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I

had originally intended to write this piece about zone

lines (as noted at the end of href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/eqn/making-stats-matter">last

week’s article),

but after thinking about it over the weekend, I came to a different

conclusion.

It’s not the zone lines that I want to see make a return

(although separation

of areas is important as I’ll talk about in a bit), but

rather the unleashing

of mobs with EverQuest Next. “Mob leashing” refers

to the act of having mobs on

an invisible leash so that if a player runs far enough away, the mob

will turn

around and return to its starting point without passing go or

collecting $200.

It will also ignore anyone in its path and will not stop until it

reaches its

origin point.

Without

any doubts, there are legitimate and well

documented reasons why mob leashing became a common theme almost 10

years ago. As

a whole, gamers will always find a way to abuse and torture their

fellow

players. Whether it’s because they feel they’ve

been slighted in some way and

are seeking revenge, are just assholes that think it’s funny

to ruin someone

else’s gaming experience, or are simply mentally deficient

human beings, the

reasons don’t matter. When mobs were not on leashes, it was

an easy matter to

train other players or groups (get a large number of mobs to follow you

and run

past the player, since at least some of the mobs chasing you would peel

off and

attack them as well). With the right class and enough skill you could

also solo

mobs that were never intended to be taken down by a character of that

level.

There

are other reasons the genre-wide change was made as

well, but there simply isn’t enough time here to list them

all. The short

version of this is that if there is a way for a player to use the lack

of a

leash on a mob to abuse someone else, it’s going to be done

at some point.

Despite all this, I think it’s time for mob leashing to go

the way of the dodo

bird or at the very least, be altered significantly. There was fun and

excitement in the act of trying to get away from a pull gone horribly

wrong. The

sense of terror that engulfed you as you desperately tried to avoid a

sometimes

inevitable death was often one of the most thrilling aspects of the

games of

yore.

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Mobs

without leashes can also be a great tool for one of

my favorite things about all games that incorporate it – that

sense of random adventure

or unexpected consequences. I’ll give you one of my favorite

examples and the

tale of my most infamous revenge killing spree ever.

In

the original EverQuest, there was a great low level

area to hunt in called Crushbone. It was the home of the Crushbone Orcs

and was

a fantastic zone. There were Orcs (duh) aplenty but there were also a

number of

slaves. One of those slaves was a small gnome by the name of Retlon

Brenclog.

He would spawn in one of the slave pits and there was a quest which

involved

freeing him with a slave key. There was just one problem when someone

would

release him – he and his earth pet would immediately go on a

rampage and kill

everything in sight.

I

can’t count how many times I was the victim of this rat

bastard in my early days. One day he managed to kill me over 10 times.

The

worst of these was when I ran for the zone line and as I came to a

frozen dead

stop, thought that I had made it and was just waiting for the screen to

load.

Nope – his damned pet had rooted me a style="">hair’s

breadth away from the zone line.

While I went about then retrieving my

corpse, Retlon went to the very top of my revenge list. Years later,

when my

Necromancer was almost level 50 (Retlon is only 15 or so), I sat in

that pit

and killed him all day. And by all day, I mean almost 6 hours straight.

Over,

and over, and over. It was glorious and one of my favorite moments in

gaming

history.

If

Retlon had been on a leash, or would only keep agro on

the first person he attacked, then it wouldn’t have been a

big deal to have him

in the game. Rather than being a named gnome I clearly remember almost

14 years

after first encountering him, he would instead have been yet another

faceless

mob that I couldn’t care about.

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Part

of that is because of mob leashing. The other side

of this coin is that without zone lines (or some sort of modern day

equivalent),

I wouldn’t have had that brief moment of triumph as my nose

froze just shy of

the zone line in my desperate escape. It would have been reduced to

“Oh, I just

need to run 50 years in any direction to get him to drop

agro.” I will agree

this mechanic lessened the ability of your average person to grief

another

player, but personally, I think it removed far more than that.

The

removal of zone lines and the addition of mob

leashing (combined with a lack of a real death penalty) has removed a

genuine

sense of danger, of thrill escapes, and of camaraderie from the games

we play

today. No more can you and your friends sit and talk about how you

barely

escaped from Crushbone, how you saved that Halfling Ranger as he went

tearing

past with a train of Gnolls on his tail, and more.

I

know that mob leashing helped solve some

problems, but I firmly believe that it’s time for a game to

come out that finds

other solutions while not handicapping its players in the process. I

hope

EverQuest Next is that game.



