I'd argue that I'm not a contrarian, but that might be counter productive.
broonsbane wrote:
he is here to threaten the NPCs and jeopardize end results.
Or, that hill is just a convenient spot to have NPCs spawn or hang out at outside the town itself. Your argument is like saying that a given gnoll in blackburrow was selected to spawn in one particular spot for some important reason. But overwhelmingly that's just the random spot in the zone that someone designing the zone thought "this would be a good spot to have a gnoll". And that gnoll, and 100 other gnolls, all spawn at different spots within the zone. Some have names. Some don't. Some roam around. Some don't. Some have special loot on their drop tables. Some don't. Some may be quest related. Some aren't. Now the whole set of them make up a dungeon full of nasty gnolls you have to overcome. But each one? Just sorta put somewhere because it looked like a good spot. Certainly, you can't assume anything more than that. Doesn't mean that there isn't more, but it doesn't mean that there is.
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Would anyone deny that it at least gives the very strong "illusion" of being a protection quest?
It gives the illusion that these NPCs had/have a purpose. But, as I said earlier, a whole lot of the stuff in EQ is designed to do that, but only a small fraction of it is stuff that the player characters actually interact with.
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For example, whenever I see a named NPC I have no doubt it has a purpose in the game. If I try to talk to it and it just stands there and does nothing, I do not in any way ever think "must be an error"; instead I think "must not be the right class/have the right flag/be on the right quest/etc." but I have no doubt it has a purpose somewhere for someone at sometime. Because it's named.
There are literally thousands of named NPCs in various zones in EQ that do not do anything at all except stand or walk around. Go into any friendly town. Walk around. Every NPC is "named". Why? Because they're supposed to appear to be real townsfolk. But most of them don't have anything specific to do with regards to player characters. They're just there for color. You do understand that it would seem pretty unrealistic for every single person in the world to have some quest of importance to adventurers within that world, right? I mean, most people are just farmers, or innkeepers, or merchants, or street sweepers. Not every priest at the local temple has a special story to tell and an adventure to send the players on. Not every merchant has a tale of woe involving his lost shipment of goods and needs someone to help him.
It would be completely unrealistic if the only NPCs in the world had quests to give out. That's why there are a ton of NPCs that don't. Their "purpose" is to make the world look like a real world instead of one just created for players to interact with.
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Now, if it doesn't have a purpose, then that means the designers have put mechanically purposeless things into the game, and to put mechanically purposeless things into a game based on discovery can only destroy confidence in the process of discovery that the game is functioning on. In other words, people will begin to lose interest in mysteries because they'll be afraid all of their effort will be meaningless, in a wild-goose-chase kind of way.
Kinda nailed it on the head there. Maybe I'm jaded, but my experience is that most NPCs involved in quests will respond to hails in some way. If they don't, then you have to have something, or do something to get a response from them, and that usually involves some other lore or information pointing you in that direction. And there are very very very few NPCs that trigger any sort of response based on wider activities around them. They just aren't programmed that way. Outside of some scripted raid events, I'm not aware of any sort of NPC action that would be triggered the way you think this needs to be (ie: You wait for all four of them to path to a spot and then they'll do something).
That's not to say something couldn't be done that way, but my experience with the game (especially the game as it was when the last FV changes were made) tells me that they aren't going to change how they react to you based on where they are, or who else is near them. The game simply didn't use those sorts of mechanics back then.
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So it's harmful to their own design to do this. Now, whether or not the players understand this, I'm confident that anyone designing a game of this complexity also knows this is the case and are acting accordingly.
I think you're being overly optimistic. I think that the game developers weigh the time/cost for creating complex dynamic stuff like you're talking about against the cost of not doing so. There's a reason why they've shifted to task based quests. And it's not because there's more value in creating hints and subtle NPC changes that players are supposed to figure out and then spend hours and hours trying to unravel. It's because the exact opposite is true. Players don't want to have to do that. They want to walk up to an NPC, hail him. Follow his dialog, and then get assigned a task that tells them step by step what they need to do to complete the task, complete with previews of the rewards they'll get upon completion.
