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No "leashing" on mob aggression? What?
BartDaCat
Member UncommonPosts: 813
So, I thought it was just an odd anomaly that happened because player-characters died close by and "aggro" shifted to the next living target, but I soon discovered that creatures in the game don't "leash" onto one particular target.
During "Heart Quest" events, players were pulling too many things, so they'd run them past me until some of the creatures shed themselves onto me. I thought, "fine, this is an event, and the creatures that spawn are going to go after everyone involved in the event." That was fine and I could accept that, BUT...
Realizing that I had completed various "Heart Quests" in the zone I was most appropriately leveled for, and not quite ready to make the jump to the next level zone, I thought I'd venture to some spot where I could grind some experience and maybe a better set of gear, and currency to pay for my repair bills and potential upgrades from the Trading House.
Well, apparently I had stumbled upon someone else's "camped" grinding spot, because they proceeded to pull massive amounts of mobs-- with attacks, NOT just running past them-- and then running through me to shed the mobs onto me.
At first, I figured I was safe, so I remained in one spot while these mobs chased them. Bad idea.
The mobs turned to me, the closest target, and proceeded to beat on me until I ran, died, or killed them off.
I "manned up". I took it in stride. I played EQ, I remember all too well the days of "TRAIN TO ZONE!" So, really I just took this as indicative of a shitty member of the community, and figured I'd just move somewhere else, but I had to ask myself, "SERIOUSLY?! That guy attacked those mobs, their threat should be entirely focused on HIM! WTF?!"
When I figured I had a decent set of gear to accept the next "Skill Challenge", I moved on to a new zone where the "Skill Challenge" resided. It was an area surrounded by aggressive mobs, some of them caster types, some of them brutal "Guardian" types with broadswords and nasty spin attacks. Duly noted, be careful of AOE and "splash damage" from nearby players... Well, that didn't work.
The "Skill Challenge" target was an aggressive Norn residing on a mountain, set back in a corraled area with a few henchmen. Someone decided to dive into the area and pull everything, including the "Skill Challenge" boss, then either realizing their mistake, or intentionally being pricks, they pulled the entire train on top of me while my back was turned further down the road, fighting my own pack of mobs. Needless to say, my character died.
I don't see regressions in mechanics such as this as anything "innovative". If I was playing EQ, and I was playing "safe" and sticking close to a zone border to avoid the inevitable "TRAIN TO ZONE" that regularly occurred, then I might find this somewhat acceptable. However, in this day and age of almost ALL other MMOs alleviating the concern for "trained aggro" with a "leashing" mechanic, I was unpleasantly surprised to find this lacking in GW2.
Comments
Have to be honest with you, the only time I noticed any mobs "shedding" was when I attacked them while they were following the other player. Sometimes the mobs will aggro onto you if the mobs are chasing the player, reset to their location and you're within their aggro range, as they are coming back.
It's possible that you experienced some sort of a bug, which is normal, considering that the game is in beta. I would report this on the official beta forums just to make sure that the developers are aware of this issue.
Also keep in mind that attacks in GW2 damage everything that's in range. It's not like other games where if a mob is locked onto me and hits me, it only attacks me. In GW2, if the mob attacks me and you're standing next to me, you'll get hit as well. It works both ways though. Most of your attacks hit multiple mobs as well. Provided that they are next to each other.
One thing I want to note is that there are no camp spots in this game. Everyone gets XP and everyone gets their own loot. So if you're fighting a mob and I attack it, you get full XP, I get full XP and we both get drops from the mob. In other words, there is no tagging or stealing camps or whatever. The game is built around cooperation amongst people on the same server, not competition.
Tell that to the other guy. They were pretty aggressive about pulling everything onto me multiple times. If they were looking for your so-called "cooperation", they made no effort to communicate this idea as they followed me around with their pack of mobs.
Aggro in its current incarnation and Leashes (the radius they can travel from their spawn point) suck.
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I don't think anyone said this was innovative? The aggro mechanic like you explained is the same as it was in GW1. It would also be pretty stupid if they decided to have an "aggro leach" mechanic, after all the effort they're putting into removing dedicated tanks from the game.
