Devs coming in as world bosses.

Leftover_Pizza

Posted this in another thread, but how cool would it be if devs come into the game, playing as a world boss, needing a large group of players to hack them down and get very rare loot from them?

A friend of mine plays DCUO, where this feature is tried out now. Pre-announced events of a dev coming into the game, playing a world boss with a huge health pool and using his/her spells unpredictable. I saw a vid of the fight, taking 32 minutes for the group to finally get the boss down.
I insta wanted that for this game too.
Also, I think this would be fun for the devs too, to kill a ton of players, before getting canned themselves.
Players roaming Overland would get a server wide warning, telling them a dev is about to spawn in a certain area in X minutes. The loot could be stuff like a radiant apex mount, an amount of crowns, crown crates, rare materials for crafting or something, without them needing to be in the top 15 highest dps list.

I mean, how cool would that be?

ButternutJam

There has been devs wiping people out on dolmen grind on console cause there were lots of bots on there. And back when the game was sub based there was interactions with so called “GM”s that dont exist anymore, there only interaction you’d get is through them actually playing eso like everyone else as a player.

Sylvermynx

Wouldn't be something I'd be interested in. And really.... the devs just need to create the game.

ButternutJam

Don’t think they have budget for them appearing as “bosses” and killing them to get special loot, it would be a waste of dev resources, some might find it cool, some might find it annoying.

Mojmir

ive seen them pvp before, would be a short fight lol

ArchangelIsraphel

These events are theoretically cool, and I've played in games that held them. They were always massive lag fests because there were too many players and skills firing on screen. With the state of eso's issues, this would likely crash the servers. The lag, disconnects, and people getting mad because they didn't get their reward due to the disconnects would be a nightmare.

I like the idea, I really do, I just don't think it's possible for this game in its current state.

WhiteCoatSyndrome

Truthfully I’d rather they just added some more wandering world bosses to the game (Coldharbour, please?) then they don’t have to micro manage once it’s up and running beyond normal bug fixes. Having someone go in and play the boss at regular intervals would be time consuming.

phaneub17_ESO

They even had the ZoS Icon in front of their names, one appeared in Grahtwood and just answered people's questions from time to time, after mandatory subscription went away they stopped showing up too.

DarcyMardin

I’ve seen this occasionally in other games — I agree it’s fun now and then. But I’m sure the ESO devs have more important thing to do right now.

Jaraal

Leftover_Pizza wrote: »

Posted this in another thread, but how cool would it be if devs come into the game, playing as a world boss, needing a large group of players to hack them down and get very rare loot from them?

This was a staple of the EverQuest experience.

Some of the most memorable moments were when a dev would pop into a zone as some gigantic, high HP monster. The word would spread like wildfire, and players from all zones would rally to defeat it. And after the fight, the dev would hand out rare gifts to those they deemed to perfomed exceptionally, and everyone got cool loot from the corpse. Then the dev would usually stick around and chat with us in /say.

Devs would also come out as an ogre dressed in green and red named Santa Clugg at Christmas, handing out milk and cookies to players, and sometimes gifts. It was an endearing experience, and presented the game creators as human and caring about the players. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort has come from (or is likely to come from) the ESO team. They are known for watching zones from the shadows, and for their non-communicative nature.

Ryuvain

Would be better as a game mode imo.

colossalvoids

Not in this game I'd say. Overall it feels like community is already pretty hostile to some of the dev team so it won't be exactly too fun, can imagine peeps running for a "revenge" and being wrecked beyond Mundus causing chat havoc etc. or chat chanting "fix your game" lol.

Tommy_The_Gun

Devs with "hax" as a free roaming bosses ? Sorry, but no. It is just another form of enabling PvP with broken builds in a PvE zone.

Mushroomancer

I'd prefer them to focus on making the game better honestly, which is sorely needed. Also, the last thing I want is a marginally interesting system that will overstay its welcome in a matter of weeks, and we all know how fond of those ZOS has been for the past few years.
At most I can see this being a thing that community managers could get into in their free time, but I'm pretty sure they work overtime too, so it would probably be a very inconsistent experience. Also, if I were a community manager, the last thing I'd want to do in my spare time would be logging into the game I promote every second of my existence to pretty much grief players.

