Shifting Perspectives: Tanks, bribes, and player behavior

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

4-12-2011 @ 5:05PM

Frank Fujita said...

I wish Blizzard would create a dungeon simulator, maybe only available on the PTR. In the simulator, you get to pick your team, and you can "talk" to them like NPCs, with options like, "I'll polymorph the mob that you mark with the moon." and "I'll use slow efficient heals until you drop below 50% health, then I'll start going oom quickly."

You would have a talk with each of the dps, and your healer, and if you do things right, then you'd down the boss, or trash pack, etc.

This would allow me the breathing space to figure out how to tank while taking my own time, and the knowledge that I can do this, if given a chance. But if you think I'm going to try to learn how to tank in the LFD...

4-12-2011 @ 5:17PM

Lissanna said...

but at that point, why market the game as an MMO if your team is all NPC's?

4-13-2011 @ 4:02PM

Eirik said...

> why market the game as an MMO if your team is all NPC's

Perhaps you are envisioning this hypothetical "simulator" as equivalent in rewards to having human-played characters in the group. With the reduced risk, I would imagine that it would be solely a training device, with no actual rewards attached.

OTOH, being computer run NPCs, I think it would be entirely too easy to be lulled into complacency of being able to predict how they will react. Much like running with a guild group, you would have practiced with "people you know". Random Joe from the Dungeon Finder is a complete cipher at the beginning of a dungeon crawl. And even after you get a feel for how Joe is going to react, humans have this built-in randomness, as well as a much wider range of possible behavior than any logic-controlled NPC could.

Just as a specific case, you would not find NPCs shouting "Leeroy Jenkins" and charging the boss - and then logging - while the party is buffing up.

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