Tannim222 wrote:

This concern may be largely alleviated by being able to add new team members even when a TF has been started. Tracking progress to earn appropriate rewards such as badges (to avoid the work-around of adding players last minute to get the final badge and so forth).

I like this solution very much. I've never understood why once a TF/SF was locked in personnel could not be changed. Things in the real world often come up. A door bell rings, a child gets sick, an phone call arrives requiring immediate attention, a baby wakes up early from a nap, etc. Not everyone can sit in front of their computer screen for 2+ hours without taking some kind of break. It always seemed to me that locking in TF/SF members was a disastrous idea.

One of the great flaws of MMORPG design has always been this assumption that a "true gamer" could spend all day and night deeply interacting in the game while someone else brought them food and drink and emptied their refuse bucket. Why are so many games specifically designed to reward this concept? It boggles the mind.

If you put in enough milestones that the game tracks at the beginning, middle, and end of the TF, you can get a decent idea of how much of the TF each player was actually present and participating for. Also, just looking at measurable things like number of times powers were activated, number of different monsters targeted, which rooms/maps your toon actually entered, etc would help. It's more work to write code for all that, but it can do a decent job of approximating how much participation people really had and use that as a way to set reward levels and/or lock in badges earned, etc.

Greyhawk wrote:

One of the great flaws of MMORPG design has always been this assumption that a "true gamer" could spend all day and night deeply interacting in the game while someone else brought them food and drink and emptied their refuse bucket. Why are so many games specifically designed to reward this concept? It boggles the mind.

Can you point to something more specific since it is my experience it's much more common, at least today, that long play sessions are proportionally equally rewarding as short ones.

I think Tannim was closer to implying that a character might get a checkmark for each mission they complete in a TF. Check off all the missions and get the badge and some reward for getting all the missions complete. At which point the checkmarks reset. Therefore a player could in theory drop after mission 5 of 8 and rejoin another team at mission 3 complete the TF and get one "TF" reward. Along with whatever rewards a player might get for completing 10 TF missions, which would be awarded after each mission.

Bonus rewards might be available for completing all the missions in a single session you might get a "continuity badge" for completing the TF with all the same team members, and another badge for completing it within a certain time frame and bonus rewards for completing it under certain conditions. Similar to Oroborus. Heck if you really wanted to go nuts you could provide some challenges on a per mission basis, IE complete mission two of story arc "OMG" without pants. Complete mission one of TF "Y" in under 2 minutes. (similar to Vindictus)

GW2 does something similar in their achievements directory. Some achievements are very straight forward. "Complete this task." Others might require you to complete these 8 tasks. And still others might require you to possess these objects (at some point) and complete the task while standing on your head and performing "I'm a little teapot" and some are worse still (do it in a PVP and WVW zone). But each task that you complete towards a given achievement rewards a checkmark which never goes away (holiday achievements being the exception) so you don't have to do everything at once to get the final reward.

How about the fill-in characters can be Invited at any time, but they can only Join between instances/episodes?

Be Well!
Fireheart

I think the days of having 12-mission long, repetitive, chained-together missions type Task Forces are not really still with us anymore. I think that the content we do in MMO games now is generally designed to be all one big dungeon or one short event event or thing unto itself, with no real need to devote 4 hours of time to doing a chain of missions in series, only to fall apart at the 3-hour mark and go away sad.

It will more likely be a game of many, many small but scalable open-world events firing off periodically for anyone and everyone to join or leave at will, with other events that fire off or are triggered by other events being completed. Like the "Protect the armored van carrying the criminal mastermind to the jail in the next town over" event, when finished, will then spawn a "The town is under attack by crooks! Protect the town!" event at that new location, which will, at it's successful conclusion, spawn a world boss named "Crimelord" who you then have to defeat. Each event, the armored car convoy, the town attack, and the world boss, would all be there in the open world and anyone could swing in, participate in some of that, then leave at will, probably getting some amount of rewards for their participation when the evnet finishes, assuming they're still in that zone (if there are zones), even if they're long gone by the time the event is over. Then there would likely be self-contained Trial type stuff that happens on it's own instance just for the team that attempts to start it. Those would be short enough that nobody who agrees to start it ought to have to leave before it's over, pass or fail.

