MMO worlds broken? Nay I say!


Agonus

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by Kiralyn View Post
(I'm also reminded of the PnP game RoleMaster.... it had the Quickness stat, which directly opposed the to-hit roll against you, alongside a seperate hit/damage chart for each weapon type vs each armor type. Heavier armors were easier to hit, but took less damage from those hits. Plus the multiple charts took into account maces or slashing or piercing vs chain or plate. Etc, etc, etc. There's a reason it's called RuleMonster or ChartMaster by some. )
I had a couple of D&D buddies who had tried that game. The only thing they had to say about it was: "You had to roll at least 8 dice to take a dump, and could easily miss or Critical Fumble."


 

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Originally Posted by Agonus View Post
Among other suggestions this guy makes that have been labeled unlikely to appear anytime soon due to hardware limitations, this guy sounds like he prefers NGE SWG, which IMMEDIATELY discredits anything he has to say in my book.
It sounds like he has no peripheral vision and can't add.


Whether you keep track of numbers and statistics during actual gameplay is, for the most part, purely a matter of personal preference. If you hate doing it, but do it anyway, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Let me be direct: prior to about I4, essentially all numerical min/maxers in CoH were doing it wrong. I can say that with almost absolute certainty because a) the public state of the art sucked prior to that, b) no one outside the dev team knew enough of the relevant numbers and mechanics, and c) even the people inside the dev team consistently got it wrong in public posts. Consider that most of the damage mitigation calculations prior to I3 didn't even factor in regeneration, the tohit algorithm wasn't well known prior to I4, and all attack chain calculations have been wrong prior to the discovery of the server-clock alias issue and the actual source of combat rooting. And that's just scratching the surface.

Its one thing to say that people who ignore the numbers can succeed: I'm saying people who pay attention to the wrong ones can still succeed. I think MMO developers don't do enough work to make their mechanics transparent, but that's not the same thing as saying people have to be statisticians to play MMOs.

I'm not saying there's no advantage to knowing the numbers, I'm just saying the advantage in conventional PvE play is usually small except in corner cases, relative to experience. It doesn't define whether you can succeed in an MMO, at least not this one or any other I've played.


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My thought in reading his article was: "Why did you bother?" I mean, look at each of his 'What needs to be done to fix it' sections: pretty much each one amounts to him saying, "I have absolutely no idea."

Wow, way to bring to light "problems" and not offer any solutions. What a moron.


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Originally Posted by Eric Nelson View Post
My thought in reading his article was: "Why did you bother?" I mean, look at each of his 'What needs to be done to fix it' sections: pretty much each one amounts to him saying, "I have absolutely no idea."

Wow, way to bring to light "problems" and not offer any solutions. What a moron.
My thought exactly on that.


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Battlerock_X - You've misunderstood the aggro mechanic. It's not a matter of roles or archetypes, it is a matter of controlling where enemies attack. You (pointedly?) ignored ChampO in your discussion, which is 'classless' did try initially to keep aggro mechanics to a minimum, but players were very quick to complain, "Where is the taunt? How do I keep opponents locked on me / targeted on someone else?".

Aggro is the way of the player working out how the AI is going to react to them and, despite vocal claims to the contrary, players like reliability. The aggro mechanic provides them with reliability.

On top of this there are some genre standards regarding how aggro 'should' behave and violating these standards sees MMO players getting upset. Setting aggro to 'always attack the healer' is something players are going to get upset about, even if it is a good tactical choice for the AI to win the battle. Because the aim isn't for the AI to win the battle, it is to look good losing it.


 

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric Nelson View Post
My thought in reading his article was: "Why did you bother?" I mean, look at each of his 'What needs to be done to fix it' sections: pretty much each one amounts to him saying, "I have absolutely no idea."
Well, its not necessary to know how to solve a problem to point out that a problem exists. But I think the author of the article suffers from a more fundamental problem: he's willing to state there's a problem without even any notion of whether there even *exists* an option.

