Why can't Dungeons be longer/harder, but more... piecework?

[Barraind]

. Players will do the optional stuff it the reward is worth it. The reason why nobody bothered with the optional sections of arr dungeons was because whatever could be obtained there was junk, plain and simple.

We had stuff like toto-raks original paths, where you could go one way and get 5 chests, or you could go the non-optimal way, get 4 chests and... a few chests that had consumables you already outleveled.

Then you look at wow's version of that, sunken temple, where the optional parts had quest mobs, relevant gear that didnt stop you from getting other gear, quest encounters, and some cool lore.


The 14 team has no clue how to incentivize peoples time in a way that isnt some mixture of: Tomestones to buy the gear you should be using and gear that is in every way worse than the tomestones you're earning for doing the dungeon.

Its a side effect of a designed 0 horizontal progression. They cant give us relevant things because they literally cant give us those things thanks to the reward structure they use. Its just more tomestones and tomestones and GC seal turnins.


14's dungeons are hallways because people wont do optional content for no reward, and they wont give correct rewards for doing them because everything is designed around a specific numerical reward of the only 2 currencies they will do anything with.

14's "raid dungeons" are just thematic trials, because again, they have no clue how to reward you with random drops or anything that isnt one of the two currencies they use (capped tomestones and normal_token or savage_token)

[Shurrikhan]

Shouldn't the fact of more variety in dungeons be enough of a reward?

Variety is a novelty. Its only necessarily good parts have an expiration date. The rest comes down to setting beneficial precedents, but you can't expect someone to appreciate those things each time on a daily basis (or however often they're running dungeons).

You'd need a way to ensure players enjoy the mechanics and side content of dungeons enough to want to do it - and I'm just not sure how that can be accomplished anymore.

For me, doing pre-nerf Pharos Sirius -- at least with more or less competent players without any significant attitude problems -- was intrinsically fun. It could have been better in a handful of different ways or an extra load of excitement or whatnot, but I quite enjoyed it. But that leaves two issues: I'm me, and may not be representative of most players, and that requires a group of "more or less competent players without any significant attitude problems".

So how do I, say, get access to a boss that finally stimulates my interests but doesn't create an effectively impassible or just heavily frustrating wall for the typical player? (For those performing far below the typical player, let us assume for now that the game might one day care about a reasonable difficulty curve, in-game teaching, and so on and thus raise the bottom tier as to no longer be either isolated from everyone else or pandered to at everyone else's expense.)

Now, the easy response would be that you can't and are forever doomed to one majority of the players... despite . It usually happens to be false, however. There are much smaller components that affect whether content attracts or repels us, and in what way, and to what degree, and to what overall effect. Most of those components can be more or less uniquely targeted. Even when you think they're inseparable, that's usually because of something else in your package you have yet to identify, or just a small mechanical issue you have yet to have your Eureka / feel-dumb-once-you-see-it moment to fix. Problem is, those corrections take time and what incredibly few things can't be feasibly separated excuse... nearly all design issues as a vain effort in compromise.

Let's consider some examples. Mechanical and gear-based difficulty are night and day from each other, despite falling under the same buzzword, and even within each there are things people like or do not like. Complexity (interlinking systems) and convolution (bloat and excessive codependence) both raise skill ceilings and knowledge requirements, but one tends to feel far worse because it devalues general intelligence in favor of counter-intuitive memorization. Even if we limit things down to "button-based engagement", so we're not looking at any feelings towards button bloat or the like, but just the results based on whether a player feels they do or do not have enough to press in any given moment, there are preferences for apm over time, minimum apm, maximum apm, and the frequency of apm spikes; more complex, there are going to differences based on whether one is using a controller or keyboard, and whether they toolkit lends itself well enough to an efficient layout for either to work as efficiently as possible. That's not to say that ever component will oblige a dive into an unknown depth of other factors so much as that simple, often seemingly trivial issues and inefficiencies are going to have cumulative effect on content, even if they normally fall outside of discussion and there are some ways of providing a given component (e.g. "difficulty not owed to memorization") that most players will agree is better, even if they disagree on how much of that component they want in the course of trying to achieve... some other component.

I'll spare you all the rant on examples of 'generally good' vs. 'noticeably flawed' design for now; I ask only that you trust that most of these so-called compromises aren't as clear-cut or zero-sum as they're made out to be. The challenge instead lies less in whom to target (and whom to leave out, by varying degree) as which processes are enjoyable and how can those processes be combined in such a way that more people feel like they've suffered little to no compromise in that content.

