Thoughts On A Solo Instance?

The fundamental design issue with regards to soloable instances is that you have to tune them to be soloable.

In this game, that basically means providing a challenge that would not favor or hinder any one class. With the nature of class diversity being what it is in this game, this severely limits the difficulty level of a soloable dungeon.

If it requires too much healing to complete, pure melee or casters are impeded.

If it requires significant amounts of dps, you either have to spec and gear properly for one, single dungeon or pure dps classes simply have a leg up.

If you can't tank or mitigate damage effectively...well, you're dead at the first pull.

Therefore, if you reduce group size and composition to a single participant, the more generic and easy you have to make the dungeon. If the dungeon then drops any significant loot, you end up with folks farming the thing at all hours and creating thousands upon thousands of instances until the hardware wets itself, then short-circuits due to increased moisture. ;)

Just some thoughts from the design side for discussion.

Q u o t e:
its certaintly easier than designing and balancing an instance for 40 people.

The dev team assures you it is not. 40-person raids have a great deal more wiggle room in terms of play and design.

Q u o t e:


SOLO INSTANCE PER CLASS, that is HARD, a true test and let it be plainly visable so all these pretenders who qq about people qqing for something besides raiding can see that it doesn't have anything to do with skill, it has to do with SCHEDULING.

I'm sorry Tseric doesn't think enough of his design skills to make it do-able.

:(

So, you're saying design nine seperate dungeons, each tuned individually. Yeah, scheduling...exactly.

Do you realize how much time that would take?

Do you have any concept of what is involved in developing content for a game? It takes a lot more than "I thought of this great idea and it will definitely work because I thought of it and that's the hard part, right?"

Here's a design problem to consider, for those really set on the idea of solo instances.

Instances run on their own server to alleviate load on the world servers.

Let's set an arbitrary number of 100 as the maximum number of instances allowed at any given time on an instance server.

500 players want to run a solo dungeon at the same time.

100 of them enter the dungeon and begin progress.

400 of them wait outside getting 'Transfer Aborted:Instance Not Found' messages for the next 3 or 8 hours...

Sound like fun to you?

Q u o t e:
I believe the solution to this is to increase your arbitrary number.

You do release new realms when the demand exceeds supply right? This would be different how?

/sigh...the hardware can only support a certain number of instances at any given time. This is a fact. Not up for debate.

I choose 100 as an arbitrary number to illustrate the problem, not for a point of negotiation. You have to take technical limitations into consideration.

This isn't about new realms. If you have 100 instances on a realm, it is simply better for everyone if those instances accomodate more than 1 person.

100 instances of 40 is better than 100 instances of 1 because the bottom line is more people are actually playing the game.

Again, address the main problem.

Q u o t e:
everything you said makes sense. the idea is possible though. this is not to say that this instance be put on any kind of express priority, but it could possibly be on a "to experiment with" list. I think it would be a great challenge for the developers as it isn't like anything that's been put into the game before and may prove to be productive.

We've already experimented with solo-oriented content. We feel it has not played to the strengths of this game. I am aware that it has been achieved in particular cases, but that doesn't mean it works here, with this game.

Epic Hunter or Priest quests required a great deal of time to create and yielded little in terms of game time. Effectively, the development time put in to it did not give an equal or greater return.

With an increasing player base, more individualized content breaks up design focus and the time needed increases dramatically. The more content you try and create, the more time and resources it takes.

Q u o t e:
Perhaps you're over-estimating, or I'm under-estimating, exactly how much "content" most people want.

There is only one answer to that. More, more, more. Always more. Always.

And I mean always.

Q u o t e:
As opposed to the content people don't want you've been putting time and resources into? The bait and switch of SIlithus not being raid content, and actually being stepping up to raid content? Naxx that the raiders like, but 99% of the population will never see, especially with the expansion?

Don't speak for others. You don't really know what they want. Your 99% number is a sensationalist exaggeration. I'm not going to bother with reductionist comments like "Nobody is ever going to go back here ever. At all." That content will still see traffic. I would bet you money.

