Riahuf22 said:oneADseven said:Just make it so that if a player engages a banker or quest giver, they also become flagged for PVP after a certain amount of time. I would love to see someone try and grief players by training a banker around for hours. They would have to be incredibly bored to do something like that (which I don't see happening in Pantheon) but even if they tried we would be able to deal with them swiftly. I like the world feeling alive. I prefer that all NPC's can be attackable and all that fun stuff but I do agree that there should be measures in place to prevent people from intentionally griefing others that can't do anything about it. An example would be someone standing in front of a doorway to block people from entering a bank ... or mass piling onto an NPC itself to prevent you from clicking it. As long as there are counter measures to dealing with griefers I could care less if they run around the world being douche bags. It would actually feel gratifying to kill them.
It doesnt matter if they do it for hours or not, the point of it is doing it, there is no reason why the merchants should be attackable for any reason long with the questgivers or bankers, there isn't one reason anyone can give why they should be able to be attacked, other than the realism that it is a person and people can die argument, but im taking a more convient approach to the situation than a realism one, becuase like i said before it isnt the killing of the merchant that is going to bother me it the training of him, and trust me ive seen enough of people on a random day doing such things like this simply becuase they got 30 minutes to kill before a raid starts or something to this nature.
Really not remembering this being such a problem as to negate the positives of having all NPC's be killable.
I really liked how EQ originally let you engage with any NPC in the entire game. I felt the game really lost something when they moved away from this practice. My solution would be:
1) Players can still interact with an NPC even if it is engaged in battle. No "I'm too busy for that right now..." or otherwise rejecting friendlies from interacting.
2) I really liked the idea of training a merchant to a zone entrance in order for a friend to sneak/buy from it. Made me feel like I could use sneaky skill to accomplish an objective rather than have faction grinding be the ONLY path to success. If others don't like this, consider having merchant NPCs mostly perma rooted when engaged.
3) Make merchants wizards with infinite casting range and no line of sight requirements. They won't run away and they will certainly be able to fight back. Would enable them to still be killed with minimal inconvenience for others.
Off the op of my head, here re some things that I think would need to happen to make attackable NPCs work.
1: If a guard or npc is killed, more and tougher guards start spawning and converging on the location. This continues until the attackers are dead or fled.
2: No loot on non guard NPCs. Nothing to incentivize killing them.
3: Very short leash lengths on non guard NPCs. That banker will not chase you outside of his bank.
4: NPCs are not attackable while others are interacting with them in other ways (using the bank, browsing their wares, etc).
5: Instant respawn for service npc's like bankers, merchants. Slower respawn for guards.
6: Killing guards and NPCs should carry a very large faction hit and should flag you so that other players don't accidentally become accomplices by healing, etc. If they do assist by healing, buffing, and so on, they should also take a huge faction hit and at least temporarily become kos. The key here is that we need to prevent two scenarios: One where someone can "help" without any penalty, and the other where players might accidentally help without realizing what is going on, and take a huge penalty for their mistake.
Riahuf22 said:oneADseven said:Just make it so that if a player engages a banker or quest giver, they also become flagged for PVP after a certain amount of time. I would love to see someone try and grief players by training a banker around for hours. They would have to be incredibly bored to do something like that (which I don't see happening in Pantheon) but even if they tried we would be able to deal with them swiftly. I like the world feeling alive. I prefer that all NPC's can be attackable and all that fun stuff but I do agree that there should be measures in place to prevent people from intentionally griefing others that can't do anything about it. An example would be someone standing in front of a doorway to block people from entering a bank ... or mass piling onto an NPC itself to prevent you from clicking it. As long as there are counter measures to dealing with griefers I could care less if they run around the world being douche bags. It would actually feel gratifying to kill them.
