Idea to improve the burn-out problem, flying-issue and boredom-problems

[Highlord Hanibuhl]

For years now, people have been complaining about 3 similair issues:

- The fact that they burn out of the world being the same, doing the same stuff over and over again
- The fact they either want flying or don't want it, to get as fast as possible from point A to B
- The game feels like it's stuck in a time-capsule, with months going by feeling the same

People long for the days of Vanilla, where we felt like the world was MASSIVE and everything was new. That feeling cannot return, but I feel like the game can improve on this.

Right now, for expansions upon expansions, the game has turned into a theme-park where every 2 meters there would be a mob, always in the same spot. Doing dailies, hunting rares or just traveling feels like chore pretty darn fast, whereas games like the Witcher 3, Grand Theft Auto V or Red Dead Redemption do not suffer from such problems.


Adding behaviours to mobs
We know we can find a mob by checking WoWhead and finding its spawn-location at the exact marker. But what if nocturnal animals only come out in the morning, evening and night, or animals can go out to eat or hunt themselves, NPC's actually have varying patterns in which they go about the world?

What if running past a herd of stag mounted, will cause them to spook... or what if certain predators can spot and track you from afar.

Then, hunting rares, traveling the world or doing quests will make the world and its inhabitants feel more alive, instead of them being mindless drones just waiting for you to aggro them.

We sometimes see this in certain area's where wolves hunt sheep, but this seems like a mechanised process where another sheep spawns right at it's place.

Knowing that a river will cause animals to go for a drink, will create oportunity for players to stalk them there.

Making the world bigger
Right now, no matter where you are in the world, you can always see something of danger/interaction near you. That isn't neccesarily a good thing as it makes the world feel small. Back in Vanilla, certain area's had a lower density of mobs, creating the need to travel more across empty stretches of land.

This can still be done again, making the world feel larger again.

Random encounters
With different behaviours for NPC's, random encounters/events could occur where players are asked by NPC's to assist them for a brief moment, help them fend off creatures, loot/rob certain NPC's or kill rares.

By adding these sorts of events to the game, every time you travel, something different happens.



I feel that by adding these things, all afor mentioned problems would be fixed;
- The world does no longer feel the same as NPC-behaviours will make the world play out different every time
- The world feels bigger and grander and also more alive, negating the need for getting as fast as possible from point A to B - you now want to cherish your travel
- Because the world feels so alive, every interaction with it can/will feel different.


I'd love to hear your thoughts!

[Eurhetemec]

All of those are good suggestions in general terms, but sadly all of them are pretty hard to implement into the current game.

They'd certainly be things I'd be looking at putting into a new MMO, though. WoW having a real-world-fixed day-night cycle also means anything to do with that can't be part of the gameplay, because depending on people's jobs and so on, they're perpetually stuck in either day or night or a certain range of time, with few times they can play in another time. I think Blizzard doing that was a mistake, and it's why we ended up with extremely light nights, but it's not going to change now. Again I hope any new MMOs have proper day-night cycles.

[therealbowser]

Adding behaviors to mobs wouldn't prevent burnout, but I'd love to see it. Immersion have been repeatedly leeched from this game and rarely, if ever, brought back. This would be very cool.

Making the world bigger wouldn't make the game more fun to me. It would burn me out more for having to travel further to do the same thing, especially without flying. I get your idea though, that things are too dense and I kind of agree, but the solution isn't really just making the world bigger for the sake of it. I think we're at a relatively okay middle ground.

Random Encounters are an excellent idea but we basically already have those. Those are world quests. They were a great idea. If you mean more of an immersion thing, I mean I'm not against it but we kind of have those, too.

Basically you want the world to feel more alive and immersive, and while I love this train of thought it is not going to prevent burnout. For me, personally, the only thing that is going to prevent burnout is having a community. And Blizzard does nothing to encourage the growth of one, so we end up with a solo game that just doesn't draw appeal for more than the content does. For an MMORPG to really thrive and keep players, it needs to have that social aspect. And WoW lost that years ago because Blizzard took it much too lightly.

Rather than cut off cross-realm content (which is just a bad idea), for me, the ideal solution is just adding systems into the game that encourage interaction. Even just having a literal, basic general global channel for servers would do wonders (both for people who wanted to participate, or wanted to see other channels used for their intended purposes again). I'd love to see a system added for players who want to mentor new players, and for new players to find mentors. This would benefit everyone involved--and the community would be better for it. I heard something like this may be added, and I hope that's true. Having a simple system to commend players would also help encourage people to not act like assholes constantly, because they'd want to be rewarded for being a nice player (shocking concept, right?).

