Developers Corner

I've always wanted to be a game creator and I sometimes come up with concepts for the fun of it. So yesterday I was planning out a Sci-Fi MMO and it donned on me: When was the last time I'd seen a Movie, TV show or Single Player game where one character runs into a mass of enemies and just stands there?

Never

In fact, when there's an ally in a mob of enemies, his friends are usually afraid to use spells or fire volley out fear of hitting him!

Realistically, if a hero is surrounded:
A) The enemies are all really stupid minions, whose attacks can be negated 100% of the time and can be 1 shotted. This would be really stupid to put in a MMO unless you were trying to grind.
B) The hero runs away, enters 'pwnd' into the chat screen and leads the enemies into an ambush.
C) Just runs away period. Peeing his pants as he does.
D) Gets his arse kicked.

So, before we do away with 'Tank's, is there any reason why these they should be in MMOs? Well, they do protect the Squishes from being mauled. But, surely there's a better, more realistic, more fun, way to do it then tanking though. My idea is the 'Struggle System'.

Struggle would be a click ability that would require you to target an ally in order to use. The ally would have to be taking damage.

Let's take something familiar:
Jim the warrior and Billy the mage are out adventuring. They come across a boar and want to kill it. Jim begins hacking away at the pig's hide and Billy begins casting spells on the pig. All suddenly, the pig decides that it doesn't like having fireballs shoved up it's rear and goes to attack Billy. Frantically trying to save his friend, Jim shout insults about the pig's mother to the pig! BUT IT DOESN'T SPEAK ENGLISH! OH NOES!!!! So, without thinking, Jim instinctively runs in front of Billy and blocks the pigs attack.

This would start a 'Strength Struggle' where Jim's player would have to press the 'q' and 'w' keys alternatively in order to keep a bar filled. If the bar reached the '0 mark' then the pig would over-power Jim, which would allow the pig to either disembowel Jim or go and maul Billy without fear of interference. However, if Jim could keep the bar filled, Billy would have cheap shots at the big while Jim kept it busy. Also, if Jim could fill the bar to the '10 mark' then he would overpower the pig, leaving him open to attacks by both Jim and Billy. Obviously, your Strength stat would effect how hard it was to keep the bar filled. Your Weapon and proficiency with it might also effect the bar especially in cases where both sides where using a weapons(IE Jim with sword vers Bob with a club)

Now if there's a 'Strength Struggle' then there's obviously other types too. For pigs, the bar makes sense but say you were guarding against an agile warrior using two swords. For that an 'Agility Struggle' might make more sense. Rather then a bar appearing on your screen, a letter or number would appear. You would have a few seconds to find that key on your keyboard and press if. By continually pressing these keys, you block the enemy's attacks. Also, as the rest of your party attacks the enemy, it's concentration will start to lower. It will begin to miss attacks and you will start to find openings in defense in order to attack it.

Imagine. If you leave your computer to get a sandwich, you might actually die!

There would also be 'Impossible Struggle's. For example, you're fighting Giant Yetis and you block Yeti's punch for your mage. This would normally be a Strength Struggle but the Yeti realizes it has two hands! OMG HOW SMART! It would knock you flat on your arse. Perhaps you'd need TWO warriors to block a Yeti!

There would also be 'Statistics Struggle's in cases where mini-games don't make sense. Like blocking Shurikins for example, would simply require a check of agility and reflexes.

Also, while I like the class system, I think it should guide the player, not force them into a set of cookie-cutter skills. After all, who says a Ranger can't pick up a metal bow, work out a little and block for his mage buddy? In fact, who says the mage can't pick up a metal staff and block for himself?

But I also think there should be a generic ability, everyone Gets called 'Pick Up and Run':

So, you forgot your metal bow and now your mage buddy is being mauled by god knows what. Why can't you just rescue him from his assaulter? You hit 'Pick Up and Run', run over, pick up your buddy, get a little head start on your enemy and hope that you can outrun it.

For PvP, the Struggle System would be hard to implement but well worth. You feel good 'owning' your opponent when there's no skill involved? Imagine if you actually used skill!

Criticism? Complaints? Help?

Amendments:
(Other people's anti-tank ideas)

Criticism:
(Good Pro-Tank Arguments to help create an unbiased discussion)

Tanks exist for a variety of MMO conventions.

