If you want less limitations, the flip side is the game would need less limitations. Instead of you being able to "pull" one or two mobs (a totally artificial construct) , all 5 of them as well as 20 more in hearing or seeing distance would all come and pulvarize you.
You make a concession (not exploiting pathing) and the game makes a concession (allowing you to fight manageable numbers of opponents).
That is the problem with this idiotic argument. There are unintended consequences when you adjust things. For example if you move the mobs you create more dead space. That makes all geographical features a place where mobs will avoid and they will gather in open areas together. Additionally, it reduces the amount of content there is in the game. People want their cake and the ability to eat it too. They want realism if it helps them but not if it makes the game harder. If they can out smart they AI they want the easy win button.
You are correct sir.
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
By the same token there wouldn't be 3 or 5 standing around every 15 yards for as far as the eye can see...
I'm all for more AI. One of the things that kills me is that the latest MMO AI isn't much better than EQ 1's AI (if it is better at all). I suppose the scripted raid bosses are a step up but... why do they always focus their attacks on the tanks?
By the same token there wouldn't be 3 or 5 standing around every 15 yards for as far as the eye can see...
I'm all for more AI. One of the things that kills me is that the latest MMO AI isn't much better than EQ 1's AI (if it is better at all). I suppose the scripted raid bosses are a step up but... why do they always focus their attacks on the tanks?
Necessary evil of games being more solo friendly.
People want their cake and the ability to eat it too.
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
By the same token there wouldn't be 3 or 5 standing around every 15 yards for as far as the eye can see...
I'm all for more AI. One of the things that kills me is that the latest MMO AI isn't much better than EQ 1's AI (if it is better at all). I suppose the scripted raid bosses are a step up but... why do they always focus their attacks on the tanks?
Yeah, because there would be 100+ standing in a camp/town/city together. Anything that would be solo or in small packs would have already been killed and therefor only weak dumb mobs would be able to be killed by small groups or soloers. Which means max level would have no solo content. How is that for realistic? We can talk all day about bringing perfect realism to MMO's but in the end, it just wouldn't be that fun.
EDIT: sorry if I misinterpreted your post and you are agreeing with me. Also if you did not agree with me, sorry about it coming off kind of hostile, its not suppose to.
East Carolina University, Computer Science BS, 2011 -------------------- Current game: DAOC
Games played and quit: L2, PlanetSide, RF Online, GuildWars, SWG, COH/COV, Vanguard, LOTRO, WoW, WW2 Online, FFXI, Auto-Assault, EVE Online, ShadowBane, RYL, Rappelz, Last Chaos, Myst Online, POTBS, EQ2, Warhammer Online, AoC, Aion, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, Allods, Darkfall.
I'm in the OP's boat. The idea here is that no one should be able to do anything the designer's don't want you to do because of balance.
Now, having done more than a thousand hours of work on balancing games, I can tell you it is very, very difficult.
Also, a bunch of focused humans are im-damned-possible to stop. I mean, they will find absolutely every possible hole given time. There is really no possibility of stopping them.
This is the reason why EQ1 took the evil step of adding summon-deathtouch two-step. Given the players and the systems, a mob given incredible HP could still be killed over time using a tank and cleric CH chains. They gave up and added death touch.
I agree EQ1 allowed more brain-power than other games to solve problems. LOTRO, on the other hand, is brain-dead. It is fun, but brain-dead. Like playing an old top or side scroller shooting game over and over. After a while, the process is automatic. But it is also comfortable and easiest for the greatest number of players.
Really hard mobs, really hard zones, or really hard puzzles piss players off. You can't make these "elite" zones either because that pisses players off when they can't have the leet goodies.
A hard niche game would have permadeath, full loot pvp, intelligent AI that uses full speed to kill characters, goes to get help, and other stuff, no map, no compass, and no chat. Mensa (minimum) level puzzles and large spanning-tree mazes with teleports, twists, and darkness would be common. The end result would be 35% or so of players would die every day. Almost everyone would rage-quit in short order. No company wants to shoot itself in the head like that.
