Monday 23 June 2014

Poor Design: Competitive PvE

[Added to my MMO Design Folder.]

When 100 people need to kill 10 rats from a pool for 10 slowly respawning rats, there's a lot of standing around to do.

This has been a problem in MMOs since forever (it feels like it anyway), so I am surprised that developers still haven't learned their lesson to avoid making these kinds of quests. In Neverwinter Online's Dwarven Valley there are two daily quests that easily sample Competitve vs Cooperative PvE.

Some days you have to kill five Deathlock Wights in a specific area who are few in number (I've only ever found 4, one of which is far isolated and often bugged), come with a group of other tough undead and take around 5 minutes to respawn. It only counts for you (and your party) if you manage to take off around 50% of its health. As you can imagine there's a fair bit of competition to find and kill these ahead of the other players who have the same quest that day. Often it means camping around one of the cairns they spawn at with your strongest attack at the ready, with the x number of strangers around you who are doing the same - all of you hoping to out DPS the other to get one step closer to finishing this stupidly designed task.

The other quest involves people blessing the exact same cairns that those wights spawn at. However since the objective is static and freely available to all who pass by, its a very different experience on those days as everyone welcomes everyone else being there to work together in clearing the scum to reach the objectives faster. Indeed, on these days you would actually be actively looking for other roaming people to join up with instead of trying to out race and out perform them. Obviously I prefer this quest type over the other one as there is no *screwing over* being done or being had while doing so.

What about you? Do you feel the same? Or maybe you have a "good" example of competitive PvE?

6 comments:

  1. I completely agree. It never made sense for me to have to compete for mobs in a PVE game. I guess it made sense in the earlier days since it was one way of forcing people to group up instead of just organically help each other to kill stuff. Still, if there is one thing that I would change in every MMO if I had the power to do so would be to change that so there would never be anymore worrying about other players coming in to do the same quest!

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  2. I think older MMOs were just badly designed in that regard :) maybe it was a technical restriction, I can't imagine it had to do with incentivizing PVE competition. And I definitely love today's games for their shared nodes and shared kills, I've no wish to compete over named mobs with anyone (and the whole grouping thing is silly too if you only group up for the 2mins).

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    1. Exactly. Today's games have "shared nodes" and objectives, which is why it's very frustrating when a new module gets released with content that isn't designed that way. :P

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  3. Phasing was invented to deal with this very problem. Some MMOs also just let anyone in the area get credit for kills. But I think its a wider problem with PvE content design than anything else. In an MMO, there should be incentive to quest together. I think its backwards: instances should be for solo'ers while the world should belong to groups.

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    1. Definitely agree with the instances bit. Actually it might be worth getting rid of it again. :P

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