It doesnt matter if they do it for hours or not, the point of it is doing it, there is no reason why the merchants should be attackable for any reason long with the questgivers or bankers, there isn't one reason anyone can give why they should be able to be attacked, other than the realism that it is a person and people can die argument, but im taking a more convient approach to the situation than a realism one, becuase like i said before it isnt the killing of the merchant that is going to bother me it the training of him, and trust me ive seen enough of people on a random day doing such things like this simply becuase they got 30 minutes to kill before a raid starts or something to this nature.
I also do not see the point in allowing merchants, bankers, etc to be attackable. I agree that this feature only serves for griefing. As far as making the perp into pvp I dislike that idea entirely. If I wanted to pvp I'd play on a pvp server. I want there to be fewer options for griefing guilds to screw up my limited time in game. Make it hard sure, but I've seen too many groups of asshats blocking bankers, killing npcs just for the fun of it.
For me personally, I think there would need to be an overwhelmingly compelling reason for NPC's to NOT be universally attackable - meaning KoS players could hit them and, if I make a mistake, I can too. I think discouraging people from griefing by killing them is as simple as having guard patrols form when a single service by NPC's is completely blocked by people killing NPCs that provide that service.
For example, if there are two banks, with two bankers in each bank, then for me, if people want to farm 3 of them (say, like in EQ, dark elves dropped "dark elf meat" and that was needed for a recipe) - well, have a day killing 3 of them... but - if they totally block the service to other players by killing all 4, then let the wrath of the gods, in the form of way too many high level guards for them to kill, spawn on their heads.
For me - I just HATE the jarring snap out of the game world you get when you get a "you can't attack that NPC" message pops up on your screen.
In 4 years of EQ I encountered this exactly zero times, especially since any town/city had a plethora of merchants ready to take your wears. Bankers were an awful target for anyone to kill since most people didn't really bank in fringe cities and in places like Freeport with heavy traffic you better believe you'd get blacklisted by the community as a whole if you tried that. It wasn't worth the real life reputation hit. But anyway they could make bankers respawn within a minute or two. Hell give bankers/quest NPCs a "memory" so that anyone who participated in their death within an hour or two takes 200% damage from them while only able to deal 10% damage back.
If you can't kill merchants/bankers/guild NPCs it really does mess with the world. If I am kill on sight in a city and happen to pass one of these magically immune people then I'm just f'd for the most part? I just get a train of guards that come kill me from out of nowhere? I'd rather be able to kill them and have a minute to get out of the area to somewhere else.
Just because there is slim potential for someone to grief others doesn't mean you should just neuter the whole thing. Trains? Don't worry about it, the mobs will path harmlessly back to their spawns without a care for anyone else until they get there because .05% of players would train groups with feign death. The danger of dungeons from non-griefing scenarios reduced dramatically for everyone.
Iksar said:In 4 years of EQ I encountered this exactly zero times, especially since any town/city had a plethora of merchants ready to take your wears. Bankers were an awful target for anyone to kill since most people didn't really bank in fringe cities and in places like Freeport with heavy traffic you better believe you'd get blacklisted by the community as a whole if you tried that. It wasn't worth the real life reputation hit. But anyway they could make bankers respawn within a minute or two. Hell give bankers/quest NPCs a "memory" so that anyone who participated in their death within an hour or two takes 200% damage from them while only able to deal 10% damage back.
If you can't kill merchants/bankers/guild NPCs it really does mess with the world. If I am kill on sight in a city and happen to pass one of these magically immune people then I'm just f'd for the most part? I just get a train of guards that come kill me from out of nowhere? I'd rather be able to kill them and have a minute to get out of the area to somewhere else.
Just because there is slim potential for someone to grief others doesn't mean you should just neuter the whole thing. Trains? Don't worry about it, the mobs will path harmlessly back to their spawns without a care for anyone else until they get there because .05% of players would train groups with feign death. The danger of dungeons from non-griefing scenarios reduced dramatically for everyone.
