Dynamic spawn vs static spawn: preference?

[Malakili]

My answer uses a different word entirely, and draws from things a few have said before me in the thread.

I want my spawns to feel organic.

Please note the use of the word *feel* in there. I don't care if it's scripted and fixed, or if it's completely off the RNG, I want it to feel natural for the state of the game world.

Sounds like sort of an MMO Turing test.  It doesn't matter if whatever is on the other end is actually a dynamic "live" world, just as long as it can fool me into thinking it is.  I basically agreed with all of what you said though.  Very much would prefer worlds to games.  Unfortunately, while it might be an even moderately popular idea here, I think in the MMO population at large, it probably isn't.  As soon as someone has to figure out for themselves what they are going to do with their time in game, you start hearing complaints that "there is nothing to do."

[AutomaticZen]

The average gamer always attempts to minimize risk and maximize reward.  If you throw in the orc village/dragon (gives more xp, but chance to have a dragon roast you) and a basic orc village (less xp, but mostly safe) 8 out of 10 players will go for the latter.  And if you don't provide that latter content, then ultimately they'll just up and go to another game.

Even CoH became familiar.  At some point, veteran players have the tileset down and can mostly navigate the levels blind, just like a WoW dungeon.  Time to get there is different, but the endpoint is the same.

[Malakili]

The average gamer always attempts to minimize risk and maximize reward.  If you throw in the orc village/dragon (gives more xp, but chance to have a dragon roast you) and a basic orc village (less xp, but mostly safe) 8 out of 10 players will go for the latter. 

The point is to seek out appropriate content.  You don't charge headlong in only to find a dragon that one shots you, you scope it out, say "Oh, wow, looks like a Dragon was here recently (smoldering ruins, whatever), and you go somewhere else.  Likewise, you could go there and find out that the orcs have moved and now goblins are living in that place, and maybe goblins aren't as much of a challenge for your group, so again, you go look elsewhere. 
Similarly, a higher level group might here wind of the fact that a dragon has taken out the orc camp and they might starting gathering some friends to go fight it.

Thats how I envision such a system working at least.

[Slyfeind]

Definitely static spawn for me. Dynamic spawn is almost going up to the devs and saying "Oh hi, can I have another monster here cause I brought a friend?" And the dev goes "Why sure you can, my boy! Sure you can!" And the dev hands them another mob, then the players go "Yay thanks, can we have some ice cream too!" And the dev goes "Sure you can, sure you can!" Then everybody gets ice cream.

^_^     

I want to turn a corner and find a dragon then realize "Holy crap this is a BAD PLACE TO BE." Then I want to die. I want that shit all over the place. I loved those big red-con giants and griffons in EQ. Maybe some times I'll find stuff that's too easy for me, and I'll be bored. But that's a price I'm willing to pay.

[Malakili]

I want to turn a corner and find a dragon then realize "Holy crap this is a BAD PLACE TO BE." Then I want to die. I want that shit all over the place. I loved those big red-con giants and griffons in EQ. Maybe some times I'll find stuff that's too easy for me, and I'll be bored. But that's a price I'm willing to pay.

I think a lot of people want unexpected experiences like that. The problem with static spawns is it only ever happens once per encounter/monster, and then you know.

[Lantyssa]

That doesn't really address the point of not feeling like you're growing.  If a group of mobs are 'average' and I go to that dungeon at level 20, get through it, and go on my merry way, then at level 40 return and those mobs are scaled to my level and still 'average' I don't feel as though I've grown in power at all.  If their power relative to me is always based on a difficulty level, again, I don't really feel as though I've grown in power.  So yeah, hard levels are important even in the small scale because it's more fun to be able to say 'I'll come back in 2 levels and this will be MUCH easier' or to say 'in 20 levels nothing here will be able to scratch me,' bwahah.

I gave two different options.  Using only that system then you cannot have what you want.  There's nothing saying that has to be the only adjustment.  My second of the two was that players choose the difficulty.  If you want to go through Dungeon X at a level 20 rating when you're 40, then why not?  If you could choose to do the dungeon at level 10, 20, 30, 40, etc rating then it allows both you and the designers that much more control.  These don't have to be exclusive adjustments.