A separate problem is that he didn't even try; specifically with regards to #4 (Aggro). Lots of people have come up with ways to replace the aggro mechanism in teaming. I did myself when I came up with my "reverse bodyguard" mechanism for tankers - which actually predates the (mastermind) bodyguard mechanism by a significant amount of time and worked somewhat differently, but I renamed to "reverse-bodyguard" after the mastermind mechanism was introduced. Basically, rather than creating an aggro mechanism where the tanker has to take aggro, allow players to block, deflect, and absorb damage directed at other players, to protect them. The critters can still attack whichever target they want: its up to the protectors to protect those targets with the mechanisms they have to do that.

I said I could replace the aggro mechanism for teams. I don't what the heck the author means when he suggests that the actual act of aggroing a critter at all should be replaced. He suggests that non-MMOs don't have this problem: oh really? There's a game that has a mechanism for NPCs initiating combat with the player that don't involve the NPC noticing the player? Heck: I'd like to see that game. I think its here that the author demonstrates their true colors in trying to be more clever than thought-provoking.


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One need read no further than

Quote:
Assuming the first priority of game design is to create a good game, massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft have failed spectacularly, opting for commercial success instead of creative integrity, entertainment value, or compelling game design.
to determine that the author is a crank.

We should all be thankful they are a good enough writer not to bury the lede, saving the attentive reader the necessity of plowing through the rest of their article. Whatever sickly plant sprouts from such an unpromising seed cannot possibly be edible.


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Originally Posted by Kiralyn View Post
...and WoW has Dodge, Parry, Shield Block, and Armor (damage absorption), along with the various magic/elemental resists.
Armor is a percentage reduction from total damage, like resists in CoH. Dodge and parry are direct avoidance, like defense in CoH. Block is percentage chance for partial avoidance of, I believe, a flat value. You're not braving multiple checks to get through this, though. If you have 21% block, then if you don't avoid, you could still block. I believe mobs also have a 5% or so chance to miss all the time, and I think defense (which reduces crit chance) has some effect on this.


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Originally Posted by BBQ_Pork View Post
I had a couple of D&D buddies who had tried that game. The only thing they had to say about it was: "You had to roll at least 8 dice to take a dump, and could easily miss or Critical Fumble."
Yeah, the only reason our RM (and SpaceMaster) games were able to actually get anywhere is that we had a GM who was rational enough to streamline the most excessive bits. /shrug


------
Quote:
One need read no further than


Quote:
Assuming the first priority of game design is to create a good game, massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft have failed spectacularly, opting for commercial success instead of creative integrity, entertainment value, or compelling game design.
to determine that the author is a crank.
We should all be thankful they are a good enough writer not to bury the lede, saving the attentive reader the necessity of plowing through the rest of their article. Whatever sickly plant sprouts from such an unpromising seed cannot possibly be edible.
Hmm. Yeah, really. I know WoW has its problems, but it was fun when I played it.


 

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Originally Posted by nivho View Post
Ah, ChartMaster. We have had a Rolemaster game going every Friday night for the past 10+ years.
My first MMO was a large-scale MUD using a quasi-Rolemaster engine.

Let me see what I can remember:

Attack Strength - Defense Strength + Weapon-vs-Armor adjustment + d100 = hit number. >100 = hit.

Randomly pick hit location. Weapon-vs-Armor type at hit location determines damage scale and crit severity. Crits can deal wounds and tack on additional damage, in addition to fun things like stuns, knockdowns, and strikethroughs for extra damage.

And then you get a "downtime" dependent on weapon speed and armor penalty.

This is completely separate, of course, from the mechanisms for casting "warding" spells, performing combat maneuvers (like tackles and disarms), and using sacred martial arts.


