le0pard64

Well, what I see as wrong here is that we are trying to make up for a pitiful Artificial Intelligence by giving monsters unbelievably obscene amounts of hit point.

In defense of the programmers who made this, The AI must be (for all I know) one of the most difficult aspects of game development. The current AI has actually worked well enough to attract some very die hard fans to the game. Unfortunately it is also one of the more pathetic parts of the game and allows players to quickly become bored.

An AI like this makes it far too easy to effectively break the game. I myself have spent all night attacking Shipron with a rune sword while AFK. I've gotten the Frube stuck on a rock so I could stand there and blast him with no danger. Almost every quest spawn necessitates getting them stuck somewhere and killing them while they are helpless. Yet almost all the monsters are stupid enough to accomplish this quite easily.

The problems I see with this are:
- It is an immersion breaker
- It gets Boring very fast
- It disrupts the game for others (I want to kill Shipron but some bloke is going to be there for the next 8 hours wacking him with a rune sword)
- It has generated an entire 'economy' of other bugs which never get fixed because how else will the game be playable. (refire rate bugs are the first to mind for me)

A good AI to me means it allows the monsters to act just like you would expect them to act. For Crom in my earlier example I would expect him to have 500-800 HP (alot more than frogs usually have but still conceivable) and still be a very VERY serious challenge. This would mean the fight is probably still going to be long, therefore he will not be able to rely on a huge pool of HP to survive.

Crom is a Frog. His is probably meant to be one of the hardest frogs in the game. He should exemplify everything awesome about a frog.
- He should be fast and agile
- He should fly around
- He should do a dang good job of being hard to hit. This may even go so far as having a knack for being behind you.
- He should probably be smart enough to use terrain as cover.
- He should be able to hide
- He should be able to heal himself, and probably uses sun heals.
- He should be smart enough to switch weapons if the one he's using is less effective. i.e. He is fighting a D poly.
- On the accuracy scale he should be very high.
- He should be able to target different parts of his opponent so he can select a part he can actually hit. No more shooting pillars
- He should be smart enough to handle multiple hostile targets (your friends)
- He should be able to employ tactics to lure, psyche out, hide from, etc. his opponent(s).
- A boss like him may even use multiple AI tactics, EYEZION and a mess of HPoCs are in the next caverns over, he may employ them for a diversion and for support.

This would make for a very challenging fight yet through all this HE IS STILL A FROG, with all of his stats and abilities still quite reasonable. It's the AI that makes him tough. None of this is stuff you would scoff at and say "yeah right, gay!" to.

Should all of the monsters in EA have this level of AI? If they did you would be raped be a flob, beginners would never get anywhere and the game would be way too difficult.

I'm no programmer, I'm a physicist. But if I were to make a game AI I would definitely want it to be discretized and quantified (break the AI up into discrete pieces and be able to scale each piece with a simple number).

Not every monster needs to have dodging skills (all mobs of the Blod race can't even move), so they would get a zero for that discrete piece. Clegurks and Clegorns hardly have any need to lead a target, they just need to point and lick so their targeting would most likely get a one or two.

To define a mob then would not actually require laborious programming, only assign it numbers for the various AI parts and away it goes.

A member of the Brawn race (Jousters, Pidions) which never was known for speed but was rather known for spewing loads of damage might have numbers like:
Jouster:
STATS
Speed - low
HP - 1000
armor - medium
AI VALUES
Reflexes - 1 (may flinch on occasion)
Dodging - 1 (hardly tries to dodge)
Perception - 8 (will notice you, large territory)
Aim - 6 (will hit often, can be avoided with moderate skill)
Healing - 0 (disabled)
MultiAI - 1 (can call close jousters for agro only)
Aggression - 10 (attack on sight)
etc, so on and so fourth

If done right there could even be a small element of randomness in the values that the general mobs spawn with. Then you might notice that for the same type of monster some are smarter that others and there is a bit of variety in what tactics they use. This would make leveling ever the adventure.

