Bosses, spawns and quests - persistent?

For those who've never played any persistent MMO ever, let me explain the problem:
Whenever you need to kill a boss (which is often considering quests) there's a fair chance the boss has been killed in the last 5 minutes or so and that you'll fight your way through the enemy spawns to see his looted corpse, forcing you to stand there and wait for another 5 minutes till the boss respawns right in front of your eyes. Obviously, I don't have to point out that this is incredibly annoying.
In the racial abilities thread, posters were discussing this and possibilities of solving this.

Originally Posted by Wethospu

Regards quests, there could be large ring around the boss. When you move in, game will be instanced and the actual quest loads (and gets balanced accordingly).

This seems terribly inconvenient. Bosses are mobile so theoretically while afk you could suddenly be thrown into a boss' instance - and then thrown out again. When there's multiple bosses in a zone they may as well have split the thing up in instances.

So anyway time to post a most probably near-impossible-to-program-but-kickass-when-implemented spawn system.



Imagine this as a prototypical GW2 area map. It features two enemies:
Yellow - Crooked Fishermen
Blue - Skales
The circled area are their spawn camps.
The yellow one is a small fisher village where the Crooks spawn. Most of them spawn with the objective to scout out do-gooders trying to destroy their terrible overfishing project; these are the yellow spots surrounding the fishing lake. These guards are well armed and alert. Attack one of their groups and the camp will send a new one running there immediately; they may even send a cry for help to have one of the other. Their initial position unaggroed is probably /crouching behind a bush or /scouting atop a cliff. Occasionally a better trained group of guards may spawn - these are of course visible by their aura of power and skills may be captured from draining that aura.
Nobody can guard for hours on end, so after a couple of minutes fresh guards are sent on over and take the old guards' place. Of course, this means they're free to go wherever they want and most of them go fishing on the small isle in the bay. Some of them will be /lounging, with one or two actually trying to fish. A bit of random light banter might pop up in text bubbles above their head. They won't be alert, are trusting and friendly and if you kill them fast enough, might not even have time to rearm. Strangely enough, most Crooks who go fishing never make it back to the spawn camp...
The Fishing leaders blame the local Skale breeding ground (the blue circle-ish area) for occasionally taking their henchmen. After all skale hunt everywhere near the lakes for fish and meat, so you can see them fighting the fishermen and wildlife *cough charmable pets cough*. Strangely enough, despite their amphibious nature Skales never hunt in the bay.

Of course authorities think something is fishy in the area so they hand out quests to Heroes who then need to interrogate the lounging fishermen in the bay (beat the crap outta them, play an emote game, whatever). You learn about their illegal conduct and if your solution was peaceful you gain a quest to eradicate the hunting skale. After hunting the skale, there's a quest to eradicate the broodmother in the breeding grounds. That area is completely instanced. The authorities would rather you hunt the Crooks and have quests to kill the guards which is rather difficult - let alone the subsequent quest of killing the Fishing Ringleaders in the village after which you'll finally have stopped the Fishing Crooks from spawning.
After a little while though, new monsters start appearing...



Apparently the Crooks on the bay isle weren't being slain by Skales at all - a Seaborn Spawnmonster was eating them all along, laying eggs which hatched into small fish, which in turn caught and fed the Skalebrood and Crooks' families. With their natural competitors gone, of course they'd quickly taken care of invading the main land. Que Hunter event quests for taking out as many Seabrood and Monsterfish as you can. These are located in the lakes. The more people enter the waters, the more Seabrood rise out of the Spawnwhale eggs resting in the murky depths.
Of course, whichever team manages to kill the Seaborn Spawnwhale before its eggs are destroyed - location marked with a large red circle with a black E at the center - gets a nice big, prestigious, reward.
For this the entire bay turns into one big soft instance; an instance where anyone can enter in a team or solo, and team up with anyone else, until the instance has reached maximum capacity. A second soft instance is then created; then a third then a fourth. This allows the experience to be balanced around a certain number of people, say 25 working in teams of 5, creating the exact epic scale you want.

tl;dr?
Have spawn camps be fully instanced. Spawns exit the spawn camp in natural fashion, to a location fitting their objective. Their animations (and friendly or hostile status) once there fit their purpose. Groups of mini bosses similar to GW1 bosses with cappable skills may spawn randomly. Quest bosses are located in the spawn camps.
Event monsters become stronger if large number of players enter their roaming area. If an event needs to be stopped, the objective is rarely to just kill event monsters, but to kill their spawn point.
Event bosses are soft instanced to allow for both feeling appropriately epic as well as persistent.