But I digress, I don't want to derail your thread or anything. I love your ideas, but I don't think they will do anything to help with burnout. It would be healthy for the game in a number of other ways though and I do sincerely hope Blizzard considers these kinds of things. Even features like having flavor text when you talk to vendor NPCs instead of going straight to the vendor's items again would be amazing.

And since I didn't cover this aspect--as far as flying and burnout goes, the simple fact is that everything feels long and drawn out, that I have to ride past or through tons of enemies just to get from point A to point B because the developers have this ridiculous notion that not having flying is such an amazing feature for the game. Pathfinding is horrible, and it gets worse every expansion. I am not looking forward to where they go with it next. Flying is cool and exciting, but I just like the quality of life of it.

Blizzard taking away quality of life features and calling it a 'feature' is such an oxymoron that I can't even begin to fathom where that thought process goes, aside from "gee, if we force them to arbitrarily grind out this laundry list of pathfinder achievement requirements, they'll keep playing the game!" No, what will happen is that people will get bored and be tired of grinding these arbitrary requirements, and quit the game because of it. Being able to play the game how we want instead of through a very arbitrary list of things--of chores--we have to do in order to enjoy the game (or worse, enjoy basic quality of life features), is a major reason why burnout occurs.

The sad thing is, Blizzard knows this, and I'm pretty certain they just don't give a damn anymore.

- - - Updated - - -

All of those are good suggestions in general terms, but sadly all of them are pretty hard to implement into the current game.

They'd certainly be things I'd be looking at putting into a new MMO, though.

Aside from making the world bigger, I don't think any of them would be hard to implement in WoW. These are mostly just flavor added to the game. That said I doubt blizzard will do it, because of that very reason. It's a significant amount of work to add flavor and life into the world instead of being intrinsically connected to some form of progression content, which Blizzard typically feels are the only thing that will keep people playing.

So... I guess in that sense, what you are saying might be true, simply because Blizzard will never be willing to add this much aesthetic content to the game.

[Eurhetemec]

Aside from making the world bigger, I don't think any of them would be hard to implement in WoW. These are mostly just flavor added to the game. That said I doubt blizzard will do it, because of that very reason. It's a significant amount of work to add flavor and life into the world instead of being intrinsically connected to some form of progression content, which Blizzard typically feels are the only thing that will keep people playing.

So... I guess in that sense, what you are saying might be true, simply because Blizzard will never be willing to add this much aesthetic content to the game.

I mean, you're kind of contradicting yourself here, saying it's easy and also too hard. A lot of the behaviours stuff is already in the game to some extent - you have mobs that eat other mobs, mobs that run away from you even when you're not attacking them, and so on. That's already in there.

So one presumes the OP means something beyond that, indeed he complains about the wolf/sheep interactions that we have now. So he seems to want something that's more like an actual fake ecology, with more complex and dynamic interactions and better-hidden spawning and so on. That would be gigantic effort to add to any MMO that doesn't already have it. Especially if you wanted it to extend to older zones, not just a new expansion.

Likewise random encounters in an MMO require a ton of spawning, scripting, balancing, and so on, as well as just developing sufficient content that people actually see them and enjoy them. This isn't some sort of trivial thing like you imply, like Blizzard are "lazy" or whatever. This is stuff you either design in to an MMO or you don't, at the start.

[Raelbo]

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

I think that most of these are pretty great ideas that would make the game feel a lot more immersive. I am not sure that they'd solve the issues you're specifically trying to solve, but that doesn't detract from them IMO.

The one idea that I would treat with caution is making large open areas devoid of mobs. The problem with making the world too big is that it can end up making things tedious. I certainly don't enjoy spending a lot of time traveling or searching for mobs to get a quest done, and I suspect a lot of other players feel the same.

[Highlord Hanibuhl]

I think that most of these are pretty great ideas that would make the game feel a lot more immersive. I am not sure that they'd solve the issues you're specifically trying to solve, but that doesn't detract from them IMO.

The one idea that I would treat with caution is making large open areas devoid of mobs. The problem with making the world too big is that it can end up making things tedious. I certainly don't enjoy spending a lot of time traveling or searching for mobs to get a quest done, and I suspect a lot of other players feel the same.

But if the world feels more alive and unique every time you go out for an adventure, it keeps things fresh right?