Besides, as @Tommy_The_Gun mentioned, it's just a way to put PvP in PvE zones, even if it's for *** and giggles and in a clearly cheeky way, so I don't think it would go over very well with the community at large.

[snip]
[edited for bashing]

BlossomDead

Not interested in any interaction with the game staff as part of content.

Indigogo

Do their partners spawn as enraged mini bosses?

Dawiz

Back in the days when I was playing SWG they sometimes had events in witch GM's would play certain key characters.
I remember one event in particular when Coronet on Corellia was invaded by the Empire and Darth Vader turned up played by a dev.
Now it was impossible to beat him how many of you there were but it made up for some pretty cool snapshots.
There was no special reward from it more than the experience and of cause the massive pvp that happened between Rebels and Empire players.
I havent experienced PvP on that scale in any other mmo, before or after.

Danikat

To be honest my first thought is it probably doesn't matter what I think because it sounds like something they'd only bother to do on NA servers. Or they'd do it at a time convenient for them, which would be the middle of the night in Europe...then probably announce they were stopping it on EU servers because too few people showed up.

Even if they are doing it at a time I can be online it still sounds like something most players are likely to miss, unless they're doing it regularly, and at that point I'd worry about what they're not doing to have time for this.

I like the idea of more roaming world bosses, or bosses which only appear at certain times but I think it would be better to automate it. I realise having a person controlling it would make it more unpredictable, but I'm not sure that's worth the time required to do it.

WhiteCoatSyndrome

Danikat wrote: »

To be honest my first thought is it probably doesn't matter what I think because it sounds like something they'd only bother to do on NA servers. Or they'd do it at a time convenient for them, which would be the middle of the night in Europe...then probably announce they were stopping it on EU servers because too few people showed up.

Even if they are doing it at a time I can be online it still sounds like something most players are likely to miss, unless they're doing it regularly, and at that point I'd worry about what they're not doing to have time for this.

I like the idea of more roaming world bosses, or bosses which only appear at certain times but I think it would be better to automate it. I realise having a person controlling it would make it more unpredictable, but I'm not sure that's worth the time required to do it.

What if they handed control of the thing off to the players? Make it a temporary earnable thing, like Emperor. You kill the most world bosses in a certain period, you get to play Godzilla, something like that.

_Zathras_

Leftover_Pizza wrote: »

Posted this in another thread, but how cool would it be if devs come into the game, playing as a world boss, needing a large group of players to hack them down and get very rare loot from them?

Back in the day, in EQ, GM's would occasionally do this. @Leftover_Pizza there is a game that is planning to do this.

So, you'd be out in the world trying not to be mauled by kodiaks in West Commons, and someone would shout in zone that something weird was going on in Greater Faydark, or East Karana, or the Oasis. Then messages would start coming in that a GM event had popped up, and everyone went crazy trying to get there to participate.

It was as you described: a large boss with a massive hp pool, or a swarm of creatures (like werewolves), and the community had to finish the event. Often it was just one unique drop, or a small handful of rewards, which were never obtainable in the game ever again. So, huge bragging rights.

If they did something like this..wow, that would rock. But they would have to manage it more carefully for fairness. People don't like to feel left out.

Leftover_Pizza

The idea is to have them appear spontaneously in a random zone. No one knows when up until 15 mins prior to the spawn.
Sure, I can imagine they have other things to do to improve the game, but that doesn't mean there wouldn't be time to jump in and have a bit of fun mashing in player's heads.
In my humble opinion, it would add something extra to the game.

Fazuszek

HELL YEAH GOOD IDEA!!!

I want Rich Lambert as GIANT FLAME BEHEMOTH !!!

Sheezabeast

This is fun in theory, but we don't need our devs being made deities. It was cringey and gross and skin-crawling enough when people made Gina a deity because they thought she was "hot" and made comments constantly about her, even when she was pregnant, and it would be even worse if she was a boss that would spawn, [snip] No thank you.

