In-Game Dungeon Overlord AKA Player Built Dungeons :)

See, we in the RP community were kind of upset when we heard that you had to use avatars. Individually, when I first heard "player-made dungeon", I thought RP opportunities. Advancing story lines, acting the part of a group of adventurers or mercenaries/bounty hunters, that sort of thing.

But then I heard "avatars", and all my hopes for this were crushed.

If you are worried about players overpowering the NPC's that are usable for the Dungeons, why not make them tougher and more capable?
Let them use tactics such as the tanks holding aggro while the blasters and scouts ranged (Assasins sneak up on Player Healers) and their healers Buffing and healing as needed.
Ranged attacks with the Ranged people rooted in areas hard to melee against.

Zabjade wrote:

That's all well and good and something I'd love to see implemented but it wouldn't solve the problem. The fact of the matter is that a raid geared character can reasonably solo content that lesser geared characters may find challenging to do in a group. The ability to do DPS increases ten-fold when you progress from DoV quested gear to DoV Raid Gear. The problem is not that all players will overpower the content, it is that some will. And if you rebalance mobs to be a challenge for people with Ry'Gorr or Drunder armor you make it impossible for characters in quested and PQ gear. By balancing the mobs for quested or PQ gear you make the zone completely trivial (and thus easy loot for no effort) for Ry'Gorr or Drunder (or, heaven forfend, raid) geared characters.
Fine, we may say. Let the dungeon builders deal with the problem, allow them the ability to set mob HP and DPS within, say certain boundaries, or add the ability to group mobs together as you see fit to increase difficulty. But that still makes it nigh impossible to give an objective measurement of difficulty. In some ways I'm not sure I see what the problem is with this, as this is an issue in developer made content as much as any prospective player made stuff. The risk vs reward of developer made content is set to a lowest common denominator approach; they decide the worst gear needed to complete the zone and then make the reward proportional to that, there's no reason why DYOD cannot use the same approach.
Well, there is a reason; it reduces the target audience for every zone to a small gear demographic and would likely damn the system to failure. Developer made content is spread across the gear spectrum while custom content using a system like this would all be aimed at one narrow gear band.
And that's the issue, unless SOE go all out with player character use in custom dungeons then it simply wont work. They have to create complex tools for altering mob difficulty, placing and behaviour. They have to add several difficulty calculation scripts to account for different gear levels, or tools to allow dungeon builders to tweak mob difficulty scaling. They might have to add in some way of approximating player ability based not just on level but on average gear quality as well.
With all that in it would be an amazing, groundbreaking, system. But it's an awful lot of work for what is, at the moment, a largely exploratory product. Let them prove the concept of the internal combustion engine before you expect them to produce an F1 car.

Circadian@Unrest_old wrote:

The arena argument doesn't work, sorry. You can also play arenas using your normal characters and people don't do that anymore either. There are several other reasons why arena's didn't work, but that's a discussion for another thread. If it were simply because of the avatar system, people would still be playing them with their own characters, but they aren't.
If the Dungeon Builder system is fun (which we think it will be), people will play it because of the variety and challenge that they should provide. We also hope to introduce some fun and exciting abilities with the avatar system that we just can't add to existing classes at this point in the game.
Lot's of you are going to have varying opinions about it, and that's fine, but try to keep an open mind about it until you've had a chance to try them.

Rothgar wrote:

You seem to be conveniently sidestepping the battlegrounds example though Rothgar, which I suspect is somewhat pertinent. It seems to me that the build your own dungeon thing is just a gimmick to sell the next expansion, just as battlegrounds were a gimmick last year.

Just assuming there are people who enjoy the build your own dungeon thing a year after they go live, what happens when some GU makes them all bugged to hell and drives most people away? Presumably you will all be too busy working on stuff for the (next) upcoming expansion and wont have time to fix it?

I really hope we get to use our arena avatars, and more avatars are made that work in both systems. In addition to this statement I would like you to make sure kills by the avatars count for the person's achievements in game as well as on the leader boards.