The most brain-like game I found was Wizard 101 as at least you needed to plan some strategy with that. Or any online CCG; but that comes down to money until everyone has the FotM deck.
Yeah, I would love a game where my brain would give me an advantage, but we aren't likely to see that soon. After all, make a game that 1% of the world can play and you severely limit scope.
OTOH I wish they would stop pandering to the 6th grade educational level and an IQ of 75 or so.
LOL! A hard niche game like that would be hilarious to play but would get old very fast.
OP, the AI is not that advance yet so when you find away to own a mob it will piss the dev's off because they must now work harder to give that specific mob a new pathing code. Programing AI is very hard because dev's try to think and give AI the mind power as the players but figure it is currently impossible. You and everyone else must play the MMORPG as how it is designed, use the shortcuts that are set up by the game Dev's. You see how pvp work right, even if you find away to be avoided from the other player you would be lable as an exploiter by that player lol.
They have an alternative which you did not quote, they evade and run away. It has been solved. First try and read all of what people write or do not quote them.
Second, the items in red help you out of your real life combat issues.
IT IS A FREAKING GAME.......IT IS NOT REAL LIFE AND IS NOT MEANT TO SIMULATE REAL LIFE. GO OUTSIDE IF YOU WANT REALITY. IF YOU WANT REAL COMBAT THERE ARE WARS GOING ON; PICK A SIDE AND PUT YOUR SKILLS TO THE TEST.
People who want reality in fantasy games are very silly.
There is a large difference between dodging and being impossible to hit. That is not evading at all and most games today uses it. Especially Wow.
And just because it is a game doesn't mean that you shouldn't be able to use tactics. There is a big difference between some ind of logic and reality. A fantasy game should reflect the reality we read about in fantasy books, not the real world of course but I never read a book where someone on higher ground were immune to arrows.
Do you seriously think it is silly to use terrain to your advantage, something that is including in every FPS game and RTS game out there?
Cool story dude.
Go play FPS and RTS if you cannot conform to the rules set fourth by the developers of the genre.
You are asking for something that is not possible and you cannot except that it is not a resonable request; seems straight foolish to me. Why bang your head against the wall. There are limits to processing power.
Not possible? If you never played an MMO made before 2004 then I can see how one would think that, but even then... to think that z-axis calculations are beyond the ability of modern programmers or that the only possible solution is server-stressing AI routines is a really limited view of the issue and its possible resolutions.
Evade! Evade! Evade! is a band-aid, slapped on to quickly patch a problem and not have to deal with it. It's disappointing that players would find that an acceptable solution.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
This whole thing is a direct result of using geographical features like water as a barrier. I'm sorry me and Mr. Orc cant swim but if you are going to use it as a physical barrier in your game dont let me target something on the opposite side of the river. It only makes sense for a ranged attacker to attempt to use something like a river or steep terrain or some other natural feature that is going to slow the enemy and keep them at a range suitable for pumping them full of spells or arrows. Stop being lazy and using things like rivers as barriers.
So this thread seems to have turned into an "is exploiting pathing cheating" thread. I actually intended this thread to be about how restricting player strategies by even labeling shooting something across a river as an exploit forces combat into dull monotony.
You see...the reason I even shot the orc across the river was not because I was trying to farm it for easy kills, or get mad exp fast, it was because I was BORED. Bored with the combat system, bored of having to fight every MOB the same way. Finding new and better ways to kill things is actually exciting to me. When I feel forced into fighting the exact same battle 5000 times, it's kind of disheartening and seeing that developers seem hell-bent on forcing players into one type of battle is even more disheartening.
MMO's should allow more freedom, the party line of developers should not be "do it our way or go home!" Yes, I realize there are consequences to not putting such hard restrictions on strategy, yes I realize that things may have to be nerfed. Still, if I had to actually think about how to engage each encounter I would have a much better time.
One poster mentioned that if we were allowed to shoot monsters across the river, then the game should compensate by making individual pulls impossible etc. YES fine, this would be great. I DO NOT want the game to be easy, I just want it to be more involving and fun.