Well ragdoll implementation would be awesome - set up hit zones and have more believable deaths. Really when you go up against a boss like Crom you'd expect two things to make it a difficult fight - his skill - his weapons - not his hit points. I mean if EA isn't like all the other point-and-click mmos why should it behave like one? Also the unmoving mobs should be able to "stretch" out of the way (like a bowl of jello) or maybe be impervious to many types of bullet. When you fight a mob in a FPS you general kill one quickly and have to then deal with the other thousand or so or its a boss and while there are visible signs of damage it takes time to kill (but not TOO much time). Your primary concern in a FPS is making sure you haven't taken enough damage to kill you - not making sure you don't get hit once. Armor in EA isn't useful except for certain armors at certain points in the game. I think armor should have qualities that would make a certain kind more specific to special fighting styles. Example - certain armors may have functions to sped falling time to avoid being hit after losing jetpack fuel. Not to say that armor shouldn't still decide how mush damage you can take but adding extra functions would make picking armor a much more customized process. I think you should be able to equip a gun and a melee weapon at the same time. You'd use the gun by pressing the left mouse button and the melee by pressing a button on the keyboard (maybe "E" or "F") or maybe use a key to switch between ranged and melee quickly.

Thanks Goldbot. Your ideas sound good to me.

I've been talkihng to some of my friends about this idea and we realized what sets EA apart from other MMOs which makes the AI so crucial. It's the fact that it is also a FPS. Most MMOs get away just fine with an extremely simplistic AI, there are endless hordes of enemies who die quickly.

With EA, however, the game has moved into the FPS arena where the AI can make or break the game. Games like Halo and Half-life are popular for a large part due to their realistic AI. The AI is not usually the first thing that jumps to mind when thinking about why you really like one game over another, but with careful thought you start to realize it is actually one of the most influential factors.

I can kill a zombie with one shotgun hit in HL, yet I still feel quite threatened by that zombie. Why? Because the AI is really fast and smart. This makes the game terrifyingly believable and therefore engrossing. I still hear people going on and on about the HL2 AI, you can watch on youtube videos of the HL2 AI where teams will use very complex strategies of cover fire, leapfrog, formation manuvers, etc. This is all interesting for nerds who think about that stuff but when you actually play the game it flows in effortlessly into a very realistic combat experience.

Well EA is not HL2, and probably doesn't ever aspire to that level of complex AI. Ignoring the fact that an AI like that would be insanely difficult and expensive to develop for an MMO platform, it may not even be appropriate. Still, the very fact that EA is an FPS suggests it should have a much more thorough AI than it currently has. As Goldbot pointed out, "you'd expect two things to make it a difficult fight - his skill - his weapons - not his hit points."

I just hope hellbinder take a look at this post - if only the few things mentioned here could be fixed EA would be quite a bit better off. Still there are problems with other aspects of the game (i.e. magic system/orb system/vehicles/elemental system) but if you can make ea feel like a true rps (role playing shooter) in combat then you've taken a huge step forward.

Great post

Thats why in battle for iia bos fights will no longer be about leveling. Bosses will have far less hit points, much more movement and be insanely accurate.

I do wish us good luck with our insanely accurate bosses, but we have actually been there once. In Aura engine of old, monsters pretty much hit you all the time, there was very little perching to be had against everything. The issue is that AI is indisputably broken. It got bad in booster, and worse from phylon. There was a day where your crom fight would have resulted in certain DEATH without a large team of people. Crom did 300 damage a shot, and certainly couldn't be bothered to miss all that much, it was important to use a team to take him on before he killed you mercilessly, or timed out. Crom doesn't have 100k hp, its about half that, and it was meant to be taken on by a team of around 8. This was a common appearance in gold, and a couple of mace using blobs could take him down in a couple minutes.