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5) Subscription Fees: May or may not be with us forever, but you won't necessarily like it if they go away. If money stops coming in for a game, it stops being improved, or even fixed. More studios could copy the Guild Wars model, sure. But here's the deal: does it actually improve anybody's life if you pay the same amount once a year for a boxed expansion versus paying the same amount once a year for a yearly subscription? I suspect the original author's real complaint is not with subscription fees, just that he wants it to be cheaper. Well, frankly, so do the MMO companies. MMO development budgets have been completely out of control for the last two or three years, which is why there's a lot of interest right now in generalizable development tools specifically for MMOs, designed specifically to lower development and maintenance costs. But those tools are still very rudimentary at best. Star Trek Online is the third game developed with the Cryptic Engine, but looks like it's going to end up with as much custom art development and custom code development (using the old-and-broken tools) as any other new game; Bioware is having the same problem with the first game developed with Simultronics' Hero Engine; nobody has yet delivered a game that doesn't suck with the Havoc Engine. Here it's not so much that MMO worlds are broken, it's that our tools are still primitive. (3GSMax, in particular, is a millstone around the entire industry's neck. Why are we still trying to build MMOs with a cluttered-up set of add-ons to 1983's AutoCAD package?)

4) Aggro: I'm going to go along with the original author on this one; I have never liked the "Tanker/Taunter" mechanic. It feels horribly unrealistic to me that enemies would continue to bother attacking an enemy once they see that they can't hurt it and it can't hurt them. It wouldn't be the first one I'd complain about; the first game mechanic I'd complain about is that NPCs are demonstrably all deaf, since they can't hear their friends screaming for help from 75 feet away, even in the same room. And the fact that a level 50 character has 15 times the hitpoints of a level 1 character strikes me as nothing short of ridiculous, too. But back to Taunting, I don't agree with the OP that the only plausible fix to this is to eliminate all combat roles other than DPS, there's no reason why you couldn't have DPS and Support and Mez and Stealth. I mean, hello: in CoV, most teams run without any kind of tanking, just fine.

3) Button Lock: Learn to look at two things at once. Seriously. If your peripheral vision isn't good enough to see the cool-down cycle icons on the button bar and watch the combat, consult an optometrist. That being said, World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online have both done something that helps people with this problem, with user-customizable, user-programmable UI mods, some of which move more of the UI to the cursor or to a frame around the targeted enemy. The last thing I wanted in the center of the screen was more visual clutter, but it would solve the original author's problem, I suppose.

2) Static Worlds: You and your team lay waste to the whole game zone, congratulations. What does the next team have available for them to do? Yeah, I agree with Mr. Incredible that sometimes, after I've saved the world, I wish it would stay saved for just a little while. There's innovation going on in this area, though. WoW is experimenting with worlds that look different to each player, depending on where they are in the storyline. CoH moves almost the entire game into instances, so does Guild Wars. EVE Online has parts of the game that can "change state" at every server maintenance based on the previous day's PvP scores. Honestly, though, once we get better world-editing tools (see #5 above), what I'd settle for is for the game world to change, more often, reflecting movement in the storyline. That'd be economically feasible, if editing a game world weren't something like 1/3rd of the development cost a whole new game.

1) You Can't Play With the People You Want to Play With: I still snicker whenever I hear this called an unsolved problem, yeah; at this point, MMOs that offer a sidekicking system of some kind outnumber those that don't. This isn't an MMO problem. This is a WoW problem; Blizzard has fallen far behind the rest of the industry.


 

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Originally Posted by UnSub View Post
Setting aggro to 'always attack the healer' is something players are going to get upset about, even if it is a good tactical choice for the AI to win the battle. Because the aim isn't for the AI to win the battle, it is to look good losing it.
Bolded for emphasis.

Too many people (game developers included) think good AI is AI designed to kill the players or be "realistic". No, it just needs to be interesting, and not make the player feel like they're just facing a giant sack of hitpoints with (or without) the ability to slaughter them in seconds if something goes wrong.