Your first one did indeed sound like an exploit of the pathfinding
Players think they are crafted when they figure out ways to cheat the AI, that isn't strategy it is limited code. If the AI were to be made truly intelligent then the game would crash due to all of the processing overload of all of those creatures running millions of computations. So MMO AI is left fairly basic to keep things running smoothly.
Yeah, that is the real reason MMO have so lousy AIs. But funny enough have Guildwars pretty smart AI and it works fine. Sure, GW is instanced but to be honest, so is most of the MMO action today.
And there are FPS games you can be pretty many players in who still uses a good AI. No, everything is about making the AI as simple as possible because it saves money. That is the reason most MMOs use the holy triad too, it also saves a lot of programming which would add to the cost of the game otherwise.
I can't wait for GW2 in this aspect, just the fact that there is no holy triad forces the devs to use a good AI. And that is well possible, but it demands good code and more work. Most MMO designers are not the least interested to make that kind of changes, they rather add pretty fluff instead and as long as everyone else has the same crappy AI you don't have to upgrade it anyways.
The AI is more or less the same as it was in Meridian 59 which I played on a 56 Kb modem. If you truly don't believe a MMO can have a better AI than that you just havn't thought about it. The net is a lot faster and the computers a lot better including the servers. Most MMOs today have limited players even in open zones and opens up an instance whenever a certain number enters and even the ones that doesn't have still mostly instances which at least could have a better AI, as GW and almost every single or group player game have proven for the last 10 years.
That doesn't mean it is right to exploit issues in the game, it just means it is sad that those things are in there from the start. The OP has indeed right that MMOs are very inflexible in many ways. The devs don't want you to think and quests can only be solved in one way.
You are missing a major difference between FPS games and MMOs.
FPS games generally have up to 50 players/creatures going on at once. That isn't much to deal with.
MMOs have thousands of players and tens of thousands of mobs that can all be active at the same time. That is a huge jump in the amount of work that has to be done by machines at any given point in time.
So can MMOs have very advanced AI, sure if they want their hardware budget to be so much each month that they can't make a profit anymore.
You can work in small things into the AI and still work in modern MMOs, and the developers are doing so slowly. You could add a check for the player distance and just have the mob run the other way if it is too far that it can't get to the player before being too hurt. But the machines couldn't even handle that back in the day so you won't see it in any of the older MMOs, and this guy was using EQ as an example.
So this thread seems to have turned into an "is exploiting pathing cheating" thread. I actually intended this thread to be about how restricting player strategies by even labeling shooting something across a river as an exploit forces combat into dull monotony.
You see...the reason I even shot the orc across the river was not because I was trying to farm it for easy kills, or get mad exp fast, it was because I was BORED. Bored with the combat system, bored of having to fight every MOB the same way. Finding new and better ways to kill things is actually exciting to me. When I feel forced into fighting the exact same battle 5000 times, it's kind of disheartening and seeing that developers seem hell-bent on forcing players into one type of battle is even more disheartening.
MMO's should allow more freedom, the party line of developers should not be "do it our way or go home!" Yes, I realize there are consequences to not putting such hard restrictions on strategy, yes I realize that things may have to be nerfed. Still, if I had to actually think about how to engage each encounter I would have a much better time.
One poster mentioned that if we were allowed to shoot monsters across the river, then the game should compensate by making individual pulls impossible etc. YES fine, this would be great. I DO NOT want the game to be easy, I just want it to be more involving and fun.
The shooting the orc across the river thing is a problematic scenario to discuss the general issue since there are so many 'simple' fixes for the issue that do not need a GM to inform players that they are exploiting. The key to this is to find a way to neuter that 'tactic' in a way that would fit into the game world.
At the same time it becomes an issue of how easily it actually is to code around the issue. If the game did not include a way to determine if a mob is 'stuck' due to pathing then any solution becomes virtually impossible to implement. However, that is a major design flaw since pathing errors would be a key error state for the game and not accounting for them is just bad coding. For more obscure issues of game geometry it becomes a different thing since those can't be predicted ahead of time as reliably.