My experience / thoughts exactly, +1 all round Iksar
Iksar said:In 4 years of EQ I encountered this exactly zero times, especially since any town/city had a plethora of merchants ready to take your wears. Bankers were an awful target for anyone to kill since most people didn't really bank in fringe cities and in places like Freeport with heavy traffic you better believe you'd get blacklisted by the community as a whole if you tried that. It wasn't worth the real life reputation hit. But anyway they could make bankers respawn within a minute or two. Hell give bankers/quest NPCs a "memory" so that anyone who participated in their death within an hour or two takes 200% damage from them while only able to deal 10% damage back.
If you can't kill merchants/bankers/guild NPCs it really does mess with the world. If I am kill on sight in a city and happen to pass one of these magically immune people then I'm just f'd for the most part? I just get a train of guards that come kill me from out of nowhere? I'd rather be able to kill them and have a minute to get out of the area to somewhere else.
Just because there is slim potential for someone to grief others doesn't mean you should just neuter the whole thing. Trains? Don't worry about it, the mobs will path harmlessly back to their spawns without a care for anyone else until they get there because .05% of players would train groups with feign death. The danger of dungeons from non-griefing scenarios reduced dramatically for everyone.
I agree, this is never an issue in eq, it's a huge issue in wow though. But again, I've said it before, the player base of the 2 games is completely different.
I could care less about merchants, but it's a complete pain in the butt when you're trying to organize stuff in your bank and someone repeatedly keeps training the banker away from his appointed duties.
Either they need to nail the banker mobs in place or have you interact with a static bank vault item in the bank (ie take out the middleman and let you put stuff straight in your safety deposit box).
For those that think "there is no good reason" to have ALL NPC's attackable, I would like to direct them to this article I think relevant.
Brad McQuaid: I want to make worlds, not games
In a "WORLD" even the innocent are fragile, and on the rare occasion where the merchant or quest giver might not be there for whatever reason... well it happens!
Edit: and YES players that attack a Guard or NPC of a city should definitely be auto flagged PVP. So some of us willing to go there can defend our home city.
Porygon said:I agree, this is never an issue in eq, it's a huge issue in wow though. But again, I've said it before, the player base of the 2 games is completely different.
I think there's a danger in thinking that Pantheon is only going to draw the disenfranchised old-timey EQ crowd like us.
There are a LOT of people that got their start in WoW and have realized they want something more. I see them all the time in other games. They'll be interested in Pantheon but they'll have been "trained" by WoW. And there will always be bad apples - there were bad apples in EQ, there are bad apples in every game.
Note that I'm not against NPC's being attackable - it makes sense from an immersion perspective. I am against allowing players to deny other players access to important NPC services on PvE servers.
That said, I don't think the solution is a blanket invincibility. I outlined above what I think might allow it to work without opening the door for people to grief each other.
I'll also say that - the more reputation can matter, the less likely it is that people will do this. But even when reputation does matter, some pople just don't care.
This topic is probably the 2nd oldest topic from these forums, discussed on hundreds of pages across dozens of threads. The end result is always "Make everything killable, we'll decide if we want to attack or not." Everything respawns so you won't have but a few minutes to wait.
Vandraad said:This topic is probably the 2nd oldest topic from these forums, discussed on hundreds of pages across dozens of threads. The end result is always "Make everything killable, we'll decide if we want to attack or not." Everything respawns so you won't have but a few minutes to wait.
Well actually the topic was City Agro, and making Merchant/Quest type NPC's alarmist where they run for help instead of standing and fighting
And I'm totally on board with that. THAT is the RIGHT way to solve any griefing problems.
If banking is the main urgent scenario people are worried about... What if you could use a banker or in their absense use a deposit box to do your banking in case the banker is occupied by attackers!
re: merchants, maybe you will just have to suffer for a lil bit while he runs off to fight or be killed and respawns, but you will be ok buying your supplies at his local competitor merchant or alternatively taking a moment to listen to Kumu's latest face melting, neck shredding, fret busting lute solo while he re spawns (on a very fast timer obviously)
Well, I guess - if it's just bankers that people are worried about, then who says that you have to actually interact with the banker to get into your vault? Maybe bankers provide banking services such as offering you a key for your vault (which once you have, you have), selling you more or larger vault slots, etc... i.e. nothing so urgent that you HAVE to have them there that very moment... but you can get into your vault by simple virtue of being in the bank and having the key to it.