And while there is that player desire, it also makes life much harder on developers since they have to create enough content to fill every level range.  If the system can adjust to its players dynamically, then the burden only becomes making quality content while not worrying so much about whether it fits your players' abilities.  (That was such a pain in my MUD days.  Lower levels need stuff to do, but the high levels are getting bored.  Or all the 40-50 zones are crap.)  Let the players wander where they want.  If they can further adjust the difficulty to match their play style, all the better.  Single player games let us do it, right?

[Grimwell]

Unfortunately, while it might be an even moderately popular idea here, I think in the MMO population at large, it probably isn't.

I totally agree. I think this is something that should deliberately target the niche. Explorer types will love it, and roleplayers could too as it creates a great tapestry for their play; but I wouldn't want to budget something like this on the hopes of a million players. Something much smaller could be possible and profitable, as long as it's not hyped as the Next Great WoW Killer, etc.

The real problem is finding someone who wants to fund a niche product.

[Koyasha]

I gave two different options.  Using only that system then you cannot have what you want.  There's nothing saying that has to be the only adjustment.  My second of the two was that players choose the difficulty.  If you want to go through Dungeon X at a level 20 rating when you're 40, then why not?  If you could choose to do the dungeon at level 10, 20, 30, 40, etc rating then it allows both you and the designers that much more control.  These don't have to be exclusive adjustments.

That completely destroys any sense of a plausible world to me.  Why can I select how difficult the enemies are going to be in a particular area?  I want the world to feel real and internally consistent, and settings like this ruin it.  I agree entirely with Grimwell in that I want it to feel like a world that feels plausible, and that mechanics like that should be behind the curtain.  Throw a 'difficulty setting' or an option to select what level my enemies are at me, and there is no feeling of that whatsoever.

[Draegan]

I agree.

The way WOW put in Heroics is interesting and fine with me.  Have a max level version and a level appropriate version.  Allowing it to go beyond that is messy.

[Lantyssa]

That completely destroys any sense of a plausible world to me.  Why can I select how difficult the enemies are going to be in a particular area?  I want the world to feel real and internally consistent, and settings like this ruin it.  I agree entirely with Grimwell in that I want it to feel like a world that feels plausible, and that mechanics like that should be behind the curtain.  Throw a 'difficulty setting' or an option to select what level my enemies are at me, and there is no feeling of that whatsoever.

You want a plausible world yet you want to be able to crush an area?  You're asking for contradictory things.  A plausible world have a low power curve and you're never going to be able to return to crush those orcs who tormented you at level 10.  Why are foozles in Area X so much weaker than Area Z?

On top of that, I'm only throwing out examples of what is possible.  Maybe you don't have more control than "a little easier" or "a little more challenging".  What's allowed is a fundamental part of the design.  Things are things which could be done.  That doesn't mean they should.

My ideal world is something like Guild Wars where the level caps out quickly and your strength is based on skill synergies and small equipment upgrades.  Dynamic spawns could still work in this system.  My ideal does not mean it's everyone else's.  That also doesn't preclude some of these concepts from working here or elsewhere.  It's one part of the whole.

[tmp]

You want a plausible world yet you want to be able to crush an area?  You're asking for contradictory things.

Not necessarily; considerable differences in technology/other areas of development do make it relatively easier to conquer certain areas, even in our own world and through our own history.

edit: on a very vaguely related note, just what the hell is happening in that AV picture? 

[Rendakor]

You want a plausible world yet you want to be able to crush an area?  You're asking for contradictory things.  A plausible world have a low power curve and you're never going to be able to return to crush those orcs who tormented you at level 10.  Why are foozles in Area X so much weaker than Area Z?

A diffierent solution to this is to have all mobs of X type be similar level. Rats are level 1, orcs are level 5, dragons are level 20. You start in the rat-infested basement, end up in "Here be dragons" territory.

[Lantyssa]

edit: on a very vaguely related note, just what the hell is happening in that AV picture? 

AV picture?  Mine?  It's a red panda hugging a stuffed dragon.

[ezrast]

A diffierent solution to this is to have all mobs of X type be similar level. Rats are level 1, orcs are level 5, dragons are level 20. You start in the rat-infested basement, end up in "Here be dragons" territory.

