I agree and disagree at the same time. I know. What? I do agree that having too many zones can spread out your player base quite a bit and make zones seem very sparse. However, staying confined in one spot can also make the game too stagnant. You can only enter the same building in the same city so many times before you start to think, "Why aren't there more areas for me to go do missions in?" Also, though, it makes it a pain in the butt to do some missions if you constantly have to travel from Zone to Zone in order to complete them. Perhaps the answer lies in trying to find a balance between how many zones everybody feels is a good amount of zones to have that doesn't stretch the players too thin.

I'm torn also. New zones were/are way up at the top of my list of things I want to see in MMO updates, and I loved all the Praetorian zones. However, you're right that the newest zones ended up looking like ghost towns (ha ha, no pun intended re: Night Ward) and that was not good.

I don't know how an MMO developer solves this problem. While it's not good to have empty zones, I'd find a MMO that doesn't expand its map to feel stagnant.

Anyone know of an MMO out there that has found the sweet spot to balance these issues?

Guild Wars 2 had some interesting ideas for this problem. First, you could not outlevel a zone. If a max level character went into a low level zone, his level was adjusted and all his attributes scaled down. While it does not work perfectly (the maxed out character would still be much more powerful, compared to a character within the level range of the zone), it ensures that the monsters you fight could actually hurt you and thus rewardet xp and loot when killed. And there was always some event nearby you could participate in.

Second, there were the daily quests for which you had to sometimes do events in a certain region, or kill enemies there. Most of the time that did not take long but often I found myself in the middle of an event chain, so I stayed a bit longer to finish that. And then there was another fun event, and another...

In City of Heroes, we sometimes had mobs that did not have a level at all, like giant monsters and those mobs that spawned during the big events in praetoria. They were equally tough for everyone, everyone could participate, regardless of level. I loved it and felt every mob in the open world should have been like this. That way every zone would stay interesting, challenging and rewarding.

Lutan wrote:

In City of Heroes, we sometimes had mobs that did not have a level at all, like giant monsters and those mobs that spawned during the big events in praetoria. They were equally tough for everyone, everyone could participate, regardless of level. I loved it and felt every mob in the open world should have been like this. That way every zone would stay interesting, challenging and rewarding.

I have a concern. Would removing the level range and making every enemy +2 just make it Dull / Bland after a while?
I'm a believer in the Roller Coaster Approach, not Always... but Depends, with a handful of short'ish Highs, and mostly long'ish Lows.

I would rather I, or teammates, think twice before attacking an enemy, purples for one.
This makes it feel like its more realistic, that the world goes by the same principles as our world, if you train at a sport for years, you experience is much greater, so you can use that gained experience to best your opponent. In CoH/V that past experience was the Levels.

RottenLuck wrote:

I agree with you. Remember the Level kind of made it fit a more Superhero idea. Superman for example would be major high level and those street thugs yanking women's purses wouldn't even tickle. Where say a Robin might be hurt (or killed) from time to time even when trained by the best MA fighter of the DC universe.

Doesnt Champions Online force your ubber High leveled toon to have to hit a very low level street thug more than Once to defeat them? That would piss me off! >:( How would my Stalker change if CoH/V did that?

I loved all of the zones. I miss Cimerora, The Shadow Shard, and Nightward the most.

I think a big part of the problem was that Incarnate content was focused in a very limited number of areas and zones had level caps/minimums that made them have a very limited span of usefulness.

The less area-limited and level-specific we can make all content, the better. There may be a practical limit as to how decentralized and level-nonspecific content can be, but I'd think the less content is tied to certain areas or levels the better.

TERRA VOLTA that was it I had to look it up.

TheMightyPaladin wrote:

I was always alone when I went to terra volta or boomtown, I never saw another player there at the same time as me. Of course I already mentioned that I didn't spend much time in either place and when I asked my friends to go there with me they said "nobody goes there".