What needs to happen before we speak of our new super awesome accurate MOB overlords, is AI needs to be fixed. This is the only real problem, because mobs are already super accurately shooting...at everyones feet.

This entire post was hilarious though. I can't help but imagine a frog intensely focusing on crom, shooting him and sweating. Jamming food into a tristnarak's mouth.

Thank Telos,
Yeah, I remember back that far. This game has gone through some interesting phases. For me, I'm an advocate of bosses being soloable because I'm a loner player. Party quests and party bosses always **** me off because I have to drag a bunch of yahoos along to help me (which requires hours to set up and patience to deal with goof balls). I think I probably am unusual in that respect.

As far as accuracy goes, getting a computer controlled monster to be accurate is rarely ever an issue. In fact targeting and leading targets and all that is very easy for a computer. The struggle is actually to find a believable way to implement a non-perfect targeting AI, especially a variable AI where some monsters are better than others. A crazy sniper monster who WILL hit you EVERY time takes all the skill out of the game. Why even try to dodge? Then it becomes a slug fest to see who can survive longer and do damage faster.

As for Blobics with the Mace of Crushing Gale... gee... I wonder how they ever got their melee skill up that high without exploiting the AI deficiencies? They either have much more patience than I would ever have guessed possible or all of them made extensive, blatant use of exploits to level up melee. Something to consider when fixing the AI, don't count on players having abilities you just made it implausible to attain. Melee has never been plausible without exploits (that I can recall). Sure, the high level swords were good but you would never get to the high level swords because you would be stuck for years killing flobs to level up melee (unless you exploit).

Most blobs in that age got their melee skill high with a gonlon and some radius heal if I remember correctly. In any case, the current AI has an accuracy percentage, but even 100% doesnt mean they wont miss. Changing them is only a problem because we don't have the engine code.

Obviously hellbinder has moved to making everything have splash damage, which will hopefully work. I still worry that certain ledges will still be exploitable.

Everything have splash damage? No....... please, no.
The AI firing accuracy could be tweaked, but wouldn't it also be nice if a monster/boss knew it was shooting a wall? I think it would be awesome if a boss would shoot at the wall next to you, where you hide behind I mean think about it it's a video game... in movies people get behind the wall and see all kinds of bullets hitting the doorway, just to scare you into hesitation because let's face it if you jump back into the fight you have the fear in knowing you're still being shot at... it might tempt you into going around the other way, but I agree with Crom going to get Eyezion or HpoC, jumping, flying, healing, switching weapons... I mean how cool would it be if Crom started casting spells and then suddenly flies at you with a sword? Walls can be clipped too easily.

If the walls weren't hollow I could see less clipping in the future, but I know some things like Wrights/Eyezoras need to pass through walls so that might pose that... Clipping is also done easily thanks to lag. I can be falling and shape shifted... REVERT just before hitting the ground and even with a ping of about 100 get through the wall... same with Normal then SHIFTING right before I hit the ground. Same goes for rebirthing. If I'm falling then REBIRTH just before hitting ground there's a chance I am reborn under the map... this also happens (lagging) when I'm an EAN shapeshifted running then REBIRTH while running up a hill I find it can often bring me under the map when I'm reborn, similar with REVERT while running up a hill.

I hate how Rune Bosses each have 1 attack. Sure, Lord Shraderix can melee you, but wtf? That's Frube's only attack. Aside from Frube's size the only real threat in his lair are the trisks, but yeah everyone knows you can lure Frube to perch away from them.

You can melee all kinds of things and get away with not getting hit, but it's getting better imo. I had level 5 armor, gun and sword and found that running up to melee the Elite/Elder shockion got more damage per second per life (before i died) than the level 5 gun could do... plus I had to dodge like Hell while shooting whereas melee I just had to run in circles around the snake on average doing up to 10x as much damage as I could shooting/dodging. Sure, they killed me in 1 hit, but I found sometimes I got 6 shots in before they tagged me and then Melee I actually had a chance to kill the Elite shockion without getting hit.

