147219-adding-battle-character-companion

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This is a way to add a new battle-pet like feature, without messing up the engineer robot advantage, while also allowing players to customize the look and even class abilities of the "battle characters". 
 
There are a lot of solo players on the site who have a tough time getting a good group together. This would help them whether they are doing instances, dungeons, expeditions or even just traveling the world.
 
Please comment if you would like this kind of feature, so that the developers know how much interest is out there. 
 
Thanks	
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			No thank you. It is far too easy to make a game broken stupid easy (I'm looking at you SWTOR) with a companion system that isn't balanced right. Even a game that manages it (Marvel Heroes) can only do so when it is designed to be an arcade experience and not a combat RPG. I want neither of those things for Wildstar. 	
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Of course the battle companion needs to be voluntary. If you don't want one, just don't buy it. Only solo players who feel the need would tend to buy them with in-game funds.
 
If you think the wild-star developers have tuned and balanced the level of effort optimally for current individual or specific group sized battles, it seems odd that you feel they couldn't handle such a small change.
 
This is really just a feature to make the game more fun for casual solo players that don't have the time or stamina to pull a group together for every non-solo battle. Maybe that isn't you, but I'll wager there are plenty of current and future players that could benefit.
 
If nothing else, it might give the WS folks another in-game income stream and a larger potential audience.	
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If you think the wild-star developers have tuned and balanced the level of effort optimally for current individual or specific group sized battles, it seems odd that you feel they couldn't handle such a small change.
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For this to work, the game would need to be designed from the bottom up with companions / battle pets / AI assistants in mind or else there's all manner of scope for problems. It works in a game like SWTOR because that game was designed for NPC companions. WS isn't.
 
Besides, they can't even get Engineer bots working properly and bug free this far after launch, there's not much hope for anything more sophisticated.	
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Of course the battle companion needs to be voluntary. If you don't want one, just don't buy it. Only solo players who feel the need would tend to buy them with in-game funds.
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When people buy this "enslaved" battle companion, they can do whatever they want with it after they buy it. Also I would prefer it be "Exiles and Dominion" but that's just me.
 
I meant the races. Being "enslaved". As Battle Companions. :huh:	
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Don't worry about the problems. It might not be that big.
 
Also if you don't like the "enslaved" battle companions don't get one. B)	
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As others have said this would be a far larger change than you may think on both the back end of getting the AI and or commands to work correctly, and content balance. I've never played SWTOR, but it sounds to me like it would basically be having the NPCs from War of the Wilds as companions and that'd be nuts. 
 
However heres where it will get complicated:
If these companions are to be used in instanced content such as expeditions, dungeons, adventures, or heck even raids then they have to be balanced further to accommodate the usage of said companions. You say that this is to help solo players so would that mean the companion is as strong as 4 people or strong enough to replace 1 person? Regardless now you have to tune the content so that it can not only fit one person using a companion, but 5+.
 
In addition to this it must be considered if these are command based like pets or AI based like combat NPCs. It's important because if it is the former then it runs the risk of "well why do engineers need bots?" depending on the skills they have and based on your words it comes off to me as the companions having actual class abilities similar to the NPCs in WotW(as that is the closest we have to class based NPCs running on an AI script). The latter runs the issue of how much power in autonomy will they be given and as such how are they to be handled in their ability to respond to attacks, etc which could be extremely devastating if these are capable of bring brought into PVP, since they will NEVER miss. Even if they were command based they'd never miss either and it would be left to deflection.
 
The other concern i that even till this day Engineer bots aren't the most.....reliable pets. They've been known to exhibit some bugginess and even path in weird ways that range from hilariously wtf to "how is this even possible, omg why is there trash being pulled into the room during this boss fight!?"(i will forever laugh at when this was happening frequently). Then there is the other spectrum of backend programing which as I've cited before is the WotW NPCs who are VERY sporadic in their behavior and have unholy reaction times. While these NPCs within their context are easy to beat on the whole in many cases(WotW isn't hard) having something like that as a companion to a player would be far too much.
 
However let's also take into consideration that you said it would be voluntary. By this I am guessing you mean there would be content specifically tuned for this type of play as in a duplicate version of a dungeon,then that requires again not only creating the coding to harbor this type of instance, but also take resources and time to tune the content accordingly. This is bound to *cupcake* off raiders and definitely going to *cupcake* off PvPers more so I'd imagine as this really doesn't add anything more than a helper to content that is not all that hard for a solo player AND if the issue is a matter of getting a group then it is more of a lack of willingness on the player to be social in most if not all cases except perhaps in the situation of adventures which are rarely done sadly.
 
Also if these are in the open world then open world bosses will need to be tuned to this feature too making them guaranteed harder to do. Though you may also say "well they're disabled when you're in a group", but thing is that we have an open tag system so you don't need to be in a group for open world content unless you want to gain renown points. So what would stop people from just not grouping up and using their companions?
 
I'm not even going to touch how this would effect PVP more than what little I have, if you intend to have these there. I definitely will not touch how these would impact raiding either if you want them there, because that is a flat out no.
 
There are a lot more questions and concerns that arise from this and as a person who hadn't played SWTOR I don't know how involved these pets get, but based on what others have said and my own perception I'd have to say no to this idea as well.  I could go on and on, but I think I've said enough...
 
TLDR: Wildstar is not tuned in anyway shape or form to accommodate battle companions and would require a degree of resources and time that could be better spent improving Engineer pets and fleshing out existing content. People who want todo group content should socialize more and if they're having trouble with soloable content they need to ask questions on where/how they can improve.
			
				
	Edited November 20, 2015 by Typrop	
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I'd rather have a Pokemon-style "Catch 'Em All" mini-game, to be honest.
 
Derivative, yes but what isn't at this point?
 
I didn't do it in WoW because "meh" but I'd probably play the heck out of it here.	
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