Why TV didnt have as many people?
- IP was sooooo long with the TV gate being Very far from the Tram.
- TV had the Gate as the only way to access it (no Tram).
- Not allot of Contacts had Missions for you in TV. (Respec TF and one or two other contacts, not much.)
- Maybe Paragon Devs had some at the beginning, but people complained it was too far?
- etc.. insert why you think TV was a ghost zone.

Praetoria was a huge letdown for me too.

Robopez said, "Sure! Add more stories, add more things to do. The game will need SOME new areas after launch, I don't doubt that. But this design philosophy of perpetually awing the players with new areas to explore I just don't agree with as a tenable goal."

I disagree with this one statement. IMHO and experience, CoT could add fresh design content through interiors of buildings and such. Possibly procedural. Most likely with a smaller, zonish realigning of districts already created, via a new story arc, or event.

Mission Maps, as would mentioned earlier, would be another way to add fresh content.

I think they harm the game by making it feel like a ghost town wherever you go and thus the game feels empty, like there's nobody playing it. I think people tend to feel like they're playing the wrong game when that happens.

I don't know how to solve that problem though. I think I like new zones, as long as you can actually access them. Making a new zone a thing you have to buy an expansion box for causes division of whatever population is on at any given time, and that's not the greatest thing for the community at large, but you gotta monetize new stuff somehow. Maybe let everyone access the new outdoor open world zones but don't let them do missions from contacts there unless they pay somehow (sub, microsub, one-time unlock, etc). MY ideas with regards to monetiztion have met with some resistance in other threads which used to exist, so I won't expand on that at all here.

Izzy wrote:

Empyrean wrote:
I'm really asking. I think I'm missing some aspect of this argument. Exactly how do relatively low population zones--even lots of them--harm the game?

Time is Money? :)

True, but I meant if they were going to make big, elaborate maps anyway, why make them mission maps with limited access rather than open maps? Same amount of work for less player access.

But, Radiac, your post really helped. I understand the argument AND why I didn't get it now--I don't think like a gamer.

I'm really an old comic book fan at heart more than a gamer, even though I did play lots of D&D growing up. When I hit an empty zone--especially an other-dimension/alternate reality one like the Shard or Praetoria or Nightward--I feel like the Fantastic Four going to the Negative Zone or Superman or Green Lantern heading out to deep space, and this really makes me feel HEROIC rather than making me think, "huh. Noone's around, this game must suck."

And I hear people often say "well, if you like solo play (or, in this case, exploring empty zones), why are you even playing an MMORPG?" Well, because I could Oro-hop one zone over and do a PUG any time I wanted, so, for me, it's the best of both worlds.

Anywho, I understand the argument now, and while I don't agree with it when it comes to MY enjoyment of a game, if lots of open zones really will harm the survival of CoT as a game because it will give most gamers a negative perception, then I'll take one for the team :).

Many of the examples brought up like Boomtown and Terra Volta were problematic because of the original design methodology applied to the hazard zones. They were suppossed to be set up for more difficult play from the encounter size difficulty to navigation. The problem was, there really weren't any reasons to go these zones. Over time the dev team wizened up and started to redesign the zones, giving them their own unique story paths.

I like the idea of doing things that way, different zones covering the same levels of other zones, each with their own unqiue story paths, possibly intersecting with one another at key points. This way there isn't just one set of zones to level through, but (hopefully) two or several. What Radiac mentioned with specific events for those locations would also be a reason to draw players there. Proper placement of player hubs between these zones and you have a common gathering place designed naturally into the game world where players meet up, and can spread out from.

Plexius wrote:

Izzy wrote:
- etc.. insert why you think TV was a ghost zone.

Imminent nuclear meltdowns happening 'round-the-clock due to constant assault from anarchists and aliens? :P

Heh.. I was reading and waiting to see you mention Sky Raiders somewhere. ;)

I love the discussion that's happening now and I love Tannim and Radiac's ideas about having 1-50 content in, ideally, all zones. This gave me an idea.