[Silverquick]

There is actually a way to keep those optional paths in a dungeon and not give it a path of least resistence.

Randomize what the actual goal is for each dungeon.

One time its the mini-boss or two on one branch... one time its a mass spam of mobs three times in a row... one time its getting 4 crystals in random parts of the dungeon to unlock to the door to the final boss.

So they can actually make optional or branching paths but make which one you need random or a combination of the above.

This would in essence never make it the same dungeon twice.

[Shurrikhan]

WoW's got enough of a history to be a good example of why we don't have long, branching dungeon in modern MMOs.

Maraudon.

Temple of Atal'Hakkar (aka Sunken Temple).

Blackrock Depths.

It was very difficult to get a group of players able to stay the entire run and even harder to find replacements when someone had to leave. The number of completed runs compared to runs started was very low as a result, not because of difficulty but because of time.

The same dungeons are also a good example of why dungeons end up with linear routes instead of branching paths. Too many players would get lost and confused, unable to remember how to get to the next boss. I spent a lot of time in Sunken Temple because I knew how to navigate the place without getting lost (and knew the statue order for the summoned boss) so others were always asking me to run it with them. Groups that didn't have someone who knew how to get around in there inevitably fell apart, which became a source of frustration and discontent.

The Thousand Maws of Toto-rak here would be a similar example. I've heard nothing but horror stories and hate for the 1.0 version because of the maze it was. Even now players continue to complain about how long the dungeon takes to finish.

I can understand why the makers of modern MMOs aren't wasting development resources on that type of content, as much fun as I personally fine it. They want to be making content that a greater portion of the player base would enjoy.

Before you say "but Ultimate is only getting done by 1% of the player base", Ultimate is also primarily put together from reused assets and generates considerable publicity within the gaming community due to the difficulty. Long branching dungeons wouldn't.

Sunken Temple was relatively fast, and for all its odd-ball design, fairly straight-forward. Across leveling 5 classes through there back in Vanilla, I don't think I've ever had a party break up in there. Even Gnomeragon would probably be a better example.

Maraudon likewise had 5 core bosses and 3 optionals, though because of the backtracking or easy exit after the 3 optionals, it was often split into "Purple" or "Green" runs for those with less time. It would have been a pretty much standard dungeon if not for that side-path being longer than usual. In terms of basic layout and time... it was a lot like RfC or BfD, just... higher level.

Blackrock Depths, on the other hand, had 20 bosses. It was quite simply a mega-dungeon, and you could work many different more reasonably timed paths to grab 6-12 if people didn't have the time to do the whole thing. And that was fine. There's nothing wrong with signing up to do just one wing or just the majority of BRD. At least, it's no more an issue than if someone signed up to do a Legion leveling dungeon (with no more bosses in total than BFD had in itself), and only did one of them. It's cool that you have more bosses and time available within the same art assets in case someone wants to do an extended run.

That's a simple efficiency-minded feature that provides a unique experience, more so than any overall failing. The only failing in that is that the less efficiently chartable bosses and wings for a quick run will be seen less often, and are therefore less deserving of development time unless the pay-off of that unique experience is sufficiently high. (Granted, given that BRD is still probably the most famous WoW dungeons, among veterans and non-WoWers alike... it probably was. But that's obviously have increasingly less novelty value with each dungeon to follow suit.) But it wasn't the size of BRD that most discouraged players. It was how far one had to travel just to get there, through zones that were considered among the least aesthetically interesting in the game (Searing Gorge and Burning Steppes) and were therefore hard to general (think "shout") chat a group out of players out of, pre-LFG chat.

And for the record, 1.0 Thousand Maws of Toto-rak was almost identical except in that it had a 30-minute time-limit (Aether poisoning or the like), it lacked the slime and diremite traps to forcibly slow you down, and had 2 optional bosses. However, though these optional bosses were removed, their rooms are identical; their loot-chests were simply replaced with... empty chests. Now, rather than being able to finish via any of the three diremite bosses, you could now leave only through Graffias's lair (one of the weaker two, but furthest away from the entrance), actually making the path to relative completion... less intuitive than before. The previous experience was that you burned through the first 2 bosses, got to where you could reach any of the diremites, and did as many diremite bosses as you could will still ensuring you had time to escape. Now, you... do a normal dungeon, but with lots of now-useless side-paths... and slime to slow you down. That's more an "even now" issue than a "because we explicitly changed it to make it slower and less rewarding" issue.