The proper response for the devs is to code around the issue and neuter it in a way that the players will find believable and will accept if they are not actually out to actively break the game. This of course takes time so the primary issue becomes how unbalanced the 'tactic' is. In the orc across river scenario it seemed like a minor thing and any advantage you would gain would be trivial. What the actual consequences of that would be for real is hard to judge from that description alone.
Yeah, because there would be 100+ standing in a camp/town/city together. Anything that would be solo or in small packs would have already been killed and therefor only weak dumb mobs would be able to be killed by small groups or soloers. Which means max level would have no solo content. How is that for realistic? We can talk all day about bringing perfect realism to MMO's but in the end, it just wouldn't be that fun.
>>
Yeah but how would those 100+ get food or water or conduct trade without spreading out a bit? Wouldn't they need to sleep? If they're constantly under siege (which is what we're playing now - everything's constantly under siege from packs of kill-crazed murderers/pillagers/looters aka PCs) then they would all be in a keep/fort with finite and dwindling supplies/supply lines. There could be fun adventures around helping them get supplies or pretending to help them to get them to open their gates or even competing factions of players helping/hindering them. But no one's even trying to do anything like that and that's mostly why I think MMOs are stuck in limboland right now.
This whole thing is a direct result of using geographical features like water as a barrier. I'm sorry me and Mr. Orc cant swim but if you are going to use it as a physical barrier in your game dont let me target something on the opposite side of the river. It only makes sense for a ranged attacker to attempt to use something like a river or steep terrain or some other natural feature that is going to slow the enemy and keep them at a range suitable for pumping them full of spells or arrows. Stop being lazy and using things like rivers as barriers.
Well this is the truly interesting thing. Water is both a barrier and its not.
If you were wearing full plate armor and you got into a real river to cross it, you would be a fool. It would be your death. You would not even within bowshot if their were hostiles on the other side. Even with chain armor you are seriously pushing your luck without some kind of rafting.
If you were in cloth or leather of some sort perhaps yout ford the river. If would be slow and you would be a sitting duck. But its possible. And even then its dangerous. Rivers are slippery and currents tricky and can sweep you away.
And before anyone says MMOs can't emulate this DDO has a swim skill and simming/diving mechanics. It has water with currents that oppose swimming motions. It has slippery sliding surfaces. It has penalties to your abilty to swim based on armour. It even has dungeons where the current will pull you into spikes and kill you.
But yet even though DDO has many aspects of the nature of water implemented it does not have mobs go into water (well it may do this more as it implements underwater combat). The mobs chase to the edge and then stop at a part where you would swim.
The fact of the matter is, a river is dangerous. Its very dangerous. But this is not captured. Most games lack mechanics to even capture this, which is sad. But even for one that does they do not have the mobs really utilize. Although in DDOs case they use "terrain exploits" all the time for NPCs. The put archers and mages across chasms filled with water or in inaccessible places or way up on some ledge that takes of alot of ladder climbing and jumping to get to.
The main reason they have mobs stop at the waters edge is because of kiting. And really it makes some sense. A wolf is chasing you and you dive into the ocean or a river it doesn't chase. It doesn't even go in the water it just watches for a bit and leaves.
One of the main reason mobs do not chase over water is because they have no real idea of how to do anything other than chase. Even having mobs run away is fairly rare in MMOs. And the behavior itself is sometimes actively hated by players as its becomes just plain annoying.
Like another poster said. Don't put mobs clsoe to a river. Problem solved. And it makes sense, because ranged weapons + river = dangerous. Getting into a river = dangerous too. And simply do what DDO does for kiting as soon as mobs sees you go in river it leaves back to its spawn if its a melee or shoots at you if its ranged. Oh yeah they shoot at you if you are trying to swim a river and they are archers. Go figure. What a crazy idea.
In the end it was laziness by the developers EQ1. They think a river is just another wall and then put up arbitrary rules to ensure that it behaves that way even though that is not what it really is. Niether in real life, nor in their imitative implementation. And yes they are imitating real life. And no their implementation did not even fit what they wanted so they made some arbitrary "exploit" rule because they put a mob too close and didn't give enough sense to back up 20 feet when its being shot at. Which many MMOs have implemented. Backing out to a favorable range. Whoa that be hard. LOTRO must be run by geniuses they actually have archer mobs that do that.