What if there were multiple all-the-way-from-1-to-50 primary story arcs, each of which included all, or at least many, of the villian/hero groups in the game, and different "phases" of each arc took place in all, or at least many, of the zones, kind of like some of the Taskforces did.

So, now there are multiple primary arcs from 1 to 50 that travel through all or most of the zones and include all or most of the story so that a) There's not just one primary path to 50 but many for altaholics, and b) you end up in many or all of the zones at some point and meet many or all of the lore groups.

And of course you wouldn't have to stay locked into any of these arcs any more than you had to stay locked in or finish an arc in CoH--so you could focus on one or skip around as you wanted, leading to even more variety in the number of potential paths to 50.

The key would be that all, or at least most, zones would have active 1-50 content. And most of it would be "indoor' and instanced, so you wouldn't have the "level 50 ambush flattening a level 5" problem.

Now, I haven't sat down and seriously thought this through yet, and even if I did, I'm not a developer and may be missing some obvious stuff, but I think there's at least some potential in this idea.

Whatcha think?

That was my thought as well, in order to keep zones relevant: they need offer something that goes beyond a simple level range. Without this any given zone becomes a mere waypoint along the leveling path. While this will undoubtedly be less of a concern for CoT with the anticipated degree of alting, it is still a concern that ought to be addressed to some degree.

Some manner of utility or additional content at a different/higher level range are the most obvious answers. As I've argued before, I believe it can be exciting for newer players to see higher level characters zooming about and I think it's nice to be able to return to "older" zones for missions. However, as Radiac has pointed out, most of this impact will be lost if all that there is to see is a higher level character going through a door. Some non-instanced content is necessary to provide the city with a sense of life and action. That, in turn, leads to the challenge of integrating higher level content into a zone primarily designed for lower level ranges.

I very much +1 Darth's post and most of what is being said in general, but I don't understand or quite agree with those who seem a bit down on instancing. The innovative use of instancing was a HUGE part of what made CoH so great, not one of it's problems.

Of course everything shouldn't be instanced, and more and better non-instanced options--as well as better ways of handling instanced options--would be a great step forward, but it would be odd for a spiritual successor to CoH to intentionally move away from instancing as a core mechanic.

Instancing isn't something that was broken or that didn't work in CoH--it was one of it's most distinctive and heralded successes.

I've said on other threads that I think it would improve the game greatly if we could do without levels.
Now other people are pointing out that level specific material is bad for the game.
Just sayin ya know.

I used to think no levels would be the holy grail, and then I played The Secret World, which has no levels, and, guess what? Content still has different levels of difficulty.

Content still has levels of difficulty, they're just unmarked and nebulous. Uncreated, unintentional, invisible, confusing levels. All it does is make it harder to gauge things because levels don't theoretically exist so you don't know exactly what's what.

Just because you stop using hours, there doesn't stop being time--you just have less of a sense of what time it is. Time passes whether you have hours to mark the passage--it's just without hours it's harder to time anything precisely or meet anyone on time.

So, new players in TSW are always asking "how do I know when I'll be able to go to this or that area and handle it", and the answer is that people started using another metric in lieu of an intentional one--you weapon's "quality level" or QL. So, that became the measure of your "level". A much less precise measure than if they just had levels.

So, to recap, I thought no levels would be awesome and amazing. I was wrong. In lieu of levels, content still has different, well, levels, of difficulty, they just aren't marked or measured. And so, in lieu of an intentional measurement, people will come up with one because, as humans, that's what we do. We measure stuff so we know what's going on.

Either mark/label content difficulty with "levels", or people will come up with some kind of system on their own to keep track of it, and that system will probably be less well-thought-out and useful.

And obviously the answer can't be "well then, make all content the same difficulty".

