Hello everyone!

I'm really excited to announce a big change has been made to several
hunting areas in the game which, in essence, improves the AI of the
mobiles players fight to make hunting more interesting and challenging.
This is a first step into improving our PVE.

You will begin to more frequently encounter denizens that have behaviors
beyond attacking you until you are dead; though, they will still do
that! Efforts so far have been focused on three areas which will serve
as live trials in order for us to adjust the difficulty and rewards
appropriately. Once a comfortable balance has been found, more areas
will begin to be worked on.

As of this post, these three areas have had their AI redesigned:

Tcanna Island
Torturers' Caverns
Drakuum

The AI for these denizens have been split into several archetypes and
assigned appropriately depending on the type of mobile. For example, you
may find that a turtle is weighted to have a 'defender' archetype
wherein it uses defensive abilities that should be dealt with
accordingly, though it might also be capable of counter-attacks via the
'counterer' archetype some times. You should be able to get a very vague
feel for the behavior of one of these redesigned denizens via PROBE.

There are currently 11 primary archetypes that will be used for
behaviors, all which can be mixed and matched in any amount and
variation to create further, advanced archetypes. In addition to this,
most all of the archetypes are being designed in such a way that they
have stat checks to encourage a more diverse spread of
strengths/weaknesses among the statpacks and player classes.

Some examples for a few archetypes:

Berserker: goes berserk, easier to pacify if higher INT.
Mender: tries to heal allies, easier to interrupt with higher DEX.
Defender: defensive stance, easier to remove guard if higher STR.

You can see more, complete details about the system and standard
archetypes currently released in HELP HUNTING.

Probably most importantly, the increase in difficulty will come with
rewards. The denizens in every revamped area have chances to drop loot
which contain relics that combine into rare, new and unique style
scrolls, vox iterators, flairs, minipets, and more.

Please keep in mind, since the infrastructure is already in place, new
archetypes are convenient to add and existing ones very easily modified.
That being said, everything will be closely monitored to ensure it's
doing more good than bad.

As this is a large transition, we can expect to see a plethora of bugs,
inconsistencies, unintentional difficulty spikes and other balance
issues. We hope to resolve them as quickly as they come up so please
make intensive use of the BUG and IDEA commands.

Please visit the discussion on the forums to ask questions and comment,
I'd really love to get your feedback so we can make this thing great:
http://forums.aetolia.com/discussion/2673/hunting-ai-overhaul


Penned by my hand on Tisday, the 21st of Chakros, in the year 468 MA.