MMO worlds broken? Nay I say!

That's an interesting conclusion, more important in games with shared public areas than in games like CoH that rely heavily on instancing, but still something to consider.

CoH's experimented with part of this in Safe Guard missions (i.e. greatly increased the "agro" radius of mobs). I remember complaints (or at least, "is this WAI?" queries) when these missions were originally added, what's the consensus on that change, assuming there is one? It seems like a non-issue from where I'm sitting, but I have no idea if I'm representative.

As far as the issue of line-of-sight, I think I like the way the dev's have handled this issue in CoH. Snipers are essentially mobs that agro using line of sight, which presents an interesting tactical challenge on missions (or in zones) that include mobs with that capability. There are a handful of other examples like this, of which I think the "interruptable summoners" are probably the best model to copy: fairly easy to neutralize if you're paying attention but can make spawns much more difficult if you're not.

While I don't think sweeping changes to CoH combat/agro system would be wise at this point, I do think the devs could add some very interesting tactical "puzzles" to the mix simply by increasing the number of tricks that mobs can use. Why can't we have mobs who break the agro rules, for example, and go after "priority" targets, the tank be damned? Or mobs who call for help if given a chance, radioing it in or literally breaking contact to bring in adds from nearby spawns? If you can defeat/interrupt these mobs before they can do their trick, you've just made a battle much easier.

There's a fine line between "challenging" and "annoying" (not to mention the one between "inconsequential" and "challenging"), which is probably delineated by quantity and magnitude (thinking clockwork, tsoo sorcerers and CoT ghosts, here; quantity on the first, magnitude on the second, and both on the third), but a handful of rare spawns that include these "trick cards" would do a lot of good in the game as far as challenge and depth is concerned.

If the devs can plan things out so some of the less-appreciated utility powers become trump cards for these tricks (thinking slow, immobilize, burst damage, -perception, etc) all the better.

The funny thing about that is, when the critters in safeguard missions aggro, they start attacking their closest target - which with the increased range is inevitably some parking meter or cardboard box instead of the player who actually triggered the aggro. This creates not so much a situation of "there's a cop way over there, shoot him" as "there's a cop way over there, quick, start *wrecking everything*!"

Hmm, let's see.....

66 Tiny "E" Crit - "Bizarre strike to eyes destroys one and leaves the other blind for two days. Foe is down and helpless for an hour. His appearance is modified by -20."



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re: subscription fees.

Yeah, the free games I've played around with a bit tend to have 1) obnoxious players, 2) be rather PvP focussed [see #1], and 3) have lots of annoying "optional" microtransactions which are pretty much required if you don't want to just be walked all over by the #1&2 crowd.

Because the game is designed assuming that they won't. If the tank can't keep those mobs off the priority targets, what is the point of the tank?

This is great, but balance has to be kept in mind. Remember how the PvE balance minimum is supposed to be soloing "heroic" (now +0 x1) missions? Well, if you have frequent cases where you have to fight 2 spawns at once if you miss the hold or kill shot on that one mob (assuming you can pick out the mob that will be calling/running for help), suddenly the minimum is raised, requiring some buffs to some player builds. That now means that normal spawns are going to become less challenging. This is fine, to me (I don't think every spawn should be a challenge, I think there should be varying levels of difficulty throughout a mission to keep things interesting), but may not be fine to the devs. They may like their 3 minions = 1 player minimum.

Also, I hope that if it is done, it isn't over-done. I'd like this situation to be an occasional surprise, not something you expect to happen 10 times in one mission.

They could add interesting tricks that mobs can do, but I do hope a lot of thought goes into how it will affect overall gameplay.

Go for the eyes, Boo!

(Also: see? 66 is crippling, not instant death!)

I wish. The only time I ever played involved a long session designing a unique and fun character that I was very into by the time he went to the docks, and with high hopes (on the part of both myself and the character) hired aboard a ship traveling across the great inland sea and adventure galore...

This is the short version of the campaign that followed (based on what I recall from the scars):

*a few days into the journey after some simple interactions with the crew and fellow passengers*

gamemaster/dice/table: it seems a storm is forming

me: OK, I'll keep out of the way of the crew, they don't need me interfering

gamemaster/dice/table: the storm gets worse, its a bad one. think hurricaine

me: ok

gamemaster/dice/table: the ship sinks

me: what? well, crap. now what? is there any debris nearby?

gamemaster: its the middle of a major storm and you are too far from any land to make it to safety

me: what?

gamemaster: you're dead

me: you have got to be kidding me

gamemaster: its what came up on the rolls


I never played again.

Crate Buster 2000 had no aggro system.