Actually you could just gain new abilities without getting increases to combat abilities or health and energy unless the new abilities you pick improve them.
Think about it. Damage is often scaled by level so without levels you don't get monster damage except on abilities that should cause it, and they have a long cool down. pluss without levels boosting your health, you don't need to cause monster damage with every attack.
Now a character with more abilities will be more versatile and powerful but not so much that he has to be segregated from everyone else. we would all still see progress but it wouldn't make us unable to team up with fresh players.

Nadira wrote:

A specific reason to have zones that is only essential really during launch month and after that works against the game, is spreading out the influx of new players. The first week, when ten or twenty thousand players flood the game you must spread them out over a larger amount of real estate. Just to keep them from competing too fiercely for login handling and in game resources (if 200 players in the game are all hunting for the same three 'purple mushrooms' there is going to be a lot of frustration. Having twenty starter zones means that only 10 players will be competing for the same quest item, and you can keep the spawn rate and the waiting time to a reasonable minimum).

This is the only part of your Wall of Text[sup]tm[/sup] that I didn't find relevant. Not that the phenomenon of new-release swamping isn't a potential issue, as anyone who managed to log onto World of Warcrack immediately after they released their most recent expansion can attest, but that more zones is not the best solution for this problem. With a megaserver splitting PCs off into shards (copies of the same zone) like CO does and like CoT will (see [url=https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/missingworldsmedia/the-phoenix-project-city-of-titans/posts/619424]Kickstarter Update # 6[/url], buried in the paragraph on Victory Beach ^_^, and I haven't heard anything changing this plan) as long as you have a server that is mega enough to handle the load, you split off shards as needed. Then when the PCs move on to new zone(s), the shards are removed until the population per shard is back up to a comfortable amount. There's a [url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/servers-0]thread on this subject[/url], but it hasn't been added to since before the Kickstarter ended.

Empyrean wrote:

Just had a conversation with my wife about how much we wish we could play City of Heroes tonight.
We tried Champions. We tried The Secret World. We tried DCUO. We just... don't want to play them. We WANT to want to play them. But we don't.
She mentioned how much time she spent in Cimerora and how much she loved it. I said "yeah, or the Shadow Shard", and she said, "yeah, I went there with you but it wasn't my thing." But, man, I spent a LOT of time in the Shadow Shard. And we BOTH love Nightward.
So, I have to say meaning no offense but in direct opposition to the OP, please, Missing Worlds Media:
More content, more content, more content.

Doesnt Valiance Online have its starting zone map setup to resemble Atlas Park? :P

A friend of mine (who is a programmer) once told me that the "server lag" problem has, in theory, been solved once and for all. Apparently Guild Wars or QW2 is using some data handling system similar to how Bit Torrent works and so in this way the users draw data they need not just from the central server but from each other as well. Every player online becomes a partial host of sorts. Apparently this causes the lag to actually decrease as population increases. I'm not a programmer, so I have no idea if this system is priotected by patents or not, etc. but it was a interesting discussion nonetheless.

In any event, to help with the graphics card issues, I think the "Atlas Park 2, 3, 4, 5, ... etc) thing should do the trick, right?

I'm "pro" levels, I would keep them. That said, maybe all open world mobs that spawn ought to be level-normalized like the giant monsters were in CoX. I'm not sure how that would work, but it's a thought.

islandtrevor72 wrote:

I should also say these events or changes should be slightly more involved than the perpetually burning building in CoH or Rikti attacks.....they should be a small limited arc or set of arcs that can be revisited in whatever flashback system CoT has.

Interestingy, this is another innovation we can reasonably crib from Guild Wars 2. They have a dynamic event system, where succeeding at an event will produce the next one in the chain, or an event following an event's failure in order to contain the fallout. They'd theoretically become a bit stale, as it'd be the same thing happening more than once, but it'd still be interesting to see.