Still doesn't explain why I can barely feel this level 5 orc stab me in the face fifty times, whereas that level 15 elf maims me with a throwing knife from 50 feet.

That completely destroys any sense of a plausible world to me.  Why can I select how difficult the enemies are going to be in a particular area?  I want the world to feel real and internally consistent, and settings like this ruin it.  I agree entirely with Grimwell in that I want it to feel like a world that feels plausible, and that mechanics like that should be behind the curtain.  Throw a 'difficulty setting' or an option to select what level my enemies are at me, and there is no feeling of that whatsoever.

But you're just selectively deciding what belongs in a 'plausible' world, and what concessions to make to the game - probably shaped mostly by what you're used to. Counterpoints: In a mostly static world, how is it plausible that...
- all the people in the Dark Castle reappear in the exact same spots doing the exact same things every time I kill them?
- I'm an intrepid adventurer living in a world of danger, yet every week I can't think of anything better to do than run through that same damn Dark Castle again?
- the Dark Overlord's glowing armor have a 93.2% chance to vaporize whenever he dies?

If you frame the adventure correctly, randomized dungeons with customized spawns can actually make a lot more sense - exploring the Forest of Mystery is a lot more mysterious and exploratory when you're setting foot on new, unmapped ground every time. And if you're a bit lower level, just choose the part of the forest known for coyotes and not for rabid grizzly bears.

Anyway, there's no reason why the two concepts can't coexist in a game. I think a fleshed out, handcrafted overworld dotted with lots of endless random Diablo-esque dungeons would be neat.

[Rendakor]

A diffierent solution to this is to have all mobs of X type be similar level. Rats are level 1, orcs are level 5, dragons are level 20. You start in the rat-infested basement, end up in "Here be dragons" territory.

Still doesn't explain why I can barely feel this level 5 orc stab me in the face fifty times, whereas that level 15 elf maims me with a throwing knife from 50 feet.

Which is a different arguement entirely.

[Ratman_tf]

Climbing the level ladder actually makes me feel like my character is getting weaker. I can burn through mobs at low levels, at med levels things start to slow down, and at high levels, it takes 25 people doing their damnest to kill just one guy! 
At best, you're treading water, or maybe running on a treadmill? 

[Count Nerfedalot]

All this talk about whether or not content should scale to the players seems to have overlooked the opposite possibility - allowing players to scale themselves to the content.  It seems this would make the content developers' lives a bit easier than doing it the other way around.  The key, it seems to me, is to still adjust the rewards appropriately.  Mentoring/sidekicking mechanics in several games already allow players to adjust themselves to some extent, but so far all the implementations I've seen miss getting the reward adjustment right.  It seems they all err on the side of underrewarding someone who adjusts their level to tackle other-leveled content, probably due to some mix of the amount of work it would take to figure out exactly what would be a reward appropriate to a wide range of risk, and also to the need to avoid EVER making a mistake in that calculation which would overreward under some circumstance as players would soon discover then abuse the hell out of it.

Another problem is the question of dynamic vs static is vague.  As others pointed out, there are multiple answers based on just what KIND of dynamism you are talking about.  I personally hate "spawn points" unless they make some kind of sense for why mobs suddenly appear out of thin air at that point.  Having a game where mobs spawn out of logical places is something I haven't seen done yet in any MMO, with the exception of attackers from dropships in some game (was that Tabula Rasa?).  I guess the biggest problem with that is that player density in these game worlds is way too high to support realistic-seeming monster spawns.  You can only fit so many caves, barracks, or whatnot in a given area, and once they were all occupied by players, there would be nothing left to do.  Randomly spawning a new nest out in the open which then spawns more critters is just as silly as the spawning the critters there themselves.

Given all that, I do appreciate when the devs put at least a little effort into hiding the staticness of a spawn by providing multiple possible spawn points for the same mob, varying the mob types and/or difficulties, having the mobs wander around, interact with each other, etc.  The more of those little things they combine, the easier it is to overlook some of the absurdities of the whole situation.