And in their attempt to imitate a bedrock feature of real life terrain, they did not even bother to learn the lessons of what they were imitating.
So this thread seems to have turned into an "is exploiting pathing cheating" thread. I actually intended this thread to be about how restricting player strategies by even labeling shooting something across a river as an exploit forces combat into dull monotony.
You're just seeing the entire situation incorrectly. Even if they allowed you to happily shoot orcs across a river, it wouldn't take more than a day or two before every goon on the server was at the same river (or thereabouts) shooting at the same orcs. Within a few months of doing nothing, ranged classes could completely drop out of grouping entirely, drop any stats or gear that gave unnecessary defensive attributes, and abandon any skills not directly related to orc-across-water-shooting. The leveling experience for every mage would be diluted down to nothing but firing the same couple of ranged spells at the same couple of spawns ad nausea.
Do you understand?
Combat is not made dull and monotonous because the developers force some arbitrary set of rules upon you; it's made dull and monotonous because that's the most effective strategy. It's logically and strategically intelligent to reduce threat of death, reduce randomness, reduce player dependency, and reduce any outstanding combat factor outside of target-orc-push-fireball-repeat.
The developers are not the ones making the combat dull, you are the one making the combat dull because you're simply a smart and strategic player. If anything, the developers are trying to save you from yourself by forcing you to take additional factors into consideration, such as how much health you have, how much aggro you're doing, and whether your healer went afk to take a poop.
Really good single-player games force you to utilize different strategies with tricky methods like steadily advancing AI or more involved environments, but MMO's are just simply too big to plan for in the same manner. That's why you invariably find loopholes.
Don't mistakenly believe that developers instantly quash anything that wasn't planned for. Paladins were never originally designed to tank in WoW but players continuously used them to handle AE events and encounters until the developers eventually incorporated the skillset into the regular class. The infamous Monk FD pull in EQ was never designed as a pulling mechanism either, but once developers realized it made for a valuable addition to a group and an added pulling mechanism, it too was incorporated into the regular evolution of the class.
Not every loophole is shut down simply because it appears. That's not to say developers don't sometimes make mistakes, there are many bad, bad, bad games that leave loopholes unchecked and many equally bad games that needlessly put systems in check that were doing no harm. But the actions of the developers are not the ones making the combat dull and monotonous, we, the players, are. And we do it because it's simply strategically and tactically smart to do so. It's called a "dominant strategy" and it's dominant because it gives the most chance for success.
The morning sun has vanquished the horrible night.
What the OP said is something that I and friends have discussed for years.. It brings back the days of early EQ1 combat.. Rather it be groups that found ways to kite, CC or whatever to achieve their result.. There were some situations that it was truely an exploint, but simple stategy such as the river fight discussed is NOT one of them.. I have no problem with someone using the terrain to their benifit.. I always have no problem with a hostile mob with no intel to run around the lake, or swim acrossed it.. (problem solved).. or an intelligent mob to run away to a safe distance or neighboring friend.. (problem solved).. BTW.. ya'll remember what happens to social agro when a mob runs into it's friends (like in EQ1).. CHOO CHOO..
I say bring back social agro and choo choo's.. This carebear attitude of running away 50 yards to lose agro is a joke.. I can see a mob giving up if you are able to put enough distance between you and them.. but as long as it's within 10 feet and nipping at your heels.. YOU never lose agro .. I loved how EQ1 handled agro.. Once you were on the list, you stayed their until you zoned out, or the mob was killed, or had it's memory wiped.. I so missed the days that combat was more then just a DPSfest
Comments
That is the problem with this idiotic argument. There are unintended consequences when you adjust things. For example if you move the mobs you create more dead space. That makes all geographical features a place where mobs will avoid and they will gather in open areas together. Additionally, it reduces the amount of content there is in the game. People want their cake and the ability to eat it too. They want realism if it helps them but not if it makes the game harder. If they can out smart they AI they want the easy win button.
You are correct sir.
--John Ruskin
By the same token there wouldn't be 3 or 5 standing around every 15 yards for as far as the eye can see...
