Current State of End-Game Contents - A Blog Post from A Japanese Player

[Xine]

Put some thought this morning into being a bit more in-depth about the whole "how do you think randomized bosses should work" and came up with this since I've yet to see anyone post anything with any real solid information or examples.

In regards to randomizing boss skills, each skill can be given a percent chance to actually be used. Want to use T5 as an example again? Might as well since its what everyone is stuck on, that and Titan EX being "too hard" to memorize/execute properly. Since the fight is currently sitting in a predetermined script, Scourges > Neurolink at 85% > Fireball/Conflags > Neurolink at 55% > Divebombs x3 > 3 Snakes > Divebombs x3 > 2 more Snakes > DPS Check to kill all 5 Snakes > Profusion > Twisters/Dreadknights > Neurolink at 30% > Hatch/Liquid Hells > Win. The fight could be made with Twin's skills in each phase and given a different % based on how dangerous they are to the party's survivability. Obviously the most dangerous out of the list can be given the lowest percent to decrease the probability of it being used back to back multiple times. However another way to combat something like this is to program the boss/fight to where it can only use Instant Death mechanics once every certain % of the boss's HP. This leaves room for people to be able to hold dps and recover from any possible deaths, provided MP holds out. Now with that said, you have people who may bring in nothing but Bards and Scholars to have "Infinite MP" and hold fights indefinitely. This is typically combated by having a "Rage Timer" during fights, which forces you to not hold a boss indefinitely and to give you a basic time limit before you're faced with the "You took too long, now you die" raging of the boss which typically involves highly increased attributes or an unavoidable instant-death ability. (See the Iron Giants in CT during the Atomos fight when there aren't 4 people standing on the platforms after a set period of time.)

Now, people complain (including Yoshi-P to a point) that making fights randomized will absolutely cause at least 1 group in the world who plays this game out of possibly millions of players/subscribers, will fail a fight, and that someone else will "just get lucky" and win. Creating a True AI in a video game is pretty damned hard I'd imagine, I'm not a computer scientist or a programming genius so I have no idea how someone would go about doing that. However, giving skills that will have a 5% chance of being used, has a less likely chance of being used again immediately after. Because there is a pool of possible skills that can be used and each one has a percent that is higher than 5%. So your chances of getting that instant-death skill twice in a row is not very likely, but that does not mean it will never happen. It can happen, and one day it will happen, whether it happens to you or not isn't the biggest problem here, its "it will happen to someone causing a negative reaction from those it happened to." There is no avoiding bad situations, they are going to happen because nothing in the world is ever simply handed over without some manner of risk involved, nor is the reality of life or gaming perfect. Here its a matter of content being fun, or just plain boring because you've memorized the fight's script. But I'll bring up what's been mentioned multiple times in this thread, you can attempt fights as often as you want without having to start over from the very beginning, be it farming a new pop set or having to memorize a brand new fight or even going so far as to start over from lv1 and losing ALL completed content to that point in the game or even from the very beginning of the dungeon (yes it drops you at the entrance but you do not have to clear all the trash mobs over again including all the previous bosses beaten.)

Now, will making the fights more randomized make them easier/more difficult? No. Will making fights more randomized make them more fun? Yes to some, No to others. Will leaving fights scripted exactly as they are while simply increasing ilv and giving out the Echo buff continue to be fun? No, I don't think I've seen anywhere where someone actually said they enjoy doing scripted fights, but that does not mean some people don't actually enjoy that. Will making fights more randomized make them less about team jump roping and completely scripted? Absolutely. Will making fights more randomized help fight against severely punishing/instand-death mechanics? Not at all. Then what's the point of doing it this way? It makes the fights more interesting, if people are bored of doing the exact same routine every single time they go to clear content because the fight follows a specific script, this will give them something else to deal with. It definitely CAN make fights more challenging, especially if certain skills/abilities aren't tweaked enough to work with a more reactive playstyle vs knowing what's coming and moving before it happens. You know those little AoEs the dogs use in the first boss of Pharos Sirius? The orange circles show up (at least on my screen) for less than half a second before disappearing and being used, they also are not used at any specific point in the fight and have nothing that prompts their use (beyond being in range for them to actually initiate their use.) Now obviously this doesn't really hurt in the slightest and probably isn't the greatest example, but my point here is you can't dodge it even though it shows up on your screen, so in that instance it fits perfectly to what I'm trying to get across.

I'm sorry but against the argument that making content more randomized without some form of control over the insta-death mechanics does not make a game any easier or harder, in fact it adds a more real feel to fights in that you never know what a boss will throw at you next, however you CAN know what abilities the boss has in store for you and you can also learn what they are and get an idea of how to react to them before going into the fight. I have lead multiple fights in FFXI which uses a battle system very similar to this and I will say that I have had extremely few problems with random pugs with a short simple overview of the upcoming fight before jumping in. I lead my own runs through Chains of Promathia before it was made faceroll easy as well as Divine Might back at lv75 caps before Mythic weapons and Abyssea were introduced when gear actually did carry you through a fight because it was years old content. You CAN have difficulty and challenge to a fight while still keeping it fun and enjoyable. Its actually finding that mixture of challenging and fun that is hard and does take some time to figure out for new games using a brand new type of mechanics and gear. (Note that FFXI never had item levels until Seekers of Adoulin was released, the only complaints I ever heard in FFXI for the 7-9 years I played it were people couldn't comprehend some of the more "complex" mechanics such as how aggro and the hate table worked which is in all honesty extremely simple and easy to understand for a person who can think beyond the inside of a cardboard box.)

Playing fights in this game DOES work for reactive playing styles, maybe not every single fight, but enough of them give enough leeway for a player with a decent connection and reaction time to get out of the way without being forced to memorize the boss's script. Honestly, I've been doing Titan HM since I first started doing my relic weapon quests back in 2.0-2.1, sure, before they updated the server updating speed I had problems dodging and was required to memorize the script. But I didn't memorize the script, I cleared Titan HM perfectly fine after that update and still to this day have not memorized Titan's exact script. I just know "see circle on the ground, this means I need to move." Adjusting/tweaking boss's skills to match for reactive play styles given a randomized skill set vs a perfectly scripted fight would not have to be so drastic as to make Landslides or WotL any less "deadly" then they already are/may be. If anything some skills/abilities would need maybe .5 seconds added to the cast time, but even that might stretching it a bit too far.

If there's any holes in this, point it out to me and I'll look over it and see if I can't remember what was running through my head when typing this all out. I tried to be as thorough as possible and read through my own post 2 or 3 times before hitting "post reply", however I am only human and humans do make mistakes.

[Kiara]

Put some thought this morning into being a bit more in-depth about the whole "how do you think randomized bosses should work"...

However, giving skills that will have a 5% chance of being used, has a less likely chance of being used again immediately after. So your chances of getting that instant-death skill twice in a row is not very likely, but that does not mean it will never happen. It can happen, and one day it will happen, whether it happens to you or not isn't the biggest problem here...

Hi Xine,

Great writeup. I would note that in regards to your question above, it *definitely* is possible (and been done before in other games) to script in a fail-safe, so that a certain Attack (Instant Kill) can never be executed twice in a row (or whatever stipulation the developer wants). So you can certainly have something like a "5% Chance to use [Uber Attack]" *and* script it to never execute if it was just used (so no back-to-back accidents can happen).