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Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
I don't what the heck the author means when he suggests that the actual act of aggroing a critter at all should be replaced. He suggests that non-MMOs don't have this problem: oh really? There's a game that has a mechanism for NPCs initiating combat with the player that don't involve the NPC noticing the player? Heck: I'd like to see that game. I think its here that the author demonstrates their true colors in trying to be more clever than thought-provoking.
I thought he was saying the opposite:

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This artifice plays a large part in building game worlds. How often have you sidled through some enemy camp hoping to skirt the aggro radius for a monster? If you weren't so conditioned to navigating aggro, you'd feel pretty stupid walking around, hidden in plain sight, while orcs shuffle through their idle animations twenty feet to your right and left. Remember when you were unsullied enough that it occurred to you how retarded this was? Those were the days.
I came to the conclusion that what he doesn't like about this is the aggro radius. I think he wants line of sight aggro based on facing, and to have worlds designed around this, instead of packing dozens of foes in a small area, while designing the game around a person only fighting a single spawn (whether it's 1 foe or 3 even con minions), which results in you fighting someone while several of their friends ignore the battle completely despite being within earshot and/or looking right at you.


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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kiralyn View Post
Yeah, the only reason our RM (and SpaceMaster) games were able to actually get anywhere is that we had a GM who was rational enough to streamline the most excessive bits. /shrug
I played with one group in 1994 that had a program written to handle the hit/damage checks on a TI 99/4A. We did still roll dice for crits, that was the fun part.


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Originally Posted by InfamousBrad View Post
And the fact that a level 50 character has 15 times the hitpoints of a level 1 character strikes me as nothing short of ridiculous, too.
Something I've always wanted to see is an Exalted MMO. Among other things, you get 7 health levels. You can pick up Ox-Body Technique as many times as you like (up to your Resistance or Stamina rating, depending on Exalt type) to increase your health levels. Your Resistance and Stamina ratings max at 5 or your Essence rating, whichever is higher. Your Essence rating maxes at 10. An Essence 10/Stamina 10 Lunar could have 47 health levels, and that would be "ohmygawd ridiculous".
(Actually... a Lunar could pick up Legendary Attribute: Stamina to get Stamina 11, get another Ox-Body, and go up to 51 health levels)

A Dragon-Blooded could get 21 health levels (or 27 if you allowed them to get Essence 10, but in the tabletop game canon they don't live long enough to reach that), but they also have more force-multiplier skills.

Any starting character could get Ox-Body Technique 5 times, for at least 14 health levels.

Quote:
Originally Posted by InfamousBrad View Post
1) You Can't Play With the People You Want to Play With: I still snicker whenever I hear this called an unsolved problem, yeah; at this point, MMOs that offer a sidekicking system of some kind outnumber those that don't. This isn't an MMO problem. This is a WoW problem; Blizzard has fallen far behind the rest of the industry.
How many MMOs have something resembling our sidekicking system? There's Final Fantasy XI, and Guild Wars 2 is supposed to have something similar (but of course, isn't released yet), but I can't think of any others.

MMOs with a sidekicking system certainly do not outnumber those that don't, even without including the Korean Grindfest MMOs.


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(5) Subscription Fees.

I don't consider this "broken". I've played games with subscription fees, with microtransactions, and free to play. I can say without reservation that, for the most part, the quality of players decreases along with fees. I find teaming in games like DDO and Guild Wars impossibly frustrating due to the huge horde of complete morons that populate such games. However, with a few notable exceptions, PUGs in CoX have been decent quality and generally fun.

(4) Aggro

I kinda agree with this one. I'd prefer enemy AIs that make more dynamic and intelligent choices. I think the paradigm of Tank/Healer/DPSer/Controller is outdated. I'd like to see something new that shatters those conventions. I think CoV does a pretty good job of this with the hybrid ATs that villain-side has. However, I'd prefer less specialization in general. The "build your own class" in Dungeon Runners was a step in the right direction.

(3) Button Lock

Less a problem in CoX than other games. This *is* a problem in many other games. Some even have a global recharge rate that hampers your ability to fire off powers: you CANNOT press more than one power button every 2 seconds in Warhammer Online, for example. I think CoX has done a pretty good job of keeping you engaged with multiple powers. I think Age of Conan did this even better with directional basic attacks as well as rechargeable combo attacks. I think "button lock" is something that seems to be being phased out of MMOs already, at least ones that aren't trying to be WoW.

