Are NPC Party Members An Inevitability?

[thunderdragon2]

I hope so. One of my favourite things about FFXIV is the Squadrons. Since it allows me to level in Dungeons without requiring a queue time or dealing with other People when I just want to chill and level an Alt.

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Plenty of People play healers and tanks. Literally every single person I play WoW with has a character they Tank or Heal with. It's just the incentives to do those roles with randoms which is the issue.

Cata and MoP call to Arms rewards were great.

if the rewards were great why are so few people playing these roles currently?

[Super Kami Dende]

if the rewards were great why are so few people playing these roles currently?

Because the Rewards are no longer great?

[Bloodyleech]

if the rewards were great why are so few people playing these roles currently?

They were great. Blizz nerfed the hell out of Call to Arms. Would they buff it up again - I'd play my tank way more in those modes.

[Danuel]

Healers probably can be easy replaced by bots.

[StationaryHawk]

Having NPCs bum-rush you, jumping around and running away is completely different from having them actually do tactics in dungeons. Especially with the overlapping RNG-fiesta style of gameplay WoW has.

Emphasis on similar, but I think you're overestimating dungeons. Unless you're running mythics, it's mostly knowing what to attack and where not to stand.

[enigma77]

Got any more terrible ideas while you're at it?

[Temp name]

if the rewards were great why are so few people playing these roles currently?

Playing a healer in a pug is a roll of the dice. Either the dungeon goes fine, or everyone sucks and you have to work 3 times as hard to keep people alive because everyone stands in stuff, no one interrupts anything, and there's no CC going out. Oh, and you still get blamed if no one else did their job and they died to avoidable damage
Also, specifically for heroic dungeons, healing sucks ass. I can be literally the best healer in the world in 228 average ilvl, but it won't go that much faster than if I were some pleb in 161 or whatever it is, who only barely was allowed to sign up. The tiny amount of gold/runes I get for queueing up with call to arms is just not worth it.

As a tank it's a little better, but if you pull the wrong things, or don't pull fast enough, people will throw shit at you

[Cosmic Janitor]

Emphasis on similar, but I think you're overestimating dungeons. Unless you're running mythics, it's mostly knowing what to attack and where not to stand.

Let me put it that way, I've seen how this feature is implemented in other games like FFXIV and once you played one or two rounds with NPCs you can see the obvious limitations of such a feature. In FFXIV for example NPCs needed to be coded to do the boss encounters in a certain way and they will only ever do them that way. This works in FFXIV because the encounters follow a strict pattern, in WoW, as I said, most enemy abilities have a strong randomized pattern. They also don't use AoE (FML, because of that it takes twice as long as running a dungeon with humans) or pull easy mobs together, they won't even gain AoE threat properly and won't overheal/use CDs to get through tough situations. It's certainly not as trivial as their IE AI in BfA, which in fact still causes laughter among my friends who know about programming, because of how overhyped it was.

[thedingleberry]

Not sure this would ever work. What would it be like for someone who wants to go in as DPS with all other people being NPCs? Would it just randomly determine if your NPC healer is going to let you die? Would it just randomly determine if the NPC tank was gonna not hold aggro? Seems like at that point you might as well just go play an RPG like Witcher... Besides, they already have this. It's called Diablo 3 with your follower. If you want this, just go play that. That's also a gear chasing game.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Why?

WoW's dungeons are built around being spammed in Mythic + keys. Even the story runs are pretty much just you either do it in 15 minutes or you don't do it ever and nothing really changes.

It's not like FF14 where you're getting a dungeon every single patch that you need to run for story's sake and they're 30 minutes of time.

[erifwodahs]

God forbid somebody in the group says "hi" to one another in a dungeon. This seems like the end conclusion to the cynical anti-social nature of modern gamers.

Well, I sit on discord all the time and chat with my friends or watch Twitch. I don't socialize with in-game players, but that doesn't mean that "modern gamers" are anti-social. Our social experiences are out of the game. Seems you are the one who is cynical here.

[Wuusah]

I don’t really care about that feature. I tried it in FF14 and it felt so miserable and depressive in a “wtf am I doing?” kind of way, so I stopped doing it and that’s it for me. But others seem to like it, so I don’t mind.

