Off-topic Discussions from 'we have a new lead game designer bill trost'

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After having watched the TL beta streams - western players don't even fucking know what L2 is, let alone having played it

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I mean, they're just making what people are buying. If majority of their consumers (especially the big spenders) were truly not ok with this shit, NCsoft wouldn't be doing it.

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The only way to have pve of higher quality is to prevent pvp from happening during the encounter. "More pve" can come in whatever form Intrepid can come up with, but better pve should be in a few instances (still keeping the 80/20 split) and definitely several "cage" encounters.

L2 worked just fine with cage design, so I'm sure Steven has at least considered that approach. Hell, the volcano dragon was pretty much that, except he didn't limit entrance when the fight started. But I'd assume that's just a few additional lines of code, so there's already base design that's related to cage encounters.

And as Noaani said, there can still be pvp in the overall encounter, but just not directly during the pve part. Variety is the spice of life, so having only "there's a mob that everyone can hit and pvp around" design would be dull.

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But, as Noaani said, that is the case currently. The strongest few guilds will control the majority of pve content (especially bosses), because they'll be able to push anyone else out of the encounter through pvp. At which point all the other guilds simply don't have the access to pve content.

I definitely hope that the world is huge and populated enough to provide everyone with enough mid-high quality pve, with the top quality stuff being limited to power checks.

I think the easiest way to do this is with party/raid quests and "cage" triggers. Maybe there's an npc you gotta bring to a location, at which point he triggers a fight in a "cage" and then you gotta bring that npc back, but he's now a target for other people and if they kill him - your reward's gone. Or you get a key for a room in an open dungeon, where the fight happens, and you then need to go deeper into the dungeon to get your loot, but your group is now perma-flagged until you get the loot or wipe.

In other words, you have assured pve content, but you still have high risk of losing the reward for it due to pvp.