[ezrast]

and also to the need to avoid EVER making a mistake in that calculation which would overreward under some circumstance as players would soon discover then abuse the hell out of it.

This. Just recently I ran some tests in City of Villains and found that it shouldn't be too hard to solo a brute to cap in under 30 hours by using the mission architect to force-exemp yourself to level one when the time/reward ratios are all out of whack. It's not such a big deal because a farm team can PL you in less time than that anyway, but in a more solo-centric game this sort of abusability could be a huge concern.

player density in these game worlds is way too high to support realistic-seeming monster spawns.  You can only fit so many caves, barracks, or whatnot in a given area, and once they were all occupied by players, there would be nothing left to do.

which brings us back to the old uniserver vs multiserver, open world vs instancing arguments. Covering a lot of ground in this thread!

[Xilren's Twin]

I wonder if a hybrid of randomly or procedureally generated instanced content that had to then be tweaked by a human (gm/designer/elder player) would hit closer to the mark of having both dynamic and static content.  Start with a themed random map, some spawns and loot with in, and overall victory condition/goal and mini boss fight of some kind, then let a human sanity check and tweak it.  Granted, there are always limits to how many building block assets you would be talking about, but having public areas like typicall mmorpg zones with radomized static spawns, and doors/gates to the instanced "partially hand crafted" that you would typically go through once.

Sounds like a niche game, or even an expansion of the NWN type concept involving player submissions that have to be sanity checked by the devs.
Having not played CoH/Cov with the Architect module, how has that affected the way players use content?  Are players primarily consuming the dev made zones and missions or the player made ones?

[Count Nerfedalot]

SWG and UO didn't generate spawn based on your party back in the olden days when old people like me played them. Maybe they've changed.

To quibble: SWG always dynamically generated spawn, but only in outdoor environments. It was hard to notice but it was there (and they talked about it at some point, I believe in beta, with some name for it I can't recall). Basically, there was a mix of static lair spawns, lairs spawned by mission terminals, and lairs spawned by players being in the area in a certain configuration and numbers.

To quibble with your quibble, it actually wasn't hard to notice at all if you knew what to look for.  Back in the pre-CU days anyway.  As with just about everything it tried, SWGs spawning concept (didn't they call them dynaspawns or something like that?) was a great-sounding idea with a horribly under-thought and buggy implementation that probably set the whole industry back a decade on ever trying the like again.  As your character or group moved around in the world, new spawn camps were triggered in your vicinity, generally in front of you, or in some direction based on the facing or direction of travel of you and your groupmates at some point in time during the decisionmaking process. There were no levels then, so the game used some sort of seekrit algorithm to determine what would be an appropriate spawn for you.   Sounds cool, but the devil was in the details which the SWG team were clueless about.  

As noted, there were a limited number of spawn camps allowed per planet so once they were used up, you could travel off into the wilderness and never EVER see another mob, unless someone killed a camp and you happened to be the lucky ones to trigger the next spawn.  The camp limit, unfortunately, was an absolutely necessary hack to prevent every planet's inhabited areas from eventually filling up with spawn camps as dense as the spacing limits (if there were any) let them.  Because the only mechanisms they had for despawning camps was: players kill camp, players abandon the sector of the world the camp was in allowing the server to unload it, or the daily server resets.  And the conditions for spawning new camps far exceeded those few criteria for despawning them.

So another detail was that any player or group moving around and exploring (or prospecting and harvesting) rather than killing everything in sight caused far more spawn camps to be added than they removed from the world.

Yet another detail is that you might never see a camp spawned for you, if you were moving too fast (once speeder bikes were implemented) or if you changed directions a lot.

Compound this with the more difficult the camp was, the less likely some other group would bother (or be able) to take it out.

And finally, there did not seem to be any controls on how many camps were spawned in a given area or how close to each other they were, other than the planetary (and possibly sector) limit(s).

The result was lots and lots of spawn camps left in the world at any given time that were created as content for people who were no longer playing in that part of the world.  This was dramatically evident at the more remote and difficult worlds in which each landing area (which was generally a safe area) would be surrounded by a solid ring of spawn camps.  Literally as you left the LZ your radar would light up with a curved wall of red dots, thinning out the farther from the LZ you managed to get.  Blow through a weak spot in the RROD (years before MS reinvinted it   ) and you could then wander the planet with relative impunity, provided enough other players remained busy grinding the mobs (and respawning them) around the spaceports and cities, or not killing mobs at all.