The key point that I think Radiac is aiming for is that as Developers and as Players, you really don't want to be dealing with "NEW" locations until the original/existing locations in the game are (in effect) [b]saturated[/b] with content and no longer have "room" for anything else to go on there. An explicit consequence of wanting to set things up that was is the implicit understanding of Ongoing Continuous Development for regions of the city ... meaning that the content for zones is deliberately designed to be Extensible, rather than Contained.

To be clearer about what I'm referring to here ... King's Row had a specific set of Missions and Story Arcs assigned to it ... which never really got augmented or expanded upon. Likewise, the Praetorian Zones all had their respective Loyalist and Resistance stories ... but then never had anything else ever added beyond those stories in their zones. In other words, existing Zones hardly ever (if ever) got anything "New" done in them, encouraging Players to return to them.

The result was always a sort of "Up and Out" kind of dynamic, in which "New" content only ever got added to "New" areas of the game ... while all of the "Old" areas got left to rot.

So I'd certainly prefer it if the Content Team devised and implemented content for regions of the City of Titans with the explicit understanding that whatever they produce is not (and indeed, CAN'T be) the "whole" story for ever and ever for various regions of the city. I'd prefer it if New Content could be added ANYWHERE in the city, at any time, without needing a "revamp" an entire zone in order to justify the addition. I'd appreciate it if the writing for the Story Arcs wasn't so tightly bound as to assume that once you've finished the story arcs that a zone launches with that there will never be any new story arcs written for that area.

In other words, content creation shouldn't "hermetically seal" zones in ways that prevent future developments within them.

Empyrean wrote:

I see your point. Zones do have a diminishing rate of return for effort once you have enough, and after that putting energy into the other things you mentioned would be a better use of dev time.
I just loves me lots of zones to explore and kick around in :P.

Indeed - and having multiple zones in the same level range helped alleviate the repetitiveness of the game for all us Alt-aholics out there. I liked the variety. The issue is getting enough content to fill those zones.

Thankfully the CoT devs are starting small and building out from there - they have definite plans on expanding the city after release. As long as there is a healthy and expanding amount of content for characters of all levels, and in a variety of locales (old and new), people should stay interested.

Content (zones and missions) and character generator stuff (powers, costumes, animations, etc) are gong to be what keep people playing the game for years. I don't expect a newborn CoT to have the same breadth of content that CoH had after 8 years, but after the technical hurdles of getting the game to work, those two things are probably going to be priority.

Like many, I agree to a certain extent. Many of the classic zones had very little traffic and then we got new zones. Personally, I would have moved the TFs and other missions to other zones and closed down Boomtown and a couple of others. Too many of the zones were too similar and way too many missions were the same thing with a different level cap.

I can see (for example) a Downtown zone with tall buildings and lots of civilians, then several other city zones with shorter buildings and more moving cars, each with a different flavor (like Industrial or whatever). Then you have a waterfront, an island, something underwater, a moon base etc.

There's only so much you can do with a city before it starts to all look the same. I see no reason why there shouldn't be more zones, each easily defined from the others.

Cinnder wrote:

I'm torn also. New zones were/are way up at the top of my list of things I want to see in MMO updates, and I loved all the Praetorian zones. However, you're right that the newest zones ended up looking like ghost towns (ha ha, no pun intended re: Night Ward) and that was not good.
I don't know how an MMO developer solves this problem. While it's not good to have empty zones, I'd find a MMO that doesn't expand its map to feel stagnant.
Anyone know of an MMO out there that has found the sweet spot to balance these issues?

FFXIV has done a decent job of it.

Gangrel wrote:

Brand X wrote:
Cinnder wrote:
I'm torn also. New zones were/are way up at the top of my list of things I want to see in MMO updates, and I loved all the Praetorian zones. However, you're right that the newest zones ended up looking like ghost towns (ha ha, no pun intended re: Night Ward) and that was not good.
I don't know how an MMO developer solves this problem. While it's not good to have empty zones, I'd find a MMO that doesn't expand its map to feel stagnant.
Anyone know of an MMO out there that has found the sweet spot to balance these issues?

