Comments on: Project M Revisited

By: Lachek

Lachek — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 20:06:56 +0000

Fantastic idea, especially if they can:

1) Facilitate communication within a pickup group of low-level mobs to allow decent strategizing and goal-orienting among people who don’t know each other,
2) Somehow force the mobs into a mob-like behaviour to keep PCs from immediately realizing they’re fighting a human-controlled adversary, and minimize the possibility for abuse/griefing.

I love the idea of being able to take a break from questing, crafting and grinding my main by possessing a dirty, smelly Orc-avatar and go wreak some random havoc onto Minas Tirith along with a horde of people I don’t know and don’t care about. I also love the idea of defending Minas Tirith from random attacks of human-controlled mobs. And the premise of not necessarily knowing whether I’m “pulling” an aggro-controlled dumb NPC or a human-controlled smart NPC who might be trying to “pull” me into an ambush is really neat.

What I fear might happen is that the final implementation will encourage people to roll up monsters that their friends will kill for XP, or that you can instantly generate disposable orcs to clean out a spawn area with, then log in with your main to pick up the loot, or any number of other stupid exploits similar to the ones in the WoW Battlegrounds.

As with all ideas, the difference between a good and a bad one is in the implementation.

By: Ethic

Ethic — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 19:09:35 +0000

You *ARE* heartless. ;)

By: Heartless Gamer

Heartless Gamer — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 19:06:03 +0000

So basically you will log into a monster and die 3 shots later from a PC :P Or even better a high level just griefs the piss out of low level monsters. Levels suck.

By: Ethic

Ethic — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 14:02:41 +0000

Sounds like there will be restrictions in place to keep that from happening. The monsters can only travel in a certain area, you can’t go anywhere you want. Also, the skills the monsters have are limited to be level appropriate so most likely you won’t be killing too many players. It will be interesting to see how they handle the potential problems. It sounds like monsters vs. players is not the main focus of this. They have quests and such, and a pvp area. I would imagine the player controlled monsters will be in pretty limited areas of the game.

Also, you would have to limit the spawn rate to be the same as the number of npc monsters that would have spawned. Don’t rest until it’s safe, just like any other time.

By: Heartless Gamer

Heartless Gamer — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 12:56:49 +0000

Gonna be a bunch of pissed newbies when Goblins 1-100 gank them while resting at 1% life after a tough fight :)

By: Oz

Oz — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 21:32:41 +0000

As a person who was subjected too deeply to Project M, it was a lot more than a small portion. It was 90% of the people. The monsters, except in rare, buggy cases, were beyond boring to play. Your mana took forever to regen so it was easier to just die in most cases and get booted to the character screen (your death ended your current monsterous career). The Monster Mission idea introduced in Depths worked better, but the exp rate was heavily nerfed from beta and became not worth it except for the early adopters who maxed early.

Back in Project M days as well, there was a great way that I would payback the griefers. Well, two ways. One was to basically just permaroot them when they were in a melee mob (snake, etc). They were stuck. You could root, then just sit down, med, and let them suffer. It made that idjit who kept interupting your medding feel some of your pain. The other way was to rez their monster body. This caused their client to crash. Griefing both ways is why it went away =p

Note: The author does not condone griefing in any way shape or form, but might have done some after being harassed all night and gotten away with it…