Yep this happened to me a couple of time, but it was because the guy was actually running through me attacking an other mob with his "train", so i agroed them (most attack are aoe, so its not hard). But the mobs have a very short reset spawn range, and past this small range they will run back to their spawn, and sometime its a bit annoying honestly, so i don't think they will be able to train a lot of mobs on you, the range is really super short and i already suggested them to make it bigger in the GW2 forum, but now that you point this i understand why its so short in GW2.
I don't know about the aggro mechanics but that whole cooperation thing requires players to actually buy into it. Some players are just going to be jerks no matter what you do. If there is a way to aggro mobs, and then have them aggro to the next available person, whether it involves dying or not, players will do this. They'll do this repeatedly until the developers do something to make it impossible.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
A lot of people test the exploitive aspect during beta.
Since I last replied to your prior post, I noticed it had been editted with this change. I had already mentioned that I took "splash damage" and AOE attacks into consideration in my original post.
In cases where I knew I was in close proximity, such as "Heart Quest" events, my contributions to damage were a given, and I would expect to attract some sort of "threat" in those cases.
What I'm discussing is those instances where I was nowhere near the target mobs to begin with, and they were being pulled toward me even though they could have been directed elsewhere, with the intention of shedding the mobs onto me.
If I had been attacking something else while seeing that these were being pulled toward me, and I stopped all attacks, they would still turn toward me, even if I was trying to move out of their path, as in the case of the person who was apparently "camping" the spot I stumbled upon. I use the term "camping" because they seemed to feel the need to force me away from the area with their aggressive threat pulling tactics until I moved elsewhere.
There is no mistake as to what I saw, because I took multiple situational events into consideration, and tried to weigh in on the ones where I had absolutely no contact with the creatures in question.
Despite any defense that someone could offer in the way of "this is why there are no leash mechanics, because there are no tanks", the fact that someone could exploit the aggression of mobs to harass or otherwise ruin the experience for other players is definitely something that should be addressed.
The range of these exploits isn't necessarily all that short either. In one case where an "elite" boss was chasing someone else, and I was under the impression that I was far enough away that there was no way it would notice me as I tried to hang far back out of its path, it still managed to detect me and use stun and knockback abilities to freeze me in place as it changed course and killed me off. In this case, I don't think that player was intentionally trying to get the "elite" to peel off, because they even ran in another direction when they saw they were moving toward me, it was just a matter of bad mechanics with unpredictable consequences.
It is annoying yes, but it actually is logical as well.
If you kick a hornet nests they will sting everyone around and wont just return home after stinging you or you gotten 50 yards from there.
Since high ups levels down it wont be used to grief people, at least not so often but you need to keep an eye out on whats happening around you.
Just like players team together to fight monsters without the need to be in a group, monsters attack all players in sight. There is no "simple aggro" mechanic in the game that can be represented by a silly bar so you know when you have and when you don't have aggro. And that's a direct result of the Holy Trinity removal. Which is of course a good thing. I don't quite understand how it happened but keep in mind when a player is chased by lots of mobs (and you wouldn't achieve anything if you helped) you got to run... otherwise they will attack you too. That's only natural and another good thing about the game
Block the trolls, don't answer them, so we can remove the garbage from these forums
A few things:
1) Sorry that happened to you. People can be dicks, especially on the internetz.
2) With few exceptions, mobs will only chase so far. I don't know what class you were when this happened, but when you go exploring it's not to bring with you a runspeed boost & a snare / block. If someone tries to do this to you you can just run away.
3) Report them. This is considered a form of harassment, and I'd be surprised if Anet didn't respond with action.
4) You really need to learn how aggro works in this game. It doesn't work like most games, and it's not a 'regression'. There are a number of factors that go into mob threat, it's not as simple 'you tagged it, your it!'. As you learned, mobs will often attack the closest target. Your situation will only happen with mobs who are openly hostile towards you. If he tried the same thing w/ neutral moa birds, they would not attack you unless you attacked them.
Furthermore, mobs will often divert to the target with the lowest health. If you are in a zone that is much higher than your current lvl, then that will generally mean you.
- Again, sorry to hear someone was being an asshat and exploiting these aggro mechanics to grief players. If you see it happening again I would serious just avoid him and report him asap. Like I said, mobs do have a limited range they will run, so you can avoid that area even if it's a large one. Run speed boosts also help (and every class has at least one of these they can use).
OP, your best bet is to report this on the official forums, in the game bugs section.
