I'd like to see a variety of options.
Pack animals chasing you down over max distance
Guards chasing over short range before returning to post
Static mobs which call out the guards
Whole camps which swarm if a senior goblin or royalty is attacked first
Rogue types which dissapear, only to rejoin the battle from behind on your next pull
Traps, mobs which are bait, which when agroed cause a fake wall to collapse and a hoard of mobs to appear
Hunter mobs which, if you don't kill, will appear randomly in a fight days or weeks later to try and finish you off
Cowards who run away (reverse leashing?)
Mobs which are faster than you, so you cant run away.
Just lots of imaginative and varied mobs.
I think it should depend on the mob type,
if it is a sentinel/guardian, they should be leashed, as they guard some point and will not run away to pursue fleeing attacker- but protect their point.
zombies ( mindless animated undead ganerally), humanoid berzerkers, trappers, enraged mobs, rabied animals, should aggro all the way to zone.
bosses, again, depend on the type, if it is a roaming boss, he should aggro to zone, but if it is a boss of a castle or camp, he should leash little bit out of the camp perimeter, there is no reason for him to run all the way to zone.
i think that one more mechanic should be implemented, the lower the attacker HP, the further the mob will pursue.
i.e. if it is a kiting ranger/ wizard that has full HP, the mobs should leash faster, if the attacking player is a hurt player that about to die he should be aggroed farther, the leash is getting longer in opposite to attacker health because the mob want to finish the kill.
EDIT: agree with Bloodfire above me,
also necro thread...
I think the point missing here is what does leashing allow? It in modern games allows the player to circumvent content by safely being able to travel through areas because they know the mobs will have to turn back.
In LoTRO, this behavior was rampant and many complained that it took away from the lore/feel of the world for players to be able to ride on through the content. So, they decided to put in a fix. If a mob hit the player once, they were immediately dismounted from their horse. Thing is, it didn't stop the behavior. People still knew that as long as they kept on running, the mob would rubber band back to its location. So, the fear of travel was not there, people still rode through areas with only minimal concern, knowing that even if they were dismounted, they could "run it off".
That is the problem with leashing.
Now, in EQ... the leash was essentially the zone line, but... because the zones were huge and unless you had run speed, most mobs could catch up to you (ie generally EQ mobs ran a tad faster than base unmodified run speed). So, unless you were near a zone line, chances are you were going to die before you got to safety. This created a need to be safe in travels, a fear in exploration, a responsbility in play.
Now that is not to say that bard speed, SoW and other spells didn't allow players to get around that by being able to outrun everything as they zoomed through the zone on to the next zone, but... they did have to be heading to another zone line regardless to clear those mobs. So there is still a problem where run speed allows people to remove fear and responsiblity in play, that I think needs to be remedied.
So, as some have suggested, putting in special abilities, to slow, stun, dispell, root, allow mobs to speed up, call for assists in the area, etc... all should be implement to retain that fear and responsibility even with run speed spells, but the leashing I think needs to be zone wide or it guarantees the player can circumvent the danger by simply runnning out the leash length, which unless the leash is the length of the zone, people are going to more easily escape.
As for the necro thread, it is per Kilsin's link from the closed thread noting there is previous topic discussing this to which I thought to carry it on in them, rather than continuing the discussion in yet another thread someone created.
This is a rather interesting old topic. One of the devs said that the zones will be soo huge that leashing will probably have to happen. I highly doubt the zone will be massive enough that you need leashing, but if that's the case then I would think range is an important factor, and whether the mobs are faster than you in terms of normal speed. I would say if you go into some dungeon then the mobs should chase you until you get out of that dungeon. Since that dungeon is their home I don't see why the mob will stop chasing you if you are still in the dungeon. However, I still think some mobs should chase you until you zone out. For example, lets take the wolf. The wolf has a way of chasing its prey for miles and miles until it tires out and goes in for the kill. This is a real life tactic they use in hunting. Anything that can fly, or float, shouldn't be leashable unless lore permits it for some reason. Usually anything that can fly or float can travel terrain very quickly and doesn't really have any normal excuse as to why they can't traverse the zone.
With what I said about dungeons, the same thing should be said about towns/cities. If you are in a city killing guards then the only way for you to escape them is if you leave the city. Even then cities usually are there because of conquered territory. So the guards should naturally chase you until you are out of the territory.
Kilsin said:Do you prefer mob leashing or once you aggro a mob you either kill it, die or zone?
