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Splinter Topic: Mob Leashing And Aggro
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
From a conversation in another thread, as usual.
Right now as of the shown flow in the Tank update, Mob Leashing seems to be short ENOUGH that you can outrange mobs within their own area. Whether this is a default or not is unclear from the content, but there has been a concern raised that this will lower difficulty and challenge if it remains as it is.
A relatively populated area would require players to run away in the right direction to avoid getting more mobs on them, but if one could realistically just 'keep running' until a safe area is reached, this may not matter.
Since I generally only play games with no leash of this type (my main game switched from 'no leash at all, the entire zone will chase you', to 'if you do manage to get away, the mob just fades after a bit and cannot easily aggro others', and BDO is BDO), I can't claim to understand why this is implemented in this way at all other than to make the game easier, as pointed out.
Do you perceive this as a problem, or is the effect on difficulty something you either don't experience, or believe should be in the game?
Right now as of the shown flow in the Tank update, Mob Leashing seems to be short ENOUGH that you can outrange mobs within their own area. Whether this is a default or not is unclear from the content, but there has been a concern raised that this will lower difficulty and challenge if it remains as it is.
A relatively populated area would require players to run away in the right direction to avoid getting more mobs on them, but if one could realistically just 'keep running' until a safe area is reached, this may not matter.
Since I generally only play games with no leash of this type (my main game switched from 'no leash at all, the entire zone will chase you', to 'if you do manage to get away, the mob just fades after a bit and cannot easily aggro others', and BDO is BDO), I can't claim to understand why this is implemented in this way at all other than to make the game easier, as pointed out.
Do you perceive this as a problem, or is the effect on difficulty something you either don't experience, or believe should be in the game?
Sorry, my native language is Erlang.
1
Comments
It should not be in the game.
One assumption is to prevent AoE farming.
AoE farming can be dealt with without short leash on mobs. There is no need to make the game less challenging by having players walk away from a bunch of mobs everytime something unexpected and potentially fun can happen.
So many months people have call for various social mob designs and behaviours. All that goes out the window, pointless, as soon as you make it ez for players to AVOID DYING.
I want either a non-leash system or at least a location-wide one.
In other words, dangerous trains should be possible. NPCs should not go back to their rest location having a powerful HoT and ignoring other players.
To me, the aspect of a games difficulty that developers should be working on is the difficulty for players to successfully kill the enemy they wish to kill. A longer leash has no impact on this at all.
If the game is designed poorly, a shorter leash may make it easier for players to get to this enemy that they want to kill, but if the game is designed in a way where they need to fight their way to this mob, then a leash has no impact here, either.
Then there is the notion of a longer leash making it harder to travel around the game world. My question here is - why should this be something that is made artificially more difficult?
In my experience, the only time you really attempt to run through an area relying on mob leashing - rather than fighting your way through that same area - is if the mobs in that area offer both no challenge and no reward, said mobs will still attack the player, and you have a specific desire to be on the other side of said mobs.
To me, this is a fault of game developers. Such areas should not exist.
If this is the case, if Intrepid do indeed have areas like this, why should players have to fight through them? Forcing players to fight through these areas isn't making the game more difficult where it counts, it is making the game more tedious in ways that don't matter.
Now, the above does assume that players can't just run through areas they wouldn't be able to easily fight their way through - this would be atrocious game design if it were the case. However, if a mob offers no challenge or reward to players, players should not feel the need to fight them just to get to the other side.
You frame that "mobs should be challenging otherwise the game failed". Whoever said anything about the mobs NOT being challenging? Why are you shifting focus to a non existent issue?
The problem is that as things are the players can ALWAYS disengage from the mobs (which are tough), when they are in trouble.
If I want to reach a spot in which the mobs have weakness in arrows, with my archer dps group, then I will have to reach that spot by fighting through other mobs.
And a no leash design would add challenge to the game.
Another scenario in which players want to go to the "other side of the mobs":
Mobs on the other side may drop X crafting scematic.
Another?
Mobs on the other side have high dmg and low def, leading to faster grind for a skilled group.
Another? The area on other the other side is elevated and we can see incoming enemy guilds.
Another? On the other side of the mobs is a quest related location.
Has the game failed because people want to fight past through some mobs and keep going (instead of staying with them)? Hell no.
Has the game failed if I can go paste those mobs without a fight, due to short leash? Yes.
What on earth are you typing about?
As usual, you didn't read what I said.
At the point in gameplay where leashing comes in to play, challenging players should not be the goal of developers.
Also, if your mobs are designed in a manner where players can just disengage if things aren't going well, then you have designed a really poor game. Now, I know you have a habit of playing games with really bad PvE design (and your opinions on PvE are based around this), but that doesn't mean your experiences are true across the board.
And neither have you.
Drop the word "anime", and you are kind of talking about a good portion of top end raid content here.
Yeah, Ill take my owpvp due to conflict of interests with the plain non-leash overland mobs, the plain sought-after open world bosses which drop valuables.
