[Roq]

Anet:

"To help ensure there is always enough for everyone to do, our events dynamically scale, so the more players who show up and participate in the event, the more enemies show up to fight them. If a bunch of players leave the event, it will dynamically scale back down so it can be completed by the people who are still there playing it. This careful balance created by our dynamic scaling system helps ensure you have the best and most rewarding play experience."

But .... If event scaling works completely linearly and events scale immediately to encompass the number of players doing them, then Anet could not achieve their real goal:

"Events are designed to help bring the community together and to give everyone a shared sense of responsibility and camaraderie in the game world."

Essentially, naive scaling would mean that it would make absolutely no difference to a player, whether anyone else was around or not - so new players in an event might just be seen as an unnecessary irritation that would probably make the event last longer.

No doubt Anet have considered this, but there is no hint on what the solution to this might be...

[borovnica]

"Essentially, naive scaling would mean that it would make absolutely no difference to a player, whether anyone else was around or not - so new players in an event might just be seen as an unnecessary irritation that would probably make the event last longer."

If a new player come and participate in an event, and event scale to accommodate him/her, then by all means it won't last longer since his contributing to a cause.... Example (pure specualtion)
if 4 ppl can handle, let's say 20 centaurs in 5min, then why can't 5 ppl handle 25 cenataur in same time.. or 20 centaurs that got just a little bit buffed?

[tmakinen]

A related question is that will the scaling be immediate or delayed.

Let's say again that centaurs are attacking a fort, and there are some players defending it. The attack force is currently scaled to that player number. Now, let's say that a couple of adventurers happen to come on the spot while the event is on and decide to help the defenders, triggering event scaling.

• If the scaling is immediate, additional attack forces pop into existence around the fort which breaks the immersion.
  
• If the scaling is delayed, the necessary amount of new centaurs spawn in their base camp and head to the fort, eventually arriving there and thus scaling the event. That would appear more natural.

So, immediate scaling sounds bad. However, if the scaling is delayed, it will be possible to 'scale spike' an event just by joining it with a large group of players, then leaving as the scaling kicks in.

Edit: a big group would apparently also be able to grief any event just by not doing anything and thus causing the event to fail (the few players that actually play the event can't handle the upscaled opposition). On a smaller scale, if the scaling is linear then it is easier to do the event alone than with another player who is less skilled than you (adding the weak player doubles the opposition but not the strength of your side).

Edited by tmakinen, 31 May 2010 - 10:28 AM.

[Tr0n]

Roq said:

Essentially, naive scaling would mean that it would make absolutely no difference to a player, whether anyone else was around or not - so new players in an event might just be seen as an unnecessary irritation that would probably make the event last longer.

How do you know it will last longer? Maybe it will be over quicker.

They also mentioned that scaling will work on players (side-kick system that may level down players).

[borovnica]

"So, immediate scaling sounds bad. However, if the scaling is delayed, it will be possible to 'scale spike' an event just by joining it with a large group of players, then leaving as the scaling kicks in."

Anet did say that they are playing events and are trying to grief them so they can make them grief proof... Hopefully they will succeed in doing it :D

[Elk]

well you can either have this, or you can have it where you cant actually do anything in a n event because it's over too quickly due to lack of scaling. seriousely, the only problem with other players coming in would be if they came in and didn't contribute/sabotaged the event but Anet are trying to stop greiving other players :o?

[Generic Member]

You don't seem to realise that this is still a huge step up from running into another player being a bad thing as all they can probably do is steal your kills etc. in standard MMO's.

Worst case scenario the event looks more epic, and as long as there's no incentives for failing but incentives for winning I don't really understand why anyone would try to break things.

Then again, who does understand idiots.

I think events will scale up in increments though, I don't see every single additional player adding more enemies. Say, one amount of enemies for a single player, another for two, another for five, another for ten, etc.

