Thursday 17 May 2007

Notes from the boardroom.


Colin: "Norman, you're looking glum, whatever is the matter?"

Norman: "You know, Colin, it's these 'player' critters; they're getting through our quests at an alarming rate, we need something to slow them down a bit, but we need to make it look like it's a cunning game mechanic..."

Colin: "Hmmm, it's a tricky one, Norman. If only... no."

Norman: "What is it, Colin?"

Colin: "No, it would never work, we would never get away with it."

Norman takes Colin's hand in his and pats it gently.

Norman: "My dear, Colin, if there's one thing we MMO developers have learned, it's that we can make those 'player' mammals jump through tiny hoops of fire into pits of boiling acid if we can put enough spin on it."

Colin: "Well... what if we made some of the mobs invisible?"

Norman: "Invisible, my dear fellow, whatever do you mean?"

Colin: "Well, I mean exactly that. Make mobs that are, in effect, and in actuality, not visible."

Norman: "But, 'players' would have to run around in endless circles for hours just trying to find them! Not only that, but it might even be that they're running around in entirely the wrong area and they'd never even know it. If we placed the not-entirely-within-the-visual-spectrum mobs in the middle of groups of plainly visible mobs, the 'player' things would have to fight through huge swathes of these normal mobs just for the opportunity to run around in circles to see if an invisible mob is roaming there."

Norman and Colin laugh nervously at the silliness of it. Then they stop and look at each other.

Colin: "It wouldn't work, would it?"

Norman: "It's genius, Colin, we'll get the programmers on it right away."

Colin: "I love you, Norman."

Norman: "Not now Colin."


Guess who spent ages hunting for invisible mobs in Lord of the Rings Online last night.

3 comments:

Zoso said...

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you were hunting Lurking Yellowfangs...

I somehow found two visible ones fairly quickly, got jumped by one invisible one in the middle of a fight, then spent the next half hour running laps with raw steak strapped to my limbs shouting "here boy!"

Melmoth said...

You win... something! As soon as I can find a prize that's not worth very much, it's yours!

I got so frustrated at one point that I was momentarily distracted and I fell off a cliff. I had to run through a high level area to get back home again as my map was on cooldown.

And I really did fall this time, rather than willingly leaping off; you can tell because there was no flying forward one-and-a-half somersaults with pike, like I usually perform with my cliff-jumping dwarves in various games.

Anonymous said...

Yep, been there, done that, didn't buy the t-shirt...damn wargs are always there when you don't need em...