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deterministic PvE really boring...
zollen
Member Posts: 351
Here are the common tatics employed by players to beat any PvE oriented game.
1. Bring specific skills/classes just to counter a specific PvE scenario
2. Bring enough players/firepowers to overcome a specific PvE scenario
3. Exploit PvE bugs or logic fault
4. Exploit PvE replayilbity, keeping trying until players win.
99% outcomes of the PvE scenarios already been determined/known before players even set foot on the PvE scenarios (i.e. dungeons..etc), because players use one or more of above tatics.
I can only have the following conclusion:
PvE scenarios are designed to "let players win".
With computer powers of million calculations per second. Any computers can easily beat us. I accept the fact that computers are "dumbed down" to entertain us. But there is no reason not making games a little bit challenging.
I am hoping to see some truely adaptive PvE scenarios where the difficulties/challenges are dynamically adjusted depends on the amount of players and compositions of players team. So the outcome of EVERY PvE scenario would be 50%/50%. (players win 50% of the time and computer win 50% of the time). Anyone know any PvE game that have this win/loss raio???
Comments
well I think what you described is what ppl want in PvE. Though I do think NPC should be a bit smarter or a bit more random so they use more different abilities/fighting styles.
For what you want, we have PvP
EDIT:
You said this: I can only have the following conclusion:
PvE scenarios are designed to "let players win".
Of course that is true, what is the point of playing a game you can't win?
The Illuminati Gaming Society
how about just stop spamming different parts of this forum whit the same stupid argument?
Which FF Character Are You?
I guess the problem of PvE oriented games is that they become nothing more than risk-free, non-adaptive puzzles, they can be easily solved as long as you know the "formula". Instead of a true counterpart of the PvP.
I guess the problem of PvE oriented games is that they become nothing more than risk-free, non-adaptive puzzles, they can be easily solved as long as you know the "formula". Instead of a true counterpart of the PvP.
I see what you mean. I think the PvE monsters should almost be practice for PvP. If they implemented typical PvP tactics into the PVE it would be awesome. like the heavey armored NPCs forming a wall in front of the mages and stuff like that.
It would be nice to have intelligent encounters rather than they just run up to you and start attacking when they see you.
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I live to fight, and fight to live.
Ok... if you spend the time and energy gathering the necessary equipment and consumables to beat a certain boss or area and you only get a 50% chance of winning, it's sort of a waste of time. Why bother running the scenario? Just hand in all the consumables and make sure you meet the gear prerequisite, talk to someone who then rolls a dice. If the roll comes up in your favor, they give you rewards, if it doesn't, you die.
The whole point of putting the effort into something is to achieve it, not hope the cards fall in your favor. You earn the rewards through time spent learning encounters and gathering the necessary supplies. If you want things to be based on luck, go play poker. Skill helps, but in the end, the person who has the most luck will win (unless they don't know what a deck of cards is).
It is all about the following:
Do you know what you are doing?
Do you know your build?
Are you good enough to face the unexpects/unpredictable?
Are you good enough to face any situation?
Can you use your situation to your advantage?
Can you work with your teammates effectively?
Can you exploit the weakness of your opponents?
How good can your adapt???????
You are right about one thing... It isn't about luck
Actully all the arguments you made could be ligit stratagies. Think about it.
1. Countering enemies. This is the old "fight fire with water" idea. Why have a mage dual when the warrior can just run through the blazing fireballs and pound the mages face in?
2. Over power the enemy. Why use three people with you can use nine? you have less deaths, better odds and sometimes more fun.
3. Any means to win. If you can hide behind that rock untill the enemy is gone, if you can get to the buildings roof and rain magic down on them then why not do it?
4. Keep trying/overwhelming numbers/run them down. Never say die
Modjoe86- Gambling is a sin.
Laserwolf- Only if you lose.
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Waiting for= PSU, WAR
First the computer power needed might be enough to get it strong enough to beat 1 or 10 or maybe even 100 players but not the 1000s of players that fights against npc all at the same time.