I'm all for more AI. One of the things that kills me is that the latest MMO AI isn't much better than EQ 1's AI (if it is better at all). I suppose the scripted raid bosses are a step up but... why do they always focus their attacks on the tanks?
Necessary evil of games being more solo friendly.
People want their cake and the ability to eat it too.
--John Ruskin
Yeah, because there would be 100+ standing in a camp/town/city together. Anything that would be solo or in small packs would have already been killed and therefor only weak dumb mobs would be able to be killed by small groups or soloers. Which means max level would have no solo content. How is that for realistic? We can talk all day about bringing perfect realism to MMO's but in the end, it just wouldn't be that fun.
EDIT: sorry if I misinterpreted your post and you are agreeing with me. Also if you did not agree with me, sorry about it coming off kind of hostile, its not suppose to.
East Carolina University, Computer Science BS, 2011
--------------------
Current game: DAOC
Games played and quit: L2, PlanetSide, RF Online, GuildWars, SWG, COH/COV, Vanguard, LOTRO, WoW, WW2 Online, FFXI, Auto-Assault, EVE Online, ShadowBane, RYL, Rappelz, Last Chaos, Myst Online, POTBS, EQ2, Warhammer Online, AoC, Aion, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, Allods, Darkfall.
Waiting on: Earthrise
Names: Citio, Goldie, Sportacus
LOL! A hard niche game like that would be hilarious to play but would get old very fast.
OP, the AI is not that advance yet so when you find away to own a mob it will piss the dev's off because they must now work harder to give that specific mob a new pathing code. Programing AI is very hard because dev's try to think and give AI the mind power as the players but figure it is currently impossible. You and everyone else must play the MMORPG as how it is designed, use the shortcuts that are set up by the game Dev's. You see how pvp work right, even if you find away to be avoided from the other player you would be lable as an exploiter by that player lol.
Not possible? If you never played an MMO made before 2004 then I can see how one would think that, but even then... to think that z-axis calculations are beyond the ability of modern programmers or that the only possible solution is server-stressing AI routines is a really limited view of the issue and its possible resolutions.
Evade! Evade! Evade! is a band-aid, slapped on to quickly patch a problem and not have to deal with it. It's disappointing that players would find that an acceptable solution.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
This whole thing is a direct result of using geographical features like water as a barrier. I'm sorry me and Mr. Orc cant swim but if you are going to use it as a physical barrier in your game dont let me target something on the opposite side of the river. It only makes sense for a ranged attacker to attempt to use something like a river or steep terrain or some other natural feature that is going to slow the enemy and keep them at a range suitable for pumping them full of spells or arrows. Stop being lazy and using things like rivers as barriers.
So this thread seems to have turned into an "is exploiting pathing cheating" thread. I actually intended this thread to be about how restricting player strategies by even labeling shooting something across a river as an exploit forces combat into dull monotony.
You see...the reason I even shot the orc across the river was not because I was trying to farm it for easy kills, or get mad exp fast, it was because I was BORED. Bored with the combat system, bored of having to fight every MOB the same way. Finding new and better ways to kill things is actually exciting to me. When I feel forced into fighting the exact same battle 5000 times, it's kind of disheartening and seeing that developers seem hell-bent on forcing players into one type of battle is even more disheartening.
MMO's should allow more freedom, the party line of developers should not be "do it our way or go home!" Yes, I realize there are consequences to not putting such hard restrictions on strategy, yes I realize that things may have to be nerfed. Still, if I had to actually think about how to engage each encounter I would have a much better time.
One poster mentioned that if we were allowed to shoot monsters across the river, then the game should compensate by making individual pulls impossible etc. YES fine, this would be great. I DO NOT want the game to be easy, I just want it to be more involving and fun.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
You are missing a major difference between FPS games and MMOs.
FPS games generally have up to 50 players/creatures going on at once. That isn't much to deal with.
MMOs have thousands of players and tens of thousands of mobs that can all be active at the same time. That is a huge jump in the amount of work that has to be done by machines at any given point in time.
So can MMOs have very advanced AI, sure if they want their hardware budget to be so much each month that they can't make a profit anymore.