What's that, Neverwinter Nights?

/facepalm

Just another example of why GMing isn't for everyone. :/

Instancing doesn't solve the problem, unless you have an MMO where there are no shared combat areas at all - which is in effect not fundamentally different than having a giant world where everyone is out of sight of each other (while in combat). Instancing is just the part of MMO gaming that deliberately separates players by design. But that doesn't solve the problem elsewhere.

This isn't a problem that can be solved by cleverness, because its simple arithmetic: if a single player (or group) can aggro a larger radius, then it will take less people to sweep out a given area. That reduces the maximum (combat-active) player density supportable in a given shared combat area as a logical consequence.

But do the crates initiate combat? And if so: with what?

What makes it different is that you can have 50 people in the same area, fighting the same foes, without them being in sight of each other. Less content needs to be created.

I just want to be clear that I know that instancing doesn't solve the immersion breaking problem created by small aggro radii everywhere if combat still exists outside of instances. I'm not stupid.

But you don't have to have combat elsewhere. Or you can accept the lower density or lowered immersion caused by small aggro radii in the open world. Edit: Or you could have an area that dynamically adds more foes based on the number of people in it, along with a combat/aggro (remember, I'm not talking about eliminating aggro, just the small radius) system that will prevent the majority of foes from ganging up on one person and ignoring the other.

I don't see that as a problem unless you have a specific combat-active player density as a goal. I offer City of Heroes as an example of why a high combat-active density isn't a requirement for a successful MMO.

Are we talking immersion concerns here?

CoX already has something a little like this: get within a certain range of a critter, and it will stop idling, look at you, and not attack for a few seconds (unless you get closer or attack). It seems like you could work with that.

Effectively: Give critters several 'concentric rings' of aggro radius. Enter their 'green zone' and they run script A: Maybe move toward you in an investigative fashion, or warn you to back up. Enter the 'yellow zone' and they run script B: activate toggles, or call for backup. Hit the 'red zone' and they attack immediately.

Or is this an issue with the computer 'cheating' you could program critters to have the same lines of sight and radii of hearing that players do. Of course they would then have to cheat in other ways to make up for their innate dumbness.

That depends on your point of view. City of Heroes has become increasingly more focused on the instanced parts of the game, or rather its more precise to say that the playerbase has become increasingly focused on the instanced parts of the game. But there are still shared zones with combat in them, and you still have to deal with the density problem there.

Furthermore, I wouldn't characterize City of Heroes as a "low density" MMO, since CoX shared zones are density-balanced around low aggro radii. The fact that there aren't many street-sweepers these days is not relevant to how the zones are designed. Saying CoX *could* be reformulated around a higher aggro-radius lower-density spawning system is only a conjecture that would require some evidence to support the notion.

Personally, I think that its a short bus ride from lowering the spawn density in the shared zones to support high-radius aggro to simply tossing the zones and replacing them with an instance list.


In any case, this is going around in circles just a bit. I said that the aggro problem the author describes is really not a problem related to aggro: its a problem related to the issue of density control. You're saying you don't care about the density control problem, which is fine: that just means for you, the aggro problem is resolvable by nullifying its underlying foundation. It doesn't contradict my assertion that the aggro problem is really just a symptom of the density problem.

Dark Age of Camelot actually did that one better... it had three ways to avoid attacks. You had Evasion (which was basically dodging and was mainly used by light armor stealth classes), Parry (which was usable by any class that could train up their weapon skills), and Block (which required a shield). You had to spend ability points training up Parry and Block (Evasion came free on classes that got it), so to be really defensive you had to sacrifice other things. Also, some attacks like large two-handed weapons or dual wielding were more effective against some defenses than others, and you generally couldn't avoid attacks from behind. The melee combat was really good in that game... lots of cool attack chains, positional and reactive attacks, it was quite tactical. Until a spellcaster walked up and vaporized you in three seconds from long range.

The problem with doing that sort of thing in a game like CoH is that superheroes and supervillains really don't act at all realistically when it comes to defense. In real life, attacking from behind makes it easier to hit someone. In a comic book... not so much, especially if you are attacking someone like Captain America, Spider Man, Batman, or Daredevil. Likewise, there is a huge range of effects that all fall into the "defense" mechanic: actually dodging the attack (Super Reflexes), deflecting it with something (Shields), being so tough it just bounces off unless it hits a really vital point (Stone Armor, Ice Armor)... it would probably be more trouble than it was worth to make separate defense mechanisms for each. Plus it would be a game balance nightmare... immobilizing a Super Reflexes character would have to reduce his defense (can't dodge as well) while not affecting a Shield character, while a hold would affect both SR and Shield (can't dodge or block) but not Energy Aura (being still doesn't affect the force field). There would have to be advantages and disadvantages added to each set to compensate, and balancing all that would be almost impossible.

