I played my first MMORPG recently, City of Heroes. I've spent a lot of hours watching friends lose themselves to EQ, which always looked like a tedious and painful experience at the best of times, so I'm not sure what I'd hoped to gain by the adventure. Regardless, one of the things that broke my will in play terms was the number of mobs running around the map, and especially the Kurtzian gaggle of low-levels that I eventually couldn't bring myself to assault. I have a couple proposed solutions (both of which have probably been tried before but even that would be useful to know). First, there's the Ignorance Button. Basically, you put blinders on, ones which only allow you to see user-specified ranges of grindable baddies. So if something "cons grey", you don't interact with it. Good enough. The mechanism can even be extended the other way, so that if a mob "cons purple", you usually don't interact it - with the exception of special mobs akin to ambushes and archvillains in the aforementioned CoH. In this scheme, the mobs can be thinner on the ground per-character because there's no newbie zone required as such, so you can mix the zone levels up a bit. The other thought I had was to implement a Fair Fight policy, where grindables are automatically adjusted at engagement time to "con white" against the player. This, to me, seems a bit annoying since you'd always be grinding against enemies of your own level, but on the plus side, you don't have to implement a con system at all under this scheme, and some of the powergamers are turned off by the experience. Anyway, those are the core ideas. Any thoughts?

I don't like the 2nd one (Fair Fight), because...as you stated...it's a lack of diversity. Also, you often base your strategy on the levels you're going in to fight. A fair fight might be six guys of a level below you...or 4 at your level...or 2 a level above. If things adjusted after you attacked, you might either suddenly find yourself in over your head, or not finding the challenge you had hoped for.

The 1st one (Ignorance Button) I sort of like. But, only in theory. Because I have to ask, what happens when you see another player fighting low-level enemies? Does it look like he's fighting thin air? Or what about if someone in your team, of a lower level, attacks an enemy he can see but you can't? Do they suddenly pop into existance for you?

All of those situations are bad. But if they would be worked out....the good would be that you don't feel like you're JUST playing a game as you bypass the masses of lower level thugs because of the lack of XP, and also (especially for CoH) if a lower level zone appeared to stop having bad guys (say, in Atlas Park) you would feel like you have actually done your job as a Super Hero and cleared the zone of all crime.

Quote: Original post by Veovis
I don't like the 2nd one (Fair Fight), because...as you stated...it's a lack of diversity. Also, you often base your strategy on the levels you're going in to fight. A fair fight might be six guys of a level below you...or 4 at your level...or 2 a level above. If things adjusted after you attacked, you might either suddenly find yourself in over your head, or not finding the challenge you had hoped for.

I agree. The "Fair Fight" approach definitely wouldn't be my approach in most situations, although I think there are some situations where it might be nice, as with the now-derailed thread of Wavinator's re: detailed injury models, where we've started talking about how to compensate in-game for frustrating or game-stopping setbacks without forcing the player to reload (or in this case, respawn at a penalty). At least if you're in, say, Boomtown, at level 5, you're not going to die just because you like exploring a little too much. I don't have any serious objections to those sorts of penalties all the same, and I think there are much better ways to handle the problem than trying to "put the fix in" for the player.

Quote: The 1st one (Ignorance Button) I sort of like. But, only in theory. Because I have to ask, what happens when you see another player fighting low-level enemies? Does it look like he's fighting thin air?

I think that this has a couple of answers.

The first solution is ignoring EVERYTHING, heroes included, of lower level based on the button, except in special cases such as guild raids and CoH's sidekicks. This would lead to a lower density of heroes in addition to a lower density of enemies, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but could be a problem in the mob psychology model of audience improvement. Also, this doesn't solve the problem completely, just reduces its scope.

The second way in which it could be improved is to set visibility of either the player or the mob based on who they're fighting - in the one case they fade out of existence, in the other they pop into view. Obviously, this is more jarring, but it's also more flexible in terms of heroes who like to occasionally help out their lower-level brethren.

The third solution I can see is to, as you say, ignore just the villains. This looks stupid, and its only benefit is to allow an even higher level of flexibility to the high-level helpers.

My instinct would be to make the level and style of "ignorance" configurable for each player, taking into account the team proviso below, defaulted to some simple but fun ignore level. You're delivering content to subscribers, so my thought is to provide them with the tools to enjoy the game in whatever manner they choose. Moreover, a configurable ignore would further extend naturally to ignoring griefers and other game-breaking fools.

Quote: Or what about if someone in your team, of a lower level, attacks an enemy he can see but you can't? Do they suddenly pop into existance for you?

I think the button would have to be settable at the team level, certainly. This is based on a very limited set of experiences with MMOs, mind, but I think that one of the core values of a party system in the first place is coherency of experience, and enforcing the limit via a set of leadership controls (already in place in CoH) is a natural extension of existing mechanisms. If you don't want to view enemies at the group level when the team ignorance has been set up, you don't really want to be teaming with this crowd anyways, is my thought.

Quote: you don't feel like you're JUST playing a game as you bypass the masses of lower level thugs because of the lack of XP, and also (especially for CoH) if a lower level zone appeared to stop having bad guys (say, in Atlas Park) you would feel like you have actually done your job as a Super Hero and cleared the zone of all crime.

These are exactly my motivations for the ideas. Especially with citizen feedback in-game, it could be made to tailor not only the combat system, but also the rest of the in-game experience to your own personal play style, so that the peons in game could deliver personal expressions of admiration to your character at how well they've cleaned the place up.