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EverQuest Players Defeat 'Unkillable' Monster
Thanks to Got Game? for their posting discussing the in-game slaying of Kerafyrm, aka The Sleeper, in PC MMO EverQuest. This event, commemorated with a screenshot on the site of one of the guilds involved, is notable because the players "...killed what Sony Online Entertainment intended to be unkillable. But rather than actually make it untargetable, Sony just gave it a hundred billion hitpoints. For those non EQers out there a reference scale: a snake has about 10 hitpoints. A dragon has about 100,000. A god has 1-2million." So, it took "close to 200 players almost 4 hours to beat the thing down into the ground", after an earlier failed attempt where the guilds "beat it down to 27% and then it mysteriously disappeared. Without dying. It seems that one of the Game Masters at SoE reset the zone because 'they thought the encounter might be bugged'."
If it's supposed to be unkillable, why didn't they just give it unlimited hit points?
Course this will probably mean 'we need 2000 people for this one guys' for some MMO gamers..
Well, it was meant to be unkillable, so I don't think anyone bothered to code some loot for it to give away in the unlikely event of its death.
You can't take the sky from me...
This is half the fun of MMORPGs and it happens all too infrequently.
Half the articles on here are about how designers want to create camraderie amongst players and keep them from griefing newbies. Here's a secret-- give them a challenge, something that they can't do, then wait and see how long it takes. And on a PVP server too, bravo.
On an old MUD I used to play the designers created quests that were insanely hard to crack. People would spend hours trying to figure them out. New games rarely have this sort of thing-- even the high level EQ quests are waaaay too straightforward and don't require any brainpower.
I suppose it just costs too much to have to make unique quests that are reworked after being solved.
Really, if Sony wanted an unkillable monster they should have done more to prevent it. Invulnerability would be the best choice, since giving people any chance means they'll take it. Failing that, a obscene hp regeneration rate coupled with pornographic hp and insta-death to anyone within theoretical attack range might work. Given the ingenuity people display when trying to circumvent the rules, however, I suspect that anything less than complete invulnerability would be overcome eventually.
Of course, the above ideas are based on the assumption that the game rules are followed. Exploits and other rule-breaking techniques throw everything out the window.
Oh, please. That sort of hack guarantees buggy code. For example, if target.hp was 1 and damage was 3, the target would suddenly become invulnerable!
What you want is a flag: if (!target.invulnerable) target.hp -= damage;
Sure, it uses at worst four bytes more memory per entity. But we're talking modern harware here, not Commodore 64.
You know, the board game that Starbucks sells in their coffee shops.
The rules are so pathetically thin that situations come up with no ready answers in the rules, so we make it up. Consequently, everyone I know plays the game a little diffently.
I had the inspiring idea during Sculptorades (where you sculpt your clues in plasticene) that I could spell the answer out in the clay. Of course, the rules say nothing about this.
People will always try to achieve the impossible or seemingly impossible.
How do they say?
Difficult things become impossible if we don't try them.
So they tried ;-).
Regards, Martin
You should probably consider thinking along these lines for your REAL life, too. ie. doing work that doesn't pay in dollars can often mean more than...
I don't know about EQ, but muds generally have monster states. EQ probably has them too, for poisoning, death, paralyzation, etc. If so, it would be much simpler to just add a status for invincibility than hack all the math references. Then they just need to add code to functions that check status and act appropriately (at least in the implementation in my head, that is a decent way of doing it).
As a hardcore gamer (though not of EQ) I totally understand the drive to succeed in a near-impossible videogame task like this, and I've seen milestones come and go time and again. The perfect Pac-Man game. 43 seconds Minesweeper Expert. Quake 1, completed in under 12 1/2 minutes. Perfect Dark, done on all difficulty settings in less than 100 minutes. I know the dedication you put in for an achievement likely to be recognised by only a tiny fraction of the whole world, and I know the elation when the barrier falls, the timer stops one second faster than the previous record, the final objective completes. I can only hope that there exist more and greater challenges out there, because, seriously, who in the world would want to stop here?
"Nearly impossible" = "possible".
qntm.org
As an avid Role-Player myself this rings true to a debate a friend and I have had for years. I play alot of D&D (3.5) and my friend plays Shadowrun. In D&D they came out with a book of Gods & DemiGods and gave them stats that it would probably take 4 - 50th level PC's to take out. As the game only supports level 20 by default (ie minus the Epic Level Handbook) I am of the opinion that that's enough to make sure they won't die should I bring them into a campaign. My friend however pointed out that in the Shadowrun universe any "plot character" such as Harlequin the Immortal Elven Mage has a character sheet that simply states "Harlequin always wins, Harlequin can do anything and everything" And I've argued that this takes away from the game. It's not even a fair playing field! I used to argue that at least the Gods in my campaign, while uber-powerful, had to follow the rules and roll a die before they accomplished something (though the odds of failure were approximately 1 in 20.) This however gives me a new perspective. And I think should my players ever beat a god ... I'll give them good loot.
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.