No, its really the simple issue that if you let critters notice you with a more realistic line of sight algorithm, they will notice you at longer ranges. This means they have to be farther apart, or radically weaker (or else an individual player or team will aggro too many critters).

If you make them farther apart, there's less targets overall, and that means the zone will support less players fighting anything: the combat density has to decrease. If you make them weaker, you get the same result because while there are the same number of critters, each player will now "sweep out" a larger number of them when they engage in combat.

This matters if you care about shared-zone combat, and you are trying to balance your shared zone size and structure relative to the number of players you want to support within it. The relationship between aggro radius and player maximum density is not a simple proportion, but the former does significantly affect the latter when it comes to designing the shared zones.

The problem is not balancing: that's a relatively straight-forward problem, if a large one in terms of total work. The more fundamental problem is whether most players actually want to track that level of detail. Chess would not be improved by making the Knights better simulations of horses.

Because everyone is different, there is no "right" answer to the question of how much detail is the right amount of detail. The only thing you can do is pick a level of detail and design a game that is attractive to the people who *would* appreciate that level of detail. CoX's complexity target is significantly lower than, say, Champions Online is. That isn't a good or bad thing: its just a thing.

(And actually, my personal complexity threshold is far higher than CoX - or even CO - so I would enjoy more complex game play and game mechanics. But even so, I think CoX currently does a better job of being consistent with its target than CO does. CoX targets lower complexity gameplay and tends to do relatively consistently across its design. CO tries to be more complex in many areas, but doesn't do so in a way that always makes complete sense. In particular, the advantage system seems to be just short of vestigial, relative to what it was originally intended to be, and the stats system is just short of being opaque, which is nonsensical as a character building option).

I guess I'm saying I don't mind if that problem still exists in CoH's open world, because in CoH it's possible for me to ignore the combat in those zones entirely. That's an option to solve the immersion issue the author complains about-- give him an alternate path, and let the people who like open world stuff keep the small aggro radius, high density design.

That works for me! Doesn't Guild Wars basically work this way (no list, but it creates an instance for your team and your team only)? I've only played it very briefly. I love the idea. Let the non-combat activities be held in a location where you meet up with people you haven't explicitly chosen to play with. Hell, I'd be happy with a chat room like Diablo II had.

What caused this disagreement was that you said it required lowering the density of critters:

and I disagreed, saying that you could allow players to survive higher critter density. You then clarified that the important part was that it required lowering the density of combat-active players, to which I say, "sure. Though, I don't view that as a problem". I do understand that some (most?) MMO developers do.

You're right, it doesn't, but I wasn't trying to contradict that assertion-- it wasn't clarified until later in the discussion, and I agree with it. I think we understand each other now.

Yeah, I like that design.

Guild Wars also did not have an aggro system designed around tanking. Aggro was a fairly short radius (you had a smaller circle around you in the compass that would show the distance where mobs would attack).

For me, that's somewhat of a denormalized perspective. Which is to say, within the context of what we're describing, if I were to replace all the CoX shared zone spawns with ones that had twice as many critters with half the power each, that would not change spawn density as I'm using the term here. What matters in context is the area that a player/team will "sweep out" when they engage the average threat limit. In that sense, making the critters weaker (or making all of the player stronger, which is the same thing) is in effect reducing spawn density when it comes to the issue of aggro distribution.

But as to the rest, I think we're in general agreement regardless.

I took what you said literally, yes. You then clarified.

Yep.

I don't think the person you quoted meant making EVERY critter ignore Taunts, but maybe a single, specialized unit in one or maybe two factions. And hopefully these wouldn't be boss-level critters, either. I mean, so what if the Empath takes a punch? They have a self-heal, blasts and hopefully some form of travel to help them get away. It's seriously not the end of the world for one guy in a group of 10 to ignore the Tanker. And much like summoners, sappers, buffers, snipers and teleporters, these guys would become priority targets and the damage dealers could just spike them before going all out on the rest of the group.

It would be better if some things required higher levels of taunt/hate to draw their attention rather than simply ignoring taunt/hate altogether. In effect, they could be resistant to taunt, and have intrinsic preferences that are mechanically like taunting themselves to attack something. So something with an "attack the healer" preference wouldn't simply ignore the tank and kamikaze the defender, it would act as if healers were taunting them with mag X, and the tanker would notice they would need to generate at least mag X+1 to get their attention (this is an oversimplification: the way taunt works doesn't quite align with this idea as I understand taunt and hate).