Death

[Snowreap]

This idea has merit for sure. The idea of mobs leveling up overtime I've encountered on many a beta forums over the years but I don't recall ever seeing it implemented.

Asheron's Call did this. mobs could (and did) level up from killing you, and increase their skills. sometimes a particular mob would become so hard to kill that it would take a large group to kill it and "reset" it back to its regular spawn level.

time for a story...

Asheron's Call has multiple servers, and it is the developer's policy to not have server divergence -- all the servers are the same (except for the pvp server, whose only difference is that you are always flagged for pvp). the developer also patches the game approximately monthly, and with each monthly update the 'epic' storyline is updated, with new quests and items added related to the current storyline.

years ago, the storyline involved the return of a great evil to the world. the mechanism by which the evil would be returned would be the destruction of certain 'warding' stones that kept it at bay. the destruction of these stones would be performed by the players, who would be rewarded for doing so with phat loots (because at that time the developers understood that the players would kill anything placed in front of them, for any reason, as long as there was loot involved). the storyline wasn't entirely clear that destroying the stones would be A Bad Thing, but on one server a group of players caught on and decided that instead of destroying the final stone, they would defend it. not only did they successfully defend the stone from other players, they also sacrificed themselves to it, letting the stone kill them and thereby level up.

the developers were then in a quandary. they did not have the technical ability to support server divergence, but the storyline (and the next month's patch) could not proceed until the last stone was destroyed on all the servers. to finally resolve the problem, the developers had to go in as 'admin-controlled monsters' and clear out the defenders, so that a group of attacking players could get a clear shot at destroying the final stone. but even with the defenders gone, the attackers couldn't manage it, because the stone had levelled up so high that it would regenerate its health as fast as it took damage.

the developers then had to give one of the attackers special gear (to be used for that fight only, and to be returned immediately afterwards, because it was truly game-breaking gear) to use to destroy the stone.

and a few days later, the next patch rolled out on schedule, and the storyline advanced as planned. there's a monument on that server now that lists the names of many of the defenders. actually the monument exists on all the servers (no divergence) but through a coding trick it's only *visible* on that one server.

-ken