Second just because you have the computer power it doesn't mean it's easy to write an algorithm that can beat the player. I'll give you an example. I play a board game named Go, this is a very popular board game specially in Asia, worldwide there are more Go players than there are Chess players. The rules of the game are fairly simple and due to its popularity a lot of time is spent developing Go playing computers. BUT despite all this there have yet to been developed a Go computer than can beat someone who has played the game for 1-2 years.
Some problems are just too hard to solve even if you have the computing power. In Go the reason for this is a combination there being too many possible combinations that even todays super computers can't brute force it and the fact that it's close to impossible to write a good pruning algo.
In an MMORPG it's different but you still face similar problems plus many more like a constantly changing game that needs to be updated and the fact the players are often better at the game than the developers and the AI can never have a better understanding of the game than the guy who wrote it.
"Memories are meant to fade. They're designed that way for a reason."
You say you want to have a 50/50 winning/losing ratio. What if you see it like a football game, you can either win or lose, but the team wins that plays best (I know that's not always true, but don't bash me on that one). Not all the players have the same equipment, and more important not all the players have the same 'gaming qualities' (means how good they know the game and what they should do at what moment). So if you as you guys want, want to balance it to a 50/50 ratio you would have the same chance of winning or losing no matter how good you play, no matter what your equipment is?
If you have the right equipment and use the right playing style in combination with your equipment and class you are better then some else who is the same level, same class, and maybe even has the same equipment.
So yes as it is now if you play good (means if you know how to play against certain enemies) you win, if you don't know how to play, you loose.
You guys are right when you say that you want some smarter or more random enemies, but that has nothing to do with a 50/50 winning/losing ratio.
The Illuminati Gaming Society
It is all about the following:
Do you know what you are doing?
Do you know your build?
Are you good enough to face the unexpects/unpredictable?
Are you good enough to face any situation?
Can you use your situation to your advantage?
Can you work with your teammates effectively?
Can you exploit the weakness of your opponents?
How good can your adapt???????
The "better" you are, naturally the more you win.
All i can say is I havent played a MMO yet where I didn't die in PVE. I doubt anyone in this forum can say they never had to release their corpse, or do a corpse run. Is it because I didn't know what I was doing? Not necessarily. Maybe an add came into the picture, maybe a spell was resisted, maybe I was stunned, etc.
Come now, surely you cannot say PVE has some challange? Sure if you make preparations you increase survivability, but there are times when even the best strategies fall short.
It is all about the following:
Do you know what you are doing?
Do you know your build?
Are you good enough to face the unexpects/unpredictable?
Are you good enough to face any situation?
Can you use your situation to your advantage?
Can you work with your teammates effectively?
Can you exploit the weakness of your opponents?
How good can your adapt???????
The "better" you are, naturally the more you win.
yes that all true you said, but what you want is that if you are good then you win. Well it's allready like that in all games right?
I don't really understand what you really want...
The Illuminati Gaming Society
One of the things I hate is that in most games playing PVE versus PVP is like switching to another game with similar graphics. The style of fighting is just completley different. PVP fights tend to be very chaotic, with a lot of movement and you just trying to get the right person targetted or to fire off a snare during the short time someone is in range. PVE fights tend to be more of set piece battles, where you come in and do your thing, often standing in one place or doing simple moves.
Plus basic mechanics are very different In WOW, for example, group PVE fighting is all about manipulating aggro; you pretty much win or lose encounters based on keeping aggro in the right person. Mobs are so strong compared to individuals that generally if a mob attacks someone it's not 'supposed' to, you're just screwed. While in PVP, there is no aggro at all, there's not even an attempt at making anything like taunts or high-aggro attacks work, but at the same time everyone is roughly as tough as you are.
Or in EVE, it's really easy to take on NPC battleships (maybe even 2-3 at a time) with a cruiser - you pretty much just fly in and orbit, use a repairer to last through their damage, and eventually you'll be collecting bounties. Taking on 3 player battleships with a cruiser is just suicide though.
This also leads to PVP gear being completely different than PVE gear, not just minor things like 'this is better because it tends to throw a human off'. In WOW, for example, you don't really need stamina on PVE gear unless you're a tank, but for PVP gear you rarely want items without stamina.