In any case, all they need to do is make it so that griefing an event is difficult, and make it easy for participants to undo the grief. (See Wikipedia)

The way I see it, if a player stands around doing nothing in an event, they get killed, the participants have to work a little harder to kill the one extra centaur, and that player that just died is long gone to the nearest ressurection shrine or something, and even if it's not that far getting back will be effort.

In most cases, even on a linear scale of every player changes things, one persons tomfoolery isn't really going to hold back 5 or 10 other people that much. It will feel like a wasted effort for the griefer, so he'll stop bothering.

[Roq]

tmakinen said:

A related question is that will the scaling be immediate or delayed.

Let's say again that centaurs are attacking a fort, and there are some players defending it. The attack force is currently scaled to that player number. Now, let's say that a couple of adventurers happen to come on the spot while the event is on and decide to help the defenders, triggering event scaling.

• If the scaling is immediate, additional attack forces pop into existence around the fort which breaks the immersion.
  
• If the scaling is delayed, the necessary amount of new centaurs spawn in their base camp and head to the fort, eventually arriving there and thus scaling the event. That would appear more natural.

So, immediate scaling sounds bad. However, if the scaling is delayed, it will be possible to 'scale spike' an event just by joining it with a large group of players, then leaving as the scaling kicks in.

Edit: a big group would apparently also be able to grief any event just by not doing anything and thus causing the event to fail (the few players that actually play the event can't handle the upscaled opposition). On a smaller scale, if the scaling is linear then it is easier to do the event alone than with another player who is less skilled than you (adding the weak player doubles the opposition but not the strength of your side).

Nice post! This catches the gist of the problems and is probably why noone else has yet tried dynamic scaling in an MMO (as far as I can tell).

No doubt, Anet have something up their sleeve to handle these issues - But, if they do, that will be the truly revolutionary game mechanic, rather than dynamic scaling itself, which IMOP would be a very poor mechanism if restricted to way it has been presented so far.

[Roq]

Generic Member said:

You don't seem to realise that this is still a huge step up from running into another player being a bad thing as all they can probably do is steal your kills etc. in standard MMO's.

I don't agree. The whole point of playing together in MMOs is to establish bonds between players. In fact ANet has made it very clear that that is what they are intending to do with events.

[Rand al'Thor]

tmakinen said:

Edit: a big group would apparently also be able to grief any event just by not doing anything and thus causing the event to fail (the few players that actually play the event can't handle the upscaled opposition). On a smaller scale, if the scaling is linear then it is easier to do the event alone than with another player who is less skilled than you (adding the weak player doubles the opposition but not the strength of your side).

I'm positive that ANet will not scale the events to the number of people present but rather those participating.

Sure you can still try to do as bad as possible, but there really is no possible way to prevent that besides making events autowins, which a) is a bad thing, b) will not happen, as they said you can fail them :)

[Generic Member]

Roq said:

I don't agree. The whole point of playing together in MMOs is to establish bonds between players. In fact ANet has made it very clear that that is what they are intending to do with events.

"Yay, we just pushed back a huge centaur army" vs "WTF NOOB U STEAL MY KILL"

Which is more likely to make the players bond?

It's still the sort of thing that's always down to the individual players to interact with each other, if you ignore everyone unless they talk to you, that's your problem, it's not something that can be fixed with a game system. The most they can do is encourage comradery by making the players work toward a cause together naturally.

Also, way to ignore the rest of my post which addressed a lot of the actual issues surrounding it.

[zwei2stein]

AOEs multiply rather fast, so linear scales would make event easier in ideal case and no change at worst case.

Simple math: say, firestorm does 10 dps one one target. One ele casting on one centaur is 10DPS. Three Es casting on three centaurs are 90DPS, 8 Es vs. 8 centaurs is 640 dps (80 dps per E, 80 DPS on each centaur). In 8vs8 scenario, centaurs go down 8 times as fast while doing constant damage (which is going to be 1/8th of damage per E compared to what they would recevie when soloing).

Group of those 8 Es could theoretically handle 64 centaurs and be as challenged as if they each soloed one.

