Contested Dungeon

Kander wrote:

Kander,
The problem with contested dungeons -- whether we talk about Blackburrow, Karnor's Castle or the Hole -- is that they lack the ability to keep the players' interest, for several reasons:

1. Experience in them is generally sub-par, especially when compared to soloing or grouping in instanced dungeons (The Hole was an exception until it was nerfed to hell).
2. Quests or other faction-based rewards are lackluster and
3. Loot drops are, generally, horrific when compared to loot from instances.

It is the same with all overland zones as well, which is why, after the initial launch of a zone with people rushing there to do quests (or level up, if the cap has been raised), most overland zones end up empty, with the exception of players passing through on their way somewhere else (less so these days with all the travel abilities available).
This situation will not be rectified, and any hard work put into creating more contested dungeons will ultimately be wasted unless you also create some sort of equalization between those and instances.
What might help?

1. Group xp gains while in overland / contested zones is increased by X% for every person in the group (i.e. X for 2 people, 2X for 3 people, etc) -- Perhaps tricky to code, as it would require this to only work in those zones and not instances, and also limited given all the abilities (LoN potions, SC potions, RaF mounts) we have of increasing XP gains, as well as the fact that it would mostly be relevant during level-cap increase expansions.
2. Loot incentives. Bluntly speaking, overland zone and contested dungeon loot should become at least as good as instance loot. Respawn timers and the fact that mobs are contested should more than make up for the fact that instances may (stress on "may"!) be more difficult to tackle. If necessary make overland / contested dungeon heroic mobs hard to solo or tag them as x2. Not saying you should populate the entire zone with heroic mobs, if ease-of-play is the target, but castrating it by filling it only with regular mobs, quest updates and loot that's not even worth selling to a vendor is a sure ticket to failure.
3. Non-loot incentives (or perhaps better described as alternative loot incentives) like special tradeskill materials that can be used to create powerfull items, of same or better quality as instance drops and can only be obtained in overland / contested zones by killing powerful creatures. Faction rewards that are actually worth a damn. Daily / weekly quests that are worth doing repeatedly.

Again, basically what you need is to give the same reasons for someone to want to group in the overland zones / contested dungeons as they do in the instances. Otherwise people will just stay in their guild halls until someone places a flag outside the dungeon and just go in for a quick run before returning to the guild hall. The zones will remain just as dead and empty and useless as they are today.

D.

TwistedFaith wrote:

It seems your stance is, this one zone made by one dev didn't work in the past, so clearly all zones made by all devs will also not work in the future! Kander, to my knowledge, made the Vasty Deep zones and the Vigilant zones (Not the contested hole as far as I know) and I think those were very enjoyable zones. Not that I know who is working on what in velious but if Kander is the dev working on this zone then I think there is reason to be optimistic. Obviously we wont know if it's successful until after it's been experienced but then again that is all the more reason to hold off on judgement until after you experience the thing. Who knows, you might be pleasantly surprised.

Also to add, I agree with what Mythal has stated in regards to incentive. I think probably the most major issue the hole faced was there wasn't enough reward in doing it most of the time. Solo, Instance quests, grinding lower level zones, etc were more efficient for leveling. There also wasn't much in terms of loot incentive. With one or two exceptions, most of the loot there was inferior to instanced stuff. Cogglius has a few choice drops for a few classes if you figured him out but he isn't enough to carry the zone by any means.
Looking at the hole, I'd say for a contested zone to be popular, it needs to have a way for people to meaningfully improve their characters that is either unique or at least very efficient. Mythal's suggestions are ones that probably would have made the hole a bit more popular if they were implemented and might be good to have for a future contested zone. Maybe it could have a few nice drops that even people who could do instances would still want to have, or it could be better than solo quests/instances for AA/XP. Or for a different approach, it could have some unique commodity that has enough value that people would want it, and this zone could be the only or the best place to acquire whatever that is. If a new contested zone had anything like that, or even multiple things like that then I think it would attract more people compared to one that didn't.

I'd love to see Crystal Caverns
I'm wondering if it's Kael or something like that. I think I'll just wait and see. Speculation gets boring afte everyone beats up the idea in every which way.

Trevalon wrote:

You mean like renaming New Amsterdam after some Brittish Duke because the Dutch no longer control it?

Kander wrote:

I thought someone let the name slip at the expainsion panel at fan faire...or am I wrong.

I guess I dont understand the reason for the need of secrecy for this, release dates I get and things like that because you would have every jackazz calling you out on it if you missed the release date by 5 min, but its not like knowing what the contested dungeon is going to be will cause any difference in how or why it will be is it? I do agree though it need to have largs spaces and plenty of room, I do hope CC and the other eq1 dubgeons are still all here but some would just be to small and closed in for lots of people. They also said in the expansion info realeased at FF, 1 huge contested dungeon, i do hope and the more i read think it will be Kael, I think itll be DN or Skyshrine for part 2.
I also think that with the hole, lots of people hated the exp nerfs but they also out leveled the zone also because the hole was the entry level dungeon, but because the level cap is not increasing with Velious this new contested dungeon should have alot longer lifespan for eveyone and last until the next level increase.