Another less than wonderful but very visible effect was you'd have this vast plain with absolutely no mobs anywhere to be seen, except for a large concentration of them right on top of this really sweet mining spot (which looked rather like an endless field of refineries).  Naturally, most of these mobs would be of the hardest type for that area, since the weaker ones were easily removed.  Too bad for you if that now-ugly industrial hellscape was the once-scenic site of your house!  If you were really unlucky, you could even have some uninvited guests attacking you while you were inside decorating or whatnot.  Naturally, they could see and attack you through the walls of your house but you couldn't fight back until you could get outside.  

So, the lesson developers learned?  Don't do random spawns.  Don't adjust spawns to player abilities.  Don't try to make things dynamic, lock everything down.  And most important of all, don't try anything new.

All the WRONG lessons of course, if you want better/more interesting/new experiences.  But when such a visible and expensive project fails so spectacularly, none of the money people care about the details of WHY it failed, only THAT it failed and anything remotely like it MUST BE AVOIDED AT ALL COSTS.  Because they wouldn't understand the details even if someone competent explained it to them, and what's the likelihood of them hearing that explanation from someone competent, given the competency of the "experts" they trusted their money with to do the job in the first place?

tl;dr dynamic spawning is FAR FAR harder to get right than the static equivalent, so unless you are willing to commit the resources to getting the right people and giving them enough time to get it right, you are FAR better off going with static spawns and MAYBE giving them a semblance of dynamism with VERY carefully controlled variability.

[ezrast]

Having not played CoH/Cov with the Architect module, how has that affected the way players use content?  Are players primarily consuming the dev made zones and missions or the player made ones?

As far as actual content, that's still mostly in the realm of dev-created stuff. More than anything else, the mission architect is used for farm teams - a tank, a couple good AoE characters and a support character or two can blow through huge spawns of customized gimp enemies at an alarming rate, generating tons of "tickets" (currency for salvage and recipe rolls) for themselves and anyone else on the team, and also powerleveling anyone who isn't already 50. I don't think taking additional characters reduces ticket rewards, so even lowbies and lolstalkers can get invited to farm teams from time to time, and it's absolutely the fastest way for most characters to level.

A lot of people also do create bona fide story arcs in the MA, some of which are pretty well done. The majority, needless to say, are not. So if you want to go that route you can either try your luck selecting missions at random, or just play the highly rated ones. But the only surefire way to avoid missions whose objectives include killing every enemy on a giant outdoor map and also clicking on 138 glowies is to avoid the MA altogether, which is what most people do.

A lot of people avoid MA like the plague because they associate it with farming and PLing, and conclude that anyone who goes there is a cheater who hates fun and enjoys kicking puppies. To an extent there's a "MA for farming, dev content for everything else" mentality which is sort of a shame since some of the MA arcs actually are really good.

Other uses for the MA include creating challenge maps for other players, testing mechanics in a controlled environment, and as a way for AV-killer characters to fight AVs without having to actually plow through their associated mission arcs and TFs (including ones that would normally only be available to opposite-aligned characters).

[Ratman_tf]

tl;dr dynamic spawning is FAR FAR harder to get right than the static equivalent, so unless you are willing to commit the resources to getting the right people and giving them enough time to get it right, you are FAR better off going with static spawns and MAYBE giving them a semblance of dynamism with VERY carefully controlled variability.

Totally. I'd be fine with the Dark Forest Full of Spiders having a few static spawns, a boss in the center, and a bunch of random spawns in the forest. Simple, easy, and bit unpredictable in that Spider X isn't always going to be at X,Y co-ords every time you visit the forest.

[Lantyssa]

SWG is a bad example to use of why it's hard.  It's not hard, they simply didn't believe their garbage collection was broken.  We were told as much when we brought it up and they wouldn't believe us.

The spawns were also a likely cause of increased poor performance since all those lairs were never deallocated.  It was simply another reflection on the poor management of the game.

