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Mechanics of dynamic events.
Grahor
Member Posts: 828
Can someone point me towards exact description of dynamic events and how they are implemented? Mechanics of events, not designer generally describing how eventily eventy those events will be and how gynamic they will be.
How "events" happen/work with current quest system? You get a quest. Step one: you get to collect 20 berries and kill 20 mobs of some type, alone or with a group, upon achievement the goal, the next step is triggered: say, to help a dragon defeat a horde of demons. Dragon fights demons, depending on you and your group, either wins (if you help him enough, heal him, etc) or lose (if you don't), upon each conclusion next step in the chain of events happening - you either proceed to the next step in the chain, or you have to "repair" the damage, but usually just to reset the quest and this time do enough to proceed to the next step in the chain.
So far I see the following differences: 1) you don't have to "take" this quest; the quest is "taken" automatically once you do something counting towards its completion (say, pick a berry, aka click on glowing bush 
).
2) There is no need to join in groups to achieve the next step: the counter is not based on your personal "quest" counter, but on outside "event" counter; whoever and wherever does something, anything, to further the quest, it counts towards completion.
3) You don't need to "finish" the quest, it is automatically finished and you get your reward, no matter if you are online or offline at that moment.
That's pretty much the only differences I've discovered, so far. If there are others, can you point me towards the information about them? Also, I have some questions, like: if there are, say, 7 steps in the event, and you have participaed in step 2 only, when and how much reward do you get and how is it calculated? If you have failed in step 7, do you need to wait till the event resets and repeat all the steps again, if you want to see the event finished and, say, boss defeated? That may be a bit of problem with many. If this particular part of the server is underpopulated, will the event dynamically simplify itself so that, say, 2 people can meaningfully participate in it, and if it's overcrowded, will it be hardened so that 20 people even noticed it? That is done with personal counters in todays quests, I wonder how it will be done in dynamic events.
Comments
I would explain it to you but cali59 would be here any moment now with a 500 word essay on Guild Wars 2's dynamic event system. ^_^
Only 500?
Hold on, I'll come up with something. Though Meowhead had the best post about the difference between quests and DEs I've ever seen, where is he when we need him?
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Read/Watch these and then come back if you have more questions:
http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/dynamic-events/dynamic-events-overview/
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013691/Designing-Guild-Wars-2-Dynamic
http://www.arena.net/blog/colin-johanson-answers-your-dynamic-event-questions
http://www.arena.net/blog/eric-flannum-answers-more-of-your-dynamic-event-questions#more-2144
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dynamic_event
I did do some searching for videos of the fights themselves but it might be better if I just try to answer your specific questions and talk about some of the other differences than the ones I snipped off the quote. I do however highly recommend the Designing Dynamic Events video that Diovidious linked.
One great explanation of the difference between a Kill X quest and what is essentially a Kill X DE was a post by Eric Flannum himself. I won't paste the whole thing in, but it's well worth a read. http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum/showpost.php?p=799576&postcount=79
There are some major differences between quests and DEs, and I will attempt to be brief, but by all means feel free to follow up with some questions.
They actually happen instead of just being talked about. In fact they happen whether players are there or not.
They scale up and down immediately based on the number of people participating. Up to 10 or so people for normal events, up to 100 for a boss fight.
They run in cycles so they're repeatable anytime they're running, unlike quests which are daily or you can only do once.
They're failable. With quests, you're going to succeed eventually unless it's an escort or other rare quest.
You can have objectives you can't easily do with a quest, like have it fail when bandits burn the hay bales.
They're cooperative. Everybody works together, everybody gets xp and loot for helping kill mobs. No competition.
They're designed to be very difficult if not impossible to grief. Nobody can fail an event for you.
They affect the world. Waypoints can be lost until retaken. Merchants might not sell fish while the boats are destroyed.
To answer your specific questions, players get rewarded after every step in the chain. If you show up in event 7, everybody will have already gotten their reward for 1-6. You'll get a partial reward for showing up in the middle of 7.
