Have you ever wondered why there are no NPCs to hire to do group content? Blizzard just introduced flexible raids to deal with the "group not full" problem, when the solution is so trivial: introduce an NPC that does acceptable DPS and can be hired for raiding. It wouldn't be any good, but better than an empty spot.
In EVE Online it's even more problematic. You see, EVE is a game of alts, I know exactly one player who doesn't have alts in the game (my girlfirend, and she is too casual to matter). CCP games said that the average account/player is above 2, yet there is no officially supported method to multibox. To make it less understandable, setting up a "follower" AI would be like 30 minutes work for a programmer: warping needs no programming as squadwarp is already available, the only coding needed is when the boss jumps or activates warp gate or jump bridge or titan, the follower does the same, upon landing activate tank and propulsion start orbiting its master, lock it up, activate helping modules on it, then attack whatever the master attacks with all offensive modules. Such ship would be much worse than a player as it needs to be capstable with all modules perma-running, couldn't overheat and couldn't attack anything else than the primary of the master. Yet it would be a welcome addition.
The reason of the missing NPC teammates isn't programming, it's a fundamental game-design thing: an NPC teammate would set a barrier of skill for players. I mean a player who is worse than the NPC is rejected from every team, including teams of equally useless players. If a drooling moron starts a team, he will also include NPCs in the hope that they can carry him than taking other drooling morons. Such feature would remove a significant playerbase from the game as they would be outcast and ridiculed as "worse than a dumb NPC". Actually that NPC is just as good for a doctrine fleet than a player, or even better as it's never late, it doesn't spam the chat, won't go AFK, doesn't DC, doesn't mind if asked to stay docked and doesn't jump the gate on arrival when it was explicitly told not to.
While I wrote it would be worse than a player I meant it would be worse than someone who can overheat, warp off when needed, switch targets without orders, keep its position on its own, keep up Ewar on others than primary. Sure, there are such players, but not many, otherwise no one would field F1-bashing fleets that are prone to bombing runs. The pure fact that both sides of the "great 2013 Summer war" use "anchor up, permarun MWD, click broadcast, press F1" fleets prove that the average player isn't far from that very primitive bot. And I'm sure they wouldn't like to find this out the hard way, being devastated by a 50-man corp with each member running 20 accounts, fielding 1000-"men" fleets.
The game companies need human players, so even PvP games go great length to prevent players figure out that they are horrible. World of Warcraft still don't have a built-in damage meter. In EVE there is no way to set up a fair fight, while it's told to be because of the "dark universe", it's actually because it keeps the loser in the game as he can always blame link alts, faction modules or blobbing. In League of Legends the rating system was hidden behind this "bronze-silver-gold..." nonsense, to make sure that the 600 rated moron never finds out that he is indeed a 600 rated moron. I needed to dig to find some source to figure which tier and subtier belongs to which ELO rating and how it translates to ones position in the playerbase (and its numbers don't add up). Even if I failed to search well, the point is that I need to do even more effort to find out how am I performing.
PS: if you know a reliable source that translate League of Legends subtiers to player positions as "silver 4 = top 12%-top 8%", please link.
In EVE Online it's even more problematic. You see, EVE is a game of alts, I know exactly one player who doesn't have alts in the game (my girlfirend, and she is too casual to matter). CCP games said that the average account/player is above 2, yet there is no officially supported method to multibox. To make it less understandable, setting up a "follower" AI would be like 30 minutes work for a programmer: warping needs no programming as squadwarp is already available, the only coding needed is when the boss jumps or activates warp gate or jump bridge or titan, the follower does the same, upon landing activate tank and propulsion start orbiting its master, lock it up, activate helping modules on it, then attack whatever the master attacks with all offensive modules. Such ship would be much worse than a player as it needs to be capstable with all modules perma-running, couldn't overheat and couldn't attack anything else than the primary of the master. Yet it would be a welcome addition.
The reason of the missing NPC teammates isn't programming, it's a fundamental game-design thing: an NPC teammate would set a barrier of skill for players. I mean a player who is worse than the NPC is rejected from every team, including teams of equally useless players. If a drooling moron starts a team, he will also include NPCs in the hope that they can carry him than taking other drooling morons. Such feature would remove a significant playerbase from the game as they would be outcast and ridiculed as "worse than a dumb NPC". Actually that NPC is just as good for a doctrine fleet than a player, or even better as it's never late, it doesn't spam the chat, won't go AFK, doesn't DC, doesn't mind if asked to stay docked and doesn't jump the gate on arrival when it was explicitly told not to.
While I wrote it would be worse than a player I meant it would be worse than someone who can overheat, warp off when needed, switch targets without orders, keep its position on its own, keep up Ewar on others than primary. Sure, there are such players, but not many, otherwise no one would field F1-bashing fleets that are prone to bombing runs. The pure fact that both sides of the "great 2013 Summer war" use "anchor up, permarun MWD, click broadcast, press F1" fleets prove that the average player isn't far from that very primitive bot. And I'm sure they wouldn't like to find this out the hard way, being devastated by a 50-man corp with each member running 20 accounts, fielding 1000-"men" fleets.
The game companies need human players, so even PvP games go great length to prevent players figure out that they are horrible. World of Warcraft still don't have a built-in damage meter. In EVE there is no way to set up a fair fight, while it's told to be because of the "dark universe", it's actually because it keeps the loser in the game as he can always blame link alts, faction modules or blobbing. In League of Legends the rating system was hidden behind this "bronze-silver-gold..." nonsense, to make sure that the 600 rated moron never finds out that he is indeed a 600 rated moron. I needed to dig to find some source to figure which tier and subtier belongs to which ELO rating and how it translates to ones position in the playerbase (and its numbers don't add up). Even if I failed to search well, the point is that I need to do even more effort to find out how am I performing.
PS: if you know a reliable source that translate League of Legends subtiers to player positions as "silver 4 = top 12%-top 8%", please link.
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