pulling or just flat out skillfully avoiding agro? We got doors and walls thrown up to block progress until mobs are dead. In short, removed problem solving tools to force us to do the dungeons their way.

A bad GM/DM will forbid players from having some of the miscellaneous tools like a rope and grappling hook if players keep using them to break their script. A good one finds a way to use those tendencies. So instead of finding ways to take advantage of players tendencies to cooperate and coordinate their skills in effective and unusual ways, it was chosen to make it not worth the players time to do so. So instead of trying to find ways to take advantage of players tendencies to try and find ways to potentially avoid mobs that might not have to be fought, it was chosen to force us to fight them instead.

There were other choices that could have been made instead of taking away tools from the players problem solving toolkit.

Ah, I see what you're saying now. I agree that countering players' creative solutions is bad. As long as they aren't flat out breaking the encounter or using blatant exploits, I don't think it should be "fixed". A good example of this is Blizzard banning two guys who duo'd an encounter in Ulduar (the WotLK raid) against the first boss on the hardest difficulty. They didn't break any rules, they just simply understood the mechanics of the fight and used them in a creative way. They didn't exploit, they didn't cheat. Doing this to players is wrong. I also think it's poor form to counter players' creative solutions just because you (the devs) didn't see the creative solution.