[edited for inappropriate content]

Kwoung

Jaraal wrote: »

Leftover_Pizza wrote: »

Posted this in another thread, but how cool would it be if devs come into the game, playing as a world boss, needing a large group of players to hack them down and get very rare loot from them?

This was a staple of the EverQuest experience.

Some of the most memorable moments were when a dev would pop into a zone as some gigantic, high HP monster. The word would spread like wildfire, and players from all zones would rally to defeat it. And after the fight, the dev would hand out rare gifts to those they deemed to perfomed exceptionally, and everyone got cool loot from the corpse. Then the dev would usually stick around and chat with us in /say.

Devs would also come out as an ogre dressed in green and red named Santa Clugg at Christmas, handing out milk and cookies to players, and sometimes gifts. It was an endearing experience, and presented the game creators as human and caring about the players. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort has come from (or is likely to come from) the ESO team. They are known for watching zones from the shadows, and for their non-communicative nature.

Yes, It has most definitely been around since EQ and I am fairly sure... before then even. Interactions between GM's (they weren't devs) and players was great. Sometimes they would bring/spawn one-off events, sometimes they were there to be the police and take care of a situation, and many, many times they were there to just hang out and shoot the **** with us, chat about the game, listen to suggestions and pass them along. In a great many cases we have GM's follow/shadow us on adventures for us to point out bugs or issues we found, so they could see them happening live in actual gameplay and capture logs to help fixing them.

It was a great time in gaming back then, when the publishers had paid staff to interact with the playerbase and show they actually cared about us and their game.

Zama666

Let players who achieve some lofty goal get to play the bosses!

Maybe next event recruit a bunch of volunteers, scale the bosses with the size of the mob.

Let'em give us a taste of they destruction style!

Wolfpaw

Guild Wars had a cool "boss" system to ban cheaters, gold sellers, etc...not exactly a boss to fight since it would one shot kill/ban your toon though. I wish more dev interactions like this were possible with the community as they were fun to witness.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9B6bZSpQHxU

WiseSky

Ferumbras

Elsonso

Leftover_Pizza wrote: »

Posted this in another thread, but how cool would it be if devs come into the game, playing as a world boss, needing a large group of players to hack them down and get very rare loot from them?

Calling @ZOS_Finn... time to get that ogre costume out of the closet.

(Edit.... ogre.... not orge, which could be completely misinterpreted, and not in a good way...)

EdmondDontes

It's painfully obvious the devs at ZOS don't play ESO.

Wolfpaw

Leftover_Pizza wrote: »

Posted this in another thread, but how cool would it be if devs come into the game, playing as a world boss, needing a large group of players to hack them down and get very rare loot from them?

A friend of mine plays DCUO, where this feature is tried out now. Pre-announced events of a dev coming into the game, playing a world boss with a huge health pool and using his/her spells unpredictable. I saw a vid of the fight, taking 32 minutes for the group to finally get the boss down.
I insta wanted that for this game too.
Also, I think this would be fun for the devs too, to kill a ton of players, before getting canned themselves.
Players roaming Overland would get a server wide warning, telling them a dev is about to spawn in a certain area in X minutes. The loot could be stuff like a radiant apex mount, an amount of crowns, crown crates, rare materials for crafting or something, without them needing to be in the top 15 highest dps list.

I mean, how cool would that be?

I like it.

To play off your idea more, if not only a boss fight but as some daedra or deity that would show up in a zone reciting some lore and after awhile granting everyone in that zone a unique buff for a short period: +10% xp, gold gain, health, etc...

It's these interactions that stick with a player over time.

Years before flying mounts were introduced in WoW a unannounced/unauthorized (?) dev dwarf showed up in Ironforge flying a griffin by the bank, everyone in the city came together just to see him/her flying...after some time the flying dev dwarf started to fill a raid group. Once it was full he announced "Now go do something!" and left lol.

That has stuck with me all these years.

Oliviander

I don't think, that any of the devs is playing their game.
Maybe they are testing it - but not playing it.
If it were so, they couldn't have the idea to remove character acheivements.