[Sheepherder]

A diffierent solution to this is to have all mobs of X type be similar level. Rats are level 1, orcs are level 5, dragons are level 20. You start in the rat-infested basement, end up in "Here be dragons" territory.

This is bat country?

Also, you've just described WoW.  Randomized mobs with constraints and (minimal) behaviours created in appropriately themed zones.  The neckbeards would claim it's not random, because the game needs to be capable of completely unpredictable and undesirable behaviours which would utterly horsefuck anyone who isn't a catass in order for them to be satisfied.  Like all of the dragons moving into Stormwind's auction house, boy would that rock.

But all of this is bullshit.  The only problem with batshit fucking insane levels of realtime procedural world generation is that is creates the potential for the game to grief the players, and grief is derived from the loss of time /played to bullshit that the player did not want to do and does not enjoy.  Corpse runs, repair bills, loss of consumable buffs, the requirement for player to re-buff each other, and other death penalties can fuck right off, then the developer can do whateverthefuck they want, and the players really no longer have any legitimate reason to gripe, because all they lost was the fifteen seconds while Cthulu raped them with his beard tentacles, and I know an absolute shitload of people who would laugh at the chaos if it wasn't for the fact that it cost them play time doing stuff they enjoy.

Like Nebu was hinting at, as soon as you start removing the potential for min/maxing (and because MMO's are essentially time sinks, all min/maxing tends to boil down to time invested versus gains) you can focus on making a good game.  What a novel concept: punching the player in the dick only makes him adverse to dick punching.  It makes him a cautious player, adverse to risk, exploration, learning, and all the other shit that people would want to do if they didn't get punched in the dick for it.

[Malakili]

 The only problem with batshit fucking insane levels of realtime procedural world generation is that is creates the potential for the game to grief the players, and grief is derived from the loss of time /played to bullshit that the player did not want to do and does not enjoy. 

I've personally never really understood this argument.   Part of it is because I, mainly, do not play MMOs for the "game," at least not in principle.  I like the idea of being a part of that virtual world, as I've mentioned earlier in this thread.  If you don't want that experience, I'd say don't play an MMO. (Yes, I realize the vast majority of MMO players don't want this experience, and most MMOs don't even try to offer it anymore).   If the cards land in such a way that you get hosed, well, thats what happens sometimes, and other times the cards will come out a different way that is in your favor.   People have this desire for unhalting progress, but I don't mind taking steps back now and again as long as it fits within the context of the game, and it is CERTAINLY worth occasionally "losing" because the game does something you didn't expect, if it means well...that the game does things you don't expect.  Besides, when losing is a real possibility, winning is that much better.

[Sheepherder]

I, mainly, do not play MMOs for the "game," at least not in principle.  I like the idea of being a part of that virtual world ... If the cards land in such a way that you get hosed

There's where your though processes go astray.  Repair bills and death penalties are a game mechanic.  Taking a visit to the blacksmith might be world, but forking over the gold is game.

[WindupAtheist]

Also, you've just described WoW.

No. In WoW I start off killing level 1 wolves, then I move along to level 5 kobolds, level 20 ogres, level 40 wolves, level 50 dragons, level 60 ogres, and finally I finish up killing level 80 kobolds that would totally anklebite those pussy dragons to death if you ever put them together.

It was completely jarring to me when I started playing WoW that any given creature comes in dozens of varieties, some dozens or hundreds of times more powerful than others.

[statisticalfool]

To the original question:

I'd want both, for variety. But I think I prefer static spawns when that's the only way of generating enough challenge, and dynamic spawns when that can do it. Borderlands is a great example of this, because for all its faults, when you're on the right part of the difficulty curve with a few friends, it can throw some really interesting puzzles just by having a certain combination of guys.

The problem with dynamic COH missions and the like is that once you get down who's supposed to do what in your group, you just do it. Maybe your numbers are high enough, maybe they're not, but that's beside the point.

It is telling that in most MMOs, the game you're playing pre level cap isn't the "how do I win this encounter?" game, but rather the meta "how do I maximize  my XP?" game. I think a large part of that is due to being unable/unwilling to offer a fun experience to players on a mob to mob basis.

