The Sad, sad, state of MMORPG in this brave new era...

I haven't done "end-game" anything in a really long time, but isn't the answer to people posting strats online and ruining the fun for everyone to simply imbue the end game mobs with AI and/or randomness? If you don't know what you are getting or you don't know what the mob will do you can't plan for it. Sure it'll go horribly wrong sometimes (too easy/too hard), but maybe that's the fun in having to stay on your toes rather than every fight being a well choreographed dance.

A good mechanic would be enemies that learned from what you specifically did to them and adapted and then made you adapt (though they'd only change if you could actually kill them). Figuring out the details of that and the timing of the adaptations while still making it fun would be incredibly difficult, but something like that would allow for changes in combat tactics without seeming fundamentally unfair. Something like the Mordor games have that at the most simple of level but MMOs are a long way off from having anything like that.

DickTrickle said:

A good mechanic would be enemies that learned from what you specifically did to them and adapted and then made you adapt (though they'd only change if you could actually kill them). Figuring out the details of that and the timing of the adaptations while still making it fun would be incredibly difficult, but something like that would allow for changes in combat tactics without seeming fundamentally unfair. Something like the Mordor games have that at the most simple of level but MMOs are a long way off from having anything like that.

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With the amount of player interactions that these mobs have I suspect you could create some really cool AIs with reinforcement learning. Give the mobs some sort of cost function and see what happens. You could have all sorts of cost functions: staying alive, killing healers, protecting treasure, guarding rooms, corpse camping you etc. It would be fun to see what sort of emergent tactics a mob might come up with given enough interactions with players.

People complain that they don't like having encounters spoiled but don't want randomness. You can't have your cake and eat it to.

Kyougou said:

Then the strategy would be to teach it to be really dumb then kill it.
Anyways, you already have that experience available in most MMOs, just go PvP.

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So that is interesting. If the cost function is based on protecting treasure for example (no idea how to design that function), and you want the treasure how would you teach it to be dumb?

Also I'm already there on the PvP. Destiny is the only game that's really hooked me in recent years.

Kyougou said:

If the cost function is getting to the treasure, how would you evaluate how close a team got to opening the treasure? Dupe the boss into thinking some stupid strategy is great by purposely getting further away from opening the treasure, then just walk in and grab it.

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The moment you grab the treasure there is going to be a big negative hit to the cost function. I don’t think that would work like you are thinking about it. Additionally, you can design around this sort of stuff. mob ai’s are laughable now. Better AIs would make for more fun and unpredictable games is all I’m really getting at.

Ukerric said:

You already do that. You kill the boss in normal. Then you go and kill it on Heroic. Then you go and kill it on Mythic. Most of the time, there's a new mechanic that gets added to deal with.

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That's not adaption. The idea with be adaptation is that you would have to figure it out as would slowly change over time. You wouldn't necessarily be able to use the same tactics for eternity, but the changes wouldn't be random either. Theings you mention are set in stone.

Again, seems eminently doable in future single player games, but not sure it would be feasible in a non instanced MMO.

Kyougou said:

Then the strategy would be to teach it to be really dumb then kill it.
Anyways, you already have that experience available in most MMOs, just go PvP.

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No, it wouldn't change until you killed it. So you couldn't train it in the way you're talking about.

If you wanted to metagame, you'd have to kill it in the most inefficient and sloppy way possible at first.

pharmakos said:

would probably just end up being several strats that you have to rotate between... use strat A then next time you need strat B, then you need strat C, then maybe strat D and back to strat A.

it would be difficult to code enough variables in the logic to require more than a handful of strats.

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The whole point of these kind of AIs is that you don't code the logic. The AIs learn from playing the game (something along the lines of Alpha Go). I don't know how tractable this is given the current state of reinforcement learning, but a learning mob should be the ultimate goal.

Chanur said:

Until it becomes self aware and builds a robot version of itself to destroy humanity to prevent it from being raided thus ensuring it's continued success.

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A risk I'm willing to live with.