Extra spawns can easily be covered by AOEs, and since there are going to be shoot-through-static-field-to-get-shock-arrow synergies, each aditional player is going to bring benefits.

Similar to party-wide defences overload.

Simply, it is more likely that people are going to be like "please, come here and trigger bigger spawn."

[Generic Member]

What zwei2stein said.

It will be effort for one player to run in and try to mess things up as they'll probably get hunted down and killed if they do nothing to the cause, it will be easy for everyone else to undo the temporary increased enemy forces.

As for the issue of large groups of players organising to grief, that will take some serious organisation on their part. Effort > Reward.

[Roq]

Generic Member said:

"Yay, we just pushed back a huge centaur army" vs "WTF NOOB U STEAL MY KILL"

Which is more likely to make the players bond?

It's still the sort of thing that's always down to the individual players to interact with each other, if you ignore everyone unless they talk to you, that's your problem, it's not something that can be fixed with a game system. The most they can do is encourage comradery by making the players work toward a cause together naturally.

Also, way to ignore the rest of my post which addressed a lot of the actual issues surrounding it.

Players bond in traditional parties, because they need each other to complete some objective. They also actively seek out other players to help with content.

The kill stealing example is just one part of open world PvE and is a minor irritation. However, more importantly, MMOs such as WoW include content in open world PvE that is too difficult to complete alone at the level you encounter it. That's designed to encourage people to meet and work together. Anet *will* do something similar with events or the whole event system will be a failure.

[Roq]

zwei2stein said:

AOEs multiply rather fast, so linear scales would make event easier in ideal case and no change at worst case.

Simple math: say, firestorm does 10 dps one one target. One ele casting on one centaur is 10DPS. Three Es casting on three centaurs are 90DPS, 8 Es vs. 8 centaurs is 640 dps (80 dps per E, 80 DPS on each centaur). In 8vs8 scenario, centaurs go down 8 times as fast while doing constant damage (which is going to be 1/8th of damage per E compared to what they would recevie when soloing).

Group of those 8 Es could theoretically handle 64 centaurs and be as challenged as if they each soloed one.

Extra spawns can easily be covered by AOEs, and since there are going to be shoot-through-static-field-to-get-shock-arrow synergies, each aditional player is going to bring benefits.

Similar to party-wide defences overload.

Simply, it is more likely that people are going to be like "please, come here and trigger bigger spawn."

But what you are essentially saying here is that events won't scale linearly in difficulty with number of players, but that additional players will make them easier. That's precisely what I think Anet will have to do. It does mean though that it may be impossible or very very hard to solo some events, because if it isn't then additional players turning up will make the event too easy and there would still be little need to work together...

[Generic Member]

Roq said:

Players bond in traditional parties, because they need each other to complete some objective. They also actively seek out other players to help with content.

The kill stealing example is just one part of open world PvE and is a minor irritation. However, more importantly, MMOs such as WoW include content in open world PvE that is too difficult to complete alone at the level you encounter it. That's designed to encourage people to meet and work together. Anet *will* do something similar with events or the whole event system will be a failure.

I think it's kind of already been suggested what they will do - For example, attacking forces will have strongholds that you can optionally try to attack if you push their attackers back. I don't think that's the sort of thing they will let a single player be able to take down alone.

If a group of players prevent centaurs from destroying a village, they obviously care about the problem enough to have done that, so why not form group and root them at the source?

Also, they have said there will be group dungeons, even if what I just said doesn't hold true.

[Rand al'Thor]

True AoE might make things easier to kill, but remember: The enemy has it too O_O
They might not do as well as players but their Dps will surely increase as well as more players come to oppose them.

[Generic Member]

Rand al'Thor said:

True AoE might make things easier to kill, but remember: The enemy has it too O_O
They might not do as well as players but their Dps will surely increase as well as more players come to oppose them.

And that's where players will have to start to co-ordinate to survive.