Kander wrote:

I for one thought the Hole was awesome. I think I've got a reasonable idea what the new contested instance could be but I can't get the name to roll out of my nugget. ROFL. My only suggestions with having a large contested instance is this:
1. The branches of the Hole were great, but the balancing of factions and the illusion form confused the heck out of people. If anything like that is done this time around, I'd make sure to fully explain it in a way that everyone will understand. I still know MANY many people who don't understand that they can max all of their factions with proper form and effort.
2. A little more sandbox. The Hole, while awesome, felt VERY linear in each branch for a contested zone.
3. The rewards were okay - I'd say a wee bit weak for the effort, but my views are skewed because I'm a raider. My biggest problem with the rewards though - the vendors didn't have much in the way of unique appearances, etc. I would have loved to find unique appearances, etc, as well as reasonable stat items in there. The Hole is an EPIC, epic zone in both EQlive and EQ2 - I feel the rewards should feel equally unique in appearance.
The difficulty of the Hole was great - I'd perhaps up the difficulty from the Hole a bit to make this new contested zone feel like a step up from it. Outside of that and the above things, I think things have been fabulous.
>.> I'm talking logically. Is this allowed?
VIVA LA FAE!

Winter wrote:

Nope, now knock it off and dont do it again, lol.
Seriously, if Kanders doing it, I am sure it will be good as, from my experience in RoK beta when he was doing JW, he does listen to input from players when he is allowed to by the rules he has to follow as a developer.

tarb wrote:

The reason for the secrecy is so they have stuff to anounce in the month or so leading upto game launch. If they anounce everything they know for a fact will be in game, now then it is very likly that come the build up to release they will only have "old news" to talk about, and that doesn't create any buzz at all. Also threads like this that are guess the name threads will also die causing interest to wain.

It's Kael Drakkal, they announced it in Fan Faire.

kela wrote:

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's where they said it was Kael.

TwistedFaith wrote:

Actually, I've been spending a lot of time in the Hole once I got to the point where I could solo a lot of it. When getting a non-PUG group is like pulling teeth it gives me something to do that isn't so falling over easy it's too boring too stand. Otherwise I'd be logging on for half an hour a day for the daily mark quest and then logging off until I eventually realized how pointless that is.
It's not crazy experience but the faction merchants are kinda nice (for non-raiders anyway) and experience from quests and killing are slowly getting my AAs to 250.
Naturally if the new contested area is just plain unsoloable it won't help and I'll most likely be back to whatever the Velious equivalent of the daily mark quest is and then logging off.

Just thinking out loud. If you want people to go into a contested dungeon, you need repeatable content that doesn't easily become trivial. Have some drops that come from that zone that you don't need to do other content, but is desirable.
For instance, have a crafting component for cure-all potions drop from the mobs in the zone. Nobody needs a cure potion that works on all non-curses, but lots of raiders WANT them. That alone would make this a heavly farmed zone.
Now throw 2 contested epics into the dungeon. The Avatar of Zek and the new King make good canidates. Just make sure they have their own wings and are the end of each wing. If you wanted to be nice, you could have some special mobs spawn in the entrance area to let people know the contested epic has spawned. Something like Arena Spectators or Pillgrims for the Avatar of Zek and Courtiers or Suplicants for the King.
It would be better to have something similar to EQ1's 3 faction war. If that was the case you could have all three sides having battles in Kael Drakal. The Coldain have a spy and tunnel network set up in the walls of the city. The dragons have effectively managed to sew seeds of disloyalty amongst the giants and managed to gain control over an entire section of the city. While some adventurers have made themselves known to the commoners, the true nobility will never recongize a non-giant as a true son of zek. As such, a nobel faction is set up that won't have adverse effects on even "loyal" adventuers if they kill them. Thus all factions can freely go after the King and his closest advisers as well as the Arena champions and the Avatar of Zek himself.

Cusashorn wrote:

Yeah, I saw that. In the video I was thining"Velketor's!" then I saw old Velk bound in ice in Kraytoc's. I hope he's merely imprisoned and not dead. Velketor was my favorite baddy in EQ1.

Personally I think exp and loot in contested zones should be better than instanced loot. Instanced loot is a daily guarantee, contested loot is not.

Contested is not truely contested unless it is on a pvp server.
other than that.. I would say Stromhold was a blast when pvp server was first launched. I still see people going there too so it must still have something to offer. I hope the new contested zones are not so dumbed down that we are soloing them after the first 3 weeks. I would like to see people having to work for the rewards as if they are a 6 person raid.

Kander wrote:

Shard of Growth

Hey.. Plane of Growth was pretty big in EQ1....