Leashing is bad design if you are trying to make a dangerous world. i am willing to pledge more to let the developers know how important this is !!!
you do know that 90% of the people here just wanted another everquest reinvigorated+ have a company that care for the game that isnt SONY right?
plzzzz nooo leashing , make the mob chase you until you are killed / it is killed / people around it are dead , its that sense of random danger & despair made eq so addicitve !
after everquest all these years those so called modern MMO are just retarded.... imagine a mob chasing you and you want to draw soem distance with it & kite it around and all of a sudden it become invincible+ untouchable and running back to its spawn point in super speed... lol what a joke ...
i was like wtf ? when i was playing world of warcraft / warhammer online / rift / elder scroll online .. god .. these generic "MMO"
I dont think enemies should never stop chasing you, until you leave the zone, that could be annoying.
It should be as realistic as possible.
If a wolf or some beast is chasing you, running away shouldnt be an option (if its a fast animal) and only if you can kill it or escape up high or on a tree or something should it eventually lose interest.
If bandits are chasing you, they would surely give up after awhile, or give us hiding mechanics that have chances of failure etc.
I think a good AI with variance based on conditions, mob personality types, zone type, location, weather, etc, would make leashing possible while still maintaining a danger component.
Alpha testing would be a good place to try some things, and see how they work.
And I still think that zoning or killing a mob should be the only way to clear your agro. Otherwise if they leash back to their home, that your agro radius is much larger unless you zone out.
Ultimately, I think anyone just passing through a zone, 9 times out of 10 is probably going to have a speed buff and the whole leash agro thing would be irrelevant to them, it's mainly the players fighting in the zone that get a bad pull. yes they could outrun the leash, but if their agro radius is 50% larger now, that changes their tactics a bit, unless they zone out to clear it.
I feel like leashing similar to what we have known in the past but with some tweaks could work well.
Maybe call it line of sight leashing.
To break the leash you must break line of sight for 10 seconds (variance depending on mob attributes, abilities etc).
If you can't outrun it, then obviously your not going to break line of sight; similarly if you can barely outrun it then you will have to run a long ways. If its a slow mob it could make pulling more tedious, due to ease of leash breaking..however..for new players slow mobs might be good; then ease them into the more hardcore escape mechanics over time.
But the mobs remember you
So you pulled a mob and feel you need to lose it, and you manage to break line of sight long enough to have it wander back to spawn point. But memory of your encounter remains, so if line of sight happens again, within some reasonable distance to be able to identify you, and this could be pretty far away, then the chase is on again. Only zoning will reset the memory of your encounter on whatever mobs you are remembered by within a given zone.
Optionally I suppose some boss mobs could have long memories that span days, reguardless of your online or zone status, but would only attack if line of sight is achieved of course; thus getting into the realm of soft lockout timers..but thats another subject I suppose.
Memories can lead to story telling
So you wander back near the spawn point; maybe this time however the mob was telling his buddies back at the spawn point about you and they come too, assuming the mob type can communicate such things. The mob might yell, "Hey I remember you, comon guys lets get him!!"
Perhaps the enchanter could be useful here by casting a memblur on the mob(s) before the puller returns to line of sight again.
In more interesting situations, such as a castle with a hierarchy of command, if you pester them enough without losing memory, word of you may spread and get search parties organized by these types of mobs to come find you. I could see doing this on purpose to have groups of mobs I need to outsmart and kill, moving around hiding attacking etc. could be pretty fun pull tactic.
So then weighing that against playability:
- Negative: May slow down pulling - Positive: Knowledge of mobs/zones and skill in pulling will matter more to keep pulling speed up
- Negative: Bad pulls can be more catastrophic - Positive: knowledge of mobs/zones and skill will matter more in general
- Negative: You may get soft locked out of certain areas and will require a group to re-enter (thinking long term memory mechanics here) -Positive: Could lead to some quite interesting team play.
- Negative: new players not used to never ending agro might have issues -Positive: you can use mob run spead to scale difficulty and ease players into it
- Negative: could make huge trains if abused, and it would be, so maybe all thats not such a good idea after all :P
Anyway thats my 2cp -- Az
azaya said:
But the mobs remember you
So you pulled a mob and feel you need to lose it, and you manage to break line of sight long enough to have it wander back to spawn point. But memory of your encounter remains, so if line of sight happens again, within some reasonable distance to be able to identify you, and this could be pretty far away, then the chase is on again. Only zoning will reset the memory of your encounter on whatever mobs you are remembered by within a given zone.
Optionally I suppose some boss mobs could have long memories that span days, reguardless of your online or zone status, but would only attack if line of sight is achieved of course; thus getting into the realm of soft lockout timers..but thats another subject I suppose.
