Walking away from aggressive mobs

[nauta]

So, I have noticed that quite a few mounts (and perhaps even people) can just walk away from aggressive mobs.  I used to think this was just the 'fast' mounts, but non-systematic discoveries have shown that it happens even on slow mounts.  I'm not really talking about spam-walk here.  The case is this:

Code Select Expand


A nasty thing has arrived from the west.
> l nasty thing
> think Uh, ok, let's get out of here!
> north
You walk north.
> north
You walk north.
>l south
[Near] Nothing.
[Far] A really nasty thing has been successfully avoided.


Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Here's why it might be a good thing:

o You can opt into the dangers -- if you need to log out, you can just walk back to a quit spot.

Why it might be a bad thing:

o We have a speed feature, where certain races and mounts are faster than others, and this is a part of the game aspect, if not the realism aspect.

Part of me wonders if this is a bug: at least it seems to me that if you are riding a slow mount or are walking, you shouldn't be able to walk away from aggressive mobs.  There should be a 'lag' between the screens that allows the mob to attack you before you can walk away from it -- unless you switch into run mode, then you should be able to run away from it.

[Riev]

If they aren't one that will follow you to the ends of the Known, but are in fact just lazy and looking to their immediate surroundings for food... sometimes the "go to the room with the unit in it" will take a moment to fire off, and you can escape. I will say it doesn't always happen, and I've had trouble outrunning a scrab before, but I've done it on a slower mount, while walking, because it took a moment to fire off.


So. Kind of inconsistently happens, seems okay to me.

[Reiloth]

It's sort of a byproduct of the binary movement possible in ArmageddonMUD -- You are either instantly moving into another room, or you are not. There is an affect on how quickly that happens -- walk, sneak, run -- but it isn't as nuanced as it is on other MUDs, where you 'begin to move in that direction' and then arrive a few seconds later, etc.

I dunno -- I always viewed it as you are running away from an aggressive creature, and you lose it in the sands/shrubs/etc.

For example, flee is an instant 'move in a direction' command. But if you had to flee from an aggressive creature, it might be more of a chase, comparing agility and movement speeds, where you run in random directions (or guided directions, if you flee 'direction' and are skilled in fleeing), until you either get away or you are caught. We sort of do this ourselves without needing a coded 'train' to run us along. It might be nice if an aggressive creature, just two rooms away, has a chance of moving towards you still. But the same could be said for a mob you are shooting full of arrows, and just sits there like a pincushion.

Part of what disconnects here is not all aggressive mobs hunt you down -- And honestly, the 'constantly hunts you until it gets to the city gates' is just as binary, in the case of Raptors. There seems to be some sort of defining line, here -- Most creatures don't go 'up' for instance, if you flee upwards or climb. And there also seem to be boundaries, possibly zones, that creatures don't cross.

[The Warshaper]

I've noticed some aggressive mobs attack very quickly upon entering a room. Others take a little time before attacking. While mounted I've had the time to decide to fill my open hand with a shield or weapon and prepare for an attack, or in the case of faster mobs get caught basically with my trousers down.

I've interpreted that some mobs 'approach' slower so that from the time they enter the room to the time they attack they are covering some sort of distance to me. While the faster ones just covered that distance to quickly for me to react. Now my experience with this is limited and may just be naive heresay but that's just how I have tried to understand it.

[Jihelu]

Hostile mobs are...
weird sometimes.
I was helping an extremely new friend to the game and I was watching him to make sure he wasn't killing himself and he was in the desert with no stamina, so basically he was killing himself, and a beetle or scrab walks in (I forget) and it stays in the room a solid minute and just leaves.
It was halarious.



Also weird.
I feel like this might be related to the 'just walk away from monsters' type thing.

[BadSkeelz]

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, I say. Being able to walk away from hostile mobs is the only thing keeping a lot of PCs alive at some point in their lives.

[a french mans shirt]

It was called a bug, the thing where aggros would instantly enter your room from the near to get you, and had been fixed, last year. Now, they have to take coded time to do it, like doing their own imaginary 'l n' and 'l w' and stuff.

[nauta]

It was called a bug, the thing where aggros would instantly enter your room from the near to get you, and had been fixed, last year. Now, they have to take coded time to do it, like doing their own imaginary 'l n' and 'l w' and stuff.

Oh, neat.  I do like that you get a little time to emote something off, but I wonder if something could be coded to make it so that:

if (aggro mob in the same room as you) then you can't just walk away from it (if you or your mount are in fact slower than it), you have to either run or flee (if it attacks).

[evilcabbage]

It was called a bug, the thing where aggros would instantly enter your room from the near to get you, and had been fixed, last year. Now, they have to take coded time to do it, like doing their own imaginary 'l n' and 'l w' and stuff.

