The Case For or Against Cross-World Dungeons

[Antipika]

The map is different, so no.

[Teakwood]

Very very much in favour, having only played FFXI and never any WoW and therefore admittedly lacking a lot of context. Even if 90% of the time you wind up getting thrown together with anonymous dumbasses, that's not much worse than your average pickup group, and the ability to just roll into a dungeon without waiting for a party or waiting for your friends to get online is worthwhile just for the 10% of interactions that -don't- fall prey to Sturgeon's Law.

[Jinko]

So If all three of us on Server A wanted to go to the Dungeon (assuming Dungeons 1,2,3 are different instances of the same dungeon), we could just grab our chocobos and ride of to that dungeon as a party?

No because you wouldn't be synced to the same instance as 4-8.

[Rutelor]

I do NOT want to look for a party for hours....

If this is ANYWAY sovles the horrid that was ff11 in this matter then DOOOO ETTTT!!!!.

/thread

Are you sure a plus is not two minuses in disguise? We cannot approach such a fundamental change assuming simplistic, half-glimpsed, perceptions. I commend the OP for bringing this point up without sensationalism. I have played both DAoC and WoW and saw negative consequences to the implementation of cross-world grouping.

In most innovations that sound sweet in prospect, the advantages are glaring, but the disadvantages are not as evident. What cross-world grouping did for WoW was further propel the game towards the hang-at-the-hub-and-only-move-to-gank end of the spectrum. It's condensed by this player, whom I quote, from the WoW official forums. He starts by claiming (perhaps inaccurately) that WoW has ceased to be a real MMO. But read on:

Simply stated. How is it not a MMO? The, game, in it's current state rewards a player by staying holded up in a capital city and queueing up for a cross-server dungeon or cross-server battleground. Yes, players can do this outside of the cities, but why would they if the auction house and class trainers are nearby?

The game went from a persistant, open-ended world in the beginning of classic WoW to a glorified chat lobby by the time ToC went live during WotLK. Cross-server pve and pvp solved the problems of long queues for battlegrounds and gave players a chance to do dungeons without having to manually form a group in chat. But I believe by doing this, it ripped away a core element from WoW which makes it a true MMO.

The ability to log in and run into groups of players while farming mats, questing, summoning other players in front of a dungeon or raid, waiting for the next battleground to commence, roleplaying, or just simply hanging out. The possibilities were nearly limitless before players were given the ability to queue up for instanced pvp and cross-realm dungeons. Nowadays, players seldom venture beyond the vincinity of Stormwind or Orgrimmar. Some roleplayers still hang out in other zones, but for the most part: the "world" of warcraft is dead or is being read it's last rites.

To further segregate players from one another on their server is flying mounts. Before they were implemented in BC, players were given the ability to travel faster then going on foot while at the same time keeping players grounded to the world they lived in. Once flying mounts were introduced, it encouraged players to skip the vast majority of the world except to quickly farm some mats, complete a quest objective, kill another player, and then swoop away.

(Full disclosure: There were plenty of negative replies to this posting in the WoW forums. Perhaps the poster's mistake was to attack the changes by claiming that they made the game less of an MMO, which is not a fact. That doesn't detract from the good points he strikes.)

One of the great achievements of early MMORPGs like Everquest, Early WoW and FFXI was the establishment of infrastructures on which communities thrived, and within which fantasy was brought close to us when these fancy-worlds started behaving in anthropologically identifiable manner.

Then, in the desperate search for convenience and expeditiousness, eager to satisfy the crowd's mindless craving for no-effort gratification, developers have followed the path of Western Culture's ditching of cultural heirlooms for the speed and insipidity of supermarkets and fast food. Moving around the game world, which used to be a cause for wonder, is now an inconvenience. Establishing ties to a community and keeping civility and cooperation so that we could thrive together is now a pain in the arse, something to be seen as a monumental hurdle on the race to "FUN."

