Play as a Monster Camps

[Vivivivi]

I hope steal and mug works on Player Monsters >

[Urteil]

Camate what about just playing as my character to fight other characters?


As it has been said before this is not a planned alternative to PvP, rather another game system- not a substitute.






If so is there something in the works for people who want to be the character they spent days, months, years, creating and adventuring the world with?

Why give up on the storylines of conflict so easily?

Or is there a way for this system to be used for players to fight each other as players?

If you do implement the system please give the option of fighting as your own character versus another character. The entire FFXI universe is rife with conflict, filled with strife, and built upon a bloody war, and catstrophes we never saw.

[Camate]

Greetings! (Sorry for the necrobump.)

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

I’d like to share a bit of information about the “Play as a Monster” (working title) content that is currently in development, so let’s take a brief look at an example…

Let’s pretend my big behemoth self turns into a different monster like this rabbit here.



The name is not the player's name as you can see, and it is displayed in the log as “Rabbit” as well.

Once you become a monster, there will be a “monster skill” option added to your action command menu. (Apologies that the below is only in Japanese, but the highlighted option is “monster skill”)



From this option you can select and execute abilities, which will require and consume TP.



Currently the rabbit’s level is pretty low, so I only have Foot Kick at my disposal, which is why I am out here fighting this mandragora. Once I level up I’ll start learning Whirl Claws and other abilities.

We wanted to become a really sweet monster and show off how you can fight against other players, but the PvP battle system is still being worked on, so we were unable to do it at this time.



It’s also possible to upgrade (evolve?) to a Black Rabbit or a White Rabbit. Depending on what kind you become the abilities will differ. For example, the White Rabbit will learn Snow Cloud.

While I am sure a great deal of players are in fact looking forward to having a new PvP aspect added to the game, those who do not fancy PvP much will still be able to enjoy this content (i.e. changing into a variety of different monsters). However, since part of a monster’s daily activity is to battle with adventurers, there is a high possibility that we will not be making it so you can completely avoid PvP on the monster-side.

Even if you are not actively picking fights, you may be attacked, so in these cases you can either try to resist as much as possible or throw in the towel. Don’t worry though, there will not be any death penalty, so just repop and keep on trucking. We would like the “Play as a Monster” PvP to be content that is enjoyable and does not disturb relationships with friends.

On another note, when becoming a monster you will not be able to form parties with other monster players or adventurers. The main reason why it will not be possible to do the former is because adventurers will not be able to defeat an alliance of fully developed monsters. We also don’t want to make it so you get head hunted while playing solo either when you are not in a party, and would like to keep it easy to play without this stress. For the latter, as I mentioned above, part of a monster’s life is to fight adventurers, so we want to keep the hostile relationship between adventurers and monster intact.

The development team is powering forward to make this content ready for testing on the Test Server, and actually a portion of the data has already been put onto the Test Server last week. We will have some more information on the overall system soon enough to share with you all!

*Please keep in mind that the above is all in development and can possibly change.

[Caketime]

I'm very excited for this. I remember saying a few years ago that PvMP would be the only way for XI to have decent pvp.

Our current PvP is some of the most in-depth and nuanced PvP in any online game ever. Other games you mash 3 buttons and jump around in circles like a tard until the enemy dies, in this game you have an ever-changing strategy that shifts moment to moment and forces the players to quickly counter their enemies' abilities and respond with their own to achieve victory.

The really sad thing about it is the devs won't take it anywhere, despite it being one of the best aspects of the entire game. There is no greater challenge than the one another player can present to you, and that's exactly why the devs do not want. They can't control every aspect 100% due to the player variable and they don't want to admit it. Community whining about x and y job being better than others is cause for concern too, because then they would have to actually balance the jobs rather than doing random adjustments and calling it balance.

Personally I think this event is going to suck gobby sack, SE only wants us to PvP the way they feel we should, with a timesink and a bunch of convoluted rules and limitations thrown in to cut back on the inevitable sea of complaints about RDM being so broken in PvP yet being terrible at everything else. I think that speaks volumes about SE's balance issues by itself, that job is a poster child for neglectful parenting.

[Elphy]

If you want to give us PvP, fix what is broken (as in take out the fact that if your not a job that can zerg everything in seconds your sol) and let us fight as ourselves.

I will not even bother with this, I do not wanna fight as a bunny or crab or whatever unless I can turn into a bluffalo and play actual content like taking out shin or real bosses like Prometheus. Seems silly, redundant and a complete waste of the few remaining devs resources.

[Vandheer]

If you want to give us PvP, fix what is broken (as in take out the fact that if your not a job that can zerg everything in seconds your sol) and let us fight as ourselves.

I will not even bother with this, I do not wanna fight as a bunny or crab or whatever unless I can turn into a bluffalo and play actual content like taking out shin or real bosses like Prometheus. Seems silly, redundant and a complete waste of the few remaining devs resources.

Opinions may differ but I think its good that SE is taking time to put out content for both casual players and endgame event grinders. I don't believe they want to give us a "new pvp" per say but they want to give us something thats new and fun. In addition, Camate did mention that its only limited to small monsters for now but I do expect and hope that this means they expand the variance of monsters beyond the simple ones.

Overall, I'm looking forward to the new way to interact with other players. As a Beastmaster I'm hoping this to help give us more insight into particular mob types. Despite all that I will level with those against this new "Play as a Monster" content and say that I do think this could go south if it doesn't have easy access unlike other creative idea's SE has put out like Pankration. Some sort of player benefit that came from partaking in this content would be nice as well.

[Luvbunny]

If you want to give us PvP, fix what is broken (as in take out the fact that if your not a job that can zerg everything in seconds your sol) and let us fight as ourselves.

I will not even bother with this, I do not wanna fight as a bunny or crab or whatever unless I can turn into a bluffalo and play actual content like taking out shin or real bosses like Prometheus. Seems silly, redundant and a complete waste of the few remaining devs resources.

Moblin Maze, Pankration, Chocobo Racing + Breeding and Colosseum said hi!! Tons of neglected contents that are half baked with no substantial rewards, such a wasted resource to make it and yet they still cannot fix most of the glaring unbalance in some jobs and swimmingly along ignoring requests to fix Campaign, Walk of Echoes, and Dynamis.

[Hashmalum]

Ok, as long as the dev team wants to talk about playing as a monster, I might as well give my question for them a shot. Will monsters have or be able to learn any normal player job abilities? After all, all monsters have at least one job, and some Notorious Monsters have player SP1 (two hour) abilities, and a few have Charm. Also, what about spells? Will we able to cast any? If so, can any monster type theoretically do that, or will it be limited to monster types that are already commonly mages (worms, hecteyes, corses, etc.)?

[MarkovChain]

We don't care about this we want salvage

[noirin]

As was mentioned a few times, Fighting adventurers is part of a Daily Monster's life. Does this mean that we HAVE to fight? as such, does this mean i can simply be trolled when i want to fight other monsters, and have high level players hunting me down in the process? is there some kind of forced cap if a higher player attempts to hunt me? I.E. if i'm a rabbit in saruta, around lvl 5, does a lvl 99 player who randomly decides to attack me incur some sort of penalty [ A level or power restriction] ? or am i just ment to let them destroy me?

I'm more than open to the idea of PvP with this, but just like how i can do things by myself in Aby here and there, i don't want to always do this content with the worry of other players taking me out every few minutes. Rapidly dying =/= Fun Times.