Quote:

What islandtrevor72 sez

That's too bad about TSW. I had high hopes for that game, at one point. Seemed like the closest I was going to get to a real World of Darkness feel in an RPG. I played it for a little bit in Beta - but honestly didn't like what I saw. Submitted a few reports, figured I'd back off and see where things went with release. By time I got a chance to play in the actual release, a few people I knew recommended spending my time elsewhere. Ah well...

As for the rest of it? Meh, not really worth wasting either of our time bantering back and forth on this one subject. I highly doubt either of us is going to sway the other's opinion - not if we haven't so far, at least!

Besides, Tannim's comments here, and elsewhere, have put most of my fears to rest. I'm comfortable in the belief that the end game product is going to be more than worthwhile.

Going back to the Magic analogy for a second, and I preface this by saying that no analogy is ever "perfect", but there are a myriad of different tournament formats within Magic. Sealed, Draft, Standard, Modern, Legacy, Vintage, Commander, etc. I don't hear any Magic players complain about tournaments saying things like "All Magic tournaments should have a Commander component to them, otherwise you're forcing players to play the game in a way that they don't like. I should be allowed to play magic the way I most prefer at all times and in all tournaments to the exclusion of formats I don't like in all cases. I need to play in EVERY tournament and play Commander in every tournament, because that's my format, otherwise you're trying to force me to do something I don't like by offering a Sealed tournament."

That doesn't happen. People who hate Sealed don't enter Sealed tournaments and they instead go looking for tournaments in formats they do like. Magic isn't requiring anybody to play Magic in a way they don't like, but they ARE providing different tournaments of different formats, and enforcing the rules specific to those formats, for the enjoyment of those who enjoy such.

Having a TF that's designed for 4-8 people and then offering it as "this is a 4-8 person story, you need 4-8 people to do this content", is not, to me, forcing anyone to do anything, it's offering a fun OPTION to those people who may be willing to form a 4-8 person team and do said content, whereas other people will go do other stuff that's designed and intended for their favorite play style. Assuming this "4-8 TF" actually has something in it that would really require at least 4 actual PCs, like levers, then you're not really DOING that TF when you do the "solo version" anyway. You're doing something else, to be honest about it. The end boss might look the same and it might be on the same map, but that's about it. Even if you think the levers are bu11sh1t and can be removed, I think you're doing the "lite" version of the TF anyway, or maybe some solo mission on the same map.

Also, what if somebody comes in and says "My preferred style is the 32-person league, all content should be doable by a 32-person league." That statement seems patently ridiculous to me, but there are things that could be scaled up to that size. One of the problems I have with that, is that the creator of the content may have had a certain team size or size range in mind when they wrote the story. Why do people think they can just demand that the author re-write the story to fit their needs instead of just respecting the author's original intentions and doing the story with the intended size team? As long as there are different TFs intended for different size teams, solo up to 32 person league and everything inbetween, I don't see why it's so important that people feel the need to insist on being able to do everything with just their preferred team size and no other. In the first place, there's absolutely no requirement placed on players that all players must do all content, and second, if a certain TF was written with a 4 person team in mind, I don't see any huge problem with offering it only to teams of 4+ people.

Going back to some of Tannim222's comments about rewards for soloing versus teaming, I would like to point out that some of the things that people who prefer solo play like about solo play is the freedom to do whatever you want without having to consider someone else's needs/wants in the process, the freedom to come and go as you please, the ability to just DO stuff without having to first form a team to to it (which can take a long time and be a lot of work, only to have the team fall apart half an hour later in some cases). So I fully understand the hardships of forming and maintaining a team, and for this reason I think team content ought to have better rewards for those who can actually do all that and finish the Task Force successfully. Pulling that off is definitely more work than just soloing the TF with the mobs reduced and the larger team size parts (i.e. "levers") eliminated, and I would expect more reward for having done that extra work, quite frankly.

I fully understand that some people don't have time to devote to that, or they have to play at weird times of day when nobody else is on, etc. But just handing those people better rewards for less work/time spent getting them is unfair to everyone else, so what you do for them you have to do for everyone else, then we end up in a world where you get ten HamiOs just for logging in once per day. I think this sort of "parity" will cause all players to actually play the game less. Better rewards and more of them ought to be the result of better play and more of it. The only recourse for the "I have no time for this game, but still want all the goodies" player should be to buy HamiOs with real money, or buy Stars with money and HamiOs with Stars off the Starmart, or better yet to convert bought Stars to IGC and use THAT to buy HamiOs off the auction house, thus putting that IGC into the pocket of the person who actually grinded for the HamiO in the first place, one hopes.

