Originally Posted by Nezralix
if you make them mindless deadweight, then it's pointless to have them, or even a liability if the player ends up babysitting.
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Well, that depends on what the "point" is. If the point is
window dressing, it may not be pointless.
One of the reactions people have had to the idea of scaling down raid encounters is that they'd "feel" less epic simply because there are fewer participants.
Imagine that we're
already talking about trivializing the encounter, such that a random PUG will get it down on the first try or at least first couple of tries.
So, we're not trying to re-create the experience of learning the encounter over weeks -- the audience this is targeted at has no interest in that. We're not trying to re-create the skill-check required -- the audience this is targeted at has no interest in that. What we're trying to do is, make it so that if, say, a novelist who doesn't understand the game-mechanics at all watched a YouTube video of a successful kill, without any access to the guild's vent channel, they might describe the raid encounter and the 5-man encounter in the same terms. "And then a bunch of guys swarmed up its leg, and..." That way, even if they get no loot or rep or anything for it, a bunch of folks could still say "yeah, I actually got to fight Ilidan!" or something. Lore access.
Some encounters are easy to scale down from 25-man difficult raid encounter to 5-man PUGable instance encounter without losing their
vibe, but some aren't (it is asserted)
just because of the number of participants. Can NPCs be a way to create that
vibe?