[tazelbain]

Also, you've just described WoW.

No. In WoW I start off killing level 1 wolves, then I move along to level 5 kobolds, level 20 ogres, level 40 wolves, level 50 dragons, level 60 ogres, and finally I finish up killing level 80 kobolds that would totally anklebite those pussy dragons to death if you ever put them together.

It was completely jarring to me when I started playing WoW that any given creature comes in dozens of varieties, some dozens or hundreds of times more powerful than others.

This is a hollowed tradition of CRPGs!

[Evil Elvis]

Put me in the "Organic" camp.  I think AI is the next big hurdle in order to move the genre forward.

Here's the big wish list:

• Mob types which have agendas: reclaim territory, avoid certain areas, etc.
• Agendas sectioned into trees to keep things interesting; allow for variation based on circumstances.
• Ability for GM's to control agendas in order to follow major story arcs.
• Variation with mob types.  While an agenda is progressing, splinter agendas could be formed by lone/small groups of mobs.
• Ability for mobs to capture/control areas: fight with other mobs, take over spawn points, control buildings, etc
• NPC's which can react to certain agendas: give warnings about an agenda in progress, send out NPC's to counter, offer rewards, etc.
• Different ways of sabotaging or stopping a mobs agenda.  The deeper a mob is into an agenda, the better the rewards for stopping them would be.

Shouldn't be too tough to implement 

[Venkman]

So a dynamically generated world with dynamically generated quests.

That's what I want too.

Nobody's been able to build it right though. Either it's skill or budget that holds them back unfortunately.

[Malakili]

So a dynamically generated world with dynamically generated quests.

That's what I want too.

Nobody's been able to build it right though. Either it's skill or budget that holds them back unfortunately.

I think the other problem is that people want a more predictable environment.  For each one of us that wants not to know whats happening, 1000 other people want to know exactly what they are going to log in to.

EDIT: My point being that sufficiently skilled or budgeted projects probably aren't going to spend  alot of time on that anyway, and the closest we get is something like Cryptics "genesis" system or "omega system" each of which are just subpar random mission generators.

[Venkman]

Yea, if you're coming from WoW, you want that kind of predictability. So is this a business possibility only if this goes into defining a new market?

[Evil Elvis]

Either it's skill or budget that holds them back unfortunately.

I'd guess the technology is the biggest constraint.  You can't just spawn a mob when a user enters an area, you need to persistently track everything always.  Tracking tons of decision trees, coupled with predictive pathing to determine the best agenda is going to put a big load on your servers.

Budget is probably a close second.  Coding all those decision trees and minutia in order for things to feel lifelike would take a lot of time and money.  Until someone makes the sandbox equivalent to WOW, companies seem content to shit out DIKU clones in hopes of one sticking.

[pxib]

• Mob types which have agendas: reclaim territory, avoid certain areas, etc.
• Agendas sectioned into trees to keep things interesting; allow for variation based on circumstances.
• Ability for GM's to control agendas in order to follow major story arcs.
• Variation with mob types.  While an agenda is progressing, splinter agendas could be formed by lone/small groups of mobs.
• Ability for mobs to capture/control areas: fight with other mobs, take over spawn points, control buildings, etc
• NPC's which can react to certain agendas: give warnings about an agenda in progress, send out NPC's to counter, offer rewards, etc.
• Different ways of sabotaging or stopping a mobs agenda.  The deeper a mob is into an agenda, the better the rewards for stopping them would be.

This sounds a lot like the old "FPS where you play a grunt or a peon" idea. Except, like most MMOGs, there's no way for either side to actually win.

How would a PvE sandbox be more engaging than the mindless PvP back-and-forth in Planetside or DAoC's frontiers? Go to sleep with a small fortress and mining camp, wake up to discover the barbarians have recaptured it. Sure, theoretically certain areas could get locked down as "safe" for longer periods of time, or the NPC forces could be weak enough to make holding them off a bore rather than a challenge... but ultimately what's the point? Nevermind the computing difficulties, what makes this stickier than PvP sandboxes have turned out to be? Sure "nobody's ever done it (except Tabula Rasa  )", but what makes it worth doing?