Ydiss wrote:
One of the areas I may look at once the current content and ROF2 are both released and working fine is the server's existing pathway for smaller guilds/group content. Indeed, the content we're designing right now is primarily aimed at groups and small guilds (though some encounters will need a larger raid to complete).
I think it's important that there be a fun and challenging pathway for players who don't want to or cannot raid up and that includes players who don't want to box but can't form a 24+ player guild. There's quite a lot of great content already for those players (you can single group all the way up to ToV, there's ldons and group instances like ascent and more recently discord tower) but I'd ideally like there to be a contigiuous pathway through the tiers that bridges any gaps between those different existing areas.
The main issue, for me, is that anything that's designed for a group to do tends to be balanced by making you do that content about 1000x more to get similar sets of gear to raid content. I get the requirement for that but I'm going to spend some time thinking about how that might change, yet still keep things fair.
One place I'm going to start with is the epic 3.0s. Vaion's work so far on these is superb and most of the sequences and challenges I went through to complete these quests were so much fun. One part of my very long "to do" list is to continue these quests where Vaion left of. But before I do that, I'm going to have a think about how to make the solo branch of these quests a little more fun and less grindy/Everquest Live campy.
No promises or guarantees right now and this might be months away before I even start. Just wanted you to know it's something I'm thinking about.
As always, any ideas are welcome so please do discuss this.
Please discuss if you have any ideas.
I'll get the ball rolling with my thoughts about the 3.0 quests, in particular the solo path and long camps within each. The story and puzzles for the 3.0 quests are excellent and I want to continue that quality with the remaining 3.0s yet to come. I've completed (as in I've played as a player, not created) three of the four quests out already (solo pathway each time) and my overwhelming impression of the camps was it reminded me of playing Everquest back in 2000; it's the first time I'd felt that on THF since playing here for 10 years. However, these are epic quests, they're supposed to take time and yet we can solo them. How do we make that fit together without very long, essentially dull camps, just like Everquest live had?
Vaion stated that the camps each had an average of 13 hours to complete. In theory, that seems OK. It's just that you need to sit there for an average of 13 hours watching the same npcs pop over and over again. They're also contended spawns and we need to retain that.
I thought, how did we do it with the earlier epics? We had longer spawn times. The unicorns for the 1.5 on a four hour timer, for example. You don't need to wait for four hours, killing the unicorns over and over again for a rare drop, you just pop into the zone, see if they're up and if they're not you come back later.
I feel this approach is less arduous but can still apply a delay to the progress. So I'm playing with the idea of doing something similar with the 3.0s.
If it's 13 hours on average then we can retain that. Currently, it's four drops required and it's about 5% chance every 20 minutes. Instead, it could be 25% chance with a spawn timer of three hours. Or 50% chance every six hours. It'll still take time to complete the whole quest, but instead of sitting out 5 or 6 13 hour camps, you just need to go on several hunts for the same targets once, twice or maybe three times a day. Then carry on doing other fun things in between.
I can add some more complexity to it, perhaps with a lot of flex with spawn timer variance to make it less predictable. In theory, I can replace some of these long solo camps with a mini solo challenge (kill a sequence of targets with a timer for example). Ultimately, that latter idea is the perfect scenario for me. Albeit the one that'll take the most effort and time to create.
What do you think? Any ideas of your own?
When I get time, I'll post some thoughts on how I'd like to see a group only pathway (from level 1 to tier 9) work. But please do add your own suggestions here.