No it sure isn’t! I always wondered what it would be like from the other guys’ point of view. Poor NPCs… But I guess that’s one thing I never really liked about the whole “mmo logic”, when there are groups of mobs and pulls and of course, when they are low level they don’t even acknowledge your existence. I wonder though, in more modern gaming times, if the mob groups are really necessary any more. I mean, look at all the new content that comes out with games like WoW or SWTOR, the raids and dungeons tend to have less and less pulls and more boss fights. So I wonder if this will be a future trend. An ending to mob groups and pulls.
Heck, even look at games like the upcoming Elder Scrolls Online, where they claim they are doing away with it completely! (As in, if you walk into a room, the whole room sees you and you’re going to have a fight on your hands, but the fights are balanced around that so it’s ok.)
Anyways, I just wonder if that’s an archaic mechanic that will be phased out, or something part of the core structure of mmos that will persist for years to come.
Well I play this App game called infinity blade and everything Is just a munch of bosses and mini-bosses! Its good for an app but wow would suck if it was only multiplayer
heh, yeah I’d suppose if they took out all the trash mobs, the game would be kind of boring.
I think a happy medium would be a balance between pulls, bosses, and even mob strategies. like, make the pulls have some kind of strat to them! wow-classic is an amazing example of this!! back in my day, you HAD to cc certain mobs. or else, ya know, you died. it was so important that group composition became a big thing. not only just freezing or sheeping or sapping, but silences or stuns or even kiting were all essential strategies just for the lowly trash mobs.
of course now gear is way out of control so most groups just plow right through content without much regard to mob tactics.
so I think a return to the slower paced pull strats, less overall pulls, and even some mini bosses here and there to mix things up would be a great way to deal with the situation.
also, I’d love to see some more group type puzzles that didn’t involve killing but more like figuring out stuff. sorry, that’s not really articulated, but you get my drift. group puzzles! do it!
Well, that’s a rather off-topic thing to write.
Druds, king of random. :)
“As in, if you walk into a room, the whole room sees you and you’re going to have a fight on your hands”
…Wait, what? I’ve always thought that computer games showed real life perfectly. This new piece of info implies that the heist I was planning is going to get harder than I thought. I was going to pull the guards in the bank one at a time, perhaps kite them around and if I accidentally pull too many, feign death to reset aggro…. This sure complicates things… Maby if I get a mage to sheep one guard and a shaman to hex one, tho I guess I wont be able to solo it and that we will need a tank and a few healers….
Seriosuly tho - I would love to have some of the oldskool wow elements such as kiting and other cc’s back into the fights. Although, on the whole, I do enjoy places where I wont have to spend three hours just clearing trash to get to the boss, usually a raid takes long enough time w/o endless trash. I think you summed up my feelings pretty well when you said “so I think a return to the slower paced pull strats, less overall pulls, and even some mini bosses here and there to mix things up would be a great way to deal with the situation.”
And yes! more puzzles!!! As long as it’s possible to solo the puzzle so that it’s not required to have a certain player to loot specific pieces to get on. An example of what I’m thinking of is in BRD. In the room just before the last boss two fires must be lit, which is done by killing and looting the fire keepers. Problem is that the item is only lootable by the one player whom gets to loot the mob (unless one goes there witha group of friends and more open loot rules) - I’ve actually been in a group which disbanded because a torch was assigned to be picked up by the one player whom never looted any mobs and whom was unable to understand why everyone was nagging at him to loot (yes, I know that there are more than enough fire keepers so we could just have killed a new one but peeps just left instead….).
hmm, yeah the problem with puzzles is that you want them to require a group for the level to get through, but you don’t want to alienate the upper level guys farming the area. there’s nothing worse than having a high level uber raid geared character that can’t get through a low level dungeon just because you needed 1 other person to click something.
uhg, brd was one of the worst yet most wonderful places! brd was actually my favorite dungeon of all time, but almost nobody ever went into the last room to finish up. sure it’s a bit of a pain, but man, talk about pulling teeth when trying to convince 4 other guys that the last boss was worth it. I guess there’s a fine balance somewhere between difficulty and reward.
