Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Why does no MMORPG have population based mob spawning?
DocBrody
Member UncommonPosts: 1,926
Hello,
I have a question: why has no MMORPG done this? Or ist there one which does it?
Coming from single player RPGs I now play some MMORPG titles which are not exactly "over populated" and each one of them, even if I am completely alone in an area, spawns mobs like crazy!
Go inside some cave, kill mobs until you get to your objective, when you are going back and outside mobs have already re-spawned and you kill the same guys again?
I understand if there are many people around, but this also happens off prime time when there is just a handful of people in an entire region. Why is there not an intelligent system to check how many people are actually around who "need" the mobs?
It would be much more immersive and give a better feeling of accomplishment if mobs would be gone if you killed them, instead of having to mow through the SAME mobs again.
I think this should be standard for any MMO which wants to simulate a little more realism.
Cheers
Doc B
Comments
A system like that would probably be abused in the opposite way of what you are thinking of.
People would just stand around together to spawn more monsters and spam AoE.
Just think of farming karma in Orr on gw2. Everyone spams attacks for hundreds of kills within minutes.
Yeah, but GW2 still does what OP asked about. I've seen (and been part of) groups that weren't able to kill "hundreds" in minutes, because there were JUST enough people to spawn too many mobs and of course, Vets or Champs. Whether people abuse it or not, it should still be implimented.
Hello,
it´s about less mobs, not more mobs.
I just don´t like mobs respawning when I already got rid of them. And if no one else than me is around in that area, for what reason are they respawning anyway? For me? Again?
e.g. you get a quest to clear an area. Fine. While you clear it, on the other side, the silly mobs are already back, although I just killed them a minute ago, but there is not even another player around who might need mobs to "clear the area" too. I just want one MMORPG which is not immersion breaking like that and high mob density.
what I want for example:
1. re-spawn mobs only if there is more than one player around
2. spawn mobs only if you have specific quest in your quest log
Yes, maybe it would be way more complicated to program, but there should be more clever systems than a simple timer on a mob which makes it come back after X seconds.
Cheers,
Doc B
Real realistic and dynamic worlds not posible yet or they are way to expensive and time consuming to develop.
So most easy way is always same mob same spots respawning over and over again specially in themparks less in snadbox but also mainly programmed like that.
You can already do this, but there is no point to it and its not what MMORPG's are for.
If you do not enjoy the said MMO element of games, you're better off playing single player RPG's.
Some games do have this, others have mobs grow stronger when more players are around. And some games do without.
There is an argument for not having monsters scale. It offers a choice to the player of how they want to play. Although it can be argued that it forces the decission.. and that mob scaling offers a choice..
But if there is no scaling the players can decide how they want to tackle it. Bring their guild or make a massive open raid and then share the few bits of loot between 50 people. Or figure out how to do it with 3 people and make a killing selling the loot you dont need.
If you have mob scaling, it basicly means that you can do anything you like with as many people as you like, and it will always be about the same challenge. It certainly has its upsides. Like if you play at off-peak hours cause you got home late one day and still want to do something in game without constantly getting swarmed by NPCs that arent being kept down by other players. It certainly makes for more of a game.
Im the virtual world kinda guy though.. and I prefer it when the mobs dont scale in dificulty or numbers for no other reason that there are more people around to kill them.
You also have to consider how it is implemented.. Is it glaringly obvious that it is going on or is it subtle, such as shorter respawn timers, more roaming mobs, or just a tiny increase in hitpoints.
And what happens if its an open zone and you have a huge influx of players just hanging out or passing through, while you are trying to farm.. all of a sudden even the simplest fight gets hard.. for no apparant reason..
GW2, EQ2, Defiance, and even UO in some places (Champ spawns).
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I got that, that's why I said it's the opposite of what you are thinking of.
Frankly you can't say it should only scale down. More than once yesterday did I wish there would be more mobs on swtor, all the quest mobs were instantly taken and me and my friend couldn't change instances.
Scaling has to go both ways.
You say that.. but I cant see why that would be the case. Other than level of detail..
The trick lies in not having mobs just appear in front of you.. And for that to happen in an MMO you also need a really large world, so you can move on after clearing an area..
I have played games where they manage this. OK they werent completly realistic but they made sense.
And we know from botters that it can infact be possible to make halfway believeable behavior in a script.
I think the real reason we dont have real realistic and dynamic worlds is that they would most likely be boring. Or too harsh.
But it should be done.. atleast for science. And we could get some sort of dumbed down and funned up version to play with. Or we can hope that games like minecraft keep developing in detail and scale and we can at some point make our own MMOs, since the publishers seem to only want to back themeparks.
It doesnt have to. But it could be a good thing for when you are just want to kill that one quest mob..
I personally hate the kind of game design where that is all you are doing. But it is trivial, if timeconsuming, to create quests instead of free form gameplay, so developers go with the safe option. Even if it makes for a trivial game.