Oh, neat.  I do like that you get a little time to emote something off, but I wonder if something could be coded to make it so that:

if (aggro mob in the same room as you) then you can't just walk away from it (if you or your mount are in fact slower than it), you have to either run or flee (if it attacks).

that already happens.

i do not remember the last time i outran a huge black beetle in the red storm area on an inix.

in fact, i never even managed to outrun it on an erdlu, so. there you have it.

[nauta]

It was called a bug, the thing where aggros would instantly enter your room from the near to get you, and had been fixed, last year. Now, they have to take coded time to do it, like doing their own imaginary 'l n' and 'l w' and stuff.

Oh, neat.  I do like that you get a little time to emote something off, but I wonder if something could be coded to make it so that:

if (aggro mob in the same room as you) then you can't just walk away from it (if you or your mount are in fact slower than it), you have to either run or flee (if it attacks).

that already happens.

i do not remember the last time i outran a huge black beetle in the red storm area on an inix.

in fact, i never even managed to outrun it on an erdlu, so. there you have it.

I have, very recently -- on one of the slower mounts, in walk mode.  Not just drov beetles either, but some ostensibly fastish predators.  This is what motivated me to bring it up, in fact.  Now I'm not sure what to make of it -- like BadSkeelz says it is a bit of a gift horse -- and it could be fluke, but it's happened a number of times.

[evilcabbage]

it is generally luck.

you made it in before the movement tick of the other mob queued through, because they run on a tick-based system.

good on you.

sometimes that same beetle enters the room and instantly attacks you. i'm not aware of this being fixed, but maybe it was.

but i still remember the days of:

a huge black beetle arrives from the south.
a huge black beetle attacks you!

[Rokal]

it is generally luck.

you made it in before the movement tick of the other mob queued through, because they run on a tick-based system.

good on you.

sometimes that same beetle enters the room and instantly attacks you. i'm not aware of this being fixed, but maybe it was.

but i still remember the days of:

a huge black beetle arrives from the south.
a huge black beetle attacks you!

That is enough to give a guy PTSD.

Happened to me. RIP that char.

I havent been very active lately but when I last played an outdoorsy char  i didn't notice this happening as much.

[gotdamnmiracle]

Each outdoor room is a league across. It always made sense to me that the attack-wait between a mob's entrance was it trying to close distance with you. Plus most mobs will still chase after you a good few rooms. After a while it either loses your scent or decides to find slower game to creep up on. I think it's reasonable.

Plus getting Carru ROFLstomped sucks. Really if you wanted to stop the spam walking I think territorial animals guarding a random direction each time they entered a room would work wonders. "Oh you're trying to head up the North Road? No you fuckin' ain't!" The carru says as it blocks you from heading east before lowering it's horns and charging.

[Miradus]

There are unseen "timers" at work here.

An aggressive mob's behavior goes through a timer in which it checks to see if anything is in its room that it can attack. That might be a 4 or 5 second loop, or less, or longer. I don't know. I have no way of timing it from my end.

Sometimes you are on the far end of the loop and you can walk out and then outrun its movement lag. Sometimes you are on the short end of the tick and it instahits you when it comes into the room. I've outrun a hundred mets and died a couple of times when I didn't. It's just about the timer.

One player's experience with this timer shouldn't be grounds for changing the way mounts work. In addition, other than the mount's endurance and speed, you have OTHER skills which are coming into play. Direction sense and ride ability being the most notable. This is what prevents a newbie from spamming out the east gate of Nak all the way to the south gate of Luir's safely, even when they know the directions.

And even if you do have all of those skills top notch, you still can't plan for Randy Random the Raptor insta-hitting you and consuming 30 movement commands in "No way! You are fighting for your life!" spam.

Would I like to see more variety in mounts? You bet. However since mounts don't eat or drink and are almost never killed by mobs, any cool mount you add into the game will become blah within about 3 months due to oversaturation. If you add something, you must also focus on a way to subtract it or it will not remain rare for long. And having rangers be the source of these rare-cool mounts is going to turn into Armageddon's version of Pokémon Go pretty quick.

[Reiloth]

Also, i'm not sure, but it may be based on agility. I had a few incredibly low agility PCs (Like poor or below average) and they couldn't run away from an aggressive MOB that entered the room if they tried (in fact, they tried, and died). Other PCs that had average or above average+ agility had no problem getting away from aggressive MOBs as they entered a room. Could be illuminati though.

[gotdamnmiracle]

Pokemon Go.

Fair point. There's gotta be a way to avoid that however without the current case of slaughterhouse fodder or, rarely, vanity pet.

[Delirium]

P.S. I vote slaughterhouse in Luirs. Or selling them at the animal pen for breeding. Excess are slaughtered or sold for money.

[solera]

It's not Luirs needs feeding with meat.

[Miradus]

Pokemon Go.