Although I have not noticed this mob "shedding" personally, I'm not dismissing it. If it does exist it is possible that ANet is not aware of the potential exploitive possibilities. Complaining about a supposed exploit on MMORPG.com does absolutely nothing. The game is in beta. Some things are broken, some exploits exist. There are also bugs.
As far as the whole "camping" issue. A lot of people are not aware of the fact that there is no mob stealing in the game. This was the first BWE for a lot of people and a lot of people simply do not know that there is no competition for mobs. It takes time to forget habits that were formed by years of playing MMOs.
If you start a fight, but let someone else finish the mob...do you get the same xp and items as if you fought it by yourself? If yes than this could be considered a clever way of playing..yes/no?
You need to deal some damage before you get credit for any kills. A simple "pull" attack won't be enough
Block the trolls, don't answer them, so we can remove the garbage from these forums
Mob trains are the #1 reason why I don't think aggressive mobs belong in WvW. I got really tired of seeing the enemy drag some 30 bears into a fight alongside them, only for those bears to up and attack my team members.
I'm of the opinion that trains are too easily exploited. I'm wondering if this might be unintentional.
Some people play MMO's to grief others, and ANET has sort of dared them to try and do so by saying they were actively removing such mechanics from the game.
Sounds like the OP ran into some folks who were determined to prove ANET wrong, and of course get some perverse enjoyment in ruining his day.
I understand why the aggro mechanics might work that way (though attacking the nearest, weakest target hardly seems revolutionary, just practical) but if the opportunity to grief with them is present, expect some subset of the community to utilize it.
I shudder to think what might be done with this by a guild such as the Goons.
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Cool, hopefully it will be enough to deter someone from doing this.
They'd kill you a couple of times before you caught on that it was on purpose, you'd report them and eventually they'd be banned.
Haha, now you've gone and done it.
For the guy getting trained: Do the same to him or just move somewhere else. The next DE/heart/whatever is just a waypoint click away with no chance for him to know where you went.
For the guy mentioning people training mobs on your team in WvW: Cast an AoE root/stun on them and watch how they are killed by their own train. Many classes in GW2 have at least one of them.
If we build security walls around any possible "exploit" in a game all we will get is a boring game in the end. Look at existing MMO's. Don't get me wrong, I don't like this behaviour at all (although the mob train in WvW sounds ok for me) but in the 12 years I am playing MMO's now there were only a handfull of these situations. The measures which were implemented by the devs to prevent those exploit possibilities did more harm to the games than improving the game.
And in GW2 I didn't see this happening at all till now. But of course 2 BWEs and a stress test is a very short time. But Anet designed the game in a way that they reward you if you help each other, not if you fight each other, except in case of pvp of course.
I've played over a hundred hours now and I haven't had this happen to me yet. Then again, when I see someone fighting a group of mobs, I tend not to sit on my hands and wait to see if he dies. I'm there backing him up as soon as I can get in range. I guess I just don't give them enough of an opportunity to grief me before jump in the fight willingly.
Maybe I'm doing it wrong...
I think you can complain about this in terms of ''fairness'', but in terms of realism it just doesn't stand up. If I wander too close to a bunch of centaurs for example, and the archer shoots me with his bow - I'm going to think nothing of opening with an aoe that hits the warrior centaur stood next to him that hasn't attacked me *yet*. Or, if I perceive the warrior centaur to be the greater threat - again even if he hasn't attacked me *yet* - I may concentrate on him till he's down before turning on the archer.
I don't see a problem with the in game monsters acting the same way - basically assuming that all humans (or whatever race) are going to act together. If they are chasing one human and can't catch him but get close enough to kill what they guess is his ally, then why wouldn't they?
Course, all I've just typed out would be fair game on an open pvp server where dicks like the guy you ran into can be punished but all the above falls flat on it's face on a server where said dicks know there is absolutely nothing you or anyone else can do about it and are playing on that fact.
With that in mind, please ignore all the above
well, i like it as it is. its oldschool :P
I'm pretty sure that's intentional.
While Anet hasn't specifically mentioned bears. They have stated that the NPCs in WvW are there to help tip the balance of a fight.
It's not like that tactic is all that difficult to counter, tbh. A simple snare, stun, chill, or knockback, and the guy trying to kite bears is finished. This isn't even getting into the fact that it's stupid easy to kill a mob of monsters in WvW, if you have more than 2 people.