If, instead of people logging in to mindlessly do their dailies for 30min and then log out, people log in to encounter a new adventure every time... wouldn't that make a lot of people happy?

[Kokolums]

What always refires my engines is some fun world pvp. Head to a world quest hotspot and start killing fools. Doesn't take long for WoW to feel fun again.

[Kumorii]

Behaviours will lead to more burnout. Since the ones getting burned out by doing the chores want them done asap. If it happens that enemies track you and prevent you from getting from a to b less quickly than if they didn't the chore would feel even worse.

Burnout can't really be fixed since it's more of a player mentality rather than game design.

[Raelbo]

But if the world feels more alive and unique every time you go out for an adventure, it keeps things fresh right?

Sure, to some extent. But that doesn't mean that they're less likely to experience burnout, or that they suddenly won't care about having a flying mount, or that they won't want actual fresh content

If, instead of people logging in to mindlessly do their dailies for 30min and then log out, people log in to encounter a new adventure every time... wouldn't that make a lot of people happy?

Variety helps. That's part of what I like about the world quest system - there's always different quests up each day. The stuff you're suggesting would be in the same vein. And like I said, it would indeed make the game more immersive, and more fun to play, but I just don't see it solving the problems you want it to solve.

People will stay end up chasing too many objectives and trying to do too much - resulting in burnout
People will still want flying because at some point feeling like you're wasting time when you could be getting things done is annoying
People will still want new, actual content

[Razorice]

Great ideas, but I'd just love to see more end-game PvE content.

[Jujudrood]

For each of these, there would be an "easy" way and a "much, much harder" way, because a lot of these are fundamental changes to foundational pieces of the game.

- Adding scripting to mobs.
It's there today, in limited format.

The Easy:
Randomize spawn points/pathing of patrols for mobs between a handful of pre-defined scripted events.
This means that, instead of a specific mob spawning at X and ALWAYS patting south, then east, then north east, then northwest back to X and repeating ad nauseam, it would have 3 pathing patterns, so maybe it starts southwest and goes counter-clockwise in one, another it could run a loop north of spawn, etc.
Then, for the spawn points, add a few more per zone and randomize mobs available for the spawn point a little more, so bears are *usually* in this part of Duskwood, but they can show up anywhere to feel more "natural" I guess.

The Hard:
Give mobs a "sense of survival", meaning mobs will aggro each other, if they are deemed predator/prey, and will seek out things like food and water sources.
This takes the "wolf kills a critter" thing to a whole other level, where now the wolf no longer has a pre-defined patrol path, but rather roams the entire zone, hunting only when the internal clock says "kill a rabbit", drinking by the river when the internal clock says "thirsty", and willing fight/defend itself should it come across another predator.
This "roaming of the zone" means collision issues and other such problems would also need worked out and scripted so they don't end up walking face first into a tree for their entire life, or trying fruitlessly to climb an unclimbable mountain.
Then there's also settlement considerations.
This would also require spawn point and pathing updates, but way upped to give it "life", and that's just one wolf; that's a lot of scripting.
Doing this for all mobs in a zone, building the predator/prey tables, hunger/thirst tracking, the "meandering" pathing, that would be an assload of work to make just one wolf feel "alive".

- Making the world "bigger"
Assuming this comes after point 1, now you want to take those "smart" mobs and make them fewer and farther between, so instead of zones have places in which you find interaction, you just want flat, barren, mobless/NPCless chunks of land to extend travel?
I can't follow the logic in this...
Make the world bigger by making it more barren; that just makes it feel more tedious to get to the "quest areas" because you now have even more effectively useless land between you and your target.
Bigger in this case means a little more boring?
But, if this happens...

The Easy:
Stretch maps a bit without adding new spawn points/mobs, just some textile/pre-fab additions.

The Hard:
Stretch out interactive areas, such as towns and such, to be more sprawling, with more structures/NPCs, giving it a "real" town feel and not just a couple cabins in the woods type of thing.
This owuldn't be *that* much harder, if adding generic prefabs and "civilian" NPCs who just stand still and do nothing.
Zones would be bigger, with "something" taking up space instead of just flat boring grass with a scant tree or two here and there but otherwise no mobs.

- Random Encounters
These are fundamental things like RDR2 does (help me to town, catch my horse, etc) that you can opt to do as you are passing by.