Any long-term type stuff should probably be the stuff of personal missions that are soloable, at the right difficulty settings, and which anyone can join you and help with, but which have no huge rewards upon completion, except maybe for the individual who has the mission in their list of things to do. Missions and arcs, like from CoH, basically.

It seems unlikely to me that we'd ever have to do anything resembling the Dr. Quarterfield TF just to get one SO Enhancment or rare recipe or something at the end ever again.

The original idea behind TFs was that a group who played together frequently would take on a couple of missions every night and slowly work through the content over the course of a week. The devs never anticipated that players would try to do the whole thing in one sitting. That it took so long for them to adapt the content and release new content that better fit that most common play style is really their biggest failure with TFs. I think the goal should not be to rule out this type of content but but make it more flexible. In GW2 most of our guild logs in Sunday night for guild night but during the rest of the week only a portion of that guild logs in at any given time. I think that is a pretty common MO and TFs should be built to accommodate that.

In COH you were either on a TF or you were not. There were a lot of things a player could do when not on a TF, but those options were drastically limited when tied to a TF. I propose that in COT you should be able to do both. If your group of friends starts a TF, they are in it. If they only get through missions 1-3 of 8 on guild night, the team can log in at various times during the week and do other missions and join other groups. The TF progress bar is still there and they might not get the "speed bonus" but the next time everyone is logged in they can start the content again and do another few missions rinse and repeat till complete. This is more in line with the way TFs were originally made to be run but without the harsh restrictions on player activity.

Come to think of it, if there are soloable long-term stories to do, it might be good to give out one type of reward for the person doing the mission, and a different type for the helpers on the team who are not completing that mission for themselves. Then make some cool item or other be crafted requiring both types of those rewards, and like MORE of the "helper" ones maybe. That way the amount of cool items you can craft is limited by both your own mission completion, and by how many other people you helped. Like maybe you need one "Gold Brick" which drops at the end of your mission when completed, but you also need like 1-3 "Silver Bricks" which only drop when you help someone else complete their mission. Thus, people need to cooperate, and will be less greedy about whose mission they're doing.

On that note, I'm in favor of making everyone have to watch the movie cutscenes, personally. The only caveat is that there are a finite amount of "first times" one can do a mission, namely, one. That said, you could have a reset that occurs every so often (daily for some stuff, maybe less frequently for other stuff) such that someone can redo the same mission as the "Gold Brick guy" while others can then be "Silver Brick guys" as desired. Theoretically, if there's a fresh reset for the rewards, then 8 people could all do the same mission again as "Gold Brickers" or you could have one Gold and 7 Silvers, etc, you just can't get both from the same mission, maybe, or maybe you can, I don't know. It could also be more of a percentage chance than a hard rule. Small chance of getting both bricks, but reliably get silver when helping and gold when being the mission guy, etc.

Come to think of it, maybe we want to have a Badge for each content piece such that when you do the mission/Trial the first time you get a badge, and then when you do that same mission/TF like 100 times, you get a different badge.

Yeah, I just think that for the longer stuff, it helps to make it work, mechanically, such that you don't have to try to keep the same team together to do it over the course of a few days, if at all possible. Also, it's not good to force the people on the team to be locked into doing that one Task Force and nothing else (as an official mission) over that time period. The longer Dr Q. type stuff could and probably should be handled as a set of missions that one person has on their docket and that person can try to finish that content either solo or with the various teams they can manage to put together over several hours or days.

That said, I think we're talking about basic mission arcs now not Task Forces, which is to say I think the longer multi-mission stuff works better when handled not as a Task Force but as a mission arc. I would limit the usual Task Force rules (like CoX had) to shorter bits of content that one expects the full team to actually be able to finish once they've begun it, preferably within 90 minutes, 2 hours at most, and with a lot of quicker Trial type stuff that only takes like 20-30 min usually.