I'd like it much better if PVE and PVP were a lot more similar than they usually are, there will always be some differences but the game doens't have to have a completely different feel.
The standard MMO bit where you walk into a room of creatures split into half a dozen groups that you fight one at a time is pretty silly. I mean, you end up fighting and watching the others standing in one spot ignoring the fight until you come in to kill them.
I don't really get how you'd pull the 50/50 win ratio on games overall, since the win/loss percentages will shift a lot over time, from the time when people first hit the encounter to when everyone has leveled/geared/etc. to where it's easier and every group has someone who knows the strat. If you're talking 50/50 going in, that's really too low for most people to be interested. I don't mind something where I lose a fight occasionally, but losing half the time in a PVE situation is just annoying, especially if there's any kind of death penalty.
I'd certainly like to see PVE that's less predictable though, where you don't come in with a set party makeup and follow a set pattern to get the loot drop then repeat. One of my favorite fights in my WOW days was on a 10-man LBRS run (Lower BlackRock Spire is a dungeon really designed for 5 players). It was mostly easy, but in one room that has stairs descending down to a big open area with lots of trolls we had a mixup. We engaged one group of trolls, somehow picked up a second group in the pull, which is no big deal since it's just 10 people running 2 5-man fights. However, it slowed us down enough that a patrol walked into our group, then someone missed a runner who pulled another set of trolls into the fight, one of the wandering big trolls got involved too, and there may have been another patrol or group of them by the end. It was a huge chaotic mess, but we managed to pull through with only one death, the main tank (me) right at the end of it when healers had run OOM.
The problem here is that a lot of the existing MMO PVEers really do want predictable fights, like what you see with raiding. The kind of people who shout 'know your role!' and go on about someone being the wrong build really do want to go in and follow a very narrow pattern to collect the loot pellet. I hope they decide not to really target that crowd, since it's pretty much the opposite of what I want to see in PVE.
You also points out that players do not like challenges and they like predictability. There may be some truths in your statement, but I also know many players quit WOW because of the massive grinding... anyway...
I do believe behaviors are taught, many players are taught to like predictable gameplay because the PvE elements of all MMORPGs are more/less the same. There is no other truely ground-breaking alternative for players. Every MMORPGs use more/less the same PvE approach, does not mean there is no better PvE solution.
No, I don't think game players in general are addicted to predictability, I just think that a good chunk of the current MMO players do. It seems that Mythic isn't trying to copy the WOW/EQ model or borrow too heavily from other games like UO or EVE, from what they've said they're making what I'd call a real game (primary focus on fun content). If they really mean what they've said so far, then I think there's a good chance that they're not going to try to pry MMO players away from grinding, raiding, and grind-fueled PVP but will be trying something new. (OTOH, WOW devs talked bit on doing something really different, and we all know how that ended, so we'll have to wait and see).
How many people kite in PvP? Many. How many MMORPG have mobs that kite? Only GW. How many MMORPGs have mobs so stupid that they would look up in a rainstorm and drown like domesticated turkey or just stand around while the flesh is burned off them from a mages aoe? All of them except Guild Wars.
I'm sorry but that is the state of things. Not only is GW the only one that has it, GW is the only one that even has an interest in doing so. And look at all the grief they get from farmers anytime they update the AI.
Do you know what would happen if WoW put AI into raid encounters instead of predictable scripts? Can you imagine the King Kong size hissy fits that would be thrown by all theTigole/Furor clones? Did you see the gigantic DnT hissy fit that occurred just because of a slight difference in scripts?
The PvE of most MMORPGs is basicaly just vairations on farming and no matter what the people say about not liking grinds that is in fact what they want. And when they get a game with intersting mob behavior and no need to farm they ask for stupid-ass EQ-style aggro and farming. OMG every single monster isn't hitting the tank what will we do?????? I dunno use some snares and kite maybe? But then we deviate from the holy trinity, that is blasphemy!