True, some games may add more npcs when more players are about, but I've not seen any game that does not bring a minimum amount back after a certain amount of time has passed. (in the open world)
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Gw2 & rift spring immediately to mind.
Others do it in a less obvious way too, its been a common mmo feature since the wow/coh/eq2 era.
I think the OP had an issue with too many mobs... but that is just a matter of balancing though. It is why it is important to send feedback when alpha/beta testing and when playing after launch..
Even if you wont get any benefit from it, unless you play through the quest again on an alt.
Why not make the AI smarter so the mobs are passive and if you get too close instead of building aggro the mob actually build fear and move away. You want to kill it? you have crowd control to stop it form running away, thats more realistic and should work better than just having dumb mobs standing there waiting for you to build aggro and kill them where they stand. And if its a hostile mob you dont want to fight you can sneak around, or just fight it and he can also try to run away if dying.
As for the respawn, make respawning more realistic. You are in a cave, you clearly killed everyone in there, you want more mobs? they will come from the entrance instead of just magically spawning in front of you. You killed every mob in the wild area near you? respawns will come running from a far enough distance that you dont see them spawning from thin air. But not just running in line every time you kill them, next!, rinse and repeat... thats boring and equally crappy. Let it happen naturally, the respawns dont even have to be routed to the same place the last respawn was. Theres room for new features like dynamic mob behavior.
Theres no excuse that the company cant handle more creativity than what we have today and blame resources or money or whatever when they clearly can handle a full mmorpg with many servers. The only way we will get rid of boring repetitive tasks in mmos is by being more creative with content and how that content works.
They're definitely possible, and implementation would certainly be time consuming, but how much of that would be subsumed in the time gained from having to create a lot less static or dynamic content, I don't know. Cost-wise it's even harder to say since it would be more of a choice of spending more money on more/more expensive servers to handle the larger cpu load, or else sacrifice some of the size and/or gameplay of the rest of the game to compensate.
UO tried this with their "artificial life engine" back during beta, but scrapped it.
And there's really not much of a difference between themepark (static) and sandbox (dynamic) in this regard. You just trade the certainty of a spawn in a location designed specifically for them to be there, for the randomness of an unknown spawn in a generic spawn location. Neither offers more than the other in terms of realism.
Just my input on the subject;
I agree with the OP, but for a slightly different reason;
I'm tired of walking out into a field and seeing 50 of a mob just standing there. It's unrealistic, and just warns me of the impending grind.
Often times it looks like the mappers just took a spawn brush and rubbed it all over anywhere that isn't the town or a mountain.
The mobs around a 'town' usually outnumber the npcs 'living' in said town by at least 5 to 1.
If I were living in the game world, I would probably find somewhere else to live.
Some games do a lot better with populations than others, though.
I'm looking in your general direction; Korea.
Darkfall Unholy Wars does.
Mob sizes and spawn rates both increase as the number of players present increases.
UO tried from launch to do an ecology based monster spawn system. Wherein players would have to responcibly manage what was killed and to what degree as one animal fed on another and the food chain was crucial for all animals to survive...within about a week they had to pull that and drop in a standard time elapse respawn system for monsters. Because the players killed EVERYTHING indiscriminantly. Though, it probably would have helped if they had not assumed players as a collective were smart enough to figure out that the game had an ecology (they didn't actually tell players that is how the game worked at the time)...
That's just an early example of what can happen when you change things up too much, too quickly. It's hard to stray to far from what is known to work... it's a dice roll every time. The one thing that cannot be predicted what-so-ever in an MMOG is how players will respond to content upon release.
Mobs spawning mostly at the same rate and numbers in the same areas. That is stability. It's nice when a game has some sort of compensary thing for higher population in place. That equates to stability with adaptability for if it would otherwise become unstable. But, if you choose to try and get away from that, you have to assume that the one thing which is most likely to throw a monkey wrench in your plan, and least likely to happen...is what will occur and in a worse way then you thought. Some elements of MMOG should just be left alone. Because they mostly work. And, we don't want them broken alltogether right?
What are MMOs for? Linear Stories? Tiny Instanced PvP?
And that kind of thing happens...mainly because a company is either using one same proprietary engine for most of their games that they built when they started and upgrade once in a while. or because they are using a crank out MMOG engine like ogre....few actually build their own engine to the needs of their game from the ground up. it's quicker and easier to use one already in existance through fair use or license. And in-so-much developers are ristricted with what they can do by the game engine they are using. Every single one has it's advantages and limitations. So, it isn't just about what they should do but what they reasonably can do. Some things are simply too radical based soley in that the game engine won't support it correctly.
I really dont see any point in this thread.
What the OP describes is IMHO a perfectionally reasonable respawn timer.
The new Darkfall Unholy Wars has population based mob spawning, for every 3 players it increases not only how fast the mobs respawn but how many respawn as well.