The thing is, it’s easier to make such a system in FF14 because dungeons there are way more scripted. The AI always knows where the safe spots are. That’s not really the case in WoW. So such a feature would be a big challenge to create. And imo the dev time put into that is not worth it. I wouldn’t want to lose out on other content to get that

[Cosmic Janitor]

Not sure this would ever work. What would it be like for someone who wants to go in as DPS with all other people being NPCs? Would it just randomly determine if your NPC healer is going to let you die? Would it just randomly determine if the NPC tank was gonna not hold aggro?

Why would it be randomly chosen? The tank does a certain amount of TPS and if you exceed them you draw agro, same stuff for healers, they heal a certain HPS, you stand in the fire - you die, you don't stand in the fire - you live. Ideally the failure state depends entirely and how well you perform your role.

DPS: Deal enough damage to kill the target without drawing agro or dying to enviromental damage.
Tank: Keep enemies occupied while the DPS kill them and you mitigate as much as possible.
Healer: Keep tank and DPS and yourself alive.

There no reason what so ever to introduce unrelated failure states. The point is not to simulate shit players.

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It's not like FF14 where you're getting a dungeon every single patch that you need to run for story's sake and they're 30 minutes of time.

I don't think another 15 minutes once a patch (aka 6 months) is a valid reason to suddenly make such a feature. No dev team would spend time on something like that for such a flimsy reason. If anything running dungeons over and over again is a good reason for the feature.

[Nite92]

Why would it be randomly chosen? The tank does a certain amount of TPS and if you exceed them you draw agro, same stuff for healers, they heal a certain HPS, you stand in the fire - you die, you don't stand in the fire - you live. Ideally the failure state depends entirely and how well you perform your role.

DPS: Deal enough damage to kill the target without drawing agro or dying to enviromental damage.
Tank: Keep enemies occupied while the DPS kill them and you mitigate as much as possible.
Healer: Keep tank and DPS and yourself alive.

There no reason what so ever to introduce unrelated failure states. The point is not to simulate shit players.

Sure, and an Autopilot for cars are also so easy to make.

If (hitsuff==1){
Don't;
}

Sure it might work, but why? There are Single Player games out there. Not every game has to be to your liking

[Nak88]

That would be the end of the Retail version of WoW.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Sure, and an Autopilot for cars are also so easy to make.

If (hitsuff==1){
Don't;
}

Sure it might work, but why? There are Single Player games out there. Not every game has to be to your liking

Maybe you should try

void Init()
{
Readingcomprehension();
}

first?

[tikcol]

I think Blizzard can code a better AI party member than the average player in this game

[Rageadon]

Solo focused content/features hurts the game

[kranur]

I'd really just have the content tuned for solo play instead of have some bullshit AI if they would ever consider to remove the neer to group with other people.
Doesn't make much sense in an mmorpg to have your party consist of AI. Isn't the whole point of it to play with a lot of other people?

[ippollite]

I dont think theres much real reason for it to be honest. If it were to be introduced, it would only likely be for normal or heroic dungeons. They're pretty adamant that the game should be fundamentally a social game, particularly at the harder levels of content. Indeed, on wowhead right now there's an interview with ion and he makes the argument again:

On guild finder:

Yes, guilds are a central part of the wow experience, for so many people your guild is your group of friends, it your family in Azeroth. we recently updated our guild in-game finding tools to make it easier for players to search for guilds or guilds to recruit players, but we would like to do more in term of activities or rewards for guilds for playing together.

And on matchmaking:

The approach that we've taken so far and I think we continue to focus on is to try to make it easier to find people of a similar skill level, with similar interests to do this content. We think there's a lot more that we can do with the group finder... we prefer to give players control over who they group with, but we also want to make it easier for them to find friends and companions.

The thing is, normal and heroic dungeons (particularly heroic) actually become much easier through the course of the expansion as players dramatically outgear it. So even players who may feel a little nervousness in joining LFD early on, will likely find it a very smooth, pressure free and incredibly asocial (should they so choose), experience. Given that, designing a system which actually makes these dungeons more difficult (with micro managing of party on top of playing your character), it seems a bit of a needless step. Dont get me wrong, it could be fun and allows for another thing players can devote their time to, but i dunno if the effort to design the system is really worth the reward.