I had enough of repetitive raids for 15 years now. Nothing exciting about them after the first encounter.
You keep playing with the mobs in your 40 year old rose-tinted mmos.
I will grind the mobs and fight the players, the players which cannot be matched by mobs in combat.
This is a better option than just blaming the issues you have had with shit developers on entire content types - which is what you do.
You being bored of raid content isn't a fault of raid content, it is a fault of you playing games that expect you to kill the same content for literal years on end, rather than either weeks or months (at the most).
Again, if you believe this, it is because you have not ever come across top end PvE content.
Top end content isn't something you grind. It also isn't something fighting against other players are ever able to compare to.
The most tedious thing I have ever seen in an MMORPG was PvP in Archeage. if you knew who was in charge of your opposition, you knew what they were going to do. It was actually boring. People are easier to work out than a well executed encounter - and in MMORPG's, you come across far fewer players in leadership positions than you do raid encounters (even Archeage had more raid encounters than players in leadership positions - and that games raid content was lacking).
Aren't we all sinners?
It's a video game that needs gameplay rules. Not David Attenborough.
NPC bounty hunters ftw!
You login, they come.
Let's say that you have multiple medium to long-leash mobs in an area. You get the attention of one, and you start running (either in or out, doesn't usually matter).
Mob A eventually gives up, but in most games I play, the difficulty (and it would be quite high, especially in dungeons) would be to somehow get to the end of Mob A's leash without either aggroing Mobs B-E on your path, OR by them 'linking' with Mob A, selecting you as 'target of their target' and then activating their own pursuit.
And so on.
Since this is entirely up to Devs in terms of paths (how many paths they give you with no Mob B-E, so you can escape from Mob A), and I generally don't seem to play games where players have meaningfully higher movespeed than Mobs, or easy retreat paths, the idea is a bit foreign to me.
tl;dr as soon as leashes aren't short in an even slightly enclosed space, my experience is that trying to run from Mob A will eventually end SOMEWHERE with Mobs W-Z killing you, and I can see why a fully open world game generally wants to have SOME leash.
personally find it fun and left many memorable moments. Granted we had "Zones" so it wasnt infinite but some maps, from point A to point B can take you 20-30 mins to run.
So in EQ, first day playing on release, I rolled a wood elf and my friend rolled a dwarf. Our other friend was a human and we wanted to go meet up with him. I needed to run to Butcherblock, got there safely. Now entering to Butcher Block, I needed to run to the Dwarf city, which is approx 10 minute of running. I am level 1, I end up pulling a orc centurion. I am now lost, we don't have a MAP, I had this MFer chase me for 5 minutes while I am trying to find safety and a place where I can die and hopefully find my body. I was on the phone with my friend, screaming and freaking out. Then I learned how brutal this game was, with no map, and now I have skeletons around my corpse - took me 1-2 hours to recover and finally got to my friend. Then we learned about the boat ride and religion choice matter in Freeport.. RIP
we got fond memories being chased around throughout our entire EQ sessions.
So at the very least, Some mobs should chase you until you leave it's node, others up to exiting a dungeon or their controlled area, like the KEEP in the video. You should not have a sense of safety anywhere.
Also, if there is a leash, should it be a location one or a player one, or a combination of both? I'd personally prefer a location leash (not just a spawn point, but a whole location) with no player leash, so that fleeing players gotta leave a location completely because all those A-Z mobs will run after them until they do.
Though this would definitely lead to aoe farming, so there'd probably have to be some AI coding against that or some other ways of making it not a super optimal way to play.
I am not going to try to convince people of the 'strong single enemies, no easy AoE farm in this game!', but that's my only experience with it.
AoE farm requires 'an entire group of mobs that you can AoE down before they kill either you or whoever is protecting you', and this exp still has to be decent, right?
I definitely have played games like that, but they were usually very action-y, and instanced-dungeon so leashes mattered minimally. Other games I play, even BDO at the more 'fun' camps, if you plan to 'AoE farm' you had better be EXTREMELY prepared for that or you will die.
We'll obviously have to see how viable that'll be once we get to the mob balancing stage, but I do think there's a chance that it's gonna be possible.
My main concern with aoe farming is one party overtaking several spawn spots. And if mobs are supposed to be thick and with longer respawns, then that party might get even more mobs under them.
But as I said before and as Azherae pointed out, most mobs should be difficult enough to just not be aoe-farmable. And those groups should just have proper mobs to occupy them.
I have an issue with the idea that in a game where things should supposedly be difficult, difficult enough that you even care what your team composition is when you enter an area, AoE farming wouldn't require either extreme skill, or wouldn't reward little exp (and I have experienced games where the latter is still not enough because they have good drops or whatever).
I really don't think Ashes is going to mess this up by accident, these people have been playing MMOs for years. The fact that a few of them have played one where this was a thing for a bit, isn't a negative, it was very popular, so many people would have.
EDIT: Fixed a double-negative, gotta get back to speaking English after being in the lang-code mines today.