About Crowd Control.

[kukurumei]

There is no such thing as a smart AI in MMOs heck there isn't such a thing as a smart AI in many genres. You either script a simple if/and/or loop and that's about it.

That's why Action MMOs tend to go downhill fast. There's only so many times you can fight an enemy you know inside and out, when a battle is based on "tricks". Kill trash mobs, dodge the spikes, wait for boss to glow red and dodge charge, end battle.

It's the joke "Flip the giant crap over to hit it's weakness for massive damage". That's basically almost every action game and thus design AIs around that scenario. But action games don't last very long. No one plays the same action games 200 times.

So it's better not to think about AI. Smart AI isn't something we can do in MMOs like this. We simply do it through content via script writing a "battle" to feel "epic".

But that's not about crowd control. Crowd control is a bit of a still half baked thing in MMOs. We are locked on a single target ideal, because it works and works well. Script writers can manipulate that to put real "fear and excitement" by using different groups with different timing, and different angles. Because you are suppose to have limited options to probably control the situation. But it's really the same deal. One enemy, one at a time.

We are now stepping into the area of AoE, or natural AoE. You are suppose to weave dodge and apply AoE, but it makes it darn hard on the script writers.

FF14 had the idea where it was many vs many and well...they found out how disgustingly hard that was when you make skills and ideals that apply to that, because to be frank they are idiots in that area.

Games that lived on Crowd control mentalities, have skills that have freeze, slow, knock back, redirect, cluster, barrier, etc.

And well, SE doesn't exactly have much experience with those terminologies, not to mention their whole FF14 development was anything but elegant anyway.

Kinda have to make due with that, since you're asking the wrong people for those things.

If I wanted to go through a list of CC theology, I would show them plants vs zombies. It's a summary of every CC concepts we have made over the pass 30yrs of gaming in simplified form.