Liav said:Or we could just not have killable bankers/NPCs and not have to waste several pages talking about workarounds for a "feature" that doesn't really serve any purpose.
Attackable NPCs serve a very important purpose. Increased immersion. Two true stories from my time in EQ:
Story 1:
There was a vendor NPC that I used, well, I couldn't tell you how many times... but suffice it to say, it was a lot. Then, one day, I ran up to the NPC in wolf form. It was the first time I had ever done that. Not sure why I had never done it before that. Well, I run up to the vendor as a wolf instead of a wood elf, expecting to trade, and it says something like "How DARE you try to deceive me!" And starts to smack the crap out of me. It was kill or be killed... and I lost.
Story 2:
My wife's cousin and I were running through Butcherblock Mountains, talking on whatever voice coms we were using back in the day. I cast stinging swarm or something like that on him. It wouldn't do any damage because we weren't PvP, but it did hit him. I hear "Oh yeah! Take that!" or something similar in voice, and then "CRAP!!" You see, by the time he cast at me, we were running past dwarven guards at one of the outpost buildings, and because he was attacking an ally race (we were both wood elves), the guards attacked him to defend me. It was huge fun for me to watch him run out of the zone with a train of dwarves chasing him the whole way.
Neither of these stories ever happen if the NPCs in EQ were non-combat because it "didn't serve a purpose"
Liav said:Yes. Players who were ignorant of one of the first games of its type, 20 years ago, made really dumb mistakes that led to extremely niche situations. None of that applies to a modern MMO.
Here's the deal. I get to have my opinion and voice it - you get to have yours. Do try to stop belittling the opinions of others that you don't agree with. Thanks.
Edit: I just don't care anymore, honestly.
Yes i understand where people talk about where if everything can be killable is the best thing to do becuase of immersive reasons, and honestly in my opinion if people are saying they haven't found where killing quest givers and such being a pain to get to havent played EQ around the Velious Era, not saying anything terrible bout the velious era becuase this expansion of EQ is probably my favorite out of all the other to ever come out, but getting to these quest givers were i pain in so many ways, TK always dead, Yelinak always dead, The 3 dragons in WToV always dead, Coldain always dead, granted these were also raid targets which was a nice twist and i had no problem with them being these raid targets but they also held very important quest turn ins that were extremely viable to a lot of players as well. I remember back in Lockjaw it took me like 3 months just to get my turn in to Yelinak for some gloves on my pally, now granted this isnt any ofmr of grieving becuase that is the way the game designed the game, but imagine if someone found a nice quest giver that gave a good high end item and he kept killing him over and over again simply so getting or turning in the quest was a night mare while he was online, this is where I'm getting at sometimes having to much immersion can be a bad thing and honestly implementing somethings such as making Merchants/Quest Givers/Bankers non attackable will basically go by unnoticed, i don't honestly see why people are actually so against this, when all it does is take away greiving, with no real drawbacks in anyway, other than you having a chance to cuase grieving.
Just because you belive it brings nothing too the game does not make it true.
Just because you belive it will go unnoticed does not make it true.
That may well be your experience with it but it is not the experience of countless others of us who have repeatedly pointed out things that will be missed, but you eat her didn't actually read the thread or you simply choose to ignore them.
Want another? There is the old standard talking to the Banker and then all the sudden you hear a "Smack" and the guy beside you is laying on the floor where he mistakenly hit his auto attack button. THAT is funny, and the loss of these things WILL be noticed.
A LIVE world instead of a Nutered world... if people want there hand held there are lots of games out there for that already.