Dynamic World

The main problem with moving mobs/bosses around in Ashes is the node system. If you have a lvl6 node that enabled a dragon boss on a neighboring mountain, you can't really move that dragon's spawn to another mountain because none of those might be tied to a lvl6 node so you'd have a way harder boss in a lower lvl location. Also, as much as I'd love to live in a "realistic" fantasy world, Ashes is still a game and, with that, come a few expectations on the players' side. Most people will expect the boss to be tied to a place. Yes, maybe not to a time, but to a place. And Lineage 2 had a range of respawn instead of a preset time, so it might be the same case here.

And when it comes to mobs migrating, even w/o considering the coding difficulties that might bring, Intrepid want to have resource scarcity based on world events. If you have a super rare bunny that only spawns when there's snow around, you'll value its loot way way more when it's summer. But if you have that bunny now spawn on a snowy mountain, the loot is not removed from the server loot pool, it's just moved. Yes, it'll move some player money around, but the resource itself won't be scarce. At least that's how I currently understand the system. I might be wrong.

NiKr wrote: »

And when it comes to mobs migrating, even w/o considering the coding difficulties that might bring, Intrepid want to have resource scarcity based on world events. If you have a super rare bunny that only spawns when there's snow around, you'll value its loot way way more when it's summer. But if you have that bunny now spawn on a snowy mountain, the loot is not removed from the server loot pool, it's just moved. Yes, it'll move some player money around, but the resource itself won't be scarce. At least that's how I currently understand the system. I might be wrong.

I don't entirely disagree, but even still, you went from 500 bunnies in all the fields in the region, to 50 on the tops of a few mountains. There'll be an economic impact there regardless, even if they're highly sought after.

There are now fewer of them, so supply is restricted and can't meet the same demand as it once did. (Obviously this can be negated by poor tuning, but why assume poor tuning? They'd just fix it.)

They are now more work to get to (having to go climb whatever mountain and deal with whatever mobs guard it, or whatever travel hazards or travel time is involved), and it's not worth it until the prices are above a certain point. A certain point that would, normally, be strange to see in winter when they're abundant.

These sorts of things would function more like soft caps on the difficulty of acquiring certain goods, and serve as a way that devs could tune the economic factors involved. Some things you want unavailable when the seasonal stock runs out. Some things you just want rare.

This sort of bottleneck could even play right into the intended style of Ashes of Creation by creating a situation where people going to a central location to compete over limited resources that are in high demand may need to deal with PvPers either trying to steal their hides on the way back down, or guilds wanting to control the spawn areas. Something you don't get with 'absolute scarcity'.

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BDO did this once, for an event. It's not that they spawned randomly and freely, but that they spawned in unusual locations (specific to the event). It was mostly just annoying. While encountering a world boss in the wild would be somewhat memorable, having them spawn in random locations just made it difficult to assemble people to fight them.

This sort of thing would work great for "secret" bosses that only spawn more rarely (to be sighted by explorers) , but for world bosses that people will be fighting on the regular? It's only good in theory.