[dev1031] Truly "Hardcore-friendly" NMs. Make us HUNT them.

I've read people that want to wait for hours for an NM spawn because that would somehow bring the "thrill of the hunt" into the picture. That honestly made me giggle a little, but it gave me an idea.

Instead of making people wasting time to wait for NMs to pop, or to camp them in a completely overcamped and cramped spot, why not to make them actually spend time having *fun* by adding a real "thrill of the hunt"?

FFXIV's areas are BIG and complex, and that's perfectly conductive to the kind of "hunt" I'm thinking about.

Here's how it'd work.

1: the NM spawns in a completely random location (certain overpopulated areas like the city entrances and the areas near camps should be excluded), leaving a "lair" decoration item there, different for any NM. That serves as a marker for the beginning of the trail.

2: the NM moves in a completely random direction, following a pattern unique to that NM. For instance some NM could move in a zig-zagging pattern, another could move alternating straights with big circles and so forth. That would give experienced "hunters" a tool to partially predict it's path. Certain NMs could even have preferred kinds of environment and would often travel towards that kind of environment (not staying there long though), for instance some animals could travel frequently to random ponds to drink.
The NM can travel across the WHOLE extension of an area. Again with the exclusion of the densely populated areas in which it cannot spawn. If it touches the border of one of those areas, it will treat it as an obstacle (see point 3).

3: when an NM encounters an obstacle, he changes direction randomly, avoiding it, then resumes his movement "pattern".

4: An NM leaves a trail behind himself. Any NM leaves an unique kind of trail. Some can leave peculiarly shaped footprints, other can leave a peculiar odor (that will appear in the chatlog of people crossing it's trail, something like "you smell a pungent odor, probably belonging to a XXX"), others can leave visible clouds of energy and so forth, the possibilities are endless.
The "tracks" should be left at a reasonable distance betwen each other, and not always easy to spot, forcing the hunters to cross-compare the position of a track with the typical pattern of each NM (that obviously will need to be studied and discovered) and possibly will have to hunt in packs in order to cover more directions from each "track" to discover the next.

5: after a while after the passage of the NM, the trail becomes cold and each track disappears. This time should be long enough to allow the "hunters" to indentify the trail itself and follow it

6: As the NM moves through the area, it's speed will normally remain rather low (about half to 3/4 of that of players) in order to allow the "hunters" to track it down. It will, though, after a certain period of time, have a short speed burst to speed superior to that of players followed by a sudden change of direction (more or less the same as it met an obstacle) , to make just following the mob in sight range for extended periods of times impossible.

7: once attacked the mob obviously pauses it's "course". If killed, it will drop it's loot with a quite high drop rate (after all it takes quite a lot of effort to track it down). The drop rate might actually increase the longer it's been traveling. It will also leave a corpse for a while, so that other people following the trail will know that the mob has been killed by someone else, and that the trail is now useless.
Then it will respawn immediately at a completely random position in the whole area. If the hunters are wiped, the mob will not despawn, will immediately have a speed burst followed by a change of direction like the ones explained in point 6. That will force the hunters to follow the trail again.

Here's the reasoning behind the implementation explained so far:

- The mob takes time and effort to track down, but it's not a timesink. The players are encouraged to actively "hunt" for the monster in what's basically an enjoyable minigame in itself.
It basically makes the player spending time while having fun, keeping awareness high for the whole time instead of wasting his time in a boring way standing around or grinding minor mobs.

- The challenge is not only in killing the NM, but also in finding it.

- Luck still plays a role, as it's possible to just walk around and met the NM randomly, but it's rare and the periodic speed burts ensure that the window of opportunity to gather a group to kill the mob will be short. In most case the gathered group will come too late and will have an idea of the location of the mob, but will still have some hunting to do.

- The NM doesn't even need a respawn timer. the fact that in most cases it will need a certain amount of time to be killed, instead of being killed basically instantly like a camped mob does, ensures that respawns will be rather slow by themselves.

- Competition is possible, but it's much less antagonistic than between a bunch of people standing in a cramped respawn spot. Most of the time groups hunting the mob won't even see each other for long periods of time, and the claim isn't a simple matter of who has the fastest finger (or the fastest bot). The best at the hunting minigame, and the most organized will have more chances to grab the claim.

- Finding the NM efficently requires ability and a well organized group/linkshell, pleasing hardcore gamers, but it's still very possible for casual gamers to engage in the hunt and grab the claim, especially since the mob cannot effectively be overcamped (it can spawn everywhere and go everywhere), ensuring accessibility.

