Randomness in Boss Mobs

[Bizanich]

Theory question since everyone here is an Armchair Developer.

If an MMOG had the uber bosses have a sort of randomness to them, how do you think the playerbase would react?

Let me elaborate.

You're fighting Lord Uberness Nerdadar, Highlord of the Rofflecopzors. You know the last two attempts he's led off with two AE's and randomly switches targets every 30 seconds. You have a strategy

You're prepared.

You lead off the attack and sure enough, Nerdadar AE's, AE's...and then AE's again.

And then summons three adds.

Or then goes into mirror image mode.

Or can only be suddenly hurt by magic.

Do you think if a boss mob had like 10 different variations of what they could do and they could switch AI patterns on the fly, if that would be considered a good thing?

Or would the whining and wailing about difficulty kill it?

I'm not talking about one or two different scripts here, I'm talking like a lot of variations.

Do you think the sudden need of adaptability for the raiding guilds be viewed poorly? I don't know any guild without at least a few fuckups in them just due to the need for bodies....

And do you think the game would do well subscription wise?
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I'm unsure myself. I think it'd be great, but I'd hate relying on 72/54/40/24 other people, or however many the raid allows.

I might have phrased the question poorly

[Clericnon2boxed]

Well I didnt like the randomness of one of the OoW trials, the one where the boss you fought would change forms. With a bit bad luck all casters would be oom within the first 20 pct.

[Szlia]

Randomness is a good thing when the dose is well measured. Too little randomness and it has no noticable impact on the fight. Too much randomness and the fight can be lost without a single thing to be done about it, something that is highly frustrating.

What you want is a randomness that can be absorbed by the skill/attention/reaction time of the players.

To go even further, I think it is very enjoyable to have fights where it is possible to recover from mistakes or bad luck. Because if a fight goes from a clear victory to a clear defeat in the blink of an eye, all it does is going from boring to frustrating. A well designed encounter should always take place in the grey area between the clear victory and the clear defeat. In uncertainty lies the thrill.

[Camerous]

No and the reason why is if you can't learn from your past mistakes then there is almost no way you can progress.

It would be like reading a book for a test but everytime you opened the book the pages you had read before were diffrent but the test was gonna be over them any way. Then after random number of pages the book would try to close and you couldn't hold it open by yourself. So you go and get 70 other people to help you hold it open. If you all weren't on your toes and working together to hold it open it would close and you had to start all over again. Only thing is you have to do this for all the people that weren't with you this time to read the book. Then just as you are about to finish the book the damn pages change ANYWAY! How would you ever get through it? You would never get any where unless by some miracle you were able to always hold the book open and get through it in one sitting and were lucky enough it never changed the pages even after you had done all you could.

I know that maybe my story might be silly but it diminstrates what I wanted to say perfectly. :-)

[Zehn - Vhex]

Basically, random things happening is good. But players have to be able to control them somehow. We have to be able to deal with it. Random "you lose" buttons blow.

For example, if we got to see a glyph on the floor moving around to see where the NPC is going to through a big ass fireball so we can dodge...that would be a fun addition to the fight.

Him just randomly throwing fireballs around and having a chance of 'randomly' throwing three in a row right where you have your priests...that would just suck.

Random mob focus is a bad thing too because only a few classes have any sense of survivability. Most boss mobs are immune to fear/frost nova, so casters will be fucked in two combat rounds. That's why the 'challenge' of alot of encounters comes in the form of agro control.

(As a side note, I firmly believe that the next great game is going to give all people equal survivability. IE: mages get mirror image, priests have sanctuary, etc...etc...)

[Kolle]

I'd like to see bosses with these huge pools of skills and abilities to draw from, but not be so powerful. They're protection abilities and tactics are just good enough and wide range enough that you don't have to give them insane dps and hps.

[Zehn - Vhex]

More ideas:

Three portals, one can spawn a warrior NPC with a fuckton of hp but low DPS. One can spawn a caster with low hp, but high DPS. One cans pawn a stealthed character that will randomly sap one of your people and then has low hp and low dps.

