Goblin Squad Member
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Escalations are supposed to be defeated. They are created from nothing and return to nothing after enough whack-a-mole activity by players.
If the game's ecology is supposed to respond to player actions, it needs to be either very very resilient against player actions (to the point where your actions taken to "preserve balance" or whatever are practically unnoticable) or risk totally collapsing several times over.
My point about escalations was that if the pressure from players is going to be THAT big, then escalations won't get past the initial stage before they're overwhelmed, rendering the entire system pointless. If Monsters can be set up to build up a hex then expand into other hexes and are expected to be able to survive long enough to do that without being kept down all the time, then animal spawns and relationships to eachother can be set up to do a similar thing.
That depends entirely on how you set it up.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I was thinking about the problem with the proposed virtual ecology. If we started with rabbits, they might be represented by rabbit holes that cannot be killed. If the players are vewy vewy quiet then the rabbit themselves might appear. Once the rabbits overpopulate predators spawn. In the meantime the rabbit skins can be harvested from craftable traps.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The solution to the ecology problem is the same as a great many other issues. If you want a balanced ecology give players a reason to keep it balanced. The better the ecology is doing the better the resources that spawn in a hex. Give Druids and Rangers advantages for operating in a healthy ecosystem.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ryan is pretty skeptical of virtual ecology: see post here.
The idea of "turn the monsters loose and let the AI sort it out" has been a part of the MMO world since Ultima Online. And it's been tried several times, and every time it fails.
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I'll remain a skeptic until I see it work at scale, under real world conditions.
I don't know, the articles Ryan linked to actually are strongly in support of the idea of a virtual ecology. It recognized there were problems, but also identified those problems as created by artificial limitations that they built into the system.
Ryan mentioned that players abused the system to farm Dragons, but the reality was that the situation was created by them limiting the amount of resources that can exist in the game. In this specific case the tendency players to horde resources was the problem. By hording fur, the players were preventing animals from spawning, which would bring more fur into the world beyond the games limit. This created a food shortage for Dragons which caused dragons to look for the nearest village food where players would annihilate the dragons.
The UO system also wasted a ton of resources by tracking each creature spawned as an individual and did so constantly rather than as a population.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ryan is pretty skeptical of virtual ecology: see post here.
The idea of "turn the monsters loose and let the AI sort it out" has been a part of the MMO world since Ultima Online. And it's been tried several times, and every time it fails.
...
I'll remain a skeptic until I see it work at scale, under real world conditions.I don't know, the articles Ryan linked to actually are strongly in support of the idea of a virtual ecology. It recognized there were problems, but also identified those problems as created by artificial limitations that they built into the system.
Ryan mentioned that players abused the system to farm Dragons, but the reality was that the situation was created by them limiting the amount of resources that can exist in the game. In this specific case the tendency players to horde resources was the problem. By hording fur, the players were preventing animals from spawning, which would bring more fur into the world beyond the games limit. This created a food shortage for Dragons which caused dragons to look for the nearest village food where players would annihilate the dragons.
The UO system also wasted a ton of resources by tracking each creature spawned as an individual and did so constantly rather than as a population.
I think there Are many ways to do it, and it is essentially about setting the conditions appropriately to the systems you're using, PFO is also ideally set up for duch a system because hexes give you a reasonable unit area to work with. Most games don't have such distinct uniform area breakdowns or the kind of dynamic content to make it meaningful that PFO is based on.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm killing time playing WoW (I know, I know...) and Blizzard has done a good job with critters. Not so much with ecology, but their critters are plentiful and varied. I can see overlapping "escalations" that are flagged differently so they propagate slowly, providing resources for trappers, hunters and survivalists without creating too much of an issue. they could also be used once things are put in like animal husbandry and taming to gather wild animals up to form herds of domesticated animals for food, mounts and other natural resources. Seems totally plausible, and I wouldn't think to hard to code now that the basic escalation cycles are operational.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think it's the sort of system you want to have in by release, as it has repercussions for resources, and is a system that isn't totally different to many of the planned features, in many ways it's just about writing the conditions for different creatures properly and not making it too static or too random.
Everquest next is planning a system for spawns (given the dynamic world they are creating) where creatures have likes and dislikes. The example they used is orcs: they like gold, they like attacking roads that are not heavily guarded, but have enough traffic to make banditry profitable.
So orcs like roads with minimal soldier patrols. Change the guard patrols, attack the Orc camps too much, and they'll move elsewhere.
It's a similar concept, you could do it by setting a bunch of likes and dislikes for various creatures to determine their spawning patterns.