As I said Rune Bosses each have 1 attack + their lair... Shipron has shrites, but shrites each have 1 attack and well it's pretty easy to bring shipron away from those shrites. Shipron could use a splash attack ON TOP OF his standard attack. Zorphion could be this or that...

Indisputably a broken game indeed...

Frogs don't get a splash attack. I've said it before and here it is again LAND MINES... Humans and Blobs can lay a land mine anywhere... what if frogs had their own version of sticky grenades? Or something... like handflare guns shoot flares that tend to bounce why not give frogs a kinda bouncy land mine? Human/Blob land mines don't shoot they just go where u click like a latent melee attack w/ splash, hand flare guns don't shoot farther than about 15 yards... I see frogs as swamp creatures with mind control, magic and mystery, but what's most mysterious about how they don't do splash damage EVER is beyond me so I know a BLOB is supposed to be a tank, but when they get their rune gun it does SPLASH go figure, but when a frog gets their OAFRONACK they still haven't had a chance to do splash damage.

Please don't make everything have splash damage, but do take this into account: If I fly in front of someone's attacks I get hurt, if a monster agros my friend and I jump in front of the monster's attacks I don't get hurt. Monsters can jump. I know this because I have shapeshifted into some of them. If the Clegorn doesn't think about jumping up to get the newbs then that's sad imo bc Clegorns are cave dwellers not fish in a barrel. In PVP if I jump in front of the PK while they are shooting at my friend they will either switch to target or melee me (chance), so naturally if a newb is fighting a clegorn...perched... and I jump in front of the clegorn and wave to it, laugh and dance in front of it, it should automatically target me even if I don't dance/laugh/wave because ...

Melee AI like Clidions/Clegurks won't even bother swinging their sword or licking until they get in range I noticed. If any AI (ranged or melee) finds themselves stuck shooting a wall, losing HP... ugh, so complicated yet so duh... ALL AI should occasionally appear angry. A clegorn doesn't charge at you ever it walks the same pace it does when no one is looking, a jouster never picks up speed... a crid does more damage to you when you're flying away from it, but it won't slow down to your speed because it can't decellerate it can only stop. If a Jouster got angry then instead of attacking you it would scare you by appearing more and becoming more aggressive (maybe increase movement speed, attack speed, accuracy) mobs once ran away from you when you shot and shot and shot them if they couldn't land a hit – that's kind of anger I mean if I couldn't aim and I was getting killed I would run away, too. Runebosses don't charge at you. If a clegorn is constantly walking forward not getting any closer to its target it should react by jumping, running away or something. ALL AI will shoot at a wall instead of trying to go around or jumping over that wall. Any boss fight/quest fight where the HM/HF/BL/AP has wings or a jetpack they never jump nor fly and NO AI will heal itself, shapeshift, use a vehicle etc... I know.

If I can recall accurately Datro led a prime example. All mobs will maintain a distance ratio, but Datro would come at you, like a charging bull AND get back to his 'distance ratio' no problem making the fight more exciting IMO.

Also... I know you guys have a lot to wok with, but that's kinda why I'm making this post long because honestly I don't want to jump in and out of the loop, if I speak my peace now I'll have sent the message and hopefully that will be enough for now. I'm not much for forums I mostly like to just play the game.

I was actually getting excited to do Alchemy to find it has changed from doing a batch to doing 1 at a time.

ALSO......... why are mobs flopping over into their death sequence telling me I can loot them, damage them, but actually they're despawning? I was trying to kill a rancon and it LOOKED LIKE it died, but I could still deal damage to it, gain exp/stats, the PRESS BUTTON TO LOOT message came up when i got near it and before long it disappeared totally ruining my hunt experience.