What happens with failure might depend on the chain what happens and when. If it's a chain leading up to a boss battle and you fail on event 7, maybe they'll push you back to a variation of event 6 or you'll get a new event to retry 7.
Dynamic events do simplify with number of players, they scale up or down immediately. If you're the only one at an event, you should be able to do it if you play well. If your server is severely underpopulated and you're the only one in a zone, all the events will have reached their endpoints where the mobs have taken over. That doesn't mean you're screwed. You just get a chance to start all the chains from their endpoints.
I hope that helps. If anything was unclear let me know and I'll try to explain it better or find a video.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Interesting. The first link was exactly the kind of "our events will be the eventest events in the eventia", more "statement of idealized intent" than reality, but in the following links they've somewhat scaled down their ambitions, fleshed out the mechanics, and explained the mechanics.
So, some events will be small-scale current-quest-like, like ogres, water and lake, and reset in 15 minutes (not an actual time, just a relative comparison of duration), while others will be much more persistent and have to be cycled manually through a series of interconnecting steps. It would be interesting to push events through the whole of their possible scenario - there would likely be a very small number of such events, comparing to the general number of "fast-resetting" events.
Scaling is, apparently, designed intelligently, and anti-griefing mechanisms implemented (surely in need of further fine-tuning, it'll be our joined effort.)
Pretty good job, I say.
I wonder, if it would be possible to kill ogres player guard. Not directly, of course, obviously not, but to draw an enemy creature towards them and lose the aggro in the position where it can't help but attack them. Nah... Key characters will be immune for that kind of manipulation from players, otherwise some a$$holes will camp them 24 hours a day, not letting anyone to complete the quest, ever. Heh.
But a designer should never, ever say things like "we make it impossible to grief people", because some... bad people see it as a challenge. It becomes a sort of achievement, a test I, for example, can't refuse...
I'm certainly getting GW2 now, and starting a guild. "Griefers for Betterment of Games (and Lulz)", may be - not because I like to grief people, I don't, but it's a matter of honor now.
You find honor in griefing other players?
Sounds like you'll be the first player of GW2 to experience the Banned for life event chain. It's not a very long chain.
Thanks. I've watched this video and, indeed, it's the most informative of the links, even though a bit long.
Oh yeah, that's how I understand the video, too. Of course, once zombies there have run away, the event will restart after some time (varies with event) with a new bunch of zombies - for a new player group to come and kill them.
Well, not all of them, of course. From the video I've got the impression that large number of events is player-triggered, and once the player leaves for good, some events continue to play out until the next equilibrium step, some reset...
As it should be. Griefing should not be left in the hands of every loser with an attitude, but be the province of highly skilled, motivated individuals working together towards this worthy goal.
It's a bet.
Somehow I don't think that'll be the same. I think the majority of events will reset to "normal starting point" in such case, or an equilibrium point where things are reasonably well, because, frankly, coming to each new village to see everyone dead, having to resurrect them and try to make their quests, only to see them succumb to overall wilderness as you leave to further zones would be a very morbid experience, and not everyone has enough of strength of character to play through it without killing himself.
From what I've seen in the video, only a relatively small number of large events will be playing itself through till the end in this way.
Thank you, it was overall very interesting.
Honor in pushing the boundaries of the system, in using my intelligence and tenacity to defeat the limitations imposed by a designer; in subverting the system and triumphing over the person who specifically wanted to stop me and had/has all the imaginable means in his disposal for that.
Suffering of other players, however small (it's not as if I'm going to, you know, stalk them through levels. Once I've learned how to do it and did it, my interest in griefing is gone. Well, may be to use it against some annoying twits from time to time) - as I've said, that suffering is a regrettable, but necessary sacrifice I'm ready to make.
As for banning, I wasn't ever banned in any game before. Wasn't even warned, ever. Somehow, I doubt it will happen now.
Haha, now I'm wondering what I wrote. I'm half asleep half the time i'm writing (Since I'm either ABOUT to go to sleep, or just woke up and am about to go to work), so I have no idea what I said.
