FD is a serious problem, but it's hardly necessary. In a dungeon, train mobs past a group and then hit a zoneline, they'll path back through the group and they won't have any options except to move. That's assuming the AI doesn't prioritize them anyway when they walk by due to range.
It depends on how the AI works, but I've yet to see FD have a positive impact on gameplay in any of the 3 games I've seen it included. I played a Monk in EQ for years (still do) and can safely say that the ability is broken. However, it is also only one small nerf away from becoming completely useless and not worth including anyway.
I think FD is great if its just used to clear aggro off your monk once the group is in combat. If the monk pulls the mobs, then FDs, and the mobs go straight for the group, forcing them to taunt/root/stun/slow the mobs and get them under control you will have fun gameplay. This gives the monk value as the only class that can clear aggro off itself but doesn't allow it to do single pulls.
Personally I think enchanters make the game way too easy, at least they did in EQ. Monk single pulls + enchanter mez can make item and xp camps a total bore. I worry sometimes that VR is missing an opportunity to evolve the gameplay into something more refined then what we had in EQ, the more time goes on the more and more it looks like the mechanics in Pantheon are going to mirror those of EQ, which disapoints me to an extent. They are probably afraid to switch up the formula too much for fear of failing, but once they give us tools like pull splitting and AOE mezes, they can't take it away, and it looks like that is the path we are going down.
vjek said:Khamodo said: ... Additionally, community policing isn't enough to deter or prevent people from using such methods as described above. ...Honestly, I have no issue with training in the larger scheme, provided the trainer dies most of the time, but being trained every time you try to get XP gets real old, real quick. (and is what it will be, worst case, with Monks current FD mechanic, in Pantheon) I mean, why wouldn't you? The game permits it... you want the camp, you take it, right? (mmm sarcasm, so tasty)
They CAN fix it so that FD'ers run the risk of death if they try to intentionally/maliciously train another group. They can. Whether or not they will is going to be interesting to see. If they leave it as is, then history says it will be used maliciously forever, just like EQ1.
@vjek, which is why, whithout any real traction, suggested in the past that there be an actual reputation system in the game.
Players could then police themselves via this system; thus those with really poor reputation would find them selves at a disadvatage.
Think Monk FD suddenly not working for some period of time.
@Khamodo - I'm interested in HOW exactly would you suggest they fix FD?
-Az
I wouldn't say FD is a problem, possibly the design around FD and how mobs interact with it (encounter design) is though. I don't think someone feigning at 100% hp should be believable. It should be more of a "O' crap" or agro reduction cooldown / button than a pulling mechanism. I think Pantheon has the ability to use it's AI to create some unique scenarios that prevent things like FD being used as solely a pulling mechanic or the need for leashing and would prefer to see the AI's limitations be pushed rather than just reusing old mechanics from EQ for nostalgia sake.
azaya said:@vjek, which is why, whithout any real traction, suggested in the past that there be an actual reputation system in the game.
Players could then police themselves via this system; thus those with really poor reputation would find them selves at a disadvatage.
Think Monk FD suddenly not working for some period of time.
You want players to be able to control other people's abilities through some in-game vigilante justice system?
LUL
@Khamodo - I'm interested in HOW exactly would you suggest they fix FD?
-Az
Make FD fail unless the mobs you are pulling have someone else on their hate table other than you. That way if you FD next to a group that you are not part of with mobs on your ass, they will at least gun right for you and take you down before moving on to anyone else. If you are grouped, the mobs should default to your group members. If you are solo...why would a mob believe that you just dropped down dead and walk away anyway?
This makes FD useless to a monk in a solo situation and makes FD training much more costly, but retains its group utility for pulling.
Liav said:azaya said:@vjek, which is why, whithout any real traction, suggested in the past that there be an actual reputation system in the game.
Players could then police themselves via this system; thus those with really poor reputation would find them selves at a disadvatage.
Think Monk FD suddenly not working for some period of time.You want players to be able to control other people's abilities through some in-game vigilante justice system?
LUL
No, but people should and will have a reputation with or without a system to support it. But short of GM intervention there is nothing that can be done about the examples in this thread for FD trainers or people that generally like to grief the community, because they don't really care if they get groups or not.
Yes I realize the potential for abuse, but as per usual the concept is sorely mis-understood.
But summarized its as follows:
- For explanation lets just say every player has a vote up or down button and so does the game engine itself.
- Players can only use their vote per player once per day, week, month (take your pick) - and perhaps you must have a player targeted to use it.
- Grouping and/or being friendly might earn you possitive reputation with players - voting you up.
- Training or generally griefing will probably earn you negative reputation with players - voting you down.