This is more about binding keys and less about the Quick Bar.
I hate the Quick Bar... it could be nice if it could be hidden, but it limits the capacity to binding equip/use items. For example there are how many slots on it? I remember having 7 more/less armor pieces bound, magic spells bound, weapons bound, potions bound, CHAT bound (omg I hate what happened to chat module, too), familiars bound, dance/wave/sit and all that bound... I guess the only thing I like about the Quick Bar is the idea that you can automatically equip everything on it at the touch of 1 button... but what is that good for now that you can right click everything in your inventory? When am I going to need to equip 8 things or more all at once? The way it was before I could bind "Use potion" and no matter how many times the game crashed or how many times i logged in/out, shapeshifted etc, that button was still available. Now... every time I shape shift I have to change buttons. Like... if QUICK BAR #1 was changed from pressing the 1 key to the "F" key and that was my potion... if I shapeshift then I have to press the 1 key OR reassign it to F OR right click the potion in my inventory (same with all keys that I liked to have changed)

another example before I move on
If I changed it from "Press Enter" to chat to "Press T" to chat then shapeshift into a Sarin
while shapeshifted it's back to the default "Enter", if I change it to T while I'm shapeshifted into a Sarin then guess what? Any time I shapeshift into a Sarin it will be T to chat. If I shapeshift into a Dark Jouster then guess what? It's Enter to chat. If I change it to T then it will be T each time I shapeshift into a Dark Jouster... I made this particular report as annoying as the actual in game experience.

Here's what NEEDs to happen to the chat module:
"You Cannot use another skill yet"
"You Have Failed" / "Attempt Succeeded"
"You lack this item in your inventory"
"Required Stats/Skill Level to equip/use"
"cannot be worn by this race"
"You are now level"
"connection Interruption"
"You damaged MONSTER/PLAYER for x"
"You need: Bone (magic example)"
"DEX/WIS/STR +1"
"you need a key to open this chest"
"access denied (fire cave entrance / 11 armor emblem and the like)"
THESE MESSAGES AND probably others I'm not thinking of CAN BE SEPERATED FROM THE CHAT MODULE

here's how:
using something like FFXI chat filters
if a player wants their damage reports to flood the chat module then they should be able to opt in for that... but if the chat module is to be used EXCLUSIVELY for chat then I can honestly say that everything in that list above (here's what NEEDs) can appear off to the side of the module as a kind of 'popup' message that fades almost immediately after it no longer applies (damage/ci/failed/you are now level/etc)

I used to have it like this:
Press T for LOCAL CHAT (for some reason now it's regional?), Press Y for GROUP CHAT and press U for CLAN CHAT. This worked well. Now everytime I REVERT/SHIFT/CHANGE AREAS/DIE it's reset to LOCAL CHAT. This is dumb imo.

Quest/Store dialog should continue to popup in a window (when I open the store menu the Store NPC message shouldn't appear in chat, but instead in a box next to all of the items INCLUDING dialog options like talking to the NPC about quests or w/e)
NPC Dialog, nonchat dialog (damage/skills/etc as listed above) and w/e can all be kept in a log for reference up to so many lines for what it's worth. Like....

You are now level 5.

3 days later or whenever.

You are now level 6.

OK, so I can see when it happened if this change was made.

You have failed at the attempt.
IRDC!!! But a window/box report that says
Today used 4 different skills (Hide/Reveal/Magic/Mind Control)
# failed attempts (includes shots missed of mind control)
9 successful attempts (2 hide/ 5 reveal / 2 death missile)
50,392 Damage dealt total. 10,072 damage dealt Today. 5,889 damage dealt that day.
0 damage dealt that day, either you didn't login or you didn't enjoy any fights...
ETCETERA
Obviously people would want to customize their report like
Maybe I only care about my damage so forget fail/success rate
Levels / Percents (e.g. Mc level 15.32) still shows up in the character page and that's fine for now I think.