Every 30 seconds during the portals open up and through comes one of the three above mentioned NPC's.

Priedictable randomness is a good thing too. Like you know a mob is going to use an frontal AE every 20 seconds, you just don't know if it's going to be the one that does 1000 damage, the one that stuns people for 3 seconds or if ti's the one that throws them back.

As someone said above, randomness you can recover from/counter is a good thing. It adds spice to an encounter. Randomness that will cause you to wipe is a bad thing.

[Camerous]

Only problem is for every DPS and AC up grade that PCs get NPCs HAVE to have more or the game becomes too easy. But if you don't let your PCs up grade then then stop playing. That's why I like instances. You can control how many people go in to it. If a game has it from the beginning then there is no need to get the super huge guilds we have in EQ and DAoC. You get alot more guilds with smaller over all numbers. This is a good thing imo. This allows you to balance the mobs per group instead of giving the mobs 1 billion hp and make them quad for 8k at once.

[larseny316]

Not a big fan of randomness in boss mob fights. A limited amount is fine, but nothing major. I remember in FF9 the last boss in the game would die in about 5 turns, but only if he didn't cast a certain move twice in those 5 turns. It sucked dying multiple times just because both he and I had the ability to do 9999 damage each turn and it was just a question of me restarting a few times until he didn't do his big move right away.

I wouldn't mind there being various random strategies the mob would use, but as long as players can react too them.

[BoggiesSZ]

I like the idea of this, but to compensate for the new added "skill" factor, the monsters would have to be toned down substanially. Magmadar was hard as fuck at first even when we know his fear was 30 sec timer, and he did his frenzy thing. Imagine if he feared randomly, or summoned adds, or did the lava surger thing. He would be unbeatable.

If you wanna add in skill and randomness, you have to lower the raw power of these bosses.

[KianwanCT]

Or you have to put in stuff that gives the players the ability to react to what is gonna happen IF they pay attention.

Say you have mr. Bigbadassgiantboss thats can do a random whirlwind attack that hits everyone around him for a_sick_amount_of_damage with knockback, why not let him do some emote 5 seconds before so that people know it and can react to it.

This makes the fight imo. more fun and challenging instead of the at X% the mob does this, at Y% that yadayadayada same BS we have had since EQ.

Or maybe you could even have the mob do some graphical thing before, like the giant from before holds his big bad ass axe high above his head just before he does mortal strike or something.

[Jait]

Originally posted by Szlia
What you want is a randomness that can be absorbed by the skill/attention/reaction time of the players.

Yup.

[Lhon]

Randomness is not what you want. That's just a substitute for poor AI. What you really want is a boss with good enough AI to adapt and use appropriate abilities to react to what the players are doing.

[0hz]

I often wondered about this...

In EQ it bothered me that bosses were generally just DPS machines (Don't know if this changed later, I quit around the launch of Kunark.) which was pretty damn plain compared to form switching and multi-target bosses of console RPGs.

I think that in general due the repetitive nature of MMO encounters randomness would generally be despised pretty quickly. What's "cool" the first time becomes a plain old pain the ass requirement to carry multiple weapon/armor sets or dependency on key classes later on.

Of course, a designer could, given the time and resources account for a lot of that but as we all know that's a lot and generally too much to ask. That's not because I think they're lazy or stupid, rather it's a pretty damn complicated task if you really try to break it down.

Personally, I'd like to see a "chapter" driven MMO which presents a cohesive plotline in which there's little or no reason and certainly no requirement to repeat content. Just complete one encounter/area and move onto the next. None of this putting encounters on "farm status" due to lack of content or an enounter which requires 25+ participants yet only produces rewards for 2.

I wouldn't mind paying a lot of money for such a game.

Though, come to think of it. I've already but something like $150 into WoW across 6 months. I can't imagine what a company would feel they should be paid for the kind of experience I describe.

[KianwanCT]

0hz, you do realize that even some of the most plain content takes way longer to design and implement than it does for players to go through ?