[Vorsakan]

There is more at stake then win/fail too: everyone gets loot from a foe they participate in the defeat of - more foes = more opportunity for loot.
Likely karma works along the same lines; winning an event against a handful of foes is probably less lucrative than winning, drawing or even losing against a huge host of enemies.

Environmental weapons & objects are another big factor - we know there will be interactive war machines and mission equipment (e.g. buckets of water to extinguish burning fields/buildings).
Very likely there'll be a sweet spot of population for each such scenario; with too few players you'll be constrained to pure combat out of necessity, where-as with more players you'll be able to make the event overall easier by having folks around to operate the optional extras.

Edited by Vorsakan, 31 May 2010 - 11:13 AM.

[4thVariety]

The game does not have to scale according to the number of players, because as was pointed out, the number of players does not tell you much in terms of how many monsters to spawn.

The game would need to collect a lot of meta-data to determine the right amount of monsters. What are the combined levels of players, how much damage per second are they causing, how much healing power do they spread around? That sort of data could allow the game to spawn monsters according to the actual playing strength of the team.

If half of the people are just clipping their toe nails, then they can't grief the rest, since the game drops them from the spawn calculation. No extra damage, no extra healing -> no extra monsters. If players are bleeding edge pros, then they still get a challenge, because the game recognizes their fighting strength, even on new characters!

Short measurement intervals could also allow the monster AI to be more or less aggressive should teams drop off in their performance. People trying to grief, by starting to idle, would be countered by the AI removing pressure on the rest of the present players.

In short: imagine Valve's AI director for GW2 events. Sure, he has his bugs too, but he knows your accuracy, reaction time, etc. and plans for it accordingly.

[Roq]

Generic Member said:

I think it's kind of already been suggested what they will do - For example, attacking forces will have strongholds that you can optionally try to attack if you push their attackers back. I don't think that's the sort of thing they will let a single player be able to take down alone.

If a group of players prevent centaurs from destroying a village, they obviously care about the problem enough to have done that, so why not form group and root them at the source?

Also, they have said there will be group dungeons, even if what I just said doesn't hold true.

I don't think they've said there will be "group" dungeons? I've only seen references to traditional party dungeons so far. It would be a nice idea if a group that has met up for an event could enter a dungeon instance together without forming a traditional party. Maybe certain events might lead to dungeon instances as optional adjuncts.

[Rand al'Thor]

Quote

What are the combined levels of players

isn't that adressed by the downscaling of players?


for the rest: i guess you could do that, but wouldnt that cause more laggs and stuff to collect and calculate? (i have no clue about these things)

However I don't think every event has to be perfectly scaled. Sometimes you cannot win, than you retreat to fight on another day, such is life.

[Amarinth]

Roq said:

The kill stealing example is just one part of open world PvE and is a minor irritation. However, more importantly, MMOs such as WoW include content in open world PvE that is too difficult to complete alone at the level you encounter it. That's designed to encourage people to meet and work together.

Actually in most MMO's only a handful of players ever bother looking for parties for regular open-world group quests, the rest just avoid them and use the generous amount of solo quests available to level up instead.

As I see it there's several reasons for that. First and foremost there's not enough incentive to do the group quest. The reward is usually not worth the time and effort it takes to find a PUG and complete the quest (not to mention frustration and repair bills, in the case of the worst PUGs). Secondly in the time it takes to complete the group quest it's usually more efficient to do several solo quests which overall give more XP and gold. Thirdly not all people can be at the keyboard 100% of the time and as a result they avoid quests that require their full attention for a minimum of x amount of time. And finally there's people who simply don't like grouping (either with people they don't know, or for trivial group quests, or just in general).

Some of these are flaws of the game, while others are things outside the developers' control, but all of them contribute to the system being far from perfect. While it may be an attempt to promote grouping in traditional MMO's and it may work partially, it's far from the definitive answer and I wouldn't tote it as 'the way it should be done'.

[Roq]

Vorsakan said:

There is more at stake then win/fail too: everyone gets loot from a foe they participate in the defeat of - more foes = more opportunity for loot.
Likely karma works along the same lines; winning an event against a handful of foes is probably less lucrative than winning, drawing or even losing against a huge host of enemies.