Fair point. There's gotta be a way to avoid that however without the current case of slaughterhouse fodder or, rarely, vanity pet.

I'm all for vanity pets or specialized mounts, up to and including flying mounts. Just need a way to extract them from the game.

But I would code requirements on to them for food and water, and even specialized food. For instance, your winged raptor needs to eat meat at twice the rate you require it. Or your fleet-foot inix needs time to graze in scrub plains or baobob grove. In addition, some mounts could not be stabled and some could only be ridden by the one who tamed it.

Current code doesn't support any of that, I bet. I wouldn't want to make it more difficult to get by with the existing pets, but maybe more interesting with some "advanced" pets.

[James de Monet]

I have zero problem with people being occasionally able to simply walk away from a PvE fight.  First of all, the combat system in Arm is so binary.  If you encounter something you can't kill, there are essentially only two possible outcomes: you get away clean (from when you decide to flee), or you die.  In any real situation with a wild animal, there are many other possible outcomes: it beats you near to death, gets bored, and leaves.  It gets distracted by something else.  If gets further from its home/food/offspring than it wants to be and gives up.  It gets tired and gives up.  You manage to hurt it enough that it reconsiders the price of its food.  You manage to put yourself somewhere where it can't get you, like up a tree, in a rock cleft, or underwater.  You manage to find stones enough to throw at it to piss it off and confuse it, and it leaves.  Another animal comes along and it turns to fight for its kill, giving you time to escape.  Etc, etc, etc.  There aren't really code mechanics to handle these kinds of situations in a realistic or feasible way, so the binary system needs to account for all of them using the two extremes.  Nothing prevents you from RPing that you got away, but only by leaving your favorite sword stuck in its ribs, or that after a few rooms your mount bleeds out and you have to walk home.  Those options are available to you.

But beyond that, I think this is the crux: a solo death to an NPC mob adds nothing to the game for the player but a little more respect for the game world (at the steep cost of days of investment lost), and nothing for anyone else but a lootable corpse with an expiration date.  It is almost always a net negative to people's fun.

Now, the game would not be fun when you're alive without the threat of loss, but it only takes getting instagibbed once or twice to give you that adrenaline rush for the next thirty times you see a big ugly, so you recoup the fun lost in that death, but very slowly over time.  The environment serves its purpose whether you have time and necessity to get around to typing "run" every time it moves, or whether you don't.  That's my two 'sid.

[Inks]

The above post is masterclass and 100% objectively the way it goes.

[Synthesis]

Armageddon's skill system more or less requires that you routinely engage in combat with things that you, at best, have a 50/50 chance of killing.  Also, the "toughness" factor of common mobs is obviously calibrated with the expectation that fleeing is possible, or there wouldn't be so many of them so near civilization.

[a french mans shirt]

Stabling inix needs to be far more expensive, and erdlus should be a little cheaper. I wish I wasn't suggesting making half-giants a little harder to play. But I'm thinking--- half-giants aren't as common as pennies, and every half-giant in the Arm or the Byn is an investment worth stabling an inix at a realistic cost.

Its true, when something in Zalanthas attacks you that isn't a pc, and usually it goes for pcs in the wild too, your options are to flee, to die, or to get knocked unconscious (and then usually die.) You failed flee twice and you trained in the Byn for five game years, and your simple little grunt mind knows things that could topple the stuffy empire that is Allanak, but that's a silt horror on the end of your sword, and -nothing- is going to save you because it saw you first and the guys didn't bring a templar along.

Most of the time its not nearly that bad, but when you spend too much time playing, losing your pc suddenly because EVERY wild beetle IN THE WORLD attacks EVERYTHING THEY SEE, kind of sucks. Even if you were being smart about it, that can't save you once you're in coded combat. Also, wild animals never sleep, or do activities that might distract them from you apart from killing something else. If you're observant enough, you might see them poop as they fight you.

[Dunetrade55]

I, myself, always type "run" once I get past a certain southern checkpoint. When those beetles get into chase mode, any advantage you can get is welcome. It's true, the wildlife does just, walk up and instagib long-lived combat classes at times, the RNG can favor you 99 times out of 100, it's just THAT ONE TIME and you, and everyone with you, is screwed... I'm not overly fond of the way things work for the opposite reasons of the OP, but I'll take what I got and try to like it. What James said is spot on.

[Miradus]

You also can't seem to guess which ones are the badasses.

Recently I plowed through a bunch of one type of mob. Killed 5 of them at one time. Hold shield, wield sword, go to town. Barely injured when I whipped out my skinning knife.

Thinking I'm the god of war, I walked around a little more and the next day saw another one. Same type of mob. In a few rounds I'm typing flee self and running for the gates with less than half my hp.

What you have no way of knowing is that the mob you just encountered has spent several days leveling up on unlucky newbies and is now at the top of its game.