Rothgar wrote:

Deal. Now can you do the same and consider letting the dungeon designer choose whether the dungeon is for characters or avatars?
Is the primary issue of doing this people basically exploiting the system? They come in with overpowered characters and do an easy dungeon and farm tokens like mad? It sounds like you already plan on having some sort of difficulty rating. If it's too short, or too easy, no tokens.
If the issue is the leaderboard, I think people are smart enough to know that there is a good chance that it will be filled with the high end raiders. Even so, that will give the high end raiders something to compete against each other with when they aren't raiding.

Rothgar wrote:

Just have Xelgad design the avatars to be like completely new classes that don't fall into the tank/DPS/healer catagories, and I'll probably have fun with them. Two full hotbars including a self heal or two, but no targeted heals, ect.
Unfortunately, while I enjoy clicking buttons, most people play the game to progress their characters and get uberer, so unless the rewards are on par with or better than easy mode raid gear (since that's the new baseline gear in DoV), few people will play them for very long.

Greg,
The BYOD idea is fantastic. Forcing players to use avatars instead of their own characters is where my excitement fizzles.
This idea is dead on arrival. You'll have people checking it out in the first few weeks, then it will be a ghost town.
Please, please, please reconsider. If you cannot get this system to work with our main characters, just scrap the idea and implement something else.

Rothgar wrote:

That's just it...we don't want to try them. Most players don't want to play some sort of avatar besides the one they have been working on for possibly years. People WANT to play their characters, and honestly...no matter what players say, we won't be heard.

steelbadger wrote:

Rothgar,
You're one of my favorite devs here, directly because of your willingness to respond and engage. Much appreciated. That said---

How about this?

Have a tickybox (perhaps even hidden behind an Advanced Options wall in the design screen) that allows people to take on dungeons as their own characters, with the explicity stated caveat (for players and designers both) that there's absolutely no reward for doing so-- no credit, tokens, leaderboard standing, etc. Just pure fun and so on.

Why would you do this? Data.

This is the kind of thing that is absolutely the future of multiplayer online gaming, and I think folks there at SoE know it. Smokejumper was eloquent in his ode to the pure joy of area creation back in the day of MUDs, talking about this feature at FanFaire.

It's completely reasonable to limit participation in player-made dungeons to some kind of avatar inasmuch as there are rewards involved, and it's really danged hard to implement a script to calculate real difficulty. But how about you take the opportunity to gather info about how to make a bigger deal of this kind of content for the next iteration of EQ, or for other SoE games? Have a meeting and figure out exaclty what kind of information you want to gather, and then do it using this new system. I understand very well that resources are limited, and it's mostly a matter at this point of trying to deliver what has been promised, but this really is an unusual learning opportunity, and I humbly suggest you take advatage of it.

Personally, I really look forward to playing with the system, whatever it looks like in the end. And my partner is really excited about the new design system being applied to housing/decorating!

Best wishes,
-L

I for one am looking forward to the feature as it was described at Fan Faire.

Circadian@Unrest_old wrote:

Because of poor balance and lack of rewards of any use in OR outside the arena.
Circadian@Unrest_old wrote:

Yep, good job this isn't the same in DYOD!
Circadian@Unrest_old wrote:

DYOD isn't supposed to be some stand alone where you only do Custom Dungeons. You get gear from Custom Dungeons to help you do other stuff like Developer Dungeons, or PQs, or Raids or to speed up questing. Lets go back to the Lavastorm shard quest; no-one tried to argue that it was 'pointless' because your gear had no use in the quest, and no-one described it as pointless because the reward from completing the quest did not, in some way, make the quest easier to complete. The problem with this quest was the mind-numbing boredom and repetition, the rewards were sufficient for many people to overlook the watching-paint-drying gameplay simply so they could get their hands on their one shard a day.
Circadian@Unrest_old wrote:

Oh, they were? I was under the impression that I'd stated an opinion (with regards to the fun aspect of Arenas, champion or otherwise). You know, one of those things kind of like fact except individually subjective? I was also under the impression that every feature does not have to cater to every player. I personally cannot stand tradeskilling but you don't see me telling you that it's boring and thus a bad feature that no-one will ever use. Ever.
(I'm also slightly confused by this response, do you mean that arenas in general were slightly less boring than watching paint dry or do you mean Arena champions were slightly less boring than character matches, which were like watching paint dry? Option one is what I went for as option 2 doesn't seem to match up with the rest of your post)
Circadian@Unrest_old wrote:

Except for the fact that the gear you get is all usable in the rest of the game. I don't think the intention is to completely sepercede developer made heroic and raid instances with Custom Dungeons. The level of connection between DYOD and Adventuring seems roughly, to me, analogous to the relationship between Tradeskilling and Adventuring.
Adventuring can make you slightly better at tradeskilling (the occasional quest that rewards crafting gear) though it's a long way off being necessary and provides only the smallest of benefits. Tradeskilling can make you a substantially better adventurer, depending on TS class and adventuring gear level. There are, of course a few tradeskill quests that improve tradeskilling, though not many, and these certainly haven't been included in Tradeskilling from the beginning.
Circadian@Unrest_old wrote:

SOE is a business and implementing player characters in DYOD would be a massive outlay in manhours that a cautious company like SOE would never countenance. That they're even willing to give this cut-down version a go as a proof-of-concept is, to me, impressive.
Circadian@Unrest_old wrote:

And yet people did it. Broken Glass. Miles. People did it. I'm not saying that this is good or that we should have more like this simply because people did it, but I'm merely pointing out that for a bit of gear people are willing to put up with far worse than it would seem DYOD will be, given the little information we have at present.


That said, my message of peace, love and tolerance is only until I see the feature first hand. If the map customization controls are poor, if mob customization is impossible, if the rewards are poor or short-lived or too hard to get or if the avatars are useless and boring then I will be a vehement critic. If the system comes in and works then I will line up with everyone else in asking for player characters as I do think that should be the final goal of a system like this. I do think that the system as currently presented represents a foot-in-the-door and a proof-of-concept and the completed system is one that uses player characters.
But for now I'm just happy to see an attempt to include player created content in the game. I'm just giving this feature a chance to prove itself, please, please just consider it with an open-mind.

Xalmat wrote:

As am I.
The only issue I have is the people in this thread claiming they speak for the majority in that this idea will tank unless they can play as themselves.
I agree that it would be a nice feature to add at some point down the road but I dont think it is required.
The way I see it is adding an alternative playstyle. i.e. Raiders, Groupers, Soloers, Tradeskillers and now Dungeon Designers and Dungeon Runners. Most people move from one style to another as they see fit, so adding more options is a good thing in my book.
I am really looking forward to see what people come up with. There are some AMAZING house designers out there so I am expecting equally good dungeons once people get the hang of the interface.

steelbadger wrote:

None of this changes the fact that an entire expansion is being based around a system that doesn't even allow the use of your character. BAD IDEA.

Circadian@Unrest_old wrote:

Not sure how Mercenaries, Beastlords, Item Reforging, and Tradeskill Apprentices are being based around the design your own dungeon feature. I'm guessing you're saying it's the biggest part of the expansion? Could be.
It sounds like regardless of our plea to make these playable with our own characters, that it isn't going to happen before the expansion comes out. Any chance of adding in the ability to play these with our own characters in a future update?

Dethdlr@Butcherblock wrote:

We are keeping an open mind about this internally, but allowing you to use your own character does come with a lot of problems that need to be solved. We have several very good ideas of how to get around them, but each one would require significant extra work that we most likely wouldn't have time to do between now and expansion launch. None of us are opposed to the idea, but we want to make sure that the environment is fun, fair and competitive. We want it to be about skill and decision making and we want players of all types to be able to compete on an even playing field.
Having been a raider myself for many years in EQ2, I'm still not convinced that just because you have raid gear that you are a better player. But in many cases, that additional power from that gear can allow you to overcome difficult encounters that more skilled players cannot overcome with lesser gear. We don't want the Dungeon Builder rewards to be easily obtainable by players that have managed to get raid gear while other players have to work 4x as hard for the same rewards. If you guys agree with that general principle, than we are on the same page.

Just make sure the avatars are interesting enough so that "skill and decision making" comes into play. Five buttons won't cut it. Even five hotbars won't cut it if the abilities are boring. The classes should be multi-dimensional (not just "dps" or "tank"), and there should be a good blend of proactive and reactive abilities.

/ponder Perhaps increase the power of the mobs if they have more then 2 or 3 pieces of raid-gear?