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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Mob skipping and Agro range
halbarz
Member
A lot of MMO's have an issue with players mob skipping, this is often poor design but also done through exploits.
How will Ashes counter this or how could they do this.
In the video showing the castle, we see steven run through the mobs in the castle.
- Should rooms be more blocked off until mobs are cleared?
- Should mobs chase a group through the whole dungeon or castle?
How do you folks see this? and how can Intrepid counter mob skipping?
Next to that Agro range in some mmo's is a joke you can stand next to the mob pretty much at times and they still do not attack. To prevent mob skipping I was thinking that chain agro should be a thing. Pulling a mob pulls all the other ones in the area, chain all the way until there are no mobs to chain pretty much
How will Ashes counter this or how could they do this.
In the video showing the castle, we see steven run through the mobs in the castle.
- Should rooms be more blocked off until mobs are cleared?
- Should mobs chase a group through the whole dungeon or castle?
How do you folks see this? and how can Intrepid counter mob skipping?
Next to that Agro range in some mmo's is a joke you can stand next to the mob pretty much at times and they still do not attack. To prevent mob skipping I was thinking that chain agro should be a thing. Pulling a mob pulls all the other ones in the area, chain all the way until there are no mobs to chain pretty much
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Comments
I think mobs should chase through a whole dungeon, however in AoC the majority of content is in the open-world, including a lot of the dungeons, so that's not really feasible.
Most games do use chain aggro, where pulling one pulls the entire group. Unless you mean an "each room is it's own entire fight" kind of thing, that's not very common.
Honestly, the only real way to counteract this is either for content to be gated or for enemies to have better ai/ability to stop you.
For the first option they could have dungeons be full of doors that don't open until you kill specific or all mobs, or maybe kill a mob for a key kind of thing. Or even puzzles that you have to do.
For the second option, that means giving mobs a lot of slows, roots, etc. (I'd include stuns but I absolutely abhor stuns as a concept) or even abilities that erect walls for you to run around. Or just making AI see you from much further away.
Mobs should be tied to the room, but the dungeons would be balanced around clearing every mob in the dungeon. Some rooms should probably close the entrance too once the party is in. If you start combat it closes in 3 seconds.
Realistically a dungeon would be many rooms put together. So I think they should be built as multiple rooms no matter what way they do it. They could have unique dungeons that don't follow that rule. Hell they could do both, but I like the room clearing way better. It would probably feel more like progression if you thought of it as beating every room anyway.
I dislike mob skipping because it was definitely not meant to be intentional in any MMO. It just became the norm because no developer ever made dungeons with this in mind. Well in MMO's. This doesn't seem like the kind of game where you don't want to kill everything anyway. So it makes sense to guide the noobs to play that way.
U.S. East
In Instanced dungeons, i do like the approach of all living mobs joining the Boss in the battle.
And mounts play a huge role in this, while also making the map smaller and terrains less challenging.
However, long distance travels hide many dangers. In games, that should be considered fun, yet people, spoiled by studios slapping a "summon mount" button, treat distance as a niusance to their 'fast tracking' from point A to B activity.
Most of the time, I just taxied someplace and rode to the next. When, flying mounts were released, I never ever touched some areas. With dungeon finder, I never left Storm/Mart. Thank the gods, we won't have these in AoC.
Yea, it's a common thing for WoW veterans to say flying mounts killed WoW
Everyone wants to get to their destination, nobody cares to smell the roses on the way, but will complain after the fact that they were allowed to skip the roses
To delve a little deeper into that mindset and come up with a solution is that people hate being forced to travel long distances for mandatory objectives. When the objectives are optional or close by, nobody complains about travel times to distant optional locations.
Because of this AoC won't really have this i think as all your quests come from your node afaik, and even visiting other nodes is entirely optional.
Where your performance in early parts of the dungeon will affect what happens at the boss fight. As such, it would be easy, and probably already planned, to have how many mobs where killed factor into how the final boss fights and it's loot table.
Personally I would like to see a random 30% have no tether and chase you till someone died.
So many of us have gotten used to just running through an area and they give chase for 30 meters then go back. Allowing us to skip stuff. In the videos of the dungeons they have shown this already happens.
"Mounts should be a way to travel to distant locations, not an ez speed buff. "
In essence that is all mounts are. A speed buff regardless of the distance.
I don't know if it's a bug or something, but playing the New World preview I've died plenty of times because mobs just would not stop chasing me to what would be a ridiculous degree in any other game. It definitely made you respect keeping a distance on mobs you didn't want to deal with, and made you think twice about running through them. The game has tons of issues, but that's something I did find interesting.
- What I always thought would be fun is an NPC taunt, it is the opposite of a fear where that you run towards the mob instead of away from it. But I am not sure if this is possible.
I also fear that one tactic will apply to skip mobs in the open world dungeons is:
- 1 player out of the party runs and pulls, everyone else follows to skip. Player 1 dies, mobs recent and he gets rezzed.
Dungeon mobs (instanced or open) should have player abilities, this would help a lot in keeping the content challenging but would also help with a lot of abuse as you would see a lot more Aoe's and etc.
Even that a lot of the world will be open world, the open-world dungeons sound very nice but also sound like an area that people will just skip everything to go to boss X. With this I then also hope that mounts will be disabled in these open-world dungeons.
Steven only survived thanks to GM cheats.
All three of them went oom on ONE mob there. A single mob was designed to take on a group of players.
Many people see Stevens game footage and think that the difficulty is pretty low, but most of them dont realize or forget that he has busted armor etc.
This exists in some games, I can't remember exactly where I've seen it, but I will say that this mechanic has the same anti-immersion / anti-fun problem that stuns do. If you're interested in what I mean by that you can read through my comments in this thread where I detail how and why stuns and CC that completely removes player agency in the face of negative outcomes is bad design.
Fear CC's are slightly more acceptable because unlike the proposed Taunt, they force you away from the danger, meaning the player doesn't feel as bad about losing control because they aren't punished as much for not having control.
I definitely agree with this for almost any game. When NPC's are just caricatures of what the player is they feel cheap and obviously programmed.