The Easy:
Make a handful of "optional" zone quests that already exist be repeatable on a soft timer for each player when they pass through the area.
This would just pop up a blue ! to indicate there's a quest to repeat that won't just always be there, but instead it will reactivate under some timing conditions.
Sounds a lot like dailies, but less reliable?

The Hard:
Script a *ton* of things to allow random NPCs traveling down the road to want to ask you to help them to town, or to get X for them, or fake an injury to stage an ambush.
Each variation would need scripted to respect the area it's in (else a bandit spawns in a tree and the event dies...).
This would make use of point 1 pathing enhancements, so if you are out hunting and some NPC says "hey, I bet I can kill more wolves than you in 5 minutes!", there's a way for him to get there, to properly hunt, and for the wolves to be spawned/available in a sufficient time to allow such an interaction.

Now, take all of the above and scope it out for one zone, you're looking at probably months of work.
Now imagine you have a game that's been around for 16 years and has dozens of zones spread across multiple continents/worlds with different NPCs, terrain, whole nine.
Yeah, something similar can be wedged in, but doing it "right" would basically mean you may as well create a brand new game.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Or people could just learn some self-control and do other things as well as applying moderation, that's the bigger crook. I don't trust the devs to strike balance these days, but there was always people complaining about "nothing to do" and boredom or burnout throughout the game. I don't think humans can ever change as far as those things go.

I've been a long-standing proponent of randomized mobs and more intelligent AI in the world though, but let's face it, that's too much work and would inevitably cause complaints to boot. "I was farming herbs and a random pack of bandits attacked me, wtf forced content??"-style...

Just look at how they nerfed the pre-patch event.

[Krasuss]

So you want to make WOW scripted single player game? Cause the games you are giving as example are exactly that, ive played them once and never touched them again after finishing the story. And "smart" mobs are bad idea too, it never works as intended unless they are fully scripted which defeats the point and ads so much more work.

[vincink]

Burn-out and boredom problem is easy to fix. Take a break from playing games for 6 to 12 months and do something completely different. When you eventually return, you'll find the game enjoyable again.

[Sinndra]

But if the world feels more alive and unique every time you go out for an adventure, it keeps things fresh right?

If, instead of people logging in to mindlessly do their dailies for 30min and then log out, people log in to encounter a new adventure every time... wouldn't that make a lot of people happy?

you are only seeing half the problem.. the other half is number of times a quest demands the same action.

meaning, if a quest says kill 10 boar.. just because the boar are far fewer in number and have a changing bag of tricks.. i still have to kill 10 boar.

changing how many boar are around, and making those few boar do something different... you must also reduce the number of boar needed to complete the quest. then you must also increase the reward rate. all of these factors contribute to the overall tedious feeling of repeatable chores.

i would rather advocate for mobs being less boring and the number of mobs needed to be reduced. the more interesting the mob, the fewer times i need to kill it.

really, players want to be rewarded for their time, Blizzard wants to increase the amount of time they play..

either: lots of highly rewarding and exciting mobs around (players choice)

or

lots of low reward, low effort mobs around (Blizzards choice)

[Djuntas]

Not having flying it causing me to burn out. To much wasted time traveling...

[therealbowser]

I mean, you're kind of contradicting yourself here, saying it's easy and also too hard. A lot of the behaviours stuff is already in the game to some extent - you have mobs that eat other mobs, mobs that run away from you even when you're not attacking them, and so on. That's already in there.

So one presumes the OP means something beyond that, indeed he complains about the wolf/sheep interactions that we have now. So he seems to want something that's more like an actual fake ecology, with more complex and dynamic interactions and better-hidden spawning and so on. That would be gigantic effort to add to any MMO that doesn't already have it. Especially if you wanted it to extend to older zones, not just a new expansion.

Likewise random encounters in an MMO require a ton of spawning, scripting, balancing, and so on, as well as just developing sufficient content that people actually see them and enjoy them. This isn't some sort of trivial thing like you imply, like Blizzard are "lazy" or whatever. This is stuff you either design in to an MMO or you don't, at the start.

The contradiction was intentional but it wasn't what you thought it was.

What I meant was it's not too hard to do, it's just that Blizzard isn't going to put even that small amount of effort into it most likely. Blizzard doesn't like "wasting" time on anything not directly related to progression content, and they are probably going to be focused on race customization. Hopefully they are doing Allied races next... and they might not even be doing that. lol

And it has absolutely nothing to do with laziness. Blizzard works hard, but they prioritize mechanical progression insanely high. Maybe it's a good thing, but I think there's some leeway for features like this.

