A few comments about monsters spawning. in a way might remember something to people who knew the spawning of crystals and those who read the wishlist regularly
How it is now and --drawbacks if any--:
1-monster M spawns at specified pos. M has defined amount of HP, atack, defence,...fixed stats --always the same--
2-waits to be attacked or attacks the closest player (the closest moving one right now) --same same--
3-killed, gives X xp, loot chance is fixed. -- the player with the final hit gets the loot even if he waited watching the info until he could finish him--
4-disapears after S seconds.
5-wait S' seconds --fixed=always the same--
6-goto 1 --loop on something that never changes--
suggestions:
1) more possible spawn positions for the same monster
this to prevent spawn camping. defining an area of spawning places would be great but on an irregular ground might represent a lot of ground surfaces. An area overing ground with spawn made within it and the mob falling before being showed...
2)variations in spawning monster stats, loot, strength
to make it less predictable. Looking at the monster before attacking could help or an indicator about target in info window (the range of possible values could be linked to 3), see below
3)ageing monsters
a monster is born more or less young and grows over time until it is killed. Newbies could kill recently spawned monsters but a more trained one would prefer to wait for it to grow for more XP. this would allow heterogen parties where trained players can hunt with less skilled ones depending on where they venture and the age of monsters they meet. size could change, skin color, ... anything to determine visualy the relative strength of the creature.
4)less monsters when less hunters. At some hours of the day there are less online players. This gives an advantage to players of some timezones. Like lemmings monsters should reproduce less when there are less ressources for them (i.e when many are spawned) and more could spawn when many are killed...unless monsters souls have to go to a death realm as well. In this case those souls might come to life attracted by the number of players/hunters in their living area.
5)dieing monsters
when too aged, monsters can cease to grow and to prevent an area to be fillled with only strong ones.
6)swapping monsters.
An area can be defined as a place where rats are found, but another creature could live in the same environment. No hurry for this point since it would require more meshes, stats
To make it short for lazy readers: more randomness in ;pos, stats, loot, strength of monsters