I'm not sure that we can assume that they will scale the rewards of an event according to the number of participants. Also loot won't necessarily scale either after all both 8/8 and 1/1 = 1 :).

[Fario]

Roq said:

I'm not sure that we can assume that they will scale the rewards of an event according to the number of participants. Also loot won't necessarily scale either after all both 8/8 and 1/1 = 1 :).

They've already said loot will scale a loong time ago. All paticipants as long as they've contributed at least a minimum amount will gain full loot and exp. It was before they even described the events.

[zwei2stein]

Roq said:

Players bond in traditional parties, because they need each other to complete some objective. They also actively seek out other players to help with content.

Which would be same as with events:

You meet with players at event and complete it. What next? If presense of other players makes events easier, you are going to tag along with group and follow them to other events. Maybe several events in row: there is no reason to abandon them too

That gives you opportunity to chat (especially if you are going to be waiting for event spawn for minute or two) and bond.

[Roq]

Amarinth said:

Actually in most MMO's only a handful of players ever bother looking for parties for regular open-world group quests, the rest just avoid them and use the generous amount of solo quests available to level up instead.

As I see it there's several reasons for that. First and foremost there's not enough incentive to do the group quest. The reward is usually not worth the time and effort it takes to find a PUG and complete the quest (not to mention frustration and repair bills, in the case of the worst PUGs). Secondly in the time it takes to complete the group quest it's usually more efficient to do several solo quests which overall give more XP and gold. Thirdly not all people can be at the keyboard 100% of the time and as a result they avoid quests that require their full attention for a minimum of x amount of time. And finally there's people who simply don't like grouping (either with people they don't know, or for trivial group quests, or just in general).

Some of these are flaws of the game, while others are things outside the developers' control, but all of them contribute to the system being far from perfect. While it may be an attempt to promote grouping in traditional MMO's and it may work partially, it's far from the definitive answer and I wouldn't tote it as 'the way it should be done'.

It's certainly true that the traditional questing system in MMOs is far from perfect and that the attempts to encourage grouping are flawed. But, they *do* work to some extent. You still occasionally see: "Need help with Hogger" requests in early Alliance questing in WoW, although with 85 levels now in WoW, its unlikely that there is any one around to help...

I think we all want the event system in GW2 to exceed what's possible with old style quests, but it certainly won't do that if it doesn't encourage player cooperation.

[Roq]

Fario said:

They've already said loot will scale a loong time ago. All paticipants as long as they've contributed at least a minimum amount will gain full loot and exp. It was before they even described the events.

Exactly, but what they haven't said is that "full loot and Exp" will scale. What they meant is that you won't get *less* loot and exp if you play together - as you do in other MMOs when someone comes along and swipes your kills.

[borovnica]

Roq said:

It's certainly true that the traditional questing system in MMOs is far from perfect and that the attempts to encourage grouping are flawed. But, they *do* work to some extent. You still occasionally see: "Need help with Hogger" requests in early Alliance questing in WoW, although with 85 levels now in WoW, its unlikely that there is any one around to help...

I think we all want the event system in GW2 to exceed what's possible with old style quests, but it certainly won't do that if it doesn't encourage player cooperation.

Every move Anet have made has been in direction of encouraging people to play together... Except personal story, but even there they offer a reward to helping someone with their story...
GW2 is build around player interacting with enviroment and with each other
first example is skill combo... Name one mmo game that have that kind a system...
second is events themselves... I don't know about you, but for me, it's much more fun to play with bunch of (unknown) people trying to defeat bandits attacking village.
Who knows maybe during those events you will find someone who is like you and after you start exploring the game together :D

Edited by borovnica, 31 May 2010 - 11:39 AM.

[Generic Member]

Roq said:

I don't think they've said there will be "group" dungeons? I've only seen references to traditional party dungeons so far.

That's what I meant. Group/Party, same thing.