There are only two major companies with any cajones and any interest in making games that are not stupid cliches in the MMORPG industry: Anet and CCP. And CCP has very little interest in NPC stuff.
Reakktor gets an honorable mention but they aren't major.
If you have a 50/50 global that means there are people that will die 90%+ as there are going to be people that will still win 90%+
How long do you think the people that die 9/10 of every encounter will continue to play? And when they quit the global scale move towards more than 50% winning which means you need to make it harder which means more people die 9/10 which means more quit. Keep it going and suddenly there are no players left.
If you want more challenge you can get it, go to places and fight things that are made for players a few levels higher than yours or if max level try solo stuff that are supposed to be group content. In most games the challenges are there for you IF you are willing to take them on.
Actually if you go with the 50/50 above what will happen is that people will just start fighting lower level stuff that they know they can win against and the only thing you managed to do is make level grinding take longer because people get less exp for the lower level stuff.
"Memories are meant to fade. They're designed that way for a reason."
One of the things I hate is that in most games playing PVE versus PVP is like switching to another game with similar graphics. The style of fighting is just completley different. PVP fights tend to be very chaotic, with a lot of movement and you just trying to get the right person targetted or to fire off a snare during the short time someone is in range. PVE fights tend to be more of set piece battles, where you come in and do your thing, often standing in one place or doing simple moves.
Yes and Yes. I've never really thought about it that way, but I agree with you both. I would love to be able to play my character in PvE the same way I would play him in PvP. Another thing it would do is prepare the hardcore PvE people to defend themselves when attacked, rather than trying to fight their PC opponent like they would a mob. This is why farmers typically are easy prey in PvP.
When I played WoW I dropped a level 60 farming warrior from full health twice by myself as a 49 rogue. Firstly, that should never happen at all. And secondly, I almost wet my pants...both times. Overpower was a rogue killer. I should have been dead in one or two shots. I don't think he ever used it. But it wasn't because I was some tricked out badass...far from it. I was an awful rogue. It was because he was a farmer...all he did was fight mobs. Once he was taken out of that environment he didn't really know what to do. If mobs were more dynamic or "chaotic" as you said above, people wouldn't be so defenseless when taken out of their element. And I think it might even convert some of those PvP haters out there.
Proud Member of Mongbat
Wouldn't even need complex AI, just have the boss not target tanks and use any nasty AOEs as often as possible. Or just simplify aggro so that the hate for someone is 10x the amount healed and 1x the amount of damaged caused and completely ignores taunts and extra aggro attacks; this would make the mob rampage through the healers, then the damage dealers from highest to lowest, and finally the tanks if any were left. I mean, how many gods are really dumb enough to keep pounding on the guy in plat mail rather than his buddy in a dress who keeps healing him?
This kind of encounter has predictability and really stupid mobs so deeply ingrained that putting AI in would render it impossible. It's not just a matter of one thing in the fight, everything about the fight and the player's gear in a raid requires that things go on a simple pattern. The only way for someone not to die in seconds to it is to be tank-geared and have casting-geared healers spamming heals on him, and the only way to do enough damage to it is to have a ton of people decked out for crazy damage spamming attacks. This is one reason why the 'no support classes' has me looking forward to WAR, it sounds like they want tactical fights instead of the equation based fights common in other games. (By equation-based I mean that you essentially compare (tank HP + heals) - (Mob DPS *time)/(tank mitigation) to (Mob HP) - (group DPS*time)/(mob mitigation) and see which one hits zero first).
And yeah, the DnT-like guilds are a good chunk of the players that I hope this game makes no attempt to cater to. I don't think that unpredictable encounters are something that can really be grafted into a game later, you need to build things from the ground up, have players used to fighting that kind of fight, and do it all along so that you don't end up with only players who like predictable fights by the time you hit the unpredictable ones.
Let me sum up everything I said into one simple question:
Should PvE be the true counterpart of PvP (technically, commerically, MMORPG wise and fun wise)?
PvE isn't all about letting the players win, it's all about challenge for faster xp, actually. you see, if you want more xp, just go fight higher level mobs, then your chance of survival goes down