- Players putting you on ignore may also cause the game engine to vote you down
- Helping and mentoring new player may cause the game engine to vote you up
- The rate of positive gain increases with the amount of postivie reputation you have and negative gain decreases; thus voting you down voting just to be a troll won't do much
- The rate of negative gain increases, and positive gain decreases while you are below zero reputation
- An extreemly negative reputation may result in automated actions being taken against your account (EG: FD stops working on monks) and we are talking like -1000 to -10,000 rep to get here.
That said, a cool side effect would be things such as having enough positive (say 10k) to maintain guild leadership.
It could be applied to guilds themselves, thus a guild that atains say -50k rep would auto disband.
It's all just theory crafting, but the idea is to allow the reputation that will naturally build for players and/or guilds anyway to actually mean something. Something that guilds and players will want to protect and hopefully make them better behaved without it being punishing or exploitable.
I didn't misunderstand at all. Your proposal is subject to extreme levels of abuse.
People on average are idiots and can not be trusted with such a system. Things like bandwagon mentality, etc. can easily take hold and have permanent, irreversible consequences. Let VR handle people.
Liav said:I didn't misunderstand at all. Your proposal is subject to extreme levels of abuse.
People on average are idiots and can not be trusted with such a system. Things like bandwagon mentality, etc. can easily take hold and have permanent, irreversible consequences. Let VR handle people.
The system proposed is basically just a popularity contest and I agree, it shouldn't exist and doesn't have a place. It would be like giving reddit the ability to disband EA right now.
Liav said:I didn't misunderstand at all. Your proposal is subject to extreme levels of abuse.
People on average are idiots and can not be trusted with such a system. Things like bandwagon mentality, etc. can easily take hold and have permanent, irreversible consequences. Let VR handle people.
Perhaps you could expand on how it is subject to extreme levels of abuse.
Khamodo said:Liav said:I didn't misunderstand at all. Your proposal is subject to extreme levels of abuse.
People on average are idiots and can not be trusted with such a system. Things like bandwagon mentality, etc. can easily take hold and have permanent, irreversible consequences. Let VR handle people.
The system proposed is basically just a popularity contest and I agree, it shouldn't exist and doesn't have a place. It would be like giving reddit the ability to disband EA right now.
OneForAll said:Khamodo said:Liav said:I didn't misunderstand at all. Your proposal is subject to extreme levels of abuse.
People on average are idiots and can not be trusted with such a system. Things like bandwagon mentality, etc. can easily take hold and have permanent, irreversible consequences. Let VR handle people.
The system proposed is basically just a popularity contest and I agree, it shouldn't exist and doesn't have a place. It would be like giving reddit the ability to disband EA right now.
Blasted Armchair Devs
Community enforced punishments is a bad idea and super slippery slope subject to all sort of abuse by groups.
Ok, fair enough. I suppose there would be those that would create 1000 accounts and or get 10,000 players to abuse a single player.
Of course I'm not sure any one server would have the capacity for millions of players making the EA example possible.
So basically we need to live with greifing and /report and hope something gets done or return to games we hate to play because they've taken all the conflict out.
In the end, player sentiment will still be in the game; it just won't mean as much to those that don't care if people want to group with them or not.
-Az
azaya said:
Ok, fair enough. I suppose there would be those that would create 1000 accounts and or get 10,000 players to abuse a single player.
So basically we need to live with greifing and /report and hope something gets done or return to games we hate to play because they've taken all the conflict out.
In the end, player sentiment will still be in the game; it just won't mean as much to those that don't care if people want to group with them or not.
-Az
I think VR just needs to do their part by keeping abusable mechanics to a minimum and we have to accept that in order to have the sort of game i think most of us want, we are going to have to put up with some evils that come along with that. we are never going to get a completely grief free experience when playing a community based game. The same can be said about the game of life.
OneForAll said:azaya said:
Ok, fair enough. I suppose there would be those that would create 1000 accounts and or get 10,000 players to abuse a single player.
So basically we need to live with greifing and /report and hope something gets done or return to games we hate to play because they've taken all the conflict out.
In the end, player sentiment will still be in the game; it just won't mean as much to those that don't care if people want to group with them or not.
-Az
I think VR just needs to do their part by keeping abusable mechanics to a minimum and we have to accept that in order to have the sort of game i think most of us want, we are going to have to put up with some evils that come along with that. we are never going to get a completely grief free experience when playing a community based game. The same can be said about the game of life.
Except life has actual consequences for poor behavior or good behavior for that matter.
OneForAll said:I think VR just needs to do their part by keeping abusable mechanics to a minimum and we have to accept that in order to have the sort of game i think most of us want, we are going to have to put up with some evils that come along with that. we are never going to get a completely grief free experience when playing a community based game. The same can be said about the game of life.