EQ moved in the direction because that's what the players wanted. This does not preclude the possibility of some older event based quest thingie, but I think your assumptions that all this evidence means that it must be this way is mistaken.
As someone else pointed out, Occams Razor tells us that the more likely explanation is that these were unimportant "color" NPCs, and no one bothered to move or deactivate their code when the zone was changed.
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It would only suggest they are still on the same path. I don't know, I didn't play then so have no idea what their old paths were. But I do know that their old spawn times are documented as 10m 40s and this has completely changed. Also they no longer despawn. So they're definitely different now.
I don't know anything about their original respawn time or whether/when they despawned, so I can't comment on that.
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Aside from what I'm saying above, out of game, the problem with "they forgot/it's an accident" is that to "forget" to remove 4 NPCs from a city is epic level error. This wouldn't be a case of "well, understandable" this would be a case of "how could you possibly be this incompetant? you are most certainly fired, and will most likely never work again, how did you even get this job to begin with?"
I think you are grossly overestimating the importance of this. How is this an epic level error? No one really noticed or cared about it. It occurred at a time when most players had long since moved away from the content involved anyway, and dev focus was on other things. I also think you're not quite understanding how mangled the old EQ zone code was with regards to NPC spawns (this was one of the earlier zones). Moving a static NPC (meaning one that just stands in one place) is relatively straightforward. You change its spawn spot. It has no internal programming telling it to move, so you're done. It will continue to do whatever it did before (hand out quests, take quest items, buy/sell goods, etc), just in a new location. Moving an NPC that roams is vastly more complicated. The internal code for the NPC tells it where to go, at what pace, in what order, etc. This requires programming waypoints, pauses, etc, which in turn require some careful testing of the whole process to avoid collisions, clipping issues, interference with other NPCs, getting stuck on walls, floors, corners, bumps on the ground, etc.
If we assume that all these mobs did was spawn in one room, then path through the town, cross the bridge, and then stand on a hill just outside, it requires some pretty significant coding to make them *not* do that and/or do something different. If there was no player interaction for them to do, it's honestly easier to just leave them where they were. They're not necessary for players to play the game. You may not be aware of this, but the FV outpost was the primary (only!) source of many 51-60 level spells. It was vastly more important to make sure that the NPCs that sold/traded spells were put in place and working (and I recall they had problems getting that working properly). In the grand scheme of things, four NPCs that don't do anything but walk from place to place end out being way down on the list of things to do. So far down, that the need to *ever* do anything with them is very close to zero.
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This would be like me saying to you, "Open that system_firiona folder and empty it of the 30 .jpg photos in there; move them, delete them, whatever- just empty the folder" and you come back "finished" and I look and there's still 4 .jpgs in the folder. If they said "Sorry I must've forgot, it was an accident" I'd only reply "All you did by saying that is go from 'suspected sabotuer' to 'confirmed sabotuer liar'" It's beyond inexcusable it's impossible. Writing/programming/scripting may be difficult (even that is relative, and I shouldn't think it difficult for the people working on this game, I should hope they are competant) but deleting a database entry is as easy as clicking a mouse button. To suggest someone forgot/accident to remove 4 NPCs is the same as suggesting someone can't read names and click a mouse button.
Except that's not a great analogy. It's more like "change this spreadsheet so that it shows the data we want to present to the executive accounting board", and the old version had some additional columns of data that aren't wanted. Do you go into the back end worksheet and delete data that is no longer needed? Or do you just change the front sheet so that it only displays the data that's wanted, and how it's wanted? Let's assume this spreadsheet had a number of custom written macros, which are no longer needed because the data format has changed? Do you go in and delete those macros? Or just leave them in because no one's going to use them, but it doesn't break anything for them to be there?