Q u o t e:
Breaks up design focus? What exactly is design focus, and how does this break it up?

Design focus is having your team work together on tasks and communicate between each other. This keeps content consistent, helps reduce bugs because people aren't making conflicting ideas and allows for efficient scheduling of patches, as everyone follows clear goals and milestones.

Say you have a team of 10 people designing a zone. They all do different parts of dungeon or item or UI design or what have you. Design focus is the difference between having them accomplish 5 main tasks in a month to release the zone and appeal to a broad set of players and having them accomplish 25 tasks for the same net gain.

No, I don't know the exact numbers for the last part, but they were inordinately large compared to making a bunch of multi-class quests.

Q u o t e:



HAHAHAHA Yet you have queues to wait to get on your servers to even actually play the game hahahahahaha

You're proving my point about hardware limitations. That and it's a completely different issue. G'bye now. :)

Q u o t e:

The instance servers appear capable of hosting all the solo people farming low level instances and running their friends through in duo's, if those people were instead running their own solo instances would that really increase the server load much?

To this point I will cite that we have limiting numbers on how many instances a player can enter per hour. This was due to exactly the type of behavior you are talking about. There have been specific cases where gold sellers, flipping instances repeatedly, directly impacted game performance on specific realms. It was bad, we set limitations.

Soloing an existing dungeon for farming purposes is different than making dungeons explicitly designed to encourage solo-instancing. The majority of the realm population will not be farming instances at the same time, so it is within reason and considered acceptable behavior.

Allowing players to utilize content in a soloable way is much different than directing your player base into a situation where they are soloing dungeons and creating an excessive number of instances.

Q u o t e:
It really sounds like you think that solo dungeons would be hugely popular? Is that misrepresenting your thoughts?

The whole point of designing a dungeon is to have people use it. If people used a solo dungeon as compared to a raid dungeon you see a dramatic increase in the number of instances, while you see a decrease in the number of overall players accessing any particular content. Comparitively speaking, more players can access content of a 5 man nature than of a 1 man nature.

That is what I'm saying. I'm not talking about subjective things like popularity or how cool the content is. I am simply illustrating real world considerations that have to be taken into account when designing such content.

Q u o t e:
Wouldn't it be pretty easy to throttle the number of solo instances through available game mechanics? For example to summon the guys in Silithus you need the twilight gear which you get as drops. Couldn't you use a similar sort of mechanic to control how frequently solo instances came up and, also, to discourage people from 'flipping' the instances to reduce server load?

Again, you're getting into more specialized paths for individuals which increases your development time. If you don't provide content between the throttle point and the dungeon, you are basically saying "the park is closed". If you create content to wind individual players towards a dungeon at a slower pace to allow trickle, you need varied content. As we are talking about solo instances, you are now generating solo quest lines for classes and we again see development time increase in more than a one-to-one incline.

Q u o t e:
Tseric, I happen to be a dev (console games), not that makes me any better than anyone else, but I think your assumption that only you and those who agree with you understand the scope of game development makes me a bit sad.

Is that what I'm conveying? C'mon, go back and read the thread. I provided topics for discussion. What I take issue with is folks throwing ideas at me like I should be implementing them post haste. Ideas that have no real context. Ideas that haven't been regarded but from a singular perspective.

I've got no problem agreeing or disagreeing with folks, but I feel like I'm providing some clearly explained reasons and people are just saying "oh, you just need to be more creative". This implies that our design team is not creative. Sorry if I take issue with that, but I do find it insulting.

Go back to the post of mine where I set a design problem forward with arbitrary numbers.

The first reply is "change the arbitrary numbers".

O.o What am I supposed to say to that? If people aren't going to understand the issue I put forth, how exactly are we going to have a reasonable discussion about it?

Q u o t e:
But, what's the reason for opposition to playing in small groups with more time flexibility?

What opposition?

The expansion is catering to that very idea! We're reducing the raid cap for that very purpose!

Winged dungeons. More 5 man content which we see as effective in terms of player use, design time and a host of other considerations which fit with the game.

You're painting me to be taking a stance that I'm not.