Shifting Perspectives: Tanks, bribes, and player behavior

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

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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