But hey, I'm not a game programmer, so I don't know for sure what issues they might run into with this kind of thing. The only thing I know for sure is that making the world bigger would be a tremendous job.

- - - Updated - - -

Not having flying it causing me to burn out. To much wasted time traveling...

It's not even that for me. Making a 10 minute detour to go around a cliff and get past 50 enemies that are dazing me isn't fun. (I am almost not even exaggerating when it comes to Nagrand in WoD, lol) Or, you know, just having to wait through tons of irritating enemies that are dazing me for the hell of it. Riding past a single trivial enemy but they get a 'lucky' hit and I get dazed... yeah, great fun.

I feel like the daze mechanic on mounts is really outdated (and my feeling on this is confirmed by the fact Blizzard regularly adds items to remove dazing now at a cost) and if they insist on this awful timegated flying system, they can at least get rid of dazing. It's so lame.

[Djuntas]

It's not even that for me. Making a 10 minute detour to go around a cliff and get past 50 enemies that are dazing me isn't fun. (I am almost not even exaggerating when it comes to Nagrand in WoD, lol) Or, you know, just having to wait through tons of irritating enemies that are dazing me for the hell of it. Riding past a single trivial enemy but they get a 'lucky' hit and I get dazed... yeah, great fun.

I feel like the daze mechanic on mounts is really outdated (and my feeling on this is confirmed by the fact Blizzard regularly adds items to remove dazing now at a cost) and if they insist on this awful timegated flying system, they can at least get rid of dazing. It's so lame.

Daze mount item done. Not having flying alters the way I play the game, I dont do much content / grinds / achievements until flying...It sucks.

[Eurhetemec]

But hey, I'm not a game programmer, so I don't know for sure what issues they might run into with this kind of thing. The only thing I know for sure is that making the world bigger would be a tremendous job.

It's not actually necessarily a huge issue programming-wise (I mean, it might be, I don't know the specifics of WoW's engine, but probably not), it's more a huge effort in terms of generating the content, testing the content, and ensuring it doesn't break anything.

If you just added these systems to a new expansion, and only to that new expansion, that would be something you could integrate into building that expansion, and balancing that expansion, and you could just work around any issues such systems created (like not making quests to kill specific mobs that might in fact be rare or prevalent based on the fake ecological system and so on). But even then it would take up a significant proportion of the development budget for the expansion.

And it would largely be pulling work from the content team - i.e. the same people who write quests, place NPCs, balance content and so on, which I suspect is already an extremely busy team.

You'd need huge testing of stuff too - this is what people casually proposing these systems never think about. Yeah, it's easy to suggest a fake ecology and/or random encounters, but then you need to test both massively, and with a large number of players, to see that they don't go horribly wrong. With most content, you can fix issues by just boosting or reducing spawn rates, making more items to pick up whatever, but with something like random encounters, that's going to be hard to get right, and what works on private alpha or even public beta, may fail completely in the face of actual play, and cause absolute havoc and be very hard to get right. Based on games that do have fake ecologies, too, that's probably going to bug out in some spectacular and unexpected way eventually as well, which will cause huge moaning.

You can do this sort of stuff easily in Skyrim or whatever, because if it bugs out, it's "lol Skyrim" and/or it's a mod so it's on you that you used it. But in a MMO? That's not going to fly.

And yeah expanding the amount of terrain is just damn hard work as you say. It might actually end up slightly easier to populate it with a fake ecology-type deal and random encounters, but it's also going to feel a lot less personalized and WoW-ish (even by MMO standards, WoW is exceptionally prone to highly-specific, highly-fixed stuff, and always has been).

Re: daze, when did you last play?

I don't mean that in a rude way, but like, a few patches ago they put in mount items, and one of them is an item that makes you immune to daze in all specs, as Djuntas says. Tanks are also immune to daze.

Flying is just incompatible with everything else being asked for. You'd need something more like No Man's Sky to incorporate these requests and flying, and that'd be an entirely different MMO (WoW's biggest problem re: flying is that it doesn't have any mechanics at all - unlike say GW2's approach to it - if WoW had done that, and there's some evidence they considered a system a bit like that, then rejected it as too much work - then I think all expansions would have had flying as an option - albeit you might have needed different monsters/vehicles to fly in different places).

[schwarzkopf]

Burn out causes boredom.

Don't do everything now - and you won't get tired/bored of doing it.

Just relax - and play the game, no need to finish off the whole expansion in 2 weeks.