Quote Originally Posted by Azuri View Post
Yoshida has addressed this request in one of the recent Live Letters. TLDR: Designing AI to interact with one player is fine, designing AI to interact with multiple players is not. They have no plans to invest into such system.
Then we should convince them to change plans! Remember how they weren't going to invest in allowing us to fly in ARR areas and they gave us the ability to increase our ground mount speed at first? We shouldn't give up.

I've seen some mention of avatar experience/leveling, but I think it's fine if avatar mode is strictly single player. I know leveling avatars and meeting level requirements was a pain with the trust system at first, but since then they've added the ability to use either the avatars system or re-run the dungeon in scenario mode where you can use the NPCs that were available at that point in the MSQ. This new duty support system doesn't have an NPC leveling component to it, so there's no concern there.

It doesn't seem like there's much to adjust:
  • As long as duty support NPCs or scenario-mode trust NPCs are used, there's no level/exp concerns.
  • It doesn't really matter who the NPCs follow, just make them follow the same human player.
  • NPCs already run on a "player adjust to them" basis. They have preset locations for stack/spread mechanics and when there's something that needs to be intercepted (pillar/tether marker), the NPCs already spread out between themselves and expect the player to find one of the ones that aren't covered.
  • NPCs can already function when down one or two NPCs. Run as a healer and let DPS die or as tank and let the healer/DPS die. The fights continue just fine even if you don't bother (or can't) raise them.

The only other thing that might be problematic is the current rule of "if the player dies, it's a wipe". It might be tricky for them to change this so that it only applies if all human players are down at the same time. The alternative is just to make normal wipe rules apply to allow trust healers to raise players. Of course, if a team of NPCs can carry a solo player through every dungeon no matter how many times the healer has to raise you, that might make dungeons "too easy".

Granted, if SE didn't want the game to be "too easy", the "very easy" mode of instanced battles wouldn't have been added. I don't care if someone else is running trust dungeons solo and letting NPCs carry them through the MSQ. They're helping to pay the dev/server costs with their subscription all the same.