NPC Dialog ...
Sometimes I have to run away from an NPC because something else is shooting from me
this automagically closes the dialog box making that particular quest a little more difficult since I either need to hide or be real careful... or speed read... if NPC/QUEST dialog showed up in the quest log then I can just Interact with the NPC and GO (good for when I already know what the NPC wants because let's face it a lot of players already know the quests by having done them before or looking up how to do them... or their clannies told them what to expect... this means that if I get to a destination and something is wrong I can easily check back and see that I missed something in the quest dialog w/o having to travel all the way back to my vault, or an NPC, or all of the NPCs thinking the quest is broken)

So I can't look back to see when I gained that level or STR, or how much damage I did that one day... not with the way it is now.

The ONLY thing I like about "You see nothing interesting here" is the fact that when it shows up I get the feeling that I'm not having a connection interruption.

I agree with you leopard64.
Quests should be soloable and

this DOES sound like a good idea imo
"To define a mob then would not actually require laborious programming, only assign it numbers for the various AI parts and away it goes."

Entertain thoughts like
In Diablo 2 you could never play with more than 7 other players, but each time someone joined in the monsters got stronger.
The AI stayed the same, but then again it wasn't FPS.

So a level 2 quest (crest/gidion for example) is definitely soloable while a level 16 (oafronack) quest is soloable granted you might find yourself wishing you had extra hands... yes, extra players coming along to help means you do have the BS in relying on people, they might accidentally lure unwanted mobs or something else like they got disconnected... so it could make the mission more difficult despite how many HitPoints Crom or whoever has, but one thing I found was that if I died while fighting a rune boss the runeboss HP resets so I found myself wishing I had someone there to continue fighting the rune boss just so that it wouldn't despawn damn how long it took and cherish the fun experience.

Spawn rate.
I remember clearing out areas like DV and finding that DV was particularly safe for minutes.
Now it seems EVERY monster in the game is reborn almost instantly .

"Cannot cast this while armed"
what CAN you cast while armed?
I think it would b less annoying if my weapon were unequipped and the spell was cast instead of seeing a stupid message like that flood the chat. As it is now you can ONLY manually unequip your weapon.

Also... staves/wands? These could provide a number of added melee/ranged attacks, improve spell success rates, improve spell strength, decrease required regeants, added quests, decrease time between casting AND you wouldn't have the hassle of having to be hands-free to cast a spell because spells can be cast while a staff/wand is equipped. That's a chip off that ice berg.

I hope this helps.
I hope this post was hard to read because of the length, but let's face it.
Food for Thought.... Feast.

I know, you're not going to believe this, but I just have 1 other thing to say.
The game could benefit from cut scenes. If instead of having to "Interact" with quest NPCs the player gets sucked into a cut scene just by making the approach to them... making the player invisible (or hidden) to monsters/other players or perhaps just making the player appear to be talking to an NPC. Like right now I know that when I go talk to Strife nothing will happen, but if I come back with what he asked for then as soon as I get within ten feet of him My Avatar becomes like any NPC (no hit box) and appears to be talking to strife while I, the player, am shown something like camera angles, dialog and cut scene activity like maybe Strife paces back and forth, stomps his feet, gets mad at his assistant Strod, shoots down a flob and cooks it for breakfast I DON'T KNOW, but it might improve game play if we started to see something like this in the future. As usual a cut scene can be 'skipped' and necessary dialog can be reviewed in the quest log. A fight with CROM of all people could be complimented with an intro scene like as soon as you enter the room show you and people you are with crouching behind bushes sneaking up on Crom, Crom is scratching his ass or chatting with Eyezion, camera zooms in on Crom's face as he notices you're there and then BAM the battle begins...

Have a nice weekend and I hope those legal issues are settled and the game comes back online soon cuz I got some broken mobs to exploit. I mean... newbs to help and skills to train.

This excessive comment is actually 2 comments thanks to forum rules and small compared to how much I really have to say about the game, but it's obvious a lot needs to be done and a lot is being done so I'll just leave this feast of thought on the table and see what happens.