(2) Static Worlds

This IS a problem. One reason I am looking forward to Global Agenda is the promise of a persistent world with player-conquerable territory (ala EVE). I think a persistent world is always much more fun than a static unchanging world. I hope more game developers take this to heart and find ways to introduce at least some degree of persistency in their games.

(1) You can't play with the people you want to play with.

I think Super-Sidekicking is the Gold Standard for resolving this sort of issue. It's something other games certainly do need to take a look at. Its one of the most frustrating things I've experienced in other games, that I can't play with friends who have a different rate of leveling than I do. This very quickly wears out the fun in those games. Teaming with friends is part of the appeal, and someone shouldn't have to stop playing just so they can team with their buddies next time, for fear of outleveling them.


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Originally Posted by eltonio View Post
This is over the top mental slavery.

 

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Originally Posted by InfamousBrad View Post
It wouldn't be the first one I'd complain about; the first game mechanic I'd complain about is that NPCs are demonstrably all deaf, since they can't hear their friends screaming for help from 75 feet away, even in the same room.
One thing that I found charming about DDO is that enemies can pretty much see you if you can see them. There's none of this stand just a few feet further away and they're oblivious nonsense.

It's also fun that they'll go summon help. Some will run ring an alarm gong, calling in reinforcements. I had one wily kobold run off into a room with some sleeping guards, wake them up, and they all came out of the room to fight us.

It was a refreshing change.


Quote:
Originally Posted by eltonio View Post
This is over the top mental slavery.

 

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Originally Posted by Fleeting Whisper View Post
Something I've always wanted to see is an Exalted MMO. Among other things, you get 7 health levels. You can pick up Ox-Body Technique as many times as you like (up to your Resistance or Stamina rating, depending on Exalt type) to increase your health levels. Your Resistance and Stamina ratings max at 5 or your Essence rating, whichever is higher. Your Essence rating maxes at 10. An Essence 10/Stamina 10 Lunar could have 47 health levels, and that would be "ohmygawd ridiculous".
(Actually... a Lunar could pick up Legendary Attribute: Stamina to get Stamina 11, get another Ox-Body, and go up to 51 health levels)

A Dragon-Blooded could get 21 health levels (or 27 if you allowed them to get Essence 10, but in the tabletop game canon they don't live long enough to reach that), but they also have more force-multiplier skills.
...
Just as long as there's no step damage system to go along with it. I hate that. Hateithateithateit. Step damage and health "levels" are usually tied together, debuffing your meager abilities the more damage you take. Yes, it's more realistic, but A) it's annoying and B) this is a game with people who fly under their own power and shoot lasers from their eyes. I like the system of having your life and abilities kept separate.

I look at hitpoints as a measure of your overall durability, sort of like how influence is supposed to be your level of pull in the area, not just money. Say I'm (generously speaking) a level 1 character. One moderate punch and I'm out cold. Now let's say someone like Fedor Emilianko is a level 15 character. The dude can take more significantly more moderate punches than me and keep on going, hence he would have more hit points.


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Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Well, its not necessary to know how to solve a problem to point out that a problem exists.
True enough -- but referring directly to the article, the way I read it is that the author is attempting to write an article that not only points out what he considers to be the top five "broken" aspects of MMOs, but also suggests fixes (that's they way he's formatted his list).

I see five separate "What needs to be done to fix it:" entries within the body of his article, corresponding to each of his five points. If part of the point of his article is NOT to include possible solutions, why are these sections included? Padding?

Either he's a crank or a very poor writer (or both) IMHO.


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Originally Posted by Liquid View Post
66 was crippling. You're thinking of 100.

I am a nerd.
No, the number 66 in Rolemaster is a "wild card" that can do almost anything. Rolling 66 on a critical result MIGHT cripple you in a strange and unexpected way, but it could also kill you in a different strange and unexpected way. You can't know for sure what it will do until you look it up on the table.

meanwhile, a result of 100 is reliably brutal and devastating, but for very light crits it might not be COMPLETELY fatal. You might just be in a coma, if you were wearing a helmet.

