Originally Posted by
Kurt2013
This is the completely wrong way.
1) The engine will not be able to handle the numbers, if you force all in one instance
2) The instance will effectively be closed for other intended uses (lowbie questing, levelling etc.). This is not worth it and very dangerous when it is a beginner levelling zone like white sands, conalls or tesso. even in kheshatta it is a problem, because it is one of very few lvl70-80 zones.
3) You will only enhance the bad effect you are already getting from rewarding only the strong. Even if you force people into one instance it will NOT mean you have more people to play with.
4) It will enhance the gap. We can agree fightclubbing is not an intended use, but the reward system and quest design just scream for it, especially with current population. Where will you draw the line? Assume there are 30 people in the zone, a jhebbal pops and soon after a fields of slaughter. Are those 6 remaining fightclubbing? If there are only 3 people in the zone and a gullah pops, are they fightclubbing?
Back to the gap: Without bringing in more people and motivating the weak to participate you will only strengthen the gear effect, since you effectively take away the "group up and kill the powerful" option. Quest designwise apart from fields of slaughter this option is also punished.
5) as you might remember in 2009 there were fightclubbers on white sands. you did not manage to force them to fight them back then, you will not do it now. For them it might be the only way to get some kind of competition ability or they have other goals. When disturbed they logged and came back when you as disturbance where gone. So where is the benefit by trying to enforce it? If you leave them alone you might even have more people at high people for minis or they come to your instance voluntarily when they think they are ready (i can give you a couple of example from well known gankers or big guild members who did exactly that and they are now very active in end game pvp). Fightclubbing might be some kind of Bori effect (or powerlevelling). It is not fun and you don't want to do it, but somehow you feel "forced" to do it, if you want to achieve certain goals in your rl lifetime.
Bottom line:
- leave the fight clubbers alone
- make the intended use of content more attractive, rewarding and faster than fight clubbing. This means also, that those "exploiting" empty areas will seek out the more populated ones voluntarily.
That is the way, that will work and deal with more than one fly in one catch.
First to do suggestions:
- offer rewards for participating, especially 2nd and 3rd places. This means maybe random dropping body xp parts or drastically increasing the open pvp xp (can easily be linked to the global buff). also like jhebbal a quest for participating will help (link to activity, so fightclubbing will take longer)
- link rewards to risk and power (e.g. a char in mixed pvet4 and pvpt4 gear will give different rewards than a new 80). This can be done via a multiplicator depending on enemies in vicinity, flexible quest rewards (for example, if you fightclub you will get less xp than when doing the quests in contested zone)
- fix the quest design: fields of slaughter is fine so far...both winner and looser have a reason to fight, maybe just change one quest to make it targeted purely for the ones not holding the point, gullah is not working on low population (maybe make the chosen change more often and more randomly), the arenas are bugged...people are green, blue or read randomly it seems (meaning attackable or not, also you need rewards for more than the 1st place)
- lower some prices in the shops or offer one time previews for just ingame gold