FFXIV has done a decent job of it.

Guild Wars 2 as well with their dailies. Even though the dailies are not necessarily tied to a zone, for the public event related dailies, players will go to where they are easiest... and sometimes that is indeed in the low level zones.
*edit* Its worth noting that I typically ran my tip missions in CoX in Atlas Park, because the size of the zone was just right for quickly speeding to and from each mission. Steel Canyon (IIRC) would have been better, but it had a few mission entrances that always threw me for a loop as to how to get to them ie the underground ones that had no obvious way to get to them.
Of course, this is where personal preference comes in.
I sometimes run the challenges in low level zones in Wildstar, even though I am level capped because they are mindless fun, and I still get *Some* reward out of doing them (those sweet sweet runic modules that I need to upgrade my level capped loot)

CoH's problem was it kinda lacked the incentive for higher levels to help lower levels.

FFXIV gives an incentive.

Has WS changed? I haven't played it since the third month of release and having gotten to 50, I recall the dailies being in high level zones. Though I'm not sure I consider it a good example for CoT to follow, because it locked so much behind content that many couldn't get into.

Gangrel wrote:

Brand X wrote:
Gangrel wrote:
Brand X wrote:
Cinnder wrote:
I'm torn also. New zones were/are way up at the top of my list of things I want to see in MMO updates, and I loved all the Praetorian zones. However, you're right that the newest zones ended up looking like ghost towns (ha ha, no pun intended re: Night Ward) and that was not good.
I don't know how an MMO developer solves this problem. While it's not good to have empty zones, I'd find a MMO that doesn't expand its map to feel stagnant.
Anyone know of an MMO out there that has found the sweet spot to balance these issues?

FFXIV has done a decent job of it.

Guild Wars 2 as well with their dailies. Even though the dailies are not necessarily tied to a zone, for the public event related dailies, players will go to where they are easiest... and sometimes that is indeed in the low level zones.
*edit* Its worth noting that I typically ran my tip missions in CoX in Atlas Park, because the size of the zone was just right for quickly speeding to and from each mission. Steel Canyon (IIRC) would have been better, but it had a few mission entrances that always threw me for a loop as to how to get to them ie the underground ones that had no obvious way to get to them.
Of course, this is where personal preference comes in.
I sometimes run the challenges in low level zones in Wildstar, even though I am level capped because they are mindless fun, and I still get *Some* reward out of doing them (those sweet sweet runic modules that I need to upgrade my level capped loot)

CoH's problem was it kinda lacked the incentive for higher levels to help lower levels.
FFXIV gives an incentive.
Has WS changed? I haven't played it since the third month of release and having gotten to 50, I recall the dailies being in high level zones. Though I'm not sure I consider it a good example for CoT to follow, because it locked so much behind content that many couldn't get into.

You are indeed correct in that the dailies are in high level zones. Although as I said, players are not penalised for doing content in the lower zones (actually going for zone completion is valid for the rep, and the challenges are quick and easy for a chance of getting the runic modules)
If you are referring to the 2 raids, which required (admittedly) quite a long quest chain (one step was getting to exalted with the main faction... doing the dailies and completing zones fully helped out on that part). Then yes, there was "content locked" away. But that was the only part that actually was.
2 raids.
Nothing else at all.
And CoX had the Magisterium iTrial which had the requirement of Lore and Destiny unlocked to get into. Something that could take quite a while to do. Although with a good group (just like in Wildstar) you could probably knock it out in a few days....

CoH did have some high level content, but it never felt locked away as much as WS's end did. Not to mention trying to do the end content through a PuG, was filled with a lot of people more than willing to drop the team if top medal wasn't going to be achieved.

Well see, that all happened after I left. My anecdotal experience being different. Now mind you, when I say all this, I actually loved the game, but in the beginning it was very much a game of "Do you have a good group to play with"

Also, having an outfit locked behind content I couldn't get into because I lacked the group, I just gave up on it. :p