Suggestion - World of Ruin

[Kalavier.1097]

Just popping in, but while a hard mode could be fun for groups/as an option (like GW1 hard mode missions and vanquishing).

Why would it have to be themed around "World in ruins"?

[CrashTestAuto.9108]

2 hours ago, Kalavier.1097 said:

Just popping in, but while a hard mode could be fun for groups/as an option (like GW1 hard mode missions and vanquishing).

Why would it have to be themed around "World in ruins"?

Oh it doesn't have to be 🙂  I used it for a few reasons, but it just needs to be visually different enough for marketability and making the experience feel tangibly different.  For example, I really like the idea of exploring Wayfarer Foothills, but it's now in a full on blizzard and highly deadly.

 

But yeah, the basic reasoning:

 

1) I think chaos is important to the design mechanically, and that tends to lead to things breaking more than fixing (not always, and a rainbow cloud unicorn land is also chaotic)

2) It's just easy to do through recolouring and darkening.  Loads of games have done this (World of Ruin isn't an original name)

3) The world is more dangerous, so post apocalyptic makes sense thematically

 

The actually lore idea would be Mists related though, so design wise it can be pretty much anything.  I'd love to see incursions of actual physical objects due to fractals kind of crashing into this realm (e.g. a big chunk of the black citadel in Caledon Forest), but that then deviates heavily from the "low resource" model I was going for 😄 

[Bladestrom.6425]

Here is how i would get what you want for free (within reason) without impacting valuable resources or budgets  for new content for everone else in the game.

1) get reshade, darken everything up.  I use reshade, makes game look twice as good.

2) Start a new character, don't boost to 80, or boost gear. only use gear drops.

Profit

Edited September 30, 2022 by vesica tempestas.1563

[Linken.6345]

2 hours ago, vesica tempestas.1563 said:

Here is how i would get what you want for free (within reason) without impacting valuable resources or budgets  for new content for everone else in the game.

1) get reshade, darken everything up.  I use reshade, makes game look twice as good.

2) Start a new character, don't boost to 80, or boost gear. only use gear drops.

Profit

That dont do much about the difficulty tho.

[mungozen.2379]

15 hours ago, Arnox.5128 said:

Every choice you take is a risk, and MMOs are by FAR the most risky games of all to make. You don't get into this business playing it safe and then expect to come out ahead. You won't. And yeah, obviously some risks are smarter than others, but regardless, just saying taking the time to improve something has risk is not really an argument for or against anything.

End of the day, leave quality feedback so the devs can understand your point of view and help to make more informed decisions instead of giving a BS answer of "No," that doesn't actually help anyone.

I'd love to see you on a product development team, so much hope!  Unfortunately, business that succeed take very minimal risk.  A game that has been around for 10 years has probably been fairly conservative with its approach, even if they are doing something groundbreaking.

However, 'No' as a standalone response is absolutely valid and is something that companies can use to make business decisions about.  Having worked in Software Development, our team would create various metrics for assessing customer feedback.  While we would provide our customers with questionnaires and polls, the answers were not always reflective of the questions asked.

If we had a number of customers simply respond with 'general negative feedback' we could assess that the customer was so disinterested with the product idea or update, that they didn't even think it was worth spending time saying how it was not for them.  Maybe they hate the idea, maybe they don't care, maybe it doesn't affect them. When you compare those 'general negative' responses against the other customer responses, you can see trends in the responses and extrapolate usable information to decide your product path.

The same, of course, could be said for 'general positive feedback' if someone just answered with a Yes.

 

As for the OP idea.  I think about 80% of it is not good.

What I do like is the idea of a zone which allows players to face much harder content in an open world environment.

Where the idea falls short:

This would appeal to a smaller number of players unless it was heavily incentivized.  If it was heavily incentivized, then it would become the new normal for player progression to move to this zone, which would require far greater investment of resources.  It is hard to make a 'broken' game mode for all players to enjoy.

Duplicating all 25 or so Core zones to this game mode is too much.  While it might be fun to have a huge amount of content to explore, it doesn't really add much to the mode when the focus is much harder mobs for skilled players.  

You also run into the issue that zones can hold a squad of 50 players, likely more.  While the focus was solo or group play, squad zergs would likely trivialize the content as it already has.  As solo players can farm Champ and Legendary bounties already, the difficulty needs to be realistically high and player count limited.