Games might have changed to adapt to the minimum common denominator in order to become more profitable, and in doing so, they might have earned the applause of the headless masses. I for one, will miss the structured world-on-a-soap-bubble feel that careful structuring and balance brought to the classic games. Now, if that could be kept while also ushering in the innovations...!!! That's a call to greatness, for Yoshida to follow.

R

[Jinko]

Questing is still very much a big thing in WoW, most people do daily quests to get their money so you see people running around the real world all the time, you see people mining and herbing all the time, low level players doing quests.

Yes the majority of high level players stay in town but how is this any different than FF14, if im not leveling a lower class im either in "town" crafting, standing around chatting in the LS or out gathering.

Only a very small part of the time I play am I doing dungeon content or boss fights.

Most of the time spent in FF11 was standing around in town also, it was probably even worse that FF14 because you were so dependant on a party that you couldn't leave town through fear of missing a shout.

I do agree that the devs of this game need to provide ways to keep players in the world and active, hamlet defense would be a good way, making players discover a dungeon before they can use the dungeon finder, I guess this will take place as part of the quest chain though.

[Sorel]

Well that's the thing, now isn't it. If we are to take Producer/Director Yoshida at his word, he plans on eventually making ALL dungeons instanced and cross-world. IF that is the case, how would my LS be able to access that content without using the cross-world queue?

You can make a party and walk into an instance and be transported to that place or go to the dungeon finder and everyone within that party will be transported to the same place.

Is that how current dungeon finders work in MMOs? If me and my friend decide to take on a high level dungeon we can just walk in, no questions asked, and complete the content?

Yup you can do it either way.

So if all three of us on Server A wanted to go to the Dungeon (assuming Dungeons 1,2,3 are different instances of the same dungeon), we could just grab our chocobos and ride of to that dungeon as a party?

No because you wouldn't be synced to the same instance as 4-8.

Now I'm confused. I thought you said we could walk in to a dungeon no questions asked?

[Jinko]

No I said you could walk into a dungeon no questions asked if you made a "full" party on your own server, just as you would do it now.

How can you enter an instance with people from another server if you can't invite them to a party anyway ?

[Seirra_Lanzce]

Now I'm confused. I thought you said we could walk in to a dungeon no questions asked?

you're question are confusing me. @_@

[Sorel]

I wasn't asking about people from another server, though. I was asking about three of us on the same server (Server A). You, me, and that guy over there choco to the geographic location of the dungeon. The dungeon has a light party minimum (4). At that point what are our options?

• Can we shout for a fourth player on our server and have them choco to us?
• Does the fourth even have to choco to our location?
• Can we three amigos go into the queue as a party, and say we are looking for a fourth from another server?
• Would we have any advantage in the queue since we at the geographical location of the dungeon?
• Would a party even have access to that dungeon's queue if they are outside that dungeon's zone?
• What happens when the only other people in the queue are parties also only looking for a fourth?

I know it's alot of questions. But what I'm looking to understand is how the other MMO's cross-server systems address these questions. IF cross-server dungeons are inevitable in FFXIV, I would like to think we can learn from the mistakes of other games and try and shape it so that we can avoid the horror stories associated with those systems.

[Blarp]

Let me be more specific. A cross-world dungeon system needs a Cross-World Queue or Cross-World Lobby system in order to facilitate the formation of parties.

My question is ... why does it have to be cross-world?? What is the added in player benefit of making it cross-world instead of keeping it native-world?

For a historical reference, look at Rift. They tried exactly that; server-specific LFG, and the amount of time spent in the queue became too long. The downside to cross server LFG is that it erodes server community a bit. The upside is that you can log on and get involved almost immediately. It gives more people a chance to see more content at the expense of community cohesion on a server.

I think cross server LFG is great. In WoW, I still talked and did things with people from my server regularly. I met people (from my server and others) I wouldn't have otherwise met. Now, you can even invite people you've met cross server and go do an instance with them. I got to participate in more content without having to yell for a group for an hour. The only downside, for me, is running into the occasional asshat, but I've run into plenty of them on my server as well.