Guild Wars 2

My issues with static enemies, these enemies are placed within zones at static locations, these actively detract away from what would be considered a realistic immersive environment. (MMO’s intentionally provide the feeling of living worlds and should provide players with content that drives them to work together)

Players generally will attempt to avoid encountering these enemies when travelling to event destinations, the enemies themselves have been specifically designed to attempt to slow travelling players down, but in most cases players will equip skills that can bypass the attacks until the range threshold has been passed.

Players looking to farm static enemies, tend to learn the enemies encounter range and will round up enemies within a set radius to achieve maximum potential of enemies killed and loot returned.

“Going forward”
Primarily all static mobs that are localised to an environmental location should be removed, and replaced with roaming groups (this is all ready in place in some parts of the game), there are several advantages to this system.

Should a lone player trying to bypass a group get tagged then there is more chance of them being killed, it increases the players understanding of the zones dynamic events and promotes players in forming groups and adds additional immersion to how a certain zone works. The groups placement and route could also represent the current dynamic events regional control of localised zone locations.

This entices the players to attack a mob rather than a single target, provides more loot to a localised encounter and more interesting dynamics in enemy groups class types and combat during the encounter. " dynamic encountering/encounters"

From a technical aspect, the group transmission can be contained to a single “root entity” and can be emphasised client side through a group descriptor when “inactive”, (due to less single entities) this should lower the zone data transmission required in addition to waypoint systems, on encounters full transmission of information for data updates of the static descriptor will allow each member of the roaming enemy group to become “active” when encountered.

Possible issues include multi mob farming where groups of players activate multiple roaming enemy groups, to counteract this, each additional group brought into an encounter provides bonuses to all “active” enemy entities within that encounter, the more groups the harder the encounter.