Where have I been? Shamefully, playing games. More time playing games with friends, less time on forums. Still about the same amount of important RL stuff (Like family), but playing games again pushed out my forum time.
Found it
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/9/view/forums/post/4423916#4423916
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Nice call.
Just had a thought there.
There was a mention of event - fortress and zombies - where for players killing all the zombies in the swamp event was finished, but for players failing - event continued with potentially more interesting fortress defence, fortress rebuilding, etc.
Somehow that seems to me like a bad idea - kind of punishing success, rewarding failure.
Of course, it could be fixed with expanding event further - after killing zombies in the swamp a new stage of, say, getting into zombie lair, etc - but the underlying thought is: with branching events, wouldn't some of those losing branches be actually more interesting for players than winning branches, and wouldn't it cause some players deliverately trying to lose in order to get to a better content/stage of event? That would be pretty bad for both immersion and satisfaction - I don't like not doing my best to win, but I don't like not getting to interesting content either.
Those 3 steps more or less sum it up. Anything else is just a hallucination caused by overhype.
If Dynamic Events catch on, you can expect to see them more often in other games as well. You can expect WoW to jump on the bandwagon big time. It would be nice to see them in games that also have the standard quest system, like SWTOR or many others, as a way to provide some different options and cater to different styles of gameplay.
I've been this site too long, to learn the habits of other users who've been on here too long. Heck, I wouldn't be suprised if DarkPony arrives to subtly tells us that the DEs are a good idea but it NEEDZ MOAR OPEN WORLD PVP!
??°?°??
A game has already done something similar, it's called Rift and it didn't turn out so well. Sure it is fun at first when your boring quest grind is interrupted by a seemingly, interesting, random event (random rift spawn or zone invasion), but eventually you'll find it incredibly annoying to find your quest hub taken over, just when you're about to turn in your log of 5 completed quests. So that's why it's good in GW2, that there are no open world quests for the Dynamic Events to interrupt. All the questing you'll be doing is within instances, where you can play it like a co-op/singleplayer online game (like GW1) and where nothing or no one can imede on your progress.
I think DEs attempt to address a lot of the issues traditional quests have (being static, wall of text presentation, solo focus) and they even go further than that I think because of the way you don't have a quest log. You don't ever get into situations with DEs like you did 3 quests in one area of the zone and then you see a questgiver you missed and then have to go back there.
That being said, I don't think DEs are necessarily the pinnacle of content design. If they were, GW2 wouldn't have a personal story. DEs are great and are better in almost every way to traditional leveling "tasks", but they don't really lend themselves to doing that epic, solo "quest" type stuff.
So I think I agree with both of you. I think variety of content is good and I also agree that Rift didn't do it very well. Just like GW2 is attempting to solve problems of existing MMOs by pushing in new directions, I think the next next generation of MMOs would be wise to solve the problems of this coming next generation.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
We need stickies for more than just videos.
Maybe one on DE's, one on game concepts. Hey, we could put it under one sticky and label it Frequently Asked Questions about Guild Wars 2.
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Well, the alternative is having it where no matter what you do, the exact same results happen. So yeah, there's the problem that some people will wonder what happens if there's a failure state...
... but the alternative is worse. So I wouldn't call it a 'bad idea'.
It's sort of like saying 'Dodging a bullet and bumping your shin on a coffee table is a bad idea, because... I mean OW. Have you ever bumped your shin on a coffee table? That really hurts!'
You're missing 4. They can happen without you (Or indeed, anybody) 5. They have fail states more meaningful than 'try again'. 6. Everybody gets rewarded for participating. 7. They can chain from one even to another, in an active fashion (Such as victorious centaurs physically moving on to another location, while some set up defenses where they won.) 8. What's happening is actually reflected in the world. 9. Change is involved that doesn't involve instancing or phasing.
But that's okay, sometimes it's hard to count past 3.
I'm probably even missing some of the other details that distinguish it from quests, that was just off hand.
I don't know how cali59 would feel about having velcro applied to his clothes and being stickied up to the front of the forums.