The longer that I “play developer” on my private EverQuest server the more I have an appreciation for the frustrations that the professionals have. The biggest challenge I’ve been facing lately is making appropriately difficult content. To say the least I’ve been a failure.
When it comes to making a resilient monster that will last a while I’ve had no trouble. I can make a fight take a while. That, however, isn’t fun in any way. Nobody wants to fight an easy monster for five minutes straight will no real risk. At the same time, however, I’ve been trying to avoid creating insanely difficult encounters that rely more on luck than execution.
I simply haven’t found a good middle ground and find it almost laughable when another one of my “named” encounters goes down easily. It also doesn’t help that my players are bringing guns to a knife fight.
One of the biggest issues I’ve been wrangling lately is what we’ve politely named “the alt train.” Essentially two thirds of the highest level group is two boxing. I will design an encounter for a group of six and it will be done by a group of six with an extra bard, cleric, shaman and paladin in tow. My poor encounters just don’t stand a chance!
At any rate it gives me insight as to why, in the past, we’ve ran into raid encounters that were ridiculously too easy or so over powered that it takes the stars and planets being in a straight line to win. Finding the balance between challenging and luck isn’t easy. Considering the professionals often toe the line I don’t consider myself too big of a failure for having a hard time with it.
Ultimately what I’ve learned so far is that it is better to create an over powered encounter and then nerf it slowly over time than to make it too easy to begin with. I’ve also learned to cut content developers a whole lot of slack when it comes to a raid being challenging or easy. In the future I’ll experience the content, write up polite feedback, and send that off.
This week I tip my hat to the guys who make balanced and challenging raid encounters without making them rely too heavily on luck. I appreciate your hard work more than you guys know!
All characters are © 2007 - 2012
Just remember you have the added challenge of having to modify existing content from huge raids to 1-2 group encounters. I imagine it is hard to develop from the start, but they are liberated compared to the constraints in which you work.
As a side note I have really enjoyed all of your content along with replaying EQ1 with friends. It’s like old times on crack.
Fuckity stays in the garage when I play with the group so count my shammy out!(Unless Durrok isn’t present, then it’s buff-bots HOOOO)