You can work in small things into the AI and still work in modern MMOs, and the developers are doing so slowly. You could add a check for the player distance and just have the mob run the other way if it is too far that it can't get to the player before being too hurt. But the machines couldn't even handle that back in the day so you won't see it in any of the older MMOs, and this guy was using EQ as an example.
The shooting the orc across the river thing is a problematic scenario to discuss the general issue since there are so many 'simple' fixes for the issue that do not need a GM to inform players that they are exploiting. The key to this is to find a way to neuter that 'tactic' in a way that would fit into the game world.
At the same time it becomes an issue of how easily it actually is to code around the issue. If the game did not include a way to determine if a mob is 'stuck' due to pathing then any solution becomes virtually impossible to implement. However, that is a major design flaw since pathing errors would be a key error state for the game and not accounting for them is just bad coding. For more obscure issues of game geometry it becomes a different thing since those can't be predicted ahead of time as reliably.
The proper response for the devs is to code around the issue and neuter it in a way that the players will find believable and will accept if they are not actually out to actively break the game. This of course takes time so the primary issue becomes how unbalanced the 'tactic' is. In the orc across river scenario it seemed like a minor thing and any advantage you would gain would be trivial. What the actual consequences of that would be for real is hard to judge from that description alone.
<<
Yeah, because there would be 100+ standing in a camp/town/city together. Anything that would be solo or in small packs would have already been killed and therefor only weak dumb mobs would be able to be killed by small groups or soloers. Which means max level would have no solo content. How is that for realistic? We can talk all day about bringing perfect realism to MMO's but in the end, it just wouldn't be that fun.
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Yeah but how would those 100+ get food or water or conduct trade without spreading out a bit? Wouldn't they need to sleep? If they're constantly under siege (which is what we're playing now - everything's constantly under siege from packs of kill-crazed murderers/pillagers/looters aka PCs) then they would all be in a keep/fort with finite and dwindling supplies/supply lines. There could be fun adventures around helping them get supplies or pretending to help them to get them to open their gates or even competing factions of players helping/hindering them. But no one's even trying to do anything like that and that's mostly why I think MMOs are stuck in limboland right now.
Well this is the truly interesting thing. Water is both a barrier and its not.
If you were wearing full plate armor and you got into a real river to cross it, you would be a fool. It would be your death. You would not even within bowshot if their were hostiles on the other side. Even with chain armor you are seriously pushing your luck without some kind of rafting.
If you were in cloth or leather of some sort perhaps yout ford the river. If would be slow and you would be a sitting duck. But its possible. And even then its dangerous. Rivers are slippery and currents tricky and can sweep you away.
And before anyone says MMOs can't emulate this DDO has a swim skill and simming/diving mechanics. It has water with currents that oppose swimming motions. It has slippery sliding surfaces. It has penalties to your abilty to swim based on armour. It even has dungeons where the current will pull you into spikes and kill you.
But yet even though DDO has many aspects of the nature of water implemented it does not have mobs go into water (well it may do this more as it implements underwater combat). The mobs chase to the edge and then stop at a part where you would swim.
The fact of the matter is, a river is dangerous. Its very dangerous. But this is not captured. Most games lack mechanics to even capture this, which is sad. But even for one that does they do not have the mobs really utilize. Although in DDOs case they use "terrain exploits" all the time for NPCs. The put archers and mages across chasms filled with water or in inaccessible places or way up on some ledge that takes of alot of ladder climbing and jumping to get to.
The main reason they have mobs stop at the waters edge is because of kiting. And really it makes some sense. A wolf is chasing you and you dive into the ocean or a river it doesn't chase. It doesn't even go in the water it just watches for a bit and leaves.
One of the main reason mobs do not chase over water is because they have no real idea of how to do anything other than chase. Even having mobs run away is fairly rare in MMOs. And the behavior itself is sometimes actively hated by players as its becomes just plain annoying.
