Feldon Despite their having hardly left the drawing board, players have drawn some conclusions about the upcoming Design Your Own Dungeon feature, based on how similar features have been implemented, and how they’ve fared–mostly unsuccessfully–in other games. Speculation, as they say, has been rampant.
However Rothgar isn’t willing to yield the “DYOD will be abandoned just like Arenas” ground just yet. From the EQ2 Forums:
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.
Lots 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.
EQ2Wire’s own Dethdlr asked:
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?
In response, Rothgar shared some interesting insight:
We are keeping an open mind about [playing with your own characters] 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.
It Has to Be Interesting
As much as players have criticized EQ2 for requiring gear moreso than skill, it’s interesting to see the arguments against Avatar-driven DYODs. If it stays an Avatar-based system, then every player, regardless of their gear, will have to prove themselves purely with skill. Players who d0n’t have a lot of gear won’t be at a disadvantage, while Raiders won’t be able to breeze through the content.
If we’re going to have to drive Avatars or ‘Adventurers’ to participate in DYODs, this puts the onus on the EQ2 team to make each of these Adventurers interesting, fully fleshed-out classes. In the past, when players have had to assume the controls of another avatar to complete a quest, the results have been rather tedious. Player-controlled avatars have typically had very few abilities, or the abilities have been underpowered, slow, and uninteresting.
For DYODs, the Avatars were are provided with are going to have to be fully realized classes, with a proper flow to the gameplay and smooth execution of different ability combinations. It’s an opportunity for EQ2 devs to create new classes-in-a-bottle and give abilities that might be overpowered or unbalanced out in the real world, but which could make DYOD designers really have to think about how to balance their own dungeons. DYOD is a huge opportunity.
There are only so many hours in the day and any leisure time I have to play EQ2 is spent advancing my main character through quests, instances or raids. If this feature does nothing to help my main character I for one will not be using it.
DYODs will result in Tokens. There will be 2 vendors, one selling items for players to add to their own DYODs, one selling gear upgrades for your main character.
Why not have us play our own characters but instead of dozens or hundreds of maps being approved, have a specialized SOE team approve and select a *few* maps that have undergone testing for class imbalance etc – a few quality maps or dungeouns every few months should be a nice boost to the regular GU’s.
I’d rather have 5 or 6 quality dungeouns out there with different lore and mobs and names – in different locations (areas unused such as Thundering Steppes)than hundreds of avatar driven content.
In other words, SOE gets free content with player resources (can give credit to the players) and all it has to do is test the content.
In other words: “Here, take our tools, make your own dungeoun and submit it to us for approval – these are the standards you have to follow: A, B, C ETC” The standards could be lore, position of nameds etc.
Why cant they just let us use our characters ‘appearance’ but give them all the standard DYOD skills that they would give the Avatars. At least that way we can still ‘see’ ourselves as our characters even if for a short time they play differently.
@alwai
And where would they get the resources to test these maps? They can’t even bug test events on time.
people dont use areans because it is set in a PVE ruleset. fix this and i would love to be able to spar with friends again.
@alawi: Their issue isn’t with class imbalance, it’s with gear imbalance. Drop a group in Fortress Spire wearing only gear from the Icy Fingers quests and they’ll probably have issues clearing the zone. Drop the same group of players into the same zone, but replace their gear with the best drops out of hard mode raid zones and they’d clear it while half of them were AFK. That’s the imbalance they’re talking about. It’s the way the entire game works but because they want to have a leader board for who can finish the dungeons the fastest, they want the playing field to be even, regardless of whether you normally solo, group, or raid. Not really sure WHY they feel this is so important, but it looks as though they feel that way.
It is just a way to get people to stay competitive and remain playing the game… Instead of leaving for some non-mmo that has leaderboards like Fps or Fighting games.
Some people just love to compete, all I want is variety and fun content that doesn’t require grinding the same boring few zones (aka Velious), because it is hard to get players to log in and go to the harder (orange heroic) zones…
Everyone tends to just grind ISK, Pools, and Ascent over and over…
For me, part of the fun is the avatar being different for DYOD, that is where variety comes in and a change of pace… I’m looking forward to it! I found the monster shrouds tedious and boring on EQ1, but at first I was excited by that before I found out how lame it was on release.
Let players have the option to put their avatar’s appearance on (purely cosmetic and simple), but bring on the awesome new designs and skills!
This is going to be dead within a month. Using Avatars and not making it a NWN style dungeon builder kills the hype of this by 10 fold.
Wouldn’t raiders be able to get better avatars easier? I know there hasn’t been lot of detail released but I thought there was an intent to have people quest and adventure for meaner avatars. If that’s the case, then their level playing field idea isn’t (unless avatars can only be earned within the DYOD system. I think I’m confused…or unconvinced.
How d’ya like how they snaked in another currency for buying gear upgrades gained by playing a “mini-game”? If the gear is good enough and the tokens come fast, people will swarm it like they did to get the gear like when BG was useful for PvE. If the gear isn’t a big shortcut to Uberville, though, it’ll have limited popularity (like BG now).
It seems that by splitting how people can/do play the game it spreads us thin. I hope for the best to keep interest up, but reserve judgement until it’s released (and been patched at least 5 or 6 times).
Someone in a group I was in recently said that BYOD comes out, there will be NO MORE Developer content (ie: dungeons/zones), that everything from this point on will be entirely approved BYODs. I certainly hope she was misinformed because that would spell the end of EQ2 for me.
On the topic of Avatars vs. Characters, I can see the point of making BYODs balanced with pre-made characters, but to me, itwouldn’t have the same ‘feel’ as it would working on my own character that I’ve sweated over for years. It’s odd to say that, because I *am* one of those who doesn’t have x4 raid gear & has to rely on my skill and knowledge of my class to get me through encounters, rather than breezing through it. Whatever SoE decides to do, I just hope they keep churning out interesting deveolper made content… I really want to see The Temple of Veeshan in Western Wastes =)
As with anything, this will only be as useful as the gear they put on those token vendors for people to get, And Afterwards their ability to upgrade and extend that progression line… Other then that, Failure to update on cause a real draw to these things will result in this becoming the same as the arenas … A dead feature … And currently as far as tokens in concern, the only “expansion” that ever produced any real draw or player interest was TSO… Vel is so bad in token itemization at this point that it barely is even bothered with, even with the weekly drops in token requirements…
IF done right theres the possibility these will become a staple in the game if done right, however considering SF and DoV I skeptical about it for the most part and thinking its going to be dead in the water once it hits…..