There are multiple points being brought up some of which are being convoluted with one another and some points being glossed over. I'll try to parse this out:

Radiac wrote:

Having a TF that's designed for 4-8 people and then offering it as "this is a 4-8 person story, you need 4-8 people to do this content", is not, to me, forcing anyone to do anything, it's offering a fun OPTION to those people who may be willing to form a 4-8 person team and do said content, whereas other people will go do other stuff that's designed and intended for their favorite play style. Assuming this "4-8 TF" actually has something in it that would really require at least 4 actual PCs, like levers, then you're not really DOING that TF when you do the "solo version" anyway. You're doing something else, to be honest about it. The end boss might look the same and it might be on the same map, but that's about it. Even if you think the levers are bu11sh1t and can be removed, I think you're doing the "lite" version of the TF anyway, or maybe some solo mission on the same map.

You're right in that if a task force dynamically generated objectives and obstacles by the team size including a team of one that the team of one is doing a "lighter version of the taskforce" [i]in comparision to[/i] having multiple players on the team.

Since this is a quantifitve increase it results in a qualitive increase of play, the solo player may be have access to the same rewards as a full team, but a full team will have greater rewards. It is that simple. As team size increases, the mission challgenges increase in difficulty. It can be far more difficult to say complete the "no deaths challenge" for a team of 1 compared to a team of 8. And since the objectives and obstacles dynamically adjust to the team size, the team needs to be involved at various stages of play, increasing maintaining the difficulty of completing a challenge. The more achievements attained, the greater the reward.

Radiac wrote:

Also, what if somebody comes in and says "My preferred style is the 32-person league, all content should be doable by a 32-person league." That statement seems patently ridiculous to me, but there are things that could be scaled up to that size. One of the problems I have with that, is that the creator of the content may have had a certain team size or size range in mind when they wrote the story. Why do people think they can just demand that the author re-write the story to fit their needs instead of just respecting the author's original intentions and doing the story with the intended size team? As long as there are different TFs intended for different size teams, solo up to 32 person league and everything inbetween, I don't see why it's so important that people feel the need to insist on being able to do everything with just their preferred team size and no other. In the first place, there's absolutely no requirement placed on players that all players must do all content, and second, if a certain TF was written with a 4 person team in mind, I don't see any huge problem with offering it only to teams of 4+ people.

I'm going on record here and saying there isn't necessarily anything wrong with designing content to a specific team size.

The difference lies in the scope of the game design of the game in question. Specifically, CoT. Now, we know from past examples in several games where required team size for content really only resulted in a minor barrierl. Players will want to challenge themselves in harder difficulty content. Our aim is to generate the content in a way that encourages the team without making it an artificial barrier. The solo player or 2 friends get to play, as to the full team of players get to play. Reference the above statements for qualitive and quantifive rewards.

I cited a very specific example pertaining to rewards and multi-team content: if the multi-team content provided rewards tied necessary for any form of character progression then the dev team will end up with a split player base between the haves and have nots.

A decision from that point needs to be made, continue to cater to the haves and continue creating content specific to that form of character progression and reward type requiring multiple teams or design additional content for the have nots to catch up to (eventually) the haves.

Now in lies a problem. Resources are limited on any dev team. And once you start down a path of character progression supplied by specific rewards connected to particular content design (multi-team raids), the tendency is to continue to design for that type of play. There isn't anything bad about that in of itself if and this is the key metric: the majority of your player base is involved in this type of content-based-character-progression.

Now if the majority of your player base isn't involved in this type of progression, but a size-able portion is, then you want to continue that development path, but you have to also guage where the rest of your player population is. If there is also a size-able portion of players who are at the barrier of progression where they can only progress through the multi-team raid content, but aren't you have to see what their play patterns are.

What will most likely be found is players who: don't play with teams often, player for shorter periods of time, or a combination of the two. If nothing is done to hook those players into continued progression, they will most likely leave the game. Again, these are players who are consistantly playing where they hit the barrier.

So, what then is a dev team to do? A good portion of their player base can't progress due to the way it plays? One solution is to split your resources: create content for the multi-team players and the non-multi team players. There is nothing wrong with this (reward metrics aside). Except that both groups of players do not see regular content updates due to constrained resources of the dev team.

Now take our dev team which is even smaller than most, on a budget that is beyond constrained. We have the tech to dynamically generate content based on team size. We can apply this to spawn size, objectives, and other obstacles. We can then attempt to see how multi-team content generates at a team of 1 and design the content in such a way that it scales proportionally.

This saves us in resources as we won't have to generate two separate paths of content. It is also possible that it may not scale up properly. That's why in my first example up thread I said possible to do, not probable. It is a qualitive difference in design at that point. Either way, it really isn't worth exhausting any further discussion toward multi-team content design beyond this because we are a loooooong way off from there. The direction we will move foward with when we are at that point will be dependant upon multiple factors which simply do not exist at this moment.