- Aggressive NMs that fit this mechanic will raise the level of thrill and "danger" in the whole area. It's very possible to be doing something completely unrelated as the NM comes and attacks.
Note:
NMs that fit this mechanic should have a variable aggressiveness value. They should be aggressive only in the open field(when the kind of mob is aggressive in itself), and go back to non-aggressive when traveling very cramped areas that makes walking around them completely impossible. This to avoid a single aggressive NM making traveling to certain locations completely impossible to low level players. While I'm sure some "hardcore" gamers would be against this, it's unreasonable to make certain areas to the ones that cannot fight the mob for a possibly long periods of time.

- The "thrill of the hunt" is now more real, as opposed to a completely artificial "waiting for the spawn", as players will frantically look for the next clue to get to the NM before someone else grabs it.

That's all, have ai it :D

I would like a system like this too, a real NM hunt, just as the name describes.

But although I like this idea, remember this is SE we're talking about. Since beta we have been dreaming of more natural and realistic approaches to NM hunts and SE just went ahead and implemented it A) like a guildleve or B) exactly like it was in FFXI.

I was about to say " one drawback of creating footprints and having the server keep track of the NM's movements is that it could place an unrealisable burden on the servers" but then I remembered that other games are coming onto the market with far more server-intensive features, so I'm sure SE are capable of implementing something like this.

But if they have the option to implement something that has been proven to work (albeit barely) or the option to implement something interesting (albeit at the cost of extra development time), which do you think an already-stressed company will choose?

i like it, reminds me of morrowwind blood moon. with the prints I vote for generated check spots. Much like mog tablets.

I think it would be a radically better advancement on what they gave us in FFXI when Ixion was introduced (I got roflstomped more than once ;_; ).

It is a very interesting idea, one I hope (and trust) SE have the tact and creative flare to incorporate!

@Gifthorse: I'm not in a terrible hurry. It could come "soon" or whenever they're not "stressed" anymore (or obviously, it could not come at all, but hope is good to have nowadays).
After all innovation pretty much always takes time to implement.

I'm quite sure it's not so burdening server-wise, as the game already has environmental collision detection (that ensures that mobs won't be stuck in the environment) and random pathing. The server load wouldn't be much higher than that of any normal mob (unless I'm missing some very big detail here, but I doubt it). I'm actually inclined to say that restricting a mob to it's territory may actually cause a higher burden on the server than letting it roam free.

but hardcores want to "work" and that takes a whole lot of sitting and waiting

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Originally Posted by Kimowar

but hardcores want to "work" and that takes a whole lot of sitting and waiting

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I hope they don't strain themselves.

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Originally Posted by Abriael

@Gifthorse: I'm not in a terrible hurry. It could come "soon" or whenever they're not "stressed" anymore (or obviously, it could not come at all, but hope is good to have nowadays).
After all innovation pretty much always takes time to implement.

I'm quite sure it's not so burdening server-wise, as the game already has environmental collision detection (that ensures that mobs won't be stuck in the environment) and random pathing. The server load wouldn't be much higher than that of any normal mob (unless I'm missing some very big detail here, but I doubt it). I'm actually inclined to say that restricting a mob to it's territory may actually cause a higher burden on the server than letting it roam free.

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I didn't mean that the mob itself would cause the server stress but that the server would have to keep track of not only where the NM is, but also where it has been. Footprints and other trackable signals would need to placed in the zone and they would congest those zones (depending of course on how far apart the footprints are) just like any other mob or item would. I mean, I'm sure in this day and age, a developer could compensate for this. But I've come to distrust the FFXIV network coders.

I like this idea. More fun, engaging and addicting indeed.

Really hope some of all these ideas we put in here, will be taken seriously in consideration for the future. :)

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Originally Posted by gifthorse

I didn't mean that the mob itself would cause the server stress but that the server would have to keep track of not only where the NM is, but also where it has been. Footprints and other trackable signals would need to placed in the zone and they would congest those zones (depending of course on how far apart the footprints are) just like any other mob or item would. I mean, I'm sure in this day and age, a developer could compensate for this. But I've come to distrust the FFXIV network coders.

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Eh, if we distrust their coders and their ability to create content in the future, we really have no reason to be here, or to even post proposals for evolution.

Even considering that they have to keep track of multiple footprints, that would just be a set of coordinates and a timer (for despawn of the track), per track. I doubt it's much of a problem, server-wise.