Hm, would be cool if grays get feared, or generally freak the heck out if you get close to them. Would make me feel powerful, if while traveling through a low level area, all the mobs run scared when I get close to them, instead of fruitlessly attacking me, or ignore me completely.
that would actually be a good idea! or even have some do the /cower emotes! man, there was like no horde of greys big enough to take down my high levels characters. lol, reminds me of my days running through ZF and doing mass aoe on the hundreds of little trolls! good times… good times…
Yay, back to Warcraft comics, baby!!!111one-hundred-and-eleven!!
BTW why a lot of the webcomic links you had some months ago were removed?
heh, yeah I’m kind of all over the place huh?
oh, I just moved them over to the left sidebar, under the ads and “vote” buttons. needed to even up the right and left sides a bit. >)
I already was seeing the ones on the left sidebar, I wanted to know where the other ones were, mister Coffin, sir.
hmm… which ones? lol! bad memory, remember?
if you mean the links from that list, I got rid of a few because some of them stopped updating. I might need to go back through and add/remove some. got few new ones I read. >)
also recommendations are welcome!
EDIT: Looks like some of the ones I removed are back! woot! >)
hmm… maybe I should make a “links” page with some sort of mini review for each… hmm, whatta ya think?
Woot, indeed!
Did you ever play FFXI, because every freaking mob in the game would aggro on you and follow you to the loading screen, you had to wait sometimes as much as 5-7 hours just to get a group (at least when I played) and then you’d finally clear mobs up to the area you wanted to level in and zone into that area to 70 mobs that would rape you because someone wasn’t good at the game or pulling and so trained the entire area to the zone in. I had 2 linkshells (think guild chat) just so I could ignore the requests from the full guild to clear out zone ins…
sigh, no. never got that one. >(
yikes, sounds kind of horrifying! though I imagine it had some good ol fun aspects to it as well.
but I guess it goes back to how you swing it. here’s a though, what about doing it similar to a tower defense game? like instead of groups and such, you fight waves. I mean, when you kill the first group in a dungeon, the whole place knows you’re there, as such they might send out squads as you make your way through, rather than stationary groups with sever bad eyesight.
In the ”Classic” setting , mobs are there to make you feel ”strong” in a sense that ‘ look at you ! You can take 10 guys at the same time ! You are a hero ! ‘ and then throwing you and 20 more people to one guy ” well looks like this boss is 20 times better than you LOLOLOLOL ”
It also adds the ”grinding” feeling to the game where MMOs want you to spend sometime on these grinds so your playing time would be MORE rather than what is happening to the current Max Level people , Queue , raid , kill , loot, exit.
Also , it is hard to balance the ‘non-grouped’ npcs as you have to think ALL the situations. One guy might just sneak past the room and the guys inside while the other , not knowing as a game’s fault, runs in and get mowed down by room full of mobs.
It is good to see MMOs getting more action oriented and Mobs getting more intellegent with their ‘Sights’ but MMOs have their own restrictions such as LeveLs, LAGS ! , Balancing.
I also think that the ‘Grey’ status kinda off-putting but it is also necessary so if you already leveled past that area…you really wouldn’t want to get harassed over over while travelling.
Also, if you make every battle as ”Boss” status, it will lose the Unique feeling of being a boss fight and will be ‘just another grind battle ‘ so they also have to find a balance there.
I guess it is the Immersion vs Mechanic usefulness and more often than not Mechanic wins over Immersion in MMOs.
lol, you just described the reason why dynasty warriors is freaking addictive fun! nothing better than cutting down an entire army with a single swing!
this is true… sometimes you just want to run somewhere without a hassle. but maybe make them do some kind of /cower or /nonchalant emote would be a cute touch.
yeah, suppose you can’t have just a boss battle game… so again, it all comes back to balance. >)