Like another poster said. Don't put mobs clsoe to a river. Problem solved. And it makes sense, because ranged weapons + river = dangerous. Getting into a river = dangerous too. And simply do what DDO does for kiting as soon as mobs sees you go in river it leaves back to its spawn if its a melee or shoots at you if its ranged. Oh yeah they shoot at you if you are trying to swim a river and they are archers. Go figure. What a crazy idea.
In the end it was laziness by the developers EQ1. They think a river is just another wall and then put up arbitrary rules to ensure that it behaves that way even though that is not what it really is. Niether in real life, nor in their imitative implementation. And yes they are imitating real life. And no their implementation did not even fit what they wanted so they made some arbitrary "exploit" rule because they put a mob too close and didn't give enough sense to back up 20 feet when its being shot at. Which many MMOs have implemented. Backing out to a favorable range. Whoa that be hard. LOTRO must be run by geniuses they actually have archer mobs that do that.
And in their attempt to imitate a bedrock feature of real life terrain, they did not even bother to learn the lessons of what they were imitating.
You're just seeing the entire situation incorrectly. Even if they allowed you to happily shoot orcs across a river, it wouldn't take more than a day or two before every goon on the server was at the same river (or thereabouts) shooting at the same orcs. Within a few months of doing nothing, ranged classes could completely drop out of grouping entirely, drop any stats or gear that gave unnecessary defensive attributes, and abandon any skills not directly related to orc-across-water-shooting. The leveling experience for every mage would be diluted down to nothing but firing the same couple of ranged spells at the same couple of spawns ad nausea.
Do you understand?
Combat is not made dull and monotonous because the developers force some arbitrary set of rules upon you; it's made dull and monotonous because that's the most effective strategy. It's logically and strategically intelligent to reduce threat of death, reduce randomness, reduce player dependency, and reduce any outstanding combat factor outside of target-orc-push-fireball-repeat.
The developers are not the ones making the combat dull, you are the one making the combat dull because you're simply a smart and strategic player. If anything, the developers are trying to save you from yourself by forcing you to take additional factors into consideration, such as how much health you have, how much aggro you're doing, and whether your healer went afk to take a poop.
Really good single-player games force you to utilize different strategies with tricky methods like steadily advancing AI or more involved environments, but MMO's are just simply too big to plan for in the same manner. That's why you invariably find loopholes.
Don't mistakenly believe that developers instantly quash anything that wasn't planned for. Paladins were never originally designed to tank in WoW but players continuously used them to handle AE events and encounters until the developers eventually incorporated the skillset into the regular class. The infamous Monk FD pull in EQ was never designed as a pulling mechanism either, but once developers realized it made for a valuable addition to a group and an added pulling mechanism, it too was incorporated into the regular evolution of the class.
Not every loophole is shut down simply because it appears. That's not to say developers don't sometimes make mistakes, there are many bad, bad, bad games that leave loopholes unchecked and many equally bad games that needlessly put systems in check that were doing no harm. But the actions of the developers are not the ones making the combat dull and monotonous, we, the players, are. And we do it because it's simply strategically and tactically smart to do so. It's called a "dominant strategy" and it's dominant because it gives the most chance for success.
The morning sun has vanquished the horrible night.
What the OP said is something that I and friends have discussed for years.. It brings back the days of early EQ1 combat.. Rather it be groups that found ways to kite, CC or whatever to achieve their result.. There were some situations that it was truely an exploint, but simple stategy such as the river fight discussed is NOT one of them.. I have no problem with someone using the terrain to their benifit.. I always have no problem with a hostile mob with no intel to run around the lake, or swim acrossed it.. (problem solved).. or an intelligent mob to run away to a safe distance or neighboring friend.. (problem solved).. BTW.. ya'll remember what happens to social agro when a mob runs into it's friends (like in EQ1).. CHOO CHOO..
I say bring back social agro and choo choo's.. This carebear attitude of running away 50 yards to lose agro is a joke.. I can see a mob giving up if you are able to put enough distance between you and them.. but as long as it's within 10 feet and nipping at your heels.. YOU never lose agro
.. I loved how EQ1 handled agro.. Once you were on the list, you stayed their until you zoned out, or the mob was killed, or had it's memory wiped.. I so missed the days that combat was more then just a DPSfest 