(Suggestion) Removing the aggroe icon for monsters.

out of all the things wrong with this game we got the dev team working on a stupid icon!?? i do not hate SE to much anymore for making a bad game i hate all you people bitching all the time.

I am in favor of anything that prevents people from rage-quitting, which I myself am guilty of doing many times in FFXI. I am all for any extra info that the game can provide itself that isn't intrusive to my whole immersion thing.

Seriously though, what's the problem? People(not everyone, just people) are going to be looking for this information outside of the game anyway. Why not just save them the time of having to go to an external site and just give the information in game? There's nothing that says this is some kind of "easy mode". Mobs aren't going to magically become easier.

I had previously made a post that could be useful to include here:

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RE:Bring back "Too weak to be worthwhile"

In FFXI, I found it very useful to determine the worthiness of fighting monsters for sp, by their "con". easy prey would give a basic expectation of sp on an easy mob, but was not considered too low to be considered a "trash mob". Too weak to be Worthwhile was used on monsters that were just that, a trash mob.

I suggest we add a new tier for monsters below blue currently in game. It can be gray, to indicate one will likely earn less than ~60-100 sp a kill

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Originally Posted by Bayohne

Hello everyone! We have more details that further flesh out the design ideas behind the current UI change and tidbits on what the future will bring. Without further ado, here is a new comment from UI lead, Hiroshi Minagawa.

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Its too bad there are too many people that are too blind to notice the giant "I wanna kill you" icon anyways... Various people I have partied with just run into a horde of hostile monsters during behests or levequests anyways, then the thaum aoe'd them all, and the archer still single target the enemy that wasn't claimed.... etc etc.

How about a "scan" skill, juste like there is in many FF games? No agro icon nor lvl indicated (as it seems the dev are talking about currently), but once you use the skill on the mob, you have the relevent information (+elemental strength or hp/mp even).

Great news, displaying the enemy level is a much better idea than the current con icon.

It seems like we're going to get some more repositioning of monsters and that the future content is going to have longer battles and more of them. It seems like this is all relating to the instances that are going to come sometime.

FFXII had a nice target and target information interface :)

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Originally Posted by Jynx

I'm sorry but personally I'm not keen to having all this information spoon-fed to me. It's part of the imersion of the game to find out and know what agros without needing a red-dot beside it "togleable or not" what links, might as well tell us how it agros and when it's going to hit it's next movement cycle just so I'm not caught off guard.

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/nod

Actually, I think the icon works against us. It's way too easy to just look for the big red icons, ignoring the mobs themselves.

Relying on *player knowledge* to avoid aggro does a lot to pull us into the game.

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Originally Posted by Jynx

I'm sorry but personally I'm not keen to having all this information spoon-fed to me. It's part of the imersion of the game to find out and know what agros without needing a red-dot beside it "togleable or not" what links, might as well tell us how it agros and when it's going to hit it's next movement cycle just so I'm not caught off guard.

Can anyone tell me what Element that Earth elemental is?

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Then just turn off the information....jesus what the hell is so hard about that? They're giving us a choice, if anything this should make you happier considering now you have no option to turn off the gigantic red aggro icon. You can keep your immersion and a new player isn't getting killed without knowing that information....EVERY ONE WINS.

I think there is one issue I have with providing all this information, and I believe its important. First, when you engage a new monster (prior to the aggro icon addition), the only source of information you were able to gather was from the model of the monster and it's behavior. Not all information is easily gathered this way, but it is still possible. For example, a new monster may look real nasty, like a hog or a flan, the angry faces kind of make it obvious. Then, theres the idle animations, are they violent and aggressive?

Now, when we add these features, that remove the need to use the model themselves, and instead shift this information on to UI features that take away from the atmosphere, the outcome is players will rather than look at the very nice models, will instead look at the UI widgets for their information.


Here's the point of this post:

Where do we see the future of MMO's going in relation to the collection of monster information.

Do we see MMO's 10 years from now still supplying 2 dimensional icons on the screen to show a monster's specific attributes?
Or

Do we see MMO's 10 years from now breathe more life into their monsters and their games by making monsters relay this information through behavior/animations or through the design of the models.


If the latter seems more interesting and more likely to be the way of 'next-gen' games. Square-Enix will either be a company that pushes the envelope towards this goal, or one of the MANY companies that resorts to old mechanics for 'safety'.


That said, I do welcome the toggling option, but I realize that by offering the option in the first place, there will be little or no work done to improve the interesting behaviors of the monsters themselves prior to engaging.