Memories can lead to story telling
So you wander back near the spawn point; maybe this time however the mob was telling his buddies back at the spawn point about you and they come too, assuming the mob type can communicate such things. The mob might yell, "Hey I remember you, comon guys lets get him!!"
Perhaps the enchanter could be useful here by casting a memblur on the mob(s) before the puller returns to line of sight again.
In more interesting situations, such as a castle with a hierarchy of command, if you pester them enough without losing memory, word of you may spread and get search parties organized by these types of mobs to come find you. I could see doing this on purpose to have groups of mobs I need to outsmart and kill, moving around hiding attacking etc. could be pretty fun pull tactic.
I mentioned something about this earlier, but the problem here is this creates a massive issue in practicality of play. Is it realistic? Absolutely, but... it would open up a can of worms that even some of the most "hardcore" players would be objecting to.
Just to give a minor example, in EQ before they did the first major iteration revamp of FD, a mob could remember you at a later point. So, for example, you could FD the mob... in most cases it would forget instantly (making FD pulling pre-Velious stupidly easy) allowing you to split and tag the mobs as you saw fit. The mobs would walk all the way back to their spawn point and sit there like nothing occurred, but, there was a very serious issue;
At any point the mob could remember the person who FD'd. It could be a few minutes or it could be over and hour or more later, but a mob "could" all of a sudden remember it was chasing you and then rush off back to chasing you (as long as you were still present in the zone and did not log out) along the way proximity agroing every mob on its direct path trying to get to you. The result were MASSIVE TRAINS of such size and legend that it would make even the hardest player shudder in fear (I am exaggerating bit, but the trains were flipping huge). This was a huge problem that led them to eventually changing the code to deal with the issues (and attempt to actually curb FD pulling in Velious as it was not generally accepted by Verant fully at the time, ie it was still considered a bit of an exploit).
I like your idea, it has merit and with some very careful implementation (you would have to get rid of proximity agro for these mobs when they are in tracking mode), but this is a lot to put on a player. I like it, don't get me wrong, it is pretty cool and definitely an issue of consequence (though I think it might be a nightmare in debugging), but also consider the balance of it in play. Most people are accepting of an immediate reaction to a poor behavior (ie.. few are going to argue with fire burning them if they put their hand in the fire and it burns immediately), but not so much to a delayed consequence several minutes or hours later.
Lets say that there are no bugs, the system works perfectly as intended. Even then, you still have the issue of players having to correct a possible past action they may not fully know they created (ie they agro'd mobs, thought it was cleared, but hours later the mobs track them down and attack them during a key boss fight). This could be a nightmare on multiple levels and a punishment that may be more "risk" than the reward in play. I am all for difficulty in play, but I also think everything has to be balanced correctly. As I have said, I don't care about "realism" when it comes to game play as I think game play should ALWAYS win out in this area. So, the risk always has to be balanced to the reward in play. I think having players several hours later paying for a mistake they may or may not know they made, without a means to correct or pay for it instantly could lead to an imbalance here.
Interesting "realistic" idea, though I am unsure if there is a practical implementation to it in an MMO (I do think this has extreme merit in a single player game).
My feeling is that a certain amount of leashing is a good thing. I've never played a game where mobs chase you all the way to the zone line, but my instinct is that this would feel more like a nuisance than a challenge, particularly if Pantheon's zones are as big as they are said to be. I would like to see a middle ground where mobs chase you far enough that they pose a real danger if accidentally aggroed, but not so far that it requires you to run all the way to the next zone if you wander too close to something you can't kill.
Gyldervane said:but my instinct is that this would feel more like a nuisance than a challenge, ...
That is the point. If you are comfortable with the situation, then it isn't an obstacle, which is exactly the problem with games today.
A game should not be "fun" all the time, its challenges should not seem "entertaining" in their obstructions, rather it should be the overall effect of ones overcoming such obstacles to which satisfaction is achieved. If you find an obstacle appealing, tolerable, and comfortable, then you have no obstacle, and I point you to the games today where achievement is nothing more than tha passing of wind, be it nature or human orfaces.
Is this relevant in 2019? Thought it was already settled. We have zoning and nothing indicating there's a leash. What is this discussion about?
Edit: spelling
Tanix said:
azaya said:
But the mobs remember you
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Memories can lead to story telling
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Interesting "realistic" idea, though I am unsure if there is a practical implementation to it in an MMO (I do think this has extreme merit in a single player game).
Ya at the very end of my post I decided it wasn't going to work lol
Too much potential for abuse..but would be way cool in a single player like you said.
At the end of the day you have to balance playability and complexity against it, but in my fantasy land of ideas it seemed like it would be fun when it was working :P
