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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 4220896" data-attributes="member: 18">No, this is essentially nonsensical. What Chris is apparently saying is "My designers are total retards who couldn't design an encounter that both worked and didn't rely on simple threat!".Chris, your designers are not that dumb.I mean, if you wanted an encounter that didn't feature threat like that, but which was still challenging, you'd lower the HP on the dragon a lot, have it go after it's targets, and those targets would try to stay alive whilst other people killed it. This would work perfectly well, indeed, I'd be surprised if there aren't already encounters in WoW that work more or less this way. Doesn't one of the MgT encounters work that way? I know the old 60 "upgrade your dungeon armour" BRD arena quest encounter with the gladiators was threatless and worked just great. Indeed it was much MORE exciting than most fights!Sure, if ALL you did to Onyxia was give her some AI instead of just a threat table, then she'd be a menace 2 society, but why in god's holy name would you do something that stupid? Chris' entire argument there is predicated on purified stupidity, which is not really an ideal basis for an argument, to be honest.As for threat making monsters smarter. Hahahahahahaha. No. When my Warrior doing his sad little Prot damage is able to hold on to four monsters at once, who could be rampaging around trying to kill the party, there's just no way you can claim that. I am not the biggest threat, I just have most of an artificial value called "threat". It's silly.So basically, Chris Metzen, love his work, talking total and utter smack here, and either insulting the intelligence of his listeners, or of his designers (or being a bit thick himself - seems unlikely).Edit - Just to mention the real two reasons threat exists:1) Vastly to design and balance an online, unmoderated game that way.2) No costly "AI" processing overhead, as your monsters don't have any AI, they have a threat table, a list of targets for "secondary target abilities" - in WoW this is usually "Whoever is nearest", and possibly a progression where they change abilities startegies at certain HP or time values.3) Most important: Even the extremely novice/weak/bad at games can handle threat-based encounters. This massively broadens your potential audience. If you go for AI, then your game will simply be too hard for a lot of extant MMORPG players, so you get less $$$. I suspect this is real main reason.</blockquote>

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