And that about sums it up.
So that was an interesting experiement:
Post something somewhat controversial, attempt to have an actual conversation about it, and get at leats two somewhat combative responses, and 3 that are more to the point. Though none can see a way this would work or give good examples why it would not. Thats ok. It doesn't have to work. It's not going to be in.
The point is, how do we all actually treat eachother?
Maybe your all are right, there is too much potential for abuse.
And maybe we could all discuss rather than bash too.
/stirs the pot.
/puts up flame shield.
azaya said:So that was an interesting experiement:
Post something somewhat controversial, attempt to have an actual conversation about it, and get at leats two somewhat combative responses, and 3 that are more to the point. Though none can see a way this would work or give good examples why it would not. Thats ok. It doesn't have to work. It's not going to be in.
The point is, how do we all actually treat eachother?
Maybe your all are right, there is too much potential for abuse.
And maybe we could all discuss rather than bash too.
/stirs the pot.
/puts up flame shield.
It's more that this is an idea that has been brought up many times and the bottom line is: any system of players giving ratings to one another is extremely abusable no matter the limitations in number or frequency of votes. These systems are also far more often only ever used in a negative way with "upvotes" being a rarity.
If you'd like to look into this more I suggest reading these threads:
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/5954/creating-social-accountability/view/page/1
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/4031/mechanisms-that-create-social-accountability
I didn't post anything directly regarding it because I see what you are trying to handling, but I do see that it would be very open to abuse. The average player isn't the problem. The griefer is the problem and unfortunately, they have a tendency to use rules intended to limit them against the average player. Even /report can be abused. Taunt and harass a player until he gets pissed off, being careful to never say a thing that actually violates the EUA. Then, when the harassed player blows up, /report them.
In this day in age, video recording tools can help bring some tools to players without even having them part of the game. But a voting system (which a reputation system winds up being) can be manipulated. Reputation works best as just that, a player's reputation based on word of mouth. Even that isn't perfect. But automating it can lead to "everyone in the guild down vote DudeWeHate" when some people in the guild never even met DudeWeHate and maybe it was just one instance where the guildmember was more at fault than DudeWeHate.
The thing is that it is just simply hard to police everything. There are behaviors that can't be policed even in real life where jail and worse are on the table. In a game, the worst that can happen is that you can't play the game anymore and even that can often be gotten around. So, the devs need to work to minimize the impact of game mechanics on that delicate balance of also not making a boring game. They also need to enforce as much as is reasonably possible, though that will never be perfect. And the rest of it is in game reputation and hoping that there are enough "average players" that don't enjoy griefing to make the game enjoyable on the whole and being thick-skinned enough to get past the times it happens.
Random thought on Feighn Death
You feign death. The mob is convinced. It promptly approaches your "Corpse" and helps itself to some or all of your gear/gold inventory etc.
Now go get it back...
You feign death. The mob is convinced. But it likes to eat it's prey. So it carries you off to be roasted on a spit.
Hope your AFK friend comes back soon to rescue you..
Kilsin said:I also think a combination is best, if we can evolve on what EQ and VG gave us (no leashing and leashing - both worked very well for each game) and have a system where an angry wolf or bear would chase you to the death but a city or town guard may be smart enough to realise they are leaving their town at a disadvantage and return after a short while we could have the best of both mechanics.
Someone made that same analogy on Twitter too which I thought was cool as that was my personal take on it ;)
Randomized distance within a certain range based on variables (faction standing, mob "job", mob disposition, mob type, etc) with some (maybe most) mobs that simply won't leash. Mobs guarding a cave entrance for example, would have a shorter leash because they need to guard the cave, not chase you all over the zone. Mobs guarding a boss could also do a number of things: have a short leash or alert the boss when engaged, or be resummoned to their spawn points upon boss engagement if still alive.
There are a lot of creative ways to tackle this problem, but a consistant and reliable "get out of jail free" card should not be one of them. You aggroed it, you deal with it (with situational leashes where it makes sense)
azaya said:Liav said:I didn't misunderstand at all. Your proposal is subject to extreme levels of abuse.
People on average are idiots and can not be trusted with such a system. Things like bandwagon mentality, etc. can easily take hold and have permanent, irreversible consequences. Let VR handle people.
Perhaps you could expand on how it is subject to extreme levels of abuse.
People band together and downvote someone..just because they want to..not because that person deserves that negative attention. We saw evidence on these very forums in the early days. Its a way to grief people...could be a guild you are competing with, could be someone that left your guild and doesn't want to be a part of it any more...any reason can be used, that isn't fair or justified. General population sometimes plays follow the leader without thinking beyond the ends of their own noses. That can create a toxic environment..let's not wish for that.
Cana