Now pretend you've got a huge time crunch involved. You're going to do what's needed, and not worry about the back end stuff that no one cares about. It's quite reasonable to assume that old code will just get left in if it doesn't have any negative impact on the result.
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Wait though- how do you know this? This statement is precisely what I'm talking about, and exactly an analogue. Think about how you got to that conclusion. How did you get to that square?
Because if 14 years after these NPCs were created, no one has found any quest involving them, it means one or both of the following is true:
1. There is no quest involving them.
2. If there is a quest involving them, the players aren't missing the fact that they haven't discovered it.
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If so, that is where our divergence is coming, and it's not really about what is going on on Firiona Vie (I am confident you must agree that the information creates at the very least an illusion of purpose?) but how we're appraoching the basic design of the game itself. If there are things like meaningless named mobs in the game then what that does is create a massive counterproductivity (presuming they want their game to contain elements of genuine discovery) because it creates a frame of reference which has no real confidence.
What if their purpose is purely to create the illusion of a living, breathing, dynamic world? Purpose does not mean "must give out a quest, or interact with players, or trigger an event". Purpose can be as simply as "I stand here and look like a person who lives their own life, but that life does not revolve around the actions of the players characters". And as I said before, for any realistic world, that's going to be most of the NPCs in the game.
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didn't sell any spells, and would have to be reprogrammed to path elsewhere given the new location of the outpost, so it was probably easier to just leave them where they were (to die over and over, poor saps), than to expend development time changing them.
click + DEL it really is that easy.
You don't honestly believe it's that easy to remove NPCs from a zone, do you?
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How do you know you weren't investigating with the wrong character class? Or without a necessary flag?
Because tens of thousand of other players encountered the same NPCs, and likely thought the same things, and tried to get some reaction, and all failed. Do you think that they were all the wrong character class, or were missing some flag? Let's not forget that there are tens of thousands of quests that people did discover by this precise process. Tons of people trying to talk to different NPCs. Handing them things. Interacting with them in every way they could think of. This is how those old quests were discovered and solved. Yet no one found anything with these NPCs.
This doesn't mean there's nothing to find, but at some point, if you haven't found anything, you have to entertain the possibility that there's nothing there to find.
This is what I'm talking about. In a game like this, when faced with a "mystery" and containing all of these many variables, these questions will inevitably arise and any designer knows this. The only way it will ever be possible for us to say "there is a purpose for this" is if we know that is axiomatic. Everything has to have a purpose (even by category- which is why we will naturally have different expectations for "Plaguebringer" than for "a giant bog rat") otherwise you're just impeding discovery, and creating meaningless work for everyone on both sides of the table. I disagree. Or at least, I disagree that said "purpose" has to be what you seem to think. It's less realistic for every named NPC to have some quest, or task, or other significant interaction with the players. As I said earlier, when designing a realistic world, you should not make the mistake of assuming that everything in it revolves around the actions and desires of the player characters. You're playing an adventurer in a world. That world consists of people who have nothing to do with you.
If you were paying someone big money to design a game like this for you, would you be happy if they spent their time putting counter-productive things in the game? If they were putting meaningless things into the game that means you're paying them for literally doing nothing. And they are creating work for themselves by making things that don't need to be there. If I'm paying them to create a believable world for my paying customers to play in, you can bet that I'd expect them to make it believable. And part of that is having tons of detail in the game that doesn't revolve around the players. Because real worlds don't only contain things for the player characters to do. It's the first rule of good world design. Sometimes that wandering merchant you encounter while traveling down the road isn't someone you need to help, or is a secret spy for the evil guys, but is just a merchant traveling down the road.
And sometimes, a group of folks go and stand outside the city gates for reasons that have nothing to do with your character. Maybe they're checking out the scenery. Maybe they're waiting for a friend. Who knows? It's not a flaw for NPCs to not be doing something that requires your interaction.
Edited, Aug 9th 2013 2:49pm by gbaji