@Ultimate. Agreed. As few people as might go through Ultimate, we probably all benefited in some way from its existence, if only via the influx of subscribing players. Now we just need content that can allow us to keep subscribers between major patches without going the semi-recent WoW permagrind route.

[Shurrikhan]

There is actually a way to keep those optional paths in a dungeon and not give it a path of least resistence.

Randomize what the actual goal is for each dungeon.

One time its the mini-boss or two on one branch... one time its a mass spam of mobs three times in a row... one time its getting 4 crystals in random parts of the dungeon to unlock to the door to the final boss.

So they can actually make optional or branching paths but make which one you need random or a combination of the above.

This would in essence never make it the same dungeon twice.

And that may be an efficient way to make more use of your art assets, lore, setup, and any unique systems for a dungeon, since it'd extend its novelty by a fair portion of what adding another dungeon would do, but with far less cost. We'd have to see it in practice, though to know just how much that little variation is going to feel augmentative, rather than just a gimmick.

[Frosthaven]

For me, doing pre-nerf Pharos Sirius -- at least with more or less competent players without any significant attitude problems -- was intrinsically fun. It could have been better in a handful of different ways or an extra load of excitement or whatnot, but I quite enjoyed it. But that leaves two issues: I'm me, and may not be representative of most players, and that requires a group of "more or less competent players without any significant attitude problems".

-snip-

I'll spare you all the rant on examples of 'generally good' vs. 'noticeably flawed' design for now; I ask only that you trust that most of these so-called compromises aren't as clear-cut or zero-sum as they're made out to be. The challenge instead lies less in whom to target (and whom to leave out, by varying degree) as which processes are enjoyable and how can those processes be combined in such a way that more people feel like they've suffered little to no compromise in that content.

Well part of it is indeed my own cynicism from gaming for 30+ years. Over the years I've found myself more and more alone in what I consider fun, technical challenge.

I've seen MMOs die that I loved by trying to provide the kind of engagement I enjoyed. I've been in multiple cases where I'd proclaim to the skies "oh my now THIS is exhilarating!" only to see I'm one of 10 people that didn't hate the content a week later when heavy nerfs to it come out.

I don't need flashy rewards or anything, either. I play for the experience, engagement, and mastery.

I guess my point in all this is that I haven't "given up" so much as slowly accepted over the years that what I find fun is niche and I just have to adapt to what's popular since that is going to drive product decisions.

Gaming has kind of moved on without me in that regard, and I either adapt to it and take it for what it is or I really do "give up".

For what it's worth, it really lightened my mood to see this thread being made and I'll be following the discussion closely

[linay]

14's dungeons are hallways because people wont do optional content for no reward, and they wont give correct rewards for doing them because everything is designed around a specific numerical reward of the only 2 currencies they will do anything with.

Well, that's the thing. It works for them. That's why I don't really see them messing with dungeons.

Whether it be for story quests, tomestones, clusters, tank mounts, mentor qualification, experience points, gears, old relic quests, minions, orchestrion rolls, wondrous tail, etc., people are running dungeons on a daily basis regardless of the people here saying they don't run dungeons because they're boring or give weaker gears (some people don't actually bother catching up with tomestone gears for one reason or another).

[Goji1639]

This wouldn't work. It might be alright for new dungeons, but new dungeons eventually become old dungeons and roulette fodder. This content needs to be able to be completed in reasonable chunks, not trap you in the same group for an hour minimum.

At the end of the day I think most players prefer the current setup, so I don't see it changing.

[testname]

Coz dungeons are boring.

Make it fast, get tomes, end of story.

[Shurrikhan]

Coz dungeons are boring.

Make it fast, get tomes, end of story.

Then...

1. What about making dungeons... not boring?
   
   
2. Why do something so boring at all? Alternatively, why should that particular task be necessary, if there are more enjoyable ways we would otherwise be able to get those rewards? Why should something so dull be made the most efficient method of collecting tomes (which are initially necessary for progression)?
   
   
3. [Hypothetical] If one were to take issue with dungeons' being so dull, why would they then -- even if, admittedly, among many others -- conditioning development towards more of the same by requesting efficiency over enjoyment ('give me something unpleasant, but quick, so I can more quickly get to the thing I'll try to make as quick as possible, even if I make it proportionately more unpleasant in the process')?