+Healing exists. It's easier for everyone to focus on keeping one guy alive than a whole party.
+Players have different amounts of hp and/or take different amounts of damage based on class. Therefore, the one that has the most hp/takes the least damage automatically becomes the tank.
+There is no friendly fire. In more real combat, archers fire to thin out the enemy until the enemy gets close. After that point, firing into melee battle risks hitting one's own people. The lack of friendly fire negates this risk, and encourages people to sit in the back and nuke.
+Focus fire. This is mostly because a target's effectiveness is not reduced as they take damage, so its easy and effective for everyone in a party to focus on one target. This ties in with the above. That is, players generally are not crowded out by each other trying to get to a target, which means they do not have to spread out much and risk more than one or two people taking hits. You know, like as in maintaining a front battle line and such.
+Lack of tactical abilities. There are not many abilities for players to take advantage of positioning. Most notably is the lack of something heavily used in Dungeons and Dragons: Attacks of Opportunity. This means fighter types cannot maintain a line and keep monsters from rushing towards the soft targets, and thus they usually fall on artificial means of keeping the enemy on them. Means like "taunt" and other skills.
+Lack of attention on PvP. A look at Guild Wars gives a real good idea of what each of of the classes roles should be in the game. The healers are typically the ones beat up on first since they are the biggest threat. Then the anti-casters are taken down, and everyone past that. But warriors have skills that make them very potential targets too, like Frenzy: +33% attack rate, suffer twice as much damage for 8 seconds. If the warrior is neglected, skills like these make them very dangerous. Just about everyone (beyond those two classes) are equal threats, and thus the role of "Tank" doesn't really exist.

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Originally posted by Distortion0

So, before we do away with 'Tank's, is there any reason why these they should be in MMOs?

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Tank is the seed of tactics development in games, you like it or not. I dont mean it must exist, anyway, i think the 'tank' idea is not bad at all.

First it's about damage dealing, the simplest combat element in a game is damage dealing. Say, if a group of 7 damage dealers can deal with all sort of mobs, what fun will it be? So you need to design a game where some mobs cannot simply be taken down by a group of pure damage dealers.

Since a full team of damage dealers is not efficient enough to win, assistant classes are added while tactics are designed such that, 6 DDs + 1 assistance class may have a chance to take down a boss, but not 7 DDs. Automatically, the assistant class is thus a none damage dealer, for the sake of tactics development. To make it more challenging, it's not only a low DD class, but also a low hp class. The bet is on, if the 6DDs can successfully protect the assistance class, they'll win, else they fail. That's how the fighting tactics is introduced from a designing point of view.

In a more intelligent design, including pvp, since everyone knows that whenever the assistant char is taken down, the 6DDs will lose, players/AI mobs will focus on killing the assistant class first, more like an exploit to break the team. Here comes the need of a tank, with the existence of a tank, you cant focus on killing the assistant class to leave the 6DDs hopeless. :) Thus DDs, the assistant and the tank act like a trio just for tactics to be introduced and developed, again from a game designing point of view.

While possibly adding to the "rabbit season, duck season" parody that this thread is in serious trouble of becoming, I'd like to point out that there are all sorts of military "units" (quite often not human) that qualify as tanks. It's just that, as has been pointed out, technical limitations make good realistic versions difficult.

The essence of a "tank" is anything that prevents an enemy from attacking you, while at the same time allowing you to attack the enemy. A similar species of unit is the one that can enguage directly with minimal threat of reprisal (calvalry, often called "the tank of the middle ages", is a prime example of this case). Perhaps history's best example of tanking tactics were the shield walls used by Roman legionnaires - but of course it's hard to determine who or what you would call the "tank" in this case. Tanks don't really need to do damage, provided that they can stay in the way!

And of course the best tanks are either disposable (serfs) of unkillable (machines, structures), so that you can indeed drench their proximity in friendly fire.

The typical MMO "tank" classes have arisen out of a desire to make classical tanking tactics possible in spite of the inability to model the physical properties that real "tanks" apply. It looks like your suggestion is to implement some more realistic tricks, which is all good: just because most developers use the simplified model doesn't mean everyone has to!

As a point of interest, "tank" is a really poor name that doesn't lend understanding. A real-world tank is an armoured artillery piece that in some situations could be considered to be able to attack with limited repraisal like the calvalry. In most situations, however, it is more similar to an MMO mage: it can do a great deal of damage at a distance, but has a short battlefield life expectancy (I have a friend who's a tanker - they train for an expected 8 seconds of survival...). 

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Originally posted by Mylon
No, tanking is not a viable strategy.  In real life, if I encountered a tank with 5" of armor and a tiny machine gun, I'd ignore it and take out the glass cannons behind it.  And this is exactly what happens in most MMO PvPs.  Tanks don't do much damage, and therefore there is little incentive to kill them first.

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