My Ideas

[Aruneko]

My wishes for PlaneShift are fairly broad.  I  think that monsters should be more significant than in other MMORPGs.  Like, in other MMORPGs, each player kills about 1000 monsters a day.  I think that its fairly annoying to have the challenge in hunting/training reduced to finding the monsters, not actually having trouble killing them.  Well, what I\'m saying is that monsters should be hard.  Like, an average player shouldn\'t be able to combat an entire army of orcs without being obliterated.

Comments?  Questions?  Complaints?

[Keldorn]

True, but if you make the monsters so hard to beat, that even advanced players have trouble defeating them, then the new players will stand before an impossible task. They could only defeat them if they were in a large group.
I think it\'s a bit unfair. You could of course create special areas where you\'ll find more skilled monsters that are harder to beat. That would be a good alternative, don\'t you think?

[DeTaiza]

I\'m assuming that monsters aren\'t going to be everywhere, but only in set regions to begin with, right?
Then it\'s just a case of putting tougher monsters in the harder-to-get-to zones, but easier ones (that give less reward) in the easy-to-get-to areas... see?

[Kiern]

i think it is actually better if there are hard and easy creatures mixed into one area, not to put one area easier than another one, its basically the same thing as a player having levels.......so maybe each race of creature can be either the easiest and there are more of them and the harder ones there is not as much of

[Princess Aelya]

thatd suck kiern. imagine a newbie all excited cuz he/she just gained a level and thinks he/she s ready for anything then a tough monster spawns next to the newbie and massacres them.

[Kiern]

i\'d get a good laugh out of that, even if it was myself

but i guess your right, maybe it could be in areas but on the harder ones not ONLY do hard creatures appear

[Malkai]

Its quite simple how to use Kierns idea. You just have the easy monsters closest to the entrance of a zone and the farther in the zone (if there will be zones that is) you reach the harder the monsters are.

[Princess Aelya]

thats a good idea. but the monsters in the zones could not cross from zone to zone. but i think itd be cool if there were areas where monsters roamed freely. also itd be nice if an army of wild monsters attacked a town or city. itd be cool if a player could gain control of monsters to well im getting off topic so ill stop.

[Malkai]

Thats why there are two kinds of monsters in most games Aelya. Passive monsters that just stand where they spawn. And then active monsters that kind of patrol the area.

[Aruneko]

Mainly I was just saying that it shouldn\'t be the quantity of monsters that matter, more like the quality.  There could easily be different areas for different levels, and the really strong people could easily travel through the lower difficulty areas.  But if the person fights at an area appropriate to their level, they should spend the most effort fighting.

[Xandria]

Originally posted by Aruneko
There could easily be different areas for different levels, and the really strong people could easily travel through the lower difficulty areas.

I remember reading something in another post about being able to have people\'s skill levels be invisible, and you would have some passive skill that allows you to guess where they\'re at.
I think it would be kinda cool to have a thing so that when the \"really strong people\" come across a low difficulty monster(s), that some of the smarter ones will interpret the player as being \"really strong\" and run like heck.
This would serve two purposes, the first being that stronger players don\'t need to waste their time fighting wimpy monsters.  Second, it would be really cool to walk into a clearing and see all the monsters run away with their tails betweent thier legs  

[Vengeance]

It is impossible to dictate which monsters will be fought by which people, especially in a system with essentially no levels and no XP as a result.  People will rapidly find the monsters which most easily succumb to the particular skills they are trying to use, where the difficulty of killing the monster is balanced against the reward of killing it.

Chasing stuff all day with quick fights is no fun, I agree.   But standing there watching your player swing his sword for 20 mins isn\'t fun either.  And we cannot control it anyway.

- Vengeance

[Aruneko]

I see what you mean, Vengeance...  Well, I guess this idea gets trashed

I\'m just pointing out the main flaw I found on many MMORPGs.

[Azora]

In DAoC like many other RPG\'s you could tell the diffrance between a powerful enemy and a weeker one, by click on em. But this might be a rather unneeded task seeing how theres a danger detection abilty (Look out spiderman your not the only one!). personaly i like the idea of hords of enemys to kill for the newbies. I think the better you are the less creatures you fight and the more senifacant your battles.

[David_HD]

I love the idea of powerful characters spooking the weaker monsters. Do that! Gets rid of annoying battles and, like Xandria said, it\'d just be awesome to walk through the woods and have the animals scurry to get as far away from you as they can. That is, of course, if you\'re not good with animals
As for determining power levels, it occurs to me that you do have levels, it\'s just really easy to go up one and the delta is relatively small. Just use the total number of points the character has recieved, right?