As I got the honour to be in this topic I will honour it by making a post.
The system I suggested was meant for actual quests. Not for every random boss, etc.
For example, you pick a boss killing quest. You move towards it and once you are near enough game asks whether you want to go to instance with your team. So you wouldn't just randomly get thrown into instances. :)

Now it's time to read rest of your topic.

lol, I believe that the instance/persistence discussion was much healthier for everyone involved than the original topic.

I like your idea but would it just repeat in a cycle? It might be better if it was a little simpler. I like the persistent to instance idea and kill spawn points not mobs thing.

First and foremost, let me just say that, perhaps I'm being pessimistic here, but persistent or not, I've yet to play a game that calls itself persistent without seeing some form of instancing, be it mild or blatant. With that out of the way..

Spoiler

I kind of see the game working out somewhat like above. You get an objective/quest/event related to the colored town or region.

For example, say you enter the area and you've never been to any of the towns before, you could still walk into one of the colored regions and have some event occur that leads you to its related town. Likewise, it may be that you go to the town, and the quest will lead you to that particular area, but because the towns are instanced in a way, you'd leave and that little area would be your own version of the map, while still being able to interact with the other players in the area.

How would that work without them hopping in to help or kill steal you? I'm not precisely sure, but the idea I had in mind was of the enemies exclusive to that version of the map appearing normal to the player with the quest and kind of ghostly to those without it. It might be explained as past or future events appearing before you've done them or repeating themselves from the past.

I was also sort of thinking of the way the recently released game Demon's Souls does it, which is more or less as I described, except without the player appearing like a ghost as well.

Originally Posted by Wethospu

For example, you pick a boss killing quest. You move towards it and once you are near enough game asks whether you want to go to instance with your team. So you wouldn't just randomly get thrown into instances. :)

Ah. I figured there was something I wasn't understanding correctly.

Originally Posted by Ender the MM

I like your idea but would it just repeat in a cycle? It might be better if it was a little simpler.

It'd depend on the event. In this case, no - I'd only let the event trigger with a few additional perimeters (in-game time has to be around noon, when it's high tide iirc, and it should be spring or summer, as that's when most wild animals propagate, when you complete both quests. This makes the event a rare occurence and an immediate hotspot).

Originally Posted by Gmr Leon

First and foremost, let me just say that, perhaps I'm being pessimistic here, but persistent or not, I've yet to play a game that calls itself persistent without seeing some form of instancing, be it mild or blatant.

Darkfall Online.

I kind of see the game working out somewhat like above.

So the entire area is an instance, with the towns and quest locations being seperate instances within the bigger area instance where you have access to world chat?

Though I like Demon's Souls, I'm wondering what happened to the persistence thing.

Originally Posted by Gmr Leon

First and foremost, let me just say that, perhaps I'm being pessimistic here, but persistent or not, I've yet to play a game that calls itself persistent without seeing some form of instancing, be it mild or blatant. With that out of the way...

I'd like to point out that I while I was playing WoW (not happily uninstalled btw), I had discussions with WoW players about where the fun was... cuz I was not finding it...

The best parts, they'd argue, are in instances.

Persistant areas aren't where the game is. It's where the play is. If you want to putz around, have fun, and lol... it's in persistant areas. The sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can move on.

I see persistent areas as JQ or FA. There are many things to do. You never know who will show up with what. You get outnumbered, or you outnumber. It's chaotic. It's fun. But it is not recognized as where you do serious PvE or PvP. It's a mess, and we love it so.

Embrace that very nature of persistence...

Events are what I think the answer to persistence. Instead of static bosses and mobs, keep things moving. Spawn mobs where there are no people, and make them move to where there are people. If density is too high, send in dragons & other flying creatures. Or give a PvP objective so they kill each other. Don't worry if the density is not uniform... some like to be alone, others like to be in large groups... that's fine.