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Liquid View Post
I came to the conclusion that what he doesn't like about this is the aggro radius. I think he wants line of sight aggro based on facing, and to have worlds designed around this, instead of packing dozens of foes in a small area, while designing the game around a person only fighting a single spawn (whether it's 1 foe or 3 even con minions), which results in you fighting someone while several of their friends ignore the battle completely despite being within earshot and/or looking right at you.
He combines two separate complaints into one: "aggro" in the sense of attention-splitting by foes:

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There is no analog for this in real videogames. It's a clunky contrivance, presumably created to keep life interesting for the poor schmucks who get stuck playing the cleric. But this awkward concept is the source of many of the gameplay tropes that keep MMOs from being interesting. Consider how the classes for an MMO are designed around the concept of a tank holding aggro while a DPS class attacks the target, a mezzer holds back adds, and a healer heals the tank, all while the players manage some invisible under-the-hood aggro values that determine which player gets attacked.
And the issue of "drawing aggro:"

Quote:
How often have you sidled through some enemy camp hoping to skirt the aggro radius for a monster? If you weren't so conditioned to navigating aggro, you'd feel pretty stupid walking around, hidden in plain sight, while orcs shuffle through their idle animations twenty feet to your right and left.
I considered the phrase "in plain sight" to mean he wasn't referencing line of sight. You can't be "hidden in plain sight" out of line of sight.

And this latter issue is not an issue of aggro: the devs could set the aggro radius to anything they want in theory, and they could add line of sight. But both are limited by the density problem: if you allow critters to notice you at higher, more realistic ranges, you have to lower the density of critters. This lowers the density of players, and you have an MMO where most players are out of sight of each other, which is undesirable.


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Quote:
Originally Posted by Smurch View Post
(5) Subscription Fees.

I don't consider this "broken". I've played games with subscription fees, with microtransactions, and free to play. I can say without reservation that, for the most part, the quality of players decreases along with fees. I find teaming in games like DDO and Guild Wars impossibly frustrating due to the huge horde of complete morons that populate such games. However, with a few notable exceptions, PUGs in CoX have been decent quality and generally fun.
I was about to point out this one too. With few exceptions, pretty much every free-to-play MMO I've seen is populated 90% by young teenagers and the 'HOW I MINE FOR FISH' crowd.


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Posted

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
He combines two separate complaints into one: "aggro" in the sense of attention-splitting by foes:
Yes, I was commenting on his latter complaint.

Quote:
I considered the phrase "in plain sight" to mean he wasn't referencing line of sight. You can't be "hidden in plain sight" out of line of sight.
That's his point. He's in line of sight, yet they aren't aggroing. You're within view, and they happily go about doing whatever they're doing while you attack their buddies because you're standing outside of their aggro radius. That's "hiding in plain sight", and he thinks that's "retarded".

Quote:
And this latter issue is not an issue of aggro: the devs could set the aggro radius to anything they want in theory, and they could add line of sight. But both are limited by the density problem: if you allow critters to notice you at higher, more realistic ranges, you have to lower the density of critters. This lowers the density of players, and you have an MMO where most players are out of sight of each other, which is undesirable.
Yes, this is the resulting issue, but I'm surprised that you're suggesting that the only option is to lower the density of critters. You can instead adjust player power level to take into account the higher density, and/or focus on instancing (and I'm sure there are other options I haven't thought of). City of Heroes is a step in that direction compared to open world MMOs-- if they only designed instance maps to be mostly rooms connected by short halls instead of mazes of halls with a few scattered rooms, and kept the foes in each room to the number that the developer expects the player(s) to handle, then we'd never have his described situation occur in missions.


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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by galadiman View Post
Yeah, but in Rolemaster, if you rolled a 66, you usually chopped a guy's head right off. Srs Bsns.

Sometimes, even with a baseball bat. You think I kid.
Heck, little kittens could chop heads off with a 66.


I don't suffer from altitis, I enjoy every minute of it.

Thank you Devs & Community people for a great game.

So sad to be ending ):