As such, I would suggest the following:

Limit these zones to only a handful, thematically aligned with each region/expac.  I'd say one each for HoT, PoF and EoD with one or two more based in the Core territories (probably something with Snow).

Limit the players per instance to 10 or 15

and for the actual mobs, I would make everything an Elite and Champion by default.  Include spawning Legendary bosses.  Have the loot in line with current existing Champ/Lege loot.

It should be that simple.  I go here and fight really hard mobs to prove my skills with this profession or build, solo or with a few friends.  Everything else is secondary window dressing.

 

 

[Obfuscate.6430]

I like the idea. It's like the Hard Mode someone else was asking for.  
Not a fan of the aesthetics though. I don't want to slog through darkness. That doesn't make the game interesting to me unless there was a mechanic that let us have light, even if temporarily.

[CrashTestAuto.9108]

42 minutes ago, Obfuscate.6430 said:

I like the idea. It's like the Hard Mode someone else was asking for.  
Not a fan of the aesthetics though. I don't want to slog through darkness. That doesn't make the game interesting to me unless there was a mechanic that let us have light, even if temporarily.

I really shouldn't have used Queensdale being dark as my example 😄  I don't want the whole world to be dark, just visually different in a way that implies danger (using only shaders for resource conservation), and the obvious thing to do in Queensdale is make it dark.

[CrashTestAuto.9108]

1 hour ago, Mungo Zen.9364 said:

I'd love to see you on a product development team, so much hope!  Unfortunately, business that succeed take very minimal risk.  A game that has been around for 10 years has probably been fairly conservative with its approach, even if they are doing something groundbreaking.

However, 'No' as a standalone response is absolutely valid and is something that companies can use to make business decisions about.  Having worked in Software Development, our team would create various metrics for assessing customer feedback.  While we would provide our customers with questionnaires and polls, the answers were not always reflective of the questions asked.

If we had a number of customers simply respond with 'general negative feedback' we could assess that the customer was so disinterested with the product idea or update, that they didn't even think it was worth spending time saying how it was not for them.  Maybe they hate the idea, maybe they don't care, maybe it doesn't affect them. When you compare those 'general negative' responses against the other customer responses, you can see trends in the responses and extrapolate usable information to decide your product path.

The same, of course, could be said for 'general positive feedback' if someone just answered with a Yes.

 

As for the OP idea.  I think about 80% of it is not good.

What I do like is the idea of a zone which allows players to face much harder content in an open world environment.

Where the idea falls short:

This would appeal to a smaller number of players unless it was heavily incentivized.  If it was heavily incentivized, then it would become the new normal for player progression to move to this zone, which would require far greater investment of resources.  It is hard to make a 'broken' game mode for all players to enjoy.

Duplicating all 25 or so Core zones to this game mode is too much.  While it might be fun to have a huge amount of content to explore, it doesn't really add much to the mode when the focus is much harder mobs for skilled players.  

You also run into the issue that zones can hold a squad of 50 players, likely more.  While the focus was solo or group play, squad zergs would likely trivialize the content as it already has.  As solo players can farm Champ and Legendary bounties already, the difficulty needs to be realistically high and player count limited.

As such, I would suggest the following:

Limit these zones to only a handful, thematically aligned with each region/expac.  I'd say one each for HoT, PoF and EoD with one or two more based in the Core territories (probably something with Snow).

Limit the players per instance to 10 or 15

and for the actual mobs, I would make everything an Elite and Champion by default.  Include spawning Legendary bosses.  Have the loot in line with current existing Champ/Lege loot.

It should be that simple.  I go here and fight really hard mobs to prove my skills with this profession or build, solo or with a few friends.  Everything else is secondary window dressing.

I like this as an alternative approach.  But I think it risks making the mode too group focused for what I was aiming for, as you'd need to group up to survive.  My idea was more focussed on the exploration than the fighting (a solo player could also stealth/run away from enemies to survive), which was why I went with so many maps.  The idea was to recreate the feeling of the first time people play the game, but now as much more experienced players ready to face a much more dangerous world.

 

If the version you've gone with is more popular though I'd certainly enjoy that too.  Maybe with slightly bigger groups just to make it more meaningfully different from 10 person content?

[Opopanax.1803]

I love the idea of a harder open world setting.