Akirai, I really like the patrols raising the alarm when they get attacked and such. Instanced (soft or hard) camps would also be really neat. I'm not sure about the part where doing something inside an instance would affect the persistent part of the world. The obvious problem would be that 10 different parties can take a quest, but as soon as one party completes it, the world changes, ruining it for the other 9. Events in the persistent world should be triggered either randomly or stochastically as a result of what everyone does. But with soft instancing, yes, it would be awesome. Sure, that has its own set of issues, but soft instances still solve all (ok, most) problems with a persistent world while avoiding the loneliness of a pure instanced one.

I doubt it would be hard to program (If you mean the "life-like" part, that's certainly not hard: did you ever play Dwarf Fortress? That was made by a guy who didn't even know how to program when he started with it). What it would be, though, is hard to design. So far I don't know of any dev team that pulled it off, or even tried.

Originally Posted by Akirai Annuvil

Darkfall Online.

I'm still a bit wary of that game, as I don't know much beyond some of the more basic aspects of the gameplay. Shortly after release, I just lost track of it all, with only the minor bits arising about it being bad or a lot of people leaving. However, that was due more to the PvP of it being so open, and so many new people coming being unaccustomed to that sort of thing.

Still, I'm sure that, even if you don't see any terrain features or portals or what have you, that there will be some loading going on unseen between certain regions. It may not be visible at all, but I imagine it's still there, occurring in the background.

Originally Posted by Akirai Annuvil

So the entire area is an instance, with the towns and quest locations being seperate instances within the bigger area instance where you have access to world chat?

Though I like Demon's Souls, I'm wondering what happened to the persistence thing.

Er..Something like that. The way I look at it is much as I was describing above, you'd have town instances within an area, which would be in itself a massive instance which once you got to the border some loading in the background would occur unnoticed (hopefully) and you'd enter the next region just like you were walking across a large persistent world.

Through this sort of instancing, each region would be seamlessly patched together as if it was a persistent world, giving off the entire feel of it, while at the same time not actually being so. Sure, you'd see other players and they would see you, and you could chat and talk and do whatever out in the areas, but in reality, in the background, the persistent world is a patchwork of instances.

The idea is, if it's done in that manner, you can more easily alter certain areas or what have you. So, in my above example, you could take a quest from one of the towns, and it would affect a certain portion of the Area "Instance" for the player, because as they leave the town they get their own instance of that Area except of course in that particular portion of it.

It's difficult to explain, especially considering I haven't even worked it out entirely myself.

What I'm attempting to say is that you can still interact with the other players, such as seeing them, chatting with them, trading with them, whatever the normal actions are between players despite having your own instance of that area which only affects a portion of it.

Sort of the reverse situation for the events suggested in one of the Anet interviews. That is, where the dragon swoops down and you have to fight it off and get a reward or fail and it destroy the bridge where you then must defend caravans against bandits as they repair it. That would be something that occurs through all the Instance Layers, whereas quests that change a portion of the area create a Unique Instance Layer.

I suppose that would be the best way to explain my thoughts, really. You have a Public Instance Layer, where normal gameplay occurs in a persistent manner with the more or less default version of the Area Instance, then a Unique Instance Layer where it still does so but with an altered version of the Area Instance, then a Public Event Instance Layer where the dragon scenario comes into play.

All of which would more or less go by unnoticed by the players as they play through the game.

..I made that a lot more complicated than I needed to, I imagine, but it's the gist I get from trying to work it out in my thoughts.

Originally Posted by Gmr Leon

Still, I'm sure that, even if you don't see any terrain features or portals or what have you, that there will be some loading going on unseen between certain regions. It may not be visible at all, but I imagine it's still there, occurring in the background.

Of course there is. You could never have the entire world and every player in it on your computer at the same time (the server does, of course, so you could, but do you have a computer as powerful as their server/server cluster?)
Instanced vs. persistent refers to what is going on server-side.

Originally Posted by raspberry jam

Of course there is. You could never have the entire world and every player in it on your computer at the same time (the server does, of course, so you could, but do you have a computer as powerful as their server/server cluster?)
Instanced vs. persistent refers to what is going on server-side.

Which goes to show my ignorance on the whole matter. I've only a vague idea of how all of that works, really, so any ideas I have that extend